Deadpan Comic Horror International: 13 Wild Oddities worth Streaming

"Take any fire, any earthquake, any major disaster, then wonder." - Plan Nine from Outer Space

Summer's in its last dying gasp and thank God. I was working on a list here of something else... something more serious and sociologically important, like lesbianism, or 'The Incredible Dissolving Father' which is, as you know, my unfinished thesis capstonezzzzz for the course not taken. But instead... doesn't anyone remember laughter? And horror? Death's too short for lofty theses and lifestyles from which I am twicefold excluded and therefore fascinated by.

The horror-comedy hybrid on the other hand, is all-inclusive. Fear leavened with laughs is like whiskey and ginger ale, like campfires and a leavening quip after a scary urban legend. After all, by day we joke about the monsters that scare us at night. At least I do. Whatever the reason, it's global - and as old as time - and we deserve better than Haunted House 2 and Scary Movie III and V (I won't allow myself to see 'em - but you can on Netflix).

Luckily, an array of options exists from all around the world, each with a mixture all its own of both elements. Some might be unintentionally funny, some are just 'witty' or 'stoner' horror/sci fi movies, not comedies John Dies at the End, Iron Sky, or Cabin in the Woods aren't included here because you just saw them or should. See them! Then wonder.

Hong Kong
OUT OF THE DARK

"Wui wan yeh" (1995) Dir. Stephen Chow
***1/2

Lucky for America, we have most of the Stephen Chow oeuvre on Netflix Streaming (still need the great and hilarious Forbidden City Cop). Here's one I'd never seen before. A huge star in HK and Mainland China, here he's mostly unknown, partly because he's not Jackie Chan or Jet Li and his satire skewers a pop culture partially different than ours but if you've seen any Asian horror movies in the last ten years -- Ringu, Ju-On, Pulse, Dark Water, Suicide Club, Tale of Two Sisters, Audition, A Chinese Ghost Story, etc. --and western films beloved of China, like The Professional and Evil Dead, you should get at least 80% of the jokes (though amazingly, this 1995 film prefigures the entire J-Horror crossover boom here in the states). Chow stars as a crazy ghost hunter called to a towering HK apartment complex to exorcise the vengeful spirit of a couple's recently deceased mother. The daughter (the great Karen Mok) is cute and restless and finds Chow's ghost chaser--with his long black coat, sunglasses and mysterious Chow Yun Fatty ways--intriguing. Soon she's showing up where he lives (an upscale lunatic asylum) dressed like Natalie Portman in The Professional.  He lets her carry his houseplant, with its flower that acts as a diving rod.

On the other hand, he's crazy. Like legit.

There's too much going on to name, but I particularly loved the juxtaposition of Chow's memories of his initial encounters with the supernatural while at a carnival as a child with what he actually saw (where he was clearly remembering all the papier mache monsters as real -left); and a weird scene where he tries to train the security guards to conquer their fears via games of lit dynamite hot potato. It's raucous but so fast you're afraid to laugh lest you miss something. It's also relentlessly scary and intense, with an extended lunatic climax that wipes away old dreads with one hand even as it's wiping new ones in with the other. (In Cantonese w/ English subtitles) 

New Zealand 
HOUSEBOUND

(2014) Dir Gerard Johnstone
***

Morgana O'Reilly does a wild, sneering bravura turn as Kylie Bucknell, an under-house-arrest punk partier cross between DEAD FILES' physical medium Amy Allan and Nicky Marotta from TIMES SQUARE (1980)- must I learn all I can about her? I must, for her wild chutzpah reflects what's missing in American womanhood? Kyle is a bit of a self-absorbed bitch, but hey, who wouldn't be a bitch if stuck, ankle bracelet monitor-first, in a haunted house presided over by a sweet but nonstop babbling mum (Rima Te Wiata), a mostly-absentee stepdad, and a house that--though bordered within and without by maniacs, ghostly visitors, and a squirrel-skinning neighbor--still suffocates with twee folksiness?  I can't reveal more about the plot, especially once it veers towards a rainy rooftop climax, but I will suggest you just relax and let go as your genre expectations are fucked with but in a way that's just deadpan enough to win you over to its weird sense of humor, and scary enough to keep you watching past the occasional ODs of kiwi quirkiness. Just keep your big red eyes on the cool, fearless Kylie who, among other things, isn't afraid to sneak into the suspected killer's house while he's asleep in order to steal the bridgework right out of his mouth. Sweet as! Her mom might be a bit much, but Kylie'll fuck you right up. (See also: The Babadook)

Spain

BITCHES' SABBATH
(aka Witching and Bitching)

"Las brujas de Zugarramurdi" (2014) - Dir. Alex de la Iglesia
***1/2

Largely undiscovered in the US (his stuff is seldom dubbed, which keeps the audience that would most appreciate him at bay, i.e. drunk flyover staters) Alex de la Iglesia is a maniac worth reading subtitles for even if you need to hold a hand over one eye to do it. This is one of his best. a ballsy 'comedy of the sexes' that bursts with mucho original ideas, carnal energy, wit, acumen, and Jungian archetypal initiation ritual mysticism. It's like a gender-reversed Magic Flute if Mozart smoked meth and was married to a hot-tempered harridan from Seville. Hugo Silva stars as a struggling divorced dad, driven past the point of his insanity by his hyper-intense and bitter ex-wife (Macarena Gómez). Beginning with a gone-awry pawn shop robbery and culminating at a bizarre witches' sabbath, the action never lets up and the astonished laughs never stop rolling in. Evoking that other great contemporary midnight movie Spaniard, Almodovar, the coven they stumble on includes a drag queen and features a great three-generational female enclave: there's the older, slightly senile--but always ready to rend a man's flesh with her sharpened steel dentures--Maritxtu (Terele Pávez); the grand dame of the coven, Graciana (Almodovar regular Carmen Maura); and the hot younger daughter Eva (the electric Carolina Bang - who rocks wild Kate McKinnon-style crazy eyes). They leap through the air, crawl on the ceiling, eat a steady diet of psychoactive toad secretions and cooked male children, and are all-in-all so evil they make the witches in Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem seem like the ones in Bewitched... 

And yet... they're jubilant and fun- there's no time to be traumatized as it all enfolds like one mad chase from a an afternoon robbery to a midnight monstrous Willendorf ceremony (that must be seen but still not believed) to a chase all the way through the dawn's merciless light.

Too bad about the tacky American title, though (Witching and Bitching? Yeesh)... and the poster art that makes it seem like a Disney movie. It ain't... no Disney movie, man! It defrosts Walt's head and eats its brains as a mousse. Going boldly through worlds, beyond where most battle-of-the-sexes movies dare go, its cogency in the face of insane chthonic maenad rendering makes it not just hilarious, but truly liberating, and muy sexy. Soy mu encantado! (more)  (In Spanish with English subtitles)

Ireland
 GRABBERS 

 (2012) Dir Jon Wright
***

It's an Irish horror-monster-comedy hybrid that's part of the lineage of solid indie horror films set in the more remote and storm-swept parts of the Emerald Isles, loosely following the 'fish-out-of-water cop relocates to quirky remote town, solves string of murders' structure so common to every BBC miniseries. Here the outsider is a by-the-book but-fetching Holly Hunter-ish cop (Ruth Bradley) who winds up saddled with a curly-haired drunkard for a partner, one long turned half-assedly morose from the sameness of his misty life (join the club!). The murders turn out to be done by giant tentacled monsters who besiege the island and love but can't process alcohol (join the club!), and the whole town gathers to arm themselves at the pub, i.e. get hammered, for their own safety! In other words, every sober alcoholic's secret fantasy (I have to drink to save my life? I am delivered!)

I've never been one for curly haired Irishmen and this film's got more than one, but Bradley's charming enough to carry the film over the rough spots, and when her character gets drunk for the first time, she becomes like a little two-fisted twinkly-eyed flush-cheeked Gallic faerie.. They have a delirious extended stake-out in the rain scene, craftily lit to make every rain drop in the deluge glisten with pregnant menace and add a depth note of genuine unease to the otherwise near-Rene Clair-style fantasy-romance. Director Wright ably captures the lovely sunsets and the stark treeless beauty of the coastline, though there's a few too many green and azure filters (as in most Irish films of the moment trying to hide their HDV origins) but the whole third act goes down over one long night, filters gone, so 'tis no burden. And like all the best horror films, it ends as dawn breaks... my favorite time of the day, presuming I've been up all night for it (rather than getting up early)... not that I ever do, get up early... that is.

I've said too much.

South Korea

THE HOST

"Gwoemul" (2006) Dir. Bong Joon-Ho
***1/2

A solid storyteller, able to inject more satiric deadpan comedy into more horrific circumstances than Shakespeare, Howard Hawks and Chaplin combined, rolled up, dipped in a sewer, "smokin'"Bong Joon-Ho is no stranger to big issue pathos fusing with doe-eyed bloody cool. HOST encompasses a broad satire against America's containment policies, blind-eye pollution, and hypocritical politics, all while providing a nail-biting endurance test as one bravely dysfunctional family tries to escape a military cover-up quarantine to rescue their young daughter/granddaughter before she dies of consumption, or is consumed by the weird mutant plesiosaurus-frog monster that's spat her out amidst its rotting corpse larder deep inside the Seoul sewer system. It can be a rough viewing experience, undergoing the constant transition between this shivering girl's dwindling optimism and the obstacles faced by her extended family as they follow her weak phone signal. What a family! There's the bronze medalist archery sister; the kindly bumpkin grandfather who presumes bribes and a hangdog look will get him through any scrape; the brother who's 'been to college' so his constant criticism of everyone else's decisions leaves him paralyzed with inaction; and the girl's dimwitted single dad (Bong's blonde-mopped regular leading man Kang-ho Song) who gamely punches his way through his own lobotomy.

Bong loves setting up our expectations for a 'giant monster' film and then skewing them, but he has a vision for mankind so dark and disturbing it almost rings true as stealth optimism. Time and again his heroes destroy themselves on the altar of a better future for their children, which of course can't ever happen. In the process, he gets endless jabs at SK's split personality: burdened by both America and itself, yet somehow finding time to love each other even as they devour the middle class between them. (In Korean with English subtitles; see also: Snowpiercer)

Chinatown (SF, California)

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA

(1986) Dir. John Carpenter
****

Released towards the end of sci fi's golden era, it took the small screen for Carpenter's satirical badass answer to Indiana Jones to find an audience of initially bewildered, half-asleep kids watching HBO on Saturday afternoons. Slowly, one at a time, we snapped out of their stupors in awe. Over the decades, through word of mouth mainly, the film became the beloved cult item it is today. I watch it at least once a year. Kurt Russell stars as Jack Burton, a blustery trucker (a rugged type of hero that was, believe it or not, a thing in the 70s, i.e, Convoy, White Line Fever, Every Which Way But Loose, High-Ballin', etc.) who winds up embroiled in mystery, monsters, and magic (!) in, around, behind, and most importantly under the streets of San Francisco's Chinatown. Carpenter packs the film with an array of welcome familiar Asian-American faces like John Lone as the tittering evil Lo Pan and the Victor Wong as a white magic wizard herb expert. There's also a gorgeous green-eyed young creature, then a total unknown, named Kim Cattrall as intrepid reporter Gracie Law. Wang (Dennis Dun) who's the one who actually does the fighting and has the romance, and so forth. Russell is hilarious, his chemistry with Cattral riveting (back during those sleepy HBO afternoons, we kids all first fell in love with her). Unmissable and beyond classic, Big Trouble doesn't even reveal its full glory until around the 12th viewing. I can't wait to see it again, when the tide is high. 

Norway
DEAD SNOW: RED VS. DEAD
"Dod Sno" (2014) Dir. Tommy Wirkola
***

The Bride of Frankenstein of satirical Nazi zombie pictures, it starts during the climax of the first film: Martin (Vegar Hoel) wakes up in Norway's socialized healthcare system with the the dreaded Colonel Herzog's (Ørjan Gamst) arm sewed onto him (the EMPs found it in the car with him) and now Martin can raise the dead. Naturally once he's released he resurrects a bunch of Russian POWs (that were executed by the Nazis and buried in a mass grave up in the Norwegian mountains - so I guess the frost preserved them fairly well), to go up against Herzog's still slaughterin' crew (who find time to rampage through a WW2 museum and get their hands on an old still-functional Panzer tank!). Martin also recruits three young American geeks-- 'the Zombie Squad' --to fly up to help him: Martin Starr (Party Down, Burning Love), Ingrid Haas, and the lovely Jocelyn DeBoer (above center) as the type who can have her pick of any man at the San Diego comic-con but probably doesn't even realize it, which adds to her smokey eyes and long red hair to make her the coolest thing south of the Arctic circle. Best of all, aside from an over-the-top small town sheriff (who thinks Martin is the one killing everyone), the cast plays it dead straight, as nature, science and Nordic tradition demands. Miss it at your own risk. It's in English (not dubbed): even the non-American actors speak it beautifully, but if you watch this back-to-back with the Norwegian language first film the result can be jarring, so don't.

Southern France

ZOMBIE LAKE 

"Le lac des morts vivants" (1981) Dir. Jean Rollin
**

This film gets a bad rap within the Nazi zombie community, but it's a great melancholy chablis blanc after the steak tartare and whiskey meal of Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead (above) if you're watching these in the presented order here. In fact, it gives a big French shoulder shrug to zombie horror movie conventions on the whole, as if they were nothing more than an annoying American tourist. Instead, as with most Jean Rollin films, Le lac prefers to loll and gambol in the natural stillness of a rural France in the company of beautiful young women and a few older character actors. Thanks to a nice HD restoration, the full pastorale lyricism of Max Monteillet's photography comes out and we can see inside the deep stark shadows of the narrow ancient architecture of village streets. There's very little dialogue, but lots of nature sounds (running water, a few bugs, a scream or two), and Daniel White's macabrely contrapuntal piano, lounge themes. There's nothing to stop us, in short, from turning off and tuning in to the ambience of the pastoral countryside, a locale where Nazi occupation is still fresh in collective memory. The cast and crew have a lot of Franco regulars but Jean Rollin (posing as J.A. Lasar) is the director and you'll know right away by his usual mix of real local French ruins, terrible fake blood, pretty young girls finding time to bathe and disrobe even when in immediate peril, ennui-crippled actors, and a vibe so French everyone seems to be lolling in the sun even when dragging each other off to be killed.

Special mention: Dredged up from the lake along with the rest of his dead Wermacht unit is a sensitive zombie private who was on his way to visit the offspring of his verboten romance with a local girl just before his unit was killed by French resistance fighters and thrown in the le lac. When he finds his daughter, he protects her from the rest of his outfit --and this all done without any speaking or mime or goofy cues, which makes it eerily touching rather than merely maudlin. Conveniently, nearly early every woman in the village is young, gorgeous, and caught completely off guard when a zombie comes shambling into her backyard, though every one in town knows perfectly well the zombies are around --that's very French! Very French, too, in that the harder it tries to be serious and horrific the more amusing and gently life-affirming it all becomes.  (In French with English subtitles.) 

Barcelona

[REC] 3: GENESIS 

"[Rec]³: Génesis" 2012 Dir. Paco Plaza
***

I don't really like, or haven't seen enough of, the first two [Rec] films but I knew a wedding video would be an ideal zombie subject, since it would basically be all your friends and family in one contained place, making their subsequent transformation from a horde of well-wishing loved ones to grabby monsters like a wedding cake in reverse. And, as the Spanish are a people in whom romantic love runs so strong it trumps self-preservation, I knew there'd be comical twists when the loved ones turned rabid. I was right! But there's other stuff I didn't expect, too. With her popping Clara Bow eyes, tattered wedding gown and chainsaw, Leticia Dolera makes a terrific romantic heroine and Diego Martin (the sheriff in the recommended Dusk to Dawn series on El Rey) struggles gamely inside his medieval helmet and armor as the new husband. Having it all take place within one big gate-enclosed wedding-hosting estate in is genius. The freedom from the constraints of found footage (after the first 20 minutes or so) is managed without losing its diegetic advantages (they just kind of slowly expand from it, not unlike Olivier with the proscenium arch in Henry V). And thanks to leaps forward in digital technology, and the flowery architecture of the manor itself enables a vast depth of HD field, with all sorts of nifty stunts, like figures falling off balconies and fighting off in the distance far behind the foregrounded actors (but still in focus), and the menacing figures emerging from the dark are all sans music cues, making for great jolts and laughs without cheap shocks and mickey-mouse scoring. The intentionally grand all white frills wedding set-up--the disco party lights, white tablecloths, tuxedoes, sexy dresses, grand fixtures and the DJ booth-- offer uncanny frisson to anyone who's spent a significant amount of their weekends going to other people's weddings, secretly wishing some disaster would strike so you could leave early. Favorite comic moments: the girl who admits she almost didn't come, the rifle-wielding SpongeJohn (not SpongeBob, for "trademark reasons"), and the pair of young revelers who miss the whole first half of the outbreak because they're off in the billiard room hooking up... muy Barthelona! (In Spanish with English subtitles).

Hollywood, USA

INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS

(1973) Dir. Denis Sanders
**1/2

Displaying kind of the reverse problem of Zombie Lake, Bee Girls' (AKA Graveyard Tramps) only real issue is its dreadful Gary Graver cinematography. He cannot block shots correctly, light anything beyond a bad student movie, or do much more than keep things in focus 80% of the time. He was a busy man, though, working on six other exploitation films in 1973 alone, including Bummer, and The Clones. It could be there's a better negative or restoration somewhere that would prove I'm wrong about old Graver, but I doubt it. Who cares? I do. Fuckin' Love Anitra Ford as a sexy etymologist, the Cronenberg-esque scientific research setting (where scientists are all dying from sexual exhaustion), the lucky break caught temporarily by the gay scientist and the investigating federal agent's relatively enlightened reaction to it, the great buzzing soundtrack and the jet black eyes.

Saskatchewan, Canada

WOLFCOP

(2014) Dir Lowell Dean
***

Shot in the woolly wilderness of Saskatchewan, this weird fusion of woodsy lupine elements includes lumberjackin', copious whiskey drinking, cop car ride-pimping/weaponizing, and a prison visit from a hot bitch bartender wearing a sexy red riding hood cape and bearing a basket of candles, erotic lotions, and fine hooch. Old lady Satanists, a good lady cop, and duplicitous heshers round out the pack. Is Wolfcop kind of rough around the edges? Does the lead have unsightly curly hair even in 'human' form? Sure. But how many films are set and shot wayyy up in the provinces, and of those, how many really capture the woodsy small town sense of boozy depressed/isolation only those of us who've lived through unreasonably harsh and brutal winters in nowhere towns by staying totally drunk 24/7 can know (1). I like it cuz it's aboot more than just dumb Troma snark, crap CGI, or Japanese arterial spray. It's mean, wry and got its nose low to the ground. It may get so drunk it can't remember its own name, but it never forgets to rock. (See also: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil)

Iran (Bakersfield, CA)

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT

2014 Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour
***1/2

This unique crowd-pleaser isn't funny haha, but funny in that it's like something Tom Waits might make if he were an Iranian vampire girl drinking the oil derrick border town dry in Touch of Evil. A Persian language film rich with a deadpan mastery of Jarmusch-brand motion-in-stillness (though it's way livelier than Jarmusch's misleadingly titled Only Lovers Left Alive), it connects indirectly with two druggy black and white NYC art movies from the 90s, Almeredya's Nadja and Ferrara's The Addiction. (See: Druggie Vampire Women of B&W City) and despite the cultural differences (different coast, decade, language) the similarities to those two films are striking, especially in the importance of alternative music on the soundtrack. Nadja made fine atmospheric use of 90s trip-hop like Portishead; Addiction found urgent West Village grit via Cypress Hill and Skooly D.; Girl makes great use of 80s pop group White Lines' song "Death," which if you didn't know of it before, will make you quietly shuffle it onto your 80s Spotify list quick-as-ya-like.

As "The Girl," Sheila Vand--her black hijab like Dracula's cape--consumes both a coke-dealing thug and a junky dad who lets his son support his habit, and we cheer their gruesome demise by this specter of Muslim feminist vengeance,  I love that she waits until they've shot up heroin or done some lines of coke before making her move, all the better to get high off their blood (though this is never spelled out, it recalls the druggy blood-harvesting of Dark Angel AKA I Come in Peace). Gauging their response to her silent staring and seemingly everywhere at once, Vand's playfulness as she stalks and mirrors carries itself a long way, especially into her touching romance with the semi-cool lead boy.  (In Persian with English subtitles)

----
NOTES
1. I was an English Lit major up in Syracuse NY from 1985-1989 
2. Though based on all her UCB videos, every little (male) nerd comic in the world feels the same way and casts her as his wide-eyed girlfriend, which makes me hate said comics for wasting our time with their wishful Napoleonic ego tripping. Unlike them, Wirkola clearly knows better: boyfriends never enter into Red Vs. Dead, which is just one of its great strengths. Jocelyn! Call me! I'm ever-so smart! 

Meta Murderous Surreal Post-Modernism in Under Twelve Minutes: TOO MANY COOKS (Infomercial)

No amount of David Lynch or Eric Andre can compare with or prepare you for TOO MANY COOKS, the recent 4 AM informercial on Cartoon Network once and now existing only on the VHS-ish Youtube pages of intrepid dupers. No matter where you think this bizarrity can go, it goes far farther than a fur-forn farddio brand of beyond the black rainbow farrity, beyond even the swords of photo bomb "Bob of Twin Peaks" giallo and Fun with Real Audio What on Was the Britney old Thinking SNL. See it and understand the cryptic proclamations of the pie Von Trier. See at last how the the need to break free from our programming is so intrinsic to the construct of our identity as to be inseparable from the programming itself, i.e. the minute you break free of your character, your identity dissolves back into project turnaround. It's enough to make better actors go mad but that's televaginal enlightenment: the acceptance of one's eternal actor darkness. Heaven for an actor is just the hell of a sitcom cycle of endless retooling fully surrendered to, letting your ego construct dissolve as the infernal flames of Nielsen-baiting groupthink shark-jumping lick your soul clean for sweeps week, award season, reruns, stalker fans, Buddhist hell, and back again backforth fardidio.

For maximized post-modernist refraction, I'd recommend seeing it on your laptop on the couch, with the TV on pause or slow-motion behind it (on any random channel --as long as it's 'desperately' random). Because when a show is this meta, it just needs one tiny push to make it off the screen and across your living room, like a loping North Korean water ghost, through your ocular cavity and into your brain, your life, your soul, our collective oversoul, and then beyond what's beyond our collective oversoul, and back around to the screen/s in perpetual shrinking /expanding Ourobros double dips forever and ever in echo rerun, on perpetually cheapening channels, so help me, God, our legal team Hunginunga, Hunginunga, Hunginungah and McCormack, and of course the holy trinity: Aaron Spelling, Norman Lear, and Steven Bochco. Sing Amen. We're home. Less.

Dawn of the Dinkins: RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE (2013), BLANK CITY (2010)

I came late to the party in Manhattan, but in 1992, moving in gradually via couch osmosis, it was still, at least, a party. The white boy funk thing was big -- Spin Doctors, Blues Traveller --my band, the Mud, 2 Skinny Js.... we danced like maniacs at Wetlands, New Music Cafe, Tramp's, Nightingale's-- most now long closed or sold, rebranded. But back then there was no 'cabaret law' (it's still illegal to dance in NYC). Back then you could drink on the street (if you wrapped it in a brown paper bag - known as the "bag law") And you could smoke. It's all gone...  but at least in the early 90s the party was still raging. Disney hadn't commandeered the porn marquess of Times Square. You could still see hookers--gay and straight--loafing out on the dirty boulevard. 

You maybe read my 2011 piece, Manhattan Sinking Like a Rock, wherein I admonished the average New Yorker for letting all our lovely sleaze disappear. I predicted (or rather hoped for) a time when the city might be sleazy and crime-ridden once more, to allow cheap rents and flourishing arts.

Man, was I wrong. NYC will never slide again or rage again, There's too much $$ invested in its real estate for the 1% to let the rents drop. No one is taking the accursed city down into the artistic abyss anymore, not without a grant, (you know, to cover the insurance).

Godard homage indicated by pose and striped shirt

Brit filmmaker Ashley Cahill feels as I do about NYC. He too remembers the brown bags and dancing wherever the fuck days of old- and he's done something about it. And that something is serial murder. Looking like some weird cross between Seth Meyers and Beck, Cahill puts himself in the center a fauxcumentary where he kills random citizenry in order to set the fuse on what he hopes will be a rent-lowering, Summer of Sam-style fear-upping art-blooming crime wave. 

God (or rather godlessness) bless his tousled little head. He's doing this for you, for me, for US, for posterity.

The film's had more than a few titles before settling on RANDOM ACTS. It was CHARM, for example, which is moronically vague, but on Netflix Streaming, with one of those ubiquitous torture porn-looking covers, it has finally landed before me as RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE. I don't know how it made it past my usual ignoring of such things (for I dread torture porn as it leaves me dispirited for years, even decades). But I am glad I did. 

If you share my mistrust of all the nanny state health that NYC is touting these days, this is your movie!

Celebrity friends should always be displayed proudly.

Godard and Truffaut T-shirts

scenebomber

It's one of those first-person meta-documentary violence deconstructions ala MAN BITES DOG, with Cahill as a slightly more homicidal version of, presumably, himself, since both he and his character are Godard-hip and so able to use the low budget and stolen shot approach as contextual meta-commentary beyond just the subject (the film is dedicated to Sam Fuller!). And though he never says so outright, he clearly shares my dislike of the second-guessing anxiety that sabotages so many homicidal comedies, i.e. the need to have Winona Ryder feel remorseful and turn on Slater in HEATHERS, or to only put her disappointing dates into comas they can one day recover from (in SEX AND DEATH 101 -see "Why Can't We All Just Morally Compromise?), or to have Dexter only kill other serial killers, or Edward the TWILIGHT vampire be a 'vegetarian.'

In other words, so many films or shows that want to be naughty are afraid to get all Alex and his Droogs-level challenging to our limits of audience identification. They want to be Scorsese but are afraid of telling Tommy DeVito to get his shine box. Not our boy Ashley. Once he does his first random stabbing in RANDOM, man, you know this Tommy be shine box splintered. Cahill is no kibbitzer!

After a lengthy opening monologue, Malcolm stops addressing the camera on the greatness of pre-Giuliani NYC (when it beat out Detroit as "the murder capital of the world"), and we're off the known grid of the normal disaffected poseur: Someone answers an anonymous door he's been knocking on, and we're expecting some kind of standard pre-arranged greeting scene (wherein a camera is already inside waiting for him as per so many reality shows). Instead, he grabs the unlucky inhabitant, throws her onto her couch and stabs her repeatedly and rapidly, without any drama or Bernard Hermann scissor music to let us prep for the discomfort and shock. He's suddenly moved faster than the cameraman and become a real threat. We're just not expecting it and its genuinely shocking - way beyond the usual tacky violence of Hollywood. Even though we know it's not 'real' per se, it's hard not to shiver, almost painfully. So many fauxquementaries have tried to get to this same spot, only to pull back like little pussies. Cahill dives in, and ignores our ashen complexions.


Your reaction will probably be centered around your own neighborhood: if you live in the suburbs, even our contemporary Disney-sanitized NYC might seem scary just for being unknown, but to me the suburbs are far scarier. When I'm visiting friends there, I'm awake all night, freaking out over the quietude and feeling of vulnerability. There's usually at least three doors and dozens of ground floor single pane windows that even a child could break into, so how can I fall asleep? Don't they have bars on windows and deadbolts? And it's so dead quiet after, say, midnight. Not a creature is stirring. Like Roderick Usher one better, I can hear the mice in the neighbor's walls. In NYC we have deadbolts on thick metal doors, and only one possible entry window (the one above the fire escape) and neighbors on every side who can hear any cry for help. But if your buzzer goes off or there's a knock on the door while you're watching RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE, I imagine it could be quite scary. And when Malcolm garrotes a guy for texting in what looks like the Anthology Film Archives' downstairs screening room it's fun to imagine seeing the film there and realizing you forgot your turn your phone off, afraid to even move to find it in your bag lest this guy be sitting behind you.

So even if --or because--it's a bit unnerving, one must applaud the filmmaker's full commitment to the tenets of starting a crime wave. And if he eventually turns on his own crew, and finally even his own French girlfriend, well that's to be expected. What's not expected is the deader-than-deadpan approach that never trivializes the violence Malcolm commits while never judging it either, so we end up in a very unique zone that's the opposite of HEATHERS' hypocritical inference that we're all so impressionable we need a pretty girl's buzzkill morals to remind us killing our high school enemies isn't "cool."

That's Jamie Frey (of the Brooklyn What?) at left-a buddy of mine who showed up in a random
RANDOM tracking shot, a comforting indication that the raw edge of NYC ain't totally dead

But even if our sense of identification is pushed to HENRY,  CLOCKWORK or RICHARD III extremes, we trust Cahill because he is so openly homicidal he shatters our conception of safety, of distance from the screen, in ways we rarely see; he evinces a thorough knowledge of the movies. The phrasing he incorporates into his speech conveys among other things a deep absorption of GODFATHER 2 ("You gonna help me with these things I gotta do, or what?"), TAXI DRIVER, GOODFELLAS, and BREATHLESS. And I applaud how much this approach ties into true film fans' collective rejection of banal reality and his Don Quixote-esque quest to exhume the twitchy corpse of New York's grimy past. Like all great quests it's doomed to backfire, but then again NYC hasn't ever been the same, not ever. Even one day to the next, it's never the same. It's like a mutating geographical variation of THE THING. Any chance to shape its mutant growth to our liking has long since gone before we even got there. Yer we already did shape it, sometime or other, and never for the better or the worse.. Always, always both.

Vince Gallo!

BLANK CITY (2010) is a real documentary about the time and place Cahill longs to return to, specifically NYC's underground 70s film scene. It's full of exquisite glimpses into the early 8mm and 16mm clips of the artsy downtown druggie enclaves centered around CBGB's, Max's Kansas City, Tompkins Square Park (when it was a homeless encampment) and the Alphabet City shooting galleries. The age of Youtube, Final Cut, and digital video put an end to the uniqueness of the scene. But I too remember how we used to project 8mm and 16mm films on white walls or sheets for gathered friends and/or family members. Each showing was a one-time event, special in the way no amount of today's Skyy Vodka sponsorship, rooftop screening fests, and swag can equal. And the kids then had more drugs--they could afford them living in $10 a month loft apartments with ten other people. So with ample footage from the original films (by people like Amos Poe and Richard Kern) and talking heads like Lydia Lunch, Steve Buscemi, Thurston Moore, John Waters, Deborah Harry, and various members of various punk bands, it's better than being there, I'm sure - at least smell-wise, and--I'm fairly sure--way better than having to see the entirety of each film.

With its good sense of humor about the poverty-enforced ingenuity of these early filmmakers, it's possible to long to return to BLANK CITY's innocence and imagine how great it would be to see the whole films, even while knowing in reality they would be excruciating for more than a few minutes, and the lack of air conditioning or clean underwear would eventually wear us down. In that sense, BLANK CITY is better than being there, while making you long to return anyway. I especially loved the snippets of ROME 78 - a re-enactment of the fall of an empire as filmed on the sly around the City's more Roman-esque landmarks, so while a kid in a toga dies in the Central Park fountain, 70s tourists walk by; a coliseum scene occurs in front of the Bronx Zoo lion cage, etc. It's the kind of gutsy shot stealing that makes New York City great!

ROME 78 - John Lurie (bottom)

And it's in that sense that the documentary's poverty-is-the-mother-of-invention reverie is so invaluable, and the scene's inclusiveness so impressive. The proletarian mix of thick New York accents, kids kicked out of their working class Bronx neighborhoods for being gay or fleeing their midwestern nowheresville hometowns like MIDNIGHT COWBOY makes for a cohesive unit of subculture that was too out there to become mainstream, but did anyway. There's also a coordinated effort merged the downtown punks with the uptown African-American WILD STYLE graffiti artists, dancers and street poets. All of it goes to prove that if you're literate, young, bisexual, and hot you can never be considered homeless in a neighborhood/time where everyone takes care of everyone else and the class system is part of what's being rebelled against... until of course the money starts rolling in...

And it's that money and the eighties that leads to skyrocketing rents, which means big real estate investments, which means the end of the squats and slums of the Village, which means the need to protect those investments, which means Republican mayors. So gradually, especially with the incursion of Giuliani in 1994, the herald of zero tolerance public smoking, the abolition of the 'brown bag' drink, and the Cabaret Law that Kevin Bacon fought successfully in FOOTLOOSE in the 80s but we lost in the 'real life' of the New York streets in the 90s, the crackdowns on the drugs at Limelight, the rise of swing dancing, the rise of video, DVD, FCP, AIDS, the WWW, and 9/11 and my own near death over and over from alcoholism... we lost it all. I blame Giuliani for all of it. We could use a man like Ed Koch or Dinkins again.

Lydia Lunch

Shooting your own shit is so easy now it's hard to warrant a film festival at all, hard to motivate people to go find some shady address from a hand-drawn flyer and sit on the concrete floor for three hours when the movie you're showing them is a mere click away on the home screen. Back then if you had a projector and a camera you could make a movie on Monday and get it back from Kodak by the weekend and screen it promptly for a 100 rowdy urchins. And since everyone knew everyone else and half the people were squatters and no one had TVs to compete with, and half the people were in the movie anyway. So huge crowds packed into lofts and garages and wherever and legends were born, and today these squalid art films are shown in university classes. But that will soon change as more and more class moves to the web and more and more public screenings are too unreliable. In other words, there's no word of mouth anymore because word of mouth itself has proliferated to infinity, and posting invites to Facebook is so easy that there are now so many options none of them end up being anything worth doing. If you went outside, well, you couldn't smoke there anyway, might not know anyone, just pay $14 for a mixed drink. Man, I remember when shit was still immediate, urgent, vital, cheap...

You know, like with Friendster. 

Basquiat (I left the red loading circle in, for art's sake)

POST SCRIPT

There's this other documentary on Netflix, WE CAUSE SCENES: THE RISE OF IMPROV EVERYWHERE (2013), about a group of NYC hipsters who do big flash mob-ish pranks and I'm a little jealous of their huge turnouts, which would seem to contradict all I've said here. But on the other hand, I've never been good at highly organized 'spontaneity.' It's fine for some people but the New Yorker embodied by Cahill in RANDOM ACTS or the filmmakers in BLANK CITY might point out as I do that it's just conformity in a new package.

Safe for mainstream consumption

I can respect the original gaggle of dudes involved in the 'sudden improv' concept, but the idea that whole masses of people want to join up and be led into safe, happy flash mob antics makes me realize that cigarettes are essential to true revolution (and I say this as part of Shelley Jackson's SKIN project) It lacks the 'everyone's in charge' freedom of similar movements (as in the Merry Pranksters or the Cockettes or Diggers) that relied on chaos for true freedom of the sort impossible without very strong psychedelics and tobacco. The idea that sober people eagerly participate in chances to get told what to do in order to 'break away' from lockstep drone reality makes no sense. This is how ideas like the Diggers morphed into cults like the Mansons, and how the Rolling Stone mossed, and how Times Square became 'family-friendly.'

Thank god there's one artist who will never break that seal. His name? Abel Ferrara. At least he understood how NYC --and therefore the world--would end in 4:44: LAST DAYS ON EARTH, not with a bang but with NY1's Pat Kiernan delivering a quietly dignified sign off.

All else is just Sony... selling itself copies of its older self... through the TV mirror.