With our tax refund this year we bought a new TV, a 50″ Samsung plasma television and a significant upgrade from our previous television, an early HD-ready set, much smaller but not flat-screen, that weighed about a thousand pounds.  This, in conjunction with recently inheriting my parents’ cast-off surround-sound speakers, has resulted in a “home theater,” I believe the kids these days are calling it.  It was fortuitous that Amazon shipped our television the very day of Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, so we can see HD programming in all its splendor.  My last TV was set up to receive HD through a receiver in our Tivo, so the image we used to have wasn’t bad at all; however the colors were not as vivid as a plasma TV can provide, and the smaller monitor meant less detail.  Significantly, I can now more easily detect a difference between a standard DVD and a Blu-Ray…and now I am rapidly becoming a Blu-Ray advocate.  The difference is stunning.  Any curmudgeon who rails against having to adopt a new format I can only presume has not upgraded his system.  If you have a smaller TV, DVDs are fine.  At 50 inches (he said, sucking in his chest), wowza but that’s a nice picture.

Now, I am painfully aware that my personal library of DVDs has grown out of control.  It fills two giant bookshelves in our living room, and has stretched to a shelf in my den.  There are two reasons it’s grown so large over the last ten years: (1) the many opportunities to buy a cheap DVD, and (2) my borderline-absurd habit of purchasing a film simply because I like it and want to display it on my shelf as some sort of “evidence” of this otherwise abstract affection.  Now that I’ve gone broke splurging on this television, it gives me an opportunity to start revisiting this collection, to make good on my ten-year-long investment and actually watch the films in my library.

I had planned on making the Inglourious Basterds Blu-Ray the inaugural film for my new TV, but alas, I’ve yet to get around to it (though of course I’ve seen the film, and love it).  At a friend’s request we watched Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder first.  Prior to calibrating the TV, the brightness and contrast was cranked high, and the color was especially vivid, or vivider than vivid.  Naturally it looked gorgeous, if eye-straining.  Some research online and my wife and I calibrated the TV on our own, hoping to prolong the TV’s life.  It still looks fantastic, but animation looks especially grand.  I had previously been skeptical that an animated film would be worth releasing in Blu-Ray, thinking that there were limits to the detail that could be seen; however, after watching first the Futurama film and then Ralph Bakshi’s Fire & Ice on the HD format, I now believe that animation in Blu-Ray can look even better than live action film.  Simply put, the colors in animation are not meant to mimic reality, not even in a rotoscoped film like Fire & Ice.  Bakshi’s film, with its designs by acclaimed pulp illustrator Frank Frazetta and background paintings by James Gurney (later of the Dinotopia books) and a then-unknown Thomas Kincaid*, on this presentation really capture the quality of a vividly backlit painter’s canvas.  I doubt this film could ever look better – the impression was of seeing an image exactly as the director intended, with an accurate and subtle color range.  I also did notice details I hadn’t seen before, most likely because of the size of the set, such as the bite marks on a “beast-man”’s arm after he removes a slug-like creature; even a humorously smutty nipple slip which some animator snuck in while illustrating the scantily-clad princess.  Although a superior presentation will never turn the pulpy and pleasingly-adolescent Fire & Ice into a great film, the new factors at play here (including the 5.1 remix) did engage me in a way which the film never had before.  I recommend it, in particular to fans of fantasy illustration.

After this, it was spending a weekend doing the obligatory sampling of modern Hollywood blockbusters – I chose to rewatch the X-Men trilogy in BD.  As opposed to the animation I’d screened, the colors now were of a more subdued quality (partly a choice of the directors), and obviously the flesh tones were more subtle and realistic.  At this point, I was more accustomed to the presentation and found nothing earth-shattering, although I did become more emotionally involved in the action–in particular the series’ high point, the second film–in a way which I had not experienced since watching them in the theater, where the size of a screen creates a certain subjective impact during the viewing experience.  Later in the week, I watched the 2009 indie horror film House of the Devil and found that, despite the film’s self-conscious use of grain (it is set in the early 80’s, and in many ways imitates the style of genre films from that period), the film’s use of black shadows and long subjective shots of wandering through an “old dark house” had a visceral impact heightened by the presentation.  This is a film which relies upon putting the viewer in the protagonist’s shoes, seeing a threatening world through her eyes: the larger the screen, the more powerful is this effect, which heightens the suspense.

But if I was going to work through my library of titles, that meant watching those DVDs–many of which will likely never get a BD upgrade.  Thanks to the “upconverting” effect of watching a DVD on a Blu-Ray player connected via an HDMI cable, even the 80’s TV show “Cheers” looks just great, or as good as it ever will.  (At this point in any article of this kind, the reader will begin to judge the writer’s viewing habits.  You are perfectly welcome to do so.)  But my Blu-Ray player is not region-free, and unless I care to laboriously rearrange my cables each time I want to watch a non-Region 1 disc, the upconverting effect, as well as the 5.1 surround, is not present for that circumstance.  Nevertheless, I wanted to see how the French film Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra looked on a bigger monitor.  This wonderful live action comic book adaptation–never released in the States, since the Asterix comics here are known to few–actually looked quite good, even when connected by “mere” component cables.  The colors were especially good, particularly in shots of sunsets or bright blue skies over the desert.  However, although faces looked just fine, technology failed when it came to representing the desert sand.  The grains were a pixelized mess, something which BluRay would be especially adept at rendering.  (It was a marked contrast with watching so much Olympics coverage in HD, where I felt that I could reach out and sink my hand into the snow.)  Despite this shortcoming, I doubt I’ll be seeing this film released in a Region 1 Blu-Ray anytime soon, so I’ll keep my U.K. DVD of this very entertaining film.

Back to high definition, I decided to test an older film by watching Criterion’s The Third Man, which went out-of-print almost as soon as it was released on BD.  At first, spoiled, perhaps, by Olympics coverage and more modern films, the grain was distracting.  (This, from a film enthusiast!)  I had read, on websites such as dvdbeaver.com as well as in Video Watchdog, that Blu-Ray makes film grain more pronounced, one of the potential downsides of HD.  High definition is meant to capture tiny details, and when it comes to a film made in the 1940’s, grain as part of the negative will make up much of those “tiny details.”  But I quickly grew accustomed to what I was seeing: those swimming particles on the image actually brought me closer to when I first saw this film, on the big screen during its revival circa 1999.  I found that it brought a curious warmth to the film, perhaps of nostalgia, but also for the nature of film.  There is a different quality to watching an older film in high definition – it evokes not the details of “reality,” or even the heightened colors of artificial reality, but rather the intimacy of cinema, as well as the tangible quality of the medium (being film).

As I continue to explore my library, I promise my next entries on this subject will be more about the films themselves.  Watching these movies again, they come alive in new ways.  When it comes to cinema, bigger really is better.

*Painter of Light (TM).

Susana (Mexico, 1951)
D: Luis Bunuel

Criterion’s relatively-new Eclipse series releases box sets of overlooked films, free of special features but cheaper than a Criterion Collection “special edition” equivalent. My wish list of what Eclipse should cover is growing. I would still like them to do a Jacques Rivette set, but oh, how I would relish a survey of Luis Bunuel’s Mexican period – that decades-long period of exile in which the famous Surrealist produced low-budget, crowd-pleasing melodramas with delicious touches of fetishism, black comedy, and subversion. Many of these films are still unavailable on DVD, but I take what I can find: like a screening of Bunuel’s Hitchcockian comedy The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz at the University of Wisconsin’s Cinematheque in the fall of this year (paired deliriously with Pedro Almodovar’s Live Flesh, which quotes the film); or a StudioCanal box set, imported from the U.K., which rigorously covers Bunuel’s late period but also includes his Mexican (and English-language) film The Young One. Then there’s Susana, which I just watched on a DVD from Cinemateca, with a crude menu, no special features, and subtitles so small they’d be more effectively used for an eye exam. So entertaining is this bizarre little B-picture that you soon forget your complaints; or maybe that’s because you’re not reading the subtitles at all, but admiring the visual storytelling that renders the subtitles irrelevant. Or perhaps you’re simply gazing at Susana’s enticing legs.  During his Mexican-studio years, Bunuel would occasionally let slip a personal work, a masterpiece (Los Olvidados, Nazarin, The Executing Angel), but more commonly he would need to settle with contorting the conventional into a slightly odd new shape, but in such a subtle fashion that many wouldn’t notice. He wasn’t making movies for the editors of Film Comment – he had no reassurances his films would ever be seen outside of Mexico. But there is a personal touch to these pictures which is unmistakable once you’ve seen enough Bunuel; he is always present in his films, winking at you, as though his whole filmography is sustained on the back of one very strange private joke.

Blonde bombshell Susana (Rosita Quintana) is introduced inhabiting, by all appearances, a Universal monster movie: imprisoned in a cell filled with straw, surrounded by unwholesome creatures to which she immediately likens herself (improbably, a tarantula, rats, and a very large bat that hangs from the ceiling), she pleads to God to be set loose in nature, at which point, immediately, the cell bars come free in her hands, and she climbs to freedom by flashing lightning and rolling thunder, screaming madly with joy, crawling upon her belly in the mud to escape razor wire – she is wild, man-destroying lust, a monster on par with Frankenstein’s, Dracula, or The Wolf Man.  Soon she discovers an idyllic Mexican ranch, overseen by the stern Don Guadalupe (Fernando Soler), his scholarly son Alberto (Luis López Somoza), and the matriarch Dona Carmen (Matilde Palou).  Guadalupe is upset because his prize mare has given birth to a stillborn, and is now herself on death’s door – and will remain so while the story unfolds, for the ranch has fallen under an unspeakable curse.  Little do they know that the ill omens are warning them of Susana, who arrives with the terrible storm, and is glimpsed staring at the frightened household through the window, a ghostly apparition straight out of Turn of the Screw.  Integrated into the family as a servant, she soon begins behaving diabolically, first enflaming the eager, studly ranch-hand Jesus (Víctor Manuel Mendoza), then working her wiles on the virginal Alberto.  (She pretends to be shocked at the sight of male nudity in one of his books, before he explains that it’s a classical depiction of Apollo, god of poetry and the arts; within the minute she is covering him with passionate kisses.)  She’s climbing a ladder, with her eyes ultimately set upon Don Guadalupe, although this simple storyline is never actually stated, and is delivered rather incoherently.  In Bunuel’s hands, Susana is the story of a succubus set loose, acting as an agent of chaotic lust in the farm, setting one against the other to no apparent strategy until we finally see Guadalupe prepared to throw his wife out, and then we have to intuit, okay, this must be what she was after.  Yet one event does not follow the other through ordinary cinematic logic.  Bunuel is simply not interested.  He is interested in Susana, in particular her body, in particular her legs.  Those inclined to track his personal fetishism will be greatly amused at the amount of screen time given to Susana’s lower limbs: here draped in mud, there splattered with egg yolk.  Given that the film is ostensibly moralizing (the evils of temptation, and the dangers of Woman in particular), it’s nothing but delightful that Bunuel clearly doesn’t buy any of it, nor does he particularly care if you do.  The film, of course, is no more a straight-up drama than Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.  It shows its true colors in that opening scene in the cell, and most particularly in the repetition of Susana, each time she wants to make an impression, lowering her blouse off her shoulders with great fuss.  It’s a costume change akin to Clark Kent stepping into a phone booth.  Eventually the men in the white coats do show up, at just the right moment, and we get a wonderfully phony resolution – Dona Carmen forgives her husband and son, Jesus is welcomed back, the mare recovers - which is so perfect that it is utterly insincere.  As the years progressed, Bunuel would refine his skill in creating subversive “happy” endings, such as sneaking a menage-a-trois reference into the last line of Viridiana, or strongly implying that Belle de Jour has not been forgiven by her husband, but slipped back into a dream (or insanity).  A modern viewer of Susana can relish the sophisticated camp, and the fact that Bunuel, temporarily beholden to commercial interests, never lost his bite.

October 31
#28 House of Dracula (1945)
#29 God Told Me To (1975)
#30 Madhouse (1974)
#31 Bedlam (1946)
#32 Feast (2006)
#33 Halloween (2007)

It’s all a blur to me now, as I stagger out of bed to set all the clocks back one hour, and notice the plastic cauldron stuffed with candy still sitting on the coffee table, and the dining room table crammed with more bags of unused candy; and there are horror DVDs scattered about the living room.  What happened?  I must piece it together.  I do recall waking and then refraining from films for Halloween morning – I believe I accomplished the act of laundry.  But after breakfast and a shower, it began around 11:30 – I decided to watch a Universal horror, I remember that now, because I hadn’t seen any of the classic monsters all month long.  So I watched House of Dracula, one of the last Universal monster mashes, and a movie I should have seen before, since it was sitting on my shelf, but although the idea of Dracula (John Carradine) seeking out a doctor (Onslow Stevens) to cure his vampirism certainly rang a bell, the majority of this film felt new to me.  Not fresh, mind you.  Interesting timing that Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.) should arrive at the doctor’s castle seeking a cure for his own problem – becoming the Wolf Man – at the exact same time as Dracula; curious, too, that the doctor has a hunchbacked assistant, albeit a beautiful female one (disappointingly, her name is not Igora).  Later the doctor discovers Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange) and seeks to revive it, although his stated reason – to discover the secret of immortality – makes no sense, since Dracula has just turned him into a vampire (secret discovered!).  But with so many monsters, and so much fun, who has time for plot?  Then I watched an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, to further the holiday mood, and this too involved a vampire, one working as a call girl in Los Angeles.  If I recall, this was extemely funny.  I – couldn’t have watched another movie right away, could I? – no, I walked the dogs.  I did some house chores.  I watched God Told Me To, an early Larry Cohen (Q: The Winged Serpent) film about a number of bizarre mass murders, all of them committed spontaneously and with no apparent motive, except that the perpetrators claim, “God told me to.”  A cop (Tony Lo Bianco), religious to the core but with a troubled personal life, is the first to see the connection between the crimes, and pursues the cause until he receives a very bizarre supernatural answer.  They recently remade Cohen’s It’s Alive, but should have tackled this one instead.  Cohen reveals a big twist far too early, could have spent a bit more time exploring the theological question in the film – which dates back, as the film reminds us, to Abraham being asked by God to sacrifice his son Isaac – and certainly lets the plot get muddled by the time the climax arrives; still, fans of 70’s grindhouse should watch, as it’s weird as all get-out.  As for the Amicus picture Grindhouse, starring Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, and Robert Quarry, I would suggest giving a pass.  Oh, it was amicable (sorry) entertainment while making dinner and not paying a great deal of attention, but this late-period Price exploiter, in which he plays an aging horror star whose alter ego, Dr. Death, appears to be murdering cast and crew members of his new TV show, is padded out far too much by clips from older Price AIP films.  I did enjoy an appearance by Brit hottie Linda Hayden (Taste the Blood of Dracula), even if she is murdered almost as soon as she arrives. 

After dinner, we walked from the Madhouse into Bedlam, as the Val Lewtonathon concluded.  Boris Karloff plays the warden of the notorious mental institution, the Bethlehem Royal Hospital in London, in the 18th century; the inimitable Anna Lee (King Solomon’s Mines) plays Nell Bowen, society girl whose proud defiance and insults toward Karloff and her benefactor, Lord Mortimer (Billy House), find her admitted against her will to the hospital.  By far the classiest of all the Lewton films, it’s a riveting social drama, with appropriate eerie touches (including a memorably grim comeuppance for Karloff), and a script which, in its best moments, is worthy of Oscar Wilde.  But enough of class.  Feast is Project Greenlight’s only horror film, and although it’s said to be the best film the reality-TV series produced, this is pretty disposable stuff.  It’s yet another monster movie utilizing the “siege” scenario which was so effective in the hands of George A. Romero and John Carpenter, but is pretty standard-issue by now; in fact, the lower-profile Splinter, which I reviewed earlier this month, is actually more compelling than this, even though some could argue it’s less inventive.  Splinter had fun with its concept while playing the action with a straight face.  Sometimes, that’s all I ask for.  Feast, on the other hand, is a “horror comedy” which is far too smug to provide real laughs.  There’s nothing less funny than a guy who thinks he’s the funniest guy in the room.  Feast certainly offers the most repulsive monsters I’ve ever seen in a motion picture, but I’ll take The Return of the Living Dead over this, thanks; that one is funny. 

The current genre trend in Hollywood is to stop with the countless sequels and “reboot” the franchise instead (that, and to remake every horror film made between 1975 and 1985).  Think for a moment that there was once a sequel to Halloween called Halloween: H20.  Yes, there is nothing more frightening than Halloween Water.  That was not actually the twentieth Halloween film, but it might as well have been: John Carpenter’s original is now considered a horror classic, and it served as a template for all slashers which arrived in its wake, but its strength was efficiency.  It was short, it was simple, and there was no explanation for the boogey man (known in the credits as “The Shape,” but better known to all as Michael Myers); he escaped from the asylum, he slaughtered some teens, and then he disappeared.  So understandably many were upset when Rob Zombie signed on to direct the inevitable “reboot.”  The 1978 Halloween is not, they would argue, House of 1000 Corpses, and Zombie’s white-trash, film-junkie aesthetic always splits fans right down the middle.  Further, there is always the apprehension that an inferior remake might overshadow the original, somehow replace it, or at the least be viewed by younger folks who would never then seek out the source.  I only read negative fan reaction to Zombie’s Halloween, but maybe that says more about the message boards I read than what people thought on the whole; after all, Zombie did just release a sequel.  But of all the remakes, reboots, and reiterations, this one serves as an interesting study in honoring the original while opening it up and, in a strange way, defying it.  Consider that the original Halloween is here, almost in its entirety, with some shots recreated with great specificity (such as Myers cocking his head curiously at the victim he’s just pinned to the wall with a knife).  But this storyline does not begin until a full hour into the film.  The first hour is, essentially, an expansion of the opening few minutes of Carpenter’s film.  The prologue of the original Halloween famously featured a subjective tracking shot from a very young Michael as he invades a house, puts on a mask and fetches a kitchen knife, spies upon a young woman and then slaughters her.  Zombie includes this minus the POV shot, but expands not only the body count but everything else: his film actually opens with the young Michael being taunted by his mother’s boyfriend and his older sister, and bullied by the kids at school.  We learn that he has a history of killing small animals.  Then we see his first murder, when he isolates one of those bullies in the woods and clubs him to death with a tree branch.  Perhaps emboldened by the crime, he turns his retribution upon his own household.  A child psychiatrist, Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance in the original, ably replaced by Malcolm McDowell here), was already looking into Michael’s case before the crimes were committed, and so, for the next fifteen years, he studies Michael and authors a book about him.  He’s fascinated by Michael’s obsession with wearing masks, and also by his complete absence of emotion – the “void” that seems to be lurking behind all those masks.  As we expect, eventually a grown-up Michael (now played by wrestler Tyler Mane, Troy’s Ajax) escapes from imprisonment and journeys to Haddonfield, where he terrorizes teenager Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) and her two girlfriends, with Loomis in pursuit.  Although Carpenter opened his film with a POV shot, it was a cheat: he never actually asked us to empathize with Michael Myers or to understand him in any way whatsoever.  For the rest of Carpenter’s Halloween, Michael Myers was, in fact, “The Shape,” a figure glimpsed out of a classroom window or down the sidewalk, always a distant watcher until he finally began his relentless attack, with that painted-white, nondescript face mask and its shadowy eye-holes.  Zombie’s remake drew ire partly because he substituted the POV trick-shot with real perspective on Michael Myers’ childhood.  Many simply did not want to know where Michael came from, the promiscuity which surrounded him (his bullies tease him because his mother is a stripper; his sister has sex while her mother’s boyfriend dozes in front of the TV downstairs), or the fact that he liked to kill rats.  But it should be noted that despite all of this “explanation,” Michael is still, as Dr. Loomis tells us, unknowable.  He is still The Shape, even without his mask.  In fact, he is the mask, which is why Michael is only comfortable when he’s wearing it.  The first hour of the film might just be set-up, but it’s still compelling, and when we suddenly switch to Haddonfield and the familiar Laurie Strode, we smile, because Zombie suddenly announces what he’s doing: now let’s watch the original film and see how it plays.  Here he becomes almost rigidly faithful to Carpenter, although, being Rob Zombie, he ramps up the sex and nudity.  As for the violence, in this portion of the film it doesn’t seem to me that much more grisly than Carpenter’s (almost bloodless) original, though at least one of the killings reminded me of The Devil’s Rejects in how it emphasizes the desperation and agony of its victim.  One thing I’ve always liked about Rob Zombie’s films is that he doesn’t let us forget that dying is a horrible thing.  He’s not interested in the makeup effects and the gimmick-kills of, say, the Friday the 13th franchise.  He’s more invested in the horror generated by a realistic portrayal of murder.  I watched the uncut version of Zombie’s film, which runs 121 minutes and feels it.  Now, the real question should be: is Carpenter’s Halloween even worthy of this kind of epic treatment?  The plot is still threadbare.  Carpenter’s film was lean and mean; Zombie’s is not just sprawling, but self-conscious in its schematic construction.  His is almost a shrine to the original, like the tombstone which Myers lugs around; but, critically, in the second half Zombie undercuts Carpenter’s intentions deliberately, and it’s a decision that will make or break the film to horror fans.  In Zombie’s vision, Laurie is an adopted daughter of the Strodes, and in reality she is Michael’s baby sister, whom he refused to harm when he went on his first massacre.  The whole reason he returns to Haddonfield – 100 miles away – is to find her again.  This would be the other reason this film drew so much ire.  But after my initial surprise, I found myself enjoying the twist, simply because he needed something to justify the length of the film.  When watching the original, I’m terrified by Myers’ unstoppable assault on Laurie and her friends; in the remake, I’m just exhausted.  But drawing some kind of connection between the two of them adds just enough emotional resonance to spark this corpse back to life (and just when rigor mortis was settling in).  Is Rob Zombie’s Halloween a great film?  No, certainly not.  Does it replace or overshadow the original?  Far from it.  But Rob Zombie’s films are always worth watching, because despite his occasional puerile impulses, he also has the instincts of a natural filmmaker.  Most importantly, he’s always interested in the story he’s telling and the characters who inhabit it.  There are scenes in this film of Laurie babysitting, joking around with her young charge, which are far more believable and realistic (and warm) than anything in Carpenter’s film.  I would also point out a brief moment right after Michael stabs his older sister.  While she looks at him in shock, Zombie cuts to a close-up of Michael’s eyes peering through the mask’s holes, looking at her curiously, almost introspectively, as though he’s trying to figure out how he feels about this – and discovering that he doesn’t feel anything.  Carpenter was content to stare out from those eye-holes for a horrifying effect; but Zombie, looking through from the other side, gives us a brief glimpse of the amorality behind Michael Myers, and it’s at least as horrifying, because he’s still The Shape intact.

Halloween is over.  I stagger away from the TV, I type these words, I vow never to do it again.  I meant to do thirty-one, I did thirty-three!  But give me a few days, and I’ll probably change my mind.

October 30
#26 The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
#27 Isle of the Dead (1945)

Today on NPR’s Science Friday, Ira Flatow was interviewing Steven Schlozman, Co-Director of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, professional child psychiatrist, and author of a new paper on the science of zombies.  Inevitably a caller asked why some zombies move slowly (George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead) while others can run (the remake of Dawn of the Dead).  Schlozman patiently answered, “Neurobiologically speaking, [zombies who run] gotta be different, they gotta have better cerebellar function than the Romero-type zombies because they move too fluidly…and they also kind of use pack behavior, hunting behavior, which suggests higher cortical involvement than you would see in Romero zombies, which literally stumble around and get stuck in windows and can’t figure out how to open them.” 

Naturally, this study deserved further research, and so I pushed forward into 1985’s The Return of the Living Dead.

Here, we have an early example of the running zombie, and this zombie also demonstrates the pack-hunting behavior which Schlozman noted.  They run after paramedics screaming, “Brains!  Brains!” and then chew upon the paramedics’ skulls.  But even more impressive, and which Schlozman should certainly look into, is their ability to adapt and learn.  For example, when a dispatcher calls into the ambulance’s radio, a zombie picks it up and responds with, “Bring more paramedics.”  Not very much later we see more ambulances arrive, and these paramedics are immediately ambushed by a horde of brains-hungry zombies.  Later in the film, the exact same tactic works in fetching delicious policemen.  Schlozman also mentioned the theory that zombie-ism spreads like influenza.  In The Return of the Living Dead, writer/director Dan O’Bannon demonstrates a more ecological variant of that theory.  At an army surplus store, the virus is unleashed by a chemical developed by the government and stored in a vat dating from 1969, which was when, according to a testimonial in the film, the events which inspired Night of the Living Dead originally took place.  (This seems odd seeing as Night was released in 1968, but perhaps the unreliability of the testimony’s source should be taken into account.)  This major discovery – that there was in fact an incident involving re-animated corpses in the 1960’s - at last settles the decades-old question as to what caused the outbreak in Romero’s film: it was, in reality if not in Romero’s fictional version, a gas developed by the government for purposes unknown, but most likely military.  When the gas is accidentally released again, it brings to life a corpse, which, when a pickaxe to the brain proves ineffective, is subsequently chopped into pieces by the brave men stationed at the warehouse.  Even these pieces still throb and wiggle with life.  With the coroner’s help, all the pieces of the corpse are incinerated, and the fumes caused by the cremation device drift up into the clouds, causing a toxic rain to fall upon the local cemetery.  Here, an army of corpses rise from the tainted soil, attacking a group of teenagers who had been merely enjoying simple pleasures such as drinking, dancing naked upon a sarcophagus, and moaning soulfully, “I just want to party.”  Later, after a group of survivors take shelter in the morgue, one zombie, severed at the waist and with a spinal cord that thrashes about, is tied to a table and interrogated.  The zombie explains that devouring brains eases the pain of death, the agony of rotting.  So it appears there is some kind of narcotic effect in brains-consumption.

Isle of the Dead, the latest entry in my ongoing Val Lewtonathon, unfortunately does not bring to light any useful information into a scientific inquiry of the zombie’s biology, although quite a few corpses turn up.  Boris Karloff plays Pherides, a general in Greece during the First Balkan War.  A rigid and sometimes callous leader of men, during a break in fighting he wishes to visit his wife’s tomb, so he takes a boat to a local island guarded by a statue of the three-headed gatekeeper of Hades, Cerberus (Pherides is himself called the “Watchdog” by his men).  Enraged upon finding that the tomb has been violated and his wife’s body is missing, he visits what appears to be the only habitation on the island to question everyone inside.  The house is owned by an archaeologist who was studying the ruins on the isle, and there are enough guests staying with him to warrant an Agatha Christie novel.  Sure enough, soon someone dies, and when a doctor declares it’s the plague, the general assists in quarantining the lot of them on the island.  But the weird, raving woman in black–a requisite of every household–is convinced the escalating deaths are being caused by a vorvolaka, a sort of vampire, taking the form of the beautiful young Thea (Ellen Drew).  Although Isle of the Dead does not concern itself with zombies, it does dwell, as so many Lewton films do, almost obsessively on the subject of death.  Here, on this island which might as well by the Underworld, one woman is mistakenly buried alive, and the result upon her psyche turns her into a sort of zombie, staggering, inarticulate, and murderous.  Director Mark Robson takes his time developing the plot, withholding the supernatural to the extent that one is quite sure, early on, that nothing supernatural will happen at all.  But slowly a spooky atmosphere settles in, fittingly claustrophobic, and at last we get some very satisfyingly eerie moments indeed, and even a pair of brutal murders with a trident.  If Ingmar Bergman ever adapted an Edgar Allan Poe story, it might have come out like this.

October 28
#25 Orphan (2009)

One has to begrudgingly admire Dark Castle Films, which, since 1999, has been consistently producing moderately-budgeted, slickly-produced, perfectly respectable horror films, none of them all that great by any means.  The original purpose of the company was to remake the films of William Castle, the legendary gimmickeer of 1950’s horror (The Tingler); but after 1999’s House on Haunted Hill and 2001’s Thirteen Ghosts, the company wisely decided to seek out more original material.  Orphan, mind you, is hardly original.  The idea of killer kids has been around since at least 1956’s The Bad Seed, which featured a murderous child played by Patty McCormack, and which spawned a number of imitators over the decades.  (I remember suffering through 1993’s The Good Son, with Macaulay Culkin, on a plane flight to Orlando, and being not terribly bothered that the plane’s rumble drowned out most of the dialogue.)  The Omen, The Children (1980 and now 2008), Children of the Corn (1984 and 2009)…I could give or take these movies, although I have a soft spot for the glowing-eyed, blond-haired tots of the original Village of the Damned.   The taboo appeal is obvious: see little kids commit horrible acts!  But the better entries usually offer something a little more to sustain interest: the occult mystery in The Omen, the sci-fi elements of Damned.  Or, perhaps, the acting and an aura of class, which is really what sets Orphan apart, although most will remember it for a late-act, “I can’t believe they just went there” twist.

Vera Farmiga (The Departed) and Peter Sarsgaard (Kinsey) play Kate and John Coleman, parents of two children, one a young girl who is mostly deaf, the other a preteen boy; a third, Jessica, was killed in a tragic accident, the details of which are unveiled over the course of the film, and a rose-decorated shrine to her memory sits outside their home. The opening scenes are the best in the film, as we see a believable portrait of family life, from casual warmth to ordinary tensions; there’s a simple and perfectly lovely sequence in which Kate signs to her daughter from a children’s book designed to help children cope with death. All of this is carefully set to a natural domestic rhythm, and it’s refreshing that genre elements don’t kick in until three-quarters of an hour have passed; undoubtedly this is why the gory shocker prologue (a silly dream sequence which has nothing to do with the tone of the rest of the film) was added. Kate and John decide to adopt, and find a Russian girl who is remarkably intelligent and creative. Their first impression is that they’ll have a gifted child – though with this comes, at first, seemingly minor signs of defiance or precociousness: she insists on wearing her antiquated, doll-like dresses, and wishes to violate a Coleman family rule by locking the door when she goes into the bathroom (the mother is nothing if not overprotective of her children, following the accidental death of Jessica). And slowly she begins to confront and manipulate the family in bizarre ways, for a purpose that is not at first clear, except that perhaps she, too, has seen The Bad Seed.

When Orphan gets going, it settles so securely into those well-worn subgenre ruts that one merely looks to see how well the vehicle drives.  In that respect, Orphan passes muster, just barely, and mainly thanks to young Isabelle Fuhrman, who gives a jarringly mature performance as Esther, one that can sell her steely-menace lines.  When she prepares to squash her brother’s head under a rock in the same manner that she earlier flattened a pigeon, you can believe that she doesn’t see much of a difference.  It’s both thrilling and gloriously absurd how decisively and openly Esther acts without getting caught; if this film were another half-hour longer, I expect she would be marching through town square with a flamethrower torching kids while the police and her parents just happen to be looking the other way.

Ever since The Sixth Sense, it seems all Hollywood genre films require a twist ending, no matter how much M. Night has devalued the idea in the intervening years. Nobody likes a twist that betrays the viewer’s trust. Ideally, a twist ending should enrich what one has previously seen, not trash it. Thankfully, Orphan’s twist–and it’s a biggie–allows you to reevaluate everything you’ve seen without necessarily voiding any established emotional connections or through-lines. But it also threatens to move the whole enterprise into the realm of camp (which fans of this subgenre usually embrace anyway). The twist does make sense, in a cracked sort of way, and it genuinely earns the “horror” label for what it manages to imply. (Or maybe just the “ick” label?) In that respect, I would almost recommend Orphan–almost. The climax is so rote that it’s dull: a chase, a little bit of gruesomeness, all vanilla-flavored. Just when the imagination seems to be kicking in, we get a sleepwalking screenwriter. How much more interesting it might have been if the film used the twist to finally tell us a completely different story than the one we were expecting going in? But then, this is a Dark Castle film, and that was a buzzer under your seat, my friend, not the Tingler.