Gag (2006)

Here's a film that most people will never hear about. A low-budget, straight-to-video torture porn effort with a lackluster screenplay but enough creepy sets and nasty torture devices to keep you interested. A film with a forgiving run-time of 75 minutes that's packed to the rim with zany madness and unjustified bloodletting. If you are willing to approach it with open-mindedness while expecting nothing in the way of intrigue, characterization or depth, this film may not have you cursing at your TV. If, on the other hand, you are one of those Saw fan-boys who revel in the tiresome intricacies of Jigsaw's traps to the point where you must constantly force comparisons with any other horror film, then Gag is probably not for you. Too simple and too straight-forward. But for me, who is not a Saw fan, it was a surprisingly solid B movie that's perfect to kill some time, which is precisely its mandate. Of course, there is no place in film history for the likes of Gag, but it's certainly got a place in the middle of a boring Sunday afternoon.

Gag begins, and ends, with very lame plot twists...

The "plot" is as follows: Tony and Detroit are two (really) small-time burglers out for a big hit in the Hollywood Hills. The only problem is that the house they select is home to a depraved murderer with sadistic impulses to kill and torture strangers. Despite obvious signs of foul-play, such as a collection of panties hung from the ceiling and large meat hooks lying around, the pair of idiots decides to venture deeper and deeper into the house. Obviously, they soon get caught up in the killer's game and are forced to fight for their lives, and those of two other prisoners, spending almost the entire run-time imprisoned in some constrictive contraption, freeing themselves only to be caught in the following minutes. In short, you should ready yourself prior to watching the film not to root for the God-awful leads. Instead, you will want to appreciate the nerdy killer (whom I thought looked exactly like the Bible-Doll killer from Maurice Devereaux' Slashers) and his zany, fun-loving type of sadistic psychosis. But you won't want to root for him either as he is one infuriating little twerp. Truth is, Gag is an ugly film, with ugly characters and situations. But isn't it what horror is all about?

As most films of its ilk, Gag is thin on plot and thick on shocks. Fueled by a series of unsatisfying plot twists, many of which will have you shouting insults at the protagonists, the paper-thin, linear storyline will unlikely surprise, let alone challenge you. However, some effective tension-building, weirdly elaborate sets and nasty violence help keep the ensemble afloat. You can first marvel at the elaborate patchwork of scraps and trash constituting the labyrinthine lair of the madman. Here, a mask of sorts is hung above a silhouette etched in the wall, evoking actual pieces of a decaying human face; there, a silhouette filled with red dots is etched upside down, suggesting a medieval torture. There is even a neat little hide-a-bed with a panel bearing the caption "Fuck Some1" that flips open to reveal another panel marked "Kill Some1". This is all elaborated from scrap and it gives the whole scenery a sense of inhuman depravity. What's more is that the endless succession of rooms, none of which being easily identifiable as a potential exit, give us a dreadful sense of inescapabilily that makes the torture all the more worthwhile. And talking of torture, the film certainly delivers. Of course, the shoestring budget wouldn't allow elaborate mechanical traps. Instead, we got good, old-fashioned elbow grease, and a little imagination: just what the doctor ordered to clean your system! I'm talking anus-impalement and blade-feeding here: esophageal horror. It may not be as graphic as some would like it to be, due to budget constraints, but it can still make your skin crawl. Hell, you know who you are. If this tickles your fancy, then grab a copy of Gag along with your Sunday groceries and enjoy!

Tied with Christmas lights and tortured with wooden poles:

Not every psychopath is as rich as Jigsaw

As I said earlier, neither the clueless protagonists nor the bland murderer are round, intriguing characters. There is actually no justification for the villain's actions, nor should there be one. Instead of wasting time on bothersome exposition (that may have stretched the run-time to a harrowing 90 minutes), the makers of this film have rather decided to throw the audience in a pool of filth and let it try to swim. Because no matter how annoyed you may be with this film, it does contain all of the necessary elements to make a viable horror film: a relentless pace, horrific images, and a strong sense of entrapment. The lack of exposition is actually beneficial as it makes the killer to be nothing more than a bored nihilist. He thus gains a fearsome new dimension that greatly helps cultivate the sense of dread emanating from his actions. If nothing else, nihilism is one of the most fearsome drive in the world, and I must say that it is sadly underused as horror film fuel. Most slashers, for example, are in it for revenge. Supernatural beasts and devil worshippers are plain evil. But nihilists, such as the murderous trio from The Strangers or Michael Rooker and Tom Towles' Henry and Otis from Portrait of a Serial Killer, these are some truly fearsome antagonists. You may meet these people at a street corner and be subsequently caught in their murderous web whereas you'd actually have to be a high school bully or a stupid, drunken frat boy to die at the hands of teen stalkers.

Say what you want about Gag, it is an unpretentious and inspired effort that could give any Saw film a run for its money. Although it lacks in funds and technical proficiency, it is a more honest film. At least it doesn't invoke a highly dubious moral superiority to justify exploitative violence. At least, it doesn't revel in contradiction and multiply the narrative strands in a transparent bid to add an impression of depth to what is essentially a generic mess. Unfortunately, it is a film that will hardly find an audience. The more cultivated filmgoers will certainly look at it with disdain, if ever they should cross path with its disgustingly generic cover while genre films will not miss the chance to compare it with the technically, and narratively superior Saw. Personally, I bought a DVD copy for a single buck. One buck. And I was wholly satisfied. Take that last comment as you will, and do consider Gag if you see it on the shelf and are lacking inspiration for a film to rent. Then, enjoy it as you would a swim in a sceptic tank. Again, take that last comment as you will.

2/5 An unpretentious and effective little trash/horror film born out of junk and a few bucks.

Header (2006)

Not unlike The Human Centipede: First Sequence (which I reviewed here), Header is an average film reaching for the stars thanks to some seriously ill-deserved hype focusing on its central, oddball gimmick. Here, the shocking, but eventually tiresome repetition of "headers" barely manages to elevate the film's anemic story of a young Fed entangled in a web of corruption and murder to the treshold of cult-ish exploitation cinema. But what enthusiastic reviewers won't tell you is just how peripheral this shock gimmick is to the main plot, and how comically it actually translates onscreen. Personnally, I was appalled to realize that half of the positive reviews on the film cover came from people who had actually played in the film, including the author of the book (!), Edward Lee, and fellow splatterpunk writer, Jack Ketchum. Now, maybe you're stoked to discover Ketchum and Lee's involvment, and maybe you should be, considering their prominence in the field of splatter, but lemme tell you: it's all a trap! For instance, you shouldn't trust these words used by Lee to describe the film: "Brilliantly macabre", neither should you trust Ketchum when he says it is "tense and brutal as hell". You shouldn't trust the image shown on the DVD cover from the Synapse Films release either. Coupled with all the undeserving hype, these elements are meant to mislead you into believing that Header is more than what it is. But you, sophisticated gorehounds from around the world, know better than to fall into a trap with such a blatant mecanism.

Meet grandpap Martin, the nicest of all horror movie patriarchs.

The film opens with a short flashback that hazily sets up the story of old boy Travis Clyde Tuckton, whose family seems to embrace rather strange traditions of murder, whose nature is left very unclear at that point. Fast-forward 11 years, when we are introduced to the film's actual protagonist, young federal agent Stewart Cummings, whose girlfriend is stricken with an illness so costly that he has to extract protection money from local peddlers to complement his salary. Then, we are re-acquainted with Tuckton who is now leaving jail after serving a rather lenghty sentence for involontary manslaughter. Knowing both his parents dead, he decides to return to his moonshine-peddling, shoemaking "grandpap" out in the woods. From then on, it is not long before the pair of rednecks becomes a duo of comical anti-heros, whose strange antics soon overshadow the main plot concerning agent Cummings' plight to generate more and more money for his sick girlfriend. You see, Travis and grandpap are eager to reinstate the old family tradition of "the header". And when they do, bodies start piling up, bodies with nasty head wounds. When these bodies attract the attention of agent Cummings, the fate of the three men become entangled, but only superficially so. And in the end, the main selling point of the film, "the header" is revealed as no more than one aspect of life in the backwoods, which is chronicled here with dry humor, clumsy visual effects, but an ultimately naturalist approach that greatly undermines the potential for horror that the film could've had.

What's a header? I really should tell you, as it is rather matter-of-factly described very early in the film. The header is the ultimate form of vendetta in the West Virginian redneck culture. It is something you do to one-up someone who has offended you beyond reparation. "It's just something that folks around here do", calmly explains the head Fed to young agent Cummings when he insists for an answer to the crucial question of "What's a header?". The act itself consists of fucking the brains of the recently murdered. You first have to make a large hole in the skull using a power drill (and not a hammer, as you might end up with "bone splinters in your pecker"), then slice the edge of the brain open with a sharp blade and insert your erect penis, thrust and repeat until the brain is soaked in sticky man-juice. Healthy variations include pissing in the brains or holding up your legless "grandpap" next to the hole and have him fuck them as well. The problem here is not how disgusting this whole process is to conceive, or to watch, but rather how mundanely it is evoked and shown. It is actually done in such a way as to totally nullify its impact by making it appear as a common practice. It is as if someone planned for you to be shocked by corruption in the political arena and was somehow convinced that you would be. That's how naive many reviewers are, saying the film is shocking and disturbing, while it is actually only chronicling a slice of life from the joyous existence of Virginian old boys (or so we're supposed to believe).

The fact that the overly exposed redneck murderers actually appear sympathetic to us, with their colorful expressions and joyous outlook on life, is also detrimental to the sense of horror one could derive from this film. Seeing how this here is a pair of likeable simpletons, eliminating people whom they truly seem to believe have offended them, it's hard to even shiver at their actions. This is just things being what they are, in a very twisted world sure, but a world realistically contained in age-old traditions of murder and revenge. The tiresome repetition of headers make it appear all the more casual and mundane, which furthmore undermines the film's potential for true horror. Then, there is the fact that the victims actually die before being brain-raped, which is fallaciously contradicted by the DVD cover image depicting a screaming head held like butt cheeks during doggy-style sex. So, the humiliation is done post-mortem, which should be a small consolation for some of the more wildly imaginative audience members, but a great let-down for fans of torture. In the end, the whole thing about headers is a worthy, but eventually futile exercise in button-pushing, especially considering the director's lack of proficiency for either atmosphere or tension-building. Obviously, one could argue that this weird tradition represents a worthy cultural anchor with which to initiate city-slicker Cummings to his new surroundings, and that would be true, especially if you consider the ending of the film. However, the lightness of tone that permeates the film, illuminating the murder scenes with a happy-go-lucky glow, actually prevents us from questioning the dubious morality of the rednecks and thus the film's tone tends to ruin what is essentially a fine, reflexive screenplay adapted from Edward Lee's novella by Michael Kennedy. Header is ultimately a self-defeating film because it fails to embrace a definite point of view on the material at hand. It would've worked best as a psycho-sociological study, but a serious lack of depth and overwhelming, but never realized, desire to gross-out the audience prevents it. As a shock, gross-out film, whatever most people will call it, it fails because it doesn't show enough. Not in my book anyway. I reckon that other blasés gore fans will feel the same. Finally, Header also fails as a horror film because it contains not a trace of terror.

False advertizing! Please don't spend the entire film, as I did,
hoping to see a live header. The thing is simply impossible.

From a technical standpoint, the film is amateurish at best and that's what causes its downfall. Shot in the state of New York, using a DV camera, it manages to wow us mostly with its gorgeous woody settings, which are completely subservient to the action and almost always shot during daytime, which further prevents the setting of an appropriate mood. The filmmakers seem to make it a point to cram as many slow-mo shots and dramatic blurs as possible during the most intense scenes, which hinders the mostly down-to-earth, realistic stance taken early on. The head-rape scenes are conveyed in uncompromising details (no actual or simulated penetration shots, but explicit shots of head drilling and brain slicing) but to no avail, since these scenes are approached in such a light-hearted manner as to make them almost fun to watch. The grotesque is thus drowned in the mundane and all effect is lost.

At this point, I would like to compare Header to the quintessential city vs country horror film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). First of all, you have to believe that the comparaison is not unfair. Both films use the very same premise in a bid to terrorize the audience: crazy rednecks with murderous family traditions. Both films are super-low budget. Believe me, if Hooper and Henkel could've shot on DV, they would've! The main difference between the two films lies in execution. Whereas Hooper could improve boring shots of bone sculptures with oppressively angled framings and screeching noise, whereas he could muster one, if not the single greatest scene in horror cinema using close-ups of eyeballs, some makeup, a bunch of sinister-looking yokels, a hammer and a metal bucket through expressive framing and editing, Flancranstin struggles to use some vastly superior FX to his advantage, choosing instead of terror, the lesser avenue of shock. One could argue that he's done so knowing his limitations, which is fine. But the fact remains that he can't direct a horror scene to save his life. To his defense, I must say that the material he had to shoot was quite touchy. First, the pornographic nature of the crimes mostly prevents the use of close-ups, which totally hinders the effectiveness of the scenes containing headers. Then, there is the crucial fact that the victims are dead during the worst part of their ordeal. So you can forget about close-ups of panicked eyeballs, screams or pain. You are thus left with boring ragdolls being punished for the sins of their fathers. The success of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) stems first from Hooper's knack for mood-building, but also from the alien nature of the villains, two things that Header lacks. By over-exposing the villains and under-exposing the victims, the latter film has completely shot itself in the foot.

It's a shame, too, since the screenplay isn't all that bad and the actors are sufficiently convincing in their roles. The ending nicely ties the two narrative strands together while providing some rare food for thought. The main problem is that those two narrative strands actually compete for our attention, with the largely overdetermined story of the corrupt Fed lagging behind the evolving, more highly dramatic story of the header-giving rednecks. Unfortunately, the plot involving Tuckton and family is tragically cut short to fit the needs of the wider narrative, which is actually narrower in scope. That said, having us sympathizing with the rednecks is a fatal mistake in a bid for horror as we should rather wish for less screentime for them and a more dire end. While watching Header, and considering all that talk about power drills and brain-fucking, I couldn't help but think of Australian slasher The Loved Ones, a slightly more conventional horror film that also features brain-invasion. Believe me, the comparison did not favor Header. In my opinion, The Loved Ones is not only vastly superior, but also much nastier. Why? Because in it, the drill is held by a despicable bitch and it goes into a sympathetic victim's head. And that's all there is to it. You cannot be terrorized by the mundane actions of anti-heroes. You can only be grossed-out. If only for that, I suggest you watch Two Girls, One Cup or Pink Flamingos instead because Header is fucking boring!

2/5 Amateurish and self-defeating, Header ruins a nice screenplay with boring imagery that will unlikely shock or horrify genre fans.

Needful Things (1993)

Prior to watching this garden-variety Stephen King adaptation, I had heard only bad things about it. So I was surprised at first to see how lush the production was, how competent the direction, and how many talented actors were involved (including the vastly under-used Ed Harris). As expected, the action is set in a small, New-England-y coastal town where decent, hard-working folks are just waiting to have their lives ruined by a supernatural apparition. This town comes complete with relatively complex, interlocking relationships between characters that make it appear like a boiling kettle of repressed emotions. The table is thus set for the ungodly apparition of Max Von Sydow. Although disguised as a mild-mannered shopkeeper, we soon find out that he is actually the Devil, out to claim the souls of Castle Rock's inhabitants. Just as the Devil would, he uses his cunning and wisdom to cash in on the townsfolk' repressed emotions and pit them against one another until they start taking out guns and meat cleavers against their neighbors. The premise of the film is actually not bad at all but in the end, thanks to a mostly plastic-minded director, Needful Things reveals itself to be criminally ineffective and wholly forgettable.

What went wrong? The actors all try their best. J.T. Walsh is particularly memorable as a manic yacht salesman named Keeton (and nicknamed Buster) while Max Von Sydow does a decent job of creating the suave aristocrat elaborated by the constrictive screenplay. The truth is that he doesn't act as an antagonist at all, more as an elderly prankster. This fact alone defuses the story a great deal. I mean, where's the horror when demons are merely characterized by plastic nails and Victorian houses? Where's the horror when the ultimate incarnation of evil is more courteous than my grandmother? The answer is that horror is actually nowhere to be found. The whole film rather plays out like a huge prank, and despite the rising body count, still maintains its careless, juvenile attitude toward human beings all the way through. Lives are lost here, without the slightest hint of drama... as if the filmmakers themselves had made a pact with the Devil that would replace their compassion with cynicism. Even the underwhelming finale seems like a practical joke pulled by Satan's lackey. It's as if Needful Things itself had paired with its characters on the path to oblivion, for it is truly a film without a soul.

"Oh, God! What's that behind you? No, I'm serious! There's really
something behind you!" (Max von Sydow as The Millenial Prankster)

The film could've been made by a robot. It is only a mechanical addition of purely picturesque scenes meant the push the plot a little further, not unlike a broken car on a straight road which needs to go from A to B in the least amount of time. But this succession of tableaux sums up to nothing significant, just to an ending that earns its name only because it is located before the end credits. A large part of the film's runtime is dedicated to a tiresome repetition of the novel's main, lame gimmick of the poisoned, "revelatory" gift. You see, in order to convince the townsfolk to do his bidding, the Devil first has to offer them a "needful" thing, which is an item from his shop that bears some special, "emotional" significance to the person to whom it is given. Whether it is a Mickey Mantle TOPS card, a precious porcelain figure or a forgotten leather jacket, all these items generate a slew of special effects as well as a succinct, shallow flashback when they come into contact with their new proprietors. Now, these flashbacks are all needless for they neither help develop the characters nor do they help justify their subsequent actions. The whole thing is just a convenient plot device, but such an under-developed one that it doesn't even function as a critique of consumerism. It merely seems to alienate the killers/pranksters from their deeper, more intrinsic motivations toward mischief and murder. Worse is that it totally fails to convince us, the audience, that the greed for these objects might actually warrant the more hardcore pranks contained in the film. For instance, when the town bum kneels beside a pet dog and readies a switchblade for the ensuing slaughter while confessing that he will do anything to keep his "needful" leather jacket, we cannot help but be somewhat perplexed by his actions. Nothing in the screenplay can justify this sudden outburst of evil besides "magic", which is also true for most of the events seen onscreen. Following the skinning of her dog by the town bum, the lonely and reserved Netty (played by Amanda Plummer) viciously attacks the woman whom she thinks has done the deed, unaware that this woman's house was vandalized earlier by a kid who cherished a "needful" baseball card. Armed with meat cleavers and butcher's knives, the two women confront each other. "You killed my dog!" says one. "You destroyed my house!" says the other. Then they fight it off to the death. HA HA HA! Lovely prank! No characterization, no drama, no tension, just a fucking prank! That's how unconcerned the filmmakers are with their characters. Same thing when they have a twelve-year old kid shoot himself in the head (!). There is no real narrative basis for such an action but it happens. It is as inevitable as Satan's visit to Small Town, USA. And we're supposed to lap it up... The filmmakers have clearly sided with the dark lord on this one, and have produced an effort that's more of a joke than an actual horror film. A good premise, and some good money have thus been utterly wasted. And that's the real joke.

The problem here seems to stem from a misconception about what constitutes a good literary adaptation. What seems to have happened is that the filmmakers have used King's novel as a template for the actions seen onscreen, while excising all the psychological subtleties and interior monologues necessary to really situate the characters and drama within the story. What is left is a skeletal outline of a plot that's populated with nice sets, capable actors, a sharp sense for photography, but no people. No victims or villains. Only lukewarm emotions of anticipation and quiet wonder seem to emerge as strange and shocking events unfold before our eyes, but fail to make us care in any way. The only thing in the film that will probably make you squirm is the shocking lack of narrative progression when it comes to the awfulness of the deadly pranks initiated by the Devil. First, you will be confronted by teenage pranks such as throwing shit on drying sheets, and the following minute, you will see skinned dogs and hacked women. The filmmakers wanted a seamless transition between such events, but it failed to materialize. The creepiness is instantaneous, but it only creeps you out for the short period of time wherein you're wondering "What the fuck?". Then it's business as usual in the lame world of the film.

Only the most hardcore of Stephen King completists should want to watch this film. Level-headed fans will probably prefer to steer clear as the novel is certainly superior and elaborate enough to make you care for the human victims. On a positive note, I must say that the film contains one of the best cat fights of all times. No bursting breasts or sweat-soaked thighs here, but some really explosive blade action and flying furniture that will surely make your eyes glitter. Unfortunately, this scene alone isn't enough to keep the sinking boat afloat. You might actually want to fast-forward to that scene, watch it, then power off your DVD player, and watch Motel Hell instead as it comes in the same three-pack. As for buying a single copy of Needful Things, forget it. If you wanna see devils making fun of you, just turn on CNN...

2/5 An easter egg of a film: a gorgeous hollow shell.

Dante 01 (2008)

Review #0052

This short review was originally written in French, my native tongue. Here is a translated, and updated version for all of you, fine English-speakers from around the world:

Dante 01 is a solo effort from Marc Caro, who is well-known for his collaboration with Jean-Pierre Jeunet on awesome films such as Delicatessen (1991) and La cité des enfants perdus (1995). Now I won't go as far as saying that he is the weakest link, but I will simply point out that while he directed only one feature film during the last fifteen years, Jeunet alone was responsible for the vastly under-rated Alien: Resurrection (which will probably be remembered in twenty years as the last good Alien film) and the international smash hit Amélie.

SYNOPSIS: Dante 01 is an orbital station hovering over fiery planet Dante. It is home to a small, experimental lab/prison that uses its criminally insane inmates as guinea pigs for pharmaceutical testing. The film opens with a small ship docking at the station, carrying in its bowels a sexy, but unethical Vietnamese doctor called Elisa and a frozen, Messianic prisoner called only Saint-Georges (the same name as a famous dragon slayer). The story revolves around bitchy Elisa's use of nasty, mood-altering nano-machines and mute Saint-Georges' arduous integration among a population of unstable psycho ward inmates who will soon discover that he is much more than he first appears to be.

APPRECIATION: Elaborated from a linear screenplay riddled with genre clichés and vacuous mythological references, this boring effort with a faint allegorical flavor falls flat during the first verbal exchange between Elisa and the lead doctor aboard Dante 01, which leaves the green filters, manic POV shots, CGI nanomachines and other visual gimmicks as sole motors of a flawed narrative. Left to fend for themselves, forced to mechanically deliver incongruous lines of dialogue, the actors cannot even hope to give life to the vain archetypes of the screenplay. It's a shame too because colorful Dominique Pinon seems ill at ease in the unlikely role of a criminal mastermind and he thus gives a performance that's a far cry from those of Delicatessen and Amélie.

You should definitely skip this film, except if you're a Caro or Pinon completist. I mean it.

*1/2
Style, sure. But no substance, an abrupt conclusion and wasted acting jobs.


Here is the original French text which I had written right after seeing the film (and which conformed with the model foregrounded by major québécois critical body Mediafilm):

Doté d'un scénario linéaire qui multiplie ad nauseam les clichés du genre et les références mythologiques creuses, cet ennuyeux huis-clos à saveur allégorique tombe à plat dès le premier échange verbal, si bien que seuls les filtres verdâtres, plans subjectifs vomissants, nanomachines de synthèse et autres excès visuels semblent propulser le récit. Livrés à eux-mêmes, forcés de débiter des platitudes sans nom dans un français international franchement déshumanisant, les interprètes n'arrivent pas à élever leurs personnages au-dessus des archétypes gnangnan du scénario. C'est quand même dommage pour le délicieux Dominique Pinon pour qui le manque de latitude constitue une muselière.

The Cronenbergian Maieutics (essay)

This essay was originally written as a term paper for the class on Canadian Cinema given by Professor Douglas at Concordia University. Before publishing it, I had a long, hard think about intellectual property, and about my actual grip on the material that came from my brain, but which I mistakenly offered to academia at no cost at all. I finally decided that I had the final say since I came up with it, and amply cited my sources all the way through. So there. I hope that all idea stealers from all universities eat lead. That said, Mr. Douglas was a mighty fine man whom I never would accuse of any wrongdoing. After all, he is the man who made me aware of a little 1919 Canadian film called Back to God's Country, which featured the fully naked Nell Shipman (!!). Talk about a cool teacher!

The Cronenbergian Maieutics

“Your skull is a cage and things are trapped in there that would be a lot better off being set free, so if you can explode that cage, you can also liberate yourself” (Simon: 53). Such a take on Scanners’ cervical explosion by its director somewhat implies a Socratic ideal, however radically it is updated. Freedom of the hidden corners of the mind is its aim and its symbol, the broken head. In fact, Scanners’ exploding head echoes the sculpture from the apartment of Rose’s final victim in Rabid, a modernist work depicting a human head split open. William Beard says that sculpture expresses the film’s view of man as a “schizoid creature whose spirit is at war against its body although they’re irrevocably tied together” (L’Esprit Viscéral : 89) and he goes on to link it to Ben Pierce’s “powerful sculptures” (also in Scanners)1. Departing a little from this lecture and keeping in touch with Cronenberg’s, I argue for a total victory of the body (i.e. bodily instincts and impulses) over the rational mind in his films, be it a liberation or a curse. The filmmaker’s capacity to provide such a victory, supported by an imagery of the broken head, is no less than a bloody version of Socrates’ maieutics. It is the Cronenbergian maieutics: the ability to extract, through the horror genre, the intrinsic and primordial concerns of the mind (mostly the masculine mind) from under the normative façade of our society.

Of course, the dualism between the calm façade and what lies beneath is closely linked to the clash between mind and body in Cronenberg’s work, this façade being no more than the rational self repressing the visceral self. Many critics have pointed to the Cronenbergian architecture as this façade, containing “ the repressed forces of sexuality, passion and desire waiting to be unleashed upon a credulous society” (Handling : 182). In this respect, the opening of Shivers and its praising of the concrete Starliners towers (situated on Nuns’ Island, no less) is brilliantly thought of as a commercial, a way of presenting a sterile and politically correct front to outsiders while hiding the actual goings-on in the building (i.e. the slicing up of Annabelle by Emil Hobbes and the eventual take-over by sex-crazed zombies). Similarly, the Mantles’ cabinet in Dead Ringers remains a mask of professionalism, even during the brothers’ descent into madness. However, this surface becomes scratched during a particularly eloquent rendering of Beverley’s addiction: the camera pans on the wasteland that has become his office, soiling the established order of things by his slippage from the rational world to an alternate drug-induced reality, gluttonously demanded by his aching body. Beard suggests a similar “ironic contrast between the decorative expressions of a society that thinks it is in control and the disorder and violence which break its established order – and its sober sense of esthetics” (L’Esprit Viscéral : 88) in Rabid. He rightfully notes the abstract painting in Rose’s room, which we see before and after the attack on Lloyd: it becomes canted and bloodied whereas it was straight and clean, not unlike the virtuous society that accepted the Keloid institute, now facing the consequences of its beliefs (i.e. Rose’s mutant body). Keeping in touch with Cronenberg’s link between bursting heads and a liberation of the self, his celebration of squirting blood as a bodily manifestation against reason, Beard also includes an example from Shivers in his argument. As in Rabid, where the framing remains the same in the two subsequent establishing shots of Rose’s room, an identical framing device emphasizes the shift from order to disorder during Nick Tudor’s illness. His bathroom, at once clean and sterile, a model of sexual repression (Nick has seemingly ceased sexual relations with his wife while engaging in such activities with Annabelle, from whom he gets the disease), becomes a bloody mess after his passage (he regurgitates a parasite), the sign of an eventual release of Nick’s sexual energies (exemplified by his later attack on Janine).

On many instances, Cronenberg has argued that the ending of Shivers is not at all pessimistic, that it posits a new world order in which social conventions are meaningless and where the visceral self is liberated from a society “that thinks too much” (to paraphrase Rollo Linsky, on Emil Hobbes’ work). Now, if Romero’s zombies are symptomatic of a culture of mechanical consumerism and warmongering, Cronenberg’s zombies are the warm, pulsating counterparts of a cerebral society, a society “of self-repressive passivity and caution” (The Canadianness of David Cronenberg : 119). The horror genre is indeed the perfect vehicle to express hidden and intrinsic passions and, if it is alien to our realist tradition, it is precisely because Cronenberg tries to break down over-reasoning and the notion of a single reality in his films. In his criticism of Kramer vs. Kramer, he indeed rejects a more realist tradition (although it is an Hollywood example) as false, at the profit of the fantastic: “ I had just gone through divorce and I felt that that film was just completely false and that The Brood, fantastic though it was, was much more honest, emotionally and every other way” (Simon: 49). Interestingly enough, narrow-minded critic Leonard Maltin’s review of the film suffers from being embedded in restrictive Hollywoodian realism. “Eggar eats her own afterbirth while midget clones beat grandparents and lovely young schoolteachers to death with mallets. It's a big, wide, wonderful world we live in!” (Cinemania). To take such a film at face value, not to further the reading beyond the surface indeed seems very limitative, a proof of the same ideological selfishness which plagued Fulford in his review of Shivers. Maltin’s use of the words “world we live in” directly clashes with the director’s view that reality is subjective (Simon: 54). It further indicates a limited knowledge of the horror genre itself, which usually prompts a symbolic universe of fear to stand in for our reality. In short, his shutting down of the filmmaker on the ground that his reality is unacceptable (to the politically correct bourgeoisie) somewhat mirrors the actions of the extremist Realists from eXistenZ, who literally shoot down the builder of worlds Allegra Geller (who takes the place of the filmmaker).

Moreover, aside from revealing the hidden side of society, the horror genre also reveals the hidden side of the human body: its insides. Why, may I ask, are the tears shed in melodramatic movies and the emotions associated with them praised while the blood gushing of horror films and the violence from where it stems labeled as disgusting and trashy? I would tend to reject as hypocritical the assumption that movies directly affect behavior, especially when coming from Hollywood, an industry that systematically sees the viewer as passive. Therefore, I am tempted to agree with Cronenberg when he deplores the limited knowledge and acceptance of our bodies, disease and death, all elements deeply rooted in nature, but fought off as the enemies of a Cartesian society. Blood, although it is intrinsic to humanity, is an enemy because it reminds us of our mortality, of our attachment to physical existence whereas tears are of a higher level of consciousness: they represent the transcendence of human emotions2. As Mumford would say, it is abstraction of the human body that maintains the capitalist system in place: it is no longer the philosophical logic that defines humanness and reality, but rather mathematical logic, which exclude the instinctive side of human life at the profit of the mechanical one. An esthetic of consumption3 is the result of this displacement wherein the outer body becomes commercially determined. It is in this respect that Elliott Mantle’s suggestion of a beauty contest for the insides of bodies is the quintessential Cronenbergian irony: it is the disruption of a system that represses humanity as long as it is not completely plastic (in the case of the beauty contest) and calculable (in the case of science, as well as capitalism), toward one that celebrates humanity in its most primal form (here, an aesthetic of the insides, but generally, the release of dormant impulses).

This irony is central to his films as it is reflected in the relation between science and human nature. By its definition, the rational study of nature, science is necessarily contradictory according to the Cronenbergian mind/body dichotomy. It is always through science however, one might say the shortcomings of science, that human nature is revealed: through Hobbe’s blood parasites, Keloid’s neutral skin graft, Raglan’s psychoplasmics, Brundle’s pods…According to Beard, “the parasitic outbreak (or parasitic liberation) is also founded on the excesses of reason. […] Science must be understood as representing reason, and in Cronenberg’s films, catastrophic results stem from rational attempts at improving the human animal” (L’Esprit Viscéral : 75). It would seem that this failure of science necessarily comes from its desire to empirically know human nature and to rationalize it, while it is impossible to do so. In fact, all throughout Cronenberg’s filmography, science finds itself puzzled before examples of extraordinary biology: an unstoppable strain of rabies against which it is powerless in Rabid, the technically impossible triple cervix that challenges the Mantles’ every bit of reason in Dead Ringers, the oxymoronic creative cancer of Crimes of the Future…In all cases, the possibilities of the body overwhelm science to the point where it is absorbed, subdued by this body: Max Renn’s hand becomes one with his pistol in Videodrome, metal and flesh also meld together in Ballard’s leg after a car Crash whereas the whole game system from eXistenZ is made out of living tissues. In fact, this amalgamation is part of Cronenberg’s evolutionary theories. If affirming that “we’ve altered the earth, the magnetic waves in the air, and we’ve altered ourselves” (Kermode: 11) seems quite dogmatic, it nonetheless implies that technological progress parallels human physical evolution. In his films, it is our perceptual apparatus that is at stake, less the fact that “we create our own reality” (ibid), but rather that our reality is modified by our evolving techno-body. Its newfound capacity to completely change the world around us through its literal penetration by the machine is an example drawn from eXistenZ. The displacement of natural sexual desires toward artificial stimulation from the automobile fetish in Crash is also an example of this “reshaping of the human body through modern technology” (Cronenberg speaking through Vaughan). The quintessential example however, comes from his original manifesto on alternate realities, Videodrome. In it, a media prophet not unlike Marshall McLuhan, Brian O’Blivion, equates our perception of reality through sensual experience and its representation on television: “the television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye”. He even goes on to say that life on television is more real than life in the flesh, breaking down the barrier between two apparently different realities. This barrier is further broken by the apparition of a living VCR (mirrored by the human VCR that Renn becomes) and the fact that the protagonist receives live messages from Bianca and Nicky through the television screen, the retina of the mind’s eye, because of its ability to showcase Max’s hallucinations. Moreover, the invasion of life by technology is also rooted in its implantation in rural areas. Cronenberg’s praise of the United Kingdom’s F1 industry, as a technological asset associated with the countryside, and as an inspiration for eXistenZ’ gamepod farm (within an interview to Positif) confirms what he believes: evolution will not be achieved by de-humanizing the world, but rather by hyper-humanizing it. His subsequent rejection of the megalopolis imagery at the profit of the purely organic (organic game system, organic gun…) when it comes to science-fiction is a further example of this. After all, Cronenberg often reasserts that humanity is not what it was 100 years ago4. In short, it would seem that it had to adapt to an increasingly technological world (especially when addressing the last 100 years4) in which the role of man resembles that of the machine more and more. The physical “revolution” of Cronenberg’s films might seem extremist, but its radicalism is as strong as it needs to be, given the strength of the progress of reason. The body is indeed revolutionary: it is Nick Tudor who kills Rollo Linsky, Max’s grenade-hand detonates Harlan, Allegra’s pods are a reaction against transCendenZ…

Concerning radical revolution let us go back to the notion of creative cancer. In itself, it seems to be a contradictory term. To the rational mind, it means creation through destruction. To Cronenberg, it simply means metamorphosis and awakening. Antonin Artaud once said that the plague and theater are alike. “Theater, like plague, is a crisis solved by death or healing. And the plague is a superior ill because it is a complete crisis after which there is only death or an extreme purification5. […] The theatrical action like that of the plague, is beneficial, because it pushes men to see themselves as they are, […] revealing to collectivities their dark power, their hidden strength, inviting them to face destiny with an heroic and superior attitude which they would never have had without it” (46). Likewise, Cronenberg’s diseases inevitably push men to reveal their true identities as lustful animals. Nick Tudor, a cold businessman becomes a sex beast once he is induced with Hobbes’ parasites. Seth Brundle becomes a brutal macho man (he shreds some guy’s arm in order to claim his girlfriend as sex-object) once he is Brundlefly… When it comes to collectivities’ dark power, Artaud certainly seems to entail a form of revolt. At the very least, it does involve a communal liberation. Now, here is Cronenberg’s take on the revolution of the body. While discussing a passage of The Brood (wherein Hartog (one of Dr. Raglan’s patients), refers to a tumor his mental desires have created as a “small revolution”), he asserts: “rather than actually dealing with the political revolution, I deal with the metaphorical political revolution of the body” (Simon: 52). Interestingly, he also tells us: “we all know there are societies that we felt were better off changed, even though there were civil wars and bloody battles that were required to achieve that” (ibid). It would therefore seem that disease is a revolutionary (communist?) weapon6. Considering that it is deeply imbedded in nature and an enemy of a clean and sanitized society, such a take is consistent with the whole Cronenbergian universe.

As it is within the dominant ideology, the male is closely associated to reason within Cronenberg’s films while the female entails naturalism, motherhood and primitive sexual energy. Is the director such a misogynist then, given that he champions a victory of intrinsic humanity over reason, which constantly fails to control or modify our profound nature (i.e. our female side)? His innocence is indeed somewhat proven by his assertion to the effect that “the most basic human is a female and then the perversion, the late development, is a male” (Simon: 55). Given the inherent logic of his work, the male is bound to eventually lose, as an embodiment of reason. Within the two main, and bipolar, readings of Shivers, concerning the benefits of a sexual liberation, the male is always at the lower end. On one hand, if you consider the parasite a curse, it is Emil Hobbes who is to blame, as a criminal against the established norms. On the other, if you see parasitic invasion as ultimately beneficial, Annabella becomes a wicked messiah7, converting frigid Nick Tudor and his kind. In this case, Roger St-Luc (stripped of his abject sanctity) is also truly liberated of his normative Puritanism by the nurse Forsythe (he initially refuses the sexual contact she proposes him). Discussing Cronenberg, John Waters (who shares a similar fetish for car accidents) points out to a similarity between unnamed sex club and the arms-filled cellar of Starliner towers wherein sexual promiscuity is likewise encouraged, as an alternative discourse perpendicular to traditions of matrimony and repression. The Fly provides further examples wherein the male is inevitably a loser, even more so than the female character, who’s doomed to give birth to a freak. Indeed, it is Seth Brundle’s love for the machine (which itself is a way to counter natural transportation) that causes his demise. It is very ironic that he would become one with the teleporter he wishes to use in order to create an artificial hybrid. Indeed, in doing so, he is disregarding natural birth (the child Quaife is bearing is already part fly, part human) at the profit of mechanical fusion: disregarding nature at the profit of science. This is also a good example of the dreadful consequences of an active, yet purely theoretical knowledge of nature that plagues Cronenbergian men. In fact, the Mantles also collapse because of Claire Niveau’s triple cervix, a scientific impossibility that disrupts their Cartesian worldview and their superficial understanding of femininity (challenged in every way by Claire, the one woman that the twins’ failure to grasp leads to their demise as theoreticians of a restrictive knowledge of the female body). Likewise, Max Renn’s self-confidence, as a man knowledgeable of primitive sexuality and desires, is shattered to bits by his encounter with Nicki Brand. She is indeed the embodiment of what he only seems to know through fiction: raw, masochistic sexual experience. In front of such a display, the shattering of his theoretical (even capitalist – deviant sex is his bread and butter) approach to visceral sex and violence only leads to his emotional breakdown (from lonely macho to dependant victim). Let me use Michael O’Pray’s words (in his discussion of “the damaged men at the heart of Cronenberg’s films” ) to describe Max’s fate: “upon gaining the self-knowledge they [the male protagonists] initially lack, [they] are psychically or even physically destroyed, sometimes both” (10). In fact, O’Pray argues for a clear shift between the “disengaged, passive, ultimately fragile” (ibid) males and “a series of ‘strong’ women characters – committed, at one with their desires, capable of action and often the emotional nexus of the narrative” (ibid). Piers Handling mentions “the radical maladjustment of the male protagonist, particularly his moral failure and, more obviously, that of his relations with women” (187) as a further example.

It would seem that there is indeed something in all of us that needs to be let out. It is something that has been repressed for the sake of capitalism, yet something that is exploited by capitalism. It is something that we all possess, yet that we have not all come to terms with. It is our humanity, an inherent part of nature that tries to live (or dies) in the concrete jungle of modern life. In our quest for the eradication of disease, we have forgotten that we must live with it. In our desire to live forever, we have forgotten to embrace death, a fact just as natural as life. What we fear is perhaps not disease or death. Perhaps it is humanity… In Cronenberg, every rabid zombie bite, every lustful parasite infection, every falling nail and every exploding head is a celebration of life. Because life, disease, and death can indeed be one and the same, his cinema is truly humane. Indeed, whereas It’s a Wonderful Life is simply uplifting, Rabid is truly humanist. Now, let the Christmas movie renting begin!

Notes

1- You will probably remember, if you’ve seen the film, Pierce’s studio wherein he and Cameron Vale meet. There is one particularly gigantic sculpture, depicting a damaged human head, not unlike Vale’s…
2- It is interesting to notice that eXistenZ is a mere fantasy provided by transCendenZ (which itself is arguably no more aligned with reality). Now, both game systems are radically different. The former is organic and plugs directly into an anal-like slot within the human body. The latter is plastic (therefore, much closer to a contemporary console) and attached to the head and hand (nervous center and outer perceptual organ). It is aligned with reason, whereas the former is aligned with the body. Therefore, it seems Geller and Pikul’s fantasies stipulate a return to nature (eXistenZ), away from the refuge against it, provided by reason (transCendenZ).
3- The Keloid clinic in Rabid provides the alteration of the body as a commercial exchange. In that respect, the idea of enfranchising this practice is symptomatic of an increased commerce of the body. “I don’t want to become the Colonel Sanders of plastic surgery”, says Keloid cynically. “Why not? It’s one of those brilliant, inevitable ideas” retorts Murray Cypher. Here, capitalism (Cypher) sides with science (Keloid) in order to merge their views of the body as a mere object in a trade. This leads to the abuses suffered by Rose’s body (doubly aligned with nature because it is the female body). The revolt of this abused body provides punishment for both Cypher and Keloid as their capitalist system crumbles under a form of reversed phallocracy. The phallus, the male weapon, becomes, through revolution of the body, the female weapon against male supremacy.
4- “In terms of a physical evolution as a species, everything has changed in the last couple of hundred years since the Industrial Revolution” (Porton: 6).
5- What happens to Max Renn after he shoots himself? Is death the result? Or is it indeed an “extreme purification”, the access to the “New Flesh”? Max’s cancer is indeed creative, but what exactly does it create? Is it a deceptive, hallucination-inducing ill? Or is it a truly evolutionary disease?
6- What of the rabid zombies in Rabid? Aren’t they aligned with 1970’s Montreal separatists? After all, they’re the ones hunted by the P.E. Trudeau stand-in… On Rabid’s rabies, Cronenberg said: “Metaphorically it’s an idea, like Bolshevism or Islam, or any idea that takes hold and infects people” (Simon: 46). Therefore, it really seems to be a revolutionary disease.
7- She is impregnated by God (Hobbes), but it is she who propagates His word through her acts of love.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARTAUD, Antonin. Le Théâtre et Son Double, Éditions Gallimard, Saint-Amand (Fr.), 1964, 220 p.

BEARD, William. “L’Esprit Viscéral” from L’Horreur Intérieure: les films de David Cronenberg (French version of The Shape of Rage) (ed. Piers Handling and Pierre Véronneau), La Cinémathèque Québécoise, Montréal, 1990, pp. 57-135

BEARD, William. « The Canadianness of David Cronenberg », published in Mosaic 27, #2 (June 1994), pp. 113-33.

CIMENT, Michel & VACHAUD, Laurent. “David Cronenberg – L’homme n’a pas encore vraiment accepté son corps”, published in Positif #458 (April 1999), pp. 15-20

DORAN, Ann. “John Waters on David Cronenberg”, published in Grand Street v.15, #4 (Spring 1997), pp. 58-61

FREELAND, Cynthia A. “Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films” from Post-theory : reconstructing film studies (ed. David Bordwell, Noel Carroll), University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1996, pp. 195-218

HANDLING, Piers. “Un Cronenberg Canadien” from L’Horreur Intérieure: les films de David Cronenberg (French version of The Shape of Rage) (ed. Piers Handling and Pierre Véronneau), La Cinémathèque Québécoise, Montréal, 1990, pp. 179-196

HURLEY, Kelly. « Reading Like an Alien : Posthuman Identity in Ridley Scott’s Alien and David Cronenberg’s Rabid », from Posthuman Bodies (ed. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston), Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1995, pp. 203-221

KERMODE, Mark. “David Cronenberg”, published in Sight and Sound v.1 (March 1993), pp. 11-13

MUMFORD, Lewis. “Cultural Preparation” from Technics and Civilization, New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1964, pp. 9-59

O’PRAY, Michael. “Fatal Knowledge”, published in Sight and Sound v.1 (March 1993), pp. 10-11

PARKER, Andrew. “Grafting David Cronenberg: Monstrosity, AIDS Media, National/Sexual Difference” from Media Spectacles (ed. Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock & Rebecca L. Walkowitz) , Routledge, New York, 1993, pp. 209-227

PORTON, Richard. "The Film Director as Philosopher: An Interview with David Cronenberg." Published in Cineaste 24, #4 (1999), pp. 4-9

SANJEK, David. “Dr.Hobbes’s Parasites: Victims, Victimization, and Gender in David Cronenberg’s Shivers”, published in Cinema Journal 36, #1 (Fall 1996) pp. 55- 74

SIMON, Adam. “The Existential Deal: An interview with David Cronenberg” published in Critical Quarterly vol. 43, #3 (Autumn 2001) pp. 34-56

STANBROOK, Alan. “Cronenberg’s Creative Cancers” published in Sight & Sound, v.58, #1 (Winter 1988), pp. 54-56

TAUBIN, Amy. "The Wrong body.", published in Sight and Sound v.1 (March 1993), pp. 8-10

WOOD, Robin. « Un point de vue dissident sur Cronenberg » from L’Horreur Intérieure: les films de David Cronenberg (French version of The Shape of Rage) (ed. Piers Handling and Pierre Véronneau), La Cinémathèque Québécoise, Montréal, 1990, pp. 197-214

WOOD, Robin. “An introduction to the American Horror Film” from The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, Festival of Festivals, Toronto, 1979, pp. 7-29

“The Brood” (review), from Microsoft Cinemania 97, CD-ROM, Microsoft Corporation, 1996.

Haute Tension (2003)

For me, the New Wave of French horror began with a still from Haute Tension taken from the program of the 2004 Fantasia film festival. A square photo featuring gorgeous Cécile de France in a particularly fetching, tight white shirt that prominently features her apparently perfect breasts. Large streaks of blood stain her entire left side, including her slender arm. Her face is gashed and bleeding. But most importantly, she is wielding a very large circular saw. The weapon is huge against her small frame and it appears all the more deadly. In my copy of the program, I have circled it with a pen, and particularly the blade, which has a thick blue ring around it. Paler strands of blue are etched up to Cécile's belly. There is even a big blue arrow pointing at the blade. I have also underlined part of a quote from the TIFF's program. It simply reads: "one of the most brutal horror films of the new century" (C. Geddes). As you can see, my original enthusiasm for the film came only from a cropped photo and a bit of text... both of which explicitely held the promise of brutality. What I truly wanted to see was Cécile chopping people up with a large circular saw. I didn't care whether she played a good or bad character. I just wanted what the French are now so consistently offering us: girls and gore. Drop-dead gorgeous girls and nasty, brutal gore, which is what all contemporary pop horror should be about. Think about it for a second: why do people watch horror films? Don't kid yourself. They watch horror films for girls and gore. So why not give it to them? Personally, I was amazed with Neil Marshall's The Descent (2005) and I loved the fact that it featured an all-female cast. Call me what you will, a misogynist who enjoys seeing women suffer or whatnot, and you will be wrong. I'm just a guy. I like to see athletic actresses in wet spelunking outfits. Is that so hard to understand? Eros and Thanatos must walk hand in hand in order to create a truly affective horror film. And that's precisely why the French are now world leaders when it comes to horror cinema. Period.

Just my kind of girl

Embraced by gorehounds and film critics alike, Haute Tension constituted a breakthrough for director Alexandre Aja, who was soon approached, then absorbed by Hollywood where he shot two remakes (The Hills Have Eyes and Piranha) as well as a lame Kiefer Sutherland vehicle (Mirrors). Despite the appreciable input by returning collaborators Grégory Levasseur and Baxter who made the trip across the pond with him, Aja failed to recapture the brilliance of Haute Tension, although he came closest with his latest film, Piranha, which featured the single greatest 3D sequence in all of film history. I'm talking of course about the naked underwater ballet featuring Kelly Brook and Riley Steele. Even then, with those two flawless bodies hovering erotically in weightlessness, he didn't come close to the unbridled sensuality of Haute Tension. Not to mention the near flawlessness and relevance of its screenplay. Truly, Aja's is a case where a director will forever chase his initial masterpiece, one that will forever elude his grasp, especially if since he is now contrived by the huge Hollywoodian system and its network of censoring agents and prude lobbyists. As things stand, we will simply wish that he keeps turning out grandiose, over-the-top gore films such as Piranha while keeping a copy of Haute Tension (known elsewhere in the world under the vastly superior title Switchblade Romance) on all of our shelves for further reference. Sorry Alex, but it seems like the weight of the world has gotten to you too.

Haute Tension focuses mainly on the relationship and sexual tension between two French college girls, Marie and Alex. They are the best of friends, but unbeknownst to Alex, Marie is also in love with her. When the pair hits the country for a weekend of quiet study at Alex's family cottage, they are soon disturbed by a particularly brutal killer (played to perfection by legendary Philippe Nahon) who slaughters the family and kidnaps Alex. As the knight-in-shining-armor that she wishes to be, Marie chases the killer in order to save her princess. That's the basic storyline. Lean and mean stuff, my friends, lean and mean stuff containing nothing in the way of convoluted explanations or counter-productive plot twists. Of course, from where you stand, that is if you haven't already seen the film, it probably sounds corny and done to death. But that's precisely how it gets you: by laying out a very conventional framework and making you question its relevance, not only in regards to genre, but most importantly, in regards to gender. That said, setting up both a female heroine and a female victim is not an innocent move. Not innocent at all. Especially since there is a romance involved, and a very complex one at that. Not only is this a treat for the audience (not having to suffer dumb, brawny guys), but it also constitutes a welcome break from some of the most enduring horror movie conventions, namely those that tend to promote rigid gender roles and archetypical characters such as the damsel in distress or sacrificial woman. It further transforms the archetype of the virginal heroine into something tremendously more ambiguous and interesting. And there is much more gender confusion along the way that I will not spoil but which will undoubtedly complicate any psychoanalytical reading of the film. While challenging horror movie conventions, this gender confusion seems to act also as a radar scrambler for pissed-off feminists, some of whom seem to enjoy female victimization as it helps validate their rigid theories. All this makes the film a true gem for horror film analysts, which is probably why I get such a kick out of it. And which is probably why I grant it such a high rating. Both the film critic and the horror fan in me have a huge boner for this film. And I do not use the term lightly.

Psychoanalytical perdition: Cécile de France reaching

for an outstretched phallus

The play on gender conventions is the film's greatest asset. This includes all nullifying effects that its central gender confusion has on the attempts to make psychoanalytical readings of the film (as well as on the shameful tagging of phallic/non-phallic weapons). But there is also a major point to be made for the near perfection of the screenplay and devilishly competent direction that allows the filmmakers to craft a work of rare concision. Clocking in at a lean 91 minutes, Haute Tension is extremely dense and wholly relevant. Just like Cécile's luscious body, it contains not one ounce of fat. The are some mild narrative inconsistencies here and there, but these are necessary to keep the spectators guessing. Other than that, the screenplay is flawless. Just consider the post-credit sequence as a case-example. Within a couple of minutes, it manages to set up an extremely complex and brilliantly exposed relationship of attraction/repulsion between the two main characters. In that regards, the car is a perfect stage for this opening sequence as it provides not only a valid narrative starting point (since the girls are on their way from the city to the country), but also a plethora of potential camera positions allowing many degrees of separation between the two women. The small bit of exposition we experience during their short ride, although it might appear as a mere exchange of platitudes, is actually very telling as it ties the opening 'dream' sequence to the narrative and, through a savvy use of framing (and over-framing), describes with utmost sensibility the high-strung emotional nature of those two characters' relationship. In the end, you need not look much further for character development as it is all here, and all done cinematographically, not theatrically. The fact is that there is actually very little screen time in the film dedicated to character development, but that screen time is used with such intelligence that it easily propels the film to where it needs to be in the budding moments of the main drama, while avoiding the need for traditional expository devices (there is usually at least half a dozen minutes in every horror film that's wasted early on for clumsy expository dialogue). Add to that a pivotal scene of nudity, and one of masturbation (both featuring bits of superb female bodies) and you've got all the exposition you need. And we immediately move on to the massacre!

Alex is sleeping and Marie is wiggling her slender fingers underneath her jeans when mysterious headlights appear on the horizon. A dirty brown truck pulls up to the cottage and a creepy blue collar guy disembarks. And when I say 'blue collar', I mean the most disgusting, most extreme incarnation of them. You don't need to look twice to figure out that he's the killer, and you don't have to wait long for confirmation either. Now, I won't fully disclose what happens in the cottage, but I will tell you this: the first two executions are amongst the most surprisingly original and satisfying in recent years. They were a huge hit at Fantasia, where I saw the film the first two times. People were screaming and clapping like crazy. Personally, I had my mind blown. And there wasn't anyone with whom I saw the film later on who didn't make some sort of gasping noise upon seeing those delicious atrocities. And thus we are introduced to the killer, a disgusting, dirty man who destroys Alex's whole family in the most brutal way possible, then kidnaps the pretty young woman. This man is truly a virile mammoth who dwarfs heroine Marie by making her appear frail and fragile in comparison. He's an overwhelming yang to her puny yin. And Nahon makes a damn good job of bringing him to life, grinning nastily to reveal dirty teeth and talking in a husky and self-assured voice that greatly contrasts with Marie's. His fat, red cheeks, his hairy hands, dirty nails and greasy clothes, everything about him reeks of unbridled masculinity whereas Marie is purely feminine. The only area in which she has the upper hand is in the size of their respective weapons: whereas the killer carries only a tiny switch-blade, Marie wields a butcher's knife. Again, this situation would indicate that everything is in its right, but it is actually not since the rigid gender gap between heroine and villain will come to be totally redefined during the course of the film. Suffice it to say that Marie uses this confrontation to gain some confidence in herself and reassert her own identity. This leads to a very, very brutal and visceral confrontation between herself and Alex's captor, both of whom share one thing: sexual desire for the poor, victimized girl. But both of whom are exact opposites: disgusting and brutal man-beast vs clean and virginal girl. In the end however, you will find that they both bleed the same red blood... and they bleed it in pints!

Talk about a beastly motherfucker (Philippe Nahon as le tueur)

Now I'd like to add a few words about the soundtrack. Although it might appear bare at first, it actually plays a crucial part in setting up the story and exposing the characters' motivations. The use of Didier Barbelivien's atrocious ballad, À toutes les filles (que j'ai aimées avant) [literal translation: To All the Girls (That I Have Loved Before)] as the killer's theme song is nothing short of brilliant as it sets him up to be no more than a retarded teenager in the body of a hulk. It makes him that much more unpredictable and cruel, while suggesting a very long career of female abduction. More brilliant even is the choice of Runaway Girl by U-Roy as the song Marie listens to while masturbating. At once, it summarizes the protagonist's angst and foreshadows her transformation into the knight-in-shining armor. Again, if we consider the soundtrack as another cornerstone of narrative construction, we can see how concise the film really is, using every bit of space available to insert material relevant to the plot. And remember, most of this narrative construction is done in a purely cinematographic fashion (using framing, editing, sound...), and not in the traditional theatrical fashion (using only dialogue). Truly, here is a rare achievement in recent horror film history.

Although I would love to write a lengthier (and meatier) article about this awesome film, I couldn't do so without spoiling it for the viewer. Moreover, I could start boring my readers at with this overwhelming passion of mine. I will thus simply recommend you see Haute Tension right away. And although some of the finer French expressions might be lost in the translation, you should nonetheless be able to appreciate the technical flawlessness of this film as well as its outstanding brutality. For any gorehound out there, it comes highly recommend without any after-thought. For those of you whom I have not yet convinced, I suggest you watch the film two times. It's short and there's bound to be many things you can appreciate in there, if only the naked body of Maïwenn LeBesco. In my book, Haute Tension easily earns a top 5 spot in the Best Horror Films of the 00s, coming just short of Tomas Alfredson's sublime adaptation of John Lindqvist's novel, Let the Right One In (2008).

4/5 A perfectly crafted horror film that's simple and effective, with plenty of gore and gender confusion. A treat to both the film analyst and the casual horror fan.

Dead End (2003)

Review #0051

"That fucking film, dude..."

Buckle up. It's going to be a bumpy ride. Just look at mom's face.

I don't quite remember why I picked up a VHS copy of Dead End. I must've read one good review and thought that the 2$ price tag was fair. I had only a mild interest in it which could best be described as a collector's impulse, or the inexplicable drive to amass, as if to compensate for loss or absence in other aspects of life. In any case, I didn't expect much from the film. And while it isn't much indeed, it's the best it could've been considering its ambitions. When I first saw it, I was happily surprised. When I saw it again, I was even more happily surprised because it does what it has to do so well while being totally unpretentious about it. Dead End is a textbook exemple of how to successfully do a B-rated horror film. And this sort of little films sure come in handy on cold, lonely, winter nights.

On Christmas Eve, a typical American family including the square-jawed, grey-haired dad, granny-ish mom, rebellious teenage son, studious, blonde daughter with a jock boyfriend, all are driving on a dark road towards the house of some relatives. At some point, dad inexplicably takes a detour, stating that he was bored with the Interstate, and feared sleep. As we all know, detours are never a good idea in horror films. Evidently, here is no exception as strange events start unfolding. There's a mysterious woman in white near the road, a ghastly apparition with a nasty gap on her forehead and a silent baby wrapped in sheets. There's a hearse roaming the road, hellbent on capturing the souls of the recently deceased and a small, empty cabin which is actually the only interior in all the film (save for the car itself). Creepy stuff happens which I can't reveal without spoiling the fun, and all the while, the characters' exposition continues. The road stretches hundreds of miles without any intersection as the characters desperately try to find a way out. The plot is simple enough, and pretty linear. Nonetheless, there are enough twists and turns to keep you interested until the mystery finally unravels and you go: "Damn, that was a crazy ride, but it was worth it!"

The woman in white is a fox: beautiful, cunning and deadly.

Cool people will inevitably tell you that they figured out the ending a couple of minutes in, which is entirely plausible considering the number of hints that the spectator has to work with. For those of us with regular insight, or more to the point, for those of us with a distrust in screenwriters so strong that they will not be convinced of any obvious truth until the drop of the curtain, the scenario will have you guessing all the way through. At any rate, the ability to predict the film's ending shouldn't impair its appreciation. It could actually heighten it, for there is no twist ending here, but a carefully planned one. You just have to observe how the mystery unfolds to capture the relevance of every scene. And reflect on how everything is precisely in its right place. Personnally, I find that it is always better to know a film's ending before even walking in the theater. That way, you can enjoy the film on a technical level without being a slave to the narrative. In saying this, I am trying to convince curious people that in this case, the ending does not make the film. It merely closes it, leaving you begging for more.

All in all, Dead End's success relies on two key elements: a strong scenario that successfully walks the thin line between humor and horror and a highly capable, and obviously willing cast led by bona fide B star Ray Wise. Ol' Ray is splendid as the over-burdened father. His stone-faced approach makes it feasible for him to handle touchy, dramatic scenes with the same ease as darkly humorous ones. 25-year-old TV actor Mick Cain first appears miscast as the family's wisecracking teenage son, but he actually does a pretty good job of bringing to life what is essentially an obnoxious brat which you will love to hate. Both guys have this zany energy that could only stem from self-enjoyment in their work, but it is ultimately Lin Shaye who steals the show as the manic-depressive mother who twitches her way through the second act, and eventually dies of an auto-erotic brain massage (!!). Truly everyone here did what they could to make this humble effort a success, including the people behind the camera.

The directors make the most of their budget by deciding to suggest carnage rather than to show it. The result is an heightened sense of horror stemming from our own input. Most of the time, there is only a small part of a corpse protruding into the frame, or the mere hint of an atrocity (such as a severed ear or the schematic drawing of a corpse) to feast upon, which is fine considering that showing poor gore could only undermine the legitimacy of the film. And besides, seeing is not as much fun as imagining, especially when cued by the characters' horrified faces. There's actually a real sense of dread emanating from the aftermath of each execution as characters fall into diverse states of madness and the chessboard is rearranged accordingly. Add to that the oppressive atmosphere stemming from dark woodlands surrounding the characters and you've got a pretty solid horror film all around. Apart from the epilogue, which I thought was over-long and over-explanatory while featuring some of the worst acting in the film, there is nothing really bad here. On the other hand, there are many interesting little novelties, or at least rarities, such as the death by brain massage or the "jerking off in the woods" part (I might have to take cues from the film, me who has actually jerked off in the woods once), little irreverent bits, which would not necessarily have been possible in a bigger-budget film.

Guessing might just be more fun than seeing.

I have mentionned the strong scenario, but it is actually amazing to see how brilliant and relevant its unfolding is. This here is truly a great cathartic adventure for the characters, all of which have dirty secrets that slowly seep out, adding not only to the characters' background, but to the sense of despair and desillusion with family life and the sacredness of some of the more incongruous family tradition, such as the dreaded (and obligatory) Christmas reunion. Christmas is actually a pretty shitty time of year for most adults. They need to drive hundreds of miles on slippery roads, in the dark, while listening to stupid carols and whining kids, all that to meet a bunch of people whom they hate, but whom they have to hypocritically treat with respect, lest their teetering marriages come to an end and they risk losing half of their possessions. Really, Christmas is particularly cathartic, especially since alcool and high-strung emotions are likely to be involved, which will loosen tongues and allow truth to rear its ugly head. This is actually a perfect set-up for an horror film. From the getgo, it gives you dark roads and dark emotions. True horror is only a few steps away in the nether regions of family life. But we all know that, through crisis, family members band back together, which is what happens here through an intriguing mechanic of attraction/repulsion which perfectly exemplifies the highs and lows experienced by all families. Of course, there are no intricate psychological subtelties here, only well-written, well-acted characters who appear entirely believable, almost more so when beginning to teeter on the brink of insanity and despair.

So, what we have here is both a great gimmick film, sort of a mystery monster movie, but also a somewaht interesting character study. The thing is that Christmas reveals a person's character (and his dark secrets) better than any other event. It is the great cathartic force behind the film. Sure, the more grisly aspects of the film may well constitute the meat of it. But eventually, it is the continual exposition of the characters which holds it together (in that, it might act as the gravy). Every event in the film is meaningful because it triggers and outpouring of secrets as the characters become more and more psychologically unstable. Everything in here is perfectly integrated in the grander scheme, as it should be. There is a reason for every scene that goes beyond the need for a new kill, and there is an evolution of the characters that follows accordingly. Hell, who said all horror films were dumb slashers?

All in all, what's great about Dead End is the smarts put in, but most importantly, the willingness and sheer enjoyment that the makers of this film hold for their work, which are prominently shown in every scene. Sure, the people responsible for this might just be there to make a buck. To make their salary and solemnly claim: "Another day, another dollar". Maybe they don't care about film fans, about horror, or about film in general... Nonetheless, they do the best they can. They're impeccable professionals. And you can admire that, as you should in every other domain: dedication to one's work. Maybe not passion, but at least a sense of responsibility which I should dare call honesty. A beautiful, but rare thing, this...

Don't judge a book by its cover... Otherwise you might think that Catcher in the Rye is shit.

I have considered many aspects of the film in my appreciation of it, but the main point I should try to make concerns its incredible potential amongst genre fans. Now, I wouldn't say the film is innovative. Sure, it does have its moments of mad brilliance, and yes, it does contain things I had never seen before. Nonetheless, it remains somewhat generic. The major thing that distinguishes it from other B-series, or straight-to-video, and ultimately ephemeral efforts is excellence. I'm talking almost perfect here. Perfect because it doesn't have lofty goals or pretentious, philosophical aspirations. Perfect in what it is trying to do.

For me, the film was a sleeper hit. I bought it in a lowly bargain bin many years ago for two measly dollars with which I can't even buy a hotdog at the Bell Center. The other night, I took it out of my library and put it in my old VHS player. The only thing I could then remember is having been surprisingly happy when I first saw it, alone on a cold winter night, wrapped in a blanked and chilled to death by the intolerable sense of dread that permeates the film (and which I found again intact the second time around). For me, the association was simple: I had just watched a confused mess of a film and its setting had reminded me of Dead End. Inside of myself, I couldn't bear the fact that me and my friends were watching Five Across the Eyes while Dead End sat on the shelf, collecting dust. It didn't seem fair for Andrea, Canepa, Wise and crew. So I had no hesitation, and God, am I glad to have trusted my instincts. The film was a hit! One of my friend kept saying: "That fucking film, dude..." as the plot twisted and turned. In the end, the cold hard truth is that, for the price you're likely to pay for this film, it's most probably worth it. You won't expect a thing, you will think, as I did: "This film can't possibly be good, just look at the cover!" But that's where you would be wrong: Never judge a book by its cover.

***  A textbook example of how to create a great B-movie.

Footnote 02/14: Removed half a star from the rating. Guess I got carried away after the film saved me from embarrassment on a night where I made the mistake of renting Five Across the Eyes (see full story here).

Five Across the Eyes (2006)

Non-review

Seeing how Fangoria gave a positive review of this film, I decided to rent it, thinking that it had to be at least remotely good. I was thus confident with myself when two friends came over that night, and I brandished the jewel case with a faint grin, showing them the round sticker branded with the coveted 16+. We were all excited by then, titillated if you will by the promise of strong gore. But that feeling soon let go. The menu appeared and some crazily unnerving dance beat came blasting out my speakers. Almost instinctively, we got up and starting dancing like crazy. We couldn't help it. We were like dislocated automatons, mocking with our frenzied dance moves an opening beat that seemed suspiciously out of place. It was all a laugh riot... but then the laughter stopped. I had settled down and make the mistake of pressing "Play".

When I first saw the opening shot of Once Upon a Time in the West, I thought to myself: "Here is a rare film that you know will be awesome right from the first instant". Well, Five Across the Eyes gave me exactly the opposite impression. The film is dreadfully shot, atrociously framed, monstrously edited, the acting is abominable and the soundtrack is completely out of synch with the atmosphere. Less than twenty seconds into the film, one of my friends turns to me in anger and shouts: "Don't tell me we can't do better than this shit" as if willing to grab my camera, go out into the night and shoot something, anything that could be proof of our technical superiority to the makers of this film. I had to concur, then I asked for a vote: "Do we keep on watching this shit, or..." We decided not to, considering that no amount of gore could possibly salvage this half-brained abomination. Fortunately, I had an ace up my sleeve that could quench our thirst for a decent horror film. I trotted to my library, stating that I knew a good, little known but solid effort in the same vein. I picked up Dead End, my key to salvaging our night. I put it in and we had a blast. As for Five Across the Eyes, I will forever have a hard time convincing myself that it is a film worth reviewing, or, to put it another way, worth sitting through. I mean, if you don't know how to frame a shot and don't know how to edit. If you find it appropriate to open an horror film with rocking dance music, you're not likely to "get it" halfway through. You either get it or you don't. Personnally, I was immensely relieved to see that the people behind Dead End could at least muster a well-composed two-shot. A two-shot for Chrissake! And that latter film didn't even bear Fangoria's seal of approval on the back cover! What a strange world we live in...

Ozu must be turning in his grave...

I shall not give Five Across the Eyes a star rating because there might, possibly, have been something in there that could've elevated this technical mess above the pit. And I do also find it unfair to rate a film of which I have seen less than a minute, a very convincing minute, but a simple minute nonetheless. I will simply suggest that you trust imdb ratings for once, and accept the generous 3.3 rating the film gets there thanks to the gorehounds' legendary leniency. Then I will invite you to read my review of the vastly superior Dead End.