Horror-a-rama

So, I've been binging on horror movies lately, because 'tis the season, and also I was able to bully my roommate into letting me use the Roku unit. All of these movies are available on Netflix Instant. Among the things I watched were:

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors: I'm not really sure why I had this on my instant queue, but it's been there for a while. I seem to recall either a commentary or critical article citing it as an influence on a movie I enjoyed a lot, but what that movie was is lost in the mists of time, leaving only this. It's OK, I guess: the episodic nature of the movie kept things rolling at a steady clip, and my roommate and I amused ourselves by guessing the twist endings to every section. But after a while, it just felt overstuffed: they seriously were just shoving in every genre they could into the stories, and the only thing really unifying them was their fatalism. The cast was surprisingly familiar, with Peter Cushing, Donald Sutherland, Christopher Lee, and Michael Gough -- the last one perhaps most familiar as Alfred from Batman '89. But the protagonists' behavior in the stories didn't make much sense at times, and the threats weren't very imaginative. Plus, and this bugged the hell out of me: Dr. Terror had a more-than-full tarot deck -- the stack he had was so thick I wondered if they were printed on graham crackers -- but the only cards he pulled were from the Major Arcana. That sort of thing almost bugs me as much as when they pull cards that don't exist. Yes, I'm a geek.

Circus of Horrors: How was this, in any way, a horror film? It was more a crime film than anything. The set-up doesn't suck: a rogue plastic surgeon goes underground after changing his own face, inherits a circus via an unfortunate "accident", and then starts stocking the ranks of the circus with scarred criminals that he uses his abilities to pretty up. If there's one thing Eyes Without A Face (released the same year) has taught us, it's that plastic surgeons are seriously creepy. Circuses have been a bottomless well of creepiness for a long time now. So why does this movie play like a domestic drama? The doctor keeps falling in love with the ingénues in his circus, but when they reject him, or try to leave the circus, he has them killed by one of his henchmen. Only the deaths are always made to look like accidents, and always happen while the girls are doing their routine in the ring. The doctor's distance from the murders, his relative lack of passion, and the fact that all the deaths look like accidents, does little to increase the level of suspense. There's a lot of behind the scenes stuff, with unrequited loves and blackmail and investigations, that it starts to seem a lot more like a soap opera than anything else. And, even though he recruits a circus of criminals, they never even do any crime! (Except for killing the 14 girls he's fallen for.) Apparently he just wants criminals so that he'll have information to hold over them if they ever want to rat him out to the police.

Vampire Circus: At least with this movie, I know the reason it was in my queue: Dr. K featured it in his Halloween Countdown last year, and I was intrigued enough to want to watch it. (Dr. K always did a great job with the horror movie write-ups; here's hoping he returns to it again!) This movie did a much better job of making the circus itself clearly awful: putting aside the fact that at least three of its members are vampires, it also has a mute strongman (played by the future body of Darth Vader!), and the creepiest little-person clown imaginable.

Seriously, this fella needs a job as a henchman for the Joker, he's that creepy. And then there's the human woman, introduced at the very beginning of the film, who actually seems to get sexually excited watching her vampire lover drink from and kill a little girl she's brought him from the village. That scene is effectively creepy. As is the fact that the village the movie takes place in is slowly being killed by a strain of rabies carried by the bats in the area: it's clear that the village is dying before the circus comes to town, a victim of an infection within its boundaries, possibly because of a curse left upon it by the vampire they killed at the beginning of the movie. Because of this, the village itself has been quarantined by the government, and anybody who tries to leave it is shot on sight, with nobody allowed to enter the village, either. Nobody, that is, but THE VAMPIRE CIRCUS! It's not a perfect movie, but it is a pretty effective one. Certainly creepier than the other two.

Let The Right One In: I can't explain why I hadn't seen this movie before now: I've certainly seen plenty written about it online, by critics and friends whose opinions I respect speaking about it in glowing terms. Part of it might have just me being contrary. But a couple nights ago, my roommate demanded (SIGH) that he choose a Halloween-type movie for us to watch, and of the options he gave me, this is the one I opted for. It isn't particularly scary, and it isn't particularly gruesome, but it is very well acted, and it is shot absolutely beautifully. Watching its outdoor scenes actually made me feel colder. The ending is more complicated and sad than it seems, although that same description could go for the movie as a whole. It's Bergman-esque horror. I liked it.

Creepshow: Another film selected by my roommate. I had actually seen about 4/5s of this movie before, and had been impressed at the time by the sudden flares of non-natural lighting whenever danger loomed. The set-ups tended to be a tad corny (which I realize was part of the point), and the sudden intrusion of panels and graphics from comics a little distracting -- I thought the lighting shifts, suddenly mimicking four-color printing, accomplished the same thing, less obtrusively. The one segment I hadn't seen, the last one, was genuinely creepy, and it reminded me of Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls." That's a good thing. And the shot of the bugs rupturing from the skin gave me my only genuine moment of queasiness throughout the whole movie, in spite of the latex being a bit obvious.

Well...

So... my laptop died. I'm typing this on an Asus Transformer that i borrowed from work, to see how it works. Pretty good, but not good enough to attempt more than a few sentences. I watched Dr. Terror's House of Horrors: I'll provide my opinion another day. Wish me luck.

I love David Hockney.

The Science of Sleep

So I go to the VLA conference tomorrow for a couple days, which, you know, it's not quite a vacation, but it is a chance to get away for a bit, maybe see Portsmouth a bit, hopefully see some sessions that aren't just stealth vendors. Except my original roommate isn't going to make it, so instead I have to room with... the Library Director.

I don't tend to sleep very well when I'm away from home anyways, particularly when I'm in a room with someone unfamiliar. I stayed at a friend's apartment in Georgia for a week earlier this month, and that entire vacation was spent with a significant sleep deficit. To be honest, I don't even have an easy time falling asleep when I'm at home: it generally takes anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour for me to actually relax to a point where I can sleep. I'm aware that this isn't normal, and I envy people who can just sort of shut down immediately in such a profound way that I'm sure you could never understand it. And yes, this problem is related to the state of mild anxiety that I tend to live my life in, thanks for letting me know. But my point is that, even with a sleeping pill, I foresee myself waking up several times over the course of tomorrow night, worrying that I might be snoring too loud.

These are the concessions I make, the inconveniences I happily accept, simply because they are part of the glory of being myself.

Who Is In Your Dream, Baby?

I love the Tiga album, Ciao!: it's exactly what I need from a dance album, with good beats couple with a sense of playful experimentation. "What You Need" is a good example of this: a lot of the song is just sort of bursts of atonal skronk and oscillating pulses fighting against each other to dominate the track. It's just noise in the beginning, swelling and cracking before the beat arrives to try to give it some order. The actual structure of the song, and it's hooks, are left to the drum machine, voices, and occasional chimes. Tiga is a limited singer at best, and even with a soulful backup singer to sweeten things a bit, he should not be up to the task. The song starts and stops, slows down and speeds up. The song is sort of anarchic, which is something that you don't often associate with dance music: the vigorous necessity of the beat generally prevents this sort of messiness. In short, the song shouldn't work. But it really kind of does.

Scarlet Billows

So today, instead of sticking to my Vincent Price diet, I decided to instead watch Dario Argento's Deep Red. Frankly, I was quite impressed. I had only seen two other Argento films before: Suspira, which I enjoyed but found the score by Goblin to be alternately overwhelming and distracting, and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which I remember thinking was very stylish, but nothing I hadn't seen before. This, however, was a tense thriller that I could get into: the plot was compelling, and the colors were lurid. The Goblin score was still occasionally distracting, but it was a little jazzier and more enjoyable. There were bows to Hitchcock throughout the course of the film (The 39 Steps, Dial M For Murder, Psycho), but Argento has his own story to tell, and it never gets to the point of being like Brian De Palma's extended homages to Hitchcock's individual films.

One thing that struck me about it was how fair the director was in the disclosure of the killer's identity. The clues are there throughout the film about who it was, but you only really understand their significance around the same time David Hemmings' character does. An early exchange between him and a female journalist seems to be a sort of extended adversarial flirtation, only to have more meaning once the killer's identity is disclosed. I sort of guessed who the killer was early on, based solely on eye-shape, but questioned that supposition many times over the course of the film.

One thing that bugged me was David Hemmings's character: his obsession with the identity of the murderer is made to seem almost as reckless and destructive as the murders themselves. When he is accused late in the movie for forcing the murders to happen because of his own curiosity, there's really something to that. He's on the scene for something like three murders, and yet never seems inclined to contact the police about them. Indeed, he doesn't seem to be put off by the murders themselves at all, except as an elaborate puzzle for him to solve. He's actually kind of a jerk.

One other thing that I appreciated: there are two gay characters in the movie, and (unlike with Hitchcock) they're actually treated very respectfully, and as genuinely loving. I feared for a long time that one of them would turn out to be the serial killer -- the gays ALWAYS seem to end up being the serial killer -- but *SPOILER ALERT* this does not end up being the case. One of them does get his head run over by a car, but these things happen.

In short, I enjoyed it.

Ham Sandwich

Tonight, in honor of the Halloween season, I watched Theatre of Blood with Vincent Price. It is not in any way great cinema: it's yet another movie where Price takes ghoulish revenge on all the fools that ever doubted him. Standard stuff for him, really, but the magic of Vincent Price is that, no matter how goofy or unbelievable a movie is on its face, I never doubt for a second his commitment to the role, or the fact that he's having a ball playing it.

The movie is not as surreal or as visually inventive as, say, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, and it strains credibility that the critics he is dispatching are quite as oblivious as they turn out to be. I mean, honestly, once a few of your peers have been murdered, wouldn't you be just the teensiest bit suspicious to come home and find that strange people had broke into your home and made you a meal of mystery meat? Also, the identity of his handlebar-mustachioed hippie protege is not quite the mystery that the film seems to think it is. But it is fun seeing him playing a gay hairdresser with an afro (!), and for once he plays opposite a female lead (Diana Rigg) that can match him in the acting department. In short: I love Vincent Price. Tomorrow perhaps I'll finally watch Witchfinder General!

Shlomo Reborn!

Like a phoenix from the ashes...

So it's been a couple years since I updated my old blog, and you know what? I kind of miss it. I miss writing, I miss knowing that I have something to say, and I miss the illusion that someone out there is actually paying attention to whatever it is I'm going on about. I mean sure, I have a Tumblr now -- all the cool kids have them, after all -- but I find that that's much more conducive to reblogging pictures of pictures of Brian Eno or Divine or Barbara Stanwyck than it is, say, making a coherent argument that Lady Gaga is neither as good nor as bad as everyone seems to think. Just as an example. And instead of going back to my old blog -- there's so much history there! so much angst! -- I figured I would set this one up as a repository for my random musings and unorthodox approach to punctuation. Expect semicolons, so many semicolons.