Stupid Wisdom Teeth

I just had two wisdom teeth extracted. I thought it would be three (I had my upper left pulled a few years ago), but my upper right wisdom just never came in, which I find a little disconcerting given the symmetry our DNA is supposed to code for. Intelligent Design indeed. I'm biting down on a gauze strip now, my lower jaw still numb, and so verbal communication is impaired, though not entirely impossible. This, writing, is much preferable, however. It makes one appreciate lucid thinking all the more.

The injection into my jaw gave me some initial pain in my ear, apparently because the nerve loops around there. When I started to go numb I began to feel an itching on my chin that no amount of scratching, short of maybe ripping off my skin, could satisfy. I needed another shot because of some extra sensitivity in the back of my jaw. This we found out by my groans when the dentist pressured and jiggled my teeth.

We had started on the left wisdom, but it proved troublesome and so the dentist "gave me a break" by working on the right. It was a straightforward affair, as far as these things go. It neither took very long, nor provided any memorable complications. The left, however, continued to be an incorrigible sonofabitch. The dentist, having loosed the tooth from its gummy moorings, attempted to pull it out in the normal fashion. It refused cooperation, however. The dentist brought up the possibility of surgical removal, but only to say he wanted to avoid doing that. Instead he got out the drill, in order to score it and split it and remove the pieces.

The experience of all this was not brutally painful, not all the time anyway, but for one who's lived as sheltered a life as I, it was probably the most pain I've ever been in, and it was enough to make me reflect on how cruel Dr. Mengele really was. Additionally, much of my anguish was not physical, but psychological: every crack and pop, scrape and grind I heard not only externally--a sound wave vibration that entered my ears--but also reverberating inside my head, prompting me to wince and yelp with every unpleasant development, regardless of the actual pain it was causing.

"This will give you something to write about," the dentist said during the procedure. I grunted assent. "You know, I saw Little Shop of Horrors before it went to Broadway, way back in the day."

After a particularly loud crack I babbled, "I' ih ovah?" It wasn't. That had only been the crown. The rest of it was soon to follow, and on its removal the issue was apparent: the root of the tooth was curved, and had been hooking into my jaw whenever it was being pulled out. After biting down on some gauze pads I was good to go.

My lower jaw will be numb for at least a couple more hours. In the meantime my lip feels fat, my swallowing is weak and cautious (don't want to upset those blood clots). I open and close my mouth periodically, like a fish. I feel old. Pressing around my ear, where numbness and feeling mingle, produces an odd, unwanted, sensation. My stomach feels just the slightest bit queasy, perhaps because of swallowing some blood, perhaps because I let myself be way too sensitive to these things.

I have a few days off from work, during which I'm going to take the downtime to watch Apocalypse Now and Dolomite, continue reading Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground, and write, if I can focus. Maybe play some video games, which I seem to have little time for these days. When I had my first wisdom tooth pulled I watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy extended edition in its entirety, back to back, while working out the entire arc of a cartoon I was doing for my school newspaper. This is a good occasion for large undertakings.

Burn After Bleeding

The funny thing about slashers is their diversity. On the surface level, they’re all much the same: psycho killer from years past seeks his revenge, disembowels nubile teenagers with characteristic edged weapon, Sex=Death, Final Girl sequence, incoherent twist ending, roll credits. Quentin Tarantino originally conceived Death Proof as a straight-up slasher, but realized he couldn’t do that because the formula is so ironclad. And yet, there are surprising disparities among the various films in terms of quality (compare Nightmare on Elm St. vs. Friday the 13th, to say nothing of Freddy vs. Jason), plot details, and even fidelity to the slasher formula.

The Burning, at first glance, is another Friday the 13th clone, with teenagers getting offed at a summer camp, but it’s a very different beast. In the first place, there’s no attempt to hide the killer’s identity. It’s plain from the very beginning that Cropsy, a former camp counselor turned burn victim, is our crazed killer. The film is at pains to keep us from seeing his face, as it was with Pamela Voorhees, but for the very good reason that it doesn’t want to spoil the wonderfully disgusting trauma makeup provided by Tom Savini of Dawn of the Dead/Friday the 13th infamy.

The next break from the slasher mold may not necessarily be a break. There’s been much hand-wringing over the genre’s misogyny, with culture warriors on one side decrying its exploitative sex and violence against women, and on the other side certain feminists (following Carol Clover’s lead) pointing out the subversive sexual politics going on in many of these films, along with the audience identification with a strong, self-sufficient Final Girl who ends up emasculating the almost always male killer. Whether slashers per se are sexist is an open question; The Burning doesn’t get off quite so easily. The first kill of the movie involves the newly recovered Cropsy picking up a Times Square hooker and sticking some shears in her guts. This in itself isn’t any more morally offensive than can be found in any other such movie, but it sticks out badly, mostly for it having nothing to do with what else is going on.

There’s also the presence of not one but TWO sexual encounters that border on assault, and a character with a Peeping Tom tendency. Granted the movie makes it clear the would-be rapists are colossal douchebags who get what’s coming to them (the characterization is actually far above what one usually must settle for in these kinds of flicks), but the scenes are, well, discomfiting. And not only is the creeper one of our Final Boys (another huge departure from the formula), but we learn of his weird proclivities after the camera itself has been ogling one of the female campers in the shower, much like the near-assault during a skinny-dipping scene. It’s nice the film takes time to deal with sexual deviants as opposed to just parading us with T&A, but having both of them together makes for utter confusion.

I’ve mentioned the Final Boy scene, but a Final Boy in itself is just the tip of the iceberg in how far from the norm The Burning goes. Technically, there are two Final Boys, and they aren’t even final: a cohort of campers makes it back to safety (including Jason Alexander’s character—yes, that Jason Alexander—who’s the most likable of the whole bunch and thus ends up a wasted opportunity), and the police show up in a helicopter afterwards. This has the effect of deflating what tension there is in the sequence, but none of that matters for two reasons: 1) the aforementioned makeup job on Cropsy’s face, and 2) his change of weapon from gardening shears to a flamethrower. It’s batshit crazy and receives no explanation at all, but a flamethrower is just what the film needs at that point.

Of course, The Burning is quite a bit better than Jason Voorhees and his ilk. The story’s logic is stretched but never insultingly so. While the acting is kind of campy (yeah, I went there), it’s never dull or flat out bad, and I gotta say, Jason Alexander makes his character, which in lesser hands would quickly become Odious Comic Relief, work. The very ending, I must say, is also actually pretty neat and doesn't pull any stupid sequel set-up shit that happens way too often. On top of these distinctions and its value as a genre curiosity, it’s also of some film history significance: it was Jason Alexander and Holly Hunter’s first film, and one of the first productions of Bob and Harvey Weinstein, founders of Miramax(!). It’s not superb—a lot of the direction is just flat and botches the kills—but it’s far better than most such movies, and worth checking out.

Last House, Last Chance

I come home just after 9:30, my evening’s rehearsal behind me, and my St. Patty’s Day pint inside. The holiday seems a good excuse to watch a movie. I consider the newly arrived 2001: A Space Odyssey, but at over two-and-a-half hours it is much too long, and such an engagement ill befits the intent to relax. There is Last House on the Left, less than 90 minutes, which had been gathering dust in my room for several weeks now; a better match by far. The jacket describes it as a “cult horror favorite,” which is about right. I had read some disparaging words about it—I think Stephen King may have had some harsh words for it—but I had also gleaned its classic status. Surely the debut of one of horror’s most recognizable names, Wes Craven, should have something to offer.

So I start the disc up on my Playstation 2, in my bedroom instead of the living room. This will save me the trouble of explaining to my mother should she come the story of two parents seeking bloody revenge on the men (and woman, it turns out) who raped and murdered her daughter.

The beginning of the film is a disclaimer, that the events depicted are true, that the names have been changed to protect the survivors. This is almost certainly a lie, but that's immaterial. The point is to plant in the audience's mind the seeds of plausibility, a trick The Texas Chainsaw Massacre would put to astonishing use only a couple years later. We move on to the first images of the film, a forest and pond. This is disconcerting, but unintentionally so, the product of ugly film stock. Again we can look to TCM for comparison, for in that film the ugly cinematography--carefully done to maximize the Texan desert's bleakness--enhances the mood of the film. Here the film is ugly by way of a distracting cheapness.

Then there are the titles, portentous: “A Sean S. Cunningham production.” Whatever significance this may have had in 1972, for anyone seeing the movie after Friday the 13th proved you didn’t need talent to make millions of dollars, it serves as a warning for cheap exploitation, one the film quickly proves well-founded.

The first person we meet is a nonentity, a postman who can apparently summon pint-sized dogs into his car at will, and whose only purpose is to inform us that Mari—who is such an important protagonist that her name is the only one that adorns her family’s mailbox—is seventeen. Depending on your scruples, this either enhances or deflates the subsequent shower scene. There is, initially, a tantalizing grasp at artistry; we see Mari from behind the bathtub’s sliding glass door, which is patterned like large fish scales such that it blurs her image to something akin to a Van Gogh painting. But then she steps out in full view, and in front of the mirror, so we can ogle her breasts at different angles without moving the camera, a merciful act. The camerawork that abhors scene-setting and is made doubly bad by the wretched cinematography. At no point is one allowed to forget this is schlock. It even appears as graffiti in the background of a scene. An artistic exercise in ironic self-deprecation, perhaps? No, Wes Craven would not mine that territory for another three decades, but that helps justify the experience, so I’ll pretend it is.

The dialogue is perfunctory. Mari is a hippie that’s into, apparently and inexplicably, some death metal precursor band (it has a gloomy name that eludes me). We know this because her parents tell us, not because we hear the band. Also, Mari’s “tits” came in last summer. Also also, one of the murderers/rapists wishes he was a frog. The woman among them pronounces Freud as ‘Frood.’ Because she’s an uneducated lowlife, ya see?

And so on and so on, and when the girls are ensnared (because how could anything go wrong stepping into a stranger’s apartment in what we are explicitly told is one of the worst neighborhoods in Travis Bickle’s New York City?) it’s hard to really work up much fear, in part because these vessels are so bland and could not command sympathy with a megaphone, in part because this endeavor is so damned chintzy. In an attempt at dramatic irony and tension the film intercuts between the two girls’ plight and Mari’s parents setting up her birthday celebration and feeling the slightest bit randy while doing it. “I’m going to attack you,” her father says. Cue the cut to one of the escaped delinquents pulling open Mari’s (friend’s?) blouse and proceeding to rape her. It’s done offscreen, under the (often true) assumption that what we imagine is more horrible than anything they could show us. But when what we are shown is so much wretchedly inept filmmaking, the viewer feels a decidedly different horror.

The Last House on the Left has a reputation for offensive nastiness that is only half-earned: the subject matter is ugly, but that need not imply the depiction of it ought be as well. Not to say rape and torture and murder are beautiful. But a movie like The Devils Rejects, which seeks to bring back the relentless unpleasantness of 70s horror, commands a certain respect for succeeding so well at being repulsive; Last House on the Left instead botches its attempts to get under your skin, and because rape is so disturbing, the movie’s utter failure to communicate that is insulting to one’s sensibilities. It’s trivializing. It could never hope to lapse into camp, and so instead it just infuriates.

So when the hooligans’ car stalls outside Mari’s parents’ frockin’ house and the police who are well aware of escaped lunatics on the loose ignore it and one of the psychos is telling Mari (or her friend) to piss her pants or her friend gets cut, my mother gets home, and I am faced with a choice to continue a movie that is punishing in ways I did not foresee or salvage what is left of my evening with other matters. I put it on pause. I talk to my mother. I pick up an issue of the New York Review of Books and read a surprisingly positive review of the controversially posthumously-published Nabokov, followed by the beginning of a Stephen Greenblatt review of a Shakespeare biography which reprints an excerpt of Ulysses that makes me want to read Ulysses. Twenty minutes later, the movie is still paused. I decide that the remainder of its running time would be better spent on the writing exercise currently under your perusal.

I can handle bad movies. Jason X and Stay Alive are both ass, but those are, respectively, fun to hate and an education in what not to do in making a horror flick. But Last House on the Left has somewhat of a reputation to live up to. It has its partisans. The last movie in such a position that failed me (almost) just as badly was Scream, also from Wes Craven. Fool me twice, I won’t get fooled again. The Hills Have Eyes has a better reputation than Last House on the Left, was Craven’s follow-up, but were it not for Nightmare on Elm Street I would probably, after tonight, just skip it. As it is I’ll get to it at some point, but I won’t put up with lapses in filmmaking for nearly as long, and I won’t dignify it with a write-up afterward.

U.S, Soldier Waterboards His Four Year-Old Daughter...

...because she can't recite the alphabet. A true patriot.

A Few Thoughts on Dawn of the Dead (the Original)

Not a review, really; I have to go soon and can't really organize my thoughts. Anyway:

- A deceptively simple and effective opening credits sequence. It boils down to a lot of arguing in a news studio about the deteriorating zombie situation, but simply showing the impact the zombies have had on society is far more unsettling than showing the zombies themselves.
- I was surprised, given the movie's reputation, at how...tame... it was. Perhaps that's not the right word, but I went in expecting a gung-ho bloodbath, like, say, Aliens, but with the undead, but the majority of the film that takes place at the mall is devoted to what boils down to housekeeping--practical solutions for fortifying their location like blocking the entrances with semis, storing bodies in freezers--and other day-in-the-life activities (a dinner date, the furnishing of the safe room with a bed and lamps).
- This is much more interesting than simply lots of zombie cannon fodder shots and is why the movie is as well-regarded as it is. That said, the very late introduction of the biker gang seems like a last-minute attempt to resolve the "plot" as opposed to just letting the characters settle into the day-to-day.

A Gore-Us Line

I had been meaning to see Stage Fright for awhile. I first read about it months ago as I scoured Google for any movie that might bear a resemblance to the idea I had for my script. As it was one that came awfully close, I wanted to check it out to see how a slasher (though an Italian work, the fact that there is no mystery to the killer’s identity would seem to disqualify it from being a giallo) set in a theater might operate. It does so surprisingly well, stunningly in some places.

The opening lets us know the proceedings are going to be a little bent. A dance number in a musical (strangely devoid of any lyrics) about a serial killer, with synthesized musical instrumentation that is quite 80s-licious. The next half hour or so is a pretty by-the-numbers set up for what’s going to happen: we meet our Final Girl and meet the meat, mostly actors, plus the director and a makeup girl, the killer escapes from a mental institution, and after a pretty neat first kill (a pickaxe in the mouth, it looks like) the cast is locked in the theater with him. It’s amusing, and certainly not painfully obnoxious, as can be the case in these kinds of flicks. It even distinguishes itself by 1) introducing a black character and not killing him off right off the bat and 2) having a gay character, a relative rarity even in today’s horror flicks, and a good sign that the movie’s setting—the theater, which has long been a queer stomping ground—is not just window dressing for the usual genre tropes. Too bad he’s the usual bitchy queen stereotype, but hey, you can’t have everything.

Things get going when the killer shows up, dressed in the serial killer’s owl-head costume from the play, and kills an actress onstage, just as the killer in the play is supposed to “kill” the actress. Right away there’s more going on here than usual: there’s some nice irony employed in the real kill taking the place of the stage kill, with the director even shouting, “Kill her!” (This particular reflexivity is hardly original, however. The idea goes back at least as far as the 1580s with the climax of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy) The deconstruction of violence-as-entertainment pops up again in a later kill, when a bottle of stage blood falls to the floor and shatters just before another character is bloodily dispatched, with the real blood indistinguishable from the fake. This theme is never developed beyond these little devices, but it doesn’t need to. We don’t watch these films to be lectured with subtext, after all.

Anyway. The middle section has some great details—including the use of melodramatic music during that aforementioned fake blood kill—and the characters, for the most part, avoid the usual stupid slasher clichés. For all of that, though, there isn’t anything terribly suspenseful in all of it. The mood is one more of detached entertainment than any real fear. Not so with the third act. Once our Final Girl wakes up to find herself for all intents and purposes the last one standing, the movie vaults from above average to pretty damned amazing. There’s a walk through a narrow hallway that’s just downright spooky, a shower kill that actually adds a pretty good twist to what we normally expect….And then there’s the climax: absolutely crazy, a visual treat, and it’s actually intense and suspenseful. Quentin Tarantino should have swiped it by now. I’m avoiding specifics in all this because anybody who might be reading this really owes it to himself to track the movie down and check it out, it’s just that great (Netflix doesn’t carry it, so I actually had to buy it cheap from Amazon. If you and I actually interact in the real world, I’ll be glad to lend it out). Unfortunately the film inherits from its slasher forefathers a logic-defying twist ending, two, actually, but that’s still not enough to ruin it.

Honestly, check it out, even if you normally think yourself too good for these kinds of movies. The Final Girl sequence is one for the ages, and the aesthetic of the whole thing (including a schizoid soundtrack that veers between operatic melodrama, heavy metal, and synth that doesn’t jar as badly as Opera) makes it a real standout

A Very Scary Christmas: Theater of Blood

[Note: I'm watching a bunch of horror films, mostly slashers, for research for a script I'm writing, and I figured I could start generating content on here again if I posted my reactions. This is the first such entry in a series titled, entirely due to the season, A Very Scary Christmas. Enjoy, whoever you are.]

To my shame I’m not familiar with Vincent Price’s body of work (outside of an old Tim Burton animation short about a boy who thinks he’s—wait for it—Vincent Price), but Theater of Blood, less of a detour in the series of horror films I’ve lately been watching than one might think, is a delightful introduction. Essentially, Price plays Edward Lionheart, a Shakespearean actor who attempted suicide after failing to win a prestigious award and proceeds to kill the critics who snubbed him, in the manner of death of characters from Shakespeare plays, delivering some of those plays’ best and most well-known speeches all the while. Shakespeare contrived some particularly nasty deaths in his day, and so the movie’s violence isn’t entirely shocking, but that some of it is as graphic as it is, is startling when one considers it came years before Dawn of the Dead, and still a year in front of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is actually much less bloody than its reputation would suggest.*

But then again, the mayhem is played obviously for laughs (it contains one of the most hilariously methodical decapitations I’ve ever seen) and most of the critics are ciphers anyway. This makes it, bizarrely, something of a proto-slasher film, insomuch as it contains elaborate killings committed by a madman against a number of barely-defined schmucks, a formula that would be refined in John Carpenter in 1978 with a focus on developing the victims rather than the killer (as well as significantly lowering their age), and then be bastardized and codified just a year later with Friday the 13th, which prized sensationalism over character, story, logic, and basic technical competence. The key difference between Theater of Blood and Halloween’s debased progeny, of course, is there is actual talent at work: Price tackles the role of an egotistical ham actor with gleeful abandon; the script by Anthony Greville-Bell is smartly written, drawing from several obscure plays in the Shakespeare canon for its kills but setting them up enough to let neophytes know what’s going on, and containing some nice, dry one-liners; and in an unexpected twist, Michael J. Lewis’ melodramatic score is surprisingly well-done and fits perfectly with Lionheart’s antic disposition.

I’ll add for the sake of completeness that the kills require a ludicrous degree of meticulous planning (even granted the help Lionheart is receiving, he puts to shame the Rube Goldberg scenarios of Saw’s Jigsaw killer), one of them (Othello) is less funny than mean and so not effective, and a late twist is aimed less at the other characters than the audience and as a result is kind of silly, but that’s the movie in a nutshell: it’s all silly and never plausible beyond the confines of the story, but it’s always aware of that (though the characters never are—a distinction that makes Lionheart campy, not cloyingly stupid), and it’s never condescending. Due to the robust stomach and possible Shakespeare geekery necessary, Theater of Blood’s appeal might be somewhat limited, but those who can clear those hurdles will find a bloody good time to be had.

*Edited to correct dates of release