Music: They Who Rock Behind the Rows.

If the Flaming Lips had grown up out of the whole No Depression thing, they'd be These United States. This nifty puppet show video is for Everything Touches Everything, title song for their new album. Despite the scarecrow singer existing smack dab in the uncanny valley, it's a fun way to start a Tuesday.

Everything Touches Everything from These United States on Vimeo.

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Movies: The corpse of true love never did run smooth.

Deadgirl is a pleasantly bracing satire of coming of age flicks which takes the extreme dehumanization of Girl Next Door and plays it as a slick epater la bourgeousie. The film's being widely heralded as a profound exploration of humanity's heart of darkness, though this seriously oversells it. It's unfair to poor Deadgirl. The flick's absurdist plot, pixilated characterizations, and lightly worn nihilism - all of which are sources of the film's grisly charm - get crushed under the ideological baggage being heaped upon it. It also elevates vacuous moral exhibitionism that confuses its metaphors for the real and then congratulates itself for grand Potemkin stances made under conditions where the right answer was given to them. The best approach to the flick is think of it as dark comedy.

Deadgirl, first feature from the directorial team of Marcel Sariento and Gadi Harel, tells the story of Rickie and J.T., two inarticulate and rage-filled slackers who ditch school one day to drink warm cans of beer and vandalize an abandoned mental hospital. Ah, youth. These early set up the dynamic between our two leads. The Mexican-American Rickie is the reserved, mopey, artistic one. Dirty white boy J.T. is violent, snide, a charismatic in a strictly animal way. Long before the titular plot development makes the scene, viewers know how this relationship is going to pear-shape on them. Rickie's the innocent - even his sexual fantasies center around a JoAnn, a girl he kissed when he was 12, suggesting she's more a symbol his own pre-sexual childhood than a real human woman with which Rickie wishes to make the beast with two backs. (In fact, the only action Rickie will see in a movie filled with rutting is when he shakes hands with Yul Brynner). In contrast, Noah Segan plays his J.T. as a destructive manboy, quickly adapting to all the worst elements of masculinity (from his Nicholson-by-way-of-Slater's-J.D.-from-Heathers delivery to his trailer trash efforts to affect Hefnerisms) filter through his pathetically limited world view. J.T. is an example of the despised becoming despicable.

Fleeing a pissed off stray dog that catches them in the tunnels under the asylum, the two boys find a captive woman, naked and bound to a medical gurney, in a hidden chamber. At first they assume that the woman is dead, but J.T. quickly discovers that she is only sorta dead. Inexplicably, J.T. wishes to keep her and, being a wuss, Rickie is unable to bring himself to call the cops. In short order, J.T. figures out that the dead girl - who remains nameless throughout the picture - is zomificated (though these teens seem to live in a world where no zombies movies, comics, or books have ever been produced since nobody uses the "zed word"). And, without much concern for the possible medical complications that would arise from fluid sharing contact with an inexplicably animate corpse, begins using her as a masturbatory aid or sex slave, depending what status you grant zombies as "people."

Of course, their secret gets out. J.T. invites stoner amigo Wheeler to join in on the fun. Then two rich kid bullies, who apparently wandered into this film from One Crazy Summer, discover J.T. zombie grotto. Complications ensue, deaths are involved, and the rapidly decaying relationship between Rickie and J.T. turns violently ugly.

Visually, Deadgirl is a surprisingly assured first feature. Though the inky blackness of the sub-asylum tunnels occasionally defeats the directors, Sariento and Harel produce a flick that is always professional and, occasionally, quite beautiful. The acting is sufficient to the flick, though I say that recognizing that the flick has tons of weird tonal shifts - from the squalid grotesque to near slapstick - and everybody should be applauded for managing to keep up at all. Segan's J.T. is a standout - Segan seems to be the only guy who not only handles the bizarre shifts in tone, but embraces them as an excuse to expand his character. Others, like Shiloh Fernandez's plodding Rickie, just hold one tone, refusing to break character even as the movie's loopy internal logic drags them from one scene to the next, breaking the logic of their characters for them.

I would say that there's just one problem with Deadgirl. Unfortunately, it is a doozy. The film wants the petrol that comes from it's shocking premise, but it doesn't want to pay the cost of truly engaging that premise. It wants to be a dark, stylish, slick, and sick entertainment; but the figure of the dead girl and grim implications of J.T.'s treatment of her loom too large in the mind of the viewer for them to come along. Despite the centrality of dead girl to the plot, what her unique status means in terms of moral engagement and how Rickie and J.T. react to that status as moral actors isn't really important to the story. The characters in the flick are written as incurious, almost thoughtless beings. There's a layer of irony that allows us to see their limitations, this also allows us to see the limitations of the zombie girl trope. It's a fake moral choice with a built-in out: For the viewer, there's never a reason to side with J.T. His position is insane and inexplicable from the get go. Even from a strictly self-interested perspective, you'd have to have a pretty specific skeez to overlook all the reasons J.T.'s option is a crap idea. Because we can't imagine siding with him, there was never really a moral conflict. Instead, we fall on the predictable idea that good guys just do good and bad folks just do bad. Rickie doesn't do the bad thing because he's a good guy and J.T. does the wrong thing because he's a bad person; and we side with Rickie because he's the good guy. But the viewer acutely feels the need for something more. The desire to see the creepiness of the abuse at the center of the film thematically justified nags at the viewer and undermines the filmmaker's more modest intentions. Like the boys in the film, they want the dead girl, but they want it consequence free. And - as any viewer of the film could have told you the moment J.T. decides to keep her - that isn't how it works out.

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Contest: Booty call.

Thank you everybody who entered the ANTSS Every Damn Comic of Solomon Kane Ever Contest. The fickle finger of fate has pointed out our winner: Pauline the Pirate Queen!

Avast Pauline, email me a mailing address at [my blogging pen name]44[that "at" symbol]yahoo[the dot]com. I'll get the books packaged up and on their way.

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Contest: I Kane, I saw, I conquered.

Just a reminder: Throw your hat in the ring for not one, but two big prozes in ANTSS Kane Komics Giveaway! Winners will be selected at random tomorrow morning.

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Movies: There's always the baker and the candlestick maker.

Perhaps the most successful Halloween costume I ever whipped up was something we ended up calling the the "pig butcher." When I was a young lad, Halloween costuming was a joint creative endeavor for my mother and me. Deciding on a season's costume was part logistical issue (what could we reuse, what do proton packs cost, and so on) and part aesthetic negotiation. Because we both had to wrap our heads around core concept, anything that was a wholly unilateral obsession was not going to make the cut. One result of this was that I never really ended up dressing as specific characters. With the exception of a rather elaborate Dr. Stantz ghostbusting outfit, all my costumes were more general types: short and tubby cowboy, short and tubby astronaut, short and tubby mad scientist, short and tubby ninja, and so on. Oh, and I was one of the gang from A Clockwork Orange once (an unusually subversive gimmick my mother cooked up that beat The Simpsons to the punch by several years), but not specifically any particular one of them. Whichever one was the shortest and tubbiest, I guess.

This tendency towards the abstract continues today. When I do the costume thing these days, I tend towards original creative expressions that don't have any particular model. (There's an exception for lucha legend Blue Demon, but he's so uniquely awesome that he doesn't have to submit to any rule he disagrees with.) The "pig butcher" was one of these ex nihilo dealies. The name's a bit deceptive as the intended meaning is not "somebody who butchers pigs," rather it's meant to communicate the notion of "a pig that butchers somebody." Basically, I wore a grocery store butcher's outfit: dark pants, work shoes, white shirt, bad tie, white apron. The whole thing was topped off by this really grotesquely realistic pig's head mask. I accessorized with a prop knife and a tin bucket of plastic people parts. Though originally meant as little more than a visual goof, the end result was surprisingly grim and distressing (I'm told - I couldn't see crap through the mask). A few folks dug a completely unintended, but completely logical pro-vegetarian vibe, but most seemed to see it a sort of memento caro, an unsettling reminder that we are all made of meat. Anyway, I remember that outfit fondly.

Which is why - against my better judgement - I watched The Butcher, Edward Gorsuch's derivative 2006 "crazy redneck psycho clan" flick, on Hulu. The promotional image Hulu posts next to the flick's link is a off-kilter full portrait of a chainsaw wielding dude in what is more intense version of the beloved "pig butcher" outfit.

Yet another copy run built using the very familiar Texas Chain Saw Massacre template, The Butcher involves a sextet of young folks are packed into a SUV on their way to Vegas. To absolutely nobody's surprise, they end up on a rural shortcut that leads them straight into the clutches of a small band of mutant hayseed cannibals.

The Butcher is a pretty awful movie. First time feature director Gorsuch is a prolific writer of Skinemax grade softcore such as Sexual Needs (2004), Sexual Retreat (2004), Sexual Revenge (2004), Sexual Indiscretion (2005), and Sexual Cravings (2006). Perhaps Gorsuch isn't comfortable working outside his comfort zone, but the movie's plot is predictable, direction is leaden, and the scares are tame. The movie earns itself some goodwill with its workman-like efficiency: the film completes the characterization of its victims (the jock a-hole, the final girl, the black friend, the lesbians - A and B, the nerd) and racks up the first kill by the four minute mark. There's also a nice late game twist that is not absurd and genuinely moves the plot forward. We're not talking a "Bruce Willis is dead" flip here, but many a better movie has been marred by more poorly handled twists. There's also some allusions to more quirky entries in the "crazy family" subgenre - everybody references Chain saw, but how many People Under the Stairs allusions do we get - that suggest a diversity of inspiration. These are not, however, enough to redeem the picture.

The problem with The Butcher is that it's too softcore about it occasionally creative ghoulish touches. Through laziness or craziness, there's a lot of wacky crap going on in film - but the film repeatedly passes up these opportunities for sustain strangeness in favor of grinding cheerlessly along with its plot. For example, the first kill in the pic involves lesbian A in a topless tree branch accident. The lesbian is topless, not the tree. Lesbian A gets ripped in half. Her lower half drops into the truck while her upper half is left on the road. The remaining characters pour out of the truck and begin to debate what they should do about their bisected friend. Meanwhile, lesbian B has gone to recover the upper half of lesbian A. She drags it all the way to the truck, begins embracing it, talking crazy about how lesbian A promised they'd never be apart (ha! a visual pun!). Lesbian B refuses to leave either half of her lover behind, so when the rest of group goes off looking for help, she stays behind with both halves of her better half, acting crazy. Admittedly, we're not talking great drama here; but if you're going to put all this in your flick, shouldn't you just play it for every freaky detail it's worth. Shouldn't this whole thing be at least as morbidly bizarre and out-there as, say, Macabre. Instead, the whole thing is underplayed. We barely see the damage done to lesbian A and little is made of the fact that she should be spilling all manner of messiness about the truck. Her lover moderately spotted with stage blood, but doesn't look like somebody who has been embracing a recently split open corpse. There's no sense of transgression, no energy, no weirdness.

The film does this again and again. Promising scenes get stepped on or rushed through. When the flick slow enough to start getting deeply gonzo, the director gets gunshy and pulls away. How can a guy wrote made a movie called The Sex Spa II: Body Work be so demure?

While you're thinking of an answer, enter yourself in the EDCSKEC - our latest and greatest contest!

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Link Proliferation: In which you meet the Iranian Little Red Riding Hood.

You Gotta Be In It, to Win It

Why haven't you entered the Every Damn Comic of Solomon Kane Ever Contest (EDCSKEC)? Do so, right now. I randomly select a winner on Monday.

Ghostly History

A now and then tour of Manhattan sense through the lens of the Ghostbusters flick.

Fairy-Tale History

The Telegraph has an interesting story on the historical age of fairy tales.

The common take on fairy tales is that they were relatively recent when Romantic nationalists started recording them in 1600s. Using "Little Red Riding Hood" and taxonomy techniques borrowed from the biological sciences, one team of anthropologists has teased out a memetic history that traces back more than 2,600 years.

A study by anthropologists has explored the origins of folk tales and traced the relationship between varients of the stories recounted by cultures around the world.

The researchers adopted techniques used by biologists to create the taxonomic tree of life, which shows how every species comes from a common ancestor.

Dr Jamie Tehrani, a cultural anthropologist at Durham University, studied 35 versions of Little Red Riding Hood from around the world.

Whilst the European version tells the story of a little girl who is tricked by a wolf masquerading as her grandmother, in the Chinese version a tiger replaces the wolf.

In Iran, where it would be considered odd for a young girl to roam alone, the story features a little boy.

Contrary to the view that the tale originated in France shortly before Charles Perrault produced the first written version in the 17th century, Dr Tehrani found that the varients shared a common ancestor dating back more than 2,600 years.

He said: “Over time these folk tales have been subtly changed and have evolved just like an biological organism. Because many of them were not written down until much later, they have been misremembered or reinvented through hundreds of generations.

Personally, I find the concept of the meme dubious at best. The application of genetics to abstract concepts like a story's themes and tropes seems to confuse phenotypes with genotypes, leading to lots of false positive "links" between things that are not really related. Still, the variants they've discovered and the range they've recorded is interesting.

Tortured History

Over at Pop Matters's, Marco Lanzagorta turns in another LP-worthy post. This time he ponders the evolution of the "torture porn" flick and traces its roots from Ulmer's The Black Catthrough 70's 'sploiters and up to now.

He contributes some original stages to the common historical narrative, most notably the "Inquisition flicks" of the 1960s and 1970s.

The first clear trend of torture films that emerged during these years can be termed as the inquisition flick. As with The Black Cat, Poe’s work served as inspiration for a film about madness, corruption, and obsession. Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) takes place in 16th century Spain and the climax involves a young man trapped in the titular torture device. The torturer, played by the inimitable Vincent Price, is revealed to be the demented son of an inquisitor.

While the violence was kept to a reasonable level, the commercial and critical success of The Pit and the Pendulum is likely to have influenced a series of films that depicted a demented inquisitor torturing, mutilating, and humiliating innocent bystanders. Most of the time, their victim was a young virginal girl who refused the sexual advances of the inquisitor. Not surprisingly, the amount of violence and sexual situations increased with each new entry in this subgenre. The most notorious flicks in this trend include The Witchfinder General (1968), The Bloody Judge (1970), Mark of the Devil (1970), and Mark of the Devil 2 (1973). Evidence of the cruelty and brutality of these films is the fact that most of them have been banned or censored at some point in time.

However, like everybody who has tried to define torture porn as a subgenre, he gets tangled up in his own definition.

Therefore, because of our complex cultural intertextuality, it may be difficult to define the exact generic conventions of the torture porn subgenre. Nevertheless, it is possible to avoid sophisticated intertextual conundrums and identify a torture flick as one where acts of torture are the main visual and narrative drivers of the storyline.

That sounds good until you start looking at examples. For example, the violence in the French Chainsaw-manqué Frontier(s), which is the columnist says can be "considered the pinnacle of the torture porn subgenre," is extreme; but whether it is torture or not (beyond the most basic assertion that any violent captivity would be torture) is dubious and, even if we decided it were, you'd need to defend the claim that torture was the driving narrative force behind that film.

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Contest: House of Kane.

Perhaps I'm still loopy from how well the whole anniversary Silent Scream series went. Maybe it's because October is here and that means we're that much closer to the fright freak's high holy day. It could be the cold medicine.

Whatever the reason, I feel like giving away stuff.

Specifically, I'm giving away two - count 'em - two big ol' comic books featuring everybody's favorite dour monster hunting Puritan: Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane.

First, I'm giving away one copy of The Saga of Solomon Kane, an omnibus style doorstop that collects hundreds of black and white pages of Kane action from his adventures in Marvel's Conan comics to his more recent shenanigans at Dark Horse.

What it doesn't include, however, is Dark Horse's recent Castle of the Devil series. So I'm going to throw that in too!

That's right!

Win this mammerjammer and you're basically awash in pulpy he-hero action!

So what do you have to do? Just leave me message below. The winner will be randomly chosen Monday morning.

Employees of Dark Horse are eligible to enter, but seriously, dude, just take it from the office. It's no biggy. Contestants should know that both books are "lightly used," though I can't discern any defects or abuse. I'm also going to have to limit this contest to folks from the US - blame shipping costs or my own rampaging jingoism, either way that's how we're doing this one.

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