Meanwhile, over at Bryce's place ...

Regular readers of Bryce Wilson’s excellent blog Things That Don’t Suck will be well aware of his side project, Son of Danse Macabre, an online book-in-progress intended as an unofficial (but absolutely respectful) sequel to Stephen King’s seminal non-fiction work ‘Danse Macabre’.

Bryce has been generous enough to turn over a fair chunk of space (about 3,000 words’ worth) to an article by yours truly exploring the post-9/11 themes inherent in contemporary American horror movies. Please also check out the wealth of incisive, in-depth writing by Bryce himself.

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Anarchy in the UK

(The following post contains general comments/thoughts on what’s been happening in the UK this week. On a personal note, my thanks to friends overseas who’ve contacted me over the past 72 hours asking if I’m okay. Much appreciated, guys.)



I posted on my Facebook status yesterday an observation that the riots taking place in various areas of the UK – including my home town of Nottingham – have brought out the inner right winger in a number of people who hitherto wore their liberal credentials on their sleeves.



I’ve spent three days sitting at work listening to reasonably educated people (many from outlying areas of the city completely unaffected by the riots) fulminate at those responsible as mindless, thuggish, work-shy freeloaders who have no political motivation but are just out to cause destruction and loot shops. Which is probably true of the vast majority of the rioters. But the mistake that’s being made here is that rioters, looters and genuine protestors are being lumped into the same group.



I’ve also spent three days listening to reasonably educated, supposedly liberal, middle class people from unaffected areas advocate the use of water cannons, rubber bullets, tear-gas or even armed response. I’ve heard people, without a trace of irony, talking about bringing back Borstals, National Service and the death penalty. I can’t imagine a less appropriate response to what’s currently happening. It’s a form of parochialism that reveals he who espouses it as little better than the hooded thug actually throwing a firebomb. One is physically undertaking a violent act, the other is suggesting that a violent act be undertaken in their name and on their behalf or – worse – implying that a heavy-handed anti-youth police state would prevail if they had their way.



I’ve also listened to a lot of pontificating about the causes of the rioting. What happened in London was sparked off by the fatal shooting of a man by Metropolitan officers. What’s getting lost in all the tabloid proselytizing is that the friends and family of the deceased, who turned up at a police station in Tottenham demanding answers, did so with the intent of staging a peaceful protest. Events exacerbated after a teenage girl who threw stones was attacked by police. Other incidences of rioting have been blamed on job cuts.



Have you ever been on a fire safety course or done it as part of an induction at work? Remember the fire triangle? You need fuel, heat and oxygen for a fire to break out. A spark itself does not cause a fire. The environment needs to be conducive. What sparks off a riot is seldom the reason for it. There has to be a tinderbox atmosphere for conflagration to ensue. And it’s generally the case that this atmosphere has been simmering away for quite some time before things erupt.



One of the most facile questions I’ve heard asked is “What’s going through the heads of the rioters while they smash windows and burn buildings?” My best guess would be: nothing much. They’re probably too driven by adrenaline, anger, frustration and the suddenly presented opportunity for destructive catharsis to do much intellectualizing about things.



The question that should be asked, and which I’m not seeing anywhere in the media or on Facebook, is this:



What created the atmosphere of disaffection and disenfranchisement so palpable in England at the moment that the riots were able to happen?



To answer that depends on how far you want to go back and how wide you want to throw the net. Personally, I’d say the seeds were sown during the 1984-85 miners’ strike when the government effectively turned the police and the armed forces against its own citizens in order to break the power of the unions. The damage done to workers’ rights was devastating. A succession of milquetoast governments have gradually acceded power to corporate entities. The Blair government – which I came to think of as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bush administration – spent three terms dismantling a tranche of basic civil liberties. The fall-out was voter apathy and political troilism (New Conservative and New Labour being virtually indistinguishable) at the last general election. The result: a coalition government. Herein the first problem: nobody votes for a coalition. Ergo we have a government that nobody wants. A government opposed by a party that has drifted so far from what Labour once stood for that its current leader, Ed Milliband, sat on the fence during last month’s public sector strike action instead of voicing support for the workers. In other words, we have no-one to believe in politically.



Now factor in the current state of the economy. For two years in the UK we had what the tabloids delighted in calling the “credit crunch”, a recession created by the greed of the financial institutions and perpetuated by media hyperbole. We’re still riding the tail-end of it, with the job market dead and buried and those of us still in work putting up with wage freezes or even cuts, while the price of living, the price of fuel and the cost of insurance keep going up and up. On a personal note, my house is in negative equity and I’m on an IVA which will last another four years. I am more or less working for nothing. I have no chance of putting aside any savings or investing towards my retirement, and won’t have for some time to come. Do I condone the rioters? No. Do I understand why someone would be filled with enough negative energy to do something destructive? Sadly, and with a heavy heart, I have to admit that yes, I do. The difference is that, if I didn’t have words as a weapon and this blog and/or social networking sites as a forum, I would be directing my negative energy by hurling a brick at the Houses of Parliament or the corporate headquarters of one of the financial institutions or one of the Murdoch-owned media organizations rather than through the window of a sports shop or a Tesco Metro.



Ah yes, the Murdoch media empire. A rapacious entity that even controls The Times, proof if any were needed that nothing is sacred. If political disenfranchisement and economical hardship weren’t enough to create a tinderbox atmosphere, we’ve just seen incontrovertible evidence that the media have perpetrated gross acts of exploitation, milking the grief of people who were at their most vulnerable at the time. Rampantly illegal acts; violation of privacy; leering and amoral voyeurism parcelled up under the disguise of journalism and disseminated to the public. And when someone does what just about everyone I know wanted to do and slaps a foam pie in Murdoch’s face during the hearings, what happens? They give him six weeks in jail. While David Cameron, who was accused last month of violating the ministerial code in his association with Murdoch, is not only not in jail but running (in the loosest sense of the word) the country.



So: we have an economically fucked nation that’s been betrayed politically for two and half decades and is currently in the hands of a government nobody voted for whose key player has links to the man responsible for a media, pitched intellectually and culturally at the lowest common denominator, which is guilty of lies, exploitation and illegal acts.



This is why an atmosphere exists which is conducive what we have seen over the last few days. But you won’t hear it from the mouth of a politician because it would an admission that they’ve failed, and you won’t see it debated in the media because it would be an admission that they’re part of the problem.



I don’t condone the rioting. My sympathies are with those who have been adversely affected. But it’s difficult to see the riots as anything other than an inevitability.

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SUMMER OF SATAN: Evilspeak

I have no idea why ‘Evilspeak’ made the DPP’s “video nasties” list back in the 1980s, unless the guardians of public morality were concerned that impressionable teenagers the length and breadth of the British Isles would, en masse, begin typing screeds of Latin onto computer screens, hit the enter key and be rewarded with translations of Satanic prose, after which said computer would play an instrumental if entirely unexplained part in conjuring forth an ancient evil from the depths of etc. etc. etc.

I’m prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. This was the ’80s, after all, and Hollywood was happily feeding the public any number of misconceptions about the operational capacities of the personal computer. One of the great clichés of the era is the character typing in a question on a DOS prompt screen backgrounded by shimmering green – usually a question to do with the projected course of an asteroid heading towards earth, or the rate of infection if the virus/alien/evil thingy isn’t stopped – hitting enter and the computer throwing up the answer immediately. No faffing about downloading or running a programme, sifting through mounds of returned data, clicking through endless installation wizards on the death of a thousand error messages. No, siree, nuthin’ like that. Just type a question, hit a key, get an answer. I can only imagine that had HAL900 been a ZX Spectrum plugged into the back of an analogue TV the size of a breezeblock and hooked up to a tape recorder that took two and a half hours to load Space Invaders, then all would have been well with the Jupiter mission and there wouldn’t have been any of that pod bay doors malarkey. Mind you, the ’80s was also the decade of teenagers hacking into the entire North American defence system and fucking around with all kinds of hardware programmed by their elders and betters that was supposed to be failsafe, so I guess there was at least some pretence at realism.

But I digress. ‘Evilspeak’, un film de Eric Weston, tells the tale of Stanley Coopersmith (Clint Howard), a “welfare case” at a once-prestigious military academy who is roundly despised by his fellow cadets. That’s “despised” as in “bullied viciously at every opportunity”. He’s equally unpopular with the staff, who either (in the case of the principal) turn a blind eye to his victimization or (pace the football coach) actively encourage it.

One day, on a punishment detail cleaning out the basement – the fiefdom of Sarge (R.G. Armstrong, notching up another Satanic entry on the CV), a drunkard and paedophile (“I’m gonna show you how I make a boy into a little girl”) – he comes across the journal of Father Esteban (Richard Moll), an exiled former priest turned Satanist. We meet Esteban in the prologue, where the Spanish clergy denounce him as a heretic and cast him out of both church and country. Esteban doesn’t seem overly bothered by this, and happily stages a Black Mass on the beach before he takes his leave. And if that’s not a “fuck you” to authority, I don’t know what is.

Coopersmith, his inability on the parade ground or football field compensated for by his IT skills, uses a computer to decipher Esteban’s arcane scribblings. The computer, seemingly possessed by Esteban’s spirit, helpfully delineates all the elements Coopersmith needs to enact his own Black Mass. Partly to keep his discovery under wraps and partly to avoid his tormentors, Coopersmith decamps to the basement, having swiped some computer equipment from class and some consecrated host (one of the ingredients for his Satan-summoning session) from the chapel. This latter acquisition perks the suspicions of fair-weather priest Reverend Jameson (Joseph Cortese).

The accepted wisdom, the way the narrative is shaping up at this point, would be: Coopersmith spends half the movie getting his ass kicked; Coopersmith conjures ol’ Scratch; Coopersmith and his new best bud spend the rest of the movie taking gory revenge on the bullies one by one. But Weston doesn’t entirely do the expected thing. True, he adheres to enough of the genre staples (particularly a shower scene so gratuitous it’s magnificent) to mark ‘Evilspeak’ as inarguably a product of both its time and its genre; but he also fucks around with the expected narrative arc.

Firstly, the journal falls out of Coopersmith’s hands for a portion of the running time and is appropriated by airhead secretary Miss Friedemeyer (Lynn Hancock). A subplot regarding wild boars kicks in at this point, and culminates in a moment of jaw-dropping what-the-fuckery as the aforementioned gratuitous shower scene segues into entrail-munching notoriety.

Secondly, Coopersmith’s attempts to conduct the Black Mass are pretty abject. He’s continually lacking something, and scene after scene ends with him shutting the computer down as he realizes he’s failed again … only for the screen to flicker back into life after he’s gone. The last two requirements of the ritual are provided purely by accident. No spoilers, but there’s irony aplenty in the bullies’ complicity.

Thirdly, Coopersmith all but abandons his plans for harnessing evil when he takes in a puppy and deludes himself that there’s a girl who maybe likes him a bit. Yes, you read that right: our much-maligned, badly bullied and vehemently victimized man of the moment lets his plans for preternatural payback fall by the wayside when somebody gives him a dog.

Of course, the anti-Coopersmith league aren’t going to let him lapse into a state of dewey-eyed enjoyment of life, and a couple of dirty deeds later the scene is set for Satanic shenanigans. After teasing the audience with Coopersmith’s never-quite-completed Black Mass for way over three quarters of the running time, Weston raises hell (the expression used advisedly) in the last fifteen minutes. And he delivers the goods in gory fashion, his fire and brimstone finale coming on a whole lot more impressive than its budget might have suggested.

In an age where technology has outpaced what was considered cutting edge (or even outright sci-fi supposition) two or three decades ago, ‘Evilspeak’ is laughable in many respects. It’s also pretty well done for a low-budget shocker; and, as the presence of Armstrong and Cortese in the cast attest, it cares a little more than most of its ilk about character and performance. Ultimately, it’s an oddball experience and its “video nasty” stigma implies an aesthetic that it only partly lives up to, but as a time-capsule movie with ten minutes of no-nonsense blood and guts at its denouement and an approach to the subject matter that doesn’t involve neophytes in robes dancing around burning trees and drawing pentagrams in chickens’ blood, it’s definitely worth a watch.

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GIALLO SUNDAY: The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh

After a two-month hiatus, Giallo Sunday returns with Sergio Martino’s 1971 giallo ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’, his first foray into the genre and his first teaming with Edwige Fenech. How is it awesome? Let me count the ways.

Firstly, its success kicked off a string of stone-cold classic gialli from Martino: ‘The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail’, ‘All the Colours of the Dark’, ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ (its title, one of the most magnificent in all of cinema, suggested directly by ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’) and ‘Torso’, two of which reunited him with Fenech.

Secondly, it features stellar turns from three giallo legends: Fenech, George Hilton and Ivan Rassimov. Rounded out by Cristina Airoldi (who has one of the most memorable scenes in ‘Torso’), Alberto de Mendoza (a character actor extraordinaire with an incredible eight-decade career in cinema), Carlo Alighiero (who played Dr Calabresi in Argento’s ‘Cat o’ Nine Tails’ the same year) and Bruno Corazzari (one of the “go to” guys for all-purpose villainy in Italian cinema), the cast is tip-top.

Thirdly, it marries stylish thrilleramics with a psychological imperative (the “let’s scare Edwige to death” syndrome: cf. ‘All the Colours of the Dark’) and delivers the whole thing in such a twist-heavy package (the last third of the film is pretty much one narrative curveball after another) that it’s deliriously difficult to keep your eye on the ball.

Fourthly, it delivers a generous helping of much-loved giallo tropes, including extended, operatic death scenes (a protracted bit of business in a park bears comparison with Argento’s ‘Four Flies on Grey Velvet’, made the same year), bottles of J&B all over the shop, a beleaguered but still gorgeous heroine, and black-gloved killers with sharp implements. Seriously, take a look at this little collection of screengrabs and tell me if they don’t scream giallo:

I could continue enumerating all the ways in which ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’ is one of the defining examples of its genre, but I’d probably end of with a repetitive article that segued into a several thousand word love letter to Edwige Fenech, so let’s get things back on track with a plot synopsis.

Julie Wardh (Fenech) has entered into a marriage of convenience with career-obsessed diplomat Neil (de Mendoza) – a man so stultifyingly dull that he dishonors the name Neil (plus, how dare someone who’s obsessed with work share the same name as me? I hate work) – in order to get away from her domineering and possessive ex, Jean (Rassimov). Jean, it is revealed in flashback, is the chap who happily pandered to Mrs Wardh’s eponymous weird kink. And the kink in question? “Blood both excites and repels her.” Hence Jean making love to Julie on a bed of broken glass. (Don’t try this home, kiddies!)

Returning from a trip abroad with Neil, Julie is unnerved by the ministrations of a psychopath targeting women in their neighborhood, and by the fact that Jean seems to be trying to inveigle his way back into her life – the two, she worries, might not be unrelated. Hanging out with BFF Carol (Airoldi), Julie meets Carol’s playboy cousin George (Hilton), whose attentions provide a welcome distraction from her worries. When a blackmailer observes her passionate interlude with George and threatens to spill the beans to Neil, Carol offers to deliver the pay-off in Julie’s place. Things go badly wrong and Julie’s life spirals into chaos and paranoia.

Any fuller synopsis than that would lead us into spoiler territory, so many great things about this film will have to go by the board, particularly anything relating to that aforementioned last third. I will give a nod, however, to the way Martino seems to wrap things up with a bit of expositional dialogue between two characters which leads to much (perverse) hilarity between them; Martino plays the scene as if he’s about to homage Clouzot’s raised-middle-finger-of-irony ending to ‘The Wages of Fear’ (I was even prepared to forgive him the plagiarism, it was done so gleefully), only to subvert expectations and deliver an equally delicious irony but effected by quite different means.

As with any labyrinthine plot, too much analysis can sometimes be fatal. The climactic revelations depend on alibis aplenty for more than one character, and the lacunae are pretty tenuous in places. Still, it’s no small measure of the film’s success that Martino is pulling unexpected moments out of the hat right till the end.

His direction is energetic. The camera prowls with POV-centric menace à la Argento. The set-pieces – including a cat-and-mouse scene in an underground car park, and a nervy exploration of an old dark house lit only by the guttering flame of a cigarette lighter – are confidently handled. ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’ was only his second non-documentary feature (after the spaghetti western ‘Arizona si scatenò... e li fece fuori tutti’), yet every frame demonstrates that with the giallo Martino had found his métier.

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Melissa George

Many happy returns to Melissa George - arguably the best horror heroine in contemporary cinema - who is 35 today.

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Battle Los Angeles

A colleague lent me ‘Battle Los Angeles’. I was told it was a gritty, in your face, street-to-street war movie. But with aliens. Excellent, I thought; the anti-‘Transformers’. Bring it on.

Ten minutes in, my thoughts were more along the lines of switch it off. I watched it to the end … sort of – there was much wandering into the kitchen to get another beer, make a sandwich, take some washing out of the machine, get another beer, etc etc – but my thoughts on ‘Battle Los Angeles’ were pretty much formed within those first few minutes.

Here are five ways in which ‘Battle Los Angeles’ is symptomatic of modern mainstream cinema:

1. Punctuation is for pussies. Back in the day, this would have been called ‘The Battle of Los Angeles’ or ‘Battle for Los Angeles’. Now it’s simply ‘Battle Los Angeles’. Time is money, people – what we save on prepositions we can throw at the “blowing shit up” budget. Okay, fair enough, but how about wheeling out one little colon – ‘Battle: Los Angeles’? Particularly when, in the opening sequence, a completely superfluous comma shows up when an onscreen title identifies Aaron Eckhart’s character as “Staff Sgt, Michael Nantz”. Excuse me? Shouldn’t it be rank followed by name and no punctuation inbetween? You wouldn’t say “Captain, America” or “General, Jackson” would you?
See also: ‘Two Weeks Notice’, ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ (watch out, watch out, there’s an apostrophe thief about).

2. If it’s worth saying, it’s worth saying twice. On the subject of our protagonist, two seconds after the title identifies his rank, two dozen marines jog past him and every man jack of them calls out “Morning, staff sergeant.” He’s swiftly transferred to a new squad, necessitating his introduction by rank and name to the men. Anyone who hasn’t cottoned on by this point that our man is called Michael Nantz and that he’s a Staff Sergeant probably shouldn’t be watching the movie.
See also: ‘Fool’s Gold’ (establish a set of facts in the prologue, roll credits, have main character rehash the entire prologue as a screed of exposition), ‘The A Team’ (have characters discuss at length how they’re going to accomplish something, then show them actually doing it; repeat half a dozen times)

3. Gritty realism. Abject cliché. Can you tell the difference?
Striving for a sense of documentary realism is a good thing … but not when your movie requires not just a suspension of disbelief but your disbelief airlifted out by a couple of Sikorsky helicopters. ‘Battle Los Angeles’ tries to be ‘Saving Private Ryan’ but ends up as a particularly witless and uncharismatic retread of ‘Independence Day’, complete with requisite “This is how we bring them down; get it on the wire; hoo-hah, grunts save the day” ending.
See also: ‘Transformers’ and its soul-destroying demonic spawn sequels.

4. “I don’t need no subtlety / I jus’ want my M-40!” Who needs finely nuanced examples of characterization and narrative when you can simply have your cast raggedly progress through a war zone, randomly firing off a variety of automatic weaponry and yawping at each in unintelligible military-speak for two hours.
See also: ‘Black Hawk Down’

5. DoP required. Steady hand not necessary. Remember ‘NYPD Blue’ and its incessant, roving, edgy handheld camerawork? Remember how that was moderately effective in a 45-minute TV show where at least you had the commercial breaks in which to recover from the feeling of dizziness? Now imagine a two-hour movie where the director and DoP can’t even stage a series of two shots in an office without the camera zooming in, jerking back, tracking down, whip-panning to the side and generally acting like it’s suffering from the worst ever case of the DTs for two solid hours. And it doesn’t even have the excuse of being a “found footage” opus.
See also: ‘Cloverfield’ (please, monster, kill them already, I’m starting to feel travel sick).

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Captain America: The First Avenger

In 1991, ‘The Rocketeer’ opened to lacklustre box office. I’ve never understood the indifference; it was a fun, briskly paced WWII-set superhero movie with gorgeous art deco stylings and an even more gorgeous leading lady in the form of Jennifer Connelly.

Twenty years later and director Joe Johnston is spectacularly vindicated as he knocks it out of the park with the best Marvel Studios production yet – ‘Captain America: The First Avenger’, a fun, briskly paced WWII-set superhero movie with gorgeous art deco stylings and an even more gorgeous leading lady in the form of Hayley Atwell.

Factoring in Emily Blunt in last year’s ‘Wolf Man’ remake, there’s probably an academic paper to be written on the role of the smokin’ hot brunette in the films of Joe Johnston, and ordinarily I’d say that I was the guy to write it, but I don’t fancy sleeping on the sofa tonight so let’s move swiftly on.

Apart from a couple of dodgy bits of CGI – just a couple, mind – ‘Captain America’ is pretty much note-perfect all the way through. The key to its success is that Johnston gives the whole thing a nice old-fashioned vibe. Not just in the period recreation, but in his directorial style. Thus an action movie that’s character-driven. An action movie where the camera is held still and the editing doesn’t resemble the work of an epileptic barber – in other words, an action movie that lets you see the action. In an age of shaky-cam and bpm-editing that reduces major set-pieces in movie after movie to an impressionistic blur, this is something to be applauded.

Johnston’s cast is bob on, as well. Kudos to Chris Evans for playing Steve Rogers straight – not even the vaguest hint remains of his smug dickwad turn in the execrable ‘Fantastic Four’ movies, nor does he make the mistake of playing Steve/the Cap as too staunch and all-American. This movie could easily have drowned in jingoistic syrup. Johnston and Evans avoid the pitfalls and deliver the goods. Or should I say, Johnston and Evans and the supporting cast.

‘Captain America’ pulsates with great supporting turns. Tommy Lee Jones is back on form plus VAT as the grouchy Colonel Phillips. I can’t think of another actor who could deliver a line like “you and me are gonna have a conversation that you will not enjoy” with such relish. Hugo Weaving gets a “man of the match” award as Johann Schmidt/Red Skull (a Nazi so demonically evil even Hitler doesn’t want him on the team award). His Werner Herzog-style accent is just brilliant, and his sneering (yet beautifully subtle) ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ reference near the start is priceless.

Stanley Tucci and Toby Jones have great fun doing two contrasting versions of the Eccentric Scientist archetype. Dominic Cooper nicely reverse engineers Robert Downey Jnr’s performance as Howard (father of Tony) Stark. And Hayley Atwell … from her first scene where she proves a point by slugging a guy twice her size, to her various scenes packing heat and exchanging fire along with the guys, to the could-have-lachrymose but actually quite poignant conclusion to her character arc (gently referencing ‘A Matter of Life and Death’), she’s absolutely one of the best things about this movie and if everyone in Hollywood isn’t lining up right now to offer her leading roles then something’s amiss.

Speaking of movie references, the nods to ‘Raiders’ and ‘AMOLAD’ are augmented by homages to ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ and at least two Bond movies. Elsewhere, Johnston’s attention to detail and playful sense of humour is evident: a group of kids read issue one of the original magazine; the hood ornament on the villain’s Mercedes replaces the three-pointed star with a death’s head; a countdown to self-destruction clicks over on a flap display. Even the most outlandish technology on display keys in to a convincing 1940s aesthetic.

The subplot whereby Rogers is pressed into a war bonds fundraising campaign kits him out in a laughable first incarnation of the Captain America costume – a stroke of genius by the filmmakers as it allows us to legitimately laugh at how ridiculous he looks. When Version 2.0 of the costume is introduced, authentically weathered and buffed up and looking the business, it just comes across as all the more cool as a result.

Just as the film itself comes across as a highpoint in the Marvel canon. Joss Whedon’s ‘The Avengers’ suddenly has a hell of a lot to live up to.

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