Link Proliferation: The new needs friends.

Buried (Under the Fold) Alive, Part I

Like cheese and science, old comments tend to get tossed away. While the occasional post might get a few hits now and then even after it has dropped off the main page, comments are more ephemeral. Recently, ANTSS received two comments that I think deserve a little attention.

First, like many of you, I was approached by the men and women of the NYC-based Charred Oak Films about crowd sourcing their indie horror-comedy Always a Bridesmaid.

Clicky peeky and then come on back.

I don't necessarily want to shill for their flick, but I do think it has the potential to be a winner. Let's face it: Women-centric horror packs them in. The comedy angle makes its tent slightly larger. And another project on their docket, Satan Camp, suggests that these folks can tap into a popular retro vibe.

But, that aside, supporting something like Always a Bridesmaid is a blow against the Empire. Specifically, the Empire of half-assed remakes, follow-the-leader copy cats, cookie cutter, formulaic, Hollywood crappola.

We vote with our dollars. You may have written the most insightful, witty, and devastating critique of Halloween II to ever grace the Interwebs. But I'll tell you what, Skippy; they don't give a crap what you said so long as ponied up like all the other marks.

Imagine this: What if everybody who shelled out ten to twelve Washingtons had, instead, kicked it towards funding an indie horror flick? The estimated budget for Always a Bridesmaid is $16,5000 (nearly one hundredth of the budget for Halloween II). At this point Zombie's flick has made more than $25 million. With that kind of cash, you could fund more than 1,500 films on the scale of Bridesmaid.

Dig hard, babies. This blog gets about 120 visitors a day. For the cost of Manhattan movie ticket, we'd raise more than a grand in a single day.

Like the weather, everybody bitches about the lamification of horror at the hands of talentless bean-counting studio douches. But unlike the weather, we can do something about it.

I'm not silly enough to believe that every indie horror flick is a gem. Nor do I believe that taking big studio scratch is like touching pitch, it blackens the hands. But preserving the diversity of voice in the genre, specifically by acting as patrons and friends to independent and developing, ensures the long term health of the genre. More than any ranting and raving we do as critics, its our actions - specifically our spending - that define us as fans.

Will Bridesmaid be great? Will it suck? I don't know. I hope to find out though. Even if only because it would mean we were all good stewards of our genre.

So, anyway, I kicked 'em a few bucks.

Buried (Under the Fold) Alive, Part II

Speaking of preserving voices . . . The second comment I wanted to draw attention to was attached to the Sprites song I posted a couple days ago. Musician Zane Grant has a nifty musical treat for ya'll. I'll just repeat his intro:

My sister and I did a 'dawn of the dead' song for a cd that retold the stories of different horror movies from the narrative perspectives of people in the movies. I must admit, The Sprites 'Dawn' song is better than ours, but our 28 days later and (drunk) susperia were fun if people want to check them out:

"28 Days Later"

"Suspiria" (drunk take)

Thanks for stopping by Mr. Grant.

Wrap Yourself in Awesome

My favorite merch tie-ins have always been those pieces of swag that appear to have come from the fictional world of the work they promote. It would be all good and well to have a t-shirt with the poster image for Die Hard on it. But it's about a million times cooler to have a shirt that appears to be swag from the Nakatomi Corporation.

The utterly incandescently brilliant t-shirt shop Last Exit to Nowhere mongers just such coolness. Here's some more samples:

Bonnet Rippers?

Now this is non-horror (though perhaps a bit frightening depending, I guess, on your tastes), but it was too odd not to pass along.

Okay, so this isn't horror, but it is too delightfully odd to pass up. There's a survey piece on the new romance subgenre of "bonnet romance" in, of all places, The Wall Street Journal. They're basically Amish/outsider forbidden love tales.

From the article:

Most bonnet books are G-rated romances, often involving an Amish character who falls for an outsider. Publishers attribute the books' popularity to their pastoral settings and forbidden love scenarios à la Romeo and Juliet. Lately, the genre has expanded to include Amish thrillers and murder mysteries. Most of the authors are women.

Here's a sample, from Cindy Woodsmall's bonneter When the Heart Cries:

His warm, gentle lips moved over hers, and she returned the favor, until Hannah thought they might both take flight right then and there. Finally desperate for air, they parted.

Whew. Mother, hide the little ones!

Sure the Englishers dig on it, but what do the Amish think:

While there are no religious strictures against contemporary novels, the church has traditionally viewed fiction as distracting and deceitful, says Donald Kraybill, a senior fellow at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, a religious studies center at Elizabethtown College.

Some Amish have nevertheless become avid fans. An Amish woman in Lancaster told Ms. Lewis that "all the women in our church district are reading your books under the covers, literally," Ms. Lewis said. Ms. Brunstetter, who lives in Tacoma, Wash., said several Amish families in northern Indiana have played host to book signings in their homes for her "Sisters of Holmes County" series.

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Movies: Over and out.

I have a soft spot for movies that pit their supernatural baddies against members of the armed forces. Properly done, the militarization of the victims of a horror film imparts a sense of genuine conflict. When a bunch of boozed up co-ed nymphomaniac camp counselors find themselves the target of an eight-foot tall semi-undead mass murderer, the action that follows resembles either a ritual sacrifice or the relentless grind of a factory farm meat processing plant. But, replace those teens with a squad of soldiers and you've suddenly got a ball game. The presence of significant levels of firepower, a pre-existing command structure meant to handle decision-making in a crisis, the willingness and capacity to meet violence with violence, training that facilitates teamwork between tactical assets, and an assumed minimal-level of individual competence all suggest that, whatever the flick might throw at them, the soldiers have a real chance at surviving.

Of course, this perception is largely illusory. My wife's mother likes to say, "God never gives you more trouble than you can handle." Horror films work on the opposite premise: The danger you face must always be greater than your capacities. Usually this works through a simple logic of escalation. Evil always rises to the occasion. If you've got a bunch of teens on a summer holiday, then a serial killer will come after them. Replace one of the teens with an ex-cop packing a .44 Magnum and the standard-issue serial killer will upgrade to a tribe of mutant cannibals. Dump the teens, remake the cop into a British soldier, add a half dozen other troopers, and the cannibal tribe will transform into werewolves. And so on and so on until you've got the entire military of a nation on one side and a giant city-stomping monster on the other.

But bigger baddies only get you so far. There's a pragmatic cap on the logic of perpetual escalation. Eventually you end up trafficking in such enormous levels of destruction that it becomes virtually impossible to conceptualize a threat that could withstand the onslaught. One workaround for the escalation problem is to hamstring the troops. You can give them incompetent leadership, place them in a training context that requires they have fake weapons, or cast "weekend warrior" National Guard types as your military personnel. Clever directors can also exploit the martial assumption that superior firepower, expertly applied, is what every situation calls for. Pit the troops against a virus, ghost, psychic phenomena, or other un-shootable thing and you've pretty negated their major advantage. Regardless of how it's done, we know on some essential level that being soldiers won't actually help the film's protags.

Still, the idea that being soldiers should matter is crucial to carrying off a good army versus monster flick. We have to feel that we're watching humanity's last line of defense, the people you'd call to handle this sort of thing, do real battle. If the mechanics of the plot are too naked visible, the actions of the characters take on an insignificance that fails to grab us.

The 2008 mercs versus monsters flick Outpost starts as a serviceable horror/actioner. But the logic behind its villainous otherworldly sci-fi Nazi immortals (not actually "zombies" in any conventional sense of the term, as is often stated) so overwhelms the agency of the soldiers of fortune at the films core that the flick's stripped down structure tips from pleasingly Spartan to smotheringly arbitrary. What starts as tension devolves into a forced march. There's plenty of gunfire, gore, and a rich layer of pulpy technobabble to act as eye glue. But once the audience has grokked that the actions of the protagonists don't have any effect on the plot's direction, the narrow pleasures of the film are undermined by the sneaking suspicion that they're just waiting for the film to run out of bodies.

The film starts with a pleasingly bare bones plot. The representative of a mysterious and unnamed cabal of investors pulls together a seven-man team of mercenaries to retrieve an unidentified item from a long-abandoned World War II Era bunker in an unnamed Eastern European country. This lack of information gives the flick a user-friendly, almost videogame-ish feel that makes up for in narrative efficiency what it lacks in depth. (Some of the deleted scenes available on the DVD include extended sequences that build character backstory and motivation, but director Steve Barker wisely left such distractions on the cutting-room floor).

Shortly after their arrival at the target, the crew is fired upon from dense woods surrounding the bunker. Convinced that they're outgunned, they hunker down. As they explore the bunker, they crew begins to fall prey to a seemingly unstoppable enemy who, despite the mercs best defenses, slips in and out of the bunker, killing with impunity.

In the meantime, their employer reveals that the target of their search is a "unified field generator," a bizarre bit of strangely Buck Rogers-ish tech that sits at the heart of this otherwise straightforward run and gun. Though I recall many Brits bemoaning the historical inaccuracies of American flicks, the backstory regarding the UFG shows that Americans have no monopoly on bad history or science. Attempting to explain the UFG, the employer explains that four forces govern the behavior of matter in the universe. He doesn't say what they are, but so far, so good. He explains that unified field theory explains the link between these forces. Then, he goes of the rails. Basically, in this film, the unified field acts like the "one ring to rule them all" of time and space. With a unifed field – which is less a mathematic explanation of the links between nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism than a new super energy – people could bend the rules that govern physics. We're told that Einstein was working on the unified field until he saw the detonation of the test a-bomb at Los Alamos. Worried about its destructive potential, he stopped working on it. (In fact, Einstein wasn't at the Trinity test, the a-bomb has little to do with unified theory, and the famed physicist never stopped working on unified field theory.)

The Nazis, it turns out, were ahead of the curve on the UFG and used the unified field to experiment on their own troops, turning them into silent, shambling things that can teleport, become solid or immaterial at will, and exist in a sort of timeless neverwhere outside of their bodies (which are piled up, perfectly preserved, in a cell in the bunker).

The rest of the flick follows our ever-dwindling crew as they slowly come to terms with truth about their unbeatable foes and getting soundly thrashed by Nazi ghosts from beyond time and space.

Though somewhat formulaic, the pick gets creativity points for its innovative and quirky monsters. I suspect the repeated use of "zombie" in reviews and commentary about this flick has to do less with intellectual laziness than with the fact that they're virtually impossible to classify using standard horror beast taxonomies. Furthermore, even in its less innovative aspects, the film's shot with a crisp confidence that carries the viewer over the less interesting bits. The acting is well handled, though nobody is given much beyond broad character types to deal with.

Ultimately, the real problem with the flick is that you can practically see the characters' strings being pulled by the director. For all the shouting and firing, characters are powerless to stop what comes their way. This powerlessness drains the fight and kill scenes of their drama and raises questions about the seemingly nonsensical way in which the Nazi unified field ghosts, or NUFGs, behave. (Even the script gives a nod towards this problem by having a character wonder aloud why the seemingly invincible NUFGs are taking so long to kill them all. He receives no explanation.) The end result is a sort of viewer indifference.

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Movies: But it's got a great personality.

It is pretty easy to dismiss Scott Reynolds's 1997 The Ugly as a cut-rate Kiwi knock off of the far superior Silence of the Lambs. After all, that's pretty much what it is. The flick revolves around a very familiar premise: a woman must conduct personal interviews with a incarcerated serial killer, finding the truth about his past while resisting the caged psycho's efforts to crawl inside her head. Admittedly, The Ugly includes a whole supernatural angle and there's a distinctly un-Silence-ish focus on the life story and thwarted central love of the killer (though, honestly, this seems as if it was heavily "influenced" by Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer); still, it's hard to shake the feeling that you've seen the film's core premise done better.

That said, after the initial disappointment, I found myself digging on The Ugly to a surprising degree. While the plot seems to be, at best, a serviceable jerry-rig of parts from better flicks, the film brings a pleasingly excessive, low-fi, originality to its visual presentation that reminds me of the giddy stylistic excesses of flicks like Evil Dead and Dead Alive. Not that The Ugly has the same splatter aesthetic – compared to the goo and gore of those other two films, The Ugly is downright demure. Rather, like Evil Dead and Dead Alive, The Ugly loses its stylistic inhibitions as it goes along, getting aggressively odder and more boldly quirky even as it settles in a predictable narrative mold. The film gives off a sort of film tech geek charm, a product of its formal playfulness, that I thought was genuinely amusing.

For example, during one of the film's many flashbacks to episodes within our killer's bloody career, we see Simon (the film's homicidal protagonist) off a dude outside a rock club. The scene's only soundtrack is the power pop that, one assumes, is pouring out of the club. Simon catches a glimpse of a witness: a young girl inside what appears to be an abandoned furniture factory next to the club. Simon bursts into the club after her and, once inside, the music stops and the film is silent. Watching this scene, I assumed that the change in the soundtrack was strictly diegetic. The sound cut off because the characters where now isolated from the source. However, as Simon and his witness play a frantic game of hide and seek in the factory, the sound cuts in and out, alternating between blasting cheese rock and silence. Ok, I thought, so it isn't diegetic; instead, the filmmakers are having a little fun with sound design. However, at the end of the scene, Simon catches the witness and notices that she's got a non-functional hearing aid. She's deaf. The sound was, in fact, diegetic from the start and it was switching from the Simon's "point-of-hearing" (if that's a term) to the witness's throughout.

The film's playful style isn't always so clearly in the service of some descriptive or thematic function. Throughout the film, for example, blood is depicted as being inky black in color (except for one odd scene at the end of the flick where blood runs a standard red). Why? I have no idea. One could also make a drinking game out of every time an empty shopping cart appears on screen. I might be missing some profound significance empty shopping carts have in New Zealand culture, but I doubt it. They're there because they're there. Drink.

There's also the curious acting style that's too straight-faced to be overtly campy, but too broad to be considered realistic. This is most notably true of Roy Ward's Dr. Marlow, who seems like a bizarre impersonation of a B-movie asylum warden. As the movie goes on, even Marlow's outfits get more and more like something out of Mark Robson's 1946 crazies-and-costumes melodrama Bedlam. And his final scene is so inexplicable as to be laugh inducing, and intentionally so I think.

Still, unlike Jackson or Raimi's films, The Ugly never just takes off the breaks and goes nuts. Both Evil Dead and Dead Alive fulfill their narrative designs by the three-quarter mark and then become a sort of plotless action/comedy splatter showcases. In contrast, The Ugly has a narrative arc it is wedded to and that keeps it from spinning off the rails. Which is unfortunate as the plot is the film's weakest element and this forced march along a very well tread saps the energy of the flick, chills the mood, and smoothers the wild energy that might have elevated it to cult fave status.

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