The Book of Horror (May Contain Spoilers)

[nopersonality]

Chapter 107: Mama Drama


Sugar Hill
(1974 / director: Paul Maslansky)

★★

As I was talking about the MGM limbo yesterday, I somehow forgot about this oft neglected AIP production - a blaxploitation zombie-horror hybrid - and was all set to insist it's some kind of tragedy this film will most likely be denied a DVD release for years to come. But now that I've seen it, I'm not so sure. What it is is a watered-down and often stupidly silly PG film which still attempts to deliver moments of hard-hitting racial tension that gave genre staples such as Coffy and Super Fly their punch. Including robotic chick fights, white men in various positions of power pushing black men around, and lots of "nigger"s, "honky"s, and "boy"s tossed around. In some circles, Sugar Hill is a cult film but I can only imagine the film could be loved by the same crowd who might embrace the equally absurd J.D.'s Revenge. And for the same reasons- smooth talking hipster characters who seem like they have it all and come out winners by the end while their enemies perish. Although both of these films have their dark clouds on the horizon. In Revenge, it was the element of the story where the boyfriend savagely beats up his girlfriend and she has little reservations afterward about taking him back. Here it's that Sugar (the character's actual nickname- the only name anyone calls her) never seems to get as emotional as you'd expect, following the murder of her boyfriend by a kind of street gang (which is all-white except for one lone black thug named "Fabulous," who actually does nothing about his white cohorts slinging insults at him). The scene of him being murdered is schlocky enough and obvious as it is. The next scene we see her in, she's smiling as though she hasn't a care in the world. She doesn't truly earn her revenge here.

And that's where AIP comes in. No strangers to the world of PG-horror (and 1972's Frogs is quite a bit more fun), they supply the film with its' very Dr. Phibes mission to kill a group of wrongdoers one-by-one in somewhat inventive ways (quicksand, carnivorous pigs, voodoo dolls, massage table, and... dig this: a severed chicken's foot with a life of its' own). Sugar enlists a man who is perhaps a ghost, zombie, or just a really clever magician with magical capabilities who likes to dress up like he lives in the circus (a sorcerer-pimp?) to help her do-in the ring leader of the 99% white gang who killed her boyfriend because he wouldn't sell out his night club. Which of course brings me to another one of the at first overriding weaknesses that drag the movie down- this is simply far too much choreography for a non-musical. At times it's not a horror film as much it is a dance-show. Even the zombie horde rise from their graves like it's some kind of disco (who look so dumb- they have goggled-bug eyes as though they're part reincarnations of the physicist from 1958's The Fly). Any chance this could have inspired Michael Jackson's Thriller? Zara Cully (who plays George's mother) from The Jeffersons appears as Mama Maitresse in a scene that looks as though it may have influenced both Child's Play (she chants a spell which has at least one of Chucky's voodoo words) and Pumpkinhead. Though the latter has a much creepier looking witch and atmospheric approach to her house, Hill does get significantly better around the 40-minute mark- actually making it somewhat superior to Pumpkinhead. The revenge scenes are at least more creative, plus the costumes are quite good and the camerawork is remarkably skillful. And then, there's the music. In fact, it's almost as good as Fulci's Zombie at times.

As later misguided efforts such as Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror and the Tales from the Crypt feature, Demon Knight, proved too well- just because you have heroes of color in your film doesn't mean they have soul (Baron Samedi the circus man even laughs in rejection when Sugar offers hers' in exchange for his services). Though this film can claim few wins, and lacks more nuanced performances than its' black horror brother, J.D.'s Revenge, it at least knows how to rumble in the jungle.

[nopersonality]

Chapter 121: Be All You Can Be
...or Not


Child's Play 3
(1991 / director: Jack Bender)

★½

By the time we get to Part 3 of any budding slasher franchise, we must inherently ask ourselves: "whY the fuck?" What could possibly have made the original so good, and what from that original has any hope of making it into a third film, that we should see it inbred again and again? Sadly, the answer to these questions - from a studio standpoint - typically is: the killer looks cool. To quote from Kindergarten Cop (because that reference couldn't be more relevant in a Child's Play sequel discussion); "now, how can you argue with that?" Yes, Chucky looks cool in the first three films. But, a lot of hardcore horror fans (myself only about 60%-included) just think Chucky's a joke. He's not scary, you can step right on him (which might not solve all your problems but it will definitely give him pause for thought before he comes knocking on your door again). The reason for that is: everywhere he goes, whatever he does- he always has to announce himself. "Here I Am! Chucky... Your killer... Now, the party can begin." This makes Chucky to the horror genre what these jokes were to comedy (I promise you it's merely a coincidence that the joke at 0:19 included the word "murder"):

And with that, the whole set-up of these movies might as well involve scenes where the potential victims pop up out of nowhere (since we already know where Chucky is at all times- why not have the victims be the surprise?) or pal around with the killer before the lame deaths you know are coming? They're both in on it and have about the same sense of "do I know you?" subtlety as the cast of series like You Can't Do That on Television (or Laugh-In) and there are no intended shocks that come off as shocking. All the mystery is gone. But then, I have to remind you of why Child's Play 2 was such a mistake in the first place: other than the fact that it's writer Don Mancini's worst idea of the francise, the first movie blew out its' own tires when they showed us that the doll was alive, revealed him to be a pointlessly "foul-mouthed little fucker" (as Jennifer Tilly so aptly put it in the franchise's best film- Bride of Chucky), and wasted the rest of the movie on the "will he or won't he" bullshit of Chucky trying to get into a human body. OH, NO! ANYTHING BUT THAT! In short: we don't care about that. Some of us wanted to hear Chucky swear while the rest of us wanted to find something remotely scary or exciting in any of the original trilogy to make us want to sit through the next movie. Alas...

Which brings us back to Don Mancini - a wonderfully ambitious writer trapped in this unrewarding and creatively stifling franchise until Bride allowed him to finally come out of the closet (in every way) and play - and this film. Probably the saddest reminder of how hard the first three productions screwed his ideas and how the stories were supposed to be about Andy- not Chucky. Thanks to Chucky's popularity, Andy walks around Child's Play 2 as though he were heavily medicated and, in Child's Play 3, bisects into 2 entirely annoying little do-gooder dorks who spend more time whining about how Chucky must be stopped instead of wondering: "what harm would it do" to let him go hogwild here in the first place. See, this sequel takes us to a hard-assed military academy where "bed wet"ing psychos and internal ticking time-bombs are created through hazing and sexual bullying techniques. A whole gang of faceless and nameless - apart from their leader - strapping young men seem supernaturally obligated to throw Andy in the mud, humiliate him in front of the entire lunch room, berate him with insults, reduce his roommate to being a slave, and push around a little 8-9 year old kid. Nice premise for a fetish porn, but when applied to reality: why would Andy give a fuck about Chucky wreaking havoc in a place like this? By our calculations, there are only 4 people in the place who don't want to beat him up.

Oh, yeah, I forgot the scenes where Andy and his motiveless nemesis Shelton play a midnight game of tag and go to each other's rooms to force themselves onto one another. Incidental or symbolic? Either way, this film could have been a cheap yet satisfying ploy to make Andy or his even quieter and more prone to standing-out roommate Whitehurst into a male Carrie. Entirely plausible, since the original film was called "Blood Brothers" and was about the doll in fact killing people Andy hated. Considering the writer's interest in character psychology and attemps to focus on how Andy actually acts out due to his traumas, the banality of the series of inconsequential events that comprise these first two sequels is insulting. And none of it is compensated for by making Chucky so annoying, you want to stomp on him yourself. He's not a bad dude, he's a self-important motormouth with crudely uninventive, and unclever, one-liners and no menace apart from his ugly, retarded freckleface, fire red hair (cue: Scrubs clip), and freak eyes which are always both wide open and in full "look at me! I'm a killer- you can tell because of my eyes" mode. However... on the technical side, this sequel is at least worth sitting through because of the camerawork- which is boldly rigid and oddly unsettling during most of the scenes where Chucky actually shuts up. And, for whatever reason, the music score tries to out-sadist the screenplay. It succeeds.

[nopersonality]

Chapter 147: That Boy is a Monster


Poison
(1991 / director: Todd Haynes)

★★

So, if you're straight, you just might wonder from time to time what it feels like to be gay. As it so happens, there are many films that attempt to answer this question. Some of them are hopelessly dull and obvious in their view of a gay existence (In & Out). And others are pretty frickin' strange (Female Trouble). The difference between these two is subtle- one is a joke that says "let's laugh about it but also open up discussion on what it feels like," while the other is a joke that says "shut up and laugh, then shut up and fuck." Both are valid in their own ways but neither one have me pinned down just yet- which is why being gay is just like being straight: it's an experience that can only be explained per the individual. Though we (like you) have several formative threads in common, so we can relate to another no matter how weird and alone we feel in going through what we do. So, what about the movies that aren't trying to think about being gay as a joke? But rather as something alien, foreign, or freakish? This brings us to Poison, the feature directorial debut of "new queer cinema" icon and indie film god Todd Haynes. A film that sees being gay as such an interesting thing, it has to split itself in 3 to try and explain it. And so, we get the anthology horror treatment. One story makes the allegory that homosexuality is literally a prison, another compares its' isolation to physically being a leper (or is this an AIDS metaphor and I'm just completely numb to it?), and the third makes the argument that being gay is supernaturally tragic.

Of course, it's a little more complex than that. But this is Todd Haynes we're talking about here. The short of it is that this is yet another film that barely makes me think and leaves me feeling empty nearly the whole way through. To say nothing of how many times characters begin to actually say what they mean but stop themselves before they actually say anything. Why? So, Haynes can sit back and the other people who attended film school will say, "yeah: that's showing and not telling." This is what Haynes does best, but he's definitely screwing over certain kinds of audience members to get it (and not just uptight homophobes, which are exclusively the kind of people this movie should be screwing over). I'm not exactly the world's biggest fan of show- don't tell. Not because I'm stubborn. But because I want honesty from a film. And what's even more important to me is that a film does both show and tell. Ghost World did this perfectly and that's why it remains one of the greatest films I've ever seen. You got a sense of the meaning of everything the film was trying to convey through a combination of both dialogue and visual storytelling. This kind of film (and Haynes' even more overpraised Safe) appears content with getting praise from hip people who don't seem to want to feel their movies come to life. And since this isn't by any means exclusively a horror film, I think I should be able to find a pulse somewhere.

Thankfully, not all the tell in this movie reeks of "ain't I hip?" posturing. The prison segment is probably the best in the film. Though it's the most graphic (and I mention this merely because the classic horror films Poison's visual style take most of its' cue from believed in letting the imagination of the audience conjure the more gross and disturbing images by itself), it also features the greatest (if not the only) moment of truth in the movie. One that is painful, sad, and yet inevitably beautiful as well. It is the best moving image that illustrates the dark and brutal nature of the film's chosen tone given to the lovemaking it can't show lovingly since homosexuality is a curse in the film. It's also an ultimate microcosm of what this film is since it's followed directly by one of the most disgusting moments of the film: an inmate of the boys reformatory we see in flashbacks is humiliated via being forced to stand still with his mouth open while the bigger, tougher boys spit on his face over and over again. Compared to that, prison rape between friends is practically romantic. Again telling is the movie's decision to abruptly end this potential romance by having one of the friends shot and killed by a prison guard. Why else did we have to sit through this whole song and dance between the two guys? Because, pre-fucking, it was cold and boring: Haynes-world in a nutshell.

The rest of the film is even more frustratingly pointless. After reconsidering the black and white segment which acts as a kind of melting pot mixing both 1958 and 1986 versions of The Fly together, it seems an even more obvious AIDS metaphor. Another one... REALLY? How many does that make now- a thousand? Sure, this may be pre-And the Band Played On, but c'mon: how does this become cutting edge? Compared to the myriad 80's horror films to deal with disease (including Larry Clark's Island of the Alive and Cronenberg's version of The Fly), this isn't the slightest bit original. Also, there's an utterly uncharming moment where we're treated to watching a man shit while a circle of other men surround him. And to think Araki was criticized for showing a guy on the toilet or a guy licking cum off his hand (okay- even I admit that one was going too far, seeing as how it was his own cum). By comparison, the TV news segment about the boy who kills his father for unknown reasons is far more interesting. The reporter collects interviews from the "grieving" mother and various people who knew the boy, most of whom claim that he was antagonistic, devious, and plain evil. And since being gay causes so much varied misery in this film, surely you'd think adequate time would be spent showing us where it all began. But, again, since this is Todd Haynes, this kind of thing isn't ripe enough with sexual imagery (though we do get a kinda sick moment of a little boy adjusting the crotch of his shorts on camera).

The film started off well enough, setting a tone with visually self-indulgently shot (though sometimes this is a successful way of getting a reference in, so I'm not knocking it) references to Polanski's Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. Later, the leper segment recalls Carnival of Souls and various 50's science-gone-amok flicks (most of which I haven't seen). The news segment features an obvious reference to the opening murder in John Carpenter's Halloween. But ultimately, horror was a manipulation crank for the director to play clever with hollow artsiness. I know films are more than entertainment and I respect filmmakers for wanting to make something complex. But, fuck me if I actually want to enjoy watching a movie. I can even enjoy a movie with a high-browed attitude. It's just very hard to do this when when the movie is hiding in the closet the whole time. I feel like I'm only getting a small piece of the picture. Or half of the smallest corner slice in a box of pizza. John Cleese said it best: "where's the pleasure in that?" (Oh, yeah...: and for whatever reason, John Leguizamo has a cameo here. Why? Couldn't tell ya.)