You’ll excuse me if I SHOUT, as my treacherous brain seems to have soaked up the song featured in the above trailer for Darren Lynn Bousman’s Repo! The Genetic Opera, and is now trying to deafen me with it.
My own fault, really. The moment I spied Sarah Brightman in the credits, I should’ve kept well clear. It was her vocalizations with Michael Crawford in the original cast recording of The Phantom of the Opera that sidelined me for a good three years back in my early 20s. Come to think of it, Tony Head’s singing in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode “Once More With Feeling” had a similar effect, and who do we find co-starring in this extravaganza? Once shame on them…
While we horror fans do get the odd glimmer of something new and different bubbling up from the ooze of the everyday (Inside being one of the best and most recent examples of this), I can’t remember the last time I saw a trailer for something that actually made me feel like I was catching a glimpse of something completely unique.
There have been a lot of shiver-inducing backstage rumblings about film distributors having no idea how to market this rock opera about a designer body part company sending its “repo man” (Head) out to snatch back these parts from those who miss their payments. On behalf of every soul out here desperately wanting to see this work, let me say to the suits: “Please don’t fumble this one! We have put up with far too much crap for far too long to miss out on a truly original work.”
Sigh. Now where’s that Phantom album…
[Note: Repo is having its North American debut at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal July 18th.]
A big shout out to Ted and Tony at the Horror Etc. podcast. Their most recent episode about Man vs. Nature movies (from Day of the Animals to The Ruins) led me to hunt down the trailer for this year’s remake of Long Weekend (see clip above). In this case, it’s Man vs. Manatee.
There is no shortage of controversy in our beloved genre. The absurd numbers of remakes that spill out of Hollywood, the validity (or lack thereof) of torture in horror films, the copious amounts of utter dreck that the average fan must sift through before finding that rarest of the rare: a great horror flick.
One of the oddest controversies revolves around the man fans love to hate: Uwe Boll.
True, the director’s cinematic output is less-than-stellar: BloodRayne, Alone in the Dark (yes, yes, the one where Tara Reid played a scientist, sigh…), House of the Dead, you all know the roll call of shame. What puzzles me is the utter vehemence with which fans have attacked the man.
We’re all friends here, and surely we can all admit that a good 95% of the movies this genre churns out is utter bilge, to put it mildly.
Let’s try a little thought experiment, shall we? Picture in your mind an empty 6×8-foot DVD rack in your local video shop. See it? Good. Now start filling that rack with each horror film that you’ve actually enjoyed, one DVD box at a time — sure, even those guilty pleasures you would never admit to watching. Chances are pretty good that you would never fill that rack. That means all of the dozens of horror films that DIDN’T make the imaginary rack are crap, and much of it probably crap no better than Boll’s works.
So why then do we not curse the name of these other directors, too? Yes, Boll’s a repeat offender, but his horror output is surprisingly small - I count seven movies - considering the amount of animosity that’s shoveled into his schnitzel.
The Scotsman published an interesting piece on this phenomenon recently, pointing out the difference between how people view Boll and the affection showered on the previous holder of the “world’s worst director” crown: Ed Wood. Though no explanation is given in the piece, one is clearly implied. Whereas Wood was something of a sweet stooge, Boll often comes across as an angry, bellicose sort. If nothing else, he may go down in history as the first director to meet his critics in the boxing ring. (Something he tried to repeat earlier this year [see clip above] with director Michael Bay.)
While this kind of behavior is far removed from the gentle, starry-eyed dreamer depicted in the 1994 biopic Ed Wood, there may be another reason why Boll is so universally reviled. Between his lashing out at the critics and his grumbling about being unappreciated, he occasionally turns the mirror back on the movie-going public. Take this open letter he posted on the Web site of his latest film, Postal:
To all of you writing now about me and the fact that POSTAL is not getting screens.
its okay ..its fun kicking a guy nonstop who is on the ground
you are all not getting it that i’m the guy who made it against the big hollywood system and you are all only busy to destroy me and finish me up
and then you YOU WON WHAT ? the attention of the studios, michael bay .. ?????
if you damage me you feel closer to Hollywood ? what is your game plan?
you want only movies like JUMPER , SPEED RACER , WHAT HAPPENDS IN VEGAS …? then keep going and your dreams will be fullfilled. POSTAL makes some very important points ..but you dont wanna see that …. : that Bush used the SEPTEMBER 11 to start a war against a country what had nothing to do with Bin Laden etc…. but this all doesnt matter because you are all busy to THINK that INDIANA JONES or NARNIA are important movies … but in real they are empty shells of an industry what wants to make money and what wants to keep you looking “escape movies” with nothing in it. in between they are putting some CONTROVERSIAL movies to show that they can do also IMPORTANT movies …but also this movies are not really critical….they only supporting the system and not showing the big picture. and POSTAL shows the BIG PICTURE …it nails the absurd situation with all the stupid religions, races and nations we are living in. POSTAL is not accepting bullshit politics. POSTAL has not the opinion that Bush made mistakes - POSTAL has the opinion that it is a scandal that BUSH is not in jail. What happened in America in the last 7 years is the biggest joke since Columbus stepped on that land.
but instead of seeing the courage i had in doing that movie against everybody who tried to stop me - you are sitting on your desks and you are working on stories about me ….and my image as the worst director on earth…and you fullfill what your editor wants from you in regards of uwe boll …or you fullfill what you think makes you a cooler guy in the internet …and you are not getting it that you are only interested in movies like IRON MAN or HULK or KUNG FU PANDA or the MUMMY 3 because the studios spending 60 mio. $ in advertising to make you interested in NON INTERESTING movies. how many times you wanna keep going in movies only because the TRAILER was so cool and the CGI was so great ?
thanks for reading this
Uwe Boll
Many crimes are unforgivable, but none so much as letting fly with a bit of truth.
The folks at Rue Morgue magazine are trying to prevent the long-awaited adaptation of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood short story “Midnight Meat Train” from being given a perfunctory theatrical release before being rushed to DVD.
It’s a Red Letter Day, kids. After months of reading articles, interviews, and seeing clips galore, your’s truly finally sat down with the French thriller Inside (A l’interieur) last night, and it did not disappoint.
I’m keeping this entry short for fear of spoiling a film that’s too new to the English-speaking world to have its twists and turns prematurely revealed. Suffice it to say that those numerous YouTube clips adequately get across the brutality of the film, but fail to communicate the depth of the overall production. Had the acting been anything below top-notch or the attention to script and aesthetics been at all lacking, this could’ve very easily spiraled into a standard slasher film. Thankfully, that is not the case. The talents of the directing/writing team of Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, combined with exemplary performances from leads Beatrice Dalle and Alysson Paradis, make this one of those films that horror fans will either see now, or will pretend they have already seen later as they wait for a copy to arrive from Netflix.
It is WAY too early to get too excited about this (Restraints! Where are the restraints?!), but a cinematic adaptation of Ryu Murakami’s Tokyo serial killer novel In the Miso Soup has been cleared for take off, with Paris, Texas director Wim Wenders and Willem Dafoe attached.
Japan Extreme die-hards will recall that Takashi Miike’s breakout flick, Audition, also was based on the work of Murakami (which remains annoyingly untranslated into English to this day, damn it). Shooting on the $8 million film begins in February, according to Screen International.
Another Murakami adaptation, Coin Locker Babies starring Val Kilmer (I know, I know), Tadanobu Asano (Kakihara from Miike’s Ichi the Killer) and Asia Argento, is also supposed to be in production, with distribution being handled by Miramax. This story of two men who were abandoned as children in coin lockers at a Tokyo train station will be Asano’s first English-speaking role, according to this snippet from The Guardian newspaper.
While putting together The New Horror Handbook chapter about Eli Roth (who showed Cabin Fever at the Toronto Film Festival that year), I was completely blown away by the overwhelming dearth of decent horror films that came out in the States that year. I love Gore Verbinski’s remake The Ring, but geez, the rest of the titles it shared that year with could make you weep:
Darkness
Eight Legged Freaks
FearDotCom
Ghost Ship!!!!
Halloween: Resurection
The Mothman Prophecies
Queen of the Damned
Resident Evil
Rose Red (technically a TV mini-series)
After such a disappointing year, you can almost see filmmakers revolting against how limp the genre had become. We move to 2003 and we start getting the likes of:
Haute Tension
House of 1000 Corpses
Ju-on: The Grudge
Oldboy
Open Water
Texas Chainsaw remake
Wrong Turn (OK, typical WB fare, but this is the only movie on this list that actually freaked me out. Go figure.)
For many of us who champion horror films past and present as much for their aesthetic qualities as their (often iffy) storytelling, Italian filmmaker Dario Argento may not be God, but he’s pretty darn close.
Certainly his last decent contribution to the genre may have been a decade ago at least, but if one is going to rest on one’s laurels, you could do a lot worse than giving the world Suspiria and Inferno, and then simply calling it a day.
Yes, they are absolute pants when it comes to plot, but as testaments to what can be done with the medium, they have few rivals. The Mona Lisa doesn’t exactly communicate a tale of wonder, either, but people have been content to stare at it for centuries. Personally I’d rather watch Suspiria.
All of which is a long way at getting to the point of this posting: Mother of Tears (here we pause for a great shuffling of feet, clearing of throats, and someone muttering “Here we go”). I haven’t yet had the opportunity to check out Argento’s closing chapter in his “Three Mothers” trilogy, but I’ve heard enough trouncing of the film to understand what lies ahead of me.
Yes, absolutely, he should’ve known better than to produce this film. How could an Argento, even in his prime (he isn’t), create a work of cinema that could fulfill the expectations set by the first two entries? How could anybody?
I urge horror fans to dial up the latest episode — #68 — of the Mondo Movie podcast for a lengthy — and at times hilarious — review of this film. Hosts Ben and Dan have been dissecting genre flicks for more than two years now, and they offer that rare thrill: movie reviews by fans — yet not love-it-all fanboys — of this deeply misunderstood medium.
Let me begin by saying I know what I’m about to say is a fantasy, the starry-eyed musings of one let down by the movie studios so frequently and so completely, one really should know better. But if nothing else, we horror fans are optimists capable of sitting through the worst dreck that cinema has to offer in hopes of finding that one tarnished jewel in the sputum tank.
While The New Horror Handbook, due out this October, concerns itself primarily with the films and other horror entertainment of the last 10 years, there is a part of me that wishes its publication could be delayed until the end of next year. That would be long enough to see if a single film hitting theaters in 2009 will have the brains and guts to live up to the existential horror of its source material.
Of course that film is Watchmen, the mega-million-dollar opus helmed by Zack Snyder (the superb Dawn of the Dead remake) and based on the groundbreaking 1986 comic book limited series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. While some horror purists may be turned off by the suggestion, I just finished rereading the trade paperback of that series and, quite frankly, believe there is more horror to be mined from its pages than any recent film you’d care to name.
I’m not talking about the usual “here’s-something-that’ll-freak-your-little-sister” blood and guts show we’ve all grown accustomed to, nor the jump-cut crap that slipped in with The Ring. What Watchmen offers, and what a faithful cinematic retelling could provide (I know, I know, I’m dreaming), is something so rare in this genre, it’s difficult to pin down. If we must call it something, “existential horror” fits nicely. A story so rooted in life as we know it, so subtle, that we don’t realize what foul seeds of despair are being planted within us until the final scene.
Jumpcuts and severed limbs are fine, but their effect persists only slightly longer than their impression on the eyes. If you want to be truly horrified, to experience something that gets you down in the belly-brain where you live, check out something like Sion Sono’s Suicide Club or Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (and please put that American remake of the latter back where you found it). These aren’t perfect films by any means, but the worlds they inhabit are eerily like our own, as are their truths.
Watching the making of Watchmen (no puns, damn it) from the sidelines is a lot like watching your favorite performance-challenged sports team finally getting the ball. You know they’re probably going to muck it up, but that doesn’t stop you imagining how sweet it would be if, just this once, someone finally got it right.
This afternoon, after months of interviews (and more still to come), I sat down to begin work on The New Horror Handbook; the chapter on Eli Roth to be exact. Wish me luck, New Horribles.
For decades, the horror film has been at once vilified for its often-violent content and exploited by large film studios as a near-certain moneymaker. In recent years, however, a small number of international auteurs have emerged to infuse the genre with a new kind of meaning and intelligence, even as they reinvigorate flagging box office returns.
But these individuals are only the most visible figures in a much larger “New Horror” movement. All over the world, writers, filmmakers and other artists are using the unique “everyone’s welcome” attitude of the genre to create new and startling works of the imagination, all on their own terms. In the process, they also are exploring what it is to be human in the 21st century.
The New Horror Handbook goes behind the scenes to speak with modern horror luminaries including:
Eli Roth (director, Hostel, Cabin Fever)
Greg McLean (director, Wolf Creek, Rogue)
Alex Bustillo, Julien Maury (writer, director, Inside)
John Fawcett (director, Ginger Snaps, The Dark)
Karen Walton (writer, Ginger Snaps)
Emily Perkins (co-star, Ginger Snaps)
Vincenzo Natali(director, Cube, Splice)
Steve Niles (creator, 30 Days of Night)
and many others.
Along the way, The New Horror Handbook explores the twists and turns that have led these individuals down the darker avenues of entertainment, and what keeps their fans coming back for more.
A former writer and editor for USA Today, A.S. Berman writes for a number of national magazines and is the author of 30 Years of British Television.
Let me begin by saying I know what I’m about to say is a fantasy, the starry-eyed musings of one let down by the movie studios so frequently and so completely, one really should know better. But if nothing else, we horror fans are optimists capable of sitting through the worst dreck that cinema has to offer in hopes of finding that one tarnished jewel in the sputum tank.
