Obsessed and Confused

by James Hansen

Befuddlingly bland, The Roommate has a stock set up with plenty of room for crazy, but can’t even match the bizarre terror unleashed via the naming privileges of director Christian Christiansen’s parents. Perhaps trapped by its PG-13 rating (although it is consistently so cobbled together that placing blame is quite difficult), The Roommate never feels like horror movie, at least certainly not a scary one, and its attempts at psychological terror are equally ill-conceived and ineffective. The jumbled direction and screenwriting, punctuated by a distressing causal justification, leaves it terribly confused. Uniquely inept, The Roommate plays out as a completely different movie than the one pieced together before the viewer’s eyes.


Sara (Minka Kelly) is a college freshman moves onto campus at the University of Los Angeles without her boyfriend, Jason, who snubbed their deal to go to school together for a last minute spot at Brown. Eventually, she meets her roommate, Rebecca (Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester), who comes off as a bit strange – a trip to see Richard Prince’s Nurse Paintings doesn’t help – but mostly stays in her room and appears to be relatively kind. Rebecca starts cracking when Sara’s attention turns elsewhere: the friend down the hall, the suave fashion professor (Billy Zane!), the sexy boyfriend (Cam Gigandet aka that dude from The OC and Burlesque!). Rebecca can’t handle anyone getting between her and her obsession.

Sadly, The Roommate is miscast, poorly written, edited, and directed, or all of the above. Meester, as Blair Waldorf on Gossip Girl, has proven she can play a complex queen and evil bitch quite effectively, swinging from the world of backstabbing, artificial validation (and great clothes) to the world of a deeply effected, vulnerable, privileged teenager trying to figure out the world around her (while still wearing great clothes). Here, Meester’s nonchalant charisma and charm turn Rebecca into something more than the purely evil roommate. It is rather clear The Roommate wants nothing to do with these added dimensions, as Meester’s performance contradicts the dangerous tone proposed by many of the Christiansen’s horror-based directorial choices.


But what is calling for Rebecca’s straight up craziness? Christiansen’s direction pushes her in that way. The script, on the other hand, calls for Meester’s characterization through its building of a narrative beyond its standard set up. The contradiction, then, that we feel coming off the screen does not involve Meester, but rather the disconnect between the screenplay and its direction. Screenwriter Sonny Malhi provides us with a strange amount of exposition about Rebecca, complete with a Thanksgiving trip home to her supportive, concerned, upper class parents. Christiansen and Malhi construct this scene merely as a way to reveal a downplayed, explanatory plot point, yet it shows not only that Rebecca has two sides, but also poses a much larger problem.

The parent’s revelation pinpoints a fundamental shift in The Roommate’s schema, which goes unrecognized by Christiansen or Malhi. Malhi’s half-hearted, yet fully invested justification for the Rebecca’s unstable actions – she’s schizophrenic and/or bipolar and off her meds! – inadvertently turns this horror saga into a strangely sad one. [I would have included a major spoiler sign if it seemed like The Roommate actually cared about said “spoiler.”] Rebecca isn’t some crazed slasher, terrorizing the friends of her roommate out of sheer delight. (Truthfully, that would make for a better horror movie and seems to be the movie Christiansen & Malhi think they are making). Instead, she’s a mentally unstable girl with no friends whose problems potentially could have been offset by a helping hand and a trip to the guidance counselor. At least when Buffy wanted to kill her college roommate, she made sure it was a conspiratorial, soul-sucking demon first.

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A Lifeless Drag

by James Hansen

Short on surprises, gags, and inspiration, Drag Me To Hell is shockingly half-hearted and surprisingly stale for the majority of its running time. How, oh how, does a movie that takes utter glee in multiple, if overly repetitive, shock gags seem so mundane? Although fault lies in many places (the vapid screenplay by Sam & Ivan Raimi, uninspired, lifeless performances by Alison Lohman and especially Justin Long, painfully lazy direction outside of the horror sequences), the main problem is that in nearly every facet of production Drag Me To Hell just isn’t committed to its own eccentricities and wild nature.


A long, flat opening is used to introduce Christine (Alison Lohman), a loan officer from a small farm town who is fighting her way towards a promotion, and her boyfriend Clay (Justin Long), an upper class university professor whose mother, in an alarmingly hackneyed phone call, which (of course) is taken on speaker phone, disapproves of the farm girl. Things finally get going when Christine returns to work after said phone call where she is met by Mrs. Ganush, an old gypsy who begs for a third extension on her mortgage. Christine, battling for an assistant manager position with an aggressively smarmy new guy named Stu, decides to do what is best for the bank and deny the gypsy. Whoopsie. Christine leaves work and is promptly attacked in her car by Mrs. Ganush who calls upon the curse of the Lamia – a dreaded curse established in the film’s prelude in which invisible creatures torture the victim for three days before (whadda ya know!) dragging them to hell.

Solid as the crazy curse premise may be, there isn’t enough energy to sustain Drag Me To Hell through its own skeletal plot. Slightly reminiscent of the stylistic buzzkill the longest Are You Afraid Of The Dark? episode ever put on film – James Wan’s Dead Silence – Drag Me To Hell’s sensitive sound design gives away the frights before they even happen. Moreover, the should-be fun scenes where spirits drive Christine to madness quickly lose their charm by becoming so re-dundant. This is really a shame because, despite the insistence on fluids spurting from the mouth in every scene (there’s something I never thought I’d complain about), Raimi and Co. have clearly put ten times the thought into the horror sequences than the rest of the film. Whether it’s the battle with Mrs. Ganush in the car, the numerous scenes where Christine is flailed around different rooms, apartments, and houses like a rag doll, a dining room scene with a clear nod to Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, or the finale where the stars have aligned to banish the Lamia (a certain moment with a certain goat is without a doubt the only truly inspired moment in the entire film), Raimi may “return to form” but only sporadically. The quick editing around the gross-out moments, likely done to keep the film at PG-13, keep even the best scenes from being totally successful. Even as an audience member in my screening shouted “This movie is fuckin’ sick!”, all I could think was “Not sick enough.”


What’s most disappointing, especially considering it as Raimi’s return to campy horror, is that the production of Drag Me To Hell seems to have forgotten how the best horror works, campy or not. Although I did think “not sick enough,” that has less to do with specific scenes than with the whole product. Certainly, there is enough vomit, blood, and general craziness for plenty of people to flip their shit, as it were. But, unlike the best horror, Drag Me To Hell, perhaps signified by the egregious phone call from mother, feels totally phoned in. The performances, save Lohman in the last 20 minutes, are on autopilot, as is the majority of Raimi’s direction. What makes the holy trinity of purposefully campy horror (Evil Dead, Dead Alive, and Cabin Fever) so great is that each vaguely nuanced performance and every overblown effect is sold on the film – whether it’s burning a Book of the Dead, running a lawnmower over hundreds of zombies, or a kid doing karate in front of an old country store screaming “Pancakes!” Much as I hoped for (hell, expected) that kind of investment from Drag Me To Hell, all I got was a mostly lifeless, half-hearted venture. Drag Me To Hell isn’t dead exactly…it’s just sort of rotting.
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Lars Von Trier's "Antichrist" Trailer

Don't even think about telling me you don't want to see this...



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Fear(s) of the Dark

by Chuck Williamson

Thomas Schatz’s contentious theory of generic evolution provides a coherent, holistic—and ultimately reductive—method of analyzing and taxonomizing popular cinematic genres. These classifications rely on what Schatz refers to as a “system of conventions” that characterize and define each generic mode, thus providing a methodology that allows the entire trajectory of a single genre to be traced in linear genealogical thread. The horror genre, in particular, contains specific narrative and iconographic elements specific to this abstract umbrella-term. Yet as I watched the black-and-white animated horror anthology Fear(s) of the Dark, I suddenly recognized the limitations of genre theory—specifically, the way the construct of “genre” has been muddled in an age of mass consumption, mass communication, and internationalism. Unlike the archival horror classics we familiarize ourselves with every Halloween—from creaky studio “creature features” to sleazy exploitation fare—Fear(s) operates outside the boundaries of this rigid genealogy. Whereas these past films borrowed heavily from classic gothic fiction, E.C. comic book anthologies, and macabre pulp fiction, Fear(s) pulls from an entirely different set of referents—particularly the thriving vanguard of American, French, and Japanese graphic fictions that have, until now, rarely found an adequate cinematic counterpart. Because of these deviations, Fear(s) of the Dark represents an original piece of pop entertainment in a genre now burned with a derivative assembly line of genre stinkers.


Of course, not all substructures of the horror genre get reconfigured in Fear(s)’s appropriation of these generic mechanisms. Directed by six independent graphic artists, Fear(s) follows the basic anthology format culled from its precursors, presenting a collection of loosely intertwined tales of terror that literalize the sort of psychic and social phobias ripe for the horror treatment. Transnational by design, the selection of artists employed in the film represents a sort of “who’s who” of contemporary sequential art and graphic design. And as with any omnibus film, some vignettes work better than others—and the quality here remains as variable as it would be in an issue of, say, Art Spiegelman’s Raw or Fantagraphics’ Mome. Black Hole novelist Charles Burns and graphic designer and Liquid Liquid bassist Richard McGuire direct the film’s two best vignettes, with the former helming a psychosexual body horror narrative of teenage love, sadomasochistic fetishization, and insectoid impregnation, and the latter opting for a more traditional haunted house narrative filled with inky shadows, atmospheric grays, and sparse noir lighting. Burns’ segment revisits the Cronenbergian mutations that characterized his aforementioned graphic novel, where biological metamorphoses and deformities function as metaphorical representations of the psychic cost of lost love, hard sex, and the pains of adolescence. Filled with pain, longing, and bodily mutations, this vignette stands between the divide of the romantic and the grotesque, delivering a caustic final image of a loveless romance taken to its gruesome metaphorical extremes. McGuire’s piece, on the other hand, shies away from these grotesqueries in favor of pure atmosphere—impenetrable shadows, harsh lighting, pregnant silences. The cumulative effect is shocking, as these techniques enhance a somewhat clichéd story of a murderous housewife and a silent drifter.

The rest, unfortunately, are less successful. Belgian artist Marie Caillou directs the disjointed dream narrative of a school girl entangled in the phantasmagoric world of Japanese ghostlore (or is she?), which unfortunately devolves into an scrambled hodgepodge of eastern supernatural ephemera: spectral samurai, shapeshifting bakemono, serial killing school children, mad scientists, dream-vs.-reality canards, etcetera, etcetera. Nullified by its staccato pacing and jumbled narrative threads, this piece comes across as nothing more than a visually arresting—albeit convoluted—catalogue of overused J-horror tropes. Italian graphic novelist Lorenzo Mattoti does better with his own exploration of adolescent horrors—a slow burn story of a parochial village menaced by a ravenous beast that may or may not be the protagonist’s best friend. While its frame narrative punctures the suspense somewhat, this piece successfully conveys the terror of childhood in its bold, scratchy art and pained mediations on growing up, where an unseen monster represents the impenetrable fog that clouds childhood. Interspersing these longer tales are Pierre di Scullo’s abstract, cubist vignettes of mutating geometric shapes—a rorsharch test for terror—overlaid with a running dialogue on the nature of fear, and Blutch’s primal, silent story of an eighteenth-century nobleman and his savage attack dogs. Both are visually intoxicating, but seem truncated and incomplete in the context of the film.


Even at its worst, Fear(s) is a sumptuous visual feast, featuring the diverse black-and-white graphic art of each creator. Burns’ photorealist E.C.-standard cum ecroche style contrasts the subtle surrealism of his story, McGuire’s geometric designs and moody lighting intensify his segment’s atmosphere, and Mattoti’s jittery, nightmarish pencilwork recalls the work of Francis Bacon. Even Calineascu’s piece features enough bug-eyed, Ghibli-inspired charm to compensate for its narrative shortcomings. But, more importantly, the film assists in the restructuring of our basic understanding of film genre. While never “making it new” in a tangible or all-encompassing sense, Fear(s) seems determined to alter what Schatz calls the “grammar” of cinematic genre. Schatz contends that “we might think of the film genre as a specific grammar or system of rules of expression and construction and the individual genre film as a manifestation of these rules.” In Fear(s), the fundamental grammar of horror is changed to simulate the mechanics of the source material. Whereas most horror films rely on fluidity and motion to stimulate fright, this film defies these conventions with jagged rhythms and static tableaus—the sort one might find in graphic fiction. Instead of the conventional handbag of shock effects systemic to the grammar of horror, Fear(s) regularly features unnerving pauses, understated silence, and an added emphasis on composition and symmetry. For all of its flaws, Fear(s) of the Dark successfully integrates the language of contemporary sequential art into the world of horror.
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"Let The Right One In" Red Band

In case you haven't seen this yet...



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ADULT.'s "Decampment" Trailer

Is anyone more familiar with these musicians or artists than I am? Looks to be one of the truly unique horror movie experiences ("midwestern horror" at that) you'll find in New York this fall. The film screens at Anthology Film Archives on October 16th at 9 and 11 PM.


DECAMPMENT from ADULT. on Vimeo.

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DVD of the Week: "Bucket of Blood" (Roger Corman, 1959)

Roger Corman’s satirical horror film, A Bucket of Blood (1959), presents an oftentimes disturbing and always hilarious parody of 1950s Beatnik culture. A young philistine, Walter Paisley (Dick Miller), is transformed into a Bohemian icon after he covers his landlady’s dead cat in sculpting plaster to hide the fact that he accidentally killed it but then has the plastered cat mistaken for a work of art. Pressured by the assumption of his creative genius and a growing reputation in the high-falutin’ café cliques, Walter moves to human figures and quickly turns homicidal in the name of preserving the haunting appearance of death described in his “sculptures” and continuing his artistic success. Scripted by Corman’s fellow B-movie master Charles B. Griffith, this surprising film lampoons cultural pretension and makes a mockery of upper-crust artsy types, shooting an arrow through the heart of the 1950s San Francisco zeitgeist.

Full of laughs and campy shocks, the film is a one-of-a-kind mixture of technically proficient filmmaking, witty humor, and macabre conceit. It’s the sort of film that might feel at home alongside Mary Harron’s American Psycho (1999) – in fact, the two would make an excellent double feature. Both films are wonderfully and unusually entertaining and provide scathing insights into social phenomena integral to understanding a certain period in American culture. What American Psycho does for 80s yuppies, A Bucket of Blood does for 50s hipsters.

by Brandon Colvin

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So Many Mirrors, Such Excessive Time

The second best movie this year revolving around people brutally committing suicide, Mirrors, directed by Alexandre Aja, is plenty crazy enough to stick with to the end though it rarely gives any dramatic reason to keep watching. At its best (which is not often enough), Mirrors strongly invokes Dario Argento’s wild supernatural spirit and, like Argento’s best films, is driven by its distinctive visuals. Although less impressive here than in his previous features, Aja is, without a doubt, a playful master of a classic horror style. Unfortunately, his scriptwriting (and, perhaps, his editor) fails to have the same flair. Mirrors contains all the elements necessary for a great horror story, but never really sets up a mystery for the audience to follow. Its characters have moments of revelation, but, other than a few good scares, the audience get none. That may sound a bit pointless in regards to a slick horror movie, but 110 minutes with too few thrills and no narrative drive is a really long time.


Transmuted from the Korean horror film Into The Mirrors (Sung-ho Kim, 2003), Mirrors stars Kiefer Sutherland as 24’s Jack Bauer, who has changed his name for the purposes of this movie to Ben Carson. After a traumatic incident at the NYPD (“I killed a man!”), Ben, separated from his wife and children, gets a new job as a night watchman at a decrepit, mostly burned down department store. Ben begins seeing gruesome images of people in the mirrors who quickly begin to endanger everyone that Ben knows, most importantly his family. ("Look at their picture! LOOK AT THEIR PICTURE!!!")

This is a pretty standard set up for what, more or less, is a pretty standard horror movie. Mirrors is practically screaming for some mirror-stage psychoanalytic content, but, other than one brief discussion, it never comes up. Rather, Aja and his excellent cinematographer Maxime Alexandre cram as many mirrors and reflections per square frame inch as possible. As visually stimulating as this is, Mirrors is overcrowded with those mirrors. The mirrors lose their horrific commodity when every table, door knob, floor, drop of water, clock face, glass cup, bottle, eyelid, store front, and, yes, mirror, is an access point for the spirits within the mirrors. Mirrors has to turn to choppy fast editing to rebuild the spooks it loses by making mirrors so normal. With more visual control and less showcasing of their talent, Aja and Alexandre could have better reflected the terror in Mirrors.


Used perhaps to offset these faults (or subversively add to them) is Keifer Sutherland’s performance. Sutherland’s overly aggressive acting certainly doesn’t help matters in building tension and creating a balance between high and low moments, something that is crucial to the horror genre. The uber-seriousness is hard to handle next to the relatively controlled emotions of everyone else in the film. Even its moments of extreme violence are no match for Sutherland’s confrontation with a nun late in the film. That said, Sutherland’s hyper-emotion gives Mirrors a sense of urgency and energy that the film lacks otherwise. As much as Sutherland’s charicature seems to be off balance with the rest of the film, it is hard to imagine Mirrors working at all without it.

Despite its many failings, when Mirrors works it really works well. Aja is still developing as a director and, even with the visual overkill, Mirrors is certainly better than most horror movies you will see this year (assuming you go to a few.) This is made remarkably clear in its totally perfunctory horror movie conclusion; the scene is so smart and brilliantly executed that you will swear you just watched a better movie than Mirrors ends up being.

by James Hansen

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"Friday the 13th" Poll Results

Thanks all for voting in the Friday the 13th poll. Hopefully we keep getting more voters in all of these polls. There was quite a split in this one, which is pretty interesting. I guess the series is a love it or hate it/wanted to see it or didn't care to see it kind of thing. Thanks again for voting!

HOW MANY MOVIES HAVE YOU SEEN IN THE FRIDAY THE 13TH FRANCHISE?

None- 6 (27%)

1-2- 3 (13%)

3-4- 2 (9%)

5-6- 4 (18%)

9-10- 1 (4%)

All of them!!!- 6 (27%)
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ZOMBIE STRIPPERS

I still haven’t made up my mind as to whether Jay Lee’s bizarre, hilarious, and mind-numbingly mind-numbing film, Zombie Strippers is beautifully subversive and John Waters-esque, or just simply bad (in which case, it’s realllllllly bad). A regular B-movie auteur, Lee wrote, directed, shot, and edited Zombie Strippers, a Jenna Jameson/Robert Englund vehicle that, true to its cast, blends gore, schlock, slapstick, porn and – existential/political commentary?(!) The film is (supposedly) an adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s Absurdist play Rhinoceros (1959). Seriously, I challenge anyone to make up something more ridiculous: canonical existentialist drama = stripping zombie pornstars.

The back story of Zombie Strippers is about as ludicrous as it is unimportant: a pissy scientist crafts a zombie virus and spreads it around at a military facility in Sartre (Jean-Paul!), Nebraska (more on the existentialism connections later), eventually infecting a soldier who escapes before he becomes completely zombified and accidentally ends up in an illegal strip club owned by Ian Essko (Robert Englund) and featuring the breast-baring talents of Kat (Jenna Jameson), Lillith (Roxy Saint), Jeannie (Shamron Moore), and hometown girl, Jessy (Jennifer Holland), among others. What ensues is a necro-erotic parade of absurdity that culminates in a predictable film-ending anti-zombie raid by the Z-Squad, an elite group of undead-killing military folk – many of whom are inexplicably scantly clad.


Although the film contains some of the most intensely quotable and irresistibly laughable lines I have ever heard, including the greatest simile ever uttered, “That chick’s as cold as the dead flesh of a stripping zombie” and “They’re strippers! They’re zombies! They’re zombie strippers!” a great deal of (intentionally?) awkward references to philosophical issues and (get ready for it . . .) the Iraq War are scattered throughout Zombie Strippers – leaving me to wonder if Jay Lee is a master of sarcasm or if he has earnestly made a zombiedy with such a pretentious and maligned “intellectual” edge.

Regardless of the distinction between intent and accident when it comes to its straight-up hilarity (which may be useless to make), Zombie Strippers abounds with allusions to existentialist figures, beginning with the source material (Ionesco!), the name of the town (Sartre!), the name of the Z-Squad leader (Major Camus!), and the choice of reading material for Jenna Jameson’s character: you guessed it, some freakin’ Friedrich Nietzsche! While preparing to go onstage and wax her asscrack with a metal pole, Jameson’s Kat buries her nose in a tome of Nietzsche’s greatest hits and spouts silly drivel about “the void” and the harshness of existence. Fittingly, once she becomes a decaying corpse, Kat claims that Nietzsche’s “stuff makes a lot more sense.” If for no other reason, Zombie Strippers is worth watching for its jarring attempts to inject high-falutin’ philosophical principles into the trashiest of trash cinema.

Even more head-scratchingly entertaining than its philosophical dabbling is the way Zombie Strippers toys with turning the strip club into a political allegory for the Iraq War, repeatedly having the buxom exotic dancers utter the phrase, “It’s a war out there,” in reference to the spotlight-drenched stage. At one point, Jessy (the hometown girl) declares “There’s a war happening out there and I can no longer close my eyes to it!” as the Z-Squad squelches the zombie attack (which is conveniently contained within the walls of the strip club). If Jay Lee and crew really are attempting to make some sort of anti-war statement, they go about it in one of the most nonsensical and half-hearted ways imaginable. Once again, either Lee is an absolute “r”-tard or a he is a backhanded genius who knows how to turn the concept of an ambitious boobs ‘n’ gore film against itself by lambasting the omnipresent insertion of Iraq-related political commentary into damn near every 1 out of 3 films that gets released (note: hyperbole).


Zombie Strippers’s absolute strangeness makes it nearly beyond good and evil; it’s a film in which taste becomes submissive to “Oh my God, they did not just do that!” One of the more (maybe) offensive aspects of the film is its outright racism against Mexicans/Mexican-Americans. The shat-upon strip club janitor, Paco (Joey Medina), is on the receiving end of quite a few racially-motivated tirades from Englund’s Ian. Undermining Ian Essko’s racist rhetoric and turning the bigotry on its ear is Paco’s WAY over the top stereotype-laden kamikaze death scene, which (seemingly) explodes many of the Mexican-American racial conventions: sombreros, mules, Pancho Villa, etc. It wouldn’t be unusual if a viewer found him/herself frowning and chuckling at the same time – which is true for most scenes in the film.

Complimenting the innumerable idiosyncrasies of Zombie Strippers is one of the most memorable and remarkably disgusting (yet hilarious) scenes ever filmed. I won’t reveal too much about the sequence but this should be enough to pique the reader’s interest: projectile ping-pong balls, projectile pool balls, Jenna Jameson’s zombified vagina, a stripping pole-cum-baseball bat, and rotting chesticles. Honestly, if this scene doesn’t accrue legendary status within the coming months, I will be shocked. I couldn’t even breathe in the theatre. I almost fell over... dead from laughter! (That’s my B-criticism version of a snappy concluding line.)

by Brandon Colvin
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