Not Quite

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There’s a debate among horror nerds that goes like this: “Blumhouse or A24?”  If this is Greek to you, Blumhouse and A24 are entertainment production companies that both make notable horror films.  I’ve always leaned a bit toward A24, to the point of making a list of their horror films and watching them when I can find them on streaming services.  Since I generally don’t read about movies before watching them, I wasn’t sure what Climax was going to be.  Distributed by A24, I figured it would be intelligent horror and it may have been.  Honestly, it was a little difficult to tell.  Nihilistic and non-scripted, it’s a movie with a very slight premise: a French dance troupe holds an after-practice party in which somebody spikes the sangria with LSD.  The entire first half of the movie, practically, is dancers doing their stuff to an incessant techno-beat.  I honestly don’t know why I kept with it.

Since it’s unscripted, most of the young people talk about sex, and occasionally other topics.  They begin to get paranoid when the acid kicks in, and throw one of the dancers out in dangerous winter conditions where he freezes to death.  They think he spiked the drink.  The troupe manager, also a suspect, has a young son that she locks into an electrical closet for protection, with predictable results.  Since she also drank the sangria, the troupe supposes she must be innocent.  A third non-drinker, who is pregnant, also gets accused.  Meanwhile some dancers keep on dancing while others start to pair off, all of them but the pregnant one, tripping hard.  In the end the police arrive and find dead or stoned dancers and really that’s about it.

How is this horror?  Psychologically, mostly.  There is a little body horror, but mostly it’s just viewers wondering what is going to happen.  Which, it turns out, is not much.  There are some religious references in the movie, which maybe offer a little depth, but really this is largely a filmed rave-like dance with a minimal storyline tossed in for good measure.  Also, it’s in French, meaning subtitles are important for following whatever plot there is.  Wikipedia leads me to believe Gaspar Noé, the “writer”-director is fond of making polarizing and controversial movies.  There’s nothing surprising about young people being interested in music and sex, nor, for that matter alcohol and drugs.  All of this is entirely conventional.  It isn’t enough for me to lose faith in A24, but it does make me wonder what they were thinking.

Littlefoot

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A film is an object.  Just like a book, a film exists and waits for someone to discover and promote it.  The vast majority of both don’t make the cut and exist in obscurity.  The Legend of Bigfoot by Ivan Marx is one of those obscure films.  I only knew of it because it was included in the DVD pack called “Beast Collection,” which I’ve already mentioned a time or two.  This set of movies is united by a few different themes which have little to do with one another.  The “Bigfoot Terror” disc includes Marx’s Legend although there’s no terror here and it presents itself as a documentary.    Interestingly, this movie actually had a theatrical release.  Of course, the mid-seventies were a high-water mark for Bigfoot interest in general, prior to the current phase.  Marx followed up his movie with a couple sequels and to his dying day claimed that his Bigfoot footage was authentic.

As far as the movie goes, it is just plain bad.  The wildlife footage, shot by Marx, is actually impressive a time or two.  Most critics dismiss his Bigfoot footage as a hoax, a view supported by the fact that the bona fide Bigfoot researchers he worked with eventually distanced themselves from him.  The movie is rambling and dull but intriguing at the same time.  It’s amazing, for example, that he was able to get this into theaters at all.  But what drove the producers of “Beast Collection” to include it, beyond it perhaps having been cheap and bit of filler on a disc claiming “approx. 5 hours of yeti scares”?  Well, it’s an object.  And it fits the theme of “yeti” but not really that of “Terror.”

There’s not a ton of information on Ivan Marx online.  IMDb has a mini-bio of him, noting the others who worked with him.  Even his wife, Peggy, who appears in the film, gets a little IMDb notice.  Such movies as this are hopeful artifacts.  Those of us who struggle against obscurity can take heart that, although probably a hoax, a movie that would otherwise likely have been forgotten made its way into a schlocky collection of horror movies to be purchased by the gullible and the hardcore.  As I mentioned in my post on Search for the Beast, I bought the collection to see Zontar: Thing from Venus, which, at the time, was available nowhere else.  I got what I wanted, and oh so much less.

Non-Demon

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The psychological horror film The Neon Demon isn’t about a literal demon.  It’s a movie about rivalry between runway models in Los Angeles, but there isn’t a great deal of story.  And what story is told doesn’t really make sense.  Sixteen-year-old Jesse, who should probably technically be an orphan, has made her way to LA because all she has is her prettiness.  Some photos get to an agency that agrees to hire her.  The other young women become jealous of the attention Jesse receives.  Only one, Ruby, a make-up artist, befriends her.  The jealous models confront her, and the creepy hotel manager where she stays seems to prey on the women who are trying to break into the dream of the city of angels.  Jesse escapes to Ruby but Ruby’s interested in a sexual relationship that Jesse doesn’t want.  Ruby and two rival models kill Jesse and eat her.  This leads to the death of Ruby and one of the models.

Some of what I describe here is speculative since there are abstract, dream sequences thrown in and it’s not always clear what is going on.  I kept finding myself wondering if this was horror, as presented in the list where I found it.  The unrelenting male gaze could be considered horror for women, but the movie doesn’t take up that narrative.  There are a few male characters, and one of them actually seems to be a good guy, but the threat comes from the other women.  Reviews for the movie were deeply polarized.  Some declared it one of the best movies of the year (2016) while others gave it abysmal ratings.  At the box office it earned about half its budget back, and that budget was a respectful seven figures.

Horror is a difficult genre to define.  I keep coming back to the fact that it’s artificial.  The history of the term began with monster movies but eventually other films with dark themes were included.  Some have no monsters unless a human acting aberrantly counts (and some do count such as monsters).  Slashers have their serial killers and gothic tales have their haunted houses.  Well over seventy sub-genres of horror have been defined.  Casting about for freebies on the weekend leads to some that you just can’t pin down.  Neon Demon does, ultimately seem to fit the label, but many viewers will probably wonder exactly how.  Being out on your own can be frightening, and cannibalism is creepy, so I’ll go with that.

Institutionalized

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When movies set out to present a different period, a bit of historical research can go a long way.  Someone like Robert Eggers offers such verisimilitude that you feel like you were at the intended time.  Others are less successful.  The Institute claims to be based on true events, and, apparently human trafficking did take place at the Rosewood Institute for a number of years.  The movie, however, gets many period details wrong and suffers from a labyrinthian story.  Also, it is shot so dark that even with brightness at full it’s difficult to tell what’s happening much of the time.  So what are these allegedly true events?  Wealthy women are admitted to the fashionable institute to recover from mental stresses.  At least that’s why Isabella Porter is there.  Drugged by the fictional Aconite Society, she is trained to be impervious to pain, erase her identity, and believe she is fictional characters to act in plays.  A strange premise.

Her brother suspects something is wrong, but under the influence of wolf’s bane, Isabella kills him.  The women are repeatedly tortured and dehumanized, ultimately to be sold to the wealthiest elites of Baltimore as slaves.  The true part of the true events is quite slim, and it’s never explained why Isabella is trained to believe that she’s Young Goodman Brown, and paired off with another woman as his wife Faith.  Also, there are Satanists involved.  With all the stops pulled out, the whole begins to sound rather silly.  It’s unfortunate since there does seem to be the core of a good idea here.  It needs a little less rather than more.

If all the storylines came together into a coherent whole, there might’ve been some takeaway.  As it is, layers of a secret society cover other layers and when you get to the center there’s nothing there.  Movies about mental institutions are difficult to pull off well, particularly when they’re based on true stories.  While a wolf-bane drinking society of the uber-wealthy does sound plausible, it leaves unanswered why they want their female patients to act out stories when they could easily afford to attend plays with professional actors.  ’Tis difficult to fathom.  The satanic aspect is never really explained but again, I wouldn’t put it past the rich.  The acting is good, from what I could see of it, except for the institute’s doctors, all of whom were woodenly portrayed.  Perhaps this was intended to be a parable, or maybe a retelling of “Young Goodman Brown.”  There was a bit of Poe thrown in as well, so all was not completely wasted.

Stop for a Bite

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Universal does monsters right.  I’m no movie maven but I don’t know why the whole Dark Universe thing didn’t work out.  These movies are good!  Abigail recently came to one of the streaming services I use and I watched it right away.  (There’s sometimes a delay between when I write about a movie and when it appears on this blog.)  There will necessarily be spoilers here.  I write this as someone who doesn’t watch trailers if I can help it, and who tries not to read about movies before watching them.  So be forewarned, if you are, by any chance, like me.  In case you’re bowing out now, this is a very good flick.

So, this is one of those spates of recent vampire movies where you go for quite a while before realizing it is a vampire film.  Set as a taut thriller, a group of six criminals who don’t know each other kidnap a twelve-year old ballerina.  She’s being held for ransom and the kidnappers have to keep her in the mansion for 24 hours, after which they each will receive their share of $50 million.  What they don’t know is that Abigail is a centuries-old vampire who likes to play with her food.  Suspecting they’ve been set up, the criminals speculate that the girl’s father has set his most vicious killer on them.  Modern, educated people, they don’t believe in vampires (there’s quite a bit of shading from Dusk Till Dawn in here) but they have to figure out how to defeat one.  Like Dusk Till Dawn, they ask themselves what they know about vampires, trying to come up with a plan to survive the night.  As you might expect, a bloodbath ensues.

If you’re the kind of person who reads about movies first, you’ll know, as I didn’t, that this was planned as a remake of Dracula’s Daughter.  It’s been so many years since I saw “the original” that I scarcely remember it.  (So you know what’s coming, eventually.)  I’ve watched many monster movies—like the books I’ve read, it’s so many that I lost count long ago.  Many of these films are pretty good.  And, of course, there are many I haven’t seen—that depends on money, time, and circumstance.  I do have to note, however, that coming up on the centenary of Universal monster movies, they haven’t lost their touch.  I have no idea what happened to their Dark Universe, but I do get the feeling they maybe gave up on the idea a little too soon.

The Power of

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One rare treat is rediscovering something that intrigued you as a young person, but which you’d completely forgot.  Living in a small town and seldom going to movie theaters, I had to have learned about Magic from television commercials.  I remember parts of the trailer, even down to particular phrases, but it was a movie I’d never seen.  I forgot about it.  That’s not to say that in the intervening decades I might not’ve relived that trailer in my head—I’m sure I did—but since I began binging on horror films a few years ago, it never occurred to me.  I remember it scared me as a kid because the trailer consisted of a monologue by the ventriloquist’s dummy.  Herein hangs the tale.  The movie did reasonably well at the box office but nobody seems to discuss it much.  When it showed up on a streaming service, the thumbnail of Fats’ face transported me back to the seventies and I knew I had to see it.

I have a soft spot for seventies horror.  I was surprised to learn that Anthony Hopkins and Burgess Meredith were in it.  And Ann-Margaret.  A movie about a stage magician going mad, I found that it kept me tense.  I didn’t know how the story went.  In case you’re curious, it goes like this: Corky, a stage magician with a ventriloquist act, is about to hit the big times.  He then flees to his childhood Catskills and finds his high school crush managing a remote, rundown resort.  She’s in a loveless marriage and Corky has trouble with women.  Two things become clear: his dummy says what he (Corky) really feels and Corky is seriously disturbed.  Fear of being found out leads him to murder and although Peg, his crush, really liked and likes him, he can’t separate himself from the dummy.

There’s an ambiguity here.  There are a couple scenes when Fats moves on his own.  Otherwise there’s nothing supernatural going on here.  That raises the question of whether the camera is lying or whether spooky action at a distance is taking place.  Overall I thought the movie was well done.  I wouldn’t have tolerated the language Fats uses when I was younger, but I did think Hopkins’ acting was quite good.  Playing a person struggling with a mental disorder requires some convincing acting to be bought.  And there was a feel to many seventies horror movies.  This one brought me back with the power of suggestion, and perhaps a little magic.

Somehow Inevitable

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You had to expect me to write about Zontar: Thing from Venus.  I bought the “Beast Collection” set to see it many years ago.  In those days I tried to watch the movies through, in order but I didn’t make it through the first disc, even.  Well, now my perspective has changed—I figured I bought this to see Zontar, and Zontar I must see.  You do know that he controls people, right?  Zontar is a notoriously bad movie.  I saw it on television as a kid, and it may have even been close to the first run since it was made for television.  It’s actually a remake of a cheap Roger Corman movie, so it is a cheap remake of a cheap original.  Nostalgia, however, does funny things to a guy.  Although I saw it half a century ago, I remembered some lines precisely.  Television does funny things to young minds after all, I guess.

In case none of the injectapods has found you yet, it goes like this: Zontar, from, well, Venus, is a bat-like monster with three eyes.  He befriends an earthling outsider scientist, through laser communication, and commandeering a satellite, which becomes a passable flying saucer, lands in  a cave from which he takes over the small town of Jackson, which has a military base and plans to take over by having a general assassinate the president.  Meanwhile, his scientist friend directs Zontar to the four people that he needs to take over the world: said general, the sheriff, the mayor, and his best friend scientist, Curt Taylor.  Things don’t quite go Zontar’s way, despite most of the movie’s running time showing him totally in control.  It feels like it’s a lot longer than its 80-minute running time.

Still, I have to agree with the TV Guide review that says it isn’t as bad as everyone says.  Yes, it is a bad movie but it does have a few redeeming features.  Some of the scenery is nice, and you even begin to care for some of the characters.  The rogue scientist’s wife—despite her constant nagging—is the first person who tries to kill Zontar, and she does this for love.  When Zontar gets her you feel a little sad.  At least I did.  You see, the injectapods haven’t reached me yet and I still have human emotions.  Ironically, it is just such things that drive me to rewatch movies like Zontar all these years later.  And the movie ends with a voice-over moral of the story.  Those 80 minutes weren’t completely wasted.

The Search Continues

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This movie’s so bad there’s a backstory.  Years ago I was really wanting to see Zontar: Thing from Venus.  This was before streaming, and I found it as part of the “Beast Collection,” a set of 11 movies for less than the price of one regular first-run DVD.  I watched a few other movies in the collection, but before long it got shoved to the back of a shelf and forgotten.  I remembered it recently because another collection I have was missing a movie, Snow Beast.  I wondered if it might be part of this otherwise forgotten set.  It was (this really encouraged me because maybe my memory is still much better than I sometimes suppose).  In any case, one of the other movies—one I’d never seen—was Search for the Beast.  I figured, why not?  This is a film that fails on every level.  And I mean every single one.  It really should merit a Wikipedia page, just for being so bad.

So, a professor in Alabama goes in search of the beast in the Okaloosa mountains.  The budget for the movie must’ve been a matter of pocket change.  Anyway, the beast has been “killing” anyone who ventures into the mountains and the professor wants to prove it exists.  He’s backed by a guy with money, who isn’t explained at all, and his university office is less well equipped than an average undergrad’s dorm room.  He takes a female grad student with him but his financier, unbeknownst to the benighted professor, hires a bunch of beefy guys with assault rifles to go along, although they’re only going to take pictures.  Of course the professor sleeps with the grad student but then the head of the tough guys kidnaps her as the beast kills off the tough guys’ heavily armed posse.  Turns out the local hillbillies are, apparently, trying to mate the beast with the women who come into the woods.  It’s worse than I’m describing it.

There is some chatter on the internet about this groaner, so I’m sure that I’m not the only one who’s seen it.  Someone recently asked me how such movies even get made.  Well, anyone with a camera can shoot a movie.  Of course, getting paid screen time (or video distribution) is another story.  I doubt the makers of this film made much money off of it, but since other suckers like myself have discussed it online, the producer, director, writer, and actor Richard Arledge, has the last laugh.  His work is being talked about, no matter if nobody has a good thing to say about it.  Of course, I wouldn’t have ever seen it at all, if I hadn’t had a hankering for Zontar: Thing from Venus all those years ago. 

Red Dress

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Horror sometimes takes a creative turn.  In Fabric is an art film as well as a horror offering.  The basic premise is that a certain red dress, sold at a bizarre fashion store, causes the death of those who wear it.  Sheila, recently divorced and having trouble with her adult, at home son, buys the dress for a date.  After leaving her with a rash, the dress leads to an arm laceration, a German Shepherd attack, an attack on her son’s girlfriend, and finally, Sheila’s death in an auto accident.  The dress is then picked up by a guy as a stag party prank where the groom has to wear it.  His soon-to-be wife finds it and wears it also.  The man, Reg, loses his job as a washing machine repairman and has no luck finding another.  While Babs, his wife, is shopping at that same strange shop, Reg’s furnace malfunctions, killing him with carbon monoxide.  Babs is trapped in the shop as it catches fire and burns down.  All those killed by the dress are shown working on new ones at the end of the film.

The movie is also called a dark comedy and there are some funny bits.  The sales clerk, Miss Luckmoore, speaks in cryptic, quasi-poetic style, never giving a straight answer to anyone.  The shop’s owner does the same.  And some of the scenarios are amusing.  Although horror, the movie isn’t really scary, but it is stylish.  Unlike some horror comedies, the tone isn’t really funny, but more wry.  And it’s a bit confusing.  The overall story arc is easy enough to follow, but some scenes just confound.  I kept waiting for an a-ha moment when everything would fall into place.  Of course, ambiguity is a hallmark of many intellectual films.

Something that I’ve been noticing, no matter the era that it’s from, is that films really need to justify that last half-hour, if they’re going for 120 minutes.  Maybe it’s just that we’ve become accustomed to the 90-minute feature, but I’ve notice that most two-hour movies (not all) seem to suffer from some pacing issues.  Of course, an art-house movie will defy conventions.  For example, the point of view is Shelia’s for about the first half of the film, then she’s killed and new characters are introduced.  Yes, this shows that the dress goes on killing, but another approach might’ve been to have the protagonist learn about past killings and realize the dress is coming for her.  But then, that might’ve been less creative.

Grown-up Jane

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Watching Stephen King’s list of scary movies in the 30 years prior to 1980, I’ve found one or two that hardly strike me as horror.  Some of the others remain remarkably effective today.  I had the wrong idea about What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?;  I’d supposed from the title that it had to do with an abducted child, a topic I generally avoid.  When looking up yet another movie on Tubi that was free, but only in Spanish, I saw Baby Jane on offer and decided to give it a try.  I was pretty impressed.  It’s overly long and drags a bit, but the story is good.  One thing about horror films from the period is that they relied on story because the special effects really didn’t exist to make movies such as many we now see—splashy, but shallow.

In case you’re even more outdated than me, Baby Jane was a successful child actor whose sister grows up to outshine her.  Blanche, the sister, is crippled in a car accident that has been blamed on Jane for the last couple of decades.  Jane really can’t act, and once her sister is disabled, the two live on Blanche’s money until Jane’s growing insanity threatens her wheelchair-bound sister.  Trapped upstairs without any means of communicating with anyone who might help, Blanche is tortured and starved by her sister.  There’s an incredible amount of tension, even if the events begin to seem unlikely as the two hours roll on.  There are a few dropped subplots—the neighbor who harbors no suspicions at all, and the musician Jane hires who discovers her secret—but overall the tension keeps building.

One thing that occurred to me was that part of the plot involves leaving a phone extension off the hook to prevent Blanche from getting help.  I pondered how some young people who only know phones as personal devices might not understand this.  How, when I was a child that if you left an extension off the hook no calls could go in or out.  And that the annoying “off the hook” tone didn’t yet exist.  Ironically, now you could watch the movie on your personal phone that you carry with you at all times.  While this isn’t a perfect movie, it is an engaging one on many levels.  The sisterly rivalry, the growing insanity of Jane, and the helplessness of an invalid all work together to create some frightening moments.  Technology sure makes life convenient, but it cuts off some avenues for horror.  Of course, as Unfriended shows, it opens new venues.  I agree with King—this is one of the actually scary films from before the eighties.

Not Friendly

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A ghost-revenge story, online.  Unfriended is one of those low-budget horror films that manages to be remarkably effective through the acting and its overall verisimilitude.  It’s also a kind of parable about the dangers of living our lives online.  The only problem is that technology is moving so fast that a ten-year old movie looks outdated.  The scary thing is many people are online even more, especially since the pandemic that came a few years after the movie was released.  Six high-schoolers are chatting on Skype (see what I mean?).  A friend in the group died by suicide a year ago because of an embarrassing video posted of her on YouTube.  Even a mature viewer like me can easily recall how deeply peer pressure cut in high school.  It’s a difficult time for all of us.  In any case, an unidentified person has joined the call and makes threatening comments via chat.

Of course, there are multiple apps (we called them programs long ago) running and nearly the entire movie is on the screen of one of the kids’ laptops.  In real life I was waiting for my low battery warning to come on, because I was watching it on a laptop, and all the notices that appeared on the upper right-hand corner made the thing look real.  Naturally enough, the kids start getting killed off.  Since this is horror their deaths are shown, if briefly, on screen and mostly they’re bizarre.  Hovering in the background is a webpage that warns against opening and answering messages from the dead.  As Blaire (whose screen we’re seeing) comes to realize that the unknown person is the girl who died by suicide, Laura (the dead friend) forces them to play a game of Never Have I Ever.  This leads to dissension and fighting as confessions come out and friends begin dying.

There’s a heavy moral element involved—the teens are being “punished” for typical teen behaviors.  Interestingly, toward the end I noticed that Blaire had a crucifix on her bedroom wall.  The kids don’t talk about religion at all (something I did do as a teen) but they all have a moral sense of what they did wrong.  The webpage about not answering online messages from the dead suggests confessing your sins, if you do open such a message.  Blaire tries to confess, but she has a secret that’s kept until the very end, so I can’t say what it is here.  I wouldn’t want to be unfriended for providing a spoiler.

Non-Believer

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Heretic may be the ultimate horror and religion movie.  It’s also a film you may need to see multiple times to follow the all-important dialogue.  It’s a movie that would’ve been front and center in Holy Horror.  And it’s deceptively simple.  As I’ve written many times before, I try to know very little about a film before I watch it.  This if often difficult with the internet and people wanting to tell you about the latest cinematic marvel.  I managed to watch Heretic knowing only that it was about two Mormon missionaries visiting a potential convert.  If you want to leave your level of knowledge at that point before seeing the movie you might not want to read on.  You have been warned.

e two women in on an inclement evening, assuring them his wife is in the next room.  He then, ever so innocently, questions them about their beliefs and about religion in general.  The missionaries grow increasingly concerned that there is no wife and that Mr. Reed (Grant) has been toying with them.  They find themselves locked in his house as he unrelentingly questions them and asking them what, and why, they really believe.  Charmingly he assures them they can leave at any time, but they have to pick a door—the lady and the tiger-like—marked either belief or disbelief.  (Both lead to the same place, and it’s not out.)  Using a trick he attempts to get them to die by suicide.  When they refuse, he kills one of them but the other discovers the truth, “the one true religion.”  I won’t tell you what it is.

The film is remarkable in that there is no horror without religion.  I made a similar argument about The Wicker Man, in my book on the movie.  When we ask ourselves what makes a horror film scary, seldom is the answer overtly “religion.”  Usually it’s a monster of some description.  Or the threat of annihilation.  Or plain old death.  Religion can be scary.  In fact, it has historically been the nepenthe for death and sorrow in this life.  Some would trace the origin of religion to that very phenomenon.  I’ve been writing for years on this blog that religion and horror belong together.  They overlap.  They blend.  They, on occasion, may be the same thing.  Heretic displays that clearly.  If I haven’t spoiled it for you, I highly recommend it.  I can honestly say it’s the first movie that has literally given me nightmares, in many, many years.

Dusk’s Early Dark

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It may be the strangest vampire movie ever, and that’s saying something.  To understand this, you have to realize that I read as little as possible about a movie before seeing it.  I try to avoid trailers, and recommendations from well-wishers play a big part in my choices.  I came across From Dusk till Dawn in a couple of online lists and when I saw it was Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney, I doubted the vampire part.  Indeed, for the first twenty minutes to half hour I was convinced I’d stepped into Pulp Fiction 2.  (Tarantino wrote it, after all.)  Those kinds of movies unnerve me, and just when I was wondering if I’d made a mistake, it became a monster movie.  An action horror film.  Lots of vampires and, surprisingly lots of talk about God.

In case you haven’t seen it, Clooney and Tarantino are brothers out on a crime spree.  Harvey Keitel is an ex-minister out on a road trip with his teenage kids.  After his wife’s death, he lost his faith although he still believes in God.  (Classic theodicy.)  The criminals abduct the family to get them into Mexico where they’ve made a deal with a guy.  They meet at about the most salacious strip club you can imagine, one that caters only to truckers and bikers.  It turns out that the staff and strippers are all vampires and they prey on the patrons.  Okay, so the story doesn’t hold together.  Clooney’s character, which is hardly the sort you’d want anywhere near you, tells Keitel’s that unless he re-finds his faith none of them will make it out alive.

There’s quite a bit of humor packed into the over-the-top fight scene, including dialogue about how to defeat vampires.  A couple of the patrons, it turns out, are pretty adept at that sort of thing, but the human holdouts keep getting bitten and have to be killed.  Finally, the titular dawn arrives, leaving just Clooney and the minister’s daughter alive.  I couldn’t help but to be reminded of Willy’s Wonderworld, in overall story arc, but the two are completely different in tone.  The fact that the movie is 28 years old and that I’d only heard of it recently really surprised me.  Especially since religion is so heavily involved in the story.  Not only that, but the message about religion, in service of the story, is that belief is good.  And this from a murderer and a thief.  Strange indeed, but not easily forgotten.

Old Movies

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Something strange is happening.  (“How’s that new?” you might well ask.)  There seems to be a bifurcation taking place in my brain, what techies might call “partitioning.”  Specifically it regards what I think of as “old movies.”  By this I don’t mean movies from the sixties or before.  No, I mean movies I saw some time ago, often on DVD or even VHS, sometimes in theaters, that became part of my standard repertoire.  I imagine most cinephiles have certain films to which they keep coming back.  But for me, the “old movies” are those I haven’t blogged about.  Also, they predate streaming so, in that sense, they are “old.”  You see, I’m not a very internet-savvy thinker.  It took me quite a few years to figure out I could link my posts with other posts on my own blog so that in the rare event that someone might want to read more they could click on the links like you do on Wikipedia.  (Now that you’re here, stay a while!)

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

This blog was started in 2009.  For most of its history it has been daily.  I didn’t automatically start blogging about movies, though.  For a few years I tried to tie all my posts into religion, widely conceived.  Then, kind of establishing my own “brand,” I started writing about less ethereal topics.  Including movies that don’t have religion in them.  By far most of the movies I discuss on this blog are first-time films for me.  Occasionally I’ll go back and address one of my “old movies.”  This occurred to me the other day when I went to link to Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.  I thought I’d posted about it, but it’s one of my oldies, so I hadn’t.  I don’t even remember when I first saw it.  If feeling nostalgic, I’ll look backward, as an historian is wont to do, but it doesn’t happen often.

Since we can’t see ahead in our lives with any real clarity, I didn’t anticipate this blog focusing on darker themes. When I started, finding a position back in academia seemed like a possibility.  For me this blog is therapy, but this is as good a place as any to talk about movies, and most of mine fall into an ill-fitting genre called “horror.”  Even among these, my “old movies,” like The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, Sleepy Hollow, or even Paranormal Activity, which now more or less define my research, were missed out for having been too old (having been seen too long ago).  Most of the movies discussed in the past few years here have been streamed.  Many of them are easily forgotten.  But the old ones, they’re stuck, apparently for good. Such is the power of old movies.

Car Talk

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Body horror isn’t my favorite sub-genre, but Titane (French for titanium) had been recommended in several places.  Body horror directed by women takes on a particular cast, especially since pregnancy is, I imagine, kind of scary.  Certainly from a male perspective it can be, so I suspect such major body changes must involve some psychological adjustments for women as well.  The story is strange.  Alexia, after a childhood car accident, has a titanium plate in her skull.  After being released from the hospital, she starts to really love cars.  I mean, really love.  She works as a car model and ends up making love to her showroom car one night.  After that she becomes pregnant.  Emotionally distant from most people, including her parents, she becomes a serial killer.  She’s not a complete sociopath, however, because she realizes this is wrong.

Wanted by the authorities after killing everyone at a house party, she tries to change her identity by cutting her hair, breaking her nose, and wrapping her torso in body tape to pass herself off as a man.  A firefighter chief whose son has been missing for a decade, believes Alexia is his son and he takes her in.  She won’t speak, which he supposes is part of the trauma.  He gives Alexia work among the other firefighters, who are generally sexist and not a little suspicious.  Especially since the chief gives Alexia preferential treatment even though she doesn’t know what she’s doing.  In one scene he tells the firefighters he is God to them and Alexia is his son.  One of the firefighters quips later, that Jesus is white and gay.  (Alexia is pretty and the broken nose only makes her appear androgynous.)

Her painful pregnancy, which involves motor oil, eventually forces her father to acknowledge that she’s not his son, but the lonely man still vows to care for her.  When it’s time to give birth the baby is part titanium (as is Alexia’s distended belly).  She dies in childbirth but her “father” accepts the hybrid baby as his own.  This art-house Euro-horror won several awards.  Exploring issues of both sexism and women’s body changes during pregnancy—particularly an unwanted one—the movie has something to say.  And it’s something that a male writer-director simply couldn’t do.  There are no jump-startles here, and the horror is a slow dread as the viewers’ sympathies tend to be with Alexia.  The first murder we’re shown is when a fan attempts to make love to her (it doesn’t go as far as rape), despite her lack of interest.  She has a motivation and it doesn’t seem evil.  And, of course, there’s a good deal of fantasy at play.  Like most Euro-horror, it leaves you thoughtful.