Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971): Cinebolically Dario

The long-awaited decent DVD release of Four Flies on Gray Velvet is a late-inning coup for anyone trying to lose their moral compass, and you should be trying, because it's harder than you think. Luckily, Argento's films--even at their worst--are never "safe" and always rich in moral ambiguity: Good guys are hipster artists driven to risk their friends' lives in finding the killer, more out of perverse fascination than genuine empathy for the victims; the killers have their reasons and police hardly matter except as deadpan mashers waiting around on the sidelines with their pages of red herring exposition.

In Four Flies for example, there's some "experimental procedure" where lasers project the retinal image at the moment of death, a surreal trip to a coffin-makers convention with a bohemian named "God," psychedelic wallpaper, chic 70s menswear, and fantasias of being a successful artist jet-setting around Rome. There's also hot chicks, mincing gay stereotypes, and gruesome stabbing but even us paranoid feminists can get into the kinky murders of Argento. He's always feeling the pain and everything's a double-edged sword of entendre and labyrinthine cinebolism.

If you're a big lover of Bird with Crystal Plumage you might long for one of Morricone's children's music box leitmotifs to run through his score for Flies but like Exorcist 2: The Heretic, his nerve-jangle drumming, mashed piano, heartbeat bass and dropping luggage on piano strings gambits don't show up until halfway through the film; before then it's all silence or generic loung psych jams of the group our hero drums for. Argento's more into the long suspenseful silence thing for Flies, anyway, with hiding in closets and hearing faint footsteps getting louder up the stairs all the time louder. Then silence in which one strains to hear the faintest scraping. The pitch blackness stretches sometimes over 3/4 of the frame, all but daring you to wonder if there's even a movie going on. There is, but a lot of it nods to other films, by Val Lewton (a whole walled-in park sequence mirrors Val Lewton and Jacque Tourneur's 1943 masterpiece, The Leopard Man).

It may have been a little too quiet and dark on a cropped blurry dupe, but with the widescreen DVD from Blue Underground we can luxuriate in every darkened corner and realize that this movie resembles Lynch's Lost Highway in its poetic use of hipster musicians standing blankly around in the darkness of their retro chic decadent apartments, waiting... thinking... standing... as Roberto, Michael Brandon is like a handsomer version of Roger Waters but Waters could act, or at least occasionally move a facial muscle, like he's so out of it he thinks he's still in make-up (since he's had a long career I presume this was Argento's directorial note) and hot frail androgynous girlfriends (Mimsy Farmer in short blonde hair). In Rome then, as well as in America, the pretty people are so privileged they become emotionally arrested zombies, alienating those around them until they're as ugly as everyone else.

There's a lot left undone that would have made this movie hum with the brilliance of Plumage, but there's no doubt it's Argento at the helm--in full control--so even if it doesn't add up to much, it's always "in the moment." And for the psychotronic scholar it's fun to connect this 1971 film to all that came before (The Leopard Man, Peeping Tom, Psycho) and all that came after (Death Proof, Bladerunner, Eyes of Laura Mars). Who knows why it's so important for people like Dario, Ennio, and Lucio that someone's slow decapitation or eye-gouging should be accompanied by languid orchestral pop balladry?! Maybe it's some anti-Catholic thing, but goddamn it, those are the moments one lives for.

Another moment is the climactic "lost footage" restoration which adds sickly minutes to an already tense situation, the suddenly reverting into Italian is a great example of Argento's unheimliche-conjuring power. In the Argentoverse scenes collapse and disappear, whether by your mental suppression scissors, or someone's real ones, only to return, decades later, in Italian with English subtitles.

Argento's films are always worth owning instead of renting as they can be re-watched repeatedly without ever seeming like the same movie, as faceted as an one's own inner romantic torment or open wound. Our mind obliterates the trauma we "block out" all traces of the pain as it happens, leaving a jewel-like shimmer in our retinae. What was it Caligula said? "Oh, If all of Rome had just one neck..." he said that because he was itchy for something that only a genius like Argento could provide, and he kept breaking necks to find it; Dario breaks the necks so we don't have to. Dario, the cinebolical Caligula of post-modern Rome!

Read my less worshipful piece on Dario's Mother of Tears here, and my most worshipful piece on daughter Asia's Scarlet Diva here

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That creepy JOSHUA (2007)

A much neglected horror classic in the making which I was recently turned onto is JOSHUA (2007), a creepy tale of Manhattan piano prodigy dealing with the arrival of a baby sister. Cinema is full of "catchable" killers, but JOSHUA tells a tale of a murderer so maddeningly ahead of the curve that even the audience can never be sure just quite what happened even after the credits roll. If that sounds like a drag to you then don't turn around two minutes later and tell me you like 1970s cinema, because you don't. In fact, you don't know shit.

It's a sad commentary on our times that this film wasn't promoted and embraced as the 21st century version of ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968), which it closely resembles. The critics generally liked it, but it came and went with little fanfare. (The icky and much-panned 2006 OMEN remake on the other hand grossed 54 million).

I'd chalk part of it up to the dangerously misguided post-1980s sanctification of all children as saints and angels (if they have clean urine and good genes, that is) but I've already done that, in my piece on GODSEND (2004).

Okay, here is a rehash: Not since the Spielberg "ET" model of Elliot-style sweetness supplanted little Damien (THE 1976 OMEN) has cinema dealt realistically with the moral ambiguity of childhood. In the late 1960s and 1970s there were open-eyed auteurs who saw the problem of child deification coming, and the result was box office bonanzas like ROSEMARY, EXORCIST and AUDREY ROSE (1977), followed by a spew of demonic child imitations. Today the demon children run things, and films like GODSEND, THE GOOD SON (1993), BIRTH (2004) and now JOSHUA are ignored, misunderstood, "demonized," or else championed by the few of us outside the bubble. This sort of "real" thriller drama is more cerebral and sociological than the MTV-editing and whiplash gore that's the current trend of disposable WB-casted horror remakes like the 2006 OMEN. That may be part of its problem; the other part may be the title - JOSHUA? It sounds like a lifetime drama about muscular dystrophy. There's about eight films with JOSHUA in the title, including JOSHUA: THEN AND NOW, starring James Woods, which you would never think from the banal title is actually a pretty good picture.

Anyway, back to our 2007 Sundance horror movie JOSHUA: Vera Famiga plays a mom battling postpartum depression and the horrific fall-out of having a son that just may be the most dangerously sociopathic genius ever, or maybe not. Maybe she's just crazy, and maybe there's child abuse actually happening in the family. Maybe there's some quiet little genius orchestrating half the catastrophes that ever happen in all family life....

Vera Farmiga is a new favorite actress of mine; take what she can do with a full-blooded part like this and then contrast with her under-written role in THE DEPARTED (2006), a role she still nails with much sexually wide-eyed alacrity. Sam Rockwell is also great as the dad, and the climax occurs in front of my favorite spot in all of New York City, the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park! I used to go there and just hate on all the little bastards climbing all over that thing, while I tried to meditate in front of it (with the giant Alice my personal savior/Buddha). Thank God someone else felt my pain, even if he did have to go to Sundance to do it.

In ROSEMARY'S BABY, part of the fun was the bizarre paranoia of it all -- was Mia Farrow just hormonal about all that tannis root nonsense? Even though you knew she wasn't, you could still enjoy the film from the point of view that maybe, just maybe, she was. There's a similar element to that at work in JOSHUA, and if you're not content to enjoy the hour or so of off-kilter family snapshots that precede the eventual mild horror outbursts, then you probably wont dig the rest of it, and you probably didn't love ROSEMARY'S BABY. If you've seen ROSEMARY'S BABY as many times as I have, then you will love JOSHUA, and I should also point you towards the very similar and even creepier Nicole Kidman vehicle, BIRTH (2004)

Like BIRTH, JOSHUA is the sort of film that offers a strange, keenly observed slice of upper-echelon metropolitan life wherein things you may think about to happen either are or are not happening, and then, suddenly, the net closes around your neck and you realize this little bastard has you. It may take a few hours or days after you view it (maybe the critics who had to rush to make a same night deadline in their review didn't have time to "sit with it") but the chilling realizations are there... they reach out of the celluloid like a pair of clutching hands, grabbing and shaking you with uncertainty as you drift off to sleep; if you could be this wrong about a movie, imagine how wrong you could be about all the other people in your life?

Special thanks to Kim Morgan for recommending this film to me. Read her own magnificent salute to insane children here and remember: don't trust anyone under 30... or over!

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Acting by the Void

I've been deeply reassessing old favorites under the new light of DVD lately. Re-visiting CARNIVAL OF SOULS in the midst of a panic attack/nervous breakdown/hazy lazy Sunday evening, the swanky Criterion DVD version with the benefit of clear focus and brilliant restoration. On a big screen, it's like I am finally melting into the film, the pure Cronenberg-ian mecha-flesh union, where eyes become sex organs embedded deep into the silver screen womb of dream. Steve Shaviro should be proud of me!

If that seems florid, consider the nature of CARNIVAL OF SOULS and its place in the cult canon; left of PERSONA, right of PSYCHO and PSYCHO's British mirror-twin, CITY OF THE DEAD (AKA HORROR HOTEL). From there SOULS branches off near THE BIRDS, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and REPULSION. This area of the film family tree  has had initials carved scalpel deep in the Freudian recesses of the American fetish icon bark--the "glacial blonde" wet wood pulp just beneath as portrayed by Janet Leigh, Candace Hilligoss, Tippi Hedren, and Kim Novak. This is where I like to visit, with my copy of Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae tucked neatly under my arm, to peer down in through the grates and watch as directors like Hitchcock and Herk Harvey point out the fascinating lobes and regions of my mom's brooding Viking cerebral cortex for my amazement.

In addition to being able to enjoy solid 16mm black and white cinematography to the fullest, which is pretty full, the DVD in hand gives you a sense of ownership over the experience. I have been trying to decipher what it means that I must keep spending way too much $$ as every wish I made as a 14 year old classic monster movie-obsessed child is suddenly, painfully, gratified. Back in the 1970s as a haunted 11 year-old I would fantasize about having all my favorite Bela and Boris movies at my command, being able to project them on the wall at will.

Of course, my trying to decipher the motives behind such reckless spendsmanship is akin to the searches conducted by the attractive blonde female protagonists of these films themselves. In my attempt to "own" a first-rate DVD of PSYCHO, for example, I "become" Norman Bates trying to "own" Janet Leigh, so he can display her as a stuffed trophy. I should mention my own mother is a blonde who in the era of these films' original release was a comparable icy beauty, so there you go... we the insane little boys of the audience craved to possess the silver screen mother and now we can, in a way that teens in the 1950s and 60s could only dream of. It's like nailing a bird to the wall in mid-flight, an owl with it's wings outstretched, longing to get unspooled through time and air and white light once more.

I think that by buying PSYCHO and CARNIVAL OF SOULS on DVD and watching them faithfully through the decades I harbor the forbidden, unconscious notion that I might undo the action of my original birth, via the death drive. I feel it pull me northwards, my chakras revolving in accordance with the earth as it goes round the sun like a slow, hypnotized dancer. The blondes seem to sense this first, like miner birds; they start the wheel a-spinning, betting all the money on red or black or whichever drips out first from between their beautiful alabaster thighs.

SPOILER ALERT - Candace Hilligoss's character in CARNIVAL "wakes up" into death, but so do they all, and so do we all - and we artists-- whether organist, writer, lover or dreamer--are called there first, and we go alone, and our friends and family fade to blurry behind us. We hear them asking us to come back, but the voices are faded and drenched in reverb. This is addiction and the siren's song luring your ship to the horny rocks of salt and delirium tremens and jail sentence suffering. From now on, your movie will exist with a gaping wound. Now there will be a centerpiece narrative shift.

But going back to the family and the friends calling vainly to your fading speck of light from their safe dull haven behind that veil seems worse; that life is spent, played, cashed. Any love you found still left there would just be crumb-like and fleeting. You know the only road left is the one to God, but it's so corny and such a total sacrifice of all one's coolness that you refuse to go. And so the priest suggests that you resign, and Norman's mother's chair starts to rock in agreement. But nothing is happening, and you finally know why that is, or do you, Mister Jones?

The truth is, you're living in a maze where every dead end's been gone over a hundred times and all the little treats have been eaten and there's nowhere to go but beyond. But instead of shuffling thy mortal coil like a good little organist you just hang around, drifting from town to town, department store to park to boarding house, waiting for the minotaur to set you free. You'll never know if you're even in the right maze until you finally feel his horns against your weeping eyes. Here be those horns! Own them!

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Friday the 13th Killed my Childhood

I was a kid in 1980 when the first Friday the 13th came out in theaters, and it was a tragic fuckin' time in cinematic history to be 13 years old and already a squeamish feminist. I grew up a horror fan, but more of the classic monsters variety, and frankly the whole murders for the sake of murdering thing scared me in a sort of pretentious "I fear for our common humanity" sort of way. I was a 70s guy. I dug the ladies, and here the ladies were getting chopped up, and the whole groovy yellow submarine was sinking.

If you too were a kid in the 1970’s then you likely remember how pervasiv classic horror and science fiction was. Old movies were always on local UHF TV, FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND was sold on every newsstand. CARRIE, THE OMEN and SUSPIRIA may have been the hot topics on the playground; when being R-rated meant something truly terrifying and forbidden. UHF classic horror was a constant, like the radio, comforting. DRACULA immunized us to real fear, such as we got from hearing about the R-rated films. As kids we saw the adults do all sorts of fun weird stuff--drugs, swinging-- and none of it was considered "evil." Scary, yes... but in an exhilarating, life-affirming way. Even those R rated films were ultimately outside our realm of true understanding, and therefore life-affirming. The first of the modern slashers, HALLOWEEN, was still that way, but it's open ending left a never-healing wound. After it infected horror stopped being sexy and started being ugly. The slasher wave crushed the sex wave underfoot, and sex’s mangled corpse washed up in the surf. Standing demurely atop that corpse, like Venus on the half-shell, was hockey-masked conservative, Jason Voorhees.

With Jason Voorhees and the slasher cycle we were forced to see that true terror lay not in the supernatural of our UHF TV creature features but in its opposite... in the bland tedium of a world without "magical thinking." Not having access to free love (due to AIDS panic) made people spiteful. What was Jason but an early and earthy version of Ken Starr? The 1970s free love folk thought they had permanently killed off the knee-jerk repression of the 1950s, but here it was, back from the grave and staggering around with a hacksaw. When John Lennon was shot the same year FRIDAY came out it was the last shot, free love froze in its tracks and slunk home, suddenly realizing they had left the kids in the microwave without a babysitter. The neo-counterculture was born. People had failed the test (everyone else, not us). "No" become the new yes. No to drugs, no to sex, no to drunk driving, yes only to survival in the most mundane sense.

To this day I have seen only a few slasher films, though I love almost all other horror sub-genres. I’m disturbed and a little depressed by the slasher cycle, to be honest, especially as I've been educated to see them all as misogynistic, foolishly thinking this would get me girls. Though as I write this I begin to see that my distrust of slasher films really a lot less to do with my hatred of misogyny and frat boys and more to do with the creepiness of the moment in time when they were all the rage in theaters and I was a depressed virgin. If I'd have gone with a date, or a pack of friends, maybe I could have figured it out, but just the way they talked about the murders of these girls made me want to never be friends with anyone at my school.

America was only beginning to homogenize itself at the time; the whimsical eccentricities of “Main Street” were just beginning to lose out to the pre-fab sterility of “The Mall” and I (like all good Americans) embraced the ensuing ennui and depression. The economy soon grew dependent on our newfound addictions, we drove long distances to get stuff cheaper at giant outlets rather than bike to the mom and pop grocer. But if there were no sidewalks anymore, if parents have to be hanging around we may as well get them to buy us comic books and Atari and then lock ourselves in our rooms and slowly gain weight and suicidal ideations.

Nowadays it's all but unthinkable, but In the 1970s kids of any age ran loose all over the neighborhood. If you were old enough to walk you were not only allowed to go off on your own and explore as far as you could walk, you were often forced to do so, not allowed back in the house til dinnertime. In the 1980s that freedom was removed thanks to hysteria over pedophiles and sundry other neighborhood menaces played up by news headlines and TV's America's Most Wanted. For some of us, it was the answer to our prayers, even though our prayers led us to become couch potato hysterics.

Along with the slashers, AIDS and the shooting of Lennon came the national furor over sexual molestations at day care centers, outrage over drunk drivers and just say no to drugs. Parents stopped going out. We barred the doors and windows. For us kids old enough to remember how cool things were just a few years earlier, the sense of despair was sudden and unrelenting; it arrived with all the force of a second national puberty. It felt right to be doing this, curtailing our liberty... it felt safer.  Jason Voorhees sprang form our forehead fully formed, not as a golem-like avenger of the unjustly persecuted but as a manifestation of the egoic infantile rage we'd been suppressing in favor of groovy vibes and love and tolerance. Suddenly there he was, like Walter Pidgeon’s Monster of the Id in FORBIDDEN PLANET or the kids in THE BROOD. Uncanny...

Of course this rotten state of affairs didn't last. The story has a happy ending. The internet! Mac notebook computers! DVDs! It's a cool world. The slasher film now provides retro delights for fun, brilliant writers like Stacie Ponder at Final Girl. I became a rock star in 1987, sobered up in 1998 and now live happily ever after until 2012. Time heals all wounds! What goes around comes around, so can a second summer of love be lurking right around the corner? I believe it can. And if Richard Beymer was here, I'd ask him to sing "Who Knows?"

So what’s the future of horror? What new bloody thing can Jason do? I’d like to leave you with the idea of death coming full circle and horror movies going through the carwash of the abyss and coming out about the dawn of life instead of onset of death. Imagine FRIDAY THE 13TH PART XX: JASON THE MIDWIFE! Picture Jason delivering babies! Gore in reverse! A slew of baby-delivery horror films -- FX shots of placenta becoming a standard "money shot" for every horror film, along with c-sections, torn vaginal walls, umbilical cords covered in alien slime… Jason grabs his mighty garden shears and severs newborn popular kid from his cozy womb of nonexistence. Another kid born screaming into this world of garden tools and tooth decay.

Do I sound crazy? Crazy like an undead cannibal fox!

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