Hey you, watch my short film. People say it's weird, and usually they mean in a good way. Imagine if Verhoeven was as big a fan of Nigel Kneal as Carpenter is, or maybe if Kneal hated yuppies more than hippies. Now turn that into a low budget movie by a big nerd from Minnesota.
Give it a rating or a review if you can. The algorithmic gods demand engagement before they will dare push unproven content to the masses.
The Chairman is a retro sci-fi/horror short about the intersection of business, media, and the supernatural. Unsanctioned by the board of directors at their powerful multinational, The Pantheon Group, Joy and her supervisor, Vincent, run an experiment on telepathic abilities. Katie, an unwilling research subject and powerful psychic antenna, prepares to silence the chaos in her head by drowning. Her father Miguel, held in a nearby warehouse, must intervene by contacting his daughter telepathically, or watch her drown via hidden cameras. When the experiment is ultimately interrupted by a call from corporate headquarters, Joy must return to the office and face her reclusive, unnatural employer, the Chairman. The Chairman draws inspiration from a wide variety of 20th century genre material. From the cynical media accelerationism of Paul Verhoeven to Nigel Kneal's scientifically recontextualized spiritualism, with hearty helpings of Cronenberg, Ballard, and even Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Beyond asthetics and nostalgia, it seeks to emulate retro horror at its most intellectual, a tradition from long before the phrase "elevated horror" emerged from the thinkpiece abyss. Clocking in at twenty minutes (an epic length in the world of short films) The Chairman is densely packed with contributions from a wildly talented cast and crew. For the world premiere at Cinepocalypse 2018, the best short film actress and actor awards were bestowed on Bianet Diaz and Al Saks for their roles as Katie and her father. In the second half of 2018 The Chairman played an additional eleven festivals, received four more award nominations, and won best editing and best visual effects at Northern Frights. The editing award is especially exciting for yours truly, as it's the first win for something I'm directly responsible for, so not only can I call it an award winning film, but I be insufferably smug and can call myself an award winning filmmaker.
While the film's eventual release on VOD/VHS is waiting for its festival run to wrap up, you can check out its trailer below, and enjoy the short's ghostly, analog synth score by UK composer OGRE Sound.
Ladies and gentlemen, Video Updates is officially in the content™ business. Please refrain from burning yourself out on retro trash before you see our short around Halloween 2018.
In the history of film criticism, gallons of ink have been spilled over auteur theory, but without the funds, clout, and sheer force of dickish will that enables James Cameron to perfectly translate the little picture shows in his skull into 48fps 3D multiplex fodder, low budget filmmakers must endlessly sacrifice chunks of their vision on the altar of practicality. (Unless those visions conveniently spring forth from a Mumblecore id.) The various actors and crew-members involved in a production all leave fingerprints on the piece, too, leaving many a would be auteur wondering if how much of the final product truly belongs to them. The fictional playwright and director from Minnesota indie The Telephone Game spends much of the movie losing control over the creative concepts crystalized in his head as they spill forth into a production, while the film itself muddies the question of its own authorship via a script improvised by the actors.
Directed by Jason Schumacher, The Telephone Game has an organic, mockumentary feel, despite at no time being billed as such. In a traditional movie, scenes are assembled from the best versions of their constituent parts based on an overarching structure, while their improvised doppelgangers are instead grown in long takes. Fruitful exchanges and choice lines of dialog are seeded into subsequent attempts until either the director is satisfied with the result, or the harsh realities of low budget scheduling come crashing down. The resulting footage is then woven together in much the same way as a non-fiction work. Narrative, theme, character; all the elements that a traditional film would establish in the writing and production phases are instead teased out of the raw dailies. In fact, the main difference between 'documentary style' post production and the real thing is that the editor of fiction is never hamstrung by the ethical concerns that arise when truth and style fail to sync up.
Milwaukee experimental filmmaker and rapperWes Tank stars as Marco DeGarr, the pretentious writer and director of "The Invisible Ropes," an impenetrable slice of community theater about monkeys and diamonds against a dystopian fantasy backdrop. (The play was actually written, in a possible nod to the Ouroboros of life imitating art, by the actor.) His main foils are theater owner and voice of practicality Irene Ilsely (KariAnn Craig) and leading lady Zelphia Anzhelina (Haley Chamberlain), with whom Marco makes an immediate connection. This connection forms the closest thing The Telephone Game has to a traditional plot, though it refuses to ever slide into melodrama.
Meanwhile, a fantastic menagerie of cast and crew-members provide background action and mini-arcs that constantly threaten to upstage the movie itself. Reluctant understudy Benjo (Alex Barbatsis) schemes to usurp the lead after Marco gives it to himself in a fit of subconscious narcissism, while Lizbeth (Alisa Mattson) plays the Lady Macbeth on his shoulder. The comic relief is rounded out by the magic obsessed Chip (Eddie Chamberlain) and roly poly stage manager Buzz (Jesse Frankson) who steals every scene he's in, whether or not he has a line. (Seriously, if it was illegal to steal scenes, they'd give him the gas chamber for this movie.)
Following "The Invisible Ropes" from casting to performance provides most the film's structure, but still doesn't quite qualify as the plot. The (movie's) audience is too removed from the chain linked fences, elaborate headdresses, dancing monkeys, and Jupiterian ice cream of the metafictional text to have much investment in its successful production. (Even the world surrounding the theater is vague; the telephones are all rotary and bow ties are worn without irony.) Conflict is instead distilled from Marco's less than stable antics. He is already prone to bizarre non-sequiturs when explaining his vision at the movie's start, and his cast's incessant clamoring for direction weighs only grinds him down further. Lacking skills in performing distracting jigs like the tormented director in Fellini's 8½(one of many influences from classic European cinema on The Telephone Game) and distracted by a blossoming relationship with his leading lady, Marco's interior condition quickly deteriorates. In an unexpected turn, he goes completely fugue state (complete with some Fear and Loathing-esque camera wackiness) before the end of the first act. Once the delusions of killer bees subside, he returns to a production that is nigh ready to move on without him and therefore hostile to the new pages of script with which he wants to reclaim his decaying personal vision.
An improvised script inevitably constrains the director's control over his narrative, even though he is on set directing the chaos toward specific goals. (As well as calling the shots in the editing bay.) And while an improv based set would obviously create some cinematographic challenges, the director can still put a much more personal stamp on the visuals. The Telephone Game might be a microbudget indie struggling for attention in a veritable sea of contemporaries, (one of the major drawbacks to video's democratization of feature narrative making: a low signal-to-noise ratio that makes it nigh impossible for anyone to get audiences' attention) but it's already got a Best Cinematography award from the Minneapolis Underground Film Fest (aka MUFF--I know, right?) for its quality emulation of monochromatic celluloid on HD video. The high contrast black & white imagery further muddies the narrative's temporal waters, while giving cinematographer Kipp Zavada plenty of leeway for creating a filmic look. Plus, many of the cheesy looking post production effects that modern editing software provides can be revelatory (or at least not as cheesy) when applied to greyscale footage. When leading lady Zelphia performs a heartfelt song about stardust for Marco and the cast midway through the movie, the darkness behind her fills with particle effects that would likely be laughable in color, but instead suggest 2001's 'Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite' sequence reimagined by Guy Maddin.
Making any movie, especially an indie on a minimal budget, can often be like sacrificing your children. ("Murder your darlings," they say.) Explosions, make up effects, dance numbers, and even whole characters must be aborted to keep finances in the black, until the auteur's grand designs are so diluted that he might as well give 'unfortunate circumstances' a writing credit. The Telephone Game may not have had outsized ambitions from inception, but like a cancer ridden Lex Luthor, it knows how to turn its weaknesses into strengths.
[Full Disclosure: in case you didn't figure it out, I am personally acquainted with the filmmakers, and even have a single shot cameo in the film. (All scenes where I open my yapper were tragically left on the cutting room floor.)]
Someone managed to find and string together almost 8 solid minutes of "You don't get it, do you?"s
Note: Before you panic about Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (one of my all time favorites) being in there, the scene is Jeremy Irons running lines with his actor girlfriend. Meta bad writing.
If you're looking for tunes to spin for the apocalypse (any minute now, right?) look no further. I've had this ready for years.
1. It's Not The End Of The World? - Super Furry Animals
2. Bad Moon Rising - CCR
3. Set the World Afire - Megadeath
4. Come, Let Us Go Back To God - The Soul Stirrers
5. The End of the World - Skeeter Davis
6. Sky Starts Falling - Doves
7. Dear Miami - Roisin Murphy
8. I Wish We'd All Been Ready - Larry Norman
9. Its The End Of The World As We Know It - REM
10. John The Revelator - Depeche Mode
11. The Man Comes Around - Johnny Cash
12. London Calling - The Clash
13. Tow at a Time - Guster
14. The Prophet's Song - Queen
15. King of the World - Steely Dan
16. Eve of Destruction - Barry McGuire
17. In the Year 2525 - Zager & Evans
18. The Earth Died Screaming - Tom Waits
Anyone in the Twin Cities this July 31st should swing by the Red Eye Theater for the premiere of Wes Tank's In Clamatore. I don't have much info to share, but judging from the trailer and what I know about Mr. Tank, it is a safe bet that it will be Tarkovskian.
It's a bit of a shame that it had to be shot on video, as the images practically cry out to be chemically burned into celluloid, but this is the world in which we are all now stuck. High Def makes for a decent simulacrum when the footage is sufficiently textured, so make sure to check out the trailer on YouTube HD if you've got the screen real estate.
It's debatable whether Hollywood's resurgent obsession with the third dimension is a step forwards or backwards for the art of cinema, but it certainly gives us younger folk a glimpse of the gimmicky showmanship that often defined the medium in years past. The silent era spawned largely from the vaudeville stage, with films frequently screened along with more traditional live entertainment. The fledgling format's novelty and purely visual nature made spectacle the order of the day; a natural fit for the vaudevillian circuit. Story and drama eventually took over as the medium ascended to the upper echelons of cultural importance, but spectacle not only remained an important feature, it returned with a vengeance whenever television threatened to topple the silver screen.
Some of the resulting innovations have transcended the pejorative 'gimmick' to become important facets of cinema. Wide aspect ratios are taken for granted in this time of 16:9 HDTVs, but originated with non-standard formats like Cinemascope that were originally implemented by competitive theater operators looking to out do each other as well drag customer eyeballs away from the Radiation King in their living rooms.
Few other cinematic gimmicks were as classy or successful as Cinemascope, but they definitely added a cheesy, carnival like atmosphere of spectacle. The undisputed king of such contrivances was William Castle, director of House on Haunted Hill, 13 Ghosts, and Mr. Sardonicus. To add some extra zazz to the scary bits of his films, he would set up elaborate contraptions in select theaters. Haunted Hill famously had a fake skeleton fly over audiences' heads at certain times, and The Tingler boasted electrified seats scattered randomly through the theater. Other films would have 'nurses' on hand to treat fear induced heart attacks, or micro-intermissions before the climax so that anyone too scared could leave and get a full refund (also a public shaming for their cowardice).
While modern moviegoers are a little too sophisticated (cynical?) to be taken in by plastic skeletons or hollow boasts of death by fright, such practices have fortunately not faded entirely away. The director of Indian horror film, Phoonk 2(Electric Boogaloo?), recently offered $10,000 to anyone brave enough to watch the movie alone in an empty theater. Plus, as mentioned above, Hollywood is making pretty much anything that it can think of into a 3D movie these days. (I miss the '80s, where you could apparently only use the process on the third film in a franchise.)
Sadly, the director of The Human Centipede (First Sequence) has not announced any sort of free vomit bag promotion at theatrical screenings of his film, but after coming up with such an outlandish and disturbing premise, everything else (likely including the film itself) will have to play second fiddle. Watch the trailer below:
Is it a spoiler to show that the centipede is completed at some point in the movie? It will surely steal some of the suspense from the cat and mouse games between the crazy German surgeon and his nubile victims, but it would be a far greater crime for us to sit through a mediocre horror/suspense film called The Human Centipede about a mad scientist trying to create said human centipede without actually having any human centipede action. I'm not buying a $10 ticket to The Human Centipede to see people narrowly escape being turned into a human centipede. The rest of the film is just (for lack of a better term) foreplay. To use another example for context: does anyone go see Friday the 13th movies to see a bunch of people narrowly escape getting murdered by Jason Vorhees? No. So let's not pretend that we're going to The Human Centipede to see if the characters manage to escape when we really just want to know what happens when the middle one has to go [insert bodily function here].
Also, you all have to go see it so the director can make The Human Centipede (Full Sequence) which may have up to a dozen(!) poor bastards sewn together.
Update (2/9): To clear up some confusion that this rambling, barely coherent post has induced in some of you, I consider the centipede itself to be the movie's gimmick. It's a premise so unique and outlandish that I have absolutely no problem with the construction of an entire movie (maybe two) around it. Plus there is the carnival freakshow aspect to it. Anyways, I don't have to explain myself to the likes of you.
Nearly two decades before they would go on to menace each other in the tense first act of Cronenberg's A History of Violence, Viggo Mortensen and Stephen McHattie could be found menacing each other in the somewhat less tense Salvation!, a long forgotten satire of televangelism from the deepest bowels of the MTV generation. Needless to say, it failed to rocket either of them to superstardom.
Stuck in an extra crappy section of Staten Island, Viggo plays a motorcycle riding thug and recently laid off factory worker. He trudges home to his vacuous, proselytizing wife (played by LA punk rocker and real life Mrs. Viggo*, Exene Cervenka) and her preening sister. In her few moments of lucidity while being mesmerized by televangelism, she insists that the 'family' will be perfectly fine.
And he sayeth "Five Dollar Footlong" Amen.
McHattie, whose recent performance in Pontypool has revealed him as one of cinema's most shamefully underutilized assets, plays the shady cathode-ray preacher with a penchant for booze and pornography. His fire and brimstone tirades are easily the film's strongest feature, which is a good thing considering how much of the runtime they fill. Most of the first 'act' is simply him on TV juxtaposed with Viggo's dysfunctional family bickering. It's as though the movie had a narrator that got religion right before shooting and decided to run with it.
[Insert 'Married with Children' and/or Ghostbusters 2 joke here]
It's almost always a bad omen for a movie's pacing when it feels the need to punctuate itself with title cards. (Things that are acceptable: "Tuesday", "Berlin, 1943", "28 Days Later", and anything from The Shining.)Salvation! is broken up into sections with names like 'dream' and 'nightmare', but the chapter names do little to alleviate the mental whiplash induced by such radical shifts in plot and tone. After the first section, wherein Viggo hollers at his wife, loses his job, and hollers at his wife some more, the film shifts to the seedy reverend, who practices his next sermon before being interrupted by Viggo's hot sister-in-law, who is stuck in the rain with a non-functioning car. She quickly seduces him, despite his suspicion that it is a blackmail scheme. Then the movie devolves into an erotic music video. Eventually, as the reverend fantasizes about a bizarre, semi-wholesome life with the little tart, she starts lip syncing to the soundtrack and it becomes explicitly a music video.
A really messed up music video, too.
Viggo finally shows up to shake the cobwebs off the daydreaming film's narrative; he's got some sort of extortion scheme underway, though he might just be jealous of McHattie getting action with his wife's very covetable sister. Things almost coalesce into a semi-coherent cat & mouse thriller, only it turns out that Viggo's plan is to force his wife into the reverend's show and take half the profits. (It's a lot like my elaborate ruse to kidnap and torture Ted Danson so that he and my dad could be squash partners.) Despite its painfully obvious brilliance, the scheme is ultimately thwarted by McHattie's second escape through a bathroom window onto his giant, neon lawn-cross. Too bad they weren't prepared for him to try the exact same thing again.
The reverend successfully escapes, only to get picked up as a hitchhiker by the very woman Viggo was attempting to foist on him.
*Title card: "Salvation"*
The 'plan' is successful and everybody is all friendly and in cahoots now! What the hell was the last forty-five minutes for? Why didn't they just send her to talk to him in the first place? Why is the movie essentially starting the plot over with less than 15 minutes left? What trick could it possibly have up its sleeve to wrap up all the loose ends that only just now appeared? (Spoiler alert: it has no trick.)
Rather than answer those questions, the third act is cool with being a confusing blur. Making sense is for square movies, Salvation! just wants to get itself over with so it can go back to smoking weed and spinning Joy Division albums. So it has Viggo and his cronies pick up groupies for the good reverend. Then they all play poker. Some fat-cat at a pool party suggests the reverend has a future in politics. The team argues over how to stay organized while raiding viewer donations from the mail bag. "Postcards on the floor; envelopes on the desk!" All while his new co-host picks up the religious monologue slack.
The reverend and Viggo's now ex-wife ultimately squeeze him and their other co-conspirators out of the scheme, but cannot agree on how to split up their profits. She suddenly reverses her characterization and cunningly suggests giving the disputed monies to a homeless shelter. (So her almost instantaneous corruption also made her smart?) He changes the subject by proclaiming "showtime". There is one more brief televised sermon, a Christian rock music video, and the movie ends.
That's it. McHattie gives one last speech, perfectly mimicking a fraying televangelist while saying absolutely nothing of real relevance to the gossamer wisps of storyline floating around. Also, in the context of a spiritual experience, he mentions having 'intercourse' with his new sidekick; an out of place line that rips itself away from the surrounding speech to make you momentarily wonder if perhaps the movie is smarter than you are giving it credit for. At least until you see the midget devil in the final scene.
With the glaring exception of an ending, Salvation! contains within itself all the individual components of a movie, but they never unite into anything even remotely resembling a plot. There are characters. Those characters speak dialog and have dramatic conflicts. Those conflicts even elicit faint implications of character growth. The problem is that the film has absolutely no idea how much time to spend on a particular scene, or how that scene should flow into and impact the scenes that follow. As Homer Simpson once said, "It's just a bunch of stuff that happened." Crucial moments are glossed over or skipped entirely, while endless minutes are spent on Viggo riding his motorcycle across Staten Island. (The least friendly place in America!) The third act might as well just be the cliff notes of an entirely different movie.
Lay the blame at the feet of writer/director Beth B, who apparently is far more at home in the world of music videos than feature films. It looks like a movie, it sounds like a movie, but it certainly doesn't flow like a movie. On the bright side, Ms. B's MTV skill-set gives the film interesting (but thoroughly dated) production design and music. New Order practically scored the thing, with the gaps filled in by a variety of mid-'80s post-punk. (Most of it written by either Arthur Baker or the director herself.) Clearly the best track is "You Can't Blackmail Jesus", an alt-country gospel sung by McHattie himself. That alone makes the movie better than Valentines Day or The Rats.
During nighttime scenes at the reverend's mansion (probably %50 of the film) the lighting alternates between electric blues and violets, and would probably be impressive looking outside the confines of a two decade old VHS tape. Otherwise it just looks like electric Smurfs are being tossed violently at the camera in every shot. Like every other aspect of the film, the cinematography can only hint at the theoretical existence of an awesome film that came very close to being made.
Salvation! certainly did one thing right (besides McHattie's phantom country music career) and that was creating a perfect storm of cinematic irrelevance. Certainly the post-punks and proto-goths of the middle 1980s were itching to knock the self righteous would-be censors of the 'religious right' down a couple of pegs, and the film's portrayal of a hypocritical televangelist who pockets his flock's money while watching porn seems to have at least shocked and appalled most of the people who have bothered to post "user reviews" of it online. The problem was that reality came along and stole the film's thunder. In the wake of the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals, the idea of a corrupt preacher of the cathode ray tube became passé. By 1990 people practically expected them to drop like flies out of grace, and today the fallen televangelist character has long passed beyond cliché into archetype. It's awfully hard to knock someone down a peg when they've already gotten drunk, passed out, and fallen completely off the pegboard (or wherever else these metaphorical pegs may be inserted). So after going out of its way to make numerous and powerful enemies, the film's satire ends up getting undercut by current events. Combine that with the fact that it's an incoherent mess, and you've got a powerful recipe for being stuck on VHS well into the 21st century and beyond.
I'm sure it's scant consolation to Beth B's abortive career in feature length narrative cinema, but her combination of unwieldyconventional filmmaking, a quality '80s soundtrack, and a cast that was literally decades ahead of its time has rendered the film irresistible to weirdos like me who buy VHS tapes off of eBay purely because they are covered by a veil of obscurity as intriguing as it is absolute.
*They once made a baby and have long since split up.
Seriously, I nominate this "richfofo" person for president of cyberspace. Sure he mainly seems to blog about reality TV and various other Slut related clap-trap, but these exhaustive montages of annoying horror-movie clichés are pure gold.
No technology has turned horror/thriller screenwriting on its head more than the cellular phone. Now that nearly every warm body in the first world has a portable means of contacting the authorities, your average psycho slasher has to adapt by killing much faster (and ending the movie too soon) or risk a humiliating slaughter fail (also ending the movie too soon). Surly this means a dramatic rethinking of horror screenwriting tropes, correct?
Wrong. It just means that every movie needs a painfully forced bit of expository dialog to remove the devices' corrosive effect on the narrative. Without further ado, here is nearly all of them:
Free slasher movie idea: The Faraday Cage - A deranged technophile kidnaps people who use their cellphones for evil purposes (taking calls during movies, texting while driving, general techno-rudeness) and traps them in a Saw-esque dungeon where cellular signals can't penetrate. Murder ensues. Problem solved.
Next up, goddamn mirror scares (and their bastard children, mirror scare fake-outs):
Hopefully we'll get to see "Blurry things running in front of the camera while a violinist has a seizure" next.
If that's not enough for "president of the internet," this person also posts a ridiculous number of videos about his weird looking cat. As we all know, the internet is made of cats.
Special Bonus! A perfect montage explanation of why I think Reality TV is the devil:
Oh boy! Shallow people acting like they think shallow people should act when cameras are around! How is that 'reality' and how is that entertaining in the least? I would rather watch a feature film that I hate than five minutes of this inexplicably popular sham that won't fucking die.
Also, this blog isn't dead... it's just resting. I'm attempting to actually write the book I've had kicking around my skull for the last three years, and Video Updates, which was originally created as a way to keep exercising the prose muscles whenever the fiction muse abandoned me, sort of took over for a while. Unfortunately, I lack the talent and discipline to maintain two simultaneous writing projects and a day job, so something is always going to get the short end of the stick.
Still, there are so many Videos to be Updated: Syngenor, Hausu, Razorback, Dead End Drive-In, Save the Green Planet, The Stone Tape, Death Bed, etc. Hell, I could spill forth another couple thousand words on Pontypool alone. So fear not, densins of the giant cyber-chasm that I scream my nonsense into, updates will continue to trickle out while I pretend to be a big boy writer. And someday, when I'm rich and famous or at least completely unemployable, Video Updates will be restored to its former glory* and then some.
Also, there will probably be more video game related content in the near future, but that still has the word "video" in it, so if you don't like it you can cram it with walnuts.
*Former glory may only exist in the author's mind. Your results may vary.
This spectacular Hungarian film about subway ticket inspectors is most notable for launching the lackluster Hollywood career of Nimród Antal, director of Vacancy, Armored, and the upcoming Predators. (I admit to not seeing any of those, but the reviews and trailers scream 'Meh' to me at the top of their metaphoric lungs.) Kontroll itself is a bit of a mixed bag of indie cinema tropes (quirky characters, fugue state twists, and a 'meet-cute' wearing a bear costume) but its kinetic, textured visuals and impressive subterranean setting, which remain impressive on the poorly mastered DVD we're currently stuck with, could blow some serious minds.
I'm still kicking myself for missing my chance to see this on the big screen. A blu-ray would go a long ways toward consoling me.
One of my all time favorite films of all time, Stalker is a languorous science fiction epic by the legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. It's a possibly allegorical tale of three men, Writer, Professor, and Stalker, who venture into a forbidden wasteland called the Zone to retrieve a possibly extraterrestrial wish granting artifact. A story of the fantastic, warped by the director into something more concerned with mankind's battered spirit than aliens or ray guns, it is nevertheless filled to the brim with striking visuals and authentically gritty locales.
Unfortunately, the film has yet to even see an adequate DVD release. For now we must settle for a murky picture inexplicably split over two out of print discs. (One dual layer, one single... why?) The only thing it really has going for it (aside from being the only game in town) is the shockingly adequate, if not entirely faithful, 5.1 surround sound mix.
I bug the Criterion Collection on a regular basis about the film, but it's likely that the distribution rights pose a problem. (They've managed to release a handful of his other films--Ivan's Childhood, Solaris, and Andrei Rublev--so there is hope for at least some HD action.)
My all time favorite J-horror, Kairo is yet another film rich in gritty detail and elaborately decaying industrial backdrops. It's even been described as 'Tarkovskian,' which is a non-pejorative way to say "glacially paced" or "slow as hell." Just don't fall asleep to the film, as I have done (same for Stalker--a great movie for naps, seriously) because the score will wake you back up for some hardcore existential dread. Hell is full, and the dead are invading our world through electrical and information networks to show us just how sad and alone we are in this universe. The only recourse is to run like hell and seal them off with red duct tape. (Then you can never, ever, ever go back there, BTW.)
If I may rant and swear for a minute, WHY THE FUCK is there a fucking HD DVD (I noticed this before the format died--yes I've got a player--shut up) and two sequels for the godawful US remake, but no known plans for an HD treatment of the original? If they release the remake on blu before the original, I'm going to ultra-plotz and take all of you with me.
Long before he sold out with the mediocre Suspect Zero, E Elias Merhige was a promising experimental filmmaker sweating over the meticulous photographic techniques in his silent, black & white epic of human suffering, Begotten. I've yet to see the whole thing, because the DVD is so out of print that it currently goes for $90(!) on Amazon. Furthermore, what little I have seen could only hint at the wonders of a theatrical or HD screening.
When mastering a home video copy of a true film, studios have an irritating 'baby with the bathwater' tendency to clean up the print with digital noise reduction. Limited use of DNR is a cost effective way to clean up the most distracting bits of dust and dirt, but many disc authorers use it as a crutch, reducing the image's total detail, eliminating all that delicious film grain, and basically destroying the entire point of high definition mastering.
The wild, organic nature to film grain (an artifact of its chemical nature) is far more pleasing to the eye than its digital equivalent (pixels, boo!) so while HD and its big brothers 2K and 4K are finally shrinking their pixels even smaller than the grains of 35mm film emulsion, the texture of those grains is still an integral element to the format and should be preserved in digital duplication whenever possible.
This most apparent in Begotten. So much time and effort went into the film's processing and optical printing that it is starting to creep into the world of animation. When poorly mastered or shown in an inadequate format, all that grain and contrast is lost in the murk. When the texture is almost more important than the image itself, and you eliminate the texture, all you have left is a shitty, blurry picture.
Sometimes high-def is the only way to properly see a film, but if no one can do so, then there ends up being little demand for a high-def release. It's a negative feedback loop of cinematic under appreciation.
See the last sentence above. Most experimental films are almost completely lost to SD video, and are definitely lost to YouTube. A collection of the greats on HD would be the closest most of us could get to seeing 'Mothlight' or 'Serene Velocity' in the proper celluloid setting.
Evilspeak boasts not the yawn inducing synergy of starting a pizza joint next to a dive bar in your local cracked-out strip mall, but the infinitely more awesome (though slightly less plausible) combination of the Apple II and Satan. Each were powerful tools circa 1981, but it clearly took a genius intellect to discover how much more they could do when combined. Just imagine what Satan could do for spreadsheet efficiency; reach six hundred and sixty six rows and columns, and the client's face literally melts.
In the film, it takes the brilliant mind and immense forehead of a young Clint Howard to combine Satan's peanut butter with the chocolate of 1mghz processing power and monochrome screens. (Of course, as we learned from Jumping Jack Flash, Apple II screens can easily do full color when imbued with the power of Johnathan Pryce.) Playing the unfortunately named Stanley Coopersmith, Clint is a hapless orphan with a charity scholarship to a prestigious military academy. He's crap at sports, has 24/7 pit stains, and is a constant target for Bubba, the school's resident bully and future bumbling neighbor on 'That '70s Show.' (For more disturbingly young Don Stark action, check out Switchblade Sisters.) His already miserable existence gets significantly worse when he's put on punishment detail and forced to clean out the dilapidated chapel basement with a surly, gin-soaked caretaker.It is while digging around in this ancient detritus that Coopersmith discovers the mystical spellbook and diary of arch-satanist Bull from 'Night Court.' Fascinated but lacking fluency in Latin, he squirrels it away to translate later. In a stroke of luck, the computer lab has some handy-dandy Latin to English software. A hobby born of curiosity at first, it becomes a dangerous obsession as the translated text ultimately turns the computer into a digital Necronomicon. Somehow the text coalesces into Satanic software (I knew there was something fishy about BASIC) and begins demanding various sacrificial items: unholy water, consecrated host (that's Jesus Crackers™ for those of you born secular), and blood. The water is found in a conveniently labeled jar on a nearby shelf, some host is procured from the chapel above, but blood will require more than a simple fetch quest to obtain. This leaves the newly possessed Apple with nothing to do but loop the film's tagline over and over: "Data Incomplete - Blood Required."The rest of the film is essentially one long justification of Clint Howard's inevitable conjuring of dark forces. Aside from a subplot revolving around the headmaster's inexplicably hot secretary and her repeated attempts to steal the jeweled pentagram off of the Satanic tome, every scene exists only to show either that everyone is mean to Clint Howard or that he clearly has nothing to lose by invoking the dark powers of Bull from 'Night Court.' After finding a stray puppy, he starts hiding it in his lair under the chapel, unable to bring himself to sacrifice it to his new hobby. When Bubba eventually breaks in with a throng of drunken bullies, they get caught a peer pressure feedback loop that results in him stabbing the puppy and draining its blood.The malevolent software is not impressed with the bully's drink sodden sacrifice, but instead of a runtime error or kernel protection fault, it simply clarifies the recipe:Finally confident that it has made its point, the movie at last gets down to business; the business of Clint Howard massacring his tormentors. He acquires human blood by hurling the headmaster, who was in the process of discovering his devilish deeds, onto a spiked chandelier of evil. (Quite an athletic feat for a nerd such as Stanley Coopersmith.) With the ritual complete and a dead puppy to avenge, Bull from 'Night Court' imbues Stanley with the demonic power to smite his enemies (who conveniently happen to represent the religious order that long ago foiled Bull's plans).At this point, the movie gets sort of awesome. Stanley emerges from his lair under the chapel with a giant sword, crazy hair, and the ability to levitate, wild boars run amok, and the nails fly out of the hands of a giant stone crucifix, firmly embedding themselves in the priest's skull. It's all very violent and sacrilegious, but the best part is how Clint Howard's demon sword doesn't chop or slice things so much as magically convert them into rubber sacks of meat that explode all over the place. Despite it's winning premise, Evilspeak (or should that be EvilSpeak... or Evil's Peak... or EvilSpeak & Spell) sulked in obscurity for many years. Due to the film being branded a 'Video Nasty' in the UK, it fell prey to that country's censorious witch hunt of the early '80s. After the moral panic caused by Abel Ferarra's Driller Killer and the exploding home video market, the Brits were jonesing to protect their children, and the best way to do that seemed to be by banning the hell out of a bunch of violent (and usually terrible) VHS tapes. The film was completely banned in England, and then only released with severe edits to all the good bits. Many of these cuts were made to other countries' releases as well, and despite the 'uncut' version eventually released in 1999, there are supposedly still some boobs and blood missing from the secretary's shower scene and subsequent death by wild boar. On top of that, several gore shots have clearly been recovered from sub-par sources. The professor's improbable death by hanging spike in particular contained a shot that looked to be taken from a VHS bootleg then chopped to fit the original aspect ratio. While censorship is nothing new for the world of cinema (nor is it going anywhere in the near future) it seems more than a little bizarre from a 21st century perspective that anyone anywhere would get their judgmental panties in a bunch over a movie in which Clint Howard uses an Apple II to summon a demonic Bull from 'Night Court' in order to get revenge on Don Stark. The fact that people took the movie serious enough to ban it just boggles the mind.
Video Updates would like to welcome filmmaker extrodinare and newest contributor, Greyduck.
Whereas terminal disease guy in the Saw movies traps his victims in elaborate torture devices to make them value their lives, James Pettis (Val Kilmer) traps his victims his victims in a sauna to make them feel like what global warming might be like someday.
His 6 victims (who include Eric Roberts and Patrick Muldoon) introduce themselves in one of the most pretentious, of many pretentious sequences, showing them through a dense yellow filter, in split screens that dissolve over more shots, that dissolve over even more shots. Needless to say, this overwhelming presentation doesn’t really leave us caring much about the characters or their fate. There’s angry Brooklyn guy, slightly older sagely guy, other guy, shy girl, seemingly normal girl, and skanky girl who walks around with her top off, while “Bolero” by Ravel booms on the soundtrack. Yes, we get it. It’s very warm in there.
We find out they’re all in the sauna as some part of dating service, although none of them seem particularly interested in making a good first impression.
Meanwhile...
Pettis goes to some talk to a guy with the press and a police detective about his little scheme with the people in the sauna, who will eventually be slowly steam baked to death and he explains he will only let them go if the paper publishes his findings on global warming, which of course will be unbearable in 2012. So Val is playing so sort of evil, insane Al Gore.
The folks in the sauna bicker. Val as Pettis continues to ramble, and the movie randomly cuts to shots of him alone on a spinning carousel, starring off blankly. I think this is supposed to re-iterate the fact that he’s crazy with a capitol C. Here’s where I take an extended phone call from a friend I haven’t heard from a while. I come back to find that not much has changed, and Val has gone from crazy to insane, or insanely constipated, judging by the way he’s biting his lip and twitching.
I’ve got to say, Val in this movie is just terrible, mostly due to the poor writing and directing, which is unfortunate, since he’s great in “The Doors”, a favorite film of my teen years, And I’m sure he’ll be good in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans (although, movie titles should never have semicolons in them... ever) Steam Experiment was certainly directed by no Werner Herzog, but by Philepp Martinez, who’s previous works include a Jean-Claude Van Damne movie, which is always a bad sign.
I digress. Anyway -SPOILERS ahead. Very lame ones.
Nails shoot through the door to the sauna, the people in the sauna get freaked out, and become more angry (hot under the collar, if they were wearing collars), and as Pettis’ theorized, begin to fight amongst each other. Shy girl slits her own throat, other die due to barely motivated quarrels, somebody gets a nail gun to the head. It's a whole-lotta chaos going on.
As Pettis continues to look more constipated and ramble on, the detective decides he’s just totally bananas and the “Steam Experiment” is just something he made up in his head to get attention and the people in it don’t actually exist. Exit detective.
The twist isn’t that they are all in his head, (for that movie, see Identity AKA “The 3”) the twist, I guess, is that Pettis’s mental ward doctor guy is also sorta crazy and is in on the experiment. He’s the the one who shot the nails through the door with a nail gun. Seemingly-normal-girl survives the experiment and we find out that she is the psychologist’s wife. Why did she participate? We’re not entirely sure. Why did his doctor help set up the experiment? We don't know. Pettis goes back to the the mental institution and lies around looking beardy. Is he crazy? Cut to him spinning around on a carousel again by himself... OK, yep = crazy, in case we forgot.
Roll credits. I'm not really sure what the film was trying to say. Probably check the history of any dating service you sign up for, and don’t let them convince you to start your date with a bunch of strangers in a creepy sauna.
Just in time for Copenhagen, another Killer Mutant Petroleum Monster has reared its hydrocarbon head. It's big, gooey, pissed off, and can be found in this outstanding CG short:
Oceansize
Great atmosphere and visuals aside, what the heck is going on? Is the oil monster defending itself from the rig? Does it not want to be pumped out of the ocean and converted to Hummer fuel? Why is the platform being operated by a hippy with incredibly long dreadlocks? Yes, the dirty and dreadlocked can frequently be found near oil rigs, but it is usually in the context of being led away in handcuffs.
Truly there is no better way to let your geek flag fly than with a nerdy T-shirt. Sure you could get a semi-functional VU meter shirt from Think Geek or wear anything seen on the chest of the Irish guy from "The IT Crowd," but wouldn't you rather dress like a rabid consumer of obscure trash cinema?
Yes now you too can dress just like the proprietor of this website... or at least dress like he would if he wasn't a cheap bastard that just spent all his money on Demon's Souls and a capped-rail picket fence for the Video Updates Small Dog Squad.
A venerable distributor of VHS tapes during the format's '80s heyday, the Vestron Video logo and/or corporate influence can be found on many of the films discussed here at Video Updates, including Slaughter High, Class of 1999, and Chopping Mall (under their "Lightning Video" subsidiary), as well as a whole host of genre favorites. Re-Animator, An American Werewolf in London, and Ghoulies just to name a few of the literally hundreds of movies they distributed. (They are also sadly responsible for the creation of Dirty Dancing and Earth Girls Are Easy.)
Another relic of the golden age of analog video tapes, Cannon Films is the company to praise/blame for things like Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo (seriously), Delta Force, and Death Wish parts 2 through 4. Amongst the action films and generic '80s filler, they also produced or distributed a host of horror and sci-fi films, including Tobi Hooper's underrated Lifeforce (which coincidentally was distributed by Vestron in some markets). None of their videos have currently been "Updated," but reviews on The Apple, Invasion USA, and possibly Ninja 3: The Domination are on the calender.
Plus, how many defunct production companies have fansites?
What the shit? This glorious affront to eyeballs everywhere is the latest gear from the venerated art-house distributor The Criterion Collection. It seems their theatrical arm, Janus Films, has gotten its mitts on the obscure Japanese slice of crazy known as Hausu (House) and has been showing it theatrically. (Fingers crossed for a DVD in the near future.) I caught it at the Oak Street a few weeks ago and was surprised at how little of the story I missed while watching my shitty, subtitle free bootleg.
Following a group of Japanese schoolgirls all named after their dominant personality trait and their misadventures in a kitty-cat controlled haunted house, it's an intensely strange, sumptuously photographed, and irrepressibly goofy little horror film that will leave you scratching your head and grinning like an idiot. It makes The Happiness of the Katakuris look like Picnic at Hanging Rock. Full review early next week.
Note: Any of these shirts would make an excellent X-mas gift for that special nerdy someone in your life. Hint hint, readers who I share DNA or alma maters with. (Probably most of you.)
I'm addicted to using parentheses, (Ooooh, that's the stuff) I watch a lot of very strange and/or obscure movies, I love videogames, I make promotional videos for sporting goods, I have a totally sweet dog who is lazier than I am, and I will most likely never finish the Sci-Fi novel I'm writing.
Update 2017: the dog and the sci-fi novel are both dead. I make children and movies now.
