Tag Archives: cinema

Trash Film Guru Vs. The Summer Blockbusters : “Prometheus”

Posted on by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

It’s funny how our expectations going into a film shape our perceptions of it while we’re watching it and, ultimately, our final opinions about it after we’ve seen it. Case in point : yesterday on this very blog I was talking about Snow White And The Huntsman, a movie I frankly expected nothing from, and about how, even though it delivered nothing but a substance-free series of pretty pretty pictures to look at, I wasn’t too pissed off about spending my hard-earned money to see because I wasn’t even sure it would deliver that much (or that little). Today, on the other hand, I’m going to be discussing a flick that I flat-out expected to suck, and that pretty much delivered on those expectations — yet left me feeling pretty well ripped off even though it, too was gorgeous to look at and even though, again, I figured it would be at least as bad as it was, if not worse.

I’m talking, of course, about Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s completely unnecessary Alien prequel. The reasons I went into this with essentially no optimism whatsoever are numerous — Scott hasn’t made a good film since Blade Runner, the script was co-authored by some guy named Jon Spaihts and one of the chief culprits behind the unwatchable, thoroughly confused mess that was TV’s Lost, Damen Lindelof (who’s apparently irked huge segments of the online film geek community with a recent series of over-the-top-in-the-self-serving-department comments), and frankly because any film that set out to “explain” and “demystify” the H.R. Giger-designed evil aliens form the original film series sounded like something with the power to not only be completely pointless (some power), but to actively detract from the impact the first film had by filling in a bunch of blanks that are best left — well, blank.

Of course, there were reasons for optimism, as well — a first-rate cast, sure-fire scrumptious CGI effects, and a promised “return to the Alien series’ roots” after some rather unfortunate side-steps and detours all sounded pretty cool, but I still went into this one prepared for the worst.

I didn’t get that. Instead I got a confused, cliched, every-bit-as-unnecessary-as-I’d-expected mess of a film that, in its defense, at least really does look amazing. Which was enough for me to give Snow White And The Huntsman a pass, admittedly — but hyprocrite that I am I just can’t be as forgiving when it comes to Prometheus. Why not? Because at the end of the day I don’t really give a shit either way about the Snow White legend, but I do care about the Alien franchise. A lot. Scott’s first film rates right up there with John Carpenter’s The Thing on my list of all-time great sci-fi horrors, and I even enjoyed most of the various sequels to one degree or another. So it’s fair to say that, even though I didn’t figure it would be, I still wanted this flick to be good.

So where to begin with the reasons why it wasn’t? Well, how about we start with that stellar cast I mentioned a minute ago. It’s completely wasted. Apart from the film’s “Ripley-lite” protagonist, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace, who turns in a heck of a good performance), none of the characters are developed at all. the very talented Idris Elba is stuck in a one-dimensional role as the titular ship’s captain and can’t even seem to decide what accent he should settle on when he’s speaking. Charlize Theron plays an ice princess — again. Michael Fassbender, at the top of pretty much every current Hollywood “hot” list, turns in a dry, uninvolved turn as the ship’s android that won’t be causing Ian Holm to lose any sleep (although, in Fassbender’s defense, the fact that Spaihts and Lindelof reveal that he’s robotic from the outset doesn’t help matters any). Guy Pearce, as old man Weyland, the expedition’s financier, might as well be replaced with a computer-generated stand-in. There’s even a completely pointless two-second cameo from Patrick Wilson inserted for reasons I can’t even begin to fathom. So much talent with oh so little to actually, you know, do.

Then there’s the script. Dear God, what a disaster. Shoehorning a bunch of unnecessary Chariots Of The Gods-style crap into the Alien “mythos” is about the worst direction these truly Lost writers could have chosen to go. Instead of illuminating anything (not , again, that much “illumination” was really needed — the original story stood on its own just fine), it just muddies the waters. There’s some laughably atrocious dialogue that wouldn’t sound out of place in an Ed Wood film (like when the ship’s geologist, in the midst of a massive freak-out, declares ” I like rocks, right? I really like rocks!”). And the main thrust of the action is essentially a direct carbon copy of the “story arc” from the first film (you know, for instance, who the only survivor is going to be from the outset). It’s like Spaihts and Lindelof can’t decide between trying to do something completely out of left field (albeit thoroughly confusing) or just settling on the same old blueprint so in the end, they go for both — and end up doing each competing narrative impulse a massive disservice.

I keep coming back to the amazing visual prowess Scott’s CGI gurus display here consistently from start to finish, and I suppose it’s worth mentioning one more time just to balance the scales here a bit, but what’s that old saying about lipstick on a pig? Prometheus cakes on the makeup, but underneath, its true face is still that of the victim of a particularly nasty car wreck. And like an accident victim, it’s so disfigured and tragic that you’re almost tempted to feel sorry for it — until you learn that said victim was driving drunk at 150 mph and the person in the other car (I guess that would be the audience in this case — bear with me as I stretch this metaphor way beyond the breaking point) didn’t make it out alive.

It takes an almost Herculean effort to not be as bad as I was fearing Prometheus would be yet still somehow leave me feeling even more cheated and let down than I would have felt had it actually been even worse (if that makes any sense at all) —yet that’s exactly what Scott, Spaihts, and Lindelof  have managed to do here. File that under “go figure” and then, to return the already-worn-out accident metaphor, move along, folks — nothing to see here.

Trash Film Guru Vs. The Summer Blockbusters : “Snow White And The Huntsman”

Posted on by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

Having proven yesterday how little I know about all things vampire with my review of Abraham Lincoln : Vampire Hunter, I figured I’d take a crack at another mythic genre, namely the fairy tale — or “folklore,” if you prefer — today. Why stop when you’re on a roll, right?

To be honest, though,  I guess what we’re here to talk about isn’t even “folklore” per se so much as the modern interpretation of a very popular piece of folklore indeed, since the film under our microscope this evening is first-time director Rupert Sanders’ Snow White And The Huntsman, the second “reimagining” of the Snow White legend to hit the screens this year following hot on the heels of Mirror, Mirror, and definitely the decidedly more “mature” of the two.

There were, frankly, a lot of reasons to be skeptical about this movie going in — Kristen Stewart sure isn’t my idea of perfect casting in the lead, for one thing — but on the whole, I actually walked out of this one pleasantly surprised. Not blown away, by any means — hell, not even bowled over — but it visually arresting enough and well-paced enough to sustain my interest throughout, even though the idea of Snow White as some kind of bad-ass warrior queen seems absurd to a guy like me who basically only knows the Disney version, and remembers it very faintly at that.

Sanders, who I understand got his start in music videos, definitely brings the kind of “these folks have a short attention span, so let’s not let up on the gas” attitude you’d expect from somebody fresh out of that milieu, and while he doesn’t really seem to be much of an actor’s director — Charlize Theron in given free reign to ham it up to the hilt with her interpretation of the evil Queen Ravenna, Chris Hemsworth is essentially just reprising his Thor role as the co-titular Hunstman, and Stewart does what she does “best,” namely look completely lost but somehow project an attitude that we’re supposed to think that’s “sexy,” and that we’re damn lucky she even inhabits the same planet as us mere mortals, as Snow White herself — but when he’s laying out a visual feast this scrumptious, I can live with a few of the ingredients being a bit sour and/or stale.

And what a feast it is! Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of liberal borrowing from the Tim Burton playbook going on here, particularly with little tricks like superimposing the heads of the likes of Bob Hoskins and Ian McShane onto CGI dwarves’ bodies, but Sanders’ overall vision of  the fantastic is considerably less color-saturated and joyful than Burton’s, and frankly a little edgier. When Burton goes “dark” or “morbid” he does so with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, while Sanders really seems to mean it — this shit is supposed be more than just a little bit intimidating.

In that sense, he’s probably closer to the original intent of the Brothers Grimm and their contemporaries than he may even have consciously been aiming for, since “fairy tales” weren’t just designed to keep the young’uns of years gone by entertained, but to scare the shit out of them by illustrating the consequences of what would happen if they didn’t do as they were told, as well. There’s irony, I suppose, in the fact that this film, clearly billed as an “adult” take on the Snow White legend, actually ends up being closer, in tone and spirit, to the original than the decidedly more “family-friendly” Mirror, Mirror, but it’s the kind of irony I can certainly get behind, especially when the end result, while ultimately as disposable as most any other summer blockbuster fare (notice how pretty much all my praise here is aimed solely at the film’s visual sensibility and nothing else — there’s good reason for that, as the story is essentially exactly the kind of  hollow, by-the-numbers modern Hollywood take on the proceedings that you’d expect), is this downright fascinating to look at. Beneath the surface, there’s not much of anything going on in Snow White And The Huntsman, to put things as kindly as possible —but the surface is so damn lush, cryptic, and enthralling that you won’t realize, or even care, that you’ve pretty much been had until well after you leave the theater.

Trash Film Guru Vs. The Summer Blockbusters : “Abraham Lincoln : Vampire Hunter”

Posted on by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

I’m not exactly sure what the advertising tagline is for this film — as a matter of fact, near as I can tell it doesn’t seem to actually have one — but I know what it ought to be : “Silver — It’s Not Just For Werewolves Anymore.”

Look, I don’t consider myself to be a scholar of the vampiric arts (or whatever they’re called)  by any means — I’ve never seen True Blood or any of the Twilight films, for instance — but I know what kills these guys : wooden stakes through the heart. Garlic. Holy water. Sunlight.

Silver? That’s for lycanthropes. But apparently not anymore. Or, rather, not in the 1800s. Don’t get me wrong — director Timur Bekmambetov’s Abraham Lincoln : Vampire Hunter (based on the novel of the same name by Seth Grahame-Smith, who also wrote the screenplay, and produced by Tim Burton, whatever that’s worth) is a clever enough little piece of throwaway historical revisionism : vampires were responsible for the death of Honest Abe (Benjamin Walker)’s parents and so, concurrent with his rise in politics, he also undertakes a crusade, under the watchful eye of his mysterious mentor, Henry Sturgess (Dominic Cooper) to kill as many of them as he can in his off-hours with this kick-ass silver-bladed trick axe that he’s got. To make matters even worse, these dastardly vampires also control the slave trade (guess it’s too controversial these days to point out that it was other human beings who were responsible for shackling, buying, selling, and ultimately working to death their brethren for generations), and we know how the man in the stove pipe hat felt about that whole dastardly business.

Okay, fair enough — while I’m sure our fellow countrymen and women south of the Mason-Dixon line might take some offense at the idea that their side in the war is depicted here as being  controlled by vampires, my honest response to that is one of “tough shit, you’re getting off easy — your real ancestors (not that it’s in any way rational to hold people responsible for the actions of their forefathers) were fighting to keep people enslaved not because they were manipulated by supernatural forces but because they were just plain greedy and racist. Feel better now?,” in point of fact it’s actually a pretty clever pretense. Even clever enough to (almost) sustain an entire film.

But then we come back to this whole goddamn silver thing.  Seriously, it’s like vampire Kryptonite in this flick. There’s just no getting around how easy it makes to kill ’em off. And that undermines what otherwise would be a pretty entertaining enough little thrill ride. The performances are perfectly decent on the whole. The costumes, sets, and effects, are all top-notch. The historicity, while complete bullshit, holds together coherently enough. And the whole thing doesn’t take itself too terribly seriously, always something this reviewer in particular appreciates. But the sheer amount of suspension of disbelief required to actually thoroughly (as opposed to in a rather half-hearted and detached “oh, that’s kinda clever” sort of way) enjoy this film becomes a bridge  just  a tad too far when we throw this annoying  new mega- wrinkle into the vampire mythos. I get why they did it, but it grates just the same, and Grahame-Smith’s story relies on it so heavily that it takes what would otherwise be an acceptable enough deus ex machina and turns it into a thick, heavy, lumbering, unyielding crutch. Think of it as the silver straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Trash Film Guru Vs. The Summer Blockbusters – “Dark Shadows”

Posted on by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

First off, a qualification : if you’re a lifelong (or thereabouts) fan of Dan Curtis’ classic Dark Shadows TV series, I can understand why you would hate Tim Burton’s new film of the same name. It’s many things, but old-school Dark Shadows isn’t one of them. Feel free, with my full blessing (whatever that’s worth), to absolutely despise this flick right down to a molecular level if you fit into this category of viewer. But if you don’t —

— then seriously, where is all this vitriol coming from? I’m not saying it’s a tremendous or important movie by any means, but it’s brainless, entertaining, heavy-on-the-camp fun that’s pretty solidly constructed Burton-by-the-numbers.

And maybe that’s the problem. Tim Burton’s work has, indeed, become almost relentlessly formulaic by this point : de-fang horror/gothic/50s-era sci-fi concepts to make them palatable to mainstream family audiences, concentrate heavily on the visuals, strenuously avoid even the hint of any political subtext, add in a dash of blatantly-obvious-but-ultimately-respectful-to-its-source self-satire, have your admittedly talented cast skew their performances toward the knowingly pantomime, and voila! You’ve got yourself morbidity for the masses.

Apparently this is now some sort of crime. Granted, Dark Shadows is no Ed Wood or Big Fish, but it doesn’t wallow in Burtonian excess the way that the more successful (as far as the box office goes) Charlie And The Chocolate Factory or the mega-successful Alice In Wonderland did. But judging by the reaction out there on Twitter and other “social media” sites, you’d think this was somehow the nadir or Burton’s career (how quickly we seem to forget Mars Attacks!) — in fact, it seems to be generating as much overly-malignant hatred as The Avengers is generating overly-effusive praise. But hell, at least this movie is recognizably the work of a singular creative vision (albeit not one operating at its peak) rather than pure CGI assembly-line product that could have been directed by any of dozens of different self-styled “action auteurs” (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — if The Avengers had been helmed by Jon Favreau, it would essentially be no different) who are ultimately as interchangeable as the material they produce.

The cast is the usual mix of Burton way-more-than-regulars (Johnny Depp in the title role of Barnabas Collins, Helena Bonham Carter as family doctor/lush Julia Hoffman, Christopher Lee in a terrific cameo — as opposed to his pointless quick turn in The Wicker Tree — as an “old man of the sea”-type), talented, well-cast veterans (Michelle Pfeiffer as tired family matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Jackie Earle Haley as the hapless Willie Loomis) and up-and-coming talents (Eva Green as Barnabas’ principal object of love/hate, Angelique Bouchard, Bella Heathcote as his principal object of love only, Victoria Winters, Jonny Lee Miller as weak-willed family weasel  Roger Collins, Chloe Grace Moretz  doing her teen-with-a-‘tude thing as Carolyn Soddard), and while none are giving what could in any way be called inspired turns, all are solid and dependable.

As is the story, an uncomplicated affair about Barnabas emerging from the grave, vamped to the hilt, in the early 70s to help his fallen-on-hard-times clan rebuild their fishing and canning empire in the face of rival competition that’s equally supernatural in origin, with a little bit of reincarnation-themed romance thrown in for good measure. It’s hardly demanding stuff, of course, but it’s perfectly suited to function as precisely what it is — a distracted afternoon’s or evening’s summer lightweight entertainment. Joss Whedon does this with a team of super-heroes and we call him a genius. Tim Burton does it with harmless comic vampires and we say he’s jumped the shark. Go figure.

All of which goes to show nothing so much as the herd mentality so prevalent amongst today’s film-buff “community.” In truth, both Dark Shadows and The Avengers are cut from remarkably similar cloth — throwaway big-budget diversionary fare that demands nothing of its audience and gives you pretty much exactly what you figure to be in for when you buy your ticket. One is being praised for it because, hey, other people immediately started talking about how good it is, and one is reviled because, hey, other people immediately started talking about how stupid it was. But you know what? At least Dark Shadows has no pretense of being anything other than precisely what it is, and no army of zombies (or vampires) doing its studios’ dirty work for it and publicizing it like mad for free.

I freely admit that might be a big reason why I actually enjoyed this a little more than Marvel’s billion-dollar-bonanza, and I also freely admit that actions taking place off-screen should , by all rights, play absolutely no part in how I react to what’s taking place on-screen. But it’s not a perfect world. And Dark Shadows is far from a perfect film. But I ended up liking it it a lot more than I was honestly expecting to — and if you go into it with an open mind, who knows? Maybe you will, too.

 

Trash Film Guru Vs. The Summer Blockbusters : “The Dictator”

Posted on by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

Well, since my less than glowing review of The Avengers (not that it was all that negative — I just said it was an okay superhero flick, not the greatest thing to ever happen in the history of the world, as some were claiming) didn’t get me tarred and feathered, I thought I would avail myself of the opportunity that this site provides me to take a look at some other films that I don’t get around to reviewing on my own site, http://trashfilmguru.wordpress.com, all that often because they just don’t fit in with the overall ethos (there’s my pretentious asshole bit out of the way) of what I try to stick to (for the most part, at any rate) over there.  Our erstwhile semi-empress, Ms. Bowman, assures me that pretty much anything goes around here, though, so without any further  ado I’m going to start up a little on-again/off-again series  where I take a look at the various summer blockbusters Hollywood is serving up this summer — something which I did, in fact, do on my own site last year, where it pretty much went over like a lead balloon, given that my readers don’t tend to stop by there looking for much by way of mainstream movie criticism. I trust folks around these parts won’t mind, though, since the mainstream isn’t something my fellow scribes here shy away from.

First up is the newly-released The Dictator, the third collaboration between supposed comic “talent” Sacha Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles. First off, let me state for the record that I have no particular objection to crass, vulgar, tasteless humor. In fact, I rather like it. But The Dictator feels less like it has an actual script than a belabored series of barely-strung-together, often overly-complicated, tremendously belabored set-ups for various gross-out gags that you can see coming from a mile (at least) away. Granted, Cohen was never going to get away with pure ad-libbing of the sort that he did in Borat again, and even the half ad-libbed/half-scripted shtick he pulled in Bruno was probably going to be a bridge too far as well, but  no way in a million years did I think his first truly non-spontaneous film was going to be this, well, clunky. It just doesn’t flow at all and it’s that blatant telegraphing of oncoming supposed “jokes,” rather than the nature of said jokes themselves, that makes this flick feel like such an insult to the audience’s collective intelligence.

Plus, there’s a none-too-subtle political agenda at work here that I find particularly underhanded and reprehensible. Let’s be honest — in between wasted cameos from the likes of Megan Fox and John C. Reilly, and criminally wasting the talents of Ben Kinglsey (who, sadly, has shown is recent years that he’ll do anything for a buck), The Dictator has one driving message from start to finish : Ahmadinejad (who Cohen’s Aladeen character is clearly based on) is a crazy loon, Iran (which the country of Wadiya that Aladeen rules over is clearly based on) is not to be trusted, the Iranians really are building nuclear weapons no matter what they say, they really want to wipe Israel off the map no matter what they say, and everyone, even cool Hollywood liberals, should get on board with the idea of bombing/and or invading them right now.

Seriously, I swear I’m not being paranoid or reading too much into things here. Before he gets lost in New York after being deposed (momentarily) by his uncle and falls in love with Anna Faris while working at her food co-op, Cohen’s Aladeen snickers as he denies his nuclear program is for peaceful, energy-producting purposes, and guffaws and snickers as he promises to leave Israel alone. Of course, the US news media assures us that Iranian “dictator” (he’s not really even the head political force in the country, but hey, whatever) Ahmadinejad does, indeed, intend to build nuclear weapons (even though more or less every international regulatory body and every truly independent defense analyst and Middle Eastern policy analyst disagrees) and he did threaten to wipe out Israel and denied the Holocaust ever happened (even though accurate translations of his comments show he’s never said anything of the sort and has been intentionally, and quite shamelessly, misquoted), so obviously Cohen’s just taking his material right from the headlines, right? Besides, didn’t I say earlier that Cohen and Charles were cool Hollywood liberals? Why, just look at that admittedly quite spot-on piece of satire  at the end of the film (which also marks more or less the only time at which Cohen and Charles hit the right notes) where Aladeen lampoons each and every facet of the so-called “war on terrorism” — he’s clearly not in favor of Bush-Cheney (or maybe that should be Bush-Cheney-Obama, since nothing in this regard has changed since the Texas oilmen left office) policies, so where do I get off thinking they’re trying to push us into another stupid war (and yes,”another stupid war” is what I object to — I’m not in any way saying that Ahmadinejad is a great guy or that  Iran isn’t a country in desperate need of wholesale reform from top to bottom — all I’m saying is that bombing and invading them is blatantly hare-brained idea)?

Oh, how short our memories are. Let’s not forget, friends, that we only went to war with Iraq after we had the so-called “opposition” on board, and that a good 75% of House and Senate Democrats voted for that ill-thought-out (to put it mildly!) scheme. Quite clearly Cohen and Charles know who their audience is, and their goal isn’t to push right-wing conservatives into supporting an attack on Iran — after all, they already do — but is rather to convince the so-called “left” (what remains of it, at any rate) that it’s a good idea, as well, since that’s the only quarter any opposition to this idea might possibly come from. And hey, let’s be honest — if Cohen and Charles really understood progressive politics at all, they wouldn’t have a picture of Barack Obama hanging on the wall of Faris’ food co-op. Ralph Nader, maybe, or Bernie Sanders, or Dennis Kucinich — but Obama? Don’t think so. These guys have clearly never spent so much as a minute in a real co-op.

Still, reprehensible as this film’s political chicanery is, it’s not the most offensive thing about The Dictator. Sorry, that still goes to its tremendously lead-footed pacing and insultingly obvious joke set-ups. Seriously, this is a movie that spends over five minutes leading up to a gag about losing a cell phone inside a woman’s vagina, and spends even longer than that cobbling together a lame punchline featuring Aladeen’s even dumber double milking a woman’s boobs into a pail. Comedy 101 — the set-up to a joke should never be more complicated than the joke itself, and when the jokes are this half-assed, they don’t require any more than the briefest of lead-in time. It’s that complete and utter non-spontaneity, ineptly handled and in service of puerile, juvenile shenanigans that hardly even deliver much of a payoff, that marks  a bigger crime, in a strictly cinematic sense, than trying to push us into another useless and counterproductive war with a wink and a nudge.

Okay, So I Saw “The Avengers”

Posted on by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

Or should that be “Okay, so I saw Marvel’s The Avengers ?”

In any case, I wasn’t going to. I was determined not to participate in the so-called “biggest event of the summer” because I’m flat-out tired of seeing Marvel (and, by extension, Disney) rake in hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars off the fruits of Jack Kirby’s imagination while “The King’s” estate gets more or less nothing (although in fairness — or should that be unfairness — they do get some sort of pittance for anything featuring Captain America in it, since he’s officially recognized as Cap’s co-creator along with Joe Simon). Stan Lee’s recent comments about Jack didn’t do much to up my enthusiasm level for this latest blockbuster either, and basically reaffirmed my opinion that he’s a major-league asshole who was lucky enough to glom onto the works a true creative genius that now he doesn’t even have the decency to acknowledge, much less thank, so yeah — it’s fair to say I was pretty cool to this whole thing and found most of the absolute gushing over it that’s been infecting the internet, Twitter in particular, to be annoying in the extreme.

But then the folks who are trying to put together The Jack Kirby Museum came up with a novel idea — donate the price of your ticket to their brick-and-mortar fund, so that future generations can have an actual, physical place to go and experience first-hand the power of the unfettered creative genius that everyone else but his family has gotten rich off. That sounded good to me, so for the price of a $7.50 admission and a matching $7.50 donation, my conscience was suitably assuaged  — hey, I guess I always knew there was some price at which my principles could be sold out, but it’s rather depressing to think that it could be so cheap. Still, best not to spend too much time dwelling on that —

Anyway, before I kick over the hornet’s nest of fan opinion, let me state for the record that I found The Avengers to be a perfectly fun, generally-well-executed, thoroughly entertaining superhero romp. But (and you knew there was a “but” coming, didn’t you?) — that’s all it is.

Sorry, assembled hordes of fandom, but it’s not “groundbreaking,” it’s far from “the best superhero movie ever,” (hello? The Dark Knight? Batman Begins? Spider-Man 2? Superman :  The Movie?) much less “the best comic book adaptation ever,” (hello again? American Splendor? Ghost World? Sin City? A History Of Violence?) and it doesn’t “prove” that co-writer/director Joss Whedon is a “visionary,” or the “new master of the superhero genre.”

And all those quotes I  pulled are, frankly, just a sampling of some of the less effusive praise I’ve seen bandied about online in regard to this flick. I’ve also seen it called “the new benchmark by which all others will be judged,” “the summer blockbuster to end them all,” “a singular work of astonishing breadth and scope,” and “the defining cinematic statement from the undisputed master of the craft.”

In this armchair critic’s opinion, unpopular as saying so is bound to make me, it’s none of those things. Not even close. Whedon has concocted a nice little script and brought it to life in an appealing and pleasant manner, but this isn’t a movie that bears any authorial signature whatsoever — if the credits were blank and someone told you it was directed by, say, Jon Favreau, you’d believe it, because it plays out pretty much exactly the same, in tone and style, as either of the two Iron Man films, and it doesn’t have anything like the individualistic flair of Kenneth Branagh’s Thor or Joe Johnson’s Captain America : The First Avenger. Hell, it even completely overuses the tedious inside-the-helmet perspective shots of Robert Downey Jr.’s head that Favreau is so annoyingly fond of.

In addition, our guy Joss shows no particularly deft touch with his cast. The acting ranges from surprisingly good (Mark Ruffalo positively nails it as Bruce Banner) to completely lethargic (Scarlett Johansson is completely listless as the Black Widow and is the least-convincing Russian superspy in movie history). Downey plays himself, as always, and the talented Jeremy Renner is criminally underutilized as Hawkeye, while both Chris Hemsworth’s Thor and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, the central villain of the piece, came off much better in Branagh’s flick. Samuel L. Jackson pretty much owns every scene he’s in as Nick Fury, but I don’t think there was ever really any doubt that he would. All told,  the whole thing has the feeling of a director who just told his cast “okay — have at it” and then let the cameras roll.

In his favor, fandom’s newest and biggest crush does do a nice, pacy job with the action sequences, of which there are many (although even he can’t make the bog-standard CGI alien invaders that attack the Earth at the end and, yawn, double-cross Loki seem interesting), and doesn’t overplay his hand in the pathos department — he gives each and every character a nice little individual “story arc” that never taxes the imagination too much and remains dimly interesting without seeming intrusive vis-a-vis the “bigger picture” — which is, of course, to show all these folks coming together and fighting a menace big enough to require their assembled talents and abilities. And while Whedon has an annoying habit of defusing every potentially tense situation with a pithy little quip of some sort, on the whole the interplay between the various characters is reasonably well-handled and plausible (as far as these things so).

So The Avengers has some pluses in its favor, as well as some minuses working against it. It’s good, solid, mindless summer entertainment with a nifty, if thoroughly uninspired, visual sensibility; it plays to what the fans want in a generally competent manner; and it keeps you at least modestly interested in the proceedings throughout. It doesn’t have the mythic scope of Donner’s Superman, nor does it redefine the possibilities inherent in the superhero genre in the way Nolan’s Batman films do. It doesn’t take the time to examine the gap between what these characters symbolize and who they actually are in the way that Marvel’s two far superior summer blockbusters of last year (again, Thor and Captain America : The First Avenger) did — hell, it doesn’t even have much of anything to say about the human condition, much less the superhuman condition. And while it’s all pretty fun to look at by and large, it doesn’t have the inventive, groundbreaking, downright operatic visual flair of Burton’s forays into Gotham City. So it’s fair to say that even the things this movie does well have been done a lot better in other films of this same genre.

But it is fun. Not as fun, or as immediate, or as dramatic, or as dynamic, as the classic Avengers stories brought to life by Jack Kirby that it’s essentially a modernized (and, frankly, watered-down — proof that “The King” could do more with a pencil than Whedon can with a couple hundred million bucks) rehash of, but a good time nonetheless — and in a society as desperate for diversion and spectacle as the one we live in, I can certainly understand why it’s such a big hit. But please. Let’s stop pretending it’s anything more than what it is — modestly-well-realized, lively,  big-budget summer fun that doesn’t demand anything from its audience apart from kicking back and enjoying the ride. And let’s stop venerating Joss Whedon for what’s essentially a director-for-hire project executed in what’s basically become Marvel’s “house style.” Sure, there’s a good possibility that the financial success of The Avengers means he might be able to write his own ticket in Hollywood from here on out — and more power to him if that’s the case since other projects he’s helmed (most notably the excellent sci-fi TV series Firefly) do indeed show that he’s capable of distinctive, highly imaginative drama — but it’s just as likely that Marvel will replace him on this film’s inevitable sequel with some youthful up-and-comer who can deliver essentially the same product and will work for half the price.

Once the novelty of having all these superheroes on screen together wears off, I predict that we’re going to realize we’ve been had a little bit here — but seeing as how we had a pretty good time in the process, there’s no real harm done.

Burn “The Wicker Tree”

Posted on by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

Honestly, friends, sometimes a person just doesn’t even know where to begin. I suppose I could individually list the catalogue of atrocities that make up writer-director Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Tree, but frankly that would mean spending more time talking about this film than I really have the energy to, and besides, our nearest thing to a “star” critic here at Through The Shattered Lens, Lisa Marie Bowman, has already done a pretty damn fine job of performing a blow-by-blow dissection of this thing’s rotted corpse in her capacity as occasional scribe over at HorrorCritic.com, so there’s no real need to duplicate what’s been done before. Allow and/or indulge me, then, as I take a slightly different tack and document my personal journey of despair with Hardy’s exercise in highly confused pointlessness.

To begin with, I should point out that the original Wicker Man is quite likely one of my ten-or-so all-time favorite films. Critics who say it’s “not actually a horror movie” are quite right, of course — it’s a unique — hell, frankly singular — amalgamation of so many different styles that the end product is well and truly unclassifiable. Part horror flick, sure, but also part musical, part (very) black comedy, part clash-of-cultures melodrama, part satire on Christian piousness, and part period-piece-albeit-in-a-then-contemporary-setting, it stands on its own as the only thing quite like it ever made. Screenwriter Anthony Shaffer perhaps put it best when he stated that his main goal was to pen a meditation on the nature of sacrifice, and everything else just sort of took off from there.

Obviously, there are so many elements about the first film that the 2011 “thematic sequel” could never hope to duplicate — songwriter Paul Giovanni is no longer with us, so right off the bat we know the music’s not going to be nearly as good because, quite frankly, it can’t be. Anthony Shaffer has passed away and therefore whatever follow-up material comes about wouldn’t in any way be his vision for how the story could or should  continue. Edward Woodward has likewise left behind this mortal coil, and his character died at the end anyway, so replicating his magnificently anally-retentive performance is probably going to prove to be out of the question, as well.  Christopher Lee is, while still awesome as hell,  also extremely frail and old at this point. And anyway — The Wicker Man still retains all its poignancy and power to this day and has only gained luster over the past 40 years. The abominable Nicolas Cage/Neil LaBute remake proved that revisiting the material was a lost cause, so why bother, five years on from that failed experiment,  with any sort of a sequel, “thematic” or otherwise?

Unfortunately, Robin Hardy wrote a book some years back called Cowboys For Christ that updated some of the concepts from his earlier film and he got the notion that it would make a decent-enough little flick. He was able to scour up $7 million-plus worth of financing, and got the folks at Anchor Bay so interested they promised not only a widespread “home viewing platform” release (and I caught this on a free screener copy that was sent my way so therefore can’t fairly comment on any extras the DVD and Blu-Ray might contain), but a even a little theatrical run, as well. It never made it to my area, and disappeared after a week from the markets it did make it into, but still —the fact that they chose to give this thing some theatrical burn when it seemingly had DTV written all over it was enough for me to, foolishly, get my hopes up.

I guess we believe what we want to believe (which is rather one of the points of the first film, after all), and a steady stream of reviews for this one that placed it at the “embarrassingly bad” end of the spectrum at worst to “maybe not quite as horrible as I’d been fearing but still pretty goddamn awful” at best weren’t enough to dampen my enthusiasm at this point. I figured it just had to be better than most folks were giving it credit for, because there’s just no conceivable way it couldn’t retain, say, at least 1/100th of the darkly charismatic charm of the first film, even if entirely by accident, right? After all, the original director was on board, and Anchor Bay wasn’t so ashamed of his finished product that they tried to hide the thing away at the bottom of some film vault (although given that it’s shot on HD, perhaps a “film” vault wouldn’t be the right place to stick it in, anyway).

It’s certainly fair to say that I wasn’t expecting greatness, or even anything of the sort, but something that still somehow cleaved to even a miniscule fraction of the spirit of the original would have been good enough for me. Unfortunately, what I got was a story about two painfully stereotypical Jesus-lovin’ Texas yokels who have gone on a mission (more typical of Mormons than of born-againers, it must be said) to evangelize in some small Scottish town that apparently has never heard the “good news.” One of our less-than-convincingly-portrayed country bumpkins, Beth Boothby (Brittania Nicol), was apparently a famous country singer with something of a “reputation” before turning her life over to Christ, while the other, her fiancee Steve Thomson (Henry Garrett), is little more just a walking, talking cowboy hat. Once in the “heathen land” of Scotland,  they enjoy the decidedly non-Southern hospitality of local nuke plant owner Sir Lachlan Morrison (Graham McTavish, in something more akin to a respectable performance than his colleagues seem capable of) and his OTT-in-the-deception-deaprtment wife, Delia (Jacqueline Leonard), but of course the dastardly couple, whose power plant has through some unexplained (and probably inexplicable, so it’s just as well Hardy doesn’t even try) means left the entire town sterile, have other plans for their simple-minded God-fearin’ visitors, plans that the Texas two-steppers are apparently too stupid to suss out even as they’re practically being openly prepared for the burning stake and, get this, the dinner table!

Yes, evidently the heathen folk of the United Kingdom’s northern reaches have taken to cannibalism in the four decades or so since our last visit, and while Hardy seems to think this somehow ups the “black comedy” factor of the proceedings, really it just serves as a cop-out by more clearly delineating who are the “good guys” here and who are the “bad guys,” a simple-minded, black-and-white approach that the first Wicker Man never resorted to even when Sgt. Howie was being burned alive (in, it must be said, one of the most visually dramatic sequences ever committed to celluloid).

And that’s a pretty much the problem at the crux of The Wicker Tree in a nutshell — sure, there are numerous and obvious others, ranging from wretched acting to dully-executed visuals to poor pacing to obvious run-time padding to inarticulate (at best) dialogue to recycled-into-a-less-involving-context story ideas to laughably one-dimensional caricatures standing in place of real, actual characters — but at the end of the day, it’s Hardy’s mistrust of his audience’s ability to make up our own collective mind, and the blatantly heavy-handed approach he takes in explaining everything for us that stems from that mistrust, that makes this such a condescending failure. I could live with the far-less-subtle approach to the “clash of cultures” theme that he takes here in comparison with the first film. I could live with the nowhere-near-as-compelling music. I could live with the rather — uhmmm — “broad strokes” with which he paints each and every character . I could live with the pointless and frankly even a bit insulting to the guy Christopher Lee cameo. Hell, I could even live with the Christian turning the tables on her pagan pursuers and winning in the end. But what I absolutely can’t abide is that Hardy thinks we’re all so unsophisticated and beneath the task of understanding his apparently-in-his-mind-quite-complex-and-challenging-themes that we need for him to hammer them home with a with a burning wicker stake through our heads. He’s had 40 years to think about how he wants to follow up a genuine, justly-lauded classic and this is what he comes up with? Set fire to me now, please, before the third installment, which he’s already working on, ever sees the light of day.

Grindhouse Classics : “She Freak”

Posted on by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

Okay, so it’s not Herschell Gordon Lewis — but 1967’s She Freak is pretty close, at least in terms of style and tone (if not gore content — the only blood on display here is in a very brief screwdriver-through-the-hand moment that frankly isn’t even nauseating) , and why shouldn’t it be? After all, it’s the “brain”child of HGL’s old producing partner, the legendary David F. Friedman, and definitely has a Lewis-like bizarre-on-a-budget sensibility. Oh, and it’s also available on DVD from Something Weird Video (nice full-frame transfer, acceptable mono sound, extras include a feature-length Friedman commentary, a gallery of exploitation art, some SWV trailers, a couple of tangentially-related shorts, etc.), the label that handles more or less all of our guy Herschell’s stuff, so — yeah, there are some similarities, to be sure.

Unfortunately, it’s even closer to Tod Browning’s seminal exploitation classic Freaks — not that there’s anything wrong with Freaks, mind you, and if you’re gonna rip something off  I suppose you might as well rip off one of the all-time greats, but anyway, read on and my use of the term “unfortunately” will, hopefully, make sense. In point of fact,  to call She Freak a rip-off is probably being a little too harsh, since even though it pretty much tells the exact same story as Freaks, it does so from the point of view of the gold-digging damsel rather than her victim. So maybe it’s more a case of an inverse carbon-copy. Which still means it’s nothing too earth-shatteringly original, but I digress.

Our story here revolves around one Jade Cochran (Claire Brennen, who bears a rather uncanny resemblance to latter-day Russ Meyer starlet Pandora Peaks minus the surgical — uhhhmmm — “enhancements”), a simple country girl who commits the cardinal exploitation movie sin of wanting something better out of life (of all the nerve!), and isn’t afraid to step on a few toes on her climb to what passes for “the top” in her admittedly limited worldview. At the outset of our little shot-around-Bakersfield-for-$65,000 morality play, Jade’s slinging hash as a waitress at the greasiest of greasy-spoon diners, but when an advance man for a traveling carnival comes though one day, she has the temerity to ask him if there’s any work for a gal with no experience,no skills, no education, but a pretty nice pair of legs in his merry troupe. He tells her to stop by and see the owner of the show after they get the tents set up, she tells her lecherous married creep of a boss to go to shove it (granted, after he fires her first and tells her she’s headed straight to hell — he’s a real charmer, this guy) and the next day she shows up at the box office and quickly finds herself employed — as a waitress (again) at the carnival snack truck. Step one on the road to world domination achieved, I guess.

It’s not long,  though, before our gal Jade really does start her hardscrabble climb up the carnival ladder. First she gets in good with a gal named “Moon” Mullins (Lynn Courtney), the closest thing to a stripper the show employs. “Moon” makes Jade the kindly offer of letting her shack up with her in her motel room while she’s in town, and before you know it Jade’s pestering her for the names of any single men with potential attached to the show. Jade’s already taken a liking to a fella named Blackie Fleming (Lee Raymond), who runs the Ferris wheel, but “Moon” lets her know there’s no future in getting mixed up with lowly ride operators and suggests that Jade should set her sights on Steve St. John (Bill McKinney), the well-to-do widower who owns the freak show — why, he’s even got a house in Tampa!

Jade takes her gal-pal up on her advice and soon begins courting her prey  over coffee and donuts every morning at the snack truck. Cut to a montage of rather listless-looking dates than play out sans dialogue and show our supposed lovebirds going out to dinner, riding around town in his car, and walking around the carnival a whole hell of a lot (when you add in all the extraneous footage of carnival set-up and tear-down activities also included in this flick — hey, Friedman had an “in” with a carny operator and wanted to get his money’s worth — you begin to see why even at a slim 83 minutes plenty of people refer to it as being “padded”) and presto!, before you know it,Ms. Cochran is now Mrs. St. John.

There are, however, a couple of pesky problems she can’t seem to run away from. One is the freaks themselves. We never actually see any of them (until the very end, and I’m sorry to report there’s not a real “freak” in the bunch — they’re all extras in makeup and cheap prosthetics), apart from a garden-variety midget named — amazingly enough — Shorty (Felix Silla),  who seems to have a penchant for following his boss’s new lady-love around, but she makes it clear that she can’t stand the sight of them and that they creep her the hell out. Steve indulges in some painfully wooden dialogue about how they’re his friends, they’re people just like you and me, he’s not exploiting them he’s giving them a chance, etc., but it’s no use. She just doesn’t care for their kind.

Her second (and larger) problem, though, his Blackie. He gives it to Jade rough-and-ready and that’s just how she likes it. In fact, she can’t seem to keep away from the guy. One night the always-underfoot Shorty spies her sneaking out of Blackie’s trailer, and when he tells his best-friend/boss about it, all he gets is a slap in the fact for his trouble. Yes, it appears as though Steve’s truly got rose-tinted glasses on when it comes to looking at his new bride, but when he gets “home” to their motel room (we never do get to see that palatial Tampa estate) and finds Blackie on his way out the door and Jade with a big smile on her face, he knows he’s been had. A fight ensues, Steve gets stabbed, Jade stands above him without lifting a finger to help and then turns her back on him as he dies, Blackie flees into the night,  is caught by the cops, confesses, and goes to jail —and now the freak show is Jade’s property, free and clear.

For the next five minutes or so we see Jade in her new incarnation as super-bitch of the midway — she drives her big Cadillac around recklessly, tells “Moon” to take a hike, spends a lot of time counting her money — and fires poor old Shorty. Which proves, of course, to be her undoing, as Shorty and his fellow losers in the genetic lottery surround her as she’s getting into her car one night, brandishing knives and torches one and all, close ranks around her terrified and convulsing body, and move in for — well, not the kill. To be honest, I have no idea exactly what they do to her, but she ends up like this —

And needless to say, for a gal that got to where she is on her looks, that’s gotta be a career-killer. To complete the homage (how’s that for being polite about it?) to Browning’s earlier film, the whole story is presented between two framing sequences featuring a carnival barker who tells his audience of gasping onlookers (and us) at the beginning that there are two kinds of freaks, those created by God and those made by man , and then we return to hear the end of his spiel before the big “reveal” finale showing us Jade as she is today (or as she was in 1967, at any rate). All in all it’s not a half-bad little time-waster as far as completely derivative and frankly unnecessary “uncredited remakes” go, and Brennen, who was actually a pretty good actress in her day (sadly, she passed away at a fairly early age from cancer in 1977) turns in a deliciously slow-burn-sinister starring turn as Jade that she clearly relishes every second of, but if you’ve seen Freaks then you’ve seen this done a)before, b)better, and c) with real circus “freak” performers.

Still, since the entire exploitation movie business was literally born as a traveling roadshow racket molded on the carny model, it’s nice to see drive-in fare that openly pays tribute to its roots like this one does. And I really shouldn’t do this, but — since exploitation’s the name of the game here, I think it only fitting that I end this whole thing by repeating a particularly salacious rumor that’s been circulating around the internet for some time now : apparently it was revealed shortly after Brennen’s death that she had secretly been seeing Felix “Shorty” Silla on the side for nine years and even bore his child! I have no idea if this is true or just another tinseltown tall tale, but it seems strangely natural that a movie like this would give birth to such a, well — freakish legend, and just think : if She Freak itself were half as interesting as this bit of gossip, it would definitely be remembered as an all-time classic!

Grindhouse Classics : “The Gore Gore Girls”

Posted on by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

Just when you thought the coast was clear, I’m back with more Herschell Gordon Lewis! Between this little haphazard Lewis retrospective Lisa Marie Bowman and I are indulging in, and her exhaustively thorough, and highly readable, Friday The 13th series of recent days, Through The Shattered Lens is really becoming a gore-hound’s delight these days, isn’t it? Hell, even the music reviews around here lately have a bombastic and violent theme to them — Bathory? Hell, I’m impressed — Quorthon’s “Viking trilogy” is my favorite period in Bathory history, truth be told, and Twilight Of The Gods my favorite Bathory album, even though my all-time favorite song of theirs, Blood, Fire, Death appears on the album — well, Blood, Fire, Death. But it’s waaaaaayyyy too early for me to be getting this hopelessly sidetracked, isn’t ? So let’s get back to our guy Herschell.

Having spent my last visit here examining the alpha of Lewis’ “gore cycle,” namely Blood Feast, I figure now would be as good a time as any to take a look at the omega (not just of his gore flicks but of his filmmaking career in general, at least until Blood Feast 2 came along about 30 years later, but we won’t pay any attention to that — nor should you), namely 1972’s The Gore Gore Girls. Somebody a whole lot wiser than I am (though I’m not sure exactly who — truth be told, it was probably several “somebodies”) once said “if you’re gonna go out, then go out with a bang,” and this movie certainly makes it clear that HGL took that advice to heart.

Even by Lewis “standards,” the plot for this one is pretty threadbare — go-go dancers at a local (in this case “local” being the Chicago area) strip joynt are being murdered in downright awesomely grotesque fashion — faces smashed to pulp in mirrors before their heads are dug into, buttocks beaten and — uhhhmmmm — tenderized with a meat mallet before having salt and pepper added to the impromptu (and quite rare, it must be said) “rump roast” for seasoning, nipples clipped off with scissors to reveal squirting biological fountains of both white and chocolate milk, heads shoved into deep-fat fryers — clearly, Herschell’s pulling out all the stops on his way out. And just as clearly, he’s well past the point of even pretending that he’s taking any of this shit seriously. Not that he ever put much effort into such  conceits in the first place, mind you,  but in the case of this film it’s especially fortunate that his tongue was so obviously placed firmly in his cheek, because it really does help to take the edge off what, on paper at least, seems like a truly OTT-in-the-misogyny-department series of murders ( a well-placed subplot involving a local feminist group helps to lessen the impact, as well — even though said group’s inclusion amounts to little more than a red herring plot-wise, the surprisingly level-headed portrayal of them by Lewis comes at least somewhat close to an admission on his part that feminist critics of his work were probably right ). Think of this as Herschell doing what he did best — giving gore-lovers more of what they wanted than they could possibly have hoped for, while not-so-tacitly admitting that it was all crap, anyway.

Anyway, back to the story — this was Lewis’ one and only attempt at injecting a bit of mystery into the proceedings, and doing their best to sleuth out the identity of the killer, without murdering each other first, are the truly odd couple of gungo-ho (but hopelessly incompetent) reporter Nancy Weston (Amy Farrell), and fancy-pants private eye Abraham gentry (Frank Kress, who absolutely sinks his teeth into the role of the — ahem! — sexually ambiguous version of Phillip Marlowe and is, in true Lewis fashion, playing the whole thing not just for laughs but for hearty, full-throttle belly laughs from start to finish). Throw in comedy legend Henny Youngman (who must have been broke or something) as the ridiculously fast-talking owner of the strip club the unfortunate victims worked at, and friends, you’ve got a recipe for a winner on your hands.

To be sure, you need a strong (hell, a cast-iron) stomach to make it through some of the death and dismemberment on display here (all of which looks pretty darn good on the Something Weird Video DVD release of this film — they did a very nice job remastering the full-frame picture, the mono sound is good, and extras include, of course, a commentary from Lewis and, doubly of course, the “Gallery of Herschell Gordon Lewis exploitation artwork”),  as the effects are, on the whole, somewhat-better-conceived than in the average HGL production, but there’s just no escaping the feeling of “the director’s not taking this whole thing too seriously, so why should I?” that permeates each and every frame of this film. It’s brutally honest in its intentions — “give the audience what they want one more time, rake up a bunch of money, and close the door behind me on the way out” is the best summation of Lewis’ aims here, and his willingness to have a few laughs as he says “thanks for the cash one more time, suckers” is just icing on the cake. Any movie that openly states that it’s proud that it’s over with (see the final screen cap below) is clearly imploring you to do anything other than take it seriously, and with that in mind, I gotta say, while The Gore Gore Girls falls absolutely flat in its attempt to wring anything like dramatic tension out of its poorly-thought-out (to be generous) murder-mystery premise, and while its absolutely appallingly brutal treatment of the female gender should be inexcusably offensive, and while it’s “fourth wall”-busting acting absolutely obliterates any chances the film might have had (not that it really wanted any) of being seen as anything other than a cash-in quickie, the fact is that it’s just about the most fun you can imagine having watching someone’s eyes being pulled out. And tits sliced off. And head deep-fried.

And that’s really the genius of Herschell Gordon Lewis in a nutshell, isn’t it? He could play you for a sucker, openly tell you that was exactly what he was doing, and make you chuckle at what a chump you were as you handed your money over to him anyway. God bless ya, Mr. Lewis — we could sure use more like you today. Thanks for this outrageous parting gift.

 

Grindhouse Classics : “Blood Feast”

Posted on by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

Tell me, friends, have you ever had — AN EGYPTIAN FEAST?

It doesn’t matter how you answer that question, the important thing is in how you ask it. You’ve gotta get all bug-eyed, swerve your neck outwards like a crane, and pause dramatically between  “hand” and “an” before raising your voice for the final three words. Then you, too, can look and sound just like Mal Arnold, the decidedly non-Egyptian “actor” (and I use that term loosely) who plays Egyptian serial-killer/caterer in director Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1963 classic Blood Feast, and know that you’ll be faithfully imitating a slice of movie history.

And no, I don’t take the phrase “movie history” lightly — but in this case it most certainly applies. Which is not to say that Blood Feast is in any way a good film — heck, in many respects it isn’t even really a competent one (wait, didn’t I just refer to it as a “classic?” — bear with me, all will be explained), but for what it did, and when it did it, well — like it or not, it really does represent a couple of important firsts.


And speaking of firsts — first, a bit of a plot rundown, not that such a thing is really all that necessary. A nubile young female strips down to take a bath while listening to a radio report about a series of brutal, unsolved killings in her area. She gets naked, opens up a book called “Weird Ancient Religious Rituals,” lays back in the tub —and is hacked to pieces by a freaky-looking intruder of vaguely foreign appearance, who leaves what’s left of her to  slowly bleed to death while he makes of with her amputated leg.

Cut to the catering shop of one Fuad Ramses, the killer from the previous scene (no mystery here folks, sorry!), who is conversing with a customer, one Mrs. Dorothy Fremont (Lyn Bolton), who is planning a birthday dinner for her daughter, Suzette (eventual 1963 Playboy Playmate of the Year Connie Mason). Ramses suggests an Egyptian feast (hence our opening quote), and Mrs. Fremont agrees that would be a lovely idea given that her daughter is taking a night class on Egyptian history and culture.

The cops, led by one Detective Pete Thornton ( Lewis regular William Kerwin, operating here under the pseudonym of “Thomas Wood”) are hot on the trail of the killer, of course. We’re informed that the “entire force” is working around the clock on tracking the psychopath down, and even though said “entire force” apparently consists of only two guys, they follow the leads they’ve got pretty well, and those leads —- uhhmmmm — lead them to the aforementioned Egyptian studies night class, where our good detective takes an instant liking to our Ms. Fremont The Younger. Of course, in between trying to make time with the wealthy young socialite, he’s still got a case to work, and a couple more bodies (of the female variety, naturally) pile up, one with its tongue removed, the other sans its brain (both shown in lovingly agonizing detail by Lewis, with the tongue scene especially being a standout for hardened gore-hounds to this day — and yes, the rumors are true, they used a sheep tongue procured from a local butcher shop), and of course both unfortunate ladies are connected with that apparently-cursed night-school class (which makes you wonder why everybody doesn’t just drop the course, but I digress).

Anyway, as events play out, clues finally lead the cops right to Ramses’ doorstep — or, more specifically, to the back room of his shop, where he’s got an impromptu shrine set up to the supposedly Egyptian goddess of death, Ishtar. The ever-enterprising Fuad is apparently attempting to serve up a bunch of body parts from different victims to people at the Fremont party as a cannibalistic sacrifice to his savage goddess  in order to facilitate her reincarnation upon the Earth into human form. Or something. And he’s got Suzette in mind as his final victim. Or to be Ishtar’s new human hostess. Or something.

I suppose none of it really matters because Fuad walks with a comically over-pronounced limp and isn’t gonna get too far once the cops show up (he makes it into the back of a garbage truck in his feeble escape attempt and is compacted therein, with Thornton intoning that he ended up exactly where he belonged because he’s nothing but human garbage anyway — whoops, sorry to give away the ending), and it’s not for its gripping and dramatic story that anyone cared — or, for that matter, still cares — about this movie anyway.

Nor, frankly, is it due its performances, most of which fall below even community theater standards,  that Blood Feast is still talked about to this day . Oh, sure, Arnold’s all kinds of fun if you can get past the blatant offensiveness inherent in the idea of a guy of course being a bloodthirsty maniac because he’s disabled, vaguely effeminate, and even — gasp! shudder! — an immigrant. He’s clearly playing the whole things for laughs (as is Lewis himself, for that matter), but the same charitable view really can’t be extended to the truly awful non-acting of Connie Mason, whose “talents” were best summarized by HGL when he famously said “I’ve often thought that if one took the key out of Connie’s back, that she’d simply stand still” — nor to Bolton, who, if anything, is even worse in her turns as Mason’s cinematic mother. Neither actress emotes in the slightest, nor are they aware enough of their own shortcomings to intentionally over-do things — they’re just basically reciting dialogue, and not even doing that very well.

So what does at leave us with? Why, surely the answer’s right in the title — blood, and lots of it (and specially-concocted blood at that — Lewis didn’t care for how any of the standard-at-the-time stage blood looked on camera, so he had a local Miami (like most of HGL’s flicks, this was lensed in the South Florida area) cosmetic company come up with a new blend just for this film that he would end up using on all his subsequent efforts — on the plus side it was entirely edible, on the minus side the base ingredient was Kaopectate) . And brains. And tongues. And entrails. And limbs. But mostly, just lots and lots — and lots! — of blood.

All of which is pretty much standard stuff these days, of course, but it certainly wasn’t back in 1963. This is well and truly the first “gore film,” and while that fact has been justly acknowledged by the horror community at large, what’s less talked about, but no less true, is the fact that Blood Feast is also the first modern slasher film. Oh, sure, Lewis and producer David F. Friedman make a big deal of pointing this out on numerous occasions on the occasionally-self-congratulatory-but-on-the-whole-pretty-lively-and-enthralling commentary track that accompanies this film’s DVD and Blu-Ray releases from Something Weird Video (it’s presented full frame with mono sound and also includes the standard “Gallery Of Herschell Gordon Lewis exploitation artwork” that all these come with), but for some reason the largely-self-appointed gatekeepers of horror-dom don’t seem to want to go there. It’s almost as if they’re willing to give Blood Feast some “props,” but not too many. You want us to admit you were the first gore flick? Fine. We can do that. But the first slasher? No way. We’ve gotta save that for a more “respectable” picture, thank you very much. It’s gotta be Halloween. Or Black Christmas. Or —

Well, folks, I’m here to call bullshit on that. Horror on the whole is already marginalized and ghetto-ized by the (again, largely self-appointed) arbiters of all that is right and good in “mainstream” cinema — to see the same thing done on a “micro” level within horror fandom itself as is done to the genre on a more “macro” level reeks of hypocrisy of the highest order. Let’s give Blood Feast its due. I’m not here to tell you it’s a great example of the slasher subgenre, or frankly even of the gore subgenre, but it did ’em both first, and everyone who came along later owes a debt of gratitude to what Lewis and Friedman did here, even if they didn’t necessarily do it all particularly well. Besides, numerous and readily-apparent flaws aside, this is good, solid, brainless fun. If more horror flicks were to put their various pretenses aside and just embrace the sense of good-time movie-making that Blood Feast positively revels in, maybe — just maybe — the genre as a whole wouldn’t find itself in the mess it’s in today. Just a thought.