Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985)

Review #0019

One of the most infamous titles of all times, this bargain-basement Japanese "effort" actually benefited from the allegations against it, turning them into some unhoped-for publicity. Legend has it that Charlie Sheen saw the film and denounced it as snuff to the MPAA (!), which in turn contacted the FBI for investigation. What everybody this side of the Pacific failed to understand is that they were five years too late. Japanese police had already investigated the case, and "forced" the release of a "Making-of Guinea Pig", billed with "Flower" on the Unearthed Films DVD (a neccessity, considering the 45-minutes runtime of "Flower"). Not unlike "Cannibal Holocaust" (also investigated on charges of verisimilitude) at the beginning of the decade, "Flower of Flesh and Blood" is pure exploitation, deserving of its cult status only insofar as candid people will believe it snuff. In itself, it is a pretty witless and forgettable film with top-notch gore effects to elevate the ensemble slightly. As in all such exercises in exploitation, primary importance is put on the goo, while everything else is secondary. The production values are minimal (the lighting being particularly awful), the "plot" is uninvolving, the sound is way off (the "noises of splatter" are so unconvicing that they border on the humorous), the acting non-existent, but the mastery of latex... magnificent!

A truly expressive image by Hideshi Hino,
unlike anything you will see in Flower...

According to an introductory text, "Flower" is the faux-doc recreation of a snuff tape sent to film director/manga artist Hideshi Hino. But it is actually a loose adaptation of "Red Flower", one of his mangas featuring a lonesome florist using severed female parts to create floral ornaments. And despite the fact that the film is virtually plotless, it contains many references to the director's mangas in a weird chant that the killer performs near the end (which mentions "Panorama of Hell" and "Lullabies from Hell"). It's a shame that such literary inspiration is almost concealed in the film, as well as the introspectively-grotesque Hino style of storytelling. What we're left with is grotesque indeed, but in a run-of-the-mill, torture-porn sort of way. It lacks any sort of finesse, and any sort of emotion. All in all, it is not more than a flat depiction of dismemberment. A woman is abducted, tied to a table, drugged, and cut down piece by piece. The killer adresses the camera and describes the events to follow in floral metaphors, then grabs the adequate tool for severing the next body part. The hands go, then the arms, legs, guts, head, and eyes, all in loving close-ups. The film is little more than an exercise in creating and framing gore. There is no tension, no thrills, no suspense, just grossness. The "bad guy" is not creepy, nor credible. He is just plain silly. And the fact that the girl is drugged (and indifferent to what is happening) greatly softens the blow, making the horror lukewarm. The film is the mise-en-scène of dismemberment. Period. The entire wealth of expression comprised in the manga is excised in favor of a snuff-looking piece of trash. "Flower" is the kind of film that will make people around you exclaim "Why the fuck would you want to see this?", or (looking at the DVD cover), "Oh my God! This is disgusting, you sick fuck!" Try to play the film at a party and watch your friends' faces, but make sure to be convincing in your explanations if you want to keep them as friends.

2/5

Hyperopic worlds

Here are some typical images of my childhood:

There was no girl with golden hair in my past, nor was there any legendary friendship. No empowering moment or first-time experience I could have benefited from... Only the sidewalk next to the convenience store and the endless discussions about what to do next, the large spit puddles from my cigarette-smoking friends and petty vandalism. Time was the fuel of my boredom, and God only knows how shamelessly I burnt it all. The story of my youth is one of a melancholy snail sliming through life, doing nothing but hope for something great to happen. Something. Anything. Clouds laced with fire or carnivorous plants suddenly springing upward, I didn’t care. I needed something to break the monotony of my suburban hometown and my autistic existence. As all kids of my kind, I even considered mass-murder a worthy solution to my ennui and pain.

The place I remember most vividly from my hometown is the video store on Brien street. The building seemed bigger than the whole town because it extanded way beyond its walls into the far reaches of the imagination. Inside were rows and rows and rows and rows of those weird, crankable boxes called "VHS tapes", each a key to my prison of flesh (that is, my diminutive body) and the bars of conventional ideas dispensed by parents and teachers, babysitters, and all form of adults who can’t understand the weight of worlds on a child’s soul. Now, this is the worst tragedy of youth: forced myopia. Again and again, children are taught to crank their universe back to fit the limitative frame of reality. Whatever exists beyond is forced into oblivion by adults. Hopelessness to reach the limits of my own realm: this is what I felt then, and still feel now. Fortunately, there is film.

As a kid, I strolled through the video store, contempling the myriad windows to other worlds. Better worlds. Worlds that went above and beyond our own. Worlds that ressembled it just enough to be plausible, but that differed so much as to make you forget the woes and melancholy sadness of youth. Hyperopic worlds, I call them, worlds built beyond the fuzz I saw as reality. No longer did I have to suffer through pain and boredom, because there was an escape. An escape of two hours worth a couple of bucks. From my viewpoint, it was worth it. Leaving a world of unfathomable sadness for wherever I wished. This was almost too much for a seven-year old to bear. The air was full of the intoxicating scent of popcorn, and the images were limitless in number. Everywhere you looked, there laid a reflecting pool wherein to step and vanish for a spell. Now, expectation is one of the most important part of the moviegoing experience. Expectation is a full-fledged prelude to any film. It is an excrescence of the whole that attaches automatically to its surface. As I desired every film in the video store, they all became alive, and started extruding their roots in all directions. I was overwhelmed.

And despite this chaos of sensations, there was always a specific section that drew me : the horror section. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was because of the many demons who already inhabited my brains and found their reflection enticing enough to be driven toward it. Perhaps it was because I wished on humanity all the pain it can withstand. Perhaps it was because of morbid curiosity, or the desire to bite into the forbidden fruit. Honestly, I can’t say. I can only suggest.

During my youth, I feared pain. I feared it so much that I didn’t even want to impose it on others. It was very late in my life that I found the capacity to hurt other human beings. Before that, I felt their pain as a projection on my own body, and it always prevented me from hitting. So I guess that horror did for me what it does for a vast portion of its spectators. It made unspeakable acts of torture... ok. Ok to watch and enjoy, and desire. I guess I was a sadist to begin with, but a sadist hampered by the physicality of his own body and that of others. I could not go beyond what I didn’t want done to me. You know : we’re told, and it’s not illogical at all, that you should not do to one what you don’t want done on you. But horror is the solution to this: it makes it acceptable to impose on your fellowman all the horror conceivable while still loving it. It constitutes an outlet for all the visceral impulses one is taught to keep hidden behind the many layers of civility.

The visceral, which I like to call “viscereal” for it is far more tangible by nature than spiritual and intellectual things, is also hampered by the social environnement. People don’t like to see blood, guts and puke, spit, snot and semen. What is inside must remain hidden while we cultivate the exterior to ridiculous extremes. We pamper ourselves to become artificially attractive, but we thus forget our humanity. We clean our living space with tremendous zeal, forgetting that men and bacterias are meant to cohabit. Most of all, we treat sickness, and particularly mental sickness, with all but the respect it deserves. The liberating experience of madness and delirium is regarded with contempt and disgust by people who truly can’t understand its nature. That is why horror and pornography are invaluable assets to our society: they show the last remainder of the real human experience in an intellectually-driven society.

This brings me to my next question. Which one is truly crazy: the man who wishes to witness the intringuing extremeties of pain, madness, fear and the grotesque lying beyond our everyday existences, or the man who lovingly spends his afternoon bowling for 150 and sitting on an orange plastic bench in an alley next to the freeway? Which one of them lives in the real world? I am saying this not to undermine the brave people who work hard all their lives and choose as a simple solution to their woes a life of quiet and anonymous consumerism. I am saying this to reevaluate the worth of “unclean” and unconventional urges. I am trying to situate our realities where they belong, as well as where they originate: in our hearts. That is where pain and horror often become unbearable, but that is also where limitless opportunities lie.















Herein, in this foreword, I wish not to discuss the legitimacy or the implications of war, genocide and other such planetary horrors. I do not wish to triviliaze their importance either. I am aware that there are undeniably real occurences of horror within the everyday of many unfortunate human beings, and all my love goes to them, for there is also love in horror. I herein speak from experience, and I limit myself to the truths of my own existence. Philosophizing is a privilege, as well as an obligation, in my opinion. There are pressing matters within the fabric of even the most insignificant suburban dweller’s life. Questions that go much deeper than the price of lawn fertilizer and snow shoveling services. Questions that flirt with the core of life in post-industrial America. "The Matrix", and "Ghost in the Shell" before it put it in eloquent images: we have chosen artifice as a way of life. That can be seen in the highly unnatural development of the suburb, and our total lack of interest for worldy affairs (in journalism, it is called, the law of proximity, and it stipulates that our interest radius weakens as we go outward from our home). The horror film, although it is generally considered as pure fantasy, is closer to the reality of the world, or at least, to the very real possibility of unspeakable violence that we have exorcised from our confortable lives.

From the beginning, I found the pain of horror movie victims extremely compelling. In the video store, I saw faces twisted in many unnatural ways, and limbs sawed off or chewed, all wondrous things to my juvenile mind, just from the stills on the boxes. Back then, I often wondered how humans could sustain so much pain. I also wondered about how the aforementioned occurrences came to be. I imagined a very sick mind responsible for them, a monster without morality or ethics, without realizing that this sick mind was actually a part of myself that existed despite all the efforts made to conceal it under the surface.

Somewhere between the constant pain I felt in my life, and my love for cinema, reality snapped, and it has never been quite the same since. I have found my place in this crazy and infinitely vast world of ours : rolled in a ball in some dark theater, millions of miles away from the flesh that has always contrived me to ridiculous extremes. That makes me quite uneasy to say, but that is the truth : I much prefer the disembodied experience of spectatorship to the control of the person I truly am, with all its limitations, social, physical, and magical. I prefer to be a guest in a foreign land than master in my home.

On the outside, I am docile, gentle and taciturn, truly a man with no spine. Being like this was the only way I found to make life livable, to be forgotten by people, whom I never found anything to share with. But inside, I am a furnace of conflicting emotions that find their way out of me only in uncontrolled bursts of anger and sadness directed solely at myself and random objects. I was always... shy about sharing feelings. Moreover, it’s not something people seem to do. People joke, they only joke and fool around because it is more comforting. Try to tackle an issue that transcends their daily lives, and they're gonna find some way to joke about it! Yet, if you punch them in the face, they will stop joking...

As a kid, I wondered why I craved horror, yet was also repelled by it. Was there a ray of hope shining over the beast I was? Or rather, was there a dark seed growing inside my otherwise healthy self? I always felt, and I still do, that there were two sides of me, much like Jekyll and Hyde. Now, that must be a feeling shared by most of you, but in my case, one is almost completely entraped in the other, and it cries for help. It cries for release, but I am too weak and afraid to let it out. I wish for the world to end, for death to start raining on unsuspecting populations. I want to kill with my bare hands, yet I lack the confidence to do it. So I watch horror films.

Suspiria (1977)

Review #0018

What can I say? This is the maestro’s masterpiece and thus a genre landmark. Rarely are horror films so technically accomplished as this one, and despite the secondary importance accorded to the plotline (involving a rather underwhelming finale), the ensemble is almost flawless. Argento herein perfectly combines all of his signature techniques (complex camerawork, mindwarping color schemes, insane rock soundtrack and vicious gore) to create something much more than his trademark giallo, something memorable which has found its way into the collective unconscious like a very determined maggot.

What we’re treated to is not a stylish stalk-and-slash police story blessed with minor innovations, like many other Argento films, but a full-fledged oneiric venture into the domain of a witch, an experience rarely equalled in the genre. Why? Because rarely has the unholy powers of a witch been so successfully translated into cinematic terms. The airborne, all-seeing eye of the camera (as well as the henchmen’s viewpoints) is her omniscient gaze, and Goblin her chorus of demons, peppering the soundtrack with hints of her presence. The excentric settings, full of mirrors and opressive colors, are architectural extensions of her body with which she deceives and terrorizes her victims. Truly every moment of every scene is filled with her influence; the celluloid itself pulsates with her occult power.

Suspiria: a sensuous, oneiric
venture into the witch's domain.

As usual in Argento films, the killer is never revealed in full until the end. Initially (during the double murder), she is barely more than what is expected, that is a vicious pair of arms and some dark clothes. But as the plot unfolds, we realize she is much more than a physical presence. She is a dark, venomous force that takes infinite shapes and infests every space. As such, she is a monster far more dreadful than any of Argento’s staple deranged killers, all of which unfortunately suffer from a grounding in reality that implies tangible (thus limitative) methods and motivations. More importantly, Helena Markos is not a lone killer; butlers and head mistresses are also enemies, as parts of a killer system that surrounds and entraps the protagonists, much like in the haunted house subgenre. Rarely in Argento is the entire environment a menace to the characters as it is the case in Suspiria and this is regrettable, because it herein greatly heightens tension, effectively compensating for the scenario’s sometimes slow pacing.

Cinematographically, the film is one very buttered toast, extremely heavy on mood rather than plot devices. The atmosphere is saturated. When we’re not blinded by the wall colors or the intricate set design, we are deafed by Goblin’s rocking soundtrack (undoubtedly their best effort for any Argento film); when we are not moved from our seats by the virtuoso camera, it is by the savvy editing (in the dance rehearsal scene, for exemple, where rhythm is at its peak), all of which contribute to our disorentation and general unease. All of which draw us inside the world of the film for a mesmerizing journey.

The brutal opening double-murder, complete with
gruesome close-ups of a beating heart being repeatedly
stabbed, constitutes one of the most exhilarating
moments in horror film history.

The film’s limitations (although it is debatable that these constitute actual flaws) lie in the scenario which is, to say the least, pretty minimalist. It is the classic tale of the righteous outsider who faces evil abroad, a seemingly undying evil to which she is the unlikely solution simply in her quality of protagonist (i.e. center of the universe). The opening murder scene is heavy on violence and style, constituting certainly a high point, an uppercut so to speak, to start the fight. Then, it briefly becomes a mystery surrounding the death of the ballerina, a mystery that soon spirals out of control into the occult. After that, the plot leaps clumsily toward the conclusion, linking nasty events one to another around the flimsy thread that has become the original mystery.

The performances, ranging from awkwardly subdued to decent are barely worth mention. It is not the actors’ fault however, struggling with dumb lines in as much as five languages, if the film is not character-driven, but mood-driven. As pawns in Helena Markos’ game (as well as Argento’s itself), none of the characters deserve remembrance, except perhaps for the sinister headmistress Tanner, whose authoritative shape and attitude contribute their part to the whole opressive atmosphere. Some fans of the genre may be stoked by Udo Kier’s presence in the cast. Those people only risk finding his performance that much more underwhelming. Despite his excentric background, he plays it incredibly straight here as the obligatory scholar who artificially forwards the plot. Nonetheless, the casting is esthetically very sound. Every actor looks the part. It is unfortunate that their characters lack the roundness necessary to elevate them above simple tokens, although it doesn’t impair the flow of the film in any major way.

The film's numerous lapses in logic fail to
undermine its impressionistic beauty.

All in all, Suspiria is a superior horror film, mainly for technical reasons, but also for its place in Argento’s body of work. All of his trademark techniques are used here with the greatest of effects. The tension, atmosphere, gore, soundtrack and set design are not bound by logic, and therefore can be expressed fully. As a master stylist and abstractionnist, Argento has made his truest film Suspiria. Never before and never again has he been freeer from the constrictive nature of the giallo. And never has he ventured so deep in the domain of pure horror (as opposed to the thriller genre). A uniquely-crafted film, Suspiria is without a doubt, one of the best entries in horror cinema.

5/5: For its masterful use of technique to create a film of pure affect that's widely considered a classic.

NB - This film is discussed in Elusive Terrors - Horror Films and the Moving Frame. 

August Underground (2001)

NB - This review contains images of extreme gore. Please be advised.

VHS aesthetics are key to the film's disturbing realism.

Extremely cheap, immoral, and exploitative : this is the pinnacle of horror for our media-frenzied 21st century. As a bargain-basement video diary, it fits right alongside the endless succession of nasty bits from Youtube and other such media outlets, which we mecanically ingurgitate and produce with a zeal unknown in most areas of life. Nowadays, everybody is a star. And so are the protagonists of the present film. These guys are vile, witless, and vacuous, but they’ve got a camera, and that makes them much greater than what they are. It gives them an hypnotic power on both sides of the spectrum. To their victims, the camera constitues the prospect of a million eyes scrutinizing their suffering. To us viewers, it's presence make us realize that our interest alone legitimizes all of the actions onscreen. Thus, we are all put to shame by it: its victims through the spectacle of their humiliating demise, and the viewers for desiring to see such unnatural images. The only ones to escape this vicious circle are the killers themselves, possessors of the weapon-camera. The question underlying the film, "What would you do if you found a tape left behind by a pair of vicious killers?", hits us right at home, because the film does look true. And we still watch it... And although I will resist to impulse to call "August Underground" a philosophical treaty on contemporary mores, I will only say that it is symptomic of a desperately voyeuristic society .

"August Underground" is a repulsive film : grainy, shaky and (almost) unbearingly nasty. It contains some of the ugliest images ever captured on tape: a series of flat, smeared tableaux of trivial torture. Despite being horrific from a purely esthetic standpoint, these tableaux look devastatingly real. The primitive camerawork, which includes frequent floor shots and constant reframings, the sheer cheapness of the image makes the film look truly homemade, and thus almost suspicious. Obviously, there are some unconvicing elements (all the punches, for example, seem obviously staged), which compromise the illusion, but the tone, settings and characters generally contribute to a faithful portrait of the existential void and ennui that would spawn such explosive violence as shown inbetween shots of empty farmland and petty roadside attractions.

The surrounding void makes the stuffy underground
interiors appear quite lively in comparison.

Call it so if you will, but the only "character development" the film offers is the interaction between the killers and their environment. Besides laughing nevrotically, joking around, and shouting insults, they do little dialogue-wise. They don't strike us as humans, but rather as fungus-like hominids growing out of suburban mire. They are wanderers in a world that doesn't matter, amongst people who don't matter (a single elderly woman, a convenience store clerk, the twin owners of a comic book shop, a slaughterhouse employee, a pair of cheap hookers...). The viciousness of their crimes, is perhaps the lone exciting element in their lives, and in the film, it offers a colorful contrast (through the blood red/flesh beige/shit brown palette used in the basement shots) to the bland-looking exterior/night shots. The clash between the horrific and the ordinary, or rather, the growth of the horrific out of the ordinary is not limited to esthetic distinctions between exterior/interior scenes, but also to thematic distinctions. "August Underground" is a circular road movie. It is a cautious ride through the countryside followed by a quick, autistic return home. A weekend spent driving aimlessly to capture images of infinite(ly empty) space marred by the intrinsic need to return to the cramped existence of underground suburbia. The film is more than the clash between the infinitely (hopelessly) vast that surrounds us with ennui, and the infinitively tiny that crushes our spirit, between the open road movie and the sufocating "in camera", but between what is aboveground, and underground. The quiet stillness of the countryside is opposite its horrific bowel movements. There is something unbearable going on underneath the maple roots: the troglodytic existence of bored psychopaths. This is rather roughly captured on tape here, but it works. We know that suburban life, at least that of the disilusionned youth within, is concentrated in the basement of family houses, right underneath the bright daffodils that are their parents pride. It has been demonstrated time and time again, but never so efficiently as in this film, with its two parentless protagonists who take great care in keeping the tacit secrecy of suburbia alive. While watching the film, the exterior scenes often offer the viewer a breath of fresh air, particularly when one compares them to the unbearable indoor scenes. But nonetheless, it is the latter who offer true insight into the life in the killers' parts.

The shameless subjective camera constantly
tortures the killers' victims with the
perspective of their projected suffering.

The protagonists' murderous impulses are tied directly to nihilism. And this makes their actions that more horrific that they don't act as they do for a grander purpose, out of obsession, or for vengeance. They do so, because it is something to do. Plain and simple time-filling, if you can believe that. They consider life with such dread that humanity becomes a mere plaything. They act toward their peers as with objects, and that makes their demise that much more unbearable. The victims in the film are butchered for no other reason than to entertain a pair of dumb brutes, who giggle and shout all the way through. In horror cinema, it is pretty rare to see motivationless killers, and that is definitively a shortcoming of the genre. If horror is truly affective, there is no actual reason to develop the killers' back story, but most films in the genre still decide to do so, to conform in a way to the traditional narrative stance of narrative cinema as a whole. Nonetheless, I believe motivation makes things all too specific for the viewer. He cannot relate to the victim if it is the killer's ex-girlfriend, or a close friend of his. He can only do so if it is just a random passerby, i.e. if he has the feeling that he could be that person. And most importantly, if there is no reason for its victimization. Think about the razor-sharp efficiency of Michael Haneke's "Funny Games", which is more or less an aristocratic version of "August Underground". Where does it lie? In the killers' direct partnership with the director, of course, but also in the indeterminacy of their motivations. There is a scene halfway in which they answer their victims' classic question: "Why are you doing this to us?". The happy-go-lucky lead killer quips: "We're bored, spoiled kids". Then he offers a completely different answer. "Is this version more satisfactory?" he asks his victims so that they know they are being toyed with. Director Haneke is quite savvy. He knows very well that logic only softens the blow, when it comes to horror. And what a blow he delivers with his film! A pair of well-manered, gloved teenagers invade the house of a bourgeois family, torture, and eventually kill them. And all we're left with after the ordeal is over is a sense of impotency, a deep and cold void that twists our bowels. The mystery is still whole regarding the killers' origin. All we know is their nastiness. And there also lies the efficiency of "August Underground". Its protagonists are monsters with no redeeming value, no humanity lying beneath the surface. There is no comfortable explanation to fall back on, and thus emptiness fills us with unfathomable dread.

August Underground is an all-American freak show,
complete with several morbid exhibits.

Actually, there is a reason why those killers kill, and this is the main point that films such as "August" and "Games" try to make. The reason is sitting on a couch at home, on the other side of the screen. It dabbles popcorn while someone is tortured to death on the ineffectual TV screen in front of him . I wouldn't go as far as to say that these films accuse us of voyeurism, but they certainly make us question our position. How "Games" function is that it lets us know early on that the killers are on the director's side (they wink at the camera). We cannot hope for a happy ending, but still we watch, until the last family member is killed. The film is so intense the first time around that you cannot help but wonder, as the credits roll: "Why did I watch this?", which is pretty much the question put forward by "August"'s brutal final cut. The latter's strategy however, differs somewhat from "Games"'. Instead of going down the classic narrative path, it draws us inside the world of the film as the cameraman and joyful watcher of atrocities. It goes for such a realistic approach that our real values are necessarily involved. On the one hand, "August" truly looks as a snuff film. Was it not for the illustrated DVD case with Toe Tag's label on it, we could very well wonder if true people were not truly killed in front of us, making us an unwilling accessory to murder. On the other, the total absence of style in the cinematography and our constant awareness of the camera's presence reminds us of our own experience as amateur filmmakers. In other words, the film looks like it was made by the viewer on a shoestring budget, making it that much more plausible. "They" kill. But is it "our" fault?

4/5

The Thing (1982)

Either a remake of "The Thing from Another World" or simply a tighter adaptation of John Campbell's novella ("Who Goes There?, 1938), this second of three Kurt Russell vehicles directed by Carpenter has all the graphic grossness one could hope for, with tight direction and solid acting (especially from its animal actors) to boot, and a loud Ennio Morricone score as a bonus. In the opening moments of the film, a Norwegian crew of Antarctic explorers are chasing a runaway Alaskan Malamute, very much trying to kill it. Have they gone mad? Or is the dog actually a vicious E.T. in disguise? The American crew who end up sheltering the Malamute soon find out, the hard way. You see, the Norwegians have just uncovered the remains of an alien spaceship buried in ice since thousands of years, as well as the frozen corpse of its pilot. Unfortunately, this alien is a parasitic metamorph who absorbs other lifeforms in order to use them as disguise. And the dog was one of these disguises. The Americans try to fight it, but they also have to fight paranoia and mistrust in the process as they ignore who could have been infected. Carpenter's best film, save for the seminal slasher, "Halloween", "The Thing" tanked at the box office, making a slim home profit of about 3 millions. Aside from the near-coincidental release of "E.T." (a slightly more accessible alien film), this could well be explained by the minimal characterization and the total absence women in the film, which could translate in a minimal involvment from moviegoers. That's all and good for those who wish to see round characters get summarily killed, but as long as you're in it for the alien, you should watch this instead of E.T. I don't usually condone FX-driven films, but here, it is elevated to the level of art. The dripping goo, melted faces, springing spider legs, wiggling tentacles, toothy mouths, framed in all their clunky glory... It brings a tear to my eye. Finally, here is a grand piece of horror craftmanship that is not merely glimpsed at, but shown proeminently. Alone, it will insure the perenniality of the film.

"The Thing" is above all a fanboy's film. Russell's character, for example, may not possess an intricate background, but he is manly and cool, with shades and a hat. That is sufficient for the needs to fulfill. The scene in which the protagonists test each others' blood with a hot coil, without being truly tense or emotional, constitutes a moment of anthology nonetheless because it's a great concept! The apparent laisser-aller of the filmmakers, the gaps in emotional logic can be easily filled by any horror fan. Suffice it to say that Carpenter makes great use of the claustrophobic Antarctic sets, and the sweet creature concept. In the end, it doesn't really matter whether or not the viewer was 100% involved in the storyline, because he's had his candy. Great sets, great direction, sound and monster design. All that's missing is a big bowl of popcorn.

3,5/5 : For being such a damn cool film!

Troll 2 (1990)

Review #0015

This uber-camp classic has all the cheese you want dripping inbetween slices of rotten bread. The lame actors (all of which are, or appear unprofessional) stare straight at the lens to deliver lame lines of dialogue (such as the classic: "They're eating her... and then they're going to eat me... OH MY GOD!", or "Nilbog! It's goblin spelled backwards! This is their kingdom!"); the nonsensical scenario involves an axe-wielding, time-stopping, lightning-shooting ghost grandfather and a magical stone that gives power to a big-breasted druidess and her goblin followers, whose plans are foiled thanks in part to a double-decker bologna sandwich(!); the goblin costumes, designed by porn star Laura Gemser (who also worked on the unrelated "Troll 3" a.k.a. "Creepers" a.k.a. "Contamination .7" a.k.a. "Troll III: Contamination Point 7" a.k.a. "The Crawlers") are basically potato sacks filled with foam, combined with stiff latex masks (only one of which featured a movable mouth) and spears made of sticks; editing is a mess, totaling more than fifty continuity errors; the two-tone soundtrack is forgettable in places and downright annoying in others (such as the "party" scene where townfolks groove to the same four notes repeated endlessly); only the FX are slightly interesting, in particular Arnold's man-tree suit and the pool of green goo where one of the girl victims dissolves. In short, "Troll 2" is a total fiasco. It doesn't even feature trolls! You see, it's one of those deals where the American distributor repackaged the film (an Italian Gremlins rip-off originally entitled "Goblins") under a new name to stimulate sales by association. And eventually, it did sell, and become a deserving cult classic. Largely considered one of the worst films of all times (as I'm writing this, it is #83 on imdb.com's Top 100 Worst Films list, #1 of which is "Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2"), it has got legions of fans attracted by its good-natured campiness. I first saw "Troll 2" at this year's Fantasia festival with an over-capacity crowd of about 700 people shouting lines and chanting "Grandpa Seth, Grandpa Seth, Grandpa Seth!", and let me just say it is the only way to see the film (and truly enjoy it). With some friends and a DVD, it's sure to draw a few laughs, but at a sold-out midnight screening, it becomes more than its filmmakers ever intended it to be: a true cultural phenomenon.

2,5/5

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Review #0014

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen: the best zombie film of all times! "Night" had laid the groundwork ten years before, but it is only with "Dawn" that Romero fully fleshes the genre (no pun intended). A group of four people (two cops, and a couple of newspeople) "run" from zombie-overrun Phillie and find shelter in a suburban mall, which they clean and wall-up as their own personal fortress. They would've been happy there, if it weren't for a ruthless gang of bikers (that includes FX maestro Tom Savini) who forces them into an all-out war. With gripping realism, the film opens in media res during the media shitstorm provoked by the rise of the dead. A talk-show featuring a guest hellbent on raising you-should-shoot-any-dead-family-member-in-the-head awareness is disturbed when protagonist Francine fights an executive over the broadcast of outdated "shelter" information. On the other side of town, protagonists Roger and Peter (fan-favorite Ken Foree who would go on to appear in dozens more genre films, including "From Beyond", "The Devil's Reject" and the "Dawn of the Dead" remake) are involved in a mission to evacuate a low-income housing project, with a trigger-happy racist at their sides, into a mazelike contraption full of the living dead. Concisely enough, the main characters are all introduced within their element, and with them, the chaotic world in which they have learned to live. The action, so to speak, begins soon after, as Roger, Peter, Francine and her boyfriend Stephen ("Fly Boy") copter their way out of the city and into the suburb. Over the countryside, they spot a party of redneck militians enjoying thermos coffee and target practice. Those guys remind us of "Night"s conclusion, but this time around, they're part of a bigger whole. You see, by covering the entire stretch of land inbetween the big city and the suburb, Romero ups the ante in terms of scale (and effect) as world contamination becomes a tangible perspective. Almost overnight, the entire human experience has become a thing of unfathomable horror.



Interestingly enough, the shopping mall thus becomes a hot destination. As the world crumbles, it remains the only shelter against the harsh reality of things, a sanctuary so to speak, from the evils of the world. It is made of bricks and steel, sure, but mostly of dreams and illusions. It is a promise of individual comfort in a world of death and destruction. The zombies frequent it, their motor reflexes dragging them back in, but so do the protagonists. In the end, they even confine themselves to its bowels, and within, a cozy apartment furnished "à la mode" where they eat delicacies and drink liquor, oblivious to the faith of other survivors. They are living the American dream, despite the dreary fact that there is no America to speak of anymore. Nonetheless, there are shades of America: consumerism, individualism, and most of all, the a rigid social stratification. You see, "Dawn" also functions as a social commentary. First, by suggesting that the desire to survive is inherently individualistic. Unlike "Night", "Land", "Survival" and most other zombie films, "Dawn" focuses not on a rag-tag collection of survivors picked along the way, but on one restricted, homogenized group that will defend its own interests against others. The paradigm is no longer "us against them" in the sense of humans against zombies, but "us", a small group of friends, against "them", the rest of the world. Many commentators even argue that the different social actors in the film are related hierarchically. Roger Avary suggests the protagonists represent the upper class (locked away in a "gated community"), while the zombies are the lower class (pushed away from that community). As a working hypothesis, it could be useful, but that's by disregarding the fact that the zombies herein are instinctively drawn to the mall. That is, they represent the growing middle class, drawn to the malls by a motorized desire to consume, which in turns constitutes their raison-d'être. The zombie is a mindless consumer, and vice-versa. In the end, the mall setting offers many narrative possibilities, yet its relevance lies in enabling the critique of consumerism that the multiplication of zombie (consumers) allows.

Finally, a few comments about the score and gore because it would be a crime to mention this film's importance without mentioning the dream team that surrounded Romero at the time. Fresh from their crucial contribution to the classic "Suspiria", Italian noise machine The Goblins (featuring the great Dario Argento) cross the Atlantic for a great cause indeed. Their warped, keyboard-heavy score, is trippy and exhilarating, making the celluloid pulsate to the beat. Most of all, it is quite unique. As if the stars had perfectly aligned so we could hear this. Then, there is Tom Savini, for whom the film constitutes a breakthrough. Deservingly so, because the bits of gore contained in the film (concentrated mostly at the beginning and end) are all disturbingly realistic. Zombie teeth break human flesh in loving close-ups, characters are eviscerated, machetes are plunged in zombie heads, all of this as extra butter on a delicious croissant. All in all, "Dawn of the Dead" is Romero's best film because it happens at such a great time for exploitation cinema. The rise of consumerism, and the multiplication of shopping malls provided the sociological framework of the film, the green-light on violence made the zombie film all the more viable, plus Romero benefited from a bigger budget (due to previous film successes), and from the contribution of Dario Argento, The Goblins, and Tom Savini, all at the peek of their careers. Statistically and historically, there is almost no chance of such a happy coincidence reccuring in horror cinema. Let us weep then, and watch "Dawn" yet another time!

5/5