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: THE SLASHER FILM - THE EX-BOYFRIEND FROM HELL

As this final Summer of Blood arrives at the slasher boom of the 1980s, it feels like a homecoming. For this is where we belong, truly: in the gutter trash world of miserably formulaic thrillers, propped up only by their most exploitative element and frequently by nothing at all. And while it's surprisingly willing to break with formula, director Joseph Zito's The Prowler, an independent release from the slasher's artistic peak year of 1981, certainly fits the second half of that summary. For the gore effects, by the justifiably legendary make-up designer Tom Savini, are as good as it gets, so persuasive and bold that they were cut to almost nothing by the reliably nervous censors in the United Kingdom, while winning Savini's praise as the work of which he is proudest from his estimable career. And there's damn little else about the movie that's of any particular merit at all. What the movie does best, perhaps, is to point out that just because a slasher film finds way to up-end and re-imagine all the usual formula signposts, it's not inherently the case that it will be good as a result of doing all of that.

And sure enough, The Prowler isn't much damn good at all, though it keeps promising that it will be, for serious, any minute now, just keep being patient. But it definitely starts out on the most unconventional footing it can manage. I beg you to tell me, how many slasher movies can you name that would have the guts to make this their very first image?

The next ten minutes are beyond doubt the weirdest and most interesting The Prowler has to offer; they're frankly among the weirdest and most interesting in the whole slasher movie Class of '81. And they are also typical of all the things that can frequently make the movie a frustrating, limited experience, since we find the movie trying three different times to start itself: first with this newsreel proclaiming the return of Our Boys from Europe following VE Day. Then it goes backwards, I think, to a letter by Rosemary Chatham, sorrowfully confessing to her boyfriend overseas (left without a name) that she just can't keep waiting, and she needs to let him go. Then it goes forward to 28 June, 1945, where the town of Avalon Bay is celebrating its graduation day dance, and we get to meet Rosemary in the flesh (Joy Glaccum), along with her new fella Roy (Timothy Wahrer), in a sequence that takes its nice, sweet time establishing the place of 1945 with remarkable attention to sound, costume, and behavior. It's not any kind of robust historical docudrama, or anything silly like that. But for a movie designed for no purpose other than removing teenagers from their dollars on the promise of violence and the odd pair of naked breasts, The Prowler's evocation of the '40s is surprisingly earnest.

Let us please not pretend that it's any more than what it is: the same exact first scene from dozens of other slashers, some of which had already been made by the time this film came out. It's the scene set in the past that shows how the killer started his career and sets up the scenario for the present-day sequences (no, tragically, The Prowler is not set in its entirety in the summer of '45; if it were, it's a dead certainty that it would be my favorite slasher movie of all time). And sure enough, just when Rosemary and Roy have sneaked away to spend some time alone, they're set upon by a man wearing the uniform of a U.S. infantryman, who pins them both together with a pitchfork. The attentive will note that this had already happened earlier in 1981, albeit with a different weapon, in Friday the 13th, Part 2, and in both cases the filmmakers were undoubtedly stealing primarily from Mario Bava's Bay of Blood/Twitch of the Death Nerve. Of course, that's because it's a great image that gets to the hard of the entire project of the slasher film: garish violence as a surrogate and punishment for sex. But it's also telling that in only its second year of widespread mainstream existence, the slasher film was already obliged to recycling ideas in such a conspicuous way.

The death of Rosemary and Roy throws us to the opening credits and thence into the future by exactly 35 years: now it's 28 June, 1980, the day of the graduation dance in Avalon Bay (this is a college graduation, not the more typical slasher setting of high school). Moreover, the day of the first graduation dance in Avalon Bay since that fatal one; Rosemary's father, Major Chatham (Lawrence Tierney, barely present), the town's foremost citizen, has spent every one of the last years using his influence to prevent the resurrection of this most hated reminder of his personal tragedy. But he has descended into weakness and senescence, and local student Pam MacDonald (Vicky Dawson) has spearheaded a movement to bring back the old tradition. And the attentive will notice that this also already happened earlier in 1981, in the form of My Bloody Valentine. For which we must surely only blame parallel evolution, though it's a weirdly specific case of that.

And at this point, The Prowler certainly becomes a much more typical slasher movie than the opening promised, though it still has some tricks up its sleeve. Pam has two roommates, Sherry (Lisa Dunsheath) and Lisa (Cindy Weintraub), who pretty neatly slot into "the slutty one" and "the pothead who's also, as it happens, the slutty one" stereotypes, while Pam is pretty significantly neither of those things. Pam does have a boyfriend, though, Deputy Mark London (Christopher Goutman), who has been put in charge briefly while Sheriff Fraser (Farley Granger) is on a fishing trip. And this will prove to be a very useful contact. See, Pam and Lisa are ready to head to the dance while Sherry's still getting ready and waiting for her boyfriend Carl (David Sederholm). He shows up, interrupting her in what I can only think of as a parody of the Psycho shower scene, and then a moment or two later is stabbed in the head with a bayonet, in one of the great triumphs of Savini's or anybody else's career. It's such a phenomenal piece of prop-making that Zito lingers on it well past any point of taste or even sense: as we watch Carl writhing and struggling for almost a minute against an attack that should have killed him almost instantly, it goes from scary to unnecessarily gross to silly. But it's never less than mind-blowing technique.

The same thing holds true for Sherry's death a moment later: she's attacked with a pitchfork in the shower, and it's filmed from every showcase angle that Zito and cinematographer João Fernandes can scrounge up. This time it never quite manages to round the corner to "silly", since this whole time the victim is wet and topless - in fact, The Prowler is unique to my slasher film knowledge in that its one and only boob scene is completely contained within one of its gore scenes. And that somehow feels crueler and more exploitative than if there had been some utterly extraneous nude scene just for the hell of it.

But morality and taste and sense all aside, the twin killings here are the best The Prowler will ever have to offer again. Back at the dance, Mark dances with another girl and earns Pam's ire; while trying to apologise, he manages to spill punch on her dress, earning even more. When she storms back to the dorms to change, she crosses paths with the man in the infantry uniform, and escapes from his clutches, after a discomfiting run-in with Major Chatham. And that's how, just about one-third of the way through its 89-minute running time, The Prowler has already entered, in a very vague way, its Final Girl sequence (as it were; this film leaves many more people alive than the phrase "Final Girl" implies), as the rest of the movie becomes an investigation by Pam and Mark into who the prowler and what he's up to (Sherry and Carl's bodies go undiscovered until the titanic pile of bullshit that is the movie's last scene), while just enough people trickle out of the dance to end up in the path of his bayonet and pitchfork.

The strengths and considerable weaknesses of the film are basically identical: Zito likes to keep things moving slow. When that results in giving Savini's gore effects a nice long showcase, or spending plenty of time building the '40s atmosphere that makes the opening sequence such a quirky experience, it's great, and makes The Prowler one of the most distinguished slashers of its era. But far more often, the result is a scene, stretching out for minutes and minutes, of nothing whatsoever happening while Pam and Mark stand around in the dark looking at clues and never putting together what's obvious to us from literally before the movie has even started: Rosemary's ex-boyfriend killed her and Roy in '45, and now that the dance is happening again, he's gone crazy and is killing again because of psycho killer reasons. Unless the contemporary killer is Major Chatham, raging against the bastard kids who've ripped open the memory of Rosemary's death. Either way, that leaves us with just two candidates for the title of the killer, and the one who isn't guilty vanishes out of the movie with no explanation.

But that's just an annoyance, sloppy writing of the kind that happens all the time in low-rent horror. It's the lingering that really makes The Prowler such a dispiriting experience; the waiting around in dark rooms for anything to happen, while quietly, sadly being certain that it will not. In the hands of great filmmakers, this would be potentially great material for turning the heat on real low and letting the film boil us alive; the tension crawling up our spines and making the movie almost unbearable by the end of it, in the best possible way. "Unbearable" would be overstating things - Dawson is an appealingly grounded protagonist for a slasher movie, and she helps to make the thing at least slightly interesting on a human level in between the moments that it's excitingly gory.

It is, though, atrociously dull, and that gets us into the neighborhood of unbearable, anyway. The film's unmistakble low points are very low - a random basement sex scene involving characters who are never thereafter heard from again, the worst imagined shock scene at the end that I think I've ever seen in a slasher movie, and so much aimless padding. So much. A film with The Prowler's specific strengths ought to be at least worth it for the genre faithful, and it is - but it is solely for the faithful, and only after they've seen enough of them that The Prowler's deviations from the norm can be seen and appreciated for what little pleasure they offer.

Body Count: 8, plus the horrible news in the opening scene that Glenn Miller's plane went down in bad weather.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR GETS MEAN - MEET THE PARENTS

Any honest accounting of the history of American horror filmmaking has to bow in the direction of the enormous influence of The Last House on the Left, the 1972 debut of writer-director Wes Craven and a solid contender for the title of most controversial movie of the last half-century. It is a film that links elbows with the two-years-younger Texas Chainsaw Massacre to go skipping down a primrose path strewn with body parts and pooled intestines, as the two most viciously nihilistic movies of an entire generation, the two movies that most directly and punishingly place the national psychic trauma of the late years of the Vietnam War into cinematic language, in which violence is shown as a depravity that makes you feel worst about life and yourself for having watched it. In terms of the marketplace, it triggered an enormous wave of knock-offs, and it more or less invented the subgenre "watch as the plot stops so that something absurdly wretched can happen to basically decent people in stomach-churning explicit violence".

Nothing I could say could ever take away the seismic importance of Last House in the development of a newer, burlier, nastier mode of horror, and I wouldn't want to try. That said, alongside its absolute, quintessential status in the genre's history, the film has also generally accrued a reputation as a great horror classic, on top of its evolutionary importance. And that just baffles the ever-living hell out of me. As I watch The Last House on the Left, I don't merely see a film that fails to be as good as it ought to have been - for that, we had better look to its altogether superior 2009 remake - I see a film that's borderline incompetent in all the places that matter the most, constantly sabotaging itself and robbing all of the impact from the handful of scenes that are able to accrue some measure of power. It's amateur-hour indie junk, not to put too fine a point on it, and whatever it manages to achieve as a powerful indictment of the human capacity for hatred and violence is nothing next to its status as a long lost Keystone Kops feature cut together with the world's shittiest folk musical.

Like all of the most grueling exercises in grind house viciousness, The Last House on the Left started life as an Ingmar Bergman film. The film is an uncredited remake of 1960 Cannes competitor The Virgin Spring, in which a medieval Swedish Christian girl is raped and murdered in the woods, her parents accidentally meet her killers and then kill them, and to cut off the cycle of vengeance and violence, her father dedicates her resting place to God and prostrates himself, begging for forgiveness, while the family's pagan maid looks on in wonder. Transfer the setting to 1970s Connecticut, remove the spiritual overtones and burning need for expiation, and hit Sven Nykvist in the head with a baseball bat until he forgets how shoot a movie that doesn't look like somebody dried off their sweaty testicles with the camera negative, and voila! You have Craven's attempt to fuse exploitation and documentary in one intense package.

It's the day before Mari Collingwood's (Sandra Cassel) 17th birthday, and she's got a big night planned: she and her edgy friend Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham) are going into New York City to see the band Bloodlust. It's a typical piece of adolescent overcompensation, trying as hard as she possibly can to shock her well-off bourgeois parents Dr. John Collingwood (Richard Towers, appearing under the hilariously ultra-WASP name of "Gaylord St. James") and Estelle (Cynthia Carr), and they respond with exactly the ill-concealed dismay at their daughter's life choices that she was undoubtedly trying to kick up.

Already, by the film's three-minute mark, we've encountered two of the things that will primarily ruin The Last House on the Left: terrible filmmaking and terrible acting. The latter, at least, is explicable: the film was conceived by Craven and producer Sean S. Cunningham (who would, eight years later, drop another bomb on the horror landscape when he produced and directed Friday the 13th) as an actual hardcore sexploitation film, deciding only at the very start of shooting that it would be better for their artistic aspirations (which were "indict a culture of violence and rape", not "get main in raincoats to whack off to a rape scene") if they dropped that angle. But they'd already assembled a cast entirely out of pornography veterans. And even though pornography in the early '70s was at its all-time height of sophistication and cultural acceptance, it wasn't a Petri dish of high-end acting talent. That being said, just because we can rationalise on paper why everybody - literally, every individual in the film who speaks lines of dialogue - feels like they learned their line phonetically and has only had enough time to think of one strategy for physical acting (which leads to a lot of fixed snarling expressions, like somebody just had a big whiff of smelly garbage and is pissed about it), it doesn't lessen the deleterious effect that has on the film's second and third acts.

As for the terrible filmmaking, it speaks less to Craven & company's lack of talent, than the apparently undecided approach the film takes to itself. The director's chief intent was, supposedly, to present an supremely artless, unmediated vision of behavior, capturing actions without commenting or looking away, and in the individual shots he and cinematographer Victor Hurwitz put together, you can see that. But the editing, by Craven himself (assisted by future slasher director Steve Miner), is almost comically incompatible with any of that, feeling every bit what an ambitious newbie would make in '72 if he wanted to be "artsy". It feels like someone absorbed the technique of French New Wave editing without paying attention to the narrative and structural importance of that editing, which leaves it choppy and discontinuous to no effect whatsoever. So, the first scene: cross-cutting between the mailman (Ray Edwards) sorting through the Collingwoods' letters and Mari getting ready to shower (so much for indicting exploitative male sexuality), and every time he says "Mari Collingwood" (postmen read the address of every piece of mail out loud, you see), the film cuts to Mari's face. To make sure that we know who she is, and that it's her birthday, since while there were other, more organic ways of doing it, none of them were as easy. It's downright hilarious, or it would be, anyway, if we were watching a parody and not an ostensibly gut-wrenching exercise in agonising terror. The worst thing is, this kind of clumsy stitching together of disparate moments using awkward sound editing and is a fucking strategy in the movie. It shows up many fucking times. And while it's happening here, we're introduced to another of the film's great sins, the music by David Hess; it's soft, elevator-style noodling without a melody, sounding perfect for a 1972 douche advertisement, and not so much a 1972 genre film.

So anyway, Mari goads her parents, and her dog - she says "tits" in reference to her snug top with neckline that goes right to her chin, and Dad gets offended that she says "tits", and there is I swear to God an insert shot of the dog looking up with a cocked-head look of shock, like this is a '90s Disney family comedy. It is possible that Craven's goal was to lull us into a relaxed state, so that he could hammer us all the harder later on. If so, he failed: by this point - and we're still just a few minutes into it - I'm just peevish and irritable. Anyway, Phyllis and Mari leave for the city, cross-cutting merrily along the way, having long conversations about their boobs that sound exactly like a 32-year-old screenwriter's impression of what he wants to imagine nubile teenagers talk like. They hear a radio news report about some escaped murder-rapists at large, including a line of dialogue that should be enshrined in the bad exposition hall of fame: "The daring daylight escape of the two convicted murderers, dope pushers and rapists cost the lives of two prison guards, and surprisingly, the life of a German Shepherd". Surprisingly! We meet those killers pretty quickly: Krug Stillo (our beloved composer Hess, kicking a career that would consist almost entirely of shadings of this same character), "Weasel" Podowski (porn director Fred Lincoln), Krug's son Junior (Marc Sheffler, who looks much too close in age to Hess), and Krug's bisexual girlfriend Sadie (Jeremie Rain). They're reprehensible and animalistic (animal imagery is used fairly heavily in their early scenes, in fact), and the first time the movie even flirts with the idea of having some kind of sickening power, though the music and acting - Rain's in particular - do everything they can to deny that power.

In the city, the girls decided to hunt for pot before they go to the show, and they have the immense misfortune to hit up Junior Stillo on a subway platform. He takes them back to the gang's ratty apartment, and it's all downhill from the moment they realise that they've just been trapped: "Oh shit" says Phyllis with the irritable tones of a woman who has just discovered that her husband didn't do the dishes like he promised, and no the ones of somebody finding herself captured by a pack of almost literally slavering rape-happy ghouls.

The criminals bind their victims and toss them in a car trunk to drive into the country for their awful fun, which of course means it's time to break out the kazoos on the soundtrack, as Hess provides the worst of his many songs, "Sadie and Krug (Baddies' Theme)"; it's a jaunty ballad that earns having the word "baddies" in its title through bubbly jollity and wordplay, and whatever ironic contrast the filmmakers were going for between the knee-slapping fun of the music and the gut-roiling tension of two young women being driven to God knows where to have God knows what done to them is not landing at all. AT ALL.

What follows is the source of all the film's notoreity and most of its actual terror: Mari and Phyllis are released in the woods near Mari's house, and being just barely far enough from safety that it does them no good at all sharpens the sense of nihilism as the two girls are forced to degrade themselves. Phyllis makes a run for it and is caught and killed; Mari tries to trick Junior into letting her go, and for her cunning is raped before she's shot to death. It is serious, grisly stuff, and it needs to be treated with utmost intelligence and dignity. But the movie has already shat that bed. Leading into this harrowing sequence with the worst music cue in a film that is hellbent on showcasing Hess's poor musical judgment is enough to dispel any controlled mood that the film vitally needs at this juncture. And Cassel is unrelentingly terrible in her role that it's difficult to care about the vile things happening to the character: she's no more convincing at being scared and in pain than she was at talking about her boobs or acting casual with her parents. The dead-eyed blankness and lack of self that follows being raped - that's the thing she's good at.

As shot, this sequence at least tries to reach the savage documentary feel that Craven claims to have had in mind. The handheld camera is loose and raw enough to impart a level of queasy potency to anything it lands on, and there are points where the accumulation of dust and dirt on the gate gives the film the look of harried realism, where the filmmakers were too busy capturing footage to stop and make sure that it was pristine and polished. Later on, the same thing happens in a context where it adds nothing of value, so this is probably simple incompetent filmmaking, not an aesthetic choice. None of this is enough to actually elevate the movie: the editing and camera movement still do a lot to pull the film's punches, even beyond how badly the film bungles the lead-up to this sequence. To compare it to the other most controversial of all movie rapes, the six-years-later I Spit on Your Grave blasts it out of the water: it's longer, more detailed, and the victim is someone who has actually come across as a legitimate human being elsewhere in the film, and the resulting sequence is galling and wretched and openly painful, where The Last House on the Left can at best hope to be gross and upsetting.

While all of this has been going on, the Collingwoods have contacted the police, who've responded with a sheriff (Marshall Anker) and his deputy (Martin Kove), and they are the worst. Both at policework, and at being movie characters. They're comic relief of the biggest, loopiest, broadest sort, getting into all manner of slapstick scrapes and making bumbling asses of themselves. That's all I have to say about them, but they take up an enormous portion of the brief running time, and every single frame that includes them is a liability at least as great as Hess's addiction to the most inappropriate music cues in history.

Eventually, the killers find their way to the Collingwood home, little realising where they are, while John and Estelle little realise who their peculiar new guests are. At first. They all figure out the situation, but the killers add morbid stupidity to their list of crimes by not supposing they need to get the hell out as soon as they put 2 and 2 together. That gives Mari's parents a chance to spend the night rigging the house with booby traps, and then arranging a bloody revenge against the four human monsters under their roof. It's a better sequence by far than the rape, since Craven has a surer idea of how to use visuals in concert with content rather than trying to pull his punches; the film is a bit less explicitly bloody than one might think, though that surely has at least as much to do with budget as anything. The inherent dramatic strength of this segment of the narrative compared to the middle - it's the difference between horror as a concrete element that comes to your home and must be exorcised, versus horror as a sort of free-floating state of suffering - was picked up by the creators of the remake, who emphasise that plot and the Collingwoods' mental state far more than Craven & co. ever do (the remake also has much better actors, so it can afford more nuanced psychological study. Here, it mostly feels like a splashy Grand Guignol finale that traffics in bloodlust and a surprisingly robust strain of rightwing class resentment - the killers explicitly detest the Collingwoods for their wealth, and they have been depicted throughout as a parody of hippie culture, which adds a measure of counter-radicalism that's not at all rare in horror, but is a bit surprising from an indie movie in '72. Not that I suspect anybody thought this through that much; like the rest of the film, this is all slapdash and trivial. The aesthetic choices are clumsy as hell, with improperly balanced close-ups and blasted-out sound effects, on top of dirty lenses (an eyelash lazily sashays across a protracted take of Estelle and Weasel chatting, as she prepares to bit his penis off) and the usual cryptic editing - the Collingwoods find Mari after all of five seconds of searching in their backyard, as far as I can tell - and stilted porn actor performance. And then it ends with a freeze frame on the pensive, blood-soaked results of violence without having an iota of the Bergman film's curiosity about the moral cost of vengeance. And then "Sadie and Krug (Baddies' Theme)" plays fucking again, over cheery shots of the cast. Because that's a great way to wrap up your harrowing horror movie.

And from this font springs much of the rest of American horror: exploitative violence and basically entered English-language genre films here, Cunningham's career directly influenced the explosion of slasher movies, and you can draw a straight line from the last scene to the torture porn genre of the 2000s. So basically, all the shitty horror traces back to The Last House on the Left, and that's exactly as it should be: shit begets shit. There's nothing about this film that I'd care to defend as worth keeping

Body Count: 6, not counting the innocence of the American filmgoing public, nor my patience.

Nastiness Rating: 4/5, pretty damn Nasty. That's adding a point, honestly, for the notoriety of the film. There comes a point when even the most visceral rape scene starts to disintegrate from all those pulled punches. Still, there's a solid 7 minutes in the middle where the film really can make it seem like everything in the world is irredeemably awful.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR GETS MEAN - BECAUSE OF THE HORRIBLE THINGS HE DOES

Herschell Gordon Lewis has long been known as the Godfather of Gore. In recent years, that nickname was used as the title of a documentary; Lewis has embraced it himself, adopting the name on his official website. In fact, the website goes one further: Lewis is, in his own words "the Godfather of Direct Marketing and Gore". Which is is one of the weirdest dual careers in the annals of Western Culture, but sure enough, alongside his invention of the modern splatter picture with Blood Feast in 1963, Lewis has decades of experience teaching companies how to use more effective active language in selling their product and inveigling customers. This sounds insane, but as I ponder it, it makes perfect sense: it's just two different forms of calculated hucksterism.

With that in mind, it's really not much of a surprise that Lewis jumped ship from the filmmaking game in the early '70s. It was a game he'd already played: as the relaxation of sexual standards led to the collapse of the market for "nudie cuties" in the early '60s, Lewis simply switched from titillating his audience through peek-a-boo nudity to doing the same through extreme violence. With the end of the production code and the explosion of low-budget gore pictures at the end of the same decade, it was no longer possible for Lewis to stand out in a newly-crowded field, so instead he simply closed up shop (only to return to the game in the 2000s, when he'd graduated to the status of living legend and inspiration to a host of grind house aficionados). After all, when there was only one Lewis, he didn't need to be good at all to be the best at it. And he exploited that reality to the hilt: his films are some of the most dismal pits of ineptitude you could ever hope to scrounge up.

We turn at this juncture to one of the director's final horror movies, made during the short window when he was able to really crank up the gory effects thanks to the loosening of moral strictures: 1970's The Wizard of Gore, which would have been an even better nickname. My sweet Lord, what a movie it is, too. There's not a genuinely good film in the director's canon (Two Thousand Maniacs! comes sneakily close, though), but this isn't the mere crappiness of no-budget regional filmmaking with a cast of the finest nonprofessionals who could be convinced to volunteer. This is rank incoherence, even worse than Lewis's notorious hatchet job cobbling the delirious Monster a-Go Go out of the incomplete footage of an unfinished production. And a more incoherent movie than Monster a-Go Go is one of those things that I pretty much assumed simply couldn't exist.

It sounds simple enough: Montag the Magnificent (Ray Sager) is a stage magician whose showy opening trick is to cut his own head off with a guillotine and re-attach it. This is merely the first of many tricks involving hideously dismembering people for the appreciation of tepidly interested audiences, but it turns out that Montag is secretly a murderous psycho, who actually kills the women he brings onstage, only he hypnotises them to think that they're fine. Once they leave the theater and it wears off, they drop dead. TV chat show hostess Sherry (Judy Cler), who is fascinated by Montag's show and wants to interview him on the air, and her journalist boyfriend Jack (Wayne Ratay) start to investigate the chain of inexplicable violent deaths. Straightforward "killer magician" boilerplate.

Move in even slightly closer than the broadest rendering of the plot, though, and The Wizard of Gore turns into a deranged slurry of aggressive stylistic mistakes strung together by the barest semblance of a plot. Like a pointillist painting, the incidents that make up the film's story appear to be a cohesive whole from a distance, but in the moment-by-moment experience of watching, it all feels like so many globules standing independently of each other and only barely gelling into something that's bound by rules of causality and chronology. At the micro level, The Wizard of Gore is a process of intercut sequences that follow the shape "Montag performs a trick, a woman dies later, Sherry wants to interview him, nobody knows why women are dying", over and over again. This pattern stops for no good reason; one imagines that the film could just as easily have been only 20 minutes long, or gone on for three or four straight hours, without meaningfully altering its impact. It concludes in a twist that makes no sense, and is individually redeemed only by immediately preceding a twist that makes so little sense that it turns into a soothing kind of Dadaist anti-logic, but may be meant to imply that we've been watching the unrealised fantasies of a murderous woman-hater all along. And that is meeting the film so much more than halfway that I'm walking up its driveway carrying a Bundt cake.

Its disastrous narrative is worse than confusing, though: it is unstintingly boring, as well. That's readily seen to by the constant repetition of basically the same three points with no consequences to any of it until suddenly it's all been kicked out from underneath, so that we can be sure that there's no consequences that will ever occur in all of the history of the universe. And yet, if all that was terrible with The Wizard of Gore was the disastrous structure of Allen Kahn's screenplay, I'd only hate it slightly. I might even find it enjoyable - superficially, most of what's bad about The Wizard of Gore is also what's bad about Blood Feast, and that movie is a hoot, in the short patches when it's not a slog.

The truly awful parts of the movie go deeper than mere writing. They go deeper than anything to do with merely poor filmmaking, though that is present in abundance. The acting, as is typical for Lewis, is bargain-basement amateur mugging, like the husband of one victim who doubles over weeping with his head in his hands like a parody commercial for a migraine medication, or the moment than an actress has to conspicuously feel around in her mouth before spitting out the hunk of red goo meant to look like her guts, or some such. Mostly people are hellaciously stiff and uncomfortable-looking. There is, though, one performance that goes off the deep end into some freakish other dimension, and that's Sager. It's not fair to blame him: he was but a young crewmember called up on the spot to fill in when the actor cast in the role walked off, and Lewis couldn't afford even a single day's delay. Being an untrained performer stuck with the film's biggest role and its heftiest lines was the first insurmountable difficulty facing Sager. Having absurdly ineffective makeup applied to his cheeks, forehead, and facial hair in a failed attempt to make him look old was the second. The monologues Kahn dumped in his lap are a third - long reams of zoned-out ranting about how all people care about these days are random acts of florid violence in their pop culture (that the film is self-aware enough to autocritique its genre is astonishing, given the pronounced lack of self-consciousness about anything else), which feel more like a stoned street preacher gone wrong than the menacing villain of a shitty horror picture.

Faced with these awful tasks, Sager called upon all the demons of hammy acting, and let forth with fiendishly potent blast of the most purple, flowery, magnificently mis-emphasised line readings it is possible for mortal minds to imagine. It's beyond my powers of transcription to even slightly imply the odd cadences and extreme shifts in volume that happen every single time Sager opens his mouth. His gestures match the grandiosity of his recitals, pointing dramatically like a bad stock player from Restoration comedy and suggesting that the Tin Man got stuck in the rain again. It is simply impossible to look away from the film even momentarily when he's onscreen; the impossibility that anybody might have let this go on for more than a few seconds, let alone filmed it, let alone cut it into the final edit of a notionally professional motion picture, demands every ounce of attention. It is horrible and painful, but it is captivating. (Bless her for trying, Cler attempts to go head-to-head with him in the final scene, but this kind of madness cant be taught, it has to be innate).

Even that, however, isn't the point where The Wizard of Gore runs screaming into the void. It's the way it has been staged - if, indeed, "staged" is the right word. That implies planning and intention, and I don't want either of those things to have been true. There's plenty of run-of-the-mill embarrassingly bad filmmaking: cutaways to a humiliatingly threadbare and barely interested audience for Montag's reedy show, flubbed lines left in of economic necessity, glaring establishing shots that couldn't be more obvious product placement for long-dead northeast Illinois fast food restaurant chain Chicken Unlimited. Which I insist on mentioning because it's just so goddamn goofy. Chicken Unlimited. Chicken Unlimited! I want there to be a synthpop flourish everytime I say it out loud, which I have of course done every time I've typed it.

But the gore scenes, the part of the film that is quite clearly the only reason that we're here: oh my God, they are impossible. This is what happens, basically, in every one of them: Montag brings up an obviously hypnotised woman from the audience. He blandly performs a violent trick as the audience watches intently. SHOCK CUT TO BLOOD SPLATTERING EVERYWHERE! THE MUSIC SHRIEKS IN ATONAL ELECTRONIC PAIN AS THERE ARE CLOSE-UPS OF SOMEBODY'S HAND MASHING AROUND IN SOME PIG GUTS DYED BRIGHT RED! SAGER ROLLS HIS HEAD AROUND LAUGHING! Cut to the very serious, solemn, bloodless version of the trick. The woman looks beatific. CUT BACK SHE'S SCREAMING! RAGEMUSIC! BLOOD BLOODBLOOD! PIGGUTS OH HO! Montag finishes the trick and everybody blandly applauds.

I have no fucking clue how to parse this. Not even at the level of who is seeing what - the sound editing alone is enough to suggest that the audience has also been hypnotised into not seeing the violence, and the victim is aware and conscious and screaming - but then, why the big deal about showing violence? What is even the point of the tricks, if there's no blood? They'd just be random, stupid bits of nothing happening. Which is certainly not something The Wizard of Gore is unfamiliar with. But then, if the audience is actually seeing the gore, why even bother cutting in the shots of bland, bloodless silence? For that matter, why bother cutting those in regardless? It's interesting almost solely because it's so confusing as to be surreal. I honestly think Lewis might have been trying to make a psychedelic splatter movie, bringing the art house and the grind house together in one package, only he did this without even slightly understanding what makes psychedelia or art films tick. As pure dizzying surrealism, it's only confusing, without being in any way atmospheric or haunting; it's like seeing a Dario Argento film remade by Ed Wood.

Reader, I hated this movie, and its languid, puttering 95 minutes bored me out of my skull. And yet I am inexplicably, even unforgivably compelled to recommend it with all the enthusiasm I can muster. It's terrible in every way - even the disreputable appeal of unflinching gore scenes is undone by the unconvincing cheapness of the effects (dropping some intestines onto a ripped dress does not, by any stretch, evoke the horror of pulling a woman's insides out) - but it is god damn weird. As weird as any movie of any extraction I've encountered in a very long time. That doesn't make the experience of watching it pleasurable, but Jesus Christ, it's memorable.


Body Count: 6, unless it's 7 - the twist makes it tricky to tell exactly who died and when. But I think it's 7. It might also be none at all.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR GETS MEAN - THEY'RE DEAD, THEY'RE ALL MESSED UP

As an inveterate lover of making grand historical movements out of molehills, it pleases me to know end that it's possible to pinpoint the exact year that American genre films switched from the classical to the modern age: 1968. In that year, both science fiction and horror made an immense, revolutionary leap forward, with a pair each of movies that made it simply impossible to take seriously the genre as it had developed to that point. Science fiction witnessed the radical visual effects and thematic density of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as the philosophically serious treatment of seemingly frivolous subject matter in Planet of the Apes (which for good measure also boasts one of cinema's all-time most audacious original musical scores). Horror, which we're here to discuss now, had the very grown up, emotionally and psychologically grounded urban realism of Rosemary's Baby, which we'll be looking at elsewhere. Right now, we're just here to talk about neophyte director George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, co-written with John A. Russo, the movie that pioneered the most stomach-churning decency-violating taboo-busting violence that English-speaking filmgoers had ever seen. And if there exists, prior to 1968, any film in all the world with anything like the pure visceral grotesqueness of NotLD, I have absolutely not seen nor heard of it.

The film did not, to be clear, invent the notion of harder-than-usual violence as a selling point. As long as Britain's Hammer Film had been in existence, one of its biggest calling cards was a level of gruesome content beyond anything the quivering Yanks were likely to produce, and five years before Romero and company hit the scene, Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast was sold on the promise of literally nothing but the bloodiness of its death scenes, and is usually cited as the first movie to so centrally fixate on depicting gore. But Night of the Living Dead is in a different league from those: indeed, the new wave of violent horror that it kicked off served in no small part to kill of Hammer, which went from looking like the nastiest, savviest stuff you could ever scrounge up to being utterly square and safe almost in the blink of an eye. NotLD had the good fortune to come out in the exact year that the old Production Code was scrapped in favor of the vastly more permissive MPAA ratings system, which explains most of it, honestly. Some film was going to fill this spot in the movie ecosystem.

But NotLD isn't just "some" film. Romero didn't merely use his new freedom to shock with unimagined levels of blood and call that a good day's work, as Lewis undoubtedly would have in the same position. As would quickly become his wont, the director was hellbent on using his movie to carve open the guts of American culture, using violence and even the horror genre itself as a tool rather than an end. That's by far the most upsetting, vicious element of the film, even if its initial reception was hung up (fairly) on its explicitness. Decades later, the most violent moment in the whole movie, an orgy of cannibalism in which the innards of two victims burning to death in a truck are paraded around by a small army of zombies, looks modest and quaint, the kind of thing that would pass uncut on a basic cable network. It might actually be the least effective part of the movie to modern eyes, for while we've lapped the effects work several times over, virtually everything else about it remains not just fresh and mostly untouched by copycats, but in some ways acutely dangerous. This is a movie that knows what the rules are, and it breaks every one it can; it has an astonishing capacity, otherwise unknown to me in horror of this age, to seriously fuck with your head.

Should it be the case that you do not know the plot of this most iconic and necessary of horror milestones, let me give you the rundown: siblings Barbra (Judith O'Dea) and Johnny (Russell Streiner) have driven hours into the Pennsylvania countryside to leave a cross of flowers on their father's grave at their bedridden mother's request. Enjoying the chance to taunt his easily-spooked sister, Johnny points to an oddly shuffling man (Bill Hinzmen) and jokingly suggests that he's coming to kill them. The joke's on Johnny: that's exactly what the man is up to, and Johnny ends up with a broken neck while Barbra flees to a farmhouse some ways distant. Her explorations lead her to a gruesomely stripped corpse, and she effectively blacks out from that point forward, but the movie is taken over by several other survivors. First comes Ben (Duane Jones), hoping to find gasoline for his truck, who secures the building from the suddenly numerous armies of unspeaking violent humans; and then it turns out that five others have already taken refuge in the cellar: young couple Tom (Keith Wayne) and Judy (Judity Ridley), and the Cooper family, blowhard Harry (Karl Hardman), his plainly resentful wife Helen (Marilyn Eastman), and their badly sick daughter Karen (Kyra Schon). The seven prepare to dig in and try to survive the night, but a power struggle almost immediately begins between Ben, who wants to stay upstairs and defend the home, and Harry, who wants to bar everyone in the cellar and hope that the authorities come along soon. Of course, the authorities are a bit busy right now: as the characters learn when they turn on the TV and radio, the eastern third of the United States has been overrun by a plague of recently-deceased bodies reviving as man-eating ghouls, and other than some vague notion about space radiation, nobody has a clue why.

The key element of Romero's ...of the Dead films (there have been six) is already fully-formed in this first outing: when presented with a stressful and deadly situation that can be fairly easily survived through clear thinking and cooperation, human beings will much prefer to fall into in-fighting and mutual distrust, and thereby fall prey to an enemy that, rationally, doesn't have much going for it. The reanimated corpses are slow, clumsy, and despite some rudimentary ability to use tools and solve basic problems, not apparently very bright. The reason for the deaths that occur in that farmhouse are, each and every one, because Ben and Harry can't compromise.

As is the most spectacularly unoriginal observation I could possibly make, Night of the Living Dead serves as a parable of 1960s America, on at least two fronts. The one that smacks you alongside the head and then asks why your face has a handprint on it is the perilous state of race relations in the winding down days of the civil rights movement: Duane Jones was the first African-American protagonist of a horror movie in the States. Romero has consistently, to my knowledge, denied that he did this on purpose, and he only cast Jones because he was the best actor to audition for the part. Which is plausible on the grounds that Jones is far and away the best actor in the completed movie. But it is beyond plausibility that a filmmaker casting a role in 1967 in the United States would put an African-American actor in a leading role - especially this leading role - and have not a single thought cross his mind that there might potentially be some kind of socio-political reading applied to it. The film never blinks on it, mind you: while the driving force of the whole deal is the increasingly enraged hatred Harry feels towards Ben, there's not one line of dialogue nor even the slightest gesture in Hardman's performance that suggests racism is behind any of it. Still, symbolism will elbow its way in no matter what, and the sight of a schlubby, slumped-over, sweaty white guy spitting invective and bristling as a black guy tells him what to do absolutely suggests certain things in a 1968 context (and, I am very sorry to say, in a 2015 context) that are impossible to overlook. Much as the film's punishingly bleak final moments don't inherently rely on race for the narrative to make perfect sense, but SPOILERS IF YOU ACTUALLY DON'T KNOW HOW THIS ENDS roving gangs of white cops shooting at barely-seen minorities without stopping to wonder if they deserve to be murdered or not can't avoid connoting things that are angry and ugly about the way society works (and, I am outrageously sorry to say, possibly more so in 2015 than in 1968).

But the bigger thing that's going on, undoubtedly, is that this story about people ending up in an unsolvable situation and dying for no good reason, but doing an awesome job of blaming each other for their predicament is a curdled, cynical parable for the Vietnam era. As a billion people have already pointed out before me, NotLD paints a profoundly hopeless picture of smart people getting out of quagmires for one particular reason, and it not only gives the film more thematic heft, it works tremendously well to its benefit as a horror movie. Simply put, everything we know about storytelling, and everything we know about unpacking visuals in narrative cinema, tells us that Ben is the hero and he knows what to do, and Harry is a selfish, cowardly asshole whose bullying attitude puts him securely in the wrong. Jones's performance is steady and full of varied, vibrant emotions (the determined way he recites his backstory is beautiful, making it clear that he's trying to put an upbeat vibe into the room or at least distract himself), while Hardman spouts lines in a petulant whine; Hardman is lit and framed to look like a bipedal tower of flop sweat. And yet Ben's plan kills everybody. Follow the rules, be sensible, and use calm logic, the film indicates, and you're just going to make everything worse. As a viewer watching a genre film, that callous violation of the basic contract we make with every movie is acutely upsetting, a daring perversity that almost a half century later has only rarely been matched; as a commentary on the nature of humanity, it is pessimistic unto nihilism, but don't look to me for the argument that it doesn't fit the facts of the world of '67 and'68 pretty neatly.

Strictly as a movie, and not as a cutting political statement, NotLD makes quite a nasty habit of breaking trust with our expectations, and if that leads to some moments which are hard to take here in the 2010s, I can't even guess what it must have been like to experience them in '68. The film lets us know right away that it plans to insult conventional decency: the very first thing we encounter is Johnny bitching about having to decorate a grave, a pointless act of empty symbolism. It's a moment that echoes on the far side of a film with a TV talking head mercilessly declaring that the time for romanticising death is over: if a loved one dies, you had damned well better desecrate their corpse on the spot and make absolutely certain they don't come back to eat you, and bullshit funerary customs are now an unavailable luxury. And there's the other echo, in a moment that has lost not an ounce of its power to devastate, when the most essential family tie of mother and child is corrupted and perverted in a scene that should be ridiculously over-emphasised, with sound editing that goes so far overboard in exaggerating the horror of the moment that it's dissociative with anything happening onscreen. And yet no matter what mood I'm in or how many times I see the movie, that's the scene where it feels like Romero and Russo are playing with actual fire, and I'm seeing something so cruelly transgressive that it flattens me every single time.

Even in its more conventional aspects - and there are not many of those - the film is a superlative piece of construction. The hook is simplicity itself: pare away the new conception of the mindless undead as a biological plague (a notion Romero confesses to having lifted intact from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend) and cannibal holocaust, and this is a straightforward "stressed out cast trapped in small location tries to survive through the night" chamber piece. Though fairness requires me to admit that it's a story model that didn't really exist before this, not in such a purified state. But withing that limited framework, Romero and crew do a fantastic job of manipulating tension in the simplest ways. The more that we're meant to be frazzled and unnerved, the more acute the angle of the camera, either on its side or tilting up and down; and while this is going on, the compositions become tighter and more cluttered. It's inelegant, but it's not really trying to be anything else. And while the use of stock music is to be bemoaned as the necessary evil of a bargain-basement production (the only sign of it, in fact; this is a master class in making a hell of a lot from good implication, repressive camera angles, and a whole lot of game extras working for a couple of nights), the use of music, if not always the specific notes melodies at every moment, is nicely timed to throw us back and forth like a rag doll.

The film is a superlative machine for making you feel ragged, terrified, and bewildered by the essential hopelessness of the universe, but it does ultimately have a distinct mechanical feel in a lot of ways, I admit this. A huge reason for this is that out of seven characters, only Ben and Harry are in any way interesting (Romero's screenplay for the 1990 remake attempted to make Barbra a stronger character than the shell-shocked babbler she is here, which is at least one thing to appreciate about that film), and Jones gives the only performance of any real meat - which isn't a flaw necessarily, Hardman being one-night and inorganic contributes to our inability to connect with Harry and the film gets a lot of mileage from that. Still, an engaging story of humans it ain't, even though it's quite the fable of humankind.

There are also inevitable shortcomings that come with the minute scale of the shoot: small but distinct continuity errors (the newscast, for example, shows an interview in broad daylight that, by the film's internal continuity, had to have taken place after dark), takes that feel like the actor lost focus for a second and found it again, some obvious Foley work. But whatever Night of the Living Dead gets somewhat wrong is negligible in the face of how much it gets right: inventing a new kind of horror movie and a new kind of monster - though Romero never uses the word "zombie" and probably wasn't even in those terms, the film's success buried the old White Zombie-style zombie picture beyond recovery, and even a transitional effort like the 1966 Hammer production The Plague of the Zombies looks woefully old-fashioned in comparison. It is a bleak movie to usher in a bleak decade, cinema's all-time most embittered period in horror and mainstream cinema alike; it is one of the handful of truly transformational individual films in the medium's history, and a gripping, intense viewing experience on top of it. This is as vital of a viewing experience as horror offers.

Body Count: 8, defined solely as those characters that we see alive in the traditional sense who are later killed and/or turned.

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GANGSTERS VS. ZOMBIES

A review requested by Eric "Sssonic" Mason, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

There is a certain kind of film that has existed ever since the first generation of film school students began to direct features, and which came to its fullest prominence beginning in the 1990s, in which a fanboy gets to put all the other movies into his movie. They can be amazingly good, and they can be amazingly terrible, or anything in between, and in the form of Versus, I believe I have been shown the purest version of the genre that I have ever seen. The 2000 film is the third project completed by director Kitamura Ryuhei, following a pair of featurelets clocking in under an hour apiece, and the 30-year-old has claimed that he feared, at the time, that he wouldn't have a chance to ever make another, so he wanted to make sure that every fucking idea he could come up with made it into the final movie (his fears were unfounded: in part because of this very film's admiring cult, he'd get a crack at directing no less a holy grail than Godzilla: Final Wars, the designated Last Godzilla Picture for a good long while. In my opinion, he made a bit of a hash of it, but that's neither here nor there). Which is why in Versus, we have history's first and probably last horror-comedy that sets a lone samurai and, a millennium later, a squad of Yakuza hitmen fighting zombies in a haunted forest, in action setpieces that owe various debts to '70s Hong Kong kung fu movies, '90s American neo-gangster pictures and Peter Jackson-style gross-out action for grossness's sake. And then it ends with a sci-fi interlude, because why not.

There are an infinite number of ways to make this all not work, but only two I can think of to make it actually work. One is to be a genius of mixing comedy, thrills, gore, and action with the fluidity and clarity of purpose of a Sam Raimi, or a... anyway, Sam Raimi could have done it. The other is to be a full-on magpie darting at shiny things without hesitation, so deeply investing into every individual scene and every individual shot, believing in it so absolutely, that every moment of the film lands successfully enough that the audience will be swept up with the filmmaker's own enthusiasm, and not pay so much attention to whether the film steps along a nice A->B->C pattern, or if it's just a string of exclamation points. Kitamura, sad to say, is not Sam Raimi. But he's a hell of a good magpie.

A plot synopsis is almost beyond reason - "Yakuzas, haunted woods, zombies, zombie Yakuzas" is really all you need to know - but in the 444th of 666 portals to Hell, the Forest of Resurrection, a pair of prisoners have escaped: one is known only by his ID number, KSC2-303 (Sakaguchi Tak), the other not even treated with that level of intimacy (he's played by Komiya Motonari). He doesn't matter much at all; KSC2-303 does, though, since he's in a position to spot a girl (Misaka Chieko) who has been kidnapped by the Yakuza and rescue her. At which point the exact plot starts to get a little confusing for me to parse, but a high-level Yakuza (Sakaki Hideo) comes along to crack some skulls, simultaneously with the multitudes of dead bodies hidden in the woods rising up to give the rest of the gangsters hell. He has darker secrets than could ever be guessed, and they connect him to KSC2-303 and the girl, and those samurai a thousand years ago, and potent demonic force of the whole forest. And it takes an enormous amount of bloody fighting to stop him from tapping into the power of Hell itself.

I didn't realise until writing all that out what it is, exactly, that appealed to me about Versus despite its wanton embrace of action that piles up on top of itself to the point of absolute incoherence: it's a Japanese version of one of Lucio Fulci's "gate to Hell" movies. The armies of zombies, the mythology that erupts into the film at at totally arbitrary point in the plot, the way that scenes are far more interested in how to make a visceral impact in and of themselves rather than how they add to the overall development of the plot; that's all pure Italian genre goodness. The particularly Japanese twist comes in the way that it's all treated with joyous goofiness: even when it's not actually stopping to make jokes (something that doesn't happen all that frequently), Versus is absolutely wacky, so overblown in its plotting and excited to show off those gore effects that it can afford - this movie adores that old "blast a hole through a zombie, then point the camera back at the shooter through the dripping wet hole" gag - that there's never much of a risk of taking it too seriously. Certainly not as horror, though it has a few good shocking moments, and the Forest of Resurrection (a well-chosen spot that offers maximum atmosphere for minimal production design and budget) can be satisfyingly creepy in the way of all sufficiently dense forests.

It is, pretty transparently, an excuse to show off, and what he lacks in finesse, Kitamura makes up for in pure showmanship. He's aided considerably by editor Kakesu Shuichi, who keeps the images flowing quickly, and composer Morino Nobuhiko, who whips the tone around from adventure to action to thriller to pensive character piece, even. Among other talented indie sorts, all diving into the visibly low-key production with the best kind of "hey! let's make a MOVIE!" gusto.

What it amounts to is a film that shows its seams rather openly, but expresses such glee in how creatively it assembles all of its ingredients into a series of demented fights that it tends to make us co-conspirators rather than an audience to be persuaded of the film's authenticity. The film is a live-action cartoon, motivated by whatever Kitamura thinks is extremely cool at a given moment, and directed with such fearless commitment to that ideal of cool that it ends up sweeping us along with it, even when our idea of cool doesn't align with the filmmakers. It's not remotely flawless, even discounting its admittedly amateurish production value. It's absolutely too long - and the uncut version of the original I watched isn't even the longest extant cut (in 2004, Kitamura revisted the film to add CGI and re-work the color timing, but that seemed like an inappropriate way to see it for the first time, to my way of thnking) - and there are places where the momentum and mania simply get tiring. And, I mean, it's pretty hard not to disagree with the more serious kind of person who would simply write all of this off as totally stupid. It is stupid. But it doesn't care not to be, and it's energetic enough to be a real gas even so.

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I AM JACK'S MOVIE REVIEW

A review requested by Alex D, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

More than a decade and a half after its underwhelming theatrical performance that sneakily begot one of the most omnipresent movie cults of the early '00s (I was in college in those days; the film was inescapable), I have to admit that I really have no damn clue what to make of Fight Club. It would be an insane thing to deny that the film is consummately well-made, and it's impossible to overlook how much it starts to overreach in its second half and especially its final quarter, as it begins to lose sight of whatever the hell it was trying to do in a flurry of super-clever twists that are very similar to, but importantly distinct from the twists in Chuck Palahniuk's source novel, adapted by Jim Uhls.

It is, I think, the platonic ideal of A Film By David Fincher; not because it uses his skills to best effect, by any means (I am quite sure that honor belongs to Zodiac, and even by the time Fight Club came out in '99, the director already had Se7en behind him), but because it best typifies the thing that he always does, whether it works well (as in those two serial killer films), or whether it sets the movie on fire (most flamboyantly in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button): he always puts a lot of energy and investment into working out the mechanics of how he wants to make this film, attending to the craft of cinema with an almost holy focus. And he always does this at the expense of the connection between that craft and anything else. That's resulted in films that are, in the aggregate, worse than Fight Club, but I don't believe he's made anything as split between its intentions and its effect.

We'll circle back to that. Meanwhile, I do not, truly, know how much this film's cult remains robust and important in the daily lives of cinephiles, so I shouldn't talk about Fight Club like we all know what I mean. The film's unnamed protagonist, played by Edward Norton, is an insomniac office drone whose soul-crushing job involves, very specifically, trying to help his company determine how much money human lives are worth. He's found one unconventional and rather shady, if ultimately harmless way of releasing his stress and angst at the world not working out properly: he attends support groups for various grave illnesses, and lets himself be carried away on a wave of crying and intimacy (feigned intimacy, but it's the best he's got). The first serpent in his paradise comes in the form of Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter, in the role that inaugurated the "Crazy Wigs and Too Much Kohl" era of her career), who's also lying her way through the support group circuit, more out of boredom than anything else, and who naps his bubble of protection. The second, who at first seems like a divine guiding light, is Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a homemade soap manufacturer and salesman that our boy meets on a plane.

They end up living together in the ancient, falling-down mansion in the city's warehouse district where Tyler has planted his flag of late, after the narrator's posh-appointed apartment explodes in a freak accident. It's from this pre-modern base of operation that Tyler begins to craft his philosophy of anti-consumerism, seeking to replace the lost self-reliance of modern masculinity that has been bred out by too many white-collar jobs and bourgie junk shops like IKEA and Starbucks. Seized by a random inspiration on their first night, Tyler asks the narrator to punch him outside of a bar, and in hardly any time, they - and an ever-increasing circle of like-minded lost souls - have formed Fight Club, a basement athletic club of sorts in which men fight, one pair at a time, in unrestrained bare-knuckle brawls, just for the sake of feeling anything. And this seems to make everybody's life better, right up until the narrator starts to figure out that Tyler is actually planning a most destructive form of anarchy that goes far deeper than convincing middle-class men that they don't need so much stuff. And there's absolutely no point to talking about Fight Club 16 years later without letting spoilers happen, so if you haven't seen the film and think you might want to - even though I frankly don't like it very much, I still believe that it's an essential piece of American cinema that needs to be studied and grappled with for plenty of reasons - here's your place to bail out.

The issue with Fight Club that transcends all other issues is not a mysterious one; those of us who don't love it have been identifying it for years now (I, personally, first made a version of this argument in 2002, and I was already parroting someone else, long-forgotten). Basically, Fight Club is David Fincher being too good at his job in the wrong way. This is, pretty clearly, a satire of the kind of wannabe superhero American masculinity that felt weakened and feminised by the economic boom and attendant emotional introspection of the 1990s - this is such a Clinton-era movie, above and beyond the fact that it's final scene would be unthinkable just two years after its premiere, in the wake of 9/11/01 - that does exactly what satire is supposed to do: it starts out with perfectly simple precepts that anybody ought to be able to agree with (IKEA overcharges you for dubiously "stylish" particleboard crap with ludicrous names), starts nudging that towards a heightened level (which is why you should feel totally excited if your apartment and all your possessions blow up), and eventually races full-out towards the kind of clearly unacceptable claims that are meant to show the basic intellectual instability of a position that might not seem at all weird if you only encounter it one bite at a time. In this case, the idea that males can only defend their maledom through increasingly militarised acts of violence.

So what happens is that Fincher, with his methodical, surgical approach to building cinema, looks at the situation that must be devised: the narrator must be seduced by Tyler. So he very flashily visualises the choking ennui of a consumption-driven lifestyle - the film's IKEA catalogue montage is legitimately one of the finest sequences in the director's career at the level of technique - and he glorifies the DIY lifestyle that Tyler lives, treating it with a certain level of irony that's nevertheless clearly enthusiastic and friendly and funny, and he stages Fight Club with the intensity and dazzlement of '90s action cinema at its fleetest. Which was not too fleet, for the most part (not in America), and so it's easy for the fight sequences to feel absolutely stunning and exciting compared to almost everything else that shared its historical moment. And he has done such a great job of building all that up, he can't back out of it. The problem at the core of Fight Club is that it's appealing because of its style, and then it tries to walk back from that at an entirely intellectual level, and it's a mishmash of energies that makes absolutely no sense. The movie says that it's horrified at Tyler's excesses, but it feels jazzed up by them, and that's before the filmmakers make the absolutely unforgivable choice to let the destruction of skycrapers at the end play as the visual punchline for the narrator and Marla to end up together, the explosions filling almost exactly the same role as the fireworks in To Catch a Thief. Movies are a visual medium; if you show us explosions in a romantic, exciting way, that matters more than telling us that they are amoral at best, and by that point in the screenplay, Fight Club really isn't concerned with even telling us that. The result is a film that's irreconcilably broken between its thoughts and its guts, and there was no way the guts were going to lost. Not with such extraordinarily visceral work being done by cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (whose offensively good capturing of the chilly shine of nighttime made him a great Fincher collaborator, making it dumbfounding and annoying they'd wait a whole decade before teaming up again for The Social Network), editor James Haygood (funneling with slurry abandon between moments, channeling music video technique with a keen sense of the needs of a feature), and electronic/hip hop producers Dust Brothers to provide the jarring, frequently toneless and always intensifying score.

The Big Ol' Twist really doesn't help matters. If this was a film about the narrator trying to stop his secretly insane buddy Tyler Durden, it would have been a great deal easier to sell the idea that the film's last forty minutes are there to disprove the first ninety; if this was a film about a man finding that he's secretly insane, and unpacking all the things that he's done as "Tyler Durden", it could have been a great psychological thriller. Doing both of those things gets muddy as hell. But I do have to hand it to Fincher and Uhls: having only finally seen the movie for a second time, knowing the twist on your way through is a marvelous experience. The way that dialogue and blocking very casually state outright things that we're simply not interested in learning yet is brazen in the best way; the weird one-frame insert shots of Pitt before he appears as a character go from being a punkish in-joke to crafty foreshadowing, especially since it's also much easier to see how much of the film is being presented from the narrator's sleep-deprived POV without actually flagging it as such. Take out the social commentary, and Fight Club, and the rather mean jokes at the expense of people trying to muddle through sickness with emotional support groups, and there's a fucking wonderful depiction of psychological unreliability that even makes Pitt's oddly uni-dimensional performance turn out to be a strength instead of a weakness. But that's taking a hell of a lot of things out.

So back to where we started: I really have no damn clue what to make of Fight Club. It's all technically gorgeous, and along with The Matrix, I'm inclined to call it one of the first American films of the 21st Century, for all its accelerated continuity and don't-stop-to-think aesthetic. But it's such a wreck of tone and intellect, and it's so inhuman in ways that all Fincher films ultimately turn out to be; but no other Fincher film takes place so necessarily inside one person's head for 100% of its running time. It's electrifying, stylish cinema, of course, and I honestly do get why people love it - whether they love its cool or its satire of the same cool. That right there, I think, is why I can't pretend to come even close to loving it myself.

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ABUSES OF POWER

A second review requested by David Greenwood, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Knowing, as one can't help but know, that Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is the most god-damned notorious art film of them all for its grotesque displays of violence, warped sexuality, and bottomless imagination for depicting human cruelty, the film's opening is even more disorienting than it should be. And it's nothing but black titles on a white background! But underneath plays a jaunty, jazzy tune, Franco Ansaldo and Alfredo Bracchi's "Son tanto triste", promising a breezy tossed-off insincere experience to follow. In its own tiny way, it's as perverse and excruciating as anything that follows.

Truth be told, Salò's reputation for toxic, vile unwatchability is a bit overblown. It is, beyond question, a harrowing experience, and one that is very difficult to recommend - having at last seen it, I'm comfortable calling it an absolutely vital work of cinema that I'll never recommend to anybody for any reason - but it's nothing like a non-stop chamber of horrors that, once it stops, never lets up in punishing the audience. It's extremely formalised, in fact, and takes repeated stops to shift away from its depictions or even descriptions of depravity to indulge in circular conversation amongst its villains about European philosophy. True, these narrative pauses have a tendency to feel like the film is mustering its strength and drawing its breath for the next onslaught, so it's not like we're given a chance to relax in front of it. No, it keeps us pretty tense and wired throughout. Really, the parts of it that are most explicit are in some way the easiest to take, since at least in those cases we get to have a reaction and thus catharsis.

The film was the last to be directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose horrible murder came earlier in the same month as the film's November, 1975 premiere in France, giving its depiction of sexualised violence an extra charge of sickening potency - moreso when it was new than now, I am sure, and the papers aren't busily running photos of Pasolini's bloody corpse. He and Sergio Citti adapted it from the novel by the Marquis de Sade, added some of Dante's Inferno for the framework - though Salò describes only a one-way descent into Hell - and transposed the action to the Mussolini government during its final days as a puppet for the waning Nazi regime. How closely it hews to de Sade, I cannot begin to say, but taken on its own terms, the story adopts an almost poetic structure, built around four "stanzas", each moving through roughly the same sequence of events, while escalating the specific cruelty and intensity of those events. Simply put, the plot centers on a Duke (Paolo Bonacelli), a Bishop (Giorgio Cataldi), a Magistrate (Umberto P. Quintavalle), and the President (Aldo Valletti), who assemble a host of gorgeous young men and women, some kidnapped and some hired, to populate their castle on the outskirts of Salò, the capitol of the short-lived Italian Social Republic. There, they conduct an endless (or 120 days, anyway) experiment in causing humiliation and torture to their victims as a way of indulging their own pleasure. And that's basically it.

Pasolini's essays and interviews conducted in the last few years of his life leave virtually no ambiguity as to what he wanted to accomplish with this film, particularly in relationship to the three immediately preceding it in his career, the "Trilogy of Life" - The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Arabian Nights. Those films, the sunniest of his career, cumulatively present an idealised vision of pre-capitalist society, using primitive film technique and ancient storytelling style to depict sexual and social freedom, something not entirely unlike Rousseau's swoony Enlightenment-era adoration of noble savagery. In that way, it makes perfect sense that Pasolini would turn to de Sade, whose work was an explicit and purposeful contrast to Rousseau's optimism, showcasing the darker side of human possibility. For Pasolini, who had abandoned Marxism but not anti-capitalism at this point, the kind of joyful sexuality he had explored in the trilogy was fundamentally implausible in the corrupt capitalist world around him, based on relationship of power and the exploitation and ownership of the lower classes by the upper classes. It's not unusual to see Salò described as an anti-Fascist parable, using humiliation, torture, and rape as metaphors for the exploitation of a whole country by right-wing authoritarians during the war, but it's more the case that Fascism itself is also a metaphor, and the whole thing is a more general parable about the inherent abuses meted out by the self-indulgent leadership classes against the rest of society, baked into The System The Way It Is Now. This approach itself led to the film being attacked by the Italian intelligentsia, notably Italo Calvino, who viewed Pasolini's appropriation of Mussolini's real-life abuses to serve as an extreme parody in a provocative movie to be dangerously amoral.

That might very well be the case - the last thing I'm qualified to do is tell the intellectuals who lived through Fascism that they don't understand Fascism. Morally, I am genuinely uncertain what we should do with Salò, other than to firmly declare that it's grotesque excesses have very little in common with the like of torture porn or the Nazi sexploitation films of the same era. As cinema, though, the film is ingenious - one can debate the merits of Pasolini's intentions, but not the skill with which he carried them off, and even if we allow for Death of the Author and Intentional Fallacy and the like (and we should), there's no denying that the movie and themes the director described in the last year of his life is precisely the movie that we can watch today, those of us who don't live in countries where it's still illegal.

It's a marvelously crafty picture, Salò is, an enormous shift away from the artful crudeness of the Trilogy of Life and mostly unlike anything Pasolini ever did. It's a mercilessly aesthetic piece: the all-star team of production designer Dante Ferretti, set decorator Osvaldo Desideri, and costume designer Danilo Donati, in concert with Pasolini and cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli's proscenium-like framing along strict gridlines, gives Salò the polish, richness, and geometric precision of classical art; for a film so jam-packed with ugliness, it's gorgeous, like, constantly. But also chilly and mechanical: what none of the visuals do is give any life to the movie, and the customary hollowed-out sound design of Italian film production does nothing to combat that, nor do the dispassionate performances which (much like the sound), only really have much vibrancy to speak of during the cruelest acts depicted. The film is so sharp and precise that it feels totally artificial, and the whole time one watches it, one is first and always aware of the artifice on display: the fussy staging, the inorganic cutting, the way that depravity turns on and off like a light switch.

It becomes uncomfortably clear, in other words, that the film anticipates an audience - ourselves, and probably Pasolini too, whose sexual proclivities weren't entirely unlike some of the ones being depicted in the film as so ugly. Particularly viewed in the context of Tree of Life, Salò is obviously a scream of primal rage, directed at a world where everything is cruel and even something as beautiful as sex has been curdled and turned into a device for the powerful to assert their control over the powerless (I'm not sure that I've ever seen a movie that so bluntly insists on rape as a totally de-eroticised act). But it is not righteous. It indicts itself, its maker, and its viewers for existing in the same system of abuse and exploitation as its subjects; even as the victimised characters start to become increasingly complicit in sustaining the sordid world they're suffering through, it grows harder to deny that Salò isn't letting us off the hook. Isn't it a beautiful movie to just look at? Aren't the many young men and women seen naked throughout the film attractive? Yes and yes - that's the movie's trap for us, for even though it's as thoroughly unpleasant as any film that does not depict actual dead humans or animals could possibly be, Salò anticipates its status as an unspeakable provocation, one of those movies that we all go see precisely because they're so shocking and upsetting and horrible. The film tricks us, though: first by including so much material that's upsetting without being shocking, its long passage of depressingly violent stories and shitty jokes and its slow-paced development of the visual and narrative rules, and sitting listening to its characters talk about how utterly vile they are without punishing them for it. And then when the shocks start to come, they're staged in a way that makes us feel like voyeurs - explicitly so, in one of the final moments. It's a film that indicts everything, up to and including itself for existing in the world it depicts.

It's a one-of-a-kind mixture of rarefied intellectualism and disgusting visceral spectacle, and its themes are so severe as to feel like a howl of despair more than an articulate statement of radical politics. But it is pure cinema. I was not glad to see it while I was watching it, but I'm glad to have seen it; it is quite a thing to grapple with. Movies like this simply don't exist: that's arguably a good thing, but it certainly makes Salò stand out as a singular artistic accomplishment.

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