LOTT D: Toxic assets?

NY Times theater reviewer Charles Isherwood takes a look at the new Trroma-inspired off Broadway musical The Toxic Avenger. To this blogger, the review suggests that this is one of those things you either decide you're into or you throw it a pass, but it is pretty much exactly what you think it's going to be. More interesting is Isherwood's rapid oscillations between elitist disdain and displays of "hey, I'm just a regular guy" wackiness. Check the end of this excerpt:

Actually, the dopey, intermittently funny show that opened on Monday night at New World Stages is not the first all-singing, all-dancing adaptation of this horror spoof dreamed up in the 1980s by Lloyd Kaufman, the no-brow auteur behind the nigh-legendary cheesy-flick manufacturer Troma Entertainment.

Um, it’s not even the second.

This new version, with book by Joe DiPietro (“I Love you, You’re Perfect, Now Change”) and music by the Bon Jovi member David Bryan, is at least the third attempt to transform Melvin, the geek turned righteous monster of the movie, into a Sweeney Todd for our times. Clearly some fictional characters are born to sing, but who could have imagined that Mr. Kaufman would become the new Metastasio?

If you can’t quite place Metastasio, he wrote opera libretti in the 18th century that were used and reused by various composers. Possibly this review is the first time these two artists’ names have ever appeared in a single paragraph. (And by the way, wouldn’t Metastasio be a great name for a superhero?)

To be fair, Isherwood's not above this campy self-referential trash cult stuff. He later opines:

Musicals based on preposterously unlikely material have become fairly commonplace — we have already been exposed to “Evil Dead: The Musical,” for heaven’s sake — so you don’t get a free pass for simply choosing a cheesy movie and making it sing. The joke is getting stale. “Little Shop of Horrors,” perhaps the progenitor of the genre, had wit, charm and a melodic, lovable retro score. Only a few songs in “Toxic Avenger” rise above the generic in either music or lyrics. (Mr. DiPietro wins a point for rhyming “macho” with “gazpacho,” but would a girl who thinks Toxic is a French name really know about that Spanish soup?)

We'll leave the aside the incongruity of wondering if a blind librarian would know gazpacho is, but not wondering why exposure to toxic waste gave Toxie superpowers instead of cancer. Rather, I think he's pulling his punches here. What he's really lamenting is the idea that, if you work in certain subgenres, you don't really have to try to produce quality. It's that free pass mentality that says, "I'm making a [fill in vaguely disreputable entertainment varietal]; quality is beside the point." This free pass mentality carries with it an often unspoken corollary that demanding quality is, somehow, elitist. As if to demanding that a third-time rehash of a production at least include some good music is the equivalent of declaring that theater has been dead since the Puritans pulled down the original Globe.

Recently, Roger Ebert hit a Isherwoodian note in his review of the new Last House on the Left. Like the Toxie musical, the new Last House is the latest addition to a long line of remakes, being the second remake of a remake. At the Hall of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers, it was decided that we should compose a response to Ebert's pan, specifically focused on this line:

Other scenes, while violent, fell within the range of contemporary horror films, which strive to invent new ways to kill people, so the horror fans in the audience will get a laugh.

That's certainly a zinger, composed intentionally to tick off a bunch of people Ebert thinks should be harassed. His characterization of horror film fans is broad and derogatory and his dismissal was sure to kick of wave after wave of pro-horrorist rodomontades. Though Ebert was an important defender of the original Halloween and (as his review mentions) the original Last House, fans have suggested that he doesn't understand the horror genre. Even more hysterically, some suggest that Ebert's a snobbish elitist, which ignores the fact that he wrote the Citizen Kane of trash flicks: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

Still, despite it's fan-baiting sharpness, that line is not, I think, the heart of Ebert's jeremiad. That appears in the paragraph previous, emphasis mine:

Not many unseasoned audience members will find the 2009 rape scene "toned down," and indeed I found it painful to watch. In the 2005 film, it was so reprehensibly and lingeringly sadistic, I found it unforgivable. So now my job as a film critic involved grading rape scenes.

For Ebert, Isherwood, and I suspect a large number of critics and fans, the issue is the gratuity of so much genre art. By "gratuitous" I don't refer to extremely violence (though that is certainly the case in many horror flicks). Rather, I mean the pointlessness of its extremes. In Ebert's review, he contrasts the inspiration for the trio of remakes, Bergman's The Virgin Spring, with the later models. His issue is not, necessarily, with the violence of the latter flicks. After all, the story is pretty much the same between all three films. What he misses is the tangle of revenge and guilt, the questions about justice and the limits of the Christian ethic of forgiveness. In the remakes, all that's left is the killing. He admits that there is a primal tension in the naked struggle to survive – "We are only human, we identify with the parents, we fear for them, and we applaud their ingenuity." – but this is that really enough?

This film, for example, which as I write has inspired only one review (by "Fright"), has generated a spirited online discussion about whether you can kill someone by sticking their head in a microwave. Many argue that a microwave won't operate with the door open. Others cite an early scene establishing that the microwave is "broken." The question of whether one should microwave a man's head never arises.

(As an aside, some have suggested that this line points to Ebert's lack of a clue, claiming that it shows Ebert is unable to distinguish the fictional depiction of murder from the real thing. "Of course you don't really stick peoples' heads in microwaves, dummy," say these critics. What Ebert is really referring to is the moral conflict the parent's feel in the original film. When does justice become bloodlust? That's what Ebert claims is missing from both the film and the fandom that supports such flicks.)

Ultimately, Ebert's correct. He has over-generalized, but he gets the basic dynamic down. Too many horror producers are willing to take the free pass. The rebirth of the slasher subgenre, perhaps the purist expression of the "ugly, nihilistic and cruel" filmmaking Ebert decries (though here Ebert's wrong; these filmmakers very strongly believe in something: they believe they'll make some money), is it most recent example. Uninspired and phoned-in pastiches that are the color-by-numbers paintings of the horror film world, these flicks are the very definition of "free pass." And it’s the fans that are handing the passes out. When fans explain to critics that bad dialogue, lack of characterization, predictable plotting, barely competent camera work, and atrocious acting are part of the point of the subgenre, they're giving these talentless hacks carte blanche to turn in crap work.

I think it's high time for a little elitist disdain up in here and I'm glad Ebert brought some.

Imagine how different the genre would be if fans told filmmakers that every time they were going to kill a bunch of people, they should have a dramatically and intellectually convincing reason to do so.

To paraphrase Kurt Weill, I don't know if that would bring you joy or grief, but it would be fantastic, beyond belief.

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Stuff: All net finger roll Edgar Allan Poe off the pick.

So you're a fan of goofy word play, basketball, and Edgar Allan Poe – and you've been wondering when, oh dear God when, somebody would make a t-shirt that allowed you to simultaneously express all these facets of your character.

Your wait, my complicated friend, is over! Now wrap yourself if the pun-tastic Goth hoop madness of Brooklyn Industries new "Poe Dunk" tee.

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Free Stuff: Zombies! Zombies! Yawn! Zombies!

Personally, I'm ready to bench the corpses for another decade or two. Horror lit needs to rotate the crops.

But, as I seem to be in the minority on this, I point you to a spiffy little contest being held by the fine folks at the Largehearted Boy blog. For just naming a book that scared you, you could win three free zombie books, including World War Z, Breathers, and, um, something else that complete escapes me at the moment.

So, right on, free stuff. Don't say I never did nothin' for yah.

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Art: It's a gasser!

Not so long ago, the fine gentleman behind When Is Evil Cool? posted an image of a small crowd of English bobbies in gas masks. I commented that they looked like a legion of Golden Age Sandmen, Wesley Dodds being my favorite comic character from the cape and cowl crowd. Then, coincidentally, the blogger behind the wonderful Horror's Not Dead posted a similar, but completely unrelated, picture of a town of post-WWI Era partisans (Spanish Civil War perhaps?) entirely in gas masks.

Curious, I wondered just how many of these group gas masks shots there were out there and, oddly enough, there were tons of them. After the First World War, it became something of a fad to trick out folks in surplus masks. Perhaps the grimmest symbol of the war, the masks quickly became novelty items for bright young things in the UK and US, where few of those who hadn't served had any first hand experience of the horrors of chemical warfare.

The pictures mix an almost strained wackiness with an edge of grim surrealism. I think, at the time, they were meant to be more funny than creepy, but that's not, I think, the modern effect.

Here's some of my favorite shots, plus the two that inspired the search.

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Link Proliferation: Intelligence can be eaten!

You Know What Will Do You Know What to Us

Here's a 1979 live telly performance of "Transmission" by Joy Division.



And here's their big one – you know the one – live in '79.



"Suicide is just what people do here because there is nothing else to do."

A strange and depressing tale from Wales.

Vanity Fair tackles "The Mystery Suicides in Bridgend County." For several years, the small Welsh town of Bridgend has suffered from an outbreak of suicides. All from a similar demographic and almost ever one of them using the exact same method. From the article:

Since January of 2007, 25 people between the ages of 15 and 28 have killed themselves within 10 miles of here, all by hanging, except for one 15-year-old, who lay down on the tracks before an oncoming train after he was teased for being gay.

The article discusses the phenomenon:

Outbreaks like this are rare but not new. Plutarch writes about an epidemic of suicide by young women in the Greek city of Miletus that was stopped by the threat that their naked corpses would be dragged through the streets. Sigmund Freud, who himself committed assisted suicide, held a conference in the 1920s on teen-suicide clusters. They have happened in Germany, Australia, Japan, the U.S., Canada, and Micronesia. Psychologists familiar with the phenomenon are saying that what’s going on in Wales is a classic case of the Werther effect, named for Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, about a young man who puts a gun to his head to end the agony of unrequited love and because he can't find his place in the provincial bourgeois society of the day. The novel's publication, in 1774, prompted young men all over Europe to dress like Werther and take their lives. It’s also called the contagion effect and copycat suicide: one person does it, and that lowers the threshold, making it easier and more permissible for the next. Like 10 people waiting at a crosswalk for the light to change, and one of them jaywalks. This gives the rest of them the go-ahead.

For a while, investigators suspected that wonderfully multipurpose villain, the Internet. Theories that the suicides were part of online community pact were bandied about.

The first known Internet suicide pact surfaced in Japan in 2000, and a new epidemic has been raging there since last April. About 1,000 Japanese have killed themselves by inhaling fumes created by mixing common household cleaning products. Police have asked Internet service providers to shut down suicide Web sites but have found it harder to keep people from posting the recipe for the mix or raving about how this method enables you to “die easily and beautifully.” Why these young people are so eager to die—what it is that their life in Japan isn’t giving them—is as much of a mystery as what is happening in Bridgend.

In Wales, however, the victims’ friends all say that the Internet has nothing to do with what is happening. “It’s nothing like that,” a girlfriend of Natasha Randall’s told a reporter. The victims acted on their own, she believes. “People get down, and they do it.” The Internet is just how young people communicate and, to a large extent, socialize these days. This certainly isn’t a suicide pact like the one made in 1997 by Heaven’s Gate, the cult in Rancho Santa Fe, California, 39 of whose members, dressed in matching black shirts and sweat pants and brand-new Nike sneakers, swallowed phenobarbital-laced applesauce with a vodka chaser, then put plastic bags over their heads to asphyxiate themselves.

Ryan's Song

Having a death sentence hanging above you (firing squad, if prosecutors get their way) might diminish the productivity of a less passionately creative person; but, from his prison cell, Indonesian serial killer Verry Idham Henyansyah, a.k.a. "Ryan" (pic above), is just hitting his stride. From the Australian edition of the Herald Sun:

The smooth-faced 31-year-old has already achieved national infamy with his confessions to a series of grisly murders - including a mother and her toddler - and details of his life as a gay man in Muslim-majority Indonesia.

Now Henyansyah, popularly known as Ryan, is chasing fame of a more orthodox kind - with a prison-penned autobiography published in February and a collection of pop songs due out next month.

Holding court in his jail cell recently, dressed in flowing white robes and a matching Muslim skullcap, Henyansyah trilled a sweet-voiced rendition of one of his songs for an appreciative crowd of court officers, local residents and reporters.

"Release me, forget me, release me from these shackles," Henyansyah sang.

"Enough for now. You can get my album soon," he said, as the applause and cheers for an encore turned to visible disappointment.

The serial killer has confessed to at least 10 murders. He claims that jealousy over the attention men gave his boyfriend and unwanted sexual advances directed towards himself were the cause of his many homicidal episodes.

Remorse for his crimes was the motivating force behind the album, which he recorded in prison, Hensyansyah said.

"I write the songs for people I love. Forgive Me Mother is for my mother. Another song, Sun, is about lovers missing each other because they are separated until they die,'' Henyansyah said.

Henyansyah has never denied the crimes that could earn him the death penalty.

Indeed, his autobiography, The Untold Story of Ryan, includes maps to the graves in his parents' backyard, as well as photographs that chart his progress from village boy to Koran recital teacher, to simpering, shirtless male model.

The Future's So Bright

PopMatters has posted not one, not two, but – count 'em! - three sample chapters from David Janssen and Edward Whitelock's new book Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music. Here's the two authors on the unlikely and short-lived musical career of Chuck Manson:

It is not necessary here to retread Manson's "philosophy" in detail, since that groundwork has already been well established by Vincent Bugliosi, John Gilmore, and Ed Sanders, among others. Suffice it to summarize that Manson's two central Family texts were the Revelation of St. John and the White Album. There are moments in the Manson narrative, though, that make one wonder if Sharon Tate might still be alive had Charlie been offered that record deal he had scammed and schemed so tenaciously to procure. Some of the anecdotes of Manson's musical development are almost romantic and fit the rock 'n' roll myth quite nicely. The world’s forgotten boy learned to play guitar in prison from Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, the last "Public Enemy #1" on Hoover’s list to be captured alive. Karpis was apparently quite the hot axeman as well, and he was impressed with his protégé’s natural abilities. In his exposé of the Manson Family, John Gilmore and Ron Kenner quote one “Wallie” Sallers, a contemporary hanger-on at Dennis Wilson’s place:

"Charlie cut an album," she remembers, "using the girls in the background, and it was really sort of an interesting album. Everybody thought he was a good musician, more or less, and he used to write a lot of songs ... Charlie had a very nice voice. He sounds something like the voice in, what was that record about Martin Luther, JFK and Bobby Kennedy all getting killed—Martin, John and Bobby—sounds just like the voice of Dion."

As grotesque as the Dion analogy might seem, it is not unreasonable to conclude that a man who could convince a young group of mostly young women that he was Christ, Satan, and the fifth Beatle would have a "nice voice." Certainly, Manson understood the power of rock as a persuasive medium, and on this point he is in close agreement with rock critics like Garlock and Larson. Manson’s following claims could have been argued just as plausibly by the latter two:

"The Beatles confuse you with what they say. They trick you with distraction, with the beat. You get programmed from the front or programmed from the back. Music doesn’t know time. Music is soul. And you can bring it in from the back. I can sing a song right now and when it’s over you forget the words, the music, but it stays in your infinite unconscious. And then a few months later you hear another song ... talking about a beer, Coors is great, Coors is great. Pretty soon you think of beer and you know that Coors is great. And this is what the Beatles do, they confuse you with cadence, and program you in the back, behind the beat, and this is what stays with you."

Manson understood and implemented the "programmable" potential of rock music, and he combined that force with the style, tone, and content of apocalypse.

The third section deals with everybody's favorite Spud Boys: Devo!

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Books: Gorgantis is ready for his close up, Mr. Whale.

Shambling Towards Hiroshima, Jim Morrow's new novella, opens on Sym Thorley, once great horror film star turned has-been horror con signature factory, contemplating suicide. After slogging through his umpteenth presentation about his golden age in the post-Univeral monster era and his last significant as the giant monster Gorgantis, Thorley is seriously considering tossing himself out his hotel window. Before he goes, however, he begins to write down a memoir of his role in Operation Knickerbocker, a super secret World War II Era project to defeat Japan with a small heard of mountain-sized fire breathing mutant iguanas and his complicity in the dawn of the Atomic Age.

As the war in the Pacific drew to a close, American military leadership began to ponder the blood and treasure cost of invading the home islands of the Japanese empire. The Army had one solution: the A-bomb. The Navy had another: unleash giant, pissed-off, fire-breathing iguanas to stomp Japan into submission. However, the deployment of either of these devices would mean ushering humanity into a new and terrible era. Either we kick off a race to obtain ever larger stockpiles of ever more powerful nuclear weapons or we relinquish our status the dominant species on the planet. Far better, the American high command decides, to simply frighten Japan with a harmless demonstration of the destructive capacity of these weapons, secure their surrender, and never actually let either of the genies out of their bottles.

Problem is that we only had two bombs and the lizards, while ready to go, had only two settings: sedated into a near coma state or uncontrollably savage and destructive. Military researchers hit one the idea of breeding a few man-sized versions of the great beasties and letting them cut loose on a giant scale model of a Japanese city. Unfortunately, shrinking these monsters down had the unintentional consequence of making them gentle as kittens.

So now the Navy had a tiny model city, an approaching curtain time, and no scary monster. What to do?

Call Hollywood, of course.

Pulling in director James Whale (yep, that James Whale), also ran monster actor Thorley, and a handful of real life monster movie magic makers that fans of early horror flicks will recognize, the Navy decides that it will simulate the simulated attack, having a man in a convincing rubber suit trash their model city. The prep for this unique performance, all clashing Dream Factory egos and occasionally Kafka-esque military security details, makes up the bulk of the this slim novel. As an added treat, fans get to follow Marrow's name checking. (Sure, James Whale is a bit obvious, but Morrow also manages to work in nearly forgotten era figures, like William "One Shot" Beaudine.)

Part Hollywood satire, part love letter to 1950s horror flicks, part meditation on the suicidal stupidity of Cold War nuclear brinksmanship, what's most surprising about Shambling Towards Hiroshima is how light and nimble the slim book is. Dexterously gliding over some of the greatest horrors of the 20th Century and the nightmares they inspired, the ultimate theme of Shambling might be how the horror genre's job – if one allows mass cult art a social function – is to trivialize the nightmarish aspects of the real world, turning them into easily consumed treats. Fully aware of this weird trick, Shambling take the madness of the nuclear era and turns it into humorously goofy shaggy dog story.

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Mad science: "Floating seahorses and featherless chickens joined the colonies of ants in the Emergency Department."

Ready for a heaping helping of surrealism?

Vaughan Bell, over at the Mind Hacks blog, has a post about a particularly involved and complex hallucination suffered by a 73-year-old female victim of Charles Bonnet Syndrome.

First described by Bonnet in 1769, sufferers of this syndrome are afflicted with often extensive hallucinations, though their mental health remains otherwise completely unimpaired. Bonnet hallucinations are thought to be the product of visual impairment. The hallucinations are strictly visual and do not affect the other senses. People suffering Bonnet hallucinations usually understand what they are seeing is not real, but this awareness does nothing to prevent reoccurrence.

Here's the description of the hallucination:

A 73-year-old woman who lived alone presented with anxiety-provoking visual hallucinations. Inch-long black ants scurried across her kitchen floor, walls and windows. In desperation, she began spraying insecticide throughout the house. Her neighbour, whose features were seemingly masked by the insects, called an ambulance. Floating seahorses and featherless chickens joined the colonies of ants in the Emergency Department.

A Roman chariot, the rider dressed in gold, flashed across the curtain several times. On the ward, tropical vines grew from the foot of her bed. A man stood with thick brown tree trunks for legs and thick green branches for arms. Nurses’ heads would shrink and then expand before melting into the floor. Brightly coloured fairies carrying wands invited her for walks around the hospital grounds.

She once caught herself telling them to get off a road at which point they donned diamond coats, jumped into a wooden carriage, and rode up to her bedside. Ants in the mirror were at times replaced by an elephant’s trunk blotting out half her face. Her hair in the reflection flowed with cobwebs and the basin was matted with hair and whiskers.

Cobwebs spilled from her cereal bowl at breakfast. The bathroom floor was covered with water that vanished whenever she tried to mop it up. The carpet in the room would lift away from the floor, roll up in the form of a snake, and slither out the door. A little girl and boy with a black and white dog stood next to the bed, as did extraterrestrial-like beings with large domed-shaped heads and slitted black eyes.

Twisted heads with grotesque faces and bulbous eyes peered out from the wall, while little red carriages, trains and push bikes disappeared into it. Further history revealed an experience of ‘ant’ hallucinations 4 months previously but the images disappeared after 2 weeks. She did not seek medical advice at that time fearing that she might be considered ‘a bit odd’.

Throughout the hospital admission she was rarely free from hallucinations and would repeatedly ask for reassurance that she was ‘not going mad’. Two months after discharge the hallucinations were still intrusive. She owned a small black dog but would see several dogs resembling oversized greyhounds with unusually long snouts in her daughter’s yard.

A man and a goat, both wearing grey hats and overcoats, often stood beside her before wandering off together down a crooked road. She grew accustomed to seeing a baby seated on the lounge chair wearing grey clothes. It smiled but made no sounds. Caterpillars and tree frogs began joining her for the evening bath.

She began to notice that distractions, such as listening to the radio and attending to household chores, dampened the hallucinations, while solitude, particularly during the evening hours, tended to heighten them.

At follow-up 1 year later, she was experiencing very much the same hallucinations but was more cognisant of their unreality and less anxious as a result. The only new hallucination that had since appeared was that of a bright kaleidoscopic array which would transiently emanate from her central field of vision.

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