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

 

                   

          

        

May

Rating: R

Run Time: 93 minutes

Director: Lucky McKee

Starring: Angela Bettis, Jeremy Sisto, Anna Faris

The first sentence of this review was going to be, “I don’t know what to make of May.”  Then I looked at the tag for the IMDb of the movie on Google and saw that some reviewer had already had this to say: “Nobody knows what to make of May.”  Dammit.  I couldn’t find the review among the hundreds on the site and I’m not certain if he or she meant May the movie, or May the character in the movie named May.  

I’m still no closer to wrapping my head around this film.  It is a sad and lonely movie, because the titular character is sad and lonely.  It’s odd, too, not because anything about the movie is strikingly unconventional; it’s pretty straightforward.  This is not a criticism of the director, Lucky McKee.  I liked the movie, and while it’s not necessarily one that calls for a great deal of conversation over its meaning, some is in order. 

The opening of the movie provides us a glimpse of May Canady’s childhood.  She is a small, delicate little girl with a lazy right eye.  Her mother covers it with an eye patch.  Then she covers the eye patch with May’s long hair.  May doesn't care for this, so she folds the hair back.  Then a group of kids send an emissary to ask her if she’s a pirate.  When she says no, they walk away from her.  She puts the lock of hair back over her patch.

Her mother decides that she can relieve May’s inability to make friends by giving her a pretty porcelain doll encased in a wood and glass box, sort of like Annabelle from the The Conjuring.  The doll will be her best friend now, but she mustn't touch it.  That’s a no-no, although we're not told why.  Intimacy issues (or the lack thereof) seem to define May's relationship with her mom.

We now skip ahead and next see May as a twenty-something girl, odd-looking but not unattractive, working at a veterinarian clinic and assisting in surgeries.  She does not interact particularly well with others, including the vet’s receptionist, a goofy and lascivious lesbian played by Anna Faris.  One day, May sees a man whose attractiveness enthralls her.  More accurately, she first sees his hands, which seem to match some standard of perfection she holds in her mind’s eye.  He is a good-looking fellow named Adam (Jeremy Sisto) and he works as a car mechanic but has apparent aspirations as a filmmaker.

Because his sensibilities are such that he is himself a bit odd and appears drawn toward the same, Adam is attracted to May.  She is instantly infatuated with him.  She tries to prettify herself; she gets contact lenses that conceal the lazy eye.  Then she sort of starts to stalk Adam.  The terrible problem May is forced to consider, however, which seems to condemn her to a life of solitude, is that, because of the long duration of her self-imposed isolation at this point, she does not know how to act around people or interact with them…at all.  She reminded me of a female Travis Bickle, particularly in the scene where Travis takes Cybil Shepherd to the porn movie.  May relates to bizarrely inappropriate stories and she cannot kiss, she bites: during what begins as a tender lovemaking scene she tries to emulate a scene from Adam’s short movie (which is a bit of a problem because the subject of the movie is cannibal love), May takes a bite out of Adam’s lower lip.  This not only causes a tad bit of pain and surprise, but he bleeds.  She smears the blood over her face.

Adam, not surprisingly, freaks the fuck out and leaves, effectively ending the relationship, which does not end May’s stalking, however.  The rejection mortifies her.  After the relationship end, May tries to lose herself in two more specific attempts to connect with the world around her.  Both end badly.  The glass case of her “best friend” begins to split and crack as she begins a dismal descent into herself that ends in what I can only describe as tragedy and comedy (which I guess makes this a tragicomedy) at movie’s end.

If you have stayed with the film this far and expect anything other than a homicidal frenzy to end it, you have not been paying attention.  And it is this ending that earns the film, at least in part, its credibility as being both horror and black comedy.  But it saddened me, too.  May, as is made abundantly clear, is metaphorically invisible to the world around her, but she does not want to be.  Her hesitating steps toward intimacy with others is pathetic.  She does what she thinks will please Adam and finds that his predilection for the weird does not extend quite that far.  Yet, who can blame him?  Long before she finally freaks out big-time (and I really don’t think that’s a spoiler), you get the sense that a real relationship with her might be dangerous, especially if, as with Adam, you do not meet her idealized standards.    

The movie has some deficiencies.  There is not enough information given us in the prelude regarding May’s upbringing to persuade us convincingly of why she is as strange as she is or why she is, effectively, an outcast from society.  The transition from these brief scenes to the present day is just too abrupt.  There are certainly all sorts of occurrences that can drive us to the despair of isolationism, but surely one damned lazy eye isn’t going to do it.  Now, I suppose if your mother is so obsessed with artificiality and facades as to make you wear an eye-patch because of your lazy eye, then, maybe…?   Still, I’ve had plenty of friends in my life who had a lazy eye and I didn't shun their company.  Would I have done so as a child?  Maybe, but the film does not show us anything to attest to the cruelty of childhood and children.  One kid asking you if you’re a pirate is not going to do it.  Besides, being a child pirate would be kinda cool.

Mrs. Canady is neurotic and embarrassed by May’s eye, of course, and her introduction of the doll and its unattainable perfection is clearly symbolized by the glass case; the glass case is a barrier that prevents May from touching this presumable symbol of sedentary perfection.  It is not clear to me that this is the point where May learns to live within herself and accepts that she, being “flawed” in the sense of being imperfect, is doomed to an existence on the fringe of the real world.  One could alternately argue that it suggests that she, being her mother’s surrogate, rejects everyone else around her because they are not as perfect as the doll behind the case.  Which would make her someone not necessarily to be pitied but something of an elitist instead.     

May’s hold on sanity is as fragile as her precious doll’s glass case.  The simple but effective symbolism of the doll and her increasingly fractured glass environment mirrors May’s descent into madness in the latter part of the movie.  Every new hairline crack in the facade of the glass case represents a further fracturing of May’s fragile psyche.  That said, I am not convinced we are to believe she is insane throughout.  Her inevitable break with reality is triggered by rejection.  Remember, the whole movie is odd, I think, because all of its characters, not just May, are odd themselves.     Adam and Polly, while the film does not at all condemn them, are, to some degree, poseurs.  He likes weird, but only to a point.  She likes weird, too, but is fickle in her passions.  Neither deserve their fates, but you can see them coming just the same.

May, too, is admittedly pretty damned weird from the get-go and clearly batshit crazy at the end, but we, or at least I, still pity her.  I saw this movie around the same time I saw Jennifer’s Body a second time.  I will say this, I believe we are meant to view both as victims: one because of society’s alienating rejection of those who are different, and the other due to the same society’s unrealistic emphasis on physical perfection.  And, really, May is caught in the maw of this one, too.

The Horror Inkwell Rate: 7/10