SUMMER OF BLOOD: 21st CENTURY HORROR - THE DAMMED

If I were to tell you that a movie called Zombeavers is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable experiences I've had with a 2015 movie (it's been kicking around since the first half of 2014, but its commercial release was slow in coming), and you were to call me a piece of shit, no good fucking liar, could I be offended? Of course not. What sort of outright psychopath would expect a movie called Zombeavers - and for exactly the reason you suppose it is called Zombeavers, which is that it has beaver zombies in it - to be even slightly close to tolerable? Let alone the funniest horror-comedy since at the very least The Cabin in the Woods, and I'd be privately inclined to set the line farther back than that.

The friend with whom I first saw it - both of us falling head-over-heels in love after expecting not a damn thing from it* - came up with a perfectly pithy one-sentence review, and there's nothing he can do to keep my from stealing it: it's the version of ThanksKilling that's terrific instead of bone-scrapingly awful. It's mostly the same ingredients: uniformly reprehensible characters who speak entirely in filthy jokes that are forcefully dirty more than clever in any meaningful way, deaths presented in a fully comic register, and killer animals that do not pretend for even one instant to be anything but hand-crafted puppets. It simply works better this time, possibly because this film is ultimately sweeter-natured; it's more upbeat, the insults more bubbly and less caustic. And it's considerably less vile in its attitude towards women, who are still objectified to a fair degree (there's an entire scene whose narrative is "girl takes off her bikini top and makes other girls feel awkward by parading about showily"), but who are presented as the authors of their own sexuality beyond what cheap-as-hell horror movies typically traffic in.

Mostly, I am tempted to say, it has better puppets: I badly want the filmmakers to authorise the production of zombeaver plushies, because I would buy one right now. They are the cutest little ugly fuckers. But in fairness, I was already on the film's side before we saw them for the first time, at the 27 minute mark of a relentlessly paced 77-minute feature.

The film's set-up could not be more generic: three college students are driving to a cabin in the woods. These are sorority sisters Jenn (Lexi Atkins), who has just been cheated on; Mary (Rachel Melvin), who has decided that this means it's time for some supportive girl time; and Zoe (Cortney Palm), who isn't trying to contain her irritation that Mary has issued a blanket "no boys and no phones" rule for the weekend. They banter in a raucous, scatological way, etching out a strong, clear-cut dynamic, even if it's also frankly a little bit like what three male screenwriters - Al Kaplan, Jon Kaplan, and Jordan Rubin, the last of whom is also the film's director - would come up with if they knew that they wanted to subvert stereotypes but also had never been around women talking. Still, it takes only a few minutes to get a crisp, strong understanding of each of these characters, and respond to them as individual personalities, which is not at all something you just get every time a genre movie crosses your path. And while their line are crude, there's some actual humor to them as well, particularly because they're tied to character: Zoe makes jokes that Mary would not, and within five minutes of meeting the trio, we understand why that is.

And the other part of the set-up is, if anything, even more generic: a pair of truck drivers hit a deer, and in the process manage to lose a barrel of toxic sludge that ends up getting in the water supply. Cue the zombies. The twist being that the truckers (played by comedian Bill Burr and snoozy rocker John Mayer) are having a filthy conversation of their own, but one that occurs in a zen-like state of stoner's consideration, profoundly anti-funny in its abiding fascination with homoeroticism and the way that both men deliver every line to sound like a non-sequitur, even when it actually follows. And then they plow into a deer, killing it in an inordinately violent way. It's a bold first scene, at any rate, so deep into irony that one can see nothing else. I love it a little bit; it's aggressively absurdist and pointedly alien.

The film, obviously, concerns of holding the zombeavers back just long enough to shake the bottle with the young women in it until it gets good and fizzy - this includes Zoe sneakily arranging for her boyfriend, Buck (Peter Gilroy) to show up, along with Mary's boyfriend Tommy (Jake Weary), and Jenn's notorious ex, Sam (Hutch Dano), and our learning what everybody but Jenn already knew, which is that seemingly kind and pure Mary was the faceless brunette seen making out with Sam in the photo that broke Jenn's heart. And then it goes straight to the usual Night of the Living Dead territory: everybody reacts to the first zombeaver in ways that would be sensible if only they weren't in a horror movie, and then tries too late to secure the cabin their in, by which point it all comes down to waiting to see what errors they'll make to let the monsters get them. Along the way, the leering, puritanical local hunter Smyth (Rex Linn) arrives to provide some false hope, as do the nice old neighbors down the way, with some pretty crude mouths of their own, the Gregorsons (Phyllis Katz and Brent Briscoe).

We're miles away from a movie that's going to work based on the density of its plot, but then you knew that the moment I said Zombeavers. The movie goes all-in on one thing and one thing only, which is a vigorously warped sense of humor. A very precise kind of humor, too: it's not exactly a Sharknado-style exercise in "can you guys believe how willfully bad and stupid and silly this is? Isn't it fun?", a mode that I find enormously enervating. But I'd be hard-pressed to explain exactly what thing Zombeavers does that keeps it out of those particular weeds. Certainly, it is stupid; certainly, it is inordinately proud of the fact that it does all of the reprehensible and trite and illogical things that make lousy monster movies lousy. It just... feels different. The difference between a movie that is funny (or supposedly funny) because it is bad at being horror, and a movie that is funny because it's good at being comedy. It never winks at us, or tries to get away with doing stupid shit by saying "look at the stupid shit!", but treats the zombeavers, within the world of the film, with perfect gravity, even as outside of the world of the film they're pure farce. Comedy is best when the characters don't realise they're in a comedy, after all.

It's a one-note comedy, fair; maybe two, with note one being "zombeavers are too ridiculous to take seriously" and note two being "these characters are deeply committed to being profoundly awful and whipping up some zesty dialogue to prove it". 77 minutes is already a generous running time for something with so few tonal registers - smutty dialogue, manic running about and yelling in a way that Rubin doesn't even slightly care about making scary, random absurdity - and at an absolute minimum, the film could do without the outtakes that are not part of the ending credits. Those are instead set to a jazzy Sinatra-style number recapping the plot of the film we just saw, which is infinitely more fun in comparison. And better still is the post-credits stinger that's a terrible visual pun of the first order, and thus a work of art that needs to be appreciated by every person with a heart.

The repetitive nature of the humor is probably the single thing that most keeps Zombeavers from realising its full potential as a bawdy comedy masquerading as a repulsively gory horror film. Not that everybody would be in the market for the absolute best possible version of that movie, though I know that I am not alone in finding even the imperfect Zombeavers to be exactly the right thing for a specific kind of moment. It's a movie that holds nothing back and pushes itself with such energy that even someone as resistant to this brand of crude comedy as myself can't help but roll over for it.

Body Count: 9, plus a very messy deer, one dog (seen), one dog (implied), and one bear.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: 21st CENTURY HORROR - YE OF LITTLE FAITH

There are many horror movies that are good until the last act, when they turn into such complete shit that it's frankly hard to remember what was good about everything up to that point. Many horror movies. The Last Exorcism, from 2010, is not necessarily distinct within that company; it does not start at the highest height, nor does it reach the lowest low. But it does stand out for how brief the bad ending actually is: only about 12 minutes before the credits is all it takes to undo the goodwill generated by a generally sturdy 74 minutes preceding.

We'll return to those 12 minutes in due course; for now, it does to accentuate the positive. To begin with, The Last Exorcism is one of those faux-documentary jobs, right before they really took off. I swear, that's one of the positive things, even though I know all the terrible things people say about the inaptly-named found footage style. I have, after all, said a great many of them. That's exactly the thing that's so nifty about the movie though (in fact, it's probably its most distinctive strength): there's a really smart, motivated reason for almost every frame of the movie that we see to have been recorded by the in-universe cameraman, Daniel Moskowitz (Adam Grimes), and his director, documentarian Iris Reisen (Iris Bahr). They are, after all, making a documentary about a charismatic exorcist, Rev. Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian). They don't know at the start that he'll be called on an exorcism, but they undoubtedly had their fingers crossed. The spooky, threatening incidents that usually trigger the wave of "put the camera down and run, dipshit" complaints are going to have the exact opposite effect on them: that is exactly what they want to film. Iris probably spends every night wishing herself to sleep that there will be some alarming, inexplicable terror to rattle her and Daniel around the room. And the way the footage is presented is exactly like an assembly cut that needs onscreen titles and some sweetening to the sound. Mind you, the film's ending commits the usual sins, and they are magnified by how solid everything up to that point has been: the way the story wraps up makes it clear that nobody would have cut the film together, and if they had, we'd never have seen it. But before then! In terms of sheer formal plausibility, it's as tight as any other found footage movie since the airtight The Blair Witch Project.

The content of Huck Botko & Andrew Gurland's script isn't too shabby itself, though it does tend to err on the side of self-congratulation. Cotton is the very definition of a good ol' boy blood & thunder preacher: anxious to give his parishioners a good show even while he's assuring them that if they make even the slightest misstep, they'll be devoured by the eternal flames of Hell. It's hardcore conservative Evangelical Protestantism with a healthy dose of Manichaeism, and it's all perfectly fraudulent. As Cotton concedes with a startling lack of shame for a man staring directly into a camera lens, he had a crippling crisis of faith when his sickly son was healed and his immediate response was to be grateful for the doctors, not God. Later on a news article about a boy his son's age died during a botched exorcism, and that shook the rest of his belief out; now he's going through the motions strictly for the benefit of his flock, on the assumption that as long as his words improve their lives, there's no harm done. "You've been a fraud", Iris accuses him, with an obvious "gotcha" tone; "That's your word, not mine", he tosses back with a big smile.

These Elmer Gantry-esque exploration of the pastor as con man and huckster are tremendously engaging, thanks almost completely to Fabian's sweeping, gregarious performance, all broad smiles and large gestures and a big way of dominating the room. He's slimy and slick, but in a way that invites us to join him in his fun trickery; his early demonstration that a recipe for banana bread can be slid into a fired-up sermon without anybody noticing is, to me, the film's most unique and enjoyable moment. The only problem with all this is that it's frankly a bit easy: taking potshots at charismatic preachers and then smirking like some kind of wounding hit has been taken is the pettiest, littlest kind of smug urbanity. We've seen this before; the charm of Fabian's performance augments that truth, but doesn't fix it.

Then again, we've seen just about everything The Last Exorcism has to offer, if we've seen more than one or two movies with "Exorcism" or "Exorcist" in the title, and the audience for a found-footage demonic possession movie is nothing if not self-selecting along those lines. Cotton gets a particularly intriguing request from a rural family, begging for help with a possession; its hand-written nature appeals to him, so off he and the filmmakers go to find out what's happening. 16-year-old Nell Sweetzer (Ashley Bell) has been acting peculiar, if slaughtering her father's livestock can be summed up with such a simple word as "peculiar". Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum) subscribes to the most archly paranoiac type of faith; he pulled his daughter and son from school because she wasn't being exposed to sufficiently Godly music in art class, among more typical reasons. He even stopped going to church with local Pastor Manley (Tony Bentley), presumably for not enough old time religion. Cotton, for his part, puts on a good show, using some electric doodads to convince the Sweetzers, including elder child Caleb (Caleb Landry Jones) that he's chasing a demon out of the girl, and calls it a good deed. But when Nell shows up at his hotel, he grows concerned that something deeper than the usual psychosomatic Sturm und Drang is going on, so he forced Louis to have her hospitalised, over the man's terror of modern medicine. And it just so happens that Nell is pregnant. Cotton and Iris immediately jump to the assumption that she's been raped by her father, but this is a movie called The Last Exorcism, and we can be forgiven for assuming it's a little more sneaky than that.

But not sneaky in the way you'd think: the idea the film starts to play around with is that Nell is suffering from a bad case of being 16 years old and having a desire to express her sexuality while trapped in an environment of severest repressions (it becomes clear later in the movie that Louis would much rather assume that his daughter has been raped than that she had sex of her own choosing). And so she has sublimated her desire to have sex and break away from her insanely puritanical family life into the form of a made-up trickster demon named Abalam, because movie demons have the worst fucking names.* But at least it lacks the slurry Zs of "Pazuzu". Sorry The Exorcist, but you have a goofy-sounding bad guy.

None of this is, as such, particularly new or exciting or brave, and like many and many an exorcism film before it, The Last Exorcism doesn't work very hard to enter into the actual possession victim's head, if only because it needs very hard to keep us wondering if she's suffering from paranormal or strictly psychological torments (for a much better experiment in the same mode, we have the 2006 German film Requiem). In The Exorcist, they could get away with that; it is a film mostly about the responses people have to the possession. Here, they cannot. Cotton starts out with a very Father Karras-ish plot arc as the man of the cloth who's lost his faith and must regain it by fighting with actual spiritual evil, but the film maintains the possibility that there is no demon for so long that he's never forced to do anything but reiterate that, as always, he's right and it's just one big psychosomatic stress. Besides, he instantly ceases to be an interesting, colorful character when he arrives at the Sweetzer home. Louis is mostly there to be nervous and plaintive - Herthum works much too hard to make the character likable, which helps in complicating the script's self-superior attitude, but not for adding an edge to the suggestion that Nell has been driven crazy by a wretch of father - and Caleb is only ever on the sidelines, which means that we're basically watching activity being performed rather than characters having feelings.

And so, for all its stabs at complexity, The Last Exorcism proves to be pretty much a generic spook show, with the usual guttural speech and self-mutilation of all the other exorcism movies. It has one strikingly original and deeply disturbing gore scene, when Nell uses the camera to beat a cat to death - its blood remains streaked on the lens for quite some time - but director Daniel Stamm otherwise offers no personalising touches to a movie that has only the gritty cheapness of the first person aesthetic to differentiate itself from 37 years of Exorcist knock-offs. Still, it acquits itself well enough for all of that; the last big exorcism movie prior to 2010 was The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and The Last Exorcism movie beats that one senseless.

So the film heads into the final stretch with a steady gait and head held high, and then it trips and head-plants into the asphalt. I'm not sure when exactly the set the marker for the film's descent into total garbage; the extremely ill-timed interview with an awkward gay teen boy (Logan Craig Reid) whom Nell had named as the real father of her non-demonic baby is the first point that I said loud, in an empty room "Well, what the fuck". Certainly, by the point that Stamm crash-zooms into a pentagram painted on the Sweetzers' wall as the music gives us the most generic sting (so much for found-footage artlessness), it's all over but the tetchy wind-down, as the film erases its ambiguity in the most speedy, arbitrary series of twists, reveals, and ginned-up jump scares possible, complete with a sudden flurry of death because, dammit, this was a horror movie, and we had best leave nobody alive, right?

It's not the most sudden nosedive in quality a horror film could take; strictly limiting ourselves to movies that premiered in 2010, it's not as calling as the third act descent into putresence that mars the splendid opening hour of Insidious. But it's still enormously misconceived and stupidly blunt, and the moderate strengths of The Last Exorcism up to that point aren't able to survive it.

Body Count: 3, with a 4th who's clearly going to die pretty soon. Also that poor cat.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: 21st CENTURY HORROR - THIS IS HALLOWEEN

All this happened years ago, and it's long since time to get over it, but it's really and truly baffling that Warner Bros. saw fit to handle Trick 'r Treat so shabbily. Having taken on the feature directorial debut of Bryan Singer's protégé Michael Dougherty (who co-wrote both X2 and Superman Returns), financed by Legendary Pictures and Singer's company Bad Hat Harry, Warner's announced a release date in time for Halloween 2007, only to cancel it at the last minute. That clearly spoke to a lack of faith in the project, though it's hard to say why: the film's December, 2007 premiere at the Butt-Numb-a-Thon festival in Austin was enormously well-received, as was its tour of the horror festival circuit over 2008. The film quickly took on the aspect of a legend, loved by all who knew it and lusted after by those who didn't. And still Warner sat on it. Finally, in October 2009 - two years and one day after its initially-scheduled release date - the company released it straight to DVD.

Not an impressive fate for one of the only obvious instant classics of horror in the first decade of the 21st Century. Trick 'r Treat is not entirely without lumps, but it's a film wherein even the most apparent flaws are so clearly a function of Dougherty's commitment to his muse, a refusal to compromise the personality of the material even slightly, that its flaws simply don't "count". And its strengths are as distinctive and impressive as anything else from its generation of American horror.

This despite having a seemingly insurmountable strike against it from the start: Trick 'r Treat is an anthology film. Anthologies, even horror anthologies, that are uniformly solid do exist, but anthologies with at least one obviously poor segment are much, much more common. Dougherty's script massages things by letting the stories bleed into each other, and he and cinematographer Glen MacPherson do splendid work unifying each of the four stories with an overall sense of thick autumnal night air, while giving each of them enough of a distinct visual style that we can usually tell where we are just at a glance. So it's not as bluntly divided against itself as it might have been, to its benefit.

Taken as a whole, the idea of each of the four segments (plus a prologue is basically the same: obey the traditions of Halloween, whatever "tradition" might mean in a given context, even the traditions that Dougherty appears mostly to have invented on the spot. The spirit of Halloween, present to witness and punish those who transgress against these traditions, is a little boy-shaped thing with tattered orange footie pajamas and a burlap mask that vaguely resembles a face; his name is Sam (Quinn Lord), which I take to be short for "Samhain", the Gaelic holiday retrofitted into Halloween. "Samhain" also appears in dialogue, and I am unduly impressed by the fact that it is pronounced correctly ("Sow-win").

The first thing we see is a snippet of a vintage safety video about trick or treating, that cuts to a glowing jack-o'-lantern smile against a pitch black field. It's as direct a reference to the opening credits of the seminal Halloween as I expect that Dougherty wanted to try to get away with, equal parts "I love you and I want to do what you did" and "okay, I can take over now". That jack-o'-lantern, when we see it, belongs to Emma (Leslie Bibb) and Henry (Tahmoh Penikett), a married couple on their way back from a costume party. Emma extinguishes the candle, over Henry's playful objections, and sets herself semi-indifferently to the task of taking down a few of the sheets from the many ghost decorations in the couple's yard, while he gets a porn video set up. Bloody limbs and creepy figures standing at a distance and staring abound, all turning out to be feints; the actual attack on Emma occurs without any set-up at all. It's mechanically perfect, a dance of false scares that distract us from the real scare until it cuts our throat with a jagged pumpkin lollipop.

Between the graceful staging of the scares, the concise, appealing character relationship established in just a few lines between Bibb and Penikett, and the wonderful visuals made by MacPherson's thick and gloomy lighting of the wonderfully evocative neighborhood location (the production design is by Mark Freeborn and the set decoration by Rose Marie McSherry), we've seen everything, in embryonic form, that Trick 'r Treat has in store, somewhere in this wonderfully self-contained anecdote. The rest is all expansion.

The four stories, in the order that they take prominence, center on Steven Wilkins (Dylan Baker), the principal of the local middle school, whose enthusiasm for the nastiest traditions of Halloween leads him to spike the candy he gives out with cyanide, and even this isn't the bleakest thing that happens when bratty kid Charlie (Brett Kelly) shows up; Macy (Britt McKillip), Sara (Isabelle Deluce), Schrader (Jean-Luc Bilodeau), and Chip (Alberto Ghisi), a group of young friends who play a prank on Rhonda (Samm Todd), an autistic girl, by recalling the grisly local story of how a busload of special needs students were driven into a flooded quarry at their parents' behest, and using this as the basis for a mean joke about zombiefied children; Laurie (Anna Paquin), a college-aged virgin whose sister Danielle (Lauren Lee Smith) and friends Maria (Rochelle Aytes) and Janet (Moneca Delain) try to set her up with a guy for their slutty costume party; and Mr. Kreeg (Brian Cox), who hates children and Halloween, and chases away trick or treaters. For this most singular rejection of the spirit of the season, he is particularly targeted by Sam. The mode is very EC Comics: each of the stories ends with a karmic shocker of some kind, and in one case an out-and-out twist (one that is deliciously foreshadowed all over the place; enough to make my least-favorite plotline on first viewing my favorite on a second). And the point is emphatically not anything deeper than a quick jolt of the creeps, exactly as you'd hope to get if you and three buddies were swapping stories around a campfire some Halloween night.

That's easily the film's greatest strength: it is the most Halloweenish Halloween movie of all (something that even Halloween itself, with its charmingly dubious "California summer in Midwestern autumn drag" looks, could never claim). If there is an aspect of Halloween festivities that's not covered by the movie, I can't name it: children play-acting at spooky rituals, adults dressing in filthy costumes, news reporters dutifully spitting out inauthentically cheery boilerplate about some town's overly enthusiastic embrace of extreme kitsch in pursuit of tourism dollars. And the look of the thing! There's no better depiction of the inky blackness of a fall night punctuated by the warm lights of houses and candles on the books, from the opening scene all the way to a climactic jump scare consisting of nothing but Kreeg's terrified discovery that his whole yard has been filled with flickering jack-o'-lanterns, a shot that's as beautiful in its glistening blackness as it is unnerving.

With such a grand creation of a sustained mood, it's little surprise that Trick 'r Treat is top-shelf horror: if not scary, as such, then admirably suffused with the chilliness and mystery of a good ghost story, crossed with the inventive violence of the better slasher films. The reliance on stillness is a gratifying strength, particularly given the frenetic era of horror that the film was made during: the wide shots of Sam standing and observing, repeated throughout the film, are a terrific way of quietly reinforcing a baseline of ominous calm, and most of the tensest moments in the film are also the slowest (this is particularly true in the fog-coated abandoned quarry of the kids' subplot, from its choked-off sound design to the simple little "bye-bye" gesture at its end). But it's no weaker when it opens the throttle: the most shocking gore effects, which I cannot talk about because they qualify as the film's one absolute spoiler, are extremely impressive and particularly unsettling in both conception and execution, especially given how frequently such effects have gone wrong in other movies. Really, as far as the nuts and bolts of horror goes, the film only commits one enormous misstep: it should never let us see underneath Sam's burlap mask, because the blankness of his expression is worth far more than the frankly squirrelly idea for what we eventually see of him.

Is this the film's only actual flaw? Probably not. Not every performance is equally good, particularly in Laurie's segment, where Paquin significantly outclasses all of her scene partners. And it's not one of those horror movies that allow much room for talking up its fascinating character arcs and social commentary: this really is all about the joy and pleasure of sharing scary stories. That's hardly a little thing; in fact, it is much too easy to overlook just how important it is. And to claim that it's the only card Trick 'r Treat has to play is doing no more than accusing the film of being an exemplary addition to a tradition of hair-raising anecdotes older than cinema itself.

Body Count: 9 in the present, plus the 8 children in the flashback to the schoolbus massacre, plus a number devoured in a murderous orgy whose number I cannot satisfactorily arrive at. But I think "not fewer than 23" is a good estimate.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE LATE 1990s - BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH, HE KINDLY STOPPED FOR ME

I have named this penultimate leg of the final Summer of Blood "Horror in the Late 1990s", but the quick-witted will notice that Final Destination was released in 2000. And no, this isn't some enormously pretentious "you see, decades begin in the year ending in -1 and end in the year ending in -0, so 'the '90s' were actually 1991-2000" type of deal, though I would absolutely not put it past myself to do that.

Rather, it's that Final Destination strikes me as a particularly clear-cut bridge between two eras of horror cinema. The Age of Scream, with almost no exceptions, largely functioned as the theatrical wing of The WB, both in the literal sense that the teen-focused network largely shared a pool of actors with the many films that tried to cut off a slice of that Scream pie for themselves, and in the more general sense that a lot of these films were basically teen soaps into which violent death wandered. Final Destination has both of those angles covered: the headliners include Dawson's Creek regular Kerr Smith and two-shot guest star Ali Larter (in fairness, Larter's fame - such as it was - largely started with Final Destination, and she could fairly be called an unknown), American Pie stand-out Seann William Scott, and in the lead role, Devon Sawa. I'm damned if I can remember now why anybody cared about Devon Sawa prior to 2000, but I vividly remember knowing that he existed when this film first came out, and thinking that it was pandering to try and force him into movie stardom, though pandering to whom, I am also at a loss to remember.

The shift in American horror that culminated in 2004's Saw, meanwhile, was directly away from the sanded edges and glib friendliness of the reedy Scream followers, and back towards a measure of nastiness and violence-for-violence's-sake. It wasn't always scary and was frequently nothing but a gonzo show of elaborate, tacky gore, but this new mode of horror was at least unsafe. It punched, where the horror of the '90s tapped or tickled. And here, too, Final Destination stakes its claim: while the blood is spilled with quite a bit of a sense of humor that functions to delegitimise its horror, there's no mistaking how nasty this film is. It takes quite a lot of pride in the viciousness of its preposterously elaborate death sequences, and it makes them land with a real punch. Any ol' slasher movie can present its character deaths with a certain flair that makes them more fun and cool than actually visceral; this is usually done with a kind of showmanship that isolates the deaths as nothing but a self-contained setpiece. Final Destination has the setpieces, but not the isolation; the whole film is build around rising momentum and dread that spans its entire running time, with every character's behavior hinging on their awareness of horrible it must be to die.

Splitting the difference between the poles means that Final Destination ends up being more of a ghoulish black comedy than it gets credit for, if less than it could be. That, in fact, is the most signal achievement of Final Destination 2, from three years later: it fully embraces the sick humor that Final Destination merely hints at, in the process becoming a bit more enthusiastic in its cruelty and a bit less hard-hitting. It's an open question in my mind which of these two approaches results in the better film, but the main point is that, rather unpredictably, Final Destination and at least its first sequel both end up being good enough that "better film" isn't a totally incongruous phrase to use. There are a lot of forces working against Final Destination, including its largely bland cast and a scenario that makes a big damn point of not clarifying its own rules or explaining itself, but it's honestly as good as a teen-focused body count picture released in 2000 was ever possibly going to be.

So about that scenario: it's a real snazzy, gimmicky bastard. Once upon a time, a few dozen seniors from Mt. Abraham High School in Vancouverton, USA were heading on their senior trip to Paris, when one of them, Alex Browning (Sawa) had an intensely real dream of the plane exploding less than a minute after take off. His subsequent hissy fit gets so frantic and noisy that he's thrown off the plane, dragging several other students and two teachers, Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke) and Larry Murnau (Forbes Angus), with him. Larry is able to argue his way back on the plane - the kids can't be without a chaperone, after all - but Valerie and the other escapees, including Alex's best friend Tod Waggner (Chad E. Donella), his best enemy Carter Horton (Smith), Carter's girlfriend Terry Chaney (Amanda Detmer), the dimwitted Billy Hitchcock (Scott), who was just making his way onto the plane when Alex had his freakout, and Clear Rivers (Larter), who uniquely among everybody involved chose to get off the plane because she actually believed Alex when he started shouting about his premonition. As well she might; the seven stranded folks haven't even caught their bearings from being unceremoniously dumped in the terminal when the plane does, in fact, explode.

39 days later, Alex has turned into a pariah and source of terror and fascination: Carter resents him even more know that he owes Alex his own life, Valerie is sickened just to look at him, Billy eagerly peppers him with questions about the future. Only Clear still wants to be his friend, I presume because of her asinine name that makes her incapable of having normal human interactions. It's Clear who serves as his sole ally when Tod dies of an apparent suicide that Alex just knows must have been an accident of some kind. We also know this, because we saw him die: we saw water inexplicably ooze across the bathroom floor, causing him to trip just so and fall across a rope hanging off the showerhead just so, and strangle to death. So we're ahead of the game when Alex and Clear sneak into the morgue to investigate Tod's body. But we're nowhere near as far ahead as the mortician, Mr. Bludworth (Tony Todd), who gently but menacingly informs the teens that they are being stalked by Death Itself, who wants to earn back the lives Alex saved with his psychic outburst. And as he says in a line that benefits immeasurably from Todd's irreplaceable bass purr, "You don't even want to fuck with that mack daddy".

And thus we have a concept loose enough to support five movies through 2011's Final Destination 5: survive an unsurvivable accident, and Death will catch up with you, though in an apparent fit of peevishness that you were able to get away from its grasp, your death is going to come in the form of a supremely complicated series of accidents that all add up to a spectacularly messy splotch where your body used to be. I will not run through the film's deaths, which start at the 36 minute mark and regularly punctuate the remaining hour, since the whole fun of Final Destination and its sequels lies in watching how much of a Rube Goldberg contraption the filmmakers can concoct to kill each cast member, and/or how much stage blood they can justify from a single human death.

What sets Final Destination apart from a routine slasher, as well as from at least some of its own sequels, is in the spirited attitude with which it moves through this mechanistic slaughtering of the innocents. There is a perfect mixture of the deadly serious and the hopelessly absurd throughout the whole movie; it's no surprise at all to learn that writer Jeffrey Reddick's first draft was a spec script for The X-Files, which is how X-Files producers Glen Morgan & James Wong picked up and rewrote it into what would become Wong's feature directorial debut. For it shares with that show a deadpan sensibility, an awareness that yes, yes, all of this is terrible - but it's also kind of ridiculous, and we're not going to try and sell you on the idea that it's not. The closest the film comes to acknowledging outright that it's a comedy at heart is when it throws a speeding bus at one of its victims quite without warning, splattering blood like a water balloon. But the whole thing has a hard time hiding its impish grin, especially in Valerie's unbelievably complex death sequence, punctuated by fake-outs where you can almost hear Wong chuckling "Gotcha! You totally expected that she was going to blow up the kitchen when she turned on that burner. Don't lie" over your shoulder.

It is, essentially, a film that knows it doesn't have the ingredients to be scary, only repulsive and nihilistic, so at least it's worth having a good time with it. Wong approaches this with a perfectly straight face, but the comedy is always right there, ready to erupt: the tasteless gag of having John Denver music play during or near every death; Scott's excellent performance as a starry-eyed moron (it is in fact my favorite of his performances, by no small margin); overblown audio cues, like a montage of packing scored like a murder scene, or a small circular fan that roars like a tiger, or the stove burners that ignite like a star exploding. It's a very heightened film that never calls attention to itself, which means that it's every bit as ominous as it is absurd: the whole movie positively looms with death, turning even the most innocuous moments and household objects into such leering avatars of destruction and bloody murder that it's hard to know whether to laugh or shudder.

At any rate, it is an ebullient movie that leaves nothing on the table; it commits hard to what it's depicting and how badly it wants to amuse & disgust the audience. Not everything plays: the "character surnames are famous horror directors" gag is musty and smug, though "Billy Hitchcock" is a magnificent character name. And the cardboard-thin performances Sawa and Larter give prevent the film from having even a smidgen of resonance - there really is no draw here besides the most superficial generic appeal, and the cackling delight the film shows in murdering its ensemble. But really, that's enough. Final Destination is shameless razzle-dazzle done by people who genuinely can't imagine why a pissed-off Death getting its revenge on meddling teenagers shouldn't be entertaining. It's crassly inhumane and too blunt to be scary, but it understands the spectacle to be gleaned from its bloody material far more viscerally than its teen-slasher forebears, and with more zest and good cheer than its torture porn descendents. All of which is enough to make it one of the few contemporary splatter pictures that also can lay claim to being something of a modern classic in horror.

Body Count: 292 if we count the plane crash, 5 if we don't, but of course, isn't the film's argument that the true body count is every single one of us?

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE LATE 1990S - CROCODILE SCHLOCK

The late 1990s were a deeply insincere moment in American pop culture. Emboldened primarily, I suppose by the enormous success of Jerry Seinfeld's famous stand-up and television comedy about nothing, every facet of music, movies, and television were infested by a great desire to indulge in something that was not, in fact, irony, but was described that way so pervasively that the word "ironic" now basically refers to that. To the glib, sophisticated style of mordant humor that permits the speaker to divorce themselves from any real engagement with what they're talking or thinking about.

I bring this up because Lake Placid, from 1999, is something of an irony bomb, explicitly mouthing these exact sentiments in the opening scene through the vessel of a character who is unmistakably looked at askance by the screenplay by David E. Kelley, himself one of the leading lights of the Age of Irony, thanks to his TV show Ally McBeal (a show for whose popularity we shall have to some day answer to our children). "Look at this joyless, square cop", the movie says in this opening scene, with mirthful detachment, "he's such a hick. Doesn't like sarcasm or city folks. Hey, let's throw a line in two-thirds of the way through the movie to suggest, a propos of nothing, that he's also a homophobe".

The film itself is part of the wide-ranging trend of mixing self-aware & self-effacing comedy into horror movies, distinctive mostly because of how heavily it skews that balance towards comedy. As will happen when a TV auteur noted for his quips takes the lead on a giant killer animal movie, and make no mistake, Lake Placid is a Kelley film in all the ways that matter, even if he didn't direct it. Even if, in fact, the director is somebody like Steve Miner, who you'd think should keep the movie more firmly tied down in horror territory: Miner having the distinction of being the only man to direct films in both the Friday the 13th and Halloween franchises (F13, Part 2 & F13, Part 3, and Halloween H20, specifically). But he also spent 1998 directing four episodes of the slick teen soap Dawson's Creek, including the pilot, and it's that skill set that gets a far more robust workout over the course of Lake Placid's gratifyingly swift 82 minutes.

The movie's plot is thoroughly formulaic in a way that would become even more familiar during the glut of direct-to-video and made-for-TV creature features in the 2000s, but was as old as the very first Jaws knock-offs. In the Maine countryside, on the picturesque Black Lake (we are told that they wanted to name it "Lake Placid", but that was taken already), Fish & Game officer Walt Lewis (David Lewis), a monosyllabic snarky bastard, and Sheriff Hank Keough (Brendan Gleeson, not even feinting towards an American accent) are on a boat. It doesn't matter why. What matters it that Walt gets attacked by some kind of a Thing, that absconds with his lower half. And this is something that Sheriff Hank has no clue how to deal with, so off we dissolve to New York City, and the film gets down to its real project: forcing us into the company of the worst goddamn people in the world. The first of these is Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda), a paleontologist at the natural history museum, who finds out that her boss-boyfriend (Adam Arkin) and BFF (Mariska Hargitay) have been sleeping together, and in this circumstance, taking an assignment to the Maine backwoods seems totally reasonable. But upon arriving, Kelly starts to complain about everything. In this wide-ranging arrogant New Yorkers-hate-nature way that, to save my life, I can't tell if we're meant to laugh with or at.

Kelly, Sheriff Hank, and a new Fish & Game officer, Jack Wells (Bill Pullman) begin to investigate, and are quickly joined by Kelly's colleague, a mythology scholar and crocodile fetishist named Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt). Note that nobody at all has said one word about crocodiles so far. That's how good Hector is. For it is, in fact, a saltwater crocodile that's haunting Black Lake and devouring the local fauna, and the film give us just enough real knowledge to encourage us to really dig in and think about all the way that this makes no sense at all (a croc swimming across the Pacific is the kind of dubious science it's possible to swallow in the interests of kicking off the plot; traversing the Indian Ocean and rounding South Africa before crossing most of the Atlantic from north to south is daring us not to call bullshit). The film eases us into that: it's a good halfway through the total running time before we see the croc in more than just a flash for a second or two, at which point it is predominately played by a really neat Stan Winston Studios animatronic, and occasionally by shiny CGI that I'd say has aged poorly, except that I distinctly remember it already looked terribly insubstantial in 1999, like this massive 30-foot crocodilian weighed no more than a soap bubble, or a fairy's kisses.

But, I mean, hell! We're not at this giant crocodile movie for the giant crocodile, I hope! No indeed, we're hear to enjoy that one of a kind David E. Kelley banter, as Kelly, Hector, Jack, and Sheriff Hank have personality clashes between their four different outlooks: Jack's taciturn manliness, Sheriff Hank's bullish rural gruffness, Hector's animalistic mysticism, and Kelly's bottomless ability to hate goddamn everything in the world. There's also sassy Mrs. Bickerman (Betty White), the old lady who's the sole human being living on the lake, ever since the time her senile husband died under circumstances that are too enormously shady for words, and now busies herself feeding cattle to the crocodile. And Deputy Sharon Gare (Meredith Salenger), who's there largely to let Platt bounce lines off somebody who won't fight back.

So all these different personality types come into conflict, which in this case means hurling invective at each other. Florid insults, to be sure. Here's a nowhere near comprehensive list of the snappy things that are said over the course of the movie:

-"Maybe later you can chew the bark off my big fat log."
-"Officer Fuckmeat."
-"The longer you live, the more sex you get to have with your sister."
-"You fuckshit!"
-"If I had a dick, this is where I'd tell you to suck it."
-"It helps to hear it from a complete stranger: you're fat."
-"If you call me ma'am one more time, I'll sue you, and with today's laws it's possible."
-"They conceal information like that in books."
-"Maybe I should just wipe myself with some leafy little piece of poison oak. And then I can spend the whole day scratching my ass, blending in with the natives."

And that's not even counting the more routine "fuck yourself" and "asshole" and such that litter the script. It's truly fatiguing. In the hands of the greats, vulgar language can be the source of some of our finest poetry, but too much of it used too bluntly is beneath artlessness. It is the effluvia of filthy-minded adolescents, gleefully shouting "fuck!" because they know it's offensive, but unable to do anything beyond carpet-bomb insults.

This is, please understand, the only card Lake Placid has to play. You either find the nasty-minded writing amusing or you don't, and there's nothing left for the film to draw on if you don't. The acting is no help to the screenplay at all, which is kind of absurd: you'd think the one thing that dialogue this chewy and acidic ought be good for is providing a lot of fun for the actors spouting it. That was, after all, the entire basis of George Sanders and Sydney Greenstreet's careers. But the unifying characteristic of the cast is that they're terrible. Unsurprisingly, in the case of Fonda, who magnifies everything objectionable, shrill, and bitchy about her deeply unpleasant stereotype of a character. And unsurprisingly in Pullman's case as well, though mostly he's just a lump of meat for the vast bulk of the film, until he finally gets an outraged moralistic speech that he completely fluffs. It is very surprising that White is so weak in her role: the foul-mouthed old lady with a cheerful attitude should have been a gift to this actor among all actors, but there's not a single moment of White's performance where she appears to believe in the character, her motivations, or the words she say. Go back to that "if I had a dick" line - there are so many ways to make that line funny, or at least energetic, and White just sort of slurs it out and lets it die.

Platt's not terrible - the crude, erratic role is a liability that any actor would be hard-pressed to make work, and he at least has the right personality for it - but it mostly falls to Gleeson to be interesting in any way, with any plot beat, or any line reading. His deadpan response, "He seemed taller", when snarkily asked to identify a corpse from just the toe is the only line in the whole movie that I, for one, find even a little bit funny, and generally speaking his deliberate approach to the character - play the man, not the collection of quips - is enough to make him far and away the most tangible figure in the movie. (we know from other evidence, of course, that Gleeson is far and away the most reliably talented member of this ensemble, but I wouldn't want to use Lake Placid itself to mount that argument).

The flat acting and the deadening effect that has on the already shaky comedy is emblematic of the film's biggest overriding problem. It wants to occupy too many tonal registers at once, and can't make any of them succeed. The lurches from comedy of ill-manners to creepy monster movie to campy exercise in musty genre mechanics are ungainly at best, and they are rarely at their best. More often, the film heaves its way through the shift from comedy to horror like a drunk attempting to navigate a narrow doorway, doing through brutal force what cannot be done through mental clarity. Miner's directing is exactly wrong: he has no apparent sense of comic timing and his approach to making a thriller consists entirely in telegraphing jump scares, not all of which actually arrive. He does, at least, show off the crocodile well, lingering on half-seen animatronic shots and jumping briskly through whole-body CGI shots. And the film gets some decent mileage from the simple technique of showing nothing on the water in wide shots: a good way of suggesting both the size and the unknowability of the lake, and allowing us to sketch in our idea of the creature living inside of it.

Still, when everything is working perfectly Lake Placid is no more than the exact same creature feature that was all over the place in the years after Jurassic Park, and was often done better (it's easy to spot problems with Anaconda, but I'd never pass up a chance to watch that movie in favor of this one). And the catastrophic mixture of dumb comedy and wimpy horror that keeps apologising for itself means that things almost never work perfectly. There are many worse giant killer animal movies than Lake Placid, of course; it is a subgenre uniquely adept at producing tacky, formulaic garbage. A snotty sense of humor detaching the film from its own content and characters is certainly not a winning strategy to redeem that formula.

Body Count: A moose, a bear, two cows, and a crocodile, and then all of two human beings, in full disregard for how badly we want to watch every last one of these people die.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE LATE 1990s - FRIEND OF A FRIEND OF A FRIEND

At a certain point fairly early in Urban Legend, the character Damon Brooks turns on the radio, and a couple of bars of the 1997 Paula Cole single "I Don't Want to Wait" play, at which he becomes overly flustered and scrambles to turn it off. The younger of you among my readers, or those with the blissful fortune to have forgotten the shittiest of late-'90s pop culture, will perhaps need to have this moment unpacked. "I Don't Want to Wait" was the theme song for a TV show that premiered in January, 1998, Dawson's Creek, which was a teen soap opera that aired on The WB. Joshua Jackson played a character on that show. So it's a simple little in-joke, but it's also probably the single most typical moment I have ever encountered from an American horror movie made between 1996 (when Scream brought horror back to major prominence after years in abeyance) and 2004 (when Saw reminded horror what it mean to be intensely violent and nihilistic). It's a joke; the great sea change of post-Scream horror was that it absolutely refused to be anything but glib. It's a sequence that insistently reminds us that Jackson was a TV star on a show designed to package nonthreatening sexuality for pubescent girls; teen TV actors had become all but unavoidable in horror over the preceding year. The entire genre had, in effect, been resurrected for the solitary purpose of being made toothless as a direct result of being tailor-made for a market of teenagers who wanted... you know what, I have no fucking clue what the people who made films like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer hits wanted from the horror films, or even if they got. But it damn certain wasn't what I want from horror films, as I am keenly reminded every time I decide that I've been making too many good life choices in a row, and thus revisit the teen soap horror boom of the late '90s into the '00s to course-correct back into masochism.

Urban Legend has few merits or points of interest. It's among the most structurally pure slasher films of the late '90s, which is a polite way of saying that it's damnably predictable in almost all its particulars. That's a horrible fate for a film so entirely driven by a gimmick that it even titles itself that way. This is supposed to be fun, or some such; instead, it's the kind of movie that one watches with a sort of a mental checklist:

-Opening sequence with a random character who dies in a manner that clearly establishes the killer's, that is to say the movie's, M.O.

-The cast is introduced in a group setting that allows us to see their group dynamic, which in turn raises the question of why the hell these people are friends. They are each given one personality trait apiece, and it is instantly obvious which one is going to stay alive longest; she is a woman.

-There's a male who is not part of the group, but who enters into their dynamic slantwise; nobody likes him, and therefore it's a ticking clock until he makes out with the already-designated Final Girl.

-Rumor of a secret institutional history of violence is mentioned.

-A character actor, legendary among the target audience but still quite cheap to acquire, is brought in to provide some omnidirectional menace.

I could go on, but it's as boring to write as it is to watch, and I suspect as it is to read. Let me fill in some of the details: the first victim is Michelle Mancini (Natasha Gregson Wagner), who is killed when a creepy gas station attendant (Brad Dourif) can't overcome his stutter long enough to warn her that somebody with an axe is hiding in her backseat. She had some mysterious connection, unknown to anybody, to Natalie Simon (Alicia Witt), the Final Girl among a group including Brenda Bates (Rebecca Gayheart), Parker Riley (Michael Rosenbaum), Damon Brooks (Joshua Jackson), and host of a radio sex advice show Sasha Thomas (Tara Reid), who is by leaps and bounds the most interesting of the side characters, almost solely because her job puts her at the center of the only creative scenes. The interloping boy is Paul Gardener (Jared Leto), brash ambulance-chasing reporter for the school paper - I didn't mention, these are all college students. And about half of them are even close enough to college age that it's not worth calling them out on it. Some of them are in the folklore class taught by William Wexler (Robert Englund, the genre legend character actor), currently on Urban Legend Week, and those of you familiar with that literary genre already recognised from Michelle's death that the flashy part of the movie is that all of the murders are stagings of famous urban legends, except for Sasha's, which is a pure slasher movie chase scene.

The concept is sound, but it's gruesomely marred in the execution by writer Silvio Horta, a 23-year-old first timer when the film was shot, and much too in love with empty-headed "cleverness" to focus on nuts-and-bolts storytelling; Urban Legend is addicted to twists that are obvious many, many scenes in advance, and its organising gimmick is applied sloppily and with increasingly limited imagination - there's little doubt that the first two deaths are by far the most inventive and thematically focused (for that matter, the gas station is even beautifully shot by James Cressanthis, the only point at which the film does much of anything visually that I can speak of positively). Director Jamie Blanks, more a composer than a director by trade, doesn't help at all; not that there was much of a tradition for making slasher movies in 1998, but the slackness with which the violent sequences are presented, the downright charming inability to mine tension from scenes in which characters are mere seconds from being murdered, is truly remarkable. Usually even the worst filmmaker stuck with a bunch of vapid TV soap stars - and they are so vapid this time around, Leto is the only under-40 actor who has even the glimmer of an inner life - and a mandate not to freak out the 13-year-old target audience too hard, R-rating or no, can still manage to get the audience to jump a little bit from a shock cut and a burst of noise on the soundtrack. Urban Legend telegraphs every last one of its thin little scares so thoroughly that one rather sits down politely to wait for them, than springs back in alarm from them. It's wan enough to make I Know What You Did Last Summer, its exact equivalent from the year prior, seem halfway decent. Shit, it's enough to make Blanks's follow-up, 2001's dreary Valentine, look like a clear and gratifying evolution in the direction of greater talent.

A few sparks of life do show up, mostly contained in the person of Loretta Devine, who plays the school's apparently only security guard, an aficionado of the '70s action films of Pam Grier; while the young people are too generic and soulless to do much in the way of acting, and the old guard, in the form of Englund and John Neville, don't even pretend to care about the mechanical crap they're obliged to shove forward, Devine at least approaches her character as somebody with thoughts in her head that aren't exactly cotangent with the words she's speaking at that exact moment. It's not inherently great, or even good acting, but at least she seems alive, and that's more than basically anybody else can lay claim to.

There are also a few decent moments of knowing humor in among all the lazy smirks and winks, an inheritance that all post-Scream slashers needed to reckon with, and which some simply weren't prepared for, wanting to be serious but forcing themselves into irony for market purposes. Urban Legend is one of those; the more it resembles Scream, the flatter it goes, with its meta-narrative flourishes easily the most ineffective parts of a movie that's only ever ineffective. But I was headed in the direction of a compliment: a few of the sardonic bits are even kind of amusing, like the deadpan creepy janitor (Julian Richings) that the movie can't put over as a red herring no matter how hard it tries.

It even manages to toss in a few smart nods to its urban legend gimmick, though never when it looks at them directly; the callers to Sasha's show have problems that map to urban legends, the last scene quietly evokes the story of the woman with a ribbon around her neck. These are nice, lovely grace notes, and the film desperately needs them; for without them it is sheer junk, a derivative slasher that is worth paying attention to only in that its absolute lack of creativity gives it some value as a survey of all the most generic elements of the '90s horror resurgence in its second year, right down to the irrevocable time-stamp of the prominent use of "Zoot Suit Riot" on the soundtrack

Body Count: That depends on how exactly you want to interpret the last scene: in keeping with the urban legend motif, the film allows the possibility that what "happened" is different based on the teller. But it's probably never going to be lower than 9. Also a dog that ended up in a microwave, also in keeping with the motif.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE SIZE OF A BUG

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Marvel's Ant-Man shows us the fun side of being so small that you have to look up to an ant. Ah, but what of the scary side?

To begin with, it's thoroughly unreasonable to expect a '50s sci-fi thriller to star Orson Welles. But the teaser trailer for 1957's The Incredible Shrinking Man makes me faintly angry for promising such a miracle, knowing full well that it would never come to pass.

But enough about film advertising. In truth, even deprived of Welles, The Incredible Shrinking Man is a pretty terrific example of its genre, despite some rather obvious and avoidable flaws of story structure and a rather massive shortchanging of the sociological analysis of Richard Matheson's source novel, in favor of more straightforward survivalist adventure. In the hands of Jack Arnold, Universal's best genre film director at that time (he was responsible for Creature from the Black Lagoon, the studio's best monster movie since the 1930s, and he went uncredited for reshooting the best parts of This Island Earth), the film has a merciless pace and excellent scenes of tension, carried on the back of some of the very best special and visual effects of the decade. And beyond the film's admirable strengths as a taut spectacle, Matheson's screenplay ends on an especially strong note, surprisingly managing to achieve in one speech all the moral philosophising that the film needs to feel like it has real depth and nuance, and that despite tapping from the same brand of flowery religiosity that did in many a sci-fi film of the time.

Having gone ahead and given itself that title, the film wastes the minimal possible amount of time in getting going. The Careys, Scott (Grant Williams) and Louise (Randy Stuart) are enjoying a boat ride on the Pacific coast, and at the exact moment that Louise heads belowdecks, a mysterious fog rolls in, covering Scott with a reflective sheen that apparently soaks into his bare skin. Six months later, he discovers that all of his clothes are slightly too large: loose in the belly, too high at the neck, too long in the arms. A doctor's appointment confirms that he's inexplicably become 5'11" instead of his customary 6'1", and he's dropped from 190 to 180 lbs. The doctor (William Schallert) comes up with pleasant, rational explanations for why this is absolutely nothing to worry about, but evidence increasingly pile up that not only is Scott smaller than he used to be, he's continuing to shrink. We're still in the first reel.

God bless the film for its haste in getting us to this point, but it's symptomatic of the film's one overriding, unanswerable shortcoming. It's worth pointing out that the novel is non-linear: it intercuts the story of the very tiny Scott trapped in his own basement, facing down a spider, with the story of how he came to be in that predicament. In other words, it throws the good stuff at the reader first, and then luxuriates in the fine details of the story in the sure knowledge that our attention has been grabbed. By straightening out the narrative line, the movie suddenly makes itself vulnerable to the killer of all B-movies - and classic status notwithstanding, this is nothing if it's not a B-movie - which is that it permits the viewer to become bored. In order to make sure that this doesn't happen, Arnold absolutely flies through all of the material between Scott's discovery of his loose clothes and the moment that his pet cat finally decides that this tiny little biped would probably be an extremely fun thing to chase and dismember, thus precipitating his fall into the depths of the basement. That escalation starts some 33 minutes into the movie, which means that an entire feature's worth of psychological discombobulation, domestic strife, and medical suspense are condensed into just a half of an hour.

Pragmatically, it works: every last moment of the film from the shot of the cat looming through the window of the dollhouse Scott now calls home to the stately appearance of the words "THE END" is gripping, and the film gets to it fast enough that there's no chance of having burned off the goodwill the audience inherently brings to a movie titled The Incredible Shrinking Man (by which I mean, if you're going to hate a movie for showing a man the size of a bug being menaced by a spider, you know damn well enough not to start watching it). Subjectively, I'd say that the film almost doesn't survive it. The paradox is that, by racing through the material so quickly, Arnold and Matheson don't give it any chance to land and linger, which makes it difficult to feel very connected to the onscreen action. Which, in turn, means that it's more boring, because of the exact technique the film uses to keep us from being bored. The most significant example of what I'm talking about is a subplot about Scott's friendship with a little person from a carnival, Clarice (April Kent), who is at that point just about his size; it's undernourished, and the ramifications are left totally ignored (I mean, hell, you could get a whole act just out of what this means to his increasingly frustrated marriage), and while it adds some depth to Scott's arc, it's patently obvious how much more it could be providing to the film with a little TLC.

Please, though, let me be absolutely clear: at its very worst, The Incredible Shrinking Man merely repeats the sins of any given '50s sci-fi movie, and it repeats them at a higher level or sophistication. At its very worst. At its best, you can count on one hand the number of its direct peers that match or top it. Even before Scott ends up in the basement there are several individually terrific sequences that stress the helplessness and weariness of the Careys' situation, or the awkwardness and dysfunction of Scott's condition. In the latter case, there's a scene with Scott's brother (Paul Langton) talking to Louise in front of a chair, and it's only belatedly and thanks to a blunt cut that we realise Scott has been sitting in that chair the whole time. In the former, the best of the film's many exemplary forced-perspective shots (it's every inch as good as the famously ambitious forced perspective in The Fellowship of the Ring, 44 years later), Louise and Scott are having a difficult time talking, and she refuses to make eye contact, thus not only further selling the illusion but also turning a visual effect setpiece into one of the best character moments in the movie.

It's in the basement, though, where the film shines, in every way. The effects work is peerless, with close-up photography of a tarantula seamlessly married to footage of Williams, and the sets and props are impressively convincing simulations of the quotidian world at several times the magnification, an exciting change from the usual chintzy foam objects populating the era's sci-fi. And Arnold stages the action from acute angles that emphasise the size and peril of these routine objects: a scene where Scott tries to use a paint-stirring stick to cross a deadly crevasse of a foot deep or more is my personal favorite part of the movie, finding a way to make the laughably common (dude can't even throw away his spent paint supplies) into something alien and nightmarish. The translation of the banal domestic world of cats, junk in the basement, and crappy water heaters into an endless chain of danger is the purest kind of horror, and it's what gives The Incredible Shrinking Man so much of its brutal punch. It's a more immediate, visceral surrogate for the thoughtful introspection of the book, which crops up only in the last scene and, to lesser effect, in the film's annoying reliance on voice-over; but it's a worthy trade-off, since it means this is also one of the most immediate, visceral sci-fi thrillers of its generation, on top of being one of the most technically audacious.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE SLASHER FILM - A REAL NAIL-BITER

So you'd have to be such an idiot that there's not a word for it in English to expect a film titled Nail Gun Massacre to be even a little bit classy. Still, the speed with which it reveals the incorrigible depths to which its not-classiness reveals itself caught me by surprise - it's not just any movie that opens with a gang rape, and by "opens with a gang rape", I don't mean that's what happens in the first scene. I mean that's what happens in the literal first second of the film's running time.

And with that jolly kick-off, I welcome you to the absolute dregs of human artistry: direct-to-video horror movies in the 1980s. The great slasher boom had largely exhausted itself by the end of 1984, just in time for the newly expanding home video market to create a new, if even cheaper and more threadbare opening for for savvy producers with a halfway decent make-up artist and a couple young actresses willing to take their tops off. It was a grubbier world with fewer rules and smaller budgets, attracting and thriving on a lower tier of talent than was necessary to pass theatrical muster. This resulted in some of the tackiest, tawdriest movies in the history of the medium as well as some of the most impossibly ill-made. Even within that company, though, Nail Gun Massacre is something special. There is not a more inappropriate word than "special". I'm sorry. That's just horrible writing.

But faced with the garishness of a movie depicting a rape in its opening frame, and only gets worse and more exploitative from there, language itself starts to break down a bit. You know that feeling when you're watching a movie for the first time, and you can already tells that it's one for the ages? Nail Gun Massacre is the opposite of that. In my notes I had written down "this is the fucking worst" before the 10-minute mark, and "this is THE FUCKING WORST MOVIE IN HISTORY" around an hour in. That's probably hyperbole. It is, however, the worst movie of the 1980s. I'm very comfortable and confident in making that claim, and I don't give a shit if I haven't seen every movie of the 1980s yet.

An attempt to describe in prose the experience of watching the film would be titanically boring, since there is virtually no plot, and the little bit that scrapes its way through, the film tries very, very hard to keep hidden. So it begins, a propos of nothing, with a gang rape, yes? And then people start dying? Unless this was to be some manner of confrontational, experimental anti-narrative, in which unrelated events take place in an arbitrary order, we can be forgiven for assuming that the murders are an act of vengeance for the rape. That's basic, 1+1=2 logic. Even the briefest, monosyllabic summary of Terry Lofton's heavily reduced script implies that motivation for this particular massacre. The movie pretends that we haven't figured that out for almost 70 minutes. This movie is a grand total of 85 minutes long. That's a repellent amount of stalling for a story that literally could not function without its "secret" being obvious from the opening, and the scene in which Doc (Rocky Patterson), the thirtysomething doctor in a small Texas town who is the closest the movie has to a hero, explains his realisation is static, maddeningly dull, and criminally mis-performed by Patterson, who like every member of the cast seems to be reciting lines that he can't begin to parse and never memorised. Elsewhere in the film, two men who were part of the original crime say their goodbyes to the visibly hostile owner of a lumberyard (Beau Leland), who mutters under his breath "I'll see you sooner than you think" with a snarl on his face. GEE I WONDER WHO THE KILLER MIGHT BE. And the film acts as though we didn't notice that, either.

There is one possibility I can imagine that might justify all this as anything but rank incompetence: co-directors Lofton and Bill Leslie were aware that the audience only cared about the killing scenes, and gave the plot away to let the audience stay ahead of the story and enjoy the ride, like Hitchcock and Vertigo. It's certainly the cast that Lofton and Leslie were only interested in staging murders; God knows there's little enough else that happens in the movie. I've already punted on trying to explain the story, but if I were going to, it would be something like this: men, usually two, who presumably had something to do with the rape - the movie doesn't try very hard to make sure we recognise characters from the opening scene, up to and including the victim, and the killer attacks plenty of people who had absolutely nothing to do with, including no fewer than five women, which I think spoils his feminist bona fides - are in an isolated location. They are approached, in a comically abrupt fashion, by a wiry little man in camouflage and a jet black motorcycle helmet with the eyepiece covered in gaffer tape, and with a ludicrous synthed-up voice that sounds like a cross between Darth Vader, Jeff Foxworthy, and Ben Stein. He quickly kills one of them with the nail gun he has handy, and then spouts several sentences. Some of them quips; fewer of them puns than you'd think. "You should never hitch a ride with a hearse, unless you're dying", he snaps to a hitchhiker to tried to thumb a ride, which is A) not funny and B) not wordplay. Oh, and the bit about the hearse is because the killer drives a hearse that has been painted bright gold. It says so much about Nail Gun Massacre that I almost forgot to mention a detail like that. He then kills the other person, if there were two, and quips some more.

As a palate cleanser in between these evocative scenes of people slumping to the ground with the heads of nails glued unpersuasive to their faces with red food dye being dribbled on their skin, we encounter Doc and the Sheriff (Ron Queen) executing the most aimless murder investigation in the annals of crime, which consists mostly of swapping the observations "[chaws thoughtfully] We nev'r used ta have this many killin's". "[nods, or just stares glassily for about ten seconds] Lot of 'um happening on Old Lady Bailey's property. Wonder if we should go to th' house". "Aww, you don't think Old Lady Bailey has anything to do-" "Course not".

Along the way, we're introduced to a panoply of non-actors of the most awe-inspiring sort. I'm particularly fond of the helpless soul who delivers the line, "Well Tom, in your infinite wisdom, I'm sure you will figure it out in due time" without seeming to know the meaning of any word in that sentence other than "Well" and "I'm". But the clear standouts are Frances Heard (Terry Lofton's grandma!) as a shopkeeper who keeps adjusting her glasses and fearlessly marches on through her pointless expository lines even after she fluffs some of them, and an old man whose identity I cannot certainly attest to (the credits are full of vague descriptions with #1 and #2 following almost all of them) who loudly mumbles with the most impenetrable Southern accent I've encountered in movies in a long while.

Not helping the actors at all, the scenes that don't involve people dying have a nasty tendency to stretch to several minutes a moment that could have been dealt with in half of a line, and frequently could have been snipped out of the film entirely. Such as the great "getting directions" scene, with the dialogue being largely drowned out by background traffic noise. But slamming the film for its technical limitations would be like kicking a beagle puppy. And insulting the directors for their lifeless camera would be pointless, almost as pointless as losing interest in the action altogether to blandly zoom into a naked pair of breasts.

Oh! That's another thing, the porn! Twice, the movie stops being an addled collection of shoddy death scenes and a glacial depiction of the minutiae of human conversation to watch people having simulated sex. And in real time. In fairness, assuming that the cast was hired because of their experience in regionally-produced rural Texas pornography answers most of my objections to the acting, but I don't think that's fair to assume. Anyway, the end of the first sex scene is my favorite part of the whole movie: the dude is lying there dead, and the woman falls on top of him, and the image simply refuses to move or cut for tens of seconds, all while the framing pretty much insists that we notice that their pubic hair is extremely visible in both cases.

This is the most bitterly functional kind of slasher movie that could possibly be: a weak pretext that's only followed about half of the time for a lengthy chain of killings with almost nothing else that could possibly constitute a narrative. It is vile, and it is sleazy, and it is insufferably slow moving nearly all of the time. There is one and only one saving grace to any of this: it is also indescribably ill-made. The acting, the writing, the staging - it's amateurs and first-timers, mixed with an awful degree of cynicism about the market sector the film is targeting. It is, frequently, truly impossible to believe that the thing onscreen could possibly have been made, and it's so daft that it manages to be weirdly compelling even though the whole thing is rotten, from the core to the surface. I have never seen such a reprehensible slasher movie in all my days, but that's not to say that it's not transfixing.

Body Count: 16, and impressively, only one of those does not involve a nail gun. Truth in advertising!

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: SWAPPIN' CONSCIOUSNESS WITH TARSEM

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: director Tarsem Singh shows us the terrible things that can happen when two personalities are stuffed into one brain in Self/less. In this, he is merely returning to his roots.

When it was new, The Cell was at the center of controversy about its content: is there something wrong and wicked about how this movie used absolutely breathtaking images to depict horrible, violent acts, stripping them of their real-world gravity. How innocent a controversy it was! Back in 2000, when this movie came out, we hadn't even seen Saw yet (a film through which you can draw a surprisingly straight line from The Cell), and we didn't know just how pornographic violence could get. I don't know about you, but if I get to choose between a film that might be fetishising violence and is also gorgeous, and a film that definitely is fetishising violence and looks like it was shot on film stock made of dog turds, I'm not going to have to think very long.

But even that's begging the question. To be clear, no, I don't think that The Cell is a fetish object for anything, outside of perhaps the impossible fantasy costumes (Eiko Isihioka and April Napier share costuming duty; I'm going to assume without any real evidence that Napier is responsible for the clothing that looks like what human beings wear, while Isioka's contribution were all of the gilded parade floats with space for people's legs at the bottom). In fact, of all director Tarsem Singh's movies - this was his first - it strikes me as the one where style is most clearly used as a function of the needs of the story and the rather horrible psychological depths that story plumbs (his sophomore effort, The Fall, strikes me more as a story built more to facilitate style than the other way 'round; not that I feel for The Fall anything less than total love).

That said, style is still a very, very important thing; style muscles its way to our eyeballs right from the opening, while the story is still deliberately keeping itself hidden. In the beginning there is desert: shattering orange sand and glowing blue skies, the undiluted colors of the very concept of The Desert of legends and myth (this sequence was shot in Namibia, which would, 15 years later, provide the same uncompromising primary colors to Mad Max: Fury Road). In the desert is a woman all in beautiful, flowing, feathered white, looking like a dove come down from heaven - we don't know her yet, but she's Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), a psychologist. And we don't know this yet, either, but this desert is all in the mind of Edward Baines (Colton James), a boy of about 10. Deane is a member of a team working on an extraordinary technology to treat extraordinary mental disorders: she can literally enter another person's headspace and interact with their consciousness directly. Edward is suffering from a coma triggered by psychological trauma, and his well-to-do parents have sponsored the development of this extraordinary technology under the hands of Drs. Kent (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Cooperman (Becker).

I'm in awe of this opening for reasons that have nothing to do with its literally awe-inspiring scenery and the exquisite costuming. By the ten-minute mark of The Cell, Tarsem and screenwriter Mark Protosevich have told us exactly what their movie is going to be and how to watch it: there will be beautiful tableaux, framed with a sense of painterly composition by music video veteran Tarsem and music video cinematographer Paul Laufer (who shot only one other movie in his career) that is far more attuned to the rules of graphical art than traditional narrative cinema, and is meant to be read accordingly. These images are the expression of moods, and the moods moreover of very specific individuals: tell a sullen 10-year-old to think of a "desert", and it is very much the desert that we get in the opening scene that he'll probably have in mind. So the first thing we learn is to read the images as essential concepts, and not as narrative spaces. The second thing we learn is that we're either on-board with a device that lets a psychologist mind-meld with comatose patients suffering from transparently made-up mental conditions, or we are not. And the film makes its technology as unreasonable as it can: the rig is some kind of fantastic open space where the participants are suspended in mid-air on many fine wires, while wearing suits that make it look rather like they've been skinned alive, which cannot possibly be an accident given the film's eventual fixation on torture and murder. Basically, I mean to say, the opening ten minutes find the movie putting everything on the table: if we aren't on its side, we never will be, and I greatly admire a film that certain of itself.

The plot pretty clearly situates The Cell at the end of the big wave of film's cribbing from The Silence of the Lambs: there's a serial killer, see, who drowns women in an implausible elaborate automated drowning cube (the glassy set for which vividly predicts Saw and its sequels and their theatrical murder boxes), and then bleaches and paints them to resemble porcelain dolls. Catching this repugnant creature has become the fixation of FBI agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn, in what is by an enormously exaggerated margin my favorite of his performances), who has finally scraped enough evidence together to catch the killer, Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio), right in his house. The problem is, Stargher's kill factory isn't in his house. And Stargher is currently suffering from another made-up psychological coma, meaning that Novak and his team only have about 40 hours to find, based on no leads at all, where the killer's present victim has been imprisoned, before she drowns. And there follows the one piece of contrived screenwriting that I can't bring myself to overlook, out of the whole lacework of contrivances that makes up the first third of The Cell: Novak is somehow aware of the experimental dream-sharing machine, and he wants Deane to go hunting in the hideous reaches of Stargher's subconscious to find any scrap of evidence for where he might leave his victims while they die.

The thing that The Cell transforms into at this point is damned near impossible to describe - certainly, even attempting a verbal sketch of the imagery is pointlessness itself. Tarsem, along with Ishioka and Napier, production designer Tom Foden, set decorator Tessa Posnansky, and art director Geoff Hubbard, create mental worlds in this film, both Stargher's and eventually Deane's, that are without specific precedent, nor can I offhand name anything that has copied them since. A few points along the way, though: the film is not quite as straightforward as "the inside of a serial killer's mind is like this" symbolism, though that's enough to get by. Beyond that, it's a synthesis of imagery from European and at least South Asian artistic traditions, as well as American pop culture, and what this suggests within the film itself is not just "let's make the most horrifying hellscapes possible by drawing on multiple sources". Instead, it suggests that Stargher is himself making the same synthesis that the filmmakers do, pulling together fragments of remembered images to construct a worldview. Setting aside its applications to the film's deep wells of horror, this is a tremendously effective way of cinematically visualising the process of how human personalities are built out of piece of memory, whether from personal experience or appropriations of fantasies, stories, and the background radiation of culture. And of course, since this is horror, the personality we need to be chiefly concerned with is one dominated by suffering, directed inward and directed outward and even freestanding representations of pain and death that simply exist, independent of who caused the pain or who receives it.

Importantly, this all applies not just to Stargher, but to Deane herself (at which point I think it deserves saying: Lopez is better in this role than she gets credit for, a placidly calm presence whose relatively simple and straightforward way of presenting the character's beatific sensibilities starts paying considerable dividends when that simplicity runs into the dense imagery), who defines her inner life with signifiers of goodness as soft and generically calming as Stargher's are specific and increasingly draining to watch. The design is no less striking, for being less cruel; Deane's get-up like a cherry blossom that became a nun is among the film's boldest costumes. This is not about reducing the film to a Manichean good/bad framework, though the implication is certainly that Deane thinks in those terms. What it's about is providing a counterpoint to the inside of Stargher's head, while making the same point: we mentally visualise the world in terms of broad signifiers which we then decorate with our own reference points, and that process is called "having a personality". A variation on it is called "consuming art, up to and including the movie titled The Cell", and that's maybe the most cunning thing about the film: it contains within its own structure the expectation that we will be effected by what we're watching. If we are healthy and know that's what we're doing, we can leave the movie having broken down its enormously memorable visual setpieces into our own personal library of reference points. If we are not healthy, well, the movie has some very imaginative ideas about what happens to people whose personality-construction goes awry. The point being, though, that the film is one of the boldest depictions of how external stimuli are transformed into internal narrative, for good or otherwise, that I know the movies to have attempted, and that's rewarding even beyond the shockingly bold images that almost exclusively make up the film's final hour and change.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE SLASHER FILM - SISTERS IN BLOOD

Look at that poster and despair! Every aspect of it - the purple, the lighting, the woman's pose, the woman's deeply inefficient clothing, and every last piece of text - promises a sultry erotic drama. The only thing, and even then it's questionable, that tips us off that it's anything even near to the vicinity of horror is the actual font used for the words The House on Sorority Row themselves. And I'm not the only one who thought so: writer-director Mark Rosman, for whom this was a labor of love uncommon in slashers of the 1980s was a vocal opponent of the image that, whatever the hell it was selling, didn't have a damn thing to do with the actual content of the film. Which for the most part is exactly what you suppose that a slasher film released in 1983 under the title The House on Sorority Row would have as its content. The sub-sub-genre of slasher films set in college housing was older than the slasher boom of the 1980s; no less a seminal text than the 1974 Black Christmas tells a story that's much akin to the one in THoSR, different more in cosmetic details (the time of year; the exact nature of the scenes that take place while the killing is waiting to start up) than in anything of substance.

Despite how obviously it would seem to be case that what you see is exactly what you get, THoSR has picked up a reputation over the years as one of the slasher movies that get it right. It is one of the handful of '80s slashers deemed iconic enough to win its very own remake, for one thing, in the form of 2009's Sorority Row, and it was one of the last breakout hits as the slasher genre started to run out of gas in '83 and '84 - just a mere $10.6 million, but on a penny-pinching budget of less than a half-million dollars, that was a pretty miraculous return on investment at the time.

The trick about the film is that it absolutely deserves its reputation, but it doesn't seem that way for a really long time. At the beginning, in fact, The House on Sorority Row seems to be at best a lateral step in quality from the previous year's crummy The Dorm That Dripped Blood, to keep it within the college slasher wheelhouse. It pukes characters at us without slowing down to differentiate them, or in some cases even give them names, and all the characteristics it bothers to deliver are enough to promise that we're going to really hate spending 90 minutes in their dwindling company. And even that's only after the film's greatly unpromising opening scene: on 19 June, 1961, a woman give birth via caesarian section to a baby who is grimly declared by the doctor to be yet another failure. A failure at what, we're not told. And if you share my particular set of hang-ups, you don't care, either: the sequence, intended by Rosman to be in black-and-white, was tinted blue at the distributor's insistence, which had the effective of accentuating some already cloudy focus, and it all basically looks like you washed your contacts in Vaseline before watching the movie. You know what's crisp, though? The sound. The sound is so crisp and hard and over-recorded that it just about cuts your eardrums. And of course, this is all so emphatically vague that you just know goddamn well that it's going to rotate back and provide the hideous backstory of the movie later on.

So that wraps itself up, anyway, and the movie picks up - still in a groove that feels like it comes from a battered library copy of the How to Make a Slasher playbook, but at least it starts to have momentum - to find the last day of school. Would you believe that it's 19 June? You had damned well better. Seven women, all seniors, all members of the same sorority, have stayed behind to plan a party at their sorority house, and in so doing are knowingly breaking the rules, to their peril: house mother Mrs. Slater (Lois Kelso Hunt, redubbed by Barbara Harris - and through no fault of either actress, the re-dubbing is the most atrocious, film-breaking thing) is a mean tyrant at the best of times, and she openly hates the girls in her care, which makes defying her a fools' errand. And this is not the best of times: Slater's physician, Dr. Beck (Christopher Lawrence), has just given her the news that her unspecified Condition is getting worse, and she should avoid stress, particular the unspecified Stress that exists back at the sorority house.

Coming back to find her unwanted wards fucking around, getting drunk, and having playfully smutty conversations is exactly the worst thing for Slater's mood, and so it is that she goes a little bit nuclear. This leads the girls, and especially queen bee Vicki (Eileen Davidson), to concoct a nasty plot: they'll throw Slater's omnipresent cane, with a nastily spiky decorative top, into the filthy pool she refuses to clean, and force her to dive in to retrieve at gunpoint. Fake gunpoint of course. But we wouldn't have a movie if the gun didn't accidentally have a real bullet after the blanks, and if Vicki didn't accidentally murder Slater. In a panic, and with a whole mess of people to show show up any minute for a going-away party, the girls, absent the requisite sexless moral one, Katherine (Kathryn McNeil), agree to pitch the old woman's body in the murky water and deal with her later. I pray that I give away nothing if I mention that during the party, the girls (and, for no obvious reason, one random guy) start vanishing, killed by a shadow wielding that same spiky cane, and by the time the survivors have figured out what's going enough to shutter the party and investigate the pool, Slater's body is missing.

It's enough of a frustration that this supposedly Actually Good Slasher Movie has such a somberly trite plot; the part that really annoyed me was that it couldn't even bother to distinguish the five sisters who weren't the obvious Final Girl Katherine, or the obvious Guilty One Who Dies Last Vicki. They are, for the record, Liz (Janis Zido), Jeanie (Robin Meloy), Diane (Harley Kozak), Morgan (Jodie Draigie), and Steve (Ellen Dorsher), and other than their hairstyles, I could not tell them apart with a gun to my head. But Rosman games things a little bit: when he separates a girl from the group, to have her meet her grisly end, that's when he throws in odd and unexpected grace notes of characterisation. In tiny little gestures, sometimes as simple as focusing on the actresses' expressions longer than seems natural, the film quickly etches out a little bit of something we should know about each of these women right at the moment we know that they're going to die. And then, in most cases, the film cuts to Katherine wondering aloud where [name] might have gotten to. It's ironic, of course, but the way it's repeated, almost like a litany, also serves a symbolic reminder that each of the victims has an identity, and they have at least one person who's actively concerned for them. This is small, but it adds a layer of confusing, "that's not what slashers do" depth to the proceedings.

Meanwhile, THoSR also plays around with our expectations by its stylistic weirdness. That Rosman had an attachment to the material rare in a slasher director, I have noted (it somehow feels exactly right that his career wouldn't end up in derivative horror, but in shepherding Hilary Duff properties to completion), and this resulted in some anxiety about doing unusual things with the camera - not always successfully! There's a slow zoom into Slater's unreadable face when she's staring down Vicki and the gun that is an absolutely wretched choice. But in generalities more than in specifics, THoSR benefits from a more subdued, watchful style than the usual flat-footed "hey, ya wanna see tits? Howsabout some gore?" camera-wrangling. And even that's not as noticeable as the incongruous Richard H. Band score, which is easily the most off-kilter music I've ever heard in a slasher movie. In and of itself, it's full of soaring, Romantic poetics, like an ad for diarrhea medicine that spends its whole running time focusing on gauzy shots of wildflowers, accomplished with generic hackiness. So it's pretty, but in an empty way - which is no different than pretty with structural pyrotechnics and complex harmonies, when the context for it is a run-of-the-mill slasher movie.

The textural strangeness that happens from the visuals and the music is enough to make THoSR an unusual, unexplainable experience for long enough that it's hard to get bored with it during its largely adequate first and second acts, typified by thoroughly unexceptional performances, too-long cutaways to a band playing at the girls' party, and murders that are significantly lacking in blood. And that is its most important trick - to get us to the third act without having turned on it. Because the third act - it's amazing. There's very little in 1980s American horror that compares to it. What happens, in the essentials, is that Dr. Beck shows up, knowing exactly what's going on, and he decides to set a trap for the killer, with Katherine as bait. To this end, he gives her a sedative against her will (and for this sin, he appropriately dies), and it apparently has a hallucinogenic quality as well, for what happens to Katherine's mind over the next ten minutes abandons any conventional mode of horror for a surrealist collage of image, lighting, and editing - tiny little jump cuts that feel like the movie is having a series of strokes, the disorienting impression that a little toy clown has instantaneously leaped to human size to embody the killer, and the film's most famous image, of a disembodied head looking up from a toilet bowl with a patient, knowing look. Some of these images are genuinely hallucinatory, some are real things Katherine sees, given a fuzzy abstraction thanks to the overall bugfuck mood of this whole ending gambit. But all of them are striking.

The end of The House on Sorority Row is among the most captivating, essential stretches of cinema in the whole of the 1980s slasher boom, fully justifying every minute of the sometimes aimless experience of the movie up to that point. A great final act following a slightly intriguing but mostly banal hour and change is hardly enough to make an all-time great genre film, and I'd rather have any of the top-to-bottom great slashers than one that peaks after making me wake for too damn long. But this is still essential viewing for anyone with even a little bit of interest in the overall slasher ecosystem, easily the best slasher of 1983 (not a high bar), and a demonstration that intentional, creative filmmaking can happen in any atmosphere, even when the limits of genre put firm bounds on how much that filmmaking is allowed to flourish.

Body Count: 9 humans and one pet songbird.

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