Prince of Darkness

Rating: R

Run Time: 102 minutes

Director: John Carpenter

Starring:  Donald Pleasence, Lisa Blout, Jameson Parker

In Prince of Darkness, Satan is extraterrestrial subatomic antimatter composed of a large clear cylinder full of swirling green fluorescent fluid…and he’s trying to bring his dad back from the “Dark Side.”  Jesus, beyond merely trying to lead us to salvation by demonstrating for us the supreme sacrifice, also tried to tell us about the green shit in the form of a series of writings that were transcribed over and over again in different languages.  Oh, and the green stuff is emitting data in the form of extremely complicated differential equations that were not thought to exist in the day this substance dates from. 

Now, the heretofore dormant green shit is beginning to stir, it seems, and John Carpenter’s favorite doom-monger, Donald Pleasance, this time a priest and not a psychiatrist, has begun to sound the death alarums in that demonstration of muted hysteria that only Donald Pleasance can do.  Who does he call upon to forestall the end times?  Not any religious group, but two academic researchers and a group of their graduate students.  What do they hope to accomplish?  Well, I don’t know.  What they do is bring in their sophisticated equipment and begin to analyze the mystery.

Prince of Darkness/POD is the second of Carpenter’s self-titled apocalypse trilogy, after the The Thing and before In the Mouth of Madness.  Given that they were released in 1982, 1987, and 1995, and considering that the thematic similarities are really only tenuous, I think it is safe to say there was little or no conscious design on Carpenter’s part at the time to link these films in any substantive way.  It’s easy to suggest the connection at a later time, and I do not doubt Carpenter has an affinity for films whose plot elements include the potential for ultimate annihilation (not only the so-called trilogy, but most of his other films suggest, even if ostensibly on a smaller scale, that the stakes are higher than just the immediacy of the plot his protagonists are involved in: The Fog, They Live, the Escape from… movies; even Assault on Precinct 13 has that apocalyptic quality to it).   

Unfortunately, already in 1987, Carpenter’s star was on the decline, at least in the sense that, after the box-office failure of his greatest film and the commercial success of the simpler Starman, Hollywood now seemed to trust him only to make movies of more limited thematic ambition on similarly reduced budgets.  I do not know if this is the period during which it is said that he returned to “small” filmmaking, but it is certainly a small film, albeit one with very large ambitions that were not ultimately fully realized.  Please don’t understand me; I don’t intend the term “small” in relation to POD to be interpreted in a perjorative sense. 

After all, both Halloween and The Fog were small films in terms of their limited budgets, but they were successful; Halloween is certainly one of the greatest horror films ever made.  Despite being “small,” however, POD has a few ideas running around in it, even if I must admit I was not paying enough attention to discern completely or parse out those ideas.

The opening credit sequence, complete with another familiar Carpenter score, is intercut with a series of short scenes introducing many of the faces we will see throughout the movie.  Most notable is Donald Pleasance, here a priest dealing with the death of a fellow cleric who was apparently the only remaining staff clergyman at a small, abandoned church in a run-down and seemingly largely deserted part of Los Angeles.  Except for the homeless; there is an apparently endless and steady supply of homeless people here (oh, and they are all, without exception, sufferers of schizophrenia, or at least so says one of the graduate students).

This opening sequence is well-paced, as is the rest of the movie.  It reveals the stakes involved, if not in elaborate detail then in general outline, and the players who will be called upon to confront whatever it is in the abandoned church that has Pleasance’s character’s, Father Tensely Nervous, frock in a tizzy.  The music, in tandem with the montage of snippet scenes, creates a suspenseful and anticipatory mood.

Father Fretting Visibly is a priest in the employ of his Eminence the Cardinal, who is never seen.  The old priest dies while waiting to meet with the cardinal, and Father Mutedly Hysterical examines the two objects the priest brought with him, a diary and a key.  He uses the key to enter an ancient structure beneath the church that houses what can only be described as the essence of Evil in liquified form.  The diary reveals the existence of a shadowy sect of priests known as the Brotherhood of Sleep, whose mission it seems is to keep watch over the dormant liquid, lest it become active and conscious again.  The brotherhood would seem also to antedate even the Church itself by two million years, during which time its members arranged for its transference from the Middle East to the New World, enabled by Spanish conquistadors as efforts were made to proselytize the native dwellers of California.

Father No Name (I checked IMDb) seeks the help of physicist and academic, Dr. Howard Birack (huh? He’s played by Victor Wong, the little Asian actor with the gimp eye, and he doesn’t look like a Howard Birack; maybe he was adopted), an unbeliever who instead is a proponent of the idea that the explanations we seek are to be found at the subatomic level.  Given what he read in the diary, the cleric would seem to agree, and thinks even the answer to the question of evil’s origin can be explained with recourse to science.  He hopes the academics will be able to, essentially, prove the existence of evil to a non-believing world.

Among these academics are several graduate students of Birack’s and another professor.  Dr. Birack does not share with anyone, at least initially, the cause for concern that was impressed upon him by Father Pleasance, so, all those students an academics get to work.  Among them is Brian Marsh (Jameson Parker, of “Simon & Simon” fame) and a whole bunch of other folks whom you may or may not have seen in other films.   Jessie Lawrence Ferguson is Calder, a big, tall black guy with this creepy laugh-cry he does after his zombification…oops, spoiler.  Sorry.        

Well, no sooner do the academics get their equipment hooked up and running than they discover something the deceased priest must have instinctively sensed: the liquid is becoming active, changing, awakening.  It calls to the homeless crowd outside the church, which it has been causing to stir for a while, to effectively barricade the researchers within, trapping them.  It begins to zombify certain team members, who kill and zombify others, until there is only a small group of survivors who remain.  It selects a surrogate, who has what looks like a raised burn or infected area on her right upper arm that looks like an ankh, to be the vessel to contain Satan.  He must apparently take corporeal form to enact what he wants to do: bring back his Father from the Dark Side. 

What’s that you say?  Satan has a father.  Of course, you didn’t know that?  You must have missed that CCE lesson.  Oh, and Satan and his father are antimatter.  Because if, like, God is like God God, then, the Anti-Christ (and his dad) must be the anti-God.  And if God is created of matter (which was not even postulated in this movie, which no one in this movie ever even suggests was either proven or considered, which is antithetical to most Christian teaching which suggests God is Spirit, which is entirely unknown period anyway), well then, certainly, Satan must  be antimatter.  What you just heard was the sound of me throwing down the bullshit card, because that, my friends, is bullshit…bullshit.              

The idea that, in an increasingly secular, not necessarily rational, but secular, world, the idea of Ultimate Eeevilll being real and Satan being it greatest adherent is an outmoded, unsophisticated concept is not only a product of Enlightenment thinking but a latent byproduct of the anti-authoritarianism of the 60s and 70s.  If you don’t believe in God, then you certainly don’t believe in the anti-God either.  POD condemns neither the rational-scientific nor the spiritual.  The film demonstrates the two working harmoniously.  In fact, Carpenter may posit some co-existence between the two forces.  There may be a rational explanation for God.  Yet rational and knowable are not synonymous.  And one thing I always admire about John Carpenter, one attribute of his film making that I love, is this: his characters are generally resilient and strong; his men and women are equal to the challenge presented by the adversary; they may not ultimately triumph, but they will fight and demonstrate courage in extremis. 

There is a certain cynicism that purports to be realism that we see increasingly in modern cinema; I don’t know if art reflects life or not in this instance.  Just as in the realms of spirituality or religion, the adherents of resistance to the adversary (whatever it be) are treated with contempt for being naïve and unsophisticated.  The nihilism that informs most modern horror, whether apocalyptic or not, suggests that human weakness is the norm (courage, whether physical or moral, is merely a chimera).  What a dire future there is for us if their sensibility triumphs.

Oh, and Alice Cooper cameos as one of the homeless people.

    

        

 

Maniac Cop I, II, & III

Rating: R

Run Time: 85 min

Director: William Lustig

Starring: Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell 

You have the right to remain silent…forever, mutha-fucka!

In this unique trilogy, Maniac Cop Matt Cordell kills the living shit out of just about any and everything that breathes or has a pulse in 1980s New York City.  I’m still not absolutely sure why he does this, and his motive becomes increasingly more obscure in each successive film.  Across all three, he also becomes progressively more hideous in appearance, too.   I’m not sure why this happens either, but it does.  However, in order to make some sense of this strange phenomenon, I’d like to offer a little thing I call the Jason Vorhees Doctrine (which I pulled out of my ass about three seconds before I wrote those words down). 

As we know of the F13 franchise, every new makeup artist, from Tom Savini to Carl Fullerton to who knows who else and on, came up with a new rendition of everyone’s favorite zombie goalie.  Because of the tortuous F13 timeline, this could be excused to some degree.  But the bottom line is this:  Jason never looks one goddamned bit like he did in the movie before.  He’s like the David Bowie of indestructible zombie serial killers.  In F13 I, he’s the English Bob Dylan; in II, he’s Ziggy Stardust; in III, he’s the Thin White Duke.  Like, am I right? Fist pump, everybody!  Fuck yeah!

This is what I mean: In F13 I, he’s a grossly deformed, bald adolescent boy.  Why is he bald?  I don’t know.  Anyway, although the intra-film time lapse between I and II is only a few months, in F13 II, he grows from a teenager to a grown-ass man with a full head of hair and a beard, too.  And he doesn’t look anything like he did when he was a kid.  In F13 III, he has either made a trip to the barber or undergone the most aggressive chemotherapy treatment imaginable…overnight, mind you.  ...and he looks like a fucking human pig.   I won’t further belabor Jason’s amazing chameleon-like shape-shifting ability because one day I’m going to have to visit that franchise and I want to be fresh for what will surely be a grueling experience.

Yet Jason’s Story is truly a grand bildungsroman-like saga that stretches across some of the most significant periods in American history.  Matt’s evolves over a contiguous and brief stretch of time; each movie starts where the one before it left off.  And it’s all in that crappy, squalid late 70s-early 80s New York City of the pre-Guliani era.  The same one that William Lustig, who directed all the Maniac Cop thrillers, utilized in his earlier exercise in serial killer squalor, Maniac.  Essentially, Matt Cordell took Manhattan long before Jason ever thought of hitching a ride on that shitty-looking barge that magically traversed from Crystal Lake to some port in the Hudson Harbor.  But let us not tarry further in our journey.

Maniac Cop opens with a scene where a gargantuan dude in a police officer’s uniform, ill-lit and in shadows, kills a poor woman who is fleeing from a couple of hijackers who are right out of Ethnic Bad Guy Central Casting.  The cop wrings her neck, snapping it, while crushing her larynx as well.  Why does he do this?  For absolutely no fucking good reason at all, that’s why.  This is not immediately apparent, however.  The body is discovered the next day and the investigation is being conducted by a lone homicide detective played by…Jake fucking LaMotta!  As in former lightweight boxing champion of the world Jake LaMotta, Scorcese Raging Bull as played by DeNiro Jake LaMotta.  

Jake doesn’t keep the case long, however, as it is soon apparent that a series of murders involving the same hulking dude in a cop’s uniform are occurring throughout the Big Apple.  Lieutenant Frank McCrae (Tom Atkins, B-movie stalwart who always, always gets the hot chicks in these movies, and God only knows why because he’s not particularly good-looking in the conventional sense; he sleeps with Jamie Lee Curtis herself in Carpenter’s The Fog, which is just damned creepy, man, because he looks old enough to be her grandfather) assumes the case and soon becomes convinced that the killer is not just a guy dressing up like a police officer, but really is a police officer.  I don’t know why.  As far as I was concerned, it’s 50/50.  What kind of cop carries a concealed saber in his nightstick?  Or wears silly-ass, foppy white gloves? 

There is an interesting sociological sub-story in the movie that is revealed through media images, involving the development of an ever-increasing distrust of police officers by practically all of New York’s citizenry.  Since when have people ever trusted police officers, I’d really like somebody to tell me.  Still, I watched the first movie relatively soon after the whole Michael Brown, Eric Garner controversy that culminated in the deaths of NYPD officers, Rafael Ramos & Wenjian Liu.  I mean, really, fuck people!  Anyway, so nobody likes cops, there’s a shocker for you.

Soon enough a suspect in these murders (a, get this, cop), is developed when his wife is murdered after she catches him in flagrante delicto with another woman.  The wife had already become all but convinced that her husband, Officer Jack Forrest, was the Maniac Cop when she followed him.  Jack, by the way, is played by Bruce “If Chins Could Kill” Campbell at the height of his B-movie character actor glory, two years after Evil Dead II was released.  Jack is having an affair with Theresa Mallory (Laurene Landon).  When Jack is arrested for the murders, McCrae figures out about the affair and rightly believes Jack is withholding that knowledge to shield Theresa’s reputation.  He learns from her that the only person she told about the affair is Officer Sally Noland, who is partially disabled with a gimp left leg that necessitates she walk with a cane.  Interestingly, Sally is played by Sheree North, who was at one time groomed to become heir apparent to the increasingly erratic Marilyn Monroe. 

The Cliff Notes version is that Frank digs up the sordid skinny on the whole Cordell story, learning also that Matt and Sally were lovers.  Her injury occurred when she attempted suicide by jumping out a window after Matt was imprisoned.  Now, being a police officer, of course, she has a gun. How much easier it would have been to have just shot herself with that gun, but okay.  Frank gets from A to C by following Sally to a rendezvous with Matt in some old decrepit storage lot.  When he is discovered, Sally starts shooting into the shadows at him, using the same damned gun she should have used to kill herself.  But if she hadn’t done what she did, we wouldn’t have ourselves a movie, folks, as you’ll figure out for yourselves if you watch. 

Before long, the Maniac Cop tries to kill Theresa as she does UC roleplaying as a prostitute.  Both she and Frank, who just shows up out of fucking nowhere, shoot Matt to no effect, including several shots to the head that would have killed a mere mortal.  After this, Frank, now convinced of his innocence, tries to get Jack out of jail but Sally has figured out what Frank knows and attacks him in her best wild-ass crazy disabled lady cop fashion in the precinct station house at the same time that Matt is making his rounds killing all the rest of the police officers in the building.  Jack and Theresa make it out.  Actually, so does Frank, only he does so through an upper floor window courtesy of a pissed-off Matt, who has up and killed Sally now, too.  I mean, this guy just beats the living shit out of the only person in the whole damn movie who even cares for him.  See what I mean by motiveless, indiscriminate killing?   

Anyway, the two survivors next visit Sing Sing and learn everything about everything on the Cordell front just before the final confrontation that ends the film.  And the ending is not even equivocal, folks.  It is made very clear that Matt is still alive.  Somewhere along the line, he has also become indestructible for no goddamned good reason at all.  In just one movie.  Whereas even the arbitrary F13 series took four before blessing Jason with immortality, Matt has gone from someone clinging to life with a faint pulse and no brain activity to full-on “you can’t kill me, ‘cause I’m already dead” mode.         

        

Maniac Cop’s not a bad movie.  It’s well-acted by a group of memorable B-movie stalwarts, including Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree, as police commissioner.  People you think will make it suddenly don’t, in a time when there was still a sense of danger about such horror/exploitation fare as this.  There is also a neat way that the killer cop is just sort of there when somebody looks his way that is super creepy.  It’s an editing trick, I think, and I am unfortunately not the kind of movie aficionado who appreciates cinematography, editing, sound mixing in any sophisticated sort of way at all…unless something sucks, I don’t register such aesthetics consciously.  I’m of the “hey, that looks like shit,” or “hey, that sounds like shit” persuasion.  Still, it is a movie made by people who did seem to care, which is itself a virtue in that 80s-era cash-grab atmosphere that clung so tenaciously to the slasher formula which form was already absolutely on its last legs when the first Maniac Cop came out (slasher era mach 1, that is).   

I have a few quibbles:  this guy’s supposed to be fucking brain-dead or some shit, yet he plots to frame another guy for the killings in a manner way, way uncharacteristic of any 80s serial killer outside of perhaps Freddie Krueger.  And his nefarious plot is far more sophisticated in its construction and intent than anything I’ve ever seen in a slasher flick.  His rationale is this: killing innocent people will discredit the police department such that doing so will lead to the downfall of those Cordell blames for the predicament that sent him to prison on trumped-up charges in the first place.  WTF?  That would require machinations that go far beyond just killing innocents on the streets of NYC. 

So, yes, there are a few problems with this theory.  First, it is strongly suggested that what landed Matt in prison prior to the events we see in the first movie was that, as an old-school police officer, he was violating the ever-loving shit out of people’s civil rights while doing his job.  It is implied that this is the only way a cop can see results or effect a change.  That logic is counterintuitive at best.  Beyond that, even, police officers can and do go to prison for doing exactly the sort of thing that he was apparently doing.  So whose fault is it you landed in Sing Sing, Mr. Badass?  Second, it is not at all clear that the people in power who allegedly screwed him for being NYPD’s greatest detective are the same people who are in still in power now.  With the exception of Richard Roundtree, who apparently was…I think. 

Oh, my.  I’m at almost 2,000 words and haven’t said a damned thing about Maniac Cop 2 and Maniac Cop 3: Badge of (get this) Silence, so let’ wrap it up.  Matt just sorta decides to show up and start the killing again in the next two, including more people you think aren’t going to get theirs…who do.  Yeah, and Robert Davi joins the cast in two and three and somehow manages to wildly overact in a subdued manner; it’s really amazing to watch, but how is that possible?  And, as I noted earlier, Matt continues to decompose at an alarming rate.  I suspect perhaps the series ended because there just wasn’t enough left of him to keep killing people.  A pity.  Why not Maniac Cop IV: Skeleton Cop?  

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 5/10

The Babadook

Rating: NR 

Run Time: 93 mins

Director: Jennifer Kent

Starring: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Daniel Henshall

I was prepared to love this movie…for a number of good reasons: I have been reading the enthusiastic hype for months; the story idea is a great springboard for a horror movie; I’m an Essie Davis fan (I encourage anyone who will listen to watch the Phryne Fisher murder mysteries); the concept art for the monster looked cool.  But you know what?

 

Ba-Ba-Ba…big fucking deal.  That’s what.

My working theory for explaining the critical adulation this film has engendered is this:  the director Jennifer Kent went all around God’s green earth talking up how clever and important and smart and deeeep and significant this movie is.  The movie is just not that good.  I have read several of these interviews and it strikes me that she has little natural affinity with the horror field.  I think Kent wanted to make an art house horror flick.  She wasn’t successful…because art house horror movies aren’t scary.     But she still has reviewers, not to miss out on that hype or be seen as unsophisticated rubes, getting absolutely orgasmic in their descriptive language of how swell and how awfully frightening the picture is.

    

Yet, with all it had in its favor and for all the complimentary reviews, The Babadook is still one of the most overrated films in years.  Go back five years at least, when the posers were creaming all over themselves about how great Black Swan was.  That overrated…

The movie tells the story of Amelia and her son, who are essentially each other’s world.  She has wrapped him in a cocoon of sorts that he actively chafes against.  Yet it is clear they love each other; their affection is very real.  Amelia was being driven to the hospital by her husband the night Jacob, her son, was born.  During the trip, they were in a vehicular accident that left the husband, Oskar, dead.  Amelia’s manner of handling her grief is to bury it.  She doesn’t allow Jacob to celebrate his birthday on his birthday, for instance.  Otherwise, they share their lives together: meals, story time, the ritual of looking in closets and under beds for the monsters. 

One evening, at Jacob’s bedtime, he discovers a children’s book that neither even knew he owned.  It’s called Mr. Babadook, and boy is it a mind fuck.  This Babadook character is not at all a nice fellow.  In fact, he’s out to fuck you up and is not coy about announcing his intentions.  When they reach the point in the illustrated book where it becomes clear that the Babadook is a sinister sort of bloke, Amelia insists they stop reading.  Good idea…except the damned thing keeps showing up again and again.  She tears it apart and trashes it; it reappears.  She burns the motherfucker; this seems to do the trick, until he starts prank-calling (it’s hard to charge a monster with terroristic threat if you can’t convince the police he’s real, after all).  What is more, Amelia starts to catch glimpses of Mr. Babadook in the shadows or around corners.  It seems the book isn't necessary to invoke him anymore; Jacob believes the fucker’s already in the house and he’s starting to suspect he might be in Mom!   

If the movie goer is to make a stab at understanding the significance of the Babadook as a symbol, he must make some assumptions about the presumed state of mind of Amelia at the film’s beginning.  The early scenes are supposed to suggest how entrenched she is in her continued grief and how exhausting the task of being the single parent of an out-of- control child; that same child is also the constant reminder of her husband’s death such as to contribute to her unconscious resentment of the son.  It is certainly true that Essie Davis looks washed out and tired beyond belief.  But I’ll tell you what: if I were a single mother trying to raise an active child while holding down a shit job, I’d look like Amelia, too.  Further, if the shit job entailed caring for senile old bitties who keep changing their tea orders, I would hate to go to work as well.  In fact, I often do hate to go to work, and I look about the same when I come home…emotionally drained.  So the film doesn't convince us that her everlasting grief or unwillingness to manage or confront it are the reasons she constantly looks like she’s about two seconds away from cutting her own throat.  I have often ended up with a few hesitation marks on my neck when I shave for work in the morning.

The same is true of Jacob.  We are apparently meant to see him as a behaviorally maladjusted child who acts out in inappropriate ways.  Clearly, Jennifer Kent doesn't have a son.  That is what every six year-old boy I have ever seen acts like…hyperactive and occasionally barely controllable.  In fact, I thought of him as being a very imaginative and precocious child in the best sense of the word; he was tremendously clever.  Further, I rather admired his ingenuity with weapons systems.  They damn well serve a practical function later in the movie.  And another thing, I would have pushed that bitch cousin out of the goddamned tree-house, too.  Save for the intermittent high-pitched, wail-like scream he would emit every once in a while, I thought he was quite normal. 

In one of her seemingly never-ending press interviews, Jennifer Kent suggested she could not find any research on the difficult (task) faced by mothers raising children.  Are you fucking kidding me?  There have been years of study on the terrible guilt working mothers experience.  There has been research on the spurious idea that women possess some mythically innate “maternal instinct.” Moreover, those studies have demonstrated that the quality is not quite so universal as our patriarchal society likes to believe.  Women can and often do resent the ever-loving shit out of their children.  And they are not the only ones.   In fact, there is an entire litany of offenses for which I, the father, have told my children I will most certainly kill them, dismember their bodies, and bury the parts in our back yard.   

So that I don’t come off entirely as a conservatively literal curmudgeon, I would like to mention the things I really did like.  The acting on the principles’ part is great.  Essie Davis does exactly what she must do to sell the part; she’s a damned good actor.  What I didn’t buy was her potential for hypersensitivity to unexplained phenomena.  Fair enough, though, because, in my understanding, psychosis with paranoid features isn’t uncommon.  It is because of her ever-increasingly suspicious frame of mind that she begins to hallucinate. 

Noah Wiseman, too, was incredible.  He was hilariously energetic, playing Jacob with a boundless energy that would suggest, too, that his imagination was so vivid that the job of differentiating between fantasy and reality might be terribly difficult for his character.  Jennifer Kent must be responsible for coaxing this performance from the boy.  She has spoken of how she coached Noah Wiseman such that she got the performance she needed without at the same time scaring the holy shit out of him, and I bet that was an incredibly difficult thing to do.  The choice to keep other characters peripheral to the story was, if not just a lazy way of shunting underwritten parts to the side, also the right one.  It effectively (highlights) the incredible isolation the mother and son feel (she subjects him to this in the mistaken belief that he is the dangerous one).  Both are alienated from any substantive companionship outside of their own circle of two. 

And, finally, the conception and rendering of the Babadook itself is great, as is the central story idea that introduces him to the film.  Kent has noted the influence of German Expressionist Horror on the character (I don’t doubt she is a cinephile, mind you) and he looks like a great cross between Lon Chaney’s vampire in the lost London After Midnight and Graf Orlock from Nosferatu.  The children’s book illustrations heighten the nightmare quality of the design.  Even here, though, I must protest.  If there was one thing that could have improved the film, I believe showing the monster lurking around in the shadows more than he is seen would have succeeded in convincing us better that we needed to pay careful/closer attention to any clues that would elucidate for us the actuality beyond our immediate senses; after all, I think that is part of the fun of watching psychological horror: you get to argue in good nature with your friends about whether the monster or ghost or demon really existed at all. 

I know this is a counterintuitive concept in horror cinema; generally, it is certainly true that the less the monster is seen, the more frightening it is.  I just don’t think it worked here.  His appearances were so infrequent that it was too easy to believe he was just not real, that he was merely an auditory and visual illusion for Amelia.  Psychological horror, as I understand it, cannot survive that absence of ambiguity.  And that is absolutely what we have here.  I’m usually not a fan of this sub-genre because it’s just not scary.  Sure, the pseudo-intellectuals like to talk about it and go on about how “frightening” such stuff is, but they’re talking out of their collective ass.  Blood and tits are too low-brow for this set. 

But if it’s done well, it can be scary as well as thought-provoking.  And it doesn’t need gore or nudity to ingratiate itself with an audience.  Psychological horror always seems firmly rooted in the fertile soil of psychoanalysis theory.  A repressed something wells up from the dark recesses of the unconscious and manifests itself in corporeal form, or at least seems to.  The trick about viewing a “psychological horror film” is determining whether the “thing” is real or imaginary.  In the world of David Cronenberg, we are blessed because his protagonists’ demons more often than not actually and absolutely do take physical form, certainly during his aptly-called body horror years.  His characters develop tumorous growths or parasitical creatures with a specifically sexual nexus, or they grow phallic appendages or vaginal orifices, or they birth “children of rage.”  Or they become something else entirely, something terrible and foreign.

In other movies, we are not so fortunate.  We must do the work ourselves…in a sense.  Surely the undisputed master of this horror sub-set was Val Lewton and his greatest director, Jacques Tourneur.  There is really no sure way to determine if voodoo magic is real or not (I Walked with a Zombie) or whether Irena is a were-panther or not (Cat People).  Tourneur would perform the same trick again in Night of the Demon in the late fifties; one could even make the argument that the demon which eventually appears is a figment of the overwrought imagination of its victims.  Consider The Haunting or The Innocents…  In fact, these two films are particularly good as exemplars to compare The Babadook to, at least and if only superficially, because they deal with women (highly suggestible women) with very sensitive and very vivid imaginations.

Of course, the central theme of what is real and what is not was baked into the movies in their adherence to their source material, but they are still marvelously constructed films that deal with women confronted with traumatic events that occur within seemingly haunted houses.  Further, Eleanor and the governess deal with their experiences in such a way that it is almost (if not) impossible to determine if what they are enduring is real or not.  That seems to be the crux of psychological horror.  The ambiguity that balances the dichotomy of the real and the purely imaginary is so tricky to parse out.  But in The Babadook, it’s just not.  And further, the way it unfolds made it difficult for me to give two shits, anyway.  Until the end.  Stick around for that, because it is good.  It cannot redeem the film for me, but it is poignant and clever.   

Some who read my thoughts on this movie may consider me a literalist philistine who lacks the subtlety of mind to “get” this picture, but do not be fooled by them; there is nothing to “get.”  In fact, and this pisses me off, really, I have yet to see or read a review whose writer has had the fortitude to call the movie out.  It’s fucking boring!  There… 

It’s this sort of hypocritical pseudo-intellectual pandering that makes the film industry the world’s largest mutual admiration, where its critics are just so many sycophants who must not miss their seat on the boat when a few respected critics start lauding a film.  Everyone must instantly write his own unthinking piece on how great the goddamned movie in question is for fear of being left out of the vomitus of hyperbole that accompanies a few favorable reviews.  I do not excuse myself, for I have been equally guilty of the very same.

Quite simply, the movie does not do a good job of rendering the central dilemma sufficiently equivocal.  First it’s one thing (the monster is real!) and then it’s the other thing (it’s all in her head!), without never there being a proper balance maintained (or even attained at all) between the two possibilities.  Sure, the idea is a really good one, as far as movies that deal with female neurosis or psychosis go (and we ought to as well add Repulsion to the list).  She is certainly repressing something…but what?  She is sleep-deprived (very often linked to psychosis as an exacerbating factor).  Check.  She is isolated.  Check.  Her constant companion is a six year-old (an unlikely source of intellectual stimulation).  Check.  Her job sucks and she’s got no love life.  Check.

But I never felt threatened.  I wasn’t scared for the mother or the kid.  I didn’t think they were ever really threatened.  So there’s no sense of danger, no stakes.  And who cares anyway, because the two of them are so fucking isolated that no one is likely to miss their stupid asses in any event.

I suppose we have Freud to blame for this…  

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 4/10

          

In Fear (2013)

Rating: R

Run Time: 85 mins

Director: Jeremy Lovering

Starring: Iain De Caestecker, Alice Englert, Allen Leech

Who was that fucking guy?

 Perhaps a great deal hinges on the answer to that question.  Then again, maybe not.

If this passes for “perhaps the best horror film of 2013,” we’re, quite simply, fucked.  If the face of modern, or post-modern, horror looks like this, we’re in for a dry spell, folks.  Well-acted and well-photographed.  Interesting idea for filming the story, which is, as a narrative, tired and a bit overused.  Ireland’s answer to hillbilly horror; although I guess you would call it hooligan horror, instead.  The Strangers on wheels (and, let me tell you, the two protagonists here are every bit as stupid).    

A couple who’ve been dating for two weeks are going to a music festival to join their mutual friends.  The male lead engineer stays over at a quaint hotel and convinces the female lead to acquiesce to staying over so they can do the horizontal bop (it is not made clear whether she ever intends to consummate what he calls their “two-month anniversary”- she is by a wide margin the more intelligent of the two,  so I would like to think she has a bit more self-esteem as well; he’s not a bad guy, not a drip or anything, just sort of clueless when a little quick-thinking resolve might have better served their later plight). 

First, they stop over at a small village pub; it’s the one you’ve seen in every Hammer monster movie since time immemorial, the same damn one in An American Werewolf in London, the same in every movie made in the United Kingdom (for the Australian variation, please see Razorback).  The one where the locals may share a full set of teeth among the whole lot, one or two of them may have a daughter-wife or perhaps an extra testicle, they’re all drinking Guinness (although there are other perfectly good English or Irish stouts), and there’s one fella who is rreeaally retarded and he’s playing a tin whistle like Charlie Daniels plays the fiddle.  The one where they always shut the absolute fuck up as soon as you cross the threshold and then stare at you with their little beady, in-bred eyes like you have a penis for a nose.  That pub…

I’ve been in a few of those English pubs and the atmosphere isn’t that intolerable.  I think perhaps the English do make a rather cold impression at first, but once they get used to the idea of you hanging around and they warm up to you, they can be friendly enough.  They may still leave your dick swaying in the wind when the village werewolf comes a huntin’, but we can’t have it all.

As have most of us, I’ve been in a few small towns in the good ole U.S.A., too, and unless the town is a tourist destination where the locals have to be nice to you, they can be pretty unfriendly as well.  That is even the case in the South, Texas say, where the reputation for hospitality, mythical as it may be, is not quite what it’s cracked up to be.  Here’s the point, I think: people who live in small towns in out of the way places in the country do so for a reason.  Some of those reasons are merely misanthropic, some are far more insidious, homicidal even.  At heart, they don’t like other people, period, game over, man, and the less they have to see of them (even if they are neighbors who are equally and mutually distrustful), the better.  If you don’t want to squeal like a pig, don’t try to canoe down the Cahulawassee River.  If you don’t want to end up sausage on someone’s plate, don’t stop in Round Rock, man.

What is interesting about this pub, however, is that we don’t see any of that stranger-local interaction or the interior of the pub at all.   We may or may not witness the aftermath of what happened in there, but we only hear versions of what really transpired, and we’re never enlightened regarding the truth.  We can only speculate.  The filmmakers’ choice not to show us what happened is a good idea.  Not only do we never learn what the truth is or whether any blame should be ascribed to anyone, we don’t know or discover whether the bad things that befall our couple are in any way related at all to the first event or if the two are randomly and capriciously chosen for torment. 

There is little more to tell.  The two leave and are directed to where the hotel is supposed to be.  Suffice it to say, they never find it.  Along the way, there are some eerie occurrences and a good scary composition or two of the Halloween/ The Strangers sort.  There is a blatant Texas Chainsaw Massacre rip-off scene which implication amounts to the same as in the Tobe Hooper classic.     

And there is torment, most assuredly, although not at all of the terribly graphic kind.  Several red herrings are never resolved.  My impression is that these would not have been so insurmountable as to trip the sirens of the “implausibility bullshit register” if the film weren’t so slow in places that you had time, too much time, to think about “Hey, what about…?” or “Wait, I thought…?”

And whoever that guy is, he’s been very busy… 

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 4/10

The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus

Rating: NR

Run Time: 95 minutes

Director: Jesus Franco

Starring: Howard Vernon, Hugo Blanco, Gogo Rojo

I am becoming a bit of a Jess Franco apologist.  El Conde Dracula was, despite what others might think, certainly not the worst thing I have ever seen, and some bits were actually good.  And here with The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus, is a second Franco film worth watching for its own sake.  The movie is an odd mix of gothic ghost story and serial murder mystery that holds one's interest and generally provides an ultimately satisfying conclusion.  And, very interestingly, in the compelling opinion of Matthew Saliba, this just might be the first giallo, the story and direction by a Spaniard one full year before Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much.  

The movie begins in the local village bar, where a bunch of guitar-playing pipe smokers (or, pipe-smoking guitar players, if you prefer) are swaying and singing the most outrageously ridiculous yet thematically-related song ever, being sung by the owner of the bar as they all sway back and forth in time to the tune.  Personally, my image of guitar players who smoke is of Keith Richards or Jimmy Page, guitar and cigarette slung low from hip and lip, not a bunch of French-speaking “Austrians” singing a song written by a jazz-loving Spaniard…to each his own.

The song foreshadows the tale we next hear from the village ragman and his diminutive sidekick, Hanzel and Theo (or maybe it's Theo and Hanzel, I really don't remember) as they ply it on the psychiatrist, Kallman (Angel Menendez) who is in town to hear some of the local legends and folklore.  It speaks of a horrid 17^th century nobleman, Baron Von Klaus, whose castle overshadows the township.  Well, of course the castle overshadows the town!  Just as in any half-way respectable Hammer gothic, the castle always overshadows the town in these movies.  Anyway, this awful man kidnapped, tortured and killed young girls for years before he was finally hunted down in the swamps of his own land and presumably drowned.  The father of one of his victims placed a curse on the baron that doomed the evil man to return to haunt the village, compelled to commit even more atrocities over the years.  Now, for a sadistic killer, this seems like a good thing, not a curse, but whatever.

Over the years, the evil soul of the original baron has continued to plague his ancestors, even so far as to possess some of the later barons in order to continue his signature killings.  There were a series of such murders approximately fifty years ago, in the youth of the ragman, and he believes the killings are beginning again.  There have already been found the mutilated bodies of two young girls.  Another signature of the baron's return is that the wild winds and even wilder animals from the hills descend to ravage the village along with the resurrected baron, who is described as either a spirit possessing his descendants or an actual ghost who rises from the depths of the swamps of his own land…take your pick (this element was confusing, although, at the end, it does seem like a little bit of both going on).

Next, we see that the two junkmen have discovered yet a third corpse on the ice one morning.  We hear the wild winds and then we see ungodly evidence of the wild animals who will unleash their unholy depredations on the town…two little bunnies who are scampering down the slope; my blood runs cold even as I write these words.  At the scene later is a tall newsman, Karl Steiner (Fernando Delgado) who is apparently known to the chief inspector, Borowsky (George Rollin).  From the back and forth banter of the dialogue, it would appear the two share a friendly adversarial relationship and that each genuinely likes the other.  Together, these two will men will eventually work to solve the crimes.

First, however, we are introduced to the latest baron, Max Von Klaus.  We see first a sinister-looking photo of him, then a sinister portrait of him, and then the very sinister him himself, played by the sinister-looking Howard Vernon.  He is at the bedside of his sister, Elisa Von Klaus (Maria Frances).  She is dying and wishes to warn off her son, both regarding the family curse and her suspicions regarding her brother (who she tells him is the spitting image of the former barons; so that portrait is actually of a former baron…hmmm).  The son, Ludvig (Hugo Blanco), arrives in town with his fiancé, Karine (Paula Martel) just before his mom expires.  She has her time alone with him and gives him the key to the original baron’s basement torture chamber.  She then tells him to get the hell out of town. These seem contradictory pieces of advice: go look at your ancestor’s cool setup downstairs; but then you better get the fuck out of here.  Another thing that bugged me about this scene: this kid is apparently the only sonofabitch within a thousand miles who has not already heard of the legend of his own damned family.

The killings continue, committed by, not a ghost, but a black–gloved man in a trench coat.  The remainder of the movie is concerned with elucidating the why and the who.  And indeed, who?  I won't tell.  But it is useful to point out its similarity to the giallo, which, although they certainly refined and defined the genre, the Italians may not have originated after all.  Almost all the tropes are present: 1) it's a murder mystery involving multiple/serial murders; 2) there is a black-gloved, hooded, trench-coated killer who uses a sharp-edged weapon; 3) the mystery is solved by a duo comprised of a detective (hard-nosed and practical) and reporter (more adventurous in his thinking & a foreign to the town); 4) there is a psycho-sexual motive for the killings (as if there were ever anything else but); 5) there are red herrings galore.  We could probably go on.  Let's not.

The film is frankly fascinating in several other ways, as well.  At some point in the story, that psychiatrist from earlier in the film provides a very good early definition of the sexual sadist who kills for pleasure and enjoys the suffering of his victim.  He also correctly points out that when the killer is not frenzied or in crisis, he may appear outwardly perfectly normal.  These are surely theories about the psychology of the serial murderer that could not have been widely known, if at all, in the early 1960s.  It would be close to another twenty years before the F.B.I.'s Behavioral Sciences Unit would begin to popularize these ideas such that they began appearing in mainstream popular fiction like, say, Thomas Harris's Red Dragon.  Yet here it is in a movie from 1962. 

Similar to this idea of there being a psychological motivation (sexual cruelty) for the killer's actions is the point Bodorowsky makes to Steiner early in the movie, telling the reporter that people always think the killer is a murderous or vengeful ghost or monster, yet in the end the murderer is found to be all too human; this is to me an interesting point to make in a particular sort of film that, together with Psycho and Peeping Tom from two years earlier, marks the move away from the supernatural and toward the psychological motivation for the killings in horror films.  Let us always keep in mind what the giallo and its European counterparts birthed in the United States and Canada a few years later. 

Who is the killer?  I won't tell.  I recommend you watch the movie.  I think perhaps its historical significance has been subsumed by others of its ilk that are no less important but which are not necessarily any more so. 

LAST THINGS:

Cons

Franco’s use of jazz music in a horror film is jarringly inappropriate to me.  He uses it even during attack scenes…

Why the does the killer torture and mutilate his victims, then fully clothe them again?  So they don’t get cold?

Why would the baron use a false name at the bar?; every last character we even peripherally meet knows the Von Klaus legend; surely everybody knows what the fucker looks like.

   

Pros

Midway in the movie is a scene where the fiancé, Karine, who is in her bedroom in the castle, is terrified by a series of loud noises; you may note its similarity to another more famous supernatural movie released a year after this one.  Cribbing?  Perhaps... 

The chase scenes in the streets at night are pretty well-done, genuinely creepy and suspenseful.

There is a very atmospheric and tension-filled hunt for the killer, torch-wielding mob in the cemetery and everything…good lighting and appropriately eerie music.

Gogo Rojo plays the sexy barmaid, Margaret, who very suggestively and conspicuously sways her butt every time we see her.  Rojo was a vedette, trained in her country of origin, Argentina.  A vedette is a female singer/entertainer (akin to a hybrid of the cabaret entertainer and showgirl) who has been trained in Latin-tinged singing, dancing, and/or acting.

Beautiful scenery, good compositions…the script is intelligent and has some poetic language in it…the last shot of everyone entering their cars and driving off as the camera pans up and the piano music crescendos is well-done.   

Interesting Chronology Screw-up

Someone says the killings first started with the original baron in the 17^th century.  Someone else says the crimes first occurred over five hundred years ago.  Assuming both were true and using a mean of 1650 AD for the 17^th century, that would make the movie a science fiction tale set in around 2150 AD.  This is the kinda thing that older films never seemed to really give a shit about.

 The Horror Inkwell Rating: 6/10            

Halloween (2007)

Rating: R

Run Time: 109 minutes

Director: Rob Zombie

Starring: Scout Taylor-Comptom, Malcolm McDowell, Tyler Mane  

When I first saw Rob Zombie’s remake of the John Carpenter classic in 2007, I was not impressed.  Like so many fans of the original, I had been waiting with bated breath to see it, even though I had not been able to stomach Zombie’s first two movies to that point.  I should have known what I was in for because I knew exactly what Zombie was about already, and I did not yet care for it.  I still held out hope, though, because I also knew he was considered an auteur of sorts within the genre, and horror cinema can use one desperately;  if blood were talent, ingenuity, or originality, horror cinema would be absolutely anemic.  Anyway, I wanted to see the spin he would put on it.  Except, and here’s the thing, I didn’t want that at all.  I wanted Zombie to re-create the movie from Carpenter’s original whole cloth.  I just didn’t know it at the time. 

So when Zombie did put his spin on it, I hated it, absolutely despised it.  But what else was he to do?  If he had done otherwise, I and everyone else would have eventually gotten around to calling him a talentless hack (without ingenuity or originality, either); after all, Zombie’s remake was firmly entrenched within the same time period that saw remakes of every other iconic ‘80s slasher/cannibal franchise and none of those films (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13^th, The Hills Have Eyes, & A Nightmare on Elm Street) were really terrible, they were just no great shakes (there was some talent for filmmaking, and some nice images, but no arresting imagery, not too many original ideas, or interesting twists on old themes). 

Yes, the remakes were slick and replete with better overall visuals, makeup, and special effects, but they left most of us cold nonetheless.  Now, whatever he is, Zombie is not a hack; nor were the other filmmakers, necessarily.  But unlike them, his gonzo style of filmmaking (just like his gonzo style of music-making) will not leave you cold; hot under the collar, a bit pissed off, a little disgusted at the apparent (apparent, I say) lack of socially redeeming merit, maybe, but not cold.  He will provoke a reaction in you.  Foremost, it is a given that the violence in a Rob Zombie movie, whether colorfully garish as in House of 1000 Corpses or more somber and brutal in tone as in The Devil’s Rejects, will be wratcheted up a notch or two.  And so it was.

But beyond that, what was he to do?  Given that it had to be done, that a Halloween remake was inevitable (which I do not accept as a given: Carpenter’s Halloween should have been out of the figurative public domain, as I believe should Spielberg’s Jaws or Coppola’s Godfather saga; this I understand to be Zombie’s take on remakes as well, by the way), I cannot think of any other course than the one Zombie took.  He deepened the backstory explaining Michael Myers’s character and showed us why he became the remorseless killer we see in the second part of the movie.  In so many words, he humanized Myers. 

The problem with doing this is that, by explaining him, you destroy the essence of what made the original so incredible.  One of the things, if not the thing, that made Michael Myers frightening was his inexplicability.  There was no appreciable backstory for him and no explanation for why he was killing.  He was the boogeyman, an incarnation in ostensibly human form of all that is sinister, destructive, and malign.  But not mindless, not mindless at all in the same way as other indestructible slasher killers.  His evil and intelligence are both active.  He releases the other inmates at Smith’s Grove to create the diversion that allows him to escape.  He knows how to drive a car.  He plots and toys with his victims in some sense.  Have you ever really thought that maybe all of that “playing possum” shit he pulls is just plain fucking with Laurie?

I have seen Carpenter interviewed regarding Michael’s character, where he identified a tendency in the viewer to project onto the killer the viewer’s own sensibility and, by extension, a very personal interpretation to explain Myers and his motivation (it’s like the criminalist Alphonse Bertillon’s quote Thomas Harris uses at the beginning of Red Dragon: one sees only what one observes, and one observes only that which is already in the mind…or some shit).  I may be guilty of doing this very thing above.  But I think I’m close.  In the original, Michael’s face is almost never seen; the pale white William Shatner mask personifies perfectly the soulless, remorseless entity that he is (or, It, as Donald Pleasance’s Sam Loomis described him).  To me at least, and to others as well, the mask is, in some sense, his true face.

The subject of masks and true faces segues nicely into a brief aside regarding something Zombie did with his spin on the character that I thought was pretty cool.  From the first introduction to Michael as a young child in Zombie’s film, he is wearing a clown’s mask.  He has, in fact, a bit of an obsession with wearing the thing.  He is played by Daeg Faerch (who is a  damned creepy-looking kid; if I were his real parents, I would sleep with the lights on, one eye open, and a gun within easy reach).  His obsession with masks never ends.  People are constantly telling him to take the damn thing off and he won’t.  At one point, he tells his mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) he does so to hide his ugly face, although he is not disfigured.  It reminded me of (again) Thomas Harris’s serial killer, Francis Dollarhyde, from Red Dragon.  Dollarhyde has surgery to correct a cleft palate.  The surgery is successful and the scar and condition are barely noticeable, yet he continues to hide his face from others, as if the deformity were still there and as if that were his true face.  That’s the way I remember it; on the other hand, I could be making shit up.  Yet it seems like reasonable shit, so let’s keep on truckin'.

When he is institutionalized, Zombie’s Michael continues to make masks, seemingly hundreds of them: bright, colorful masks, creatively-designed masks.  It seems as if, being a more human character to some degree, Michael uses the masks to hide his true face, which is that of a psychopath (not really; please read on); he is not of mythical status as was Carpenter’s Myers. 

This got me to wondering if Rob Zombie was familiar with Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity, an early 20^th century work on psychopathy.  I’ve begun but not finished the book, but I read far enough to understand Cleckley’s title was intended as metaphor.  Psychopaths are often capable of mimicking normal behavior that has been modeled for them at some point.  The behavior or behaviors they exhibit to imitate or parody normality constitutes the mask.  

Now, I do not think the description of Myers as a psychopath in either Carpenter’s or Zombie’s film is at all apt; in fact, it is just wrong.  He is not a psychopath in the clinical sense of the term as I understand it.  I am a layperson with regard to the mental health profession; I have read sections of the DSM IV (which does not use the term at all) but do not claim to have truly comprehended what I read.  But I think any and every mental health professional would probably agree with me on this.  The word, psychopath, as a descriptive term, has been misused by all of us for so long now  that appears to have lost its meaning.  This is primarily due, I think, to the advent of our cultural fascination with serial killers and slasher movies and books and all the other attendant nonsense.   

Here is what I understand: psychopaths generally do not kill; they are not usually or necessarily prone to violence at all.  They are superficial and shallow.  Their affect or expression, if they are not yet adept at mimicking appropriate responses, is strange or weird.  Their behavior is often more self-destructive than it is harmful when directed at others (other than their attempts at manipulation).  In other words, while they may be shallow, they are not empty vessels for evil; their expressions may be unusual, but they are not void of them wholly.  Simply, neither the Michael Myers of John Carpenter or Rob Zombie is a psychopath; he is something else entirely.

Sorry for the digression, but I think it speaks to an important point.  Whatever negative influences that operate in the life of the young Michael Myers, together with any pre-existing biological underpinnings at play, do not create a psychopath at all, but something much worse and far more monstrous.  The Michael Myers of Rob Zombie’s imagination is a raging Id externalized and set loose on the small township of Haddonfield, Illinois.  This is even more evident when this movie is viewed in tandem with Zombie’s Halloween II.  His rampage is fueled not by a mere lack of empathy for the suffering of others, but by a pathological hatred (of any and everything) that is unbounded.   

Anyway, I wonder if Zombie too sees Michael’s masks as metaphorical, hiding the depraved mind of a homicidal maniac?  He is pretty sharp in his use of imagery elsewhere in his movies, so my money is on the affirmative.  I sincerely want it to be, because otherwise the sight of Tyler Mane (who makes Kane Hodder and Gunnar Hansen look like pussies) wearing that orange mask is just asinine.

Anyway (for those who are still with us after that rambling diatribe), we open in the Myers’ home, at a point in time where Michael, at ten, is already killing small animals.  He and his family are living in squalor.  His mother is both Madonna and Whore, loving and affectionate with her children on the one hand and working as a dancer in a strip club on the other.  I’m not suggesting the two are mutually incompatible, but one gets the feeling she doesn’t work there by choice and her job causes her son to be ridiculed by bullies.  His sister is already sexually active and the object of his step-father’s lascivious attention.  Step-dad is played by William Forsyth, and he is vile.

There’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and then, before we know it, it’s killing time.  Michael does a number on one of the bullies, his sister and her lover, and step-daddy.  He spares Mom and his infant sister (“Boo”/Angel).  Then he is institutionalized in lieu of prison and placed under the care of a psychiatrist whom we briefly saw earlier during a conference between a principal of Michael’s school and Ms. Myers.  And who do you think it is, long hair in a pony-tail and all hippy-dippy?  Dr. Samuel fucking Loomis, that’s who!  The mind reels. 

In a way, this is an interesting alteration from the original itself, in the sense that it now introduces a mental health professional who can provide some perspective on Myers that is entirely distinct from the Sam Loomis of Carpenter’s movie.  I think Malcolm McDowell to have been perfectly capable of the same take on the character as was the great Donald Pleasance, but that is not the character as written by Zombie.  To Carpenter’s Loomis, Michael is something not entirely human against which society must be protected at any cost.  Zombie’s Loomis is still a bit of a character, but Rob Zombie’s B-movie is not the same as John Carpenter’s B-movie.  Zombie is ostensibly interested in what motivates Michael’s actions or makes Michael “tic.”  Therefore, his Loomis, importantly, likes and sympathizes with Michael.  Actually, that’s a big fucking mistake, but hey…

Except Loomis doesn’t end up illuminating us with that much-needed exposition at all, and this is where Zombie’s vision fails to deliver what is promised.  There are a few bullshit sessions that accomplish nothing, something about black being the absence of light (which was, I admit, kinda cool), Michael’s mom visits once or twice, and then Michael, for no fathomable reason, kills a nurse (Sybil Danning, who does not flash her boobs) with his lunch fork; I’m sorry because I hate it when sanctimonious critics pick apart every implausibility or continuity error like the second-guessing asses they are, but, come on, who would give that motherfucker a fork?!? (not a plastic spork, either, by the way but an honest-to-God four-tined metal fork).  There is much sturm und drang and then the scene ends with a freeze frame of Michael’s face, contorted with rage.

Before moving on, I want to talk about why I think Zombie’s Loomis (Zombie’s Loomis…that sounds like some weird infection the living dead are vulnerable to) fails.  To me it’s simple: Malcolm McDowell is let down by the contradictions in the script.  You can’t have a new-agey, compassionate Dr. Loomis who morphs mid-way into Donald Pleasance’s modern-day Van Helsing.  It’s jarring and doesn’t work.  In my fantasy world, where I am king, I kept hoping McDowell would don a black bowler and white jumpsuit and suggest that he and Michael head on down to Haddonfield and do some serious ass-whupping to the strains of “Singing in the Rain.”  That would have been some truly inspired insanity.              It didn’t happen.

Flash forward fifteen years, where Loomis is telling the behemoth that is now Michael Myers (Tyler Mane, R.J. from The Devil’s Rejects, still wearing the damned orange mask) about how he’s sorry but this is going to be his last visit to Michael and how he feels like Michael, who apparently hasn’t said a frickin’ word in fifteen years, is his best friend. Come again?

I think I get where Zombie was going.  Much as in Stoker’s Dracula, where Van Helsing admires the intelligence and courage of the medieval Dracula but recognizes the necessity for destroying the monster he has become, Loomis has compassion for Michael but knows what and how dangerous he is.  This (to my mind) failure to establish an essential character’s plausibility illustrates well a credible complaint so many have had with the movie: that what we have here is two mini-movies that are incompatible as parts of a whole.  

Anyway, pretty soon, Michael kills the shit out of several B-movies cameos and heads home to Haddonfield (sorry about the alliteration)…

The last hour pretty faithfully follows the first film.  The deaths are much more violent (there was no blood in the original, of course).  The first time I saw the movie, I was pissed about this.  I thought it was an uninspired use of gore for gore’s sake, and there is some truth to this, I think.  But in another sense, the second version probably does, whether we like it or not, more realistically depict the violence that would be inflicted by a seven foot thirteen inch monster.  Plus, I think that’s just Zombie’s thing.  Somehow, the violence he stages looks a lot like the real thing. 

Tyler Mane makes a dangerous Michael Myers.  Not at all the same way that Nick Castle was menacing, but scary nonetheless simply because of his size.  I have heard some critical disapproval that the humanizing aspects (?) of the first forty-five minutes made it difficult for them not to continue thinking of Michael as a person with human motivations.  Let me tell you, I did not have that problem.  Once he donned the coveralls and mask, he became a monster, and a very brutal one.  But even that is problematic, because I don’t know that Zombie intends that we forget Michael’s humanity, even here at the end.        

Random Thoughts/Interesting Tidbits

I would like to introduce my corollary to the Jump Scare Doctrine.  There are jump scares, when you get that frisson of fear where your upper body freezes with nervous shivers and you say, “shit!”  And there are Jolt Scares, where you freak out, drop or spill whatever you’re holding, jump half a foot into the air, and scream, “fuck!” very loudly.

There was one very good jump scare and two great jolt scares in this movie that are almost, in retrospect, worth the price of admission.        

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 5/10