The Subterraneans: RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR, SWITCHBLADE SISTERS, THE BOOGENS

As bipolar March melts and freezes and jumps 30 degrees almost every day here in NYC, SADD drags me around like Angel tied to the back of Mapache's automóvil. My mother died last month, so who am I trying to shock with all my crazy gonzo rambling now? What's my character motivation now that my main audience back startled by my transgressive utterances is beyond my reach? I've been writing about the lysergic properties of The Green Pastures all week, but with all the instant crucifying going on in the blogosphere I'm worried my post is racist instead of merely clever. If the weather wasn't so unendurable I might hazard a guess, but the barometric pressure makes clarity impossible. Luckily, a see-saw bows one's way at least half the time, so in a bit I'll be back to chillin,' banging out some entries in the drive-in triple feature canon. Now more than ever, good recycled trash just might be the only haven from the demons at our doorstep, and so I turn to Joanne Nail to fuck the shit up on my behalf, for my God is one of wrath and vengeance and he's tired of bureaucrats and bourgeois liberal tenure-trackers bearin' false witness. Hear these words long written down: Swing See-Saw Swing! the Jezebels will be back! 

RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR

(1984) Dir: Bruno Mattei 

**1/2

Time and again El Rey has delivered the great trashy 1970s-80s Italian goods, stuff I'd never know about or normally just avoid based on the title but am more than willing to have on in the background via cable TV. Rats: Night of Terror (1984) for example, is a title I've seen over the years but always drew a vaguely irritated shrug, conjuring in my mind yet another  Willard or Food of the Gods, or Rats, as in the Frank Herbert horror novel about giant rats. Which I loved in high school (turned onto it by reading Stephen King's Danse Macabre in the school library) -- but the movie sucked.

I was wrong to dismiss it, wrong like sticky traps instead of the humane quick snap; El Rey and Mattei were right. We must set, bait and camouflage our snap traps or be overrun, and lose dominance of the planet.

What sets Mattei's brand of vermin above the dregs is that it's more post-apocalyptic than 'big bug'-based. Based on the title one expects a 'wild man flame-thrower wielding exterminator is the only one who can save NYC from a trash strike rat infestation" plot, rife with dead hobos bobbing up in the sewers and a woman screaming in her shower), but a post-apocalyptic gang war style part of Italy's welcome wave of Escape from New York, The Warriors, The Road Warrior-imitations that dotted grindhouse and drive-ins and video shelves of the early-80s? Count me in. Like all of Rome's wily thieves, Mattei only steals the good stuff, and even then only from the best! SNAP.

I still would have run the other way seeing this on some 80s pan and scan cable channel, but El Rey and HD have brought new life to it: the restored deep blacks and deep rich grime shades help me get over the general displeasure seeing masses of rats congregated in a room with no clear motive or cheese incentive. In fact these poor rats all seem rather bewildered, tired, and scared. with good reason. Lukily director Bruno Mattei made sure no rats were harmed during filming. Oh wait, this is Italy, so yeah they were probably incinerated. But in a hellscape like this, the dead are the lucky ones. And at least we don't see them look all betrayed and startled as they're shot with a Bert I. Gordon pink pellet in slow motion like we do in Food of the Gods. I saw one running on fire, but in general they're mere extras; we don't see them much and the close-up they figure in (for real as opposed to cat toy stand-ins of long shots), are looped while the actors try to turn running up the basement steps in single file into a whole scene. Watch out for that loop of red-eyed rat close-up zoom shot! Hey, the human cast does try hard and the editor tries to make it all fit together and I suppose it might pass for a movie if you were half asleep in a dark drive-in, or on your couch years later catching it on cable like a certain someone. 

The non-tsy action follows a post-Road Warrior style biker gang with tricked out vehicles that must have been left over from the 1983 Enzo Castellari film I nuovi barbari (The New Barbarians AKA Exterminators AKA Warriors of the Wasteland) which were from his classic 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) and its sequels. In fact, in Germany, Rats: Night of Terror was billed as the Rifts III - Die Ratten von Manhatten i.e. billed as third in the Bronx Warriors trilogy--hey, there were others still to come, and hey, they borrow from the best, including themselves. Map of the bridge! Hey! Hey! Hey! 

So these Bronx "Rifts" pull into a deserted (bombed out in WW2 and never restored?) Italian (not supposed to be?) villa (Manhattan it ain't) and soon are besieged by shots of molti ratti --never funnier than when being pulled en masse via an 'unseen' carpet underneath their feet, towards our "terrified" antiheroes and their molls on the other end of the dusty, empty room. Keeping up the sci-fi end, there's a secret chamber with futuristic radio equipment and an opening scrawl that delivers a whole series of post-apocalyptic upsets. You know: evolution amok, up and under. None of it matters or makes sense except as setup for a 'gotcha' ending, which-- if we're 14 years old--we'll come out of nowhere. And we can alwyas laugh at the 'suggestions of rat' tongue puppet and great exploding bodies where all the rats come tumbling out of the belly and orifices like an out-of-hand Rod Stewart/Richard Gere rat orgy.

But what makes it work (for the fans) is the terrible dubbing and game if amateur acting/directing, centering around the dubious wisdom of gang leaders Kurt and the competitor for his alpha position, the Native American GI-esque Duke. Duke's right, after all, Kurt basically makes all the wrong moves, he must have got the job for being prettiest, and says lame shit like "Open up in the name of humanity!!" after blindly trusting Duke to guard the women in the other room and then unlock the door to let him in after he leaves to turn walking down a small flight of basement steps into a whole scene (lots of walking in place and reacting to rats that were presumably going to be overlaid). 

The diving bell and ominous jet landing synth pads and little rat skittering drum loops of the Luigi Ceccarelli score is perfect if not great and the film looks foxy and retro-chic so don't miss it. For those of us who saw the Escape-Road-Warriors trifecta over and over and over as young teenagers, it's enough that this film tries hard to look like them, though caked with the usual gray dust and has explosions and mounted machine guns. 

Could-a done without the rats, though. Twist!

SWITCHBLADE SISTERS

(1975) Dir. Jack Hill
****

"The only thing a man's got below his belt is clay feet."

If you love to see men the target of feminine violence, then for you, almost always, lurks Jack Hill, the auteur behind SPIDER BABY, COFFY, THE BIG DOLL HOUSE, but almost more importantly, SWITCHBLADE SISTERS. A preconfiguration of what was to become a street gangs/amok youth craze that fused the urban grime apocalypse of 70s street gang violence--ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976), THE WARRIORS (1978), SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977), ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)--and do-wop post-HAPPY DAYS greaser nostalgia--THE WANDERERS (1979), THE LORDS OF FLATBUSH (1974), HE GOOD LOOKIN' (1982), GREASE (1978) . SWITCHBLADE SISTERS (1973) predates it all, looking back only to juvenile delinquent movies of Corman and Mamie Van Doren pics of the 50s. The cast includes Lenny Bruce's daughter Kitty as Donut (lower right), the gang member who gets picked on regularly by doll-faced, sweet voiced but tough-as-nails Lace (Robbie Lee). No one fucks with new girl in town Maggie (Joanne Nail) though, cuz she's not averse to whipping off her chain belt and/or grabbing a switchblade (they all use their jackets as a kind whip/shield, a good whip to whack a knife out of someone's hand). Lace isn't threatened by such moxy but Lace's one-eyed suck-up Patch (Monica Gale) sees the writing on the wall: Maggie's gonna steal Patch's man, the goomba Alpha of their male counterparts, Dominic (Ashner Brauner); Lace just thinks Patch is jealous of the beta female position but ole Patch is right; the sparks between Dom and Maggie are real enough, even his breaking into her room to rape her can't change that. In short, this is Jacobean tragedy of the most Shakespearean order, with a roller rink subbing for the town square, and an enemy family in the form of a Crabs and his drug dealing bunch of smartasses posing as a local political group who run up against Dom's operation. But eventually the men are thrown over.

So why did it fail? The film's original title THE JEZEBELS possibly made drive-in audiences think it was that hoary old Bette Davis southern romance (so it bombed). By the time the distributors changed the title, word had gotten around that JEZEBELS was the film to see, but now they couldn't find it. D'oh!! If it had been called KNIVES OF THE JEZEBELS or better yet, I'LL SLIT YOUR FUCKING THROAT, it would be talked about to this day. Hill's previous great feminist-with-a-knife film, SPIDER BABY (1968), had the bad luck to be come out at a time when drive-ins didn't want black and white movies anymore, unless maybe they had graphic cannibalism. SWITCHBLADE SISTERS was a great title either, making it seem like some ditzy Andy Sidaris softcore lesbo thing. SPIDER BABY just sounds vaguely cheesy or boring, too; it should have been called THE SPIDER GIRL GAME or better yet, I'LL SLASH YOU TO FUCKING RIBBONS!

Anyway, you can guess the story, SISTERS is great when you're really pissed off, like I am right now. It goes all the way, from sleazy initiations, cigarette burning, a rape/abduction by a rival gang triggering massive retaliation, vicious bite blow-jobs, a constant flux of acting ability, butch prison guards, roller rink massacres, and keeps going long after other films pull back. There is a feminist black militant ghetto uprising with machine guns and a badass armored Cadillac, a shocking Cagney-by-way-of Lorre raving mad closing monologue (maybe my favorite ending in all schlock cinema), an OTHELLO-style jealous mind poisoning, the Daryl Hannah-prefiguring eye patch of Patch, the heavenly blonde jawline of Janice Karman (she barely speaks here but would go voiceover work as part of the THE CHIPMUNKS), the badass 70s funk score by Medusa (their one screen credit), the way Ashner Brauner sounds like Ralph Meeker when he's really mad; Hill gives us all that and more, and Quentin Tarantino brings us to the Hill by way of his Miramax "Band Apart" label, looking damn good by way of Netflix Streaming. Forever.

Maybe I'm really pissed off right now, and taking it out on the infinitely carvable idiots in my mind who've kept my office working until four while a blizzard's been raging outside since noon. So I protested by sulking in my office, blasting this movie on Netflix like a badass, then tripping on my snow boot shoelaces like a four alarm ponce. Even so, SWITCHBLADE SISTERS is the shit. See it when you're in the mood to stomp on someone, it will 'flatten out your sine curves.' That it's on Netflix in HD with gorgeous colors is one of cinema's current great gifts. See it when you're super furious at the world (did I just say that?) or just strung out with the shakes because your dealer never showed, and bask in the cathartic powers of the fabulous Joanne Nail, the way Robbie Lee's eyes widen and dilate, then contract into a glowing glaze. And Joanne Nail's final rant to the fat cop, her face streaked with blood, eyes wide and maniacal, delivers just the right amount of Meyer-esque camp to her lines.  Joanne Nail would be back all right... in the fascinating 70s all-purpose drive-in capstone, THE VISITOR! (1979)

THE BOOGENS
(1981) Dir James L. Conway
 ***

Am I crazy to have had to get this on Blu-ray? I had to see what was going on better as all early videos were notoriously too dark. Not that I saw any. I read all the reviews and chat rooms about such things and was turned off by the title: "Boogens" is like what some gross kid sitting across from me in 7th grade lunch might call the peas he stuck up his nose. These Boogens showed up during the height of the slasher boom and seemed part and parcel with all the bland baghead movies coming out like blood from America's open veins, sending my alienated 14 year-old feminist arms all akimbo in indignant horror. Well, maybe it just needed 30 years for both of us to get clear of that goddamned early 80s nonsense, because now I think the BOOGENS is fucking great. Okay, it's just 'good'. Okay... good enough. You can take the peas out of your nose now, Eugene. I'm here to stay. Hmm, maybe put them back in, Eugene. I'm too mature to handle it after all. BOOGENS sucks.

What really sets it apart from the pack right off is an early 20s Canadian-style maturity (the film company is situated in Salt Lake, so--you know): the snowy Utah mountain environment (the outfit making and releasing the film was big on nature movies like GRIZZLY ADAMS) creates a sense of believable daylight savings eeriness and the way the two young male characters (Fred McCaren, Jeff Harlan), both fresh out of engineering school, tackle the job re-opening an old silver mine while preparing to spend the weekend with two young women (Rebecca Balding, Anne-Marie Martin). One is the girlfriend, the other a final girl type just there to ski and maybe let herself be set up with the single friend--not in a skeevy way, but in the real way you can imagine you and your friend arranging a similar thing--neither sappy love at first sight strings nor revulsion and clashing, but real 'arranged' hook-up between young adults of legal age kind of vibe, you know, like you find anywhere but the US? Unlike most horror scripts, the dialogue between the boys and girls feels written between two people with differing views rather than one hack writing everyone the same. The dichotomy works really well because we're so used to the extreme polarities of geeky virgin nerds and hunky alpha bland lotharios, sluts and final girl virgins, with nothing in between. The 'in-between' is on full display in The Boogens, making us realize how underrepresented this type usually is. Boogens asks: What about the singleguys and girls old enough to not be virgins but young enough they're still a little insecure when real emotion intrudes on the mechanics of a one-weekend stand, but mature enough to not let fooling around affect their self esteem one way or the other? Sure the 'sex talk' coming out of the girls' mouths in their dialogue together in the car and before the boys arrive feels like it's written by a dude. What it really needed was to let the actors improvise and find their own rhythm, because the actors aren't up to making mediocrely-written small talk seem spontaneous. A Debra Hill or a Gale Hurd, or Polly Platt, or a Daria Nicolodi on the team could have really helped. 

Despite the occasional script issue, the characters are at least professional at their jobs, and the scenery is beautiful. The mountains, the mines, and the monsters have an ingenious connection to the land and to all the homes in the neighborhood (via ancient tunnels connecting to air vents) and in their cool blobby way they recall the crawling things in Hammer's Island of Terror (1966). As is so important, the film takes its time not showing the beasts too early, which is how it should be, and each scene stretches out, confident in its moment-by-moment accumulation of unease, like when one of the girls is chased around the cabin fresh out of the shower (we neither see the monster nor gawk at the nudity); and there' an explosive ending and some good (presumably real) cavern scenes, which we can see and appreciate now that it's no longer on a dark smudgy cropped VHS screen. 

Blu-ray --is there nothing it can't do?

Best of 2014 (Movies and TV)

Here's the future I read in the blood spatter from my Herculean hacks at the digital hydra of 2014 film-TV-video: even the most lovable pop culture icons--the ones with whom I spent some considerable time in childhood (listening to my parent's LPs of "I started out as a child" and "Why is there Air" over and over)--can turn out to be monsters, and the low pit of the stomach sense of childhood being whisked away by obsequious demons must be soul-crushing at a high enough decibel; and that a few wily filmmakers can shake the world just by depicting worldshakers getting comedically killed, and that the amok digital technology curve we're headed for involves software-direct-to-brain connections--the getting rid of screens and earbuds altogether by installing them through the third eye--and we should be very careful about that and maybe not even go there.

In short, the year in entertainment seems to have melted into a lump of digital coal these last few months, it has seen my America scrambling for contextualization, hoping to right our virtual axis before we cave in the core of the world culture simulacrum. We are the world, through Seth Rogen. Long may his dick jokes reign.

But as for the other thing, the slow pall of realizing that maybe David Icke and the hysteric Satanic panickers who sank my faith in humanity during the slasher 80s and the anti-porn crusaders were right all along, it's to Disney's dark, brooding, strange masterpiece MALEFICENT I turn. I has import and dark beauty priapic critics missed, perhaps because the film came out before the Cosby thing broke, so they weren't ready to realize how well the film mythically situates the perils of trusting the Prince Charming garments of our childhood friends not to hide slimy toad intent. Trouble is there's no good men left in the family unit to turn to--dad's been left alone to die in the Disney world bathroom and the inhumane experiments of industrial science on chimps shall haunt us for a Triassic age as traumatized apes deliver unprovoked violence (or just the threat of it) to change the world into the vile place we made them see it is; and the goodness in our hearts will have to triumph again and again just to stay afloat in the bullshit sea of godless despair, and the cowardice we exhibit today will kill us tomorrow, but constant courage is hard when the BLACK MIRROR shows more and more of our decomposing Dorian Gray visage.

from top:UNDER THE SKIN, THE BABBADOOK, BLACK MIRROR

MAYBE If we can fall in love with humankind and not worry about the approaching cliff--be like Scrooge Redux, combat strangling with soft cheek caresses, challenge bogeymen with tiger-sized ferocity tempered by love and forgiveness, and keep the bogey in the basement and give him a bowl of worms at lunchtime--then maybe 2015 will open the door to Humanity Mach 2.

BUT we're still growing in population, it's doubled since the last time we worried about it. We've become the kind of space parasite we routinely defend against in sci fi blockbusters, and Matt McConaughey's heading the swarm to the next host planet while SNOWPIERCER and NOAH realize that pulling the plug on humanity altogether may just be the most heroic thing we can do, our gift to the cosmos and the inbred animals from that ark. OBVIOUS CHILD even dared wage comedy in the face of abortion, without being crude, didactic or mean-spirited --a major first. And for the badass superstar East Village bitches in BROAD CITY, and in the post-digital terror in BLACK MIRROR, and the beyond-the-pale metatextuality of TOO MANY COOKS, and ERIC ANDRE show, it's business as usual for the apocalypse of televisual memory, nostalgia and spinoffs like ever-evolving tentacles through the horror film ether. We may be heading into a black post-modern melt-down abyss, but we're doing it together, goddamn it, so be true to your friends even if they're trees.

Now if we could only get rid of the bad people... but they're everywhere, they're inside our systems, and our basements, and our childhood nostalgia vats, fermenting. Killing them only makes you one of them, and they're part of you already. Only through tiger fierceness and unconditonal love enough to embrace even the foulest of our hidden inner lepers will we at least be able to... get our wings back and/or watch MANHATTAN again. But is there any fairy paradise un-parking lot paved left to fly to? Will there ever be a rainbow? Well fly there one day... either way... sweet Lucifer Ball. The flames are there for your protection. And please mind the receptacles on your way out.

1. MALEFICENT
Dir. Robert Stromberg

Critics said it was too dark, Jolie was stiff, and it was too much like WICKED, as if two feminist revision / witch character redemption tales in the same century would topple them from their papers' lofty mastheads. Maybe they're right. Toppling has already begun. And all the while, WICKED has been around, it's been contained up in mid-town: no film version, so what in Sam Hill are they waiting for? Meanwhile, if you dare to find it / look to the western skies and see MALEFICENT, a great Xmas present to the girl who's just turned too old for FROZEN, and needs a myth subverting the patriarchally-instilled importance of a handsome prince in the heroine's maturation. It's a complex work of psyche building that can also stand proudly next to Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" on the shelf labeled "Feminist psychoanalytical myth re-balancing of the patriarchally-endorsed brutality towards womankind through the recapturing of her chthonic power" Yeah, I said it!

Scripted with great sensitivity and Jungian Girls who Run with the Wolves-ish archetypal revisionist awareness by Linda Woolverton, Jolie's not quite back at her GIRL INTERRUPTED levels of wild, but she's at least got the regal bearing, razor blade cheekbones, joyless laugh and a peerless sense of wry poise down pat. I know a girl or two just like her in AA and maybe they're cold for similar reasons. What's more important, maybe this film can heal her. For young girls and children have at last been given a mythic contextualization of that most odious crime, the date rape. One doesn't realize the extent of it as a problem of female maturity today (or any day presumably, just kept quieter before, to all our detriment) until we see it added into the mythic iconography of Disney.

And from there, the healing: Elle Fanning is a great snaggle-toothed princess, like a combination Drew Barrymore now and Dakota before, and Juno Temple is a welcome face as the younger of the three good fairy godmothers. In short, it's potent stuff, alchemically healing as a caustic salve that brought up from deep into the murky chthonic of a growing girl's true poltergeist power. With art direction that can stand proudly next to the Pre-Raphaelite work of Edward Burne-Jones, J.W. Waterhouse, Michael Parkes, Maxfield Parrish, and William Blake, Maleficent's fairy kingdom pulses and writhes. Trees grow and change at an accelerated rate; warriors of stone and tree root rise up from the ground on command; beings small and large fly and shimmer at night in ways Max Reinhardt would have been jealous of in his 1935 production of MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. And this time there's not a single Mickey Rooney to queer the deal.

2. THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS

(L'étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps)

Dir. Hélène Cattet et Bruno Forlani

Hélène Cattet et Bruno Forlani, cinema's first and only mixed gender / race / nationality writing-directing couple have been setting my head on fire ever since their 2009 feature debut AMER. I was so blown away by their unique mix of modernist experimental and post-modern 70s Italian horror narrative, especially as they're not alone in finding a creative wellspring in the updating and abstracting and melding of classic Argento, Morricone, and Antonioni (like Peter Strickland), dubbed from hereon out by the spirits deep in this blog, the Darionioni Nuovo. Argento may not have made a decent film since the mid 90s, but Forlani and Cattet have taken his blazing primary color and straight razor iconography and shattered it into a million psychosexual grim Freudian mind-meld slivers. Granted their looping-loopy style will no doubt prove alienating after about twenty minutes to people who don't know SUSPIRIA and INFERNO like the black of their gloves, and who don't swoon at gorgeous ironwork mazes of art nouveau architecture and Jungian psychosexual mythic color-coded resonance. But even those of us swooning over the ironwork maze of art nouveau architecture and Jungian psychosexual mythic color-coded resonance might need a break halfway through.

The plot concerns Dan (Klaus Tange), a very French middle-aged executive who returns home to his very cool apartment after a long business trip to find his wife missing and only a series of bizarre clues as to where she disappeared to. Apparently she's either dead or in bed with some sadistic lesbian lover somewhere inside the massive byzantine, super strange building. As we gawk in awe and wonder what parts of this amazing edifice are sets and which actual building interiors, we-- irregardless of the sensual dangers behind every wall--long to move in forever. As strange clues are whispered through vents; elderly neighbors relate haunting story flashbacks that don't ever return to the present; eyes peer through ceiling holes and vice versa, a gendarme detective drops to help Dan knock on doors but no one he's met before is the same person who answers this time so of course Dan looks guiltier than ever.

Going up to the roof for a cigarette Dan meets Barbara (Anna D'Annunzio) and we just know he's found some dark dangerous anima void, the type of girl a man meets only in rare and strange dreams where she hides or waits within rooms within locked rooms and only by sheerest chance do we ever actually meet her face-to-face. She's so hot yet dangerous that death and desire, agony and ecstasy orbit and merge into her aura as time stands whirlpool maelstrom still - she could be the evil daughter of those witches in the Three Mothers Trilogy. How she manages to convey this with little more than a black satin shirt, open collar and long dark hair, dark red lipstick is beyond me, but just meeting her causes a blood chilling sensation in both Dan and the viewer that's like a razor blade dipped in ice water before being run down our backs. A sublime and terrifying anima, we get the feeling that we'll never find her again, or escape her bedroom vortex if we do, except on her own mutilating terms. She may be the one who sliced up our wife (presuming she's dead) and going to bed with her will be a fatal mistake we'd be a fool not to make. Harrowing enough to make Hellraiser's Pinhead reach for his safe word, this harbinger of slashing, glass-eating, and multicolored gem fingernail gashing, is so vividly photographed that sweet pain and unbearable pleasure, intoxicating agony, nonexistent time blow your brains back in right onscreen like a reverse R. Bud Dwyer.

---------

LAS BRUJAS DE ZAGGARAMURDI 

(AKA Witching and Bitching)

Dir Alex de la Iglesia

Speaking of crazy witches, over in the modern Spain the gender war seems lost to the women, and it's about time.  If that sounds sexist than you've clearly never been married to or dated a Spanish-speaking mujer, como yo. If you have, then you'll roar with delight over this film, in which, far from the dubious victory run by Burton in TAMING OF THE SHREW or the bloody draw in WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, we have something far more subversive and strange. Alex de la Iglesias directs with lots of rapid cut multi-camera editing like Romero uses in DAWN OF THE DEAD, so if you can handle subtitles or speak fluent Spanish, just hold on tight, and roll with it, at least until the gigantic strutting... thing... shows up. And forgive the film its stupid American title, WITCHING AND BITCHING. I've given it the far better name in my head, BITCHES' SABBATH. (my full lavish praise here).

4. SNOWPIERCER
Dir. Bong Joon-Ho

Joon Bong Ho's film is technically from 2013, but what are you going to do? It didn't really come into any kind of theatrical release here until recently - and is currently on Netflix streaming. But it's a great work of existential train class warfare druggy social critique. You can tell Ho's a fan of RUNAWAY TRAIN and every other damned train movie worth a damn. The film's a fucking work of genius. Who cares!! Fuck you!

5. OBVIOUS CHILD

Written and Directed by Gillain Robespierre 

The first great abortion comedy, OBVIOUS CHILD is hilarious down to its fertile core. SNL alum Jenny Slate stars as struggling Williamsburg hipster comic Donna who "would like an abortion, please," and respectfully declines hearing the other options from the Planned Parenthood counselor. She likes the guy she met on a one-night stand, Max (Jake Lacy, from THE OFFICE), who was too drunk to get the condom on, but not enough to keep the baby, or even tell him, especially since he might be a closet Christian. Credit a beautiful script by director Gillain Robespierre (based on her short film of the same name) that we never doubt Donna's sensitivity to her situation, even as the jokes fly furious. We can respect that her mind is made up and that she's smart and has considered her options without needing to hear them from a pro-life zealot and is neither martyr nor lost soul, checking her own tendency to leaven her inner tension to convey she's aware of the gravity of the situation, yet never presuming that tension is somehow 'valid' because of the surrounding controversy. There's such a perfect flow between Slate and the material it's hard to believe it's all not happening in the moment, with special attention to the way people actually talk --not 'normal' people, the kind of banal life-affirming doltishness Hollywood jadedly associates with the 'true America'--but real young Williamsburg or Greenpoint-dweller college-educated witty individuals. I've seen this kind great naturalistic flow only with the best 'ensemble' female comedy teams--Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph in BRIDESMAIDS (2007); Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer in BROAD CITY--women who've done enough improv and rehearsal to make their characters breathe and roll rather than submitting to some half-assed plot twists thrust on them by some clueless male or self-hating female screenwriter. (more)

6. DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

Dir. Matt Reeves

It's not quite the howl of freedom for oppressed primates that the original was, more a ballad about what's good in tribal living vs. bad, the way one act of violence ricochets forever with ever-increasing retaliations--that fear makes sure we're never more than a swing state away from dystopia --unless some kind of forgiveness is learned, and the painful idea that the animal kingdom may inherit our violent species-ist paranoia, that the inhumane medical experiments on primates will have dire and far-reaching consequences to our collective karma. In short, it must be hard to work in a slaughterhouse all day unless you're a Conservative Republican. How else do you live with your crimes--the ones needed just to survive--without the ability to become a sociopath as needed? And of course, Andy Serkis is still our new century's technological groundbreaker. He is to motion capture technology what Sinatra was to the condenser microphone, what Louis Armstrong was to small combo jazz-- its full expression beyond what we thought possible in a dawning medium. Serkis' Caesar here is so human as to be recognizably animal, and--like it does for Kim Jong Il--the goofy face of James Franco projected on a screen has uncanny power for him. Serkis' Caesar elevates both species just as the factual Kim Jong denigrates just ours --either way, el Franco is there.

7. IS THE MAN WHO IS TALL HAPPY?
Dir. Michel Gondry

Noam Chomsky + magic markers + Michel Gondry = Magic. Chomsky delves into the roots of language, how our entire unconscious is structured by basic rules of grammatical structure (or vice versa), and the way the symbolic register coheres between the real and imaginary like both the greatest and worst thing that can possibly happen to not just interpersonal communication but the formation of the human thought process, from neuron to mental image, infancy through old age, in a flash of a neuron, and all while Gondry weaves hand-drawn magic marker miracles illustrating everything far more perfectly than any lone still image or real life recreation ever could --  even when, as a freely admits, he's getting it wrong. Daring geniuses with fathomless limits of benevolent creative compassion, man.

8. A FIELD IN ENGLAND

Dir. Ben Wheatley

Great as the existential Sartre-Godot-Aristophanes-style robust gallows humor is, and the weird mystical angles with ropes into the alternate realities, etc., the peak aspect comes from a unique recreation of a ground zero time-distilled psilocybin freak-out wherein--buzzing and soaring in and around its droning center--the score sirens out across a series of overlapping strobes and mirror splitting. And you might say yeah yeah, that mirror effect hasn't been fresh since Led Zeppelin's Song Remains the Same, (I even used it in Queen of Disks) but you're wrong! Shit is fresh! And the strobe cutting is so seizure-inducing it comes with a warning label, but 'tis no stoner fucking about but a calculated specific effect. Wheatley and Amy Jump, who co-edited the film, alternate split second imagery until new shapes emerge that breathe and pulse. On one hand it's nothing too different than what one might shoot with their friends on mushrooms in the graveyard as I once did (and Syd Barrett before me) there's no unusual sight or diegetic sound (I was thinking for sure they'd switch film stock to color for the tripping parts, ala Wizard of Oz or Jose Marin's Awakening of the Beast) but the strobing overlapping images create a truly psychedelic effect, the two or more images cohering into one buzzing throbbing molecular NOW waiting for us all just outside the veil, ala William Blake or the old school alchemist woodcuts. And the thin fiberoptic line between waking life and the collective archetypal unconscious is frayed for a moment rare, and the black hole sun overlap between waking and dreaming is exposed afresh, and the union of birth and death, past and future, real and unreal, speed and stillness up our perceptions fast enough that death's hidden-from-the-sober-living flag unfurls for all three of your agog eyes and the psychedelic peak across linear time's usually uncrossable river is at last crossed. And when one returns to the sane bank of sanity, one is a renewed, a third eye Popeye coming back from the dead and now completely made of atomic spinach. (More)

9.a. THE LEGO MOVIE

Dir. Phil Lord

It's hard not to swoon and get chills from the cumulative emotional effect of this well-thought out barrage of sensory stimuli. And I'm grateful for its message about letting your freak flag raft inflate and never buy Lego sets that come with instructions and guides to how to build cities, because it will make your dad into a control freak. It might dampen sales of such sets, but it's a lesson needs teaching, because with cell phones it's never been so easy to hover. Hopefully helicopter parents who see this with their kids can maybe see the error of their ways with the kids right in the same room, and that's golden. Though once again, Hollywood's idea of the 'average guy' hero is painfully narrow --the blankest and naivest of nerds.

9 ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW

Dir. Randy Moore

Little CGI flashes of animatronic fangs, blackening pupils, shining hypnotizing jewels, and fairy wings all work wondrously ambiguous in this undersong testament to the madness and derangement that results when immersed too deeply in Disney's subversive archetypal psychology-accessing 'scape, where mind and fantasy land are one, enabling the idea that, in order to appreciate a fake wonderland, your schizophrenia has to supply the missing details--and as with Antonioni, the realization there are details that aren't missing is the post-modern frisson. Having never tripped at Disney World I'm not sure if this is what it's like, but I'm guessing it's like the classic SIMPSONS episode where the kids go to Duff Gardens and Lisa ends up drinking the water under the log ride and hallucinating wildly, and eventually declaring "I am the Lizard Queen." And little moments like the pool scene, wherein both the girls and the wife seem to be both pulling him towards them and away at the same time until he seems trapped in the center of the pool like a spooked Marilyn caught between Gable and Clift rodeo lassos. Lifeguards pull him out of the water thinking he's drowned; has he? Is this what it's like in your last hours on earth? Are heaven and hell really all commingled in a land of fake castles, expensive glamorous witch costumes, "plushies," and nubile woodland fauns with braces? Considering all the photos being taken in the park every day it's hardly surprising that a guerrilla film could be pulled off under their noses, but it's still an audacious move, throwing legal safety to the wind (Disney is a notoriously rigid enforcer of their copyrights) along with any semblance of sanity or logic, an--aside from a few missteps, such as a scatologically unfortunate climax (I went into the other room until the gross noises stopped)--it's pretty damned artsy. Even the shots that are obviously filmed against a blue screen of park footage ring with an absurdist post-modern unease (MORE)

10. a-c: The Marvelverse:

CAPT. AMERICA- THE WINTER SOLDIER
Dir. Anthony and Joe Russo

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY
Dir. James Gunn
X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST
Dir. Bryan Singer

GUARDIANS left me all verklempt with the giddy boy rapture I felt watching STAR WARS at some North Carolina theater, months before anyone else knew about it; this time I was the very last to know how Chris Pratt is a genius in the lead, as he fits the perfect cool older brother mode, what Han Solo was to us 70s kids, sparing us the icky Luke looking at horizons and aww shucking with Uncle Ben business and getting right to the good stuff. Story-wise it's nothing new - but neither was STAR WARS. It's mythic so doesn't need to be; just savor the nonstop feast of imagination and great cut-through-the-crap dialogue Marvel is by now bracingly good at.

(From Dystopian Parables for the Masses:) In WINTER... the moment of exposing the demon face behind the mask is akin to when rumor and conspiracy theory starts to lock shut, too late to resist it, no time to plan a defense. When what you didn't see coming comes not on the horizon ahead of you but behind you, next to, within, making its move only when its sure all resistance has been pre-demonized as terrorism and disarmed, isolated, and surrounded, then the NSA takes off its mask and the Sixth Reich Paperclip draconian totalitarian future-present is right there, and has been, in disguise all this time, and the Homeland Security emblem turns out to be a scrambled up swastika just waiting to re-form, and it's too late to do anything about it because we've signed all our freedoms away because we got all scared when the news waved some Muslims at us (Muslims the Homeland Security/Nazis themselves funded). We chased the messenger Snowden who tried to tell us what was happening. God help us, we activated SKYNET. General Ripper was right! They've infiltrated our precious bodily fluids.

But the best... X-MEN. Now that Bryan Singer's returned, there's no super hero series ever been better. With the anti-mutant hate and fear making an ideal modern parable for everything from homosexuality to drug abuse, and bolstered immeasurably by the powerhouse acting and great love-hate relationship between Fassbender and McAvoy, it's not only knock your socks off badass fun, it's potent. Not in a tired IRON MAN 3 Pepper belittling of manly nonsense way, saving the Earth as a poor excuse not to settle down and blah blah but in a truly understanding the guts it takes to stop drinking or using heroin, or coming out of the closet, asking for help when your gay, abused, or suicidally depressed kind of way. In addition, it has an ingenious fusing of time travel, superhero myths and good writing / great acting that make it in a class by itself. The worst thing about it is Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique (maybe she's overextended?). With her cross-eyed yellow stare and terrible bottle "red" hair (the type of rust color so inevitable amidst the bitter divorcees of the UES) she's a slight on the great and underrated Rebecca Romjin's ferociously icy adult version in the original trilogy. That said, it resonates and McAvoy and Fassbender are perfect, each a master class in how to bring Shakespearean gravitas without sacrificing a drop of that old comic book zing.

11.a/b - Entre les Maenads:

UNDER THE SKIN
Dir. Jonathan Glazer

VENUS IN FUR

Dir. Roman Polanski

"Stand over there! Dominate me!" these two seemingly contradictory commands given by Polanski-esque stand-in Mattieu Amalric (the bad guy in QUANTUM OF SOLACE) to Polanski's real-life wife Emmanuelle Seigner in VENUS. Her character veers from begging him for the lead role while dripping wet and disheveled for a last ditch audition as he's packing his script notes to go home--to having him beg her to stay while she badmouths the infantile myopia at the heart of his beloved Sacher Masoch source text. From this beginning, Polanski proves once again he's the one true inheritor of the von Sternberg-Bunuel dog collar. To prove it, she even starts talking in fake German saying she's adding some Dietrich to her role. As a Woman who seems too educated on the intricacies of Masoch's text to be just a part-time temp / call girl / actress threatening to call actor's equity one minute and taking his money and passport the next while he becomes more and more dependent on her brazen gleaming energy, Seigner runs with her part (she's also several inches taller --something that never seems to faze the diminutive Polanski with his giant brides).

 (From Antichrist in Translation:) "Under the Skin tries hard to puncture some hidden and vital vein in our culture, the way any sense of a dislocated universal all-seeing perception dissolves in the dead of night in the middle of nowhere; Scarlett drives slowly trying to lure into her SUV figures of hunched over men, pummeling their way on foot through the darkness, shopping or working long after normal people go to sleep, and Scotland especially seems as abandoned by God as the most lifeless corner of the galaxy...

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12. a/b -When Good Moms Go Bad
THE BABADOOK
Written and Directed by Jennifer Kent
OCULUS
Dir. Mike Flannagan

There's a special nightmare sense of forlorn abandonment when moms turn evil, turning the once-secure house into something foreboding and sinister. In both these films, children must be very very brave as their parents are possessed, and--among other things--block all access to the outside world, to sane rational adults who might help. In other words, the Overlook is anywhere a parent is susceptible to the madness of isolation. If dad's alive and regularly gets out of the house to work, maybe reality will have a fighting chance. But if he's dead or gone or works from home, the monsters get him early on. All it takes--as we learn on THE HAUNTING TV show--is for the kid's screaming about bogeyman under the bed to rob him of a few nights sleep and he becomes the very bogeyman they fear.

In OCULUS, dad spends long hours of the night in his front room office with a strange antique mirror and gradually it makes him go very very bad. And mom's not far behind. The film brilliantly collapses flashbacks from childhood and current paranormal investigations, so eventually both sides see each other from beyond the pale. (See full review).

In BABADOOK, the widowed mom of a precocious and possibly deranged boy must resist a dark energy that's overtaken her (spurred by a lack of sleep that's due largely to the kid's constant barging in - which also prevents her from 'ahem' - due to a monster under the bed and in the closet). I'm not sure it's as great as some critics are saying, nor UNDER THE SKIN either --but if I hadn't read all this gorgeous advance press maybe my expectations would have been sufficiently lowered, as they were for the magnificent OCULUS. What's great about BABADOOK is the tight attention to Jungian fairy tale detail. We see all the time how too much surface goodness gives rise to erupting gushers of crude oil evil, never about the vice versa. (full review)
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TELEVISION

With whole series dropped all at once, expressly for "binge viewing" - it's clear more than ever that thanks to cable and Netflix, the line between TV and cinema are quickly blurring beyond all recognition. So on that note, for the first time on Acidemic, the best-of the year for TV:

 1. TOO MANY COOKS

Adult Swim - Cartoon Network

No amount of David Lynch or Eric Andre can compare with or prepare you for TOO MANY COOKS, the recent 12 minute long informercial on Cartoon Network. 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" Dobbes / 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, and understand, at last, how the need to break free from our programming is so intrinsic to our identity as to be inseparable from the programming itself. It's enough to make lesser actors go mad but that's 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 lick your soul clean for sweeps week, award season, reruns, royalties, stalker fans, Buddhist hell, sweet sweet royalties and backforth... backatcha... and baller. (see it here) (royalties)

2. BLACK MIRROR

BBC Channel 4

... as far as nightmare dystopian parables, BLACK MIRROR is twenty years ahead of its closest neighbors and that it's on Netflix streaming is just too perfect as far as metatextuality. Watch and be warned, though: This show questions the very presence of media in your life in ways I know I, personally, wasn't quite ready for. The show has left a burnished patina of dread to my life; the usual amniotic safety of the widescreen HD image is no longer so reassuring. There's no magic at work, no hallucinations, no monsters in BLACK MIRROR - just sci fi-tinged (but believable as a real possibility) future dystopia parables about where the light speed advancements in digital media and advertising saturation are hurtling us, and maybe it's already too late to change. Maybe all those contracts we clicked 'I accept' on have quietly stripped us of 'real' self, like watching a commercial for the swinging pendulum from the couch-strapped pit, as thousands of avatars cheer from nearby screens, or the razor coming at your eye in a Dali or Fulci film right as you leave the last few scraps of 'reality' behind and enter the no-exit image, trapped in a nightmare feedback loop. It's a feeling I had forgotten about, safe in my mediated womb, a feeling I know only from the few times I took way way too much acid back in the 80s. But this show's got my mediated womb all cased out and they cut right in... . (MORE)

3. BROAD CITY

Comedy Central

These girls are so great I wish they didn't feel the need to add this doofus pantless roomate (not even a roommate, a freeloader more or less) who eats all their food. It's basic NYC 101 learning how to get rid of dipshits like this, and these girls aren't naive simpletons like the ones in FRANCES HA or JUNO, so what the fuck? I've kicked a fair share of crashers out of my apartments and houses since I moved out from my parents in 1985, and so has my roommate, who once even threw Andy Dick out. Had to eject him out of the building. But do it he did. It's a rite of NYC passage to evict the mooch and the dork and the wally. That aside the show is priceless. How rare to see smart as whips, hard-partying girls not afraid to get belligerent or violent in the name of posterity. Check out their holiday guide where they among other things start an orgy, smoke weed in the bathroom and hurl molotov cocktails. 

4. Kyle Mooney's "Wing" and "Bad Boys" short clips on SNL
NBC

It's a testament to the power of their post-modern genius that I have almost no frame of reference for the 90s TGIF line-up (shows like STEP BY STEP, FULL HOUSE, FAMILY MATTERs, etc.) Kyle Mooney and Co. are presumably satirizing here. Awkward and bizarre, they speak to the weird overreactions to small things; in my day it was WHAT'S HAPPENING? and the bootleg taping a Doobie Brothers concert, here it's throwing someone else's ball back and forth without permission from its owner or the gay come-ons attached with getting the last wing. Either way the atonal strangeness, on-point guitar lick scene change cues, completely random cutaways, deadpan monotone acting and keyed-up studio audience laugh track all combine to make these small masterpieces of post-modern deadpan hilarity. Overall, this season's SNL was very uneven (and no end in sight to the mealy Jost) but there were two shining lights: the larger-than-life wild woman energy of Leslie Jones, and the amazing Kyle Mooney (see here for his brilliant calling card, "smoking")

5. THE ERIC ANDRE SHOW

Adult Swim - Cartoon Network

I'm a big fan of deconstruction mixed with literal destruction, especially when harnessed to genuine subversive wit and not just gross-outs and double entendres. I can't literally can't stomach TIM AND ERIC, for example, but I like that both Andre and co-host Hannibal Buress are black yet race never really factors into the show - which is more about bizarro mondo video moments of near Subgenius-abstraction, i.e. they don't need their blackness. Instead they have a bemused band, sullen Mexican day laborer producer, and strange gags, including guests that turn out to be deranged impersonators, rappers, and confused B-listers. It's short, too.

6.a. THE LATE LATE SHOW

CBS

6.b. THE COLBERT REPORT (w/Stephen Colbert)

Comedy Central

Goodbye you beautiful bastards' current incarnations.

7. the Lucas Bros. Moving Co. (Hi-Def Animation)

Fox

They're like the Brooklyn stoner version of the Olsen twins. 

8. DRUNK HISTORY

Comedy Central

Here are important or at least interesting moments in history, generally not taught in school, that need to be learned. Some of our historian drunks don't seem to take to the format as well as others (it probably helps to lay down a good bed first) but the booze works to short circuit any prosaic meandering while adding the oomph of revelry and truth, and the idea of getting an all-star cast to enact and lip sync the drunkenly related narrative is genius and the overall effect makes it the most tangible and accessible of all history shows, ever. Originally a Funny or Die video series, I hope it breeds similar education-subversion hybrids. Drugs and alcohol have a long history of being associated with idiocy, burn-outs, the unemployed and mean-- this show proves they can be associated with edshacation too.

9. HOMELAND - season 4

Showtime

I wanted to avoid continuing series like MAD MEN but HOMELAND is now free of Brody and his nagging family--and thus is barely even the same show. Carrie's tenuous sanity is accepted as a reasonable risk for her bravery and brilliance and by setting it Islamabad, involving a Pakistani government more friendly to the Taliban than they publicly admit, the show gamely gives us a CIA that starts out more or less the bad guys, with Carrie known as 'the Drone Queen' for her merciless bombing from the air of Taliban figures -but nothing is as it seems and it all seems to reach a peak with a storming of the US Embassy. Carrie even has a similarly brilliant counterespionage spy lady foe, and there are tons of explosions, Duck Phillips, a possible friendly Pakistani ally, a hostage exchange, escapes, and other riveting stuff, the highlight being a deranged Carrie freaking out on psychedelic-spiked meds while loose in the Islamabad streets.

10.  FROM DUSK TIL DAWN - season 1

El Rey Network

The Robert Rodriguez-backed new cable channel El Rey (read my shuddering praise here) premiered with the From Dusk til Dawn series, a ten episode-long retelling/elaboration of the RR-QT 1999 film, adding the full measure of hallucinations and replacing Tarantino in the part of psycho brother Richie Gecko with a much more mesmerizing lad named Zane Holz. As Richie's brother and fellow bank robber Seth, D.J. Cotrana diffuses Clooney's terminal charm with hothead overreactions, so now the two feel like real brothers who actually grew up together, rather than the charismatically mismatched Quentin and Clooney. And the queen Mayan reptilian hottie Santanico Pandimonium (Selma Hayek in the original) has a much more integral part with lots of dialogue and empowering femme fatale inscrutability, fully and luxuriantly embodied by Mexican TV actress/pop singing star (and staggering beauty) Eiza Gonzalez. T2's Robert Patrick is the disillusioned preacher, Don Johnson the Michael Parks sheriff, and a cast of handsome well-spoken Mexican-American actors with either admirable swagger or furrowed brow intensity as an array of partiers, bikers, tourists, hostages, and vampires. The ten part series all occurs over the course of one 24-hour period, from dusk to dawn more or less, which slows things way down with that old tick-tockality and a novelistic attention to detail. And I love any movie or series that can go all night.  (MORE)

From my grave to yours: PENNY DREADFUL (Showtime), FROM DUSK TIL DAWN (El Rey)

Two new horror series are worth checking out, presuming you have the patience, the cajones, and the channels on your cable. The Robert Rodriguez-backed channel El Rey (read my shuddering praise here) launched a month or so ago with the From Dusk til Dawn series, a ten episode-long elaboration of the RR-QT 1999 film, adding the full measure of hallucinations and Tex-Mex flavor and replacing Tarantino in the part of psycho brother Richie Gecko with a much more mesmerizing low key lad named Zane Holz. As Richie's brother and fellow bank robber Seth, D.J. Cotrana diffuses Clooney's terminal charm with hothead overreactions, so now the two feel like real brothers who actually grew up together, rather than the charismatically mismatched Quentin and Clooney, and each has problems the other helps correct, like real siblings. And the queen Mayan reptilian hottie Santanico Pandimonium (Selma Hayek in the original) has a much more integral part with lots of dialogue and empowering femme fatale inscrutability, embodied by Mexican TV actress/pop singing star (and staggering beauty) Eiza Gonzalez. Robert Patrick is the disillusioned preacher, Don Johnson the sheriff, and a cast of handsome Mexican-Americans with either admirable swagger or furrowed brow intensity. The ten part series all occurs over the course of one 24-hour period, from dusk to dawn more or less, which slows things way down with that old tick-tockality and a novelistic attention to detail.

Eiza on the street! 

It all works because it's not that the performances are great, but that they are all of a piece; as is so essential for a good horror, they play it deadpan straight while never overdoing it and driving their ordeals into bummer territory (I mean, there's a way to act pained and ennui-ridden without causing viewers to get depressed or upset). I mention all that because, in Showtime's new horror series Penny Dreadful, that level of solid team player dynamics vanishes to be replaced with a bunch of breathing exercise-prepared actors all fighting over every syllable like it's their last chance at an Emmy. Only dimly aware there's other actors across the dark expanses of the cavernous Victorian era sets, they rant and rave and hope... hope....

I'll confess I desperately wanted to love Penny Dreadful. I am a chronic disciple of Eva Green. But the show simultaneously tries too hard and not hard enough, cramming in all the famous literary characters from the Victorian era's (and earlier) literary mythology it can remember from its year at Cambridge. It never seems to know what to do with all these public domain easily-recognized monsters, though, other then send them walking in ornately-stressed Victorian garments through long tracking shots or into bed for joylessly graphic sex scenes. I'm hoping they rectify the absence of any characters or monsters actually from the real penny dreadfuls (such as seen above in my hand-made collage), instead of the same old Dracula (here a Drac-mummy hybrid) or Jack the Ripper (and no doubt Burke and Hare are soon to follow), or Frankenstein. Where's Spring-Heeled Jack? Wither Varney the Vampire? Just because Dorian Gray's an immortal bunburying Sadean doesn't make him a monster, just an aesthete.


On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned this young fellow playing him, Reeve Carney (left), has the whole show sowed up in his pocket. While the other characters rant and rave and underplay, Carney's Gray seems genuinely entranced, not in any effusive way but in a delicate, eerily jaded way, and graced with an in-the-moment openness that makes him seem to me one of the few young actors around who seems to understand the importance of seeing as much as being seen and who seems to fully inhale the atmosphere. (the only other one I can think of offhand is Kristen Stewart). Trying to figure out who Carney reminds me of, then it hits me --he could be the son of old Brian Deacon, the young man in the trailer outside the castle in VAMPYRES (1974).

Meanwhile the murky dim brown Victorian London craftsmaship often runs the risk of choking the life out of things (though the darkness can be very very dark, almost 3-D and it seems thrillingly real, like life before electricity was one long SILENCE OF THE LAMBS climax) and the writers are so busy paraphrasing the eloquent flights of 19th century authors that the British thesps run unsupervised over actorly monologues until every line sings with resonant oratory. In other words, it's very gay, in its way, though not in a giddy, delightful Tim Curry or Udo Kier way, more a Sal from Mad Men kind of humorless straight burlesque. And each of these unsmiling characters must play many parts: Eva Green is a vampire hunter who is also a trance medium easily possessed by demons and departed angry daughters; Timothy Dalton is the Qatermain / Dr. Ven Helsing / Seward who just wants his daughter back (Mina, the daughter who's already gone to Dracula arms); Josh Harntett is a Wild Bill Hicocky dead shot who may also be Jack the Ripper; a brilliant young Frankenstein is probably going to have to be Jekyll and Hyde later on (his monster doubles as the Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, and The Crow). I have no doubt Drac will turn out to be another hunky British monologuist impeccably attired in elegantly distressed Victorian fashion who says things like "the burden of eternal life wears me down like a slow watch, like the taste of withered dying opium addicts, their narcotic blood crawling time to a standstill...."

Second Episode is a big improvement - it gets more down to a set of reversals and twists and seems less about getting its lighting as painterly and haunted. The purplish blue mist of London coal fog in gorgeous compositions of ships in harbor and snug waterfronts is impressive, but the centerpiece Eva Green possession monologue, while a brilliant showcase for a brilliant, nervy performer (her voice sails up and down octaves while her body writhes and contorts and eyes glare with unholy fire) goes on long past our patience or its own effectiveness. By contrast, FX's AMERICAN HORROR STORY might pick up and abandon story threads like an impatient schoolkid but it understands momentum as key, and transgression as a locomotive, and above all it doesn't take itself a tenth as seriously. PENNY is so busy covering the period and its famous characters that it doesn't notice a real person squeezed through. Played by Billie Piper as a de facto heroine streetwalker, she's coughing up blood like a Poe heroine or Doc Holiday, but doesn't complain and not only that, has large measures of bar whiskey for breakfast (Doc, is it you?) with Josh Hartnett's Earp, whose staying at her same inn? They lounge with ease in the saloon window they're written by Eugene Goddamned O'Neill waiting for Hickey and for just a minute there, the show is awesome. It's not trying to be eight ways of macabre at once and winding up paralyzed, waiting on the x while the art director fiddles with the sun-dappled coal dust streaks. These two are in a real scene and it's lovely and vivid and not overwrought or trembling with import.

These kind of character-based critiques don't concern FROM DUSK TIL DAWN.  As Santinico, Eiza Gonzalez is no Eva Green she's got a certain cold allure, even naked but for a golden bronze tan, brown bikini and Aztec shaman blood queen headdress she's always capably holding her own, in charge, using her body to seduce and ensnare men, to believably conjure ancient Mayan deities, to pit brothers against each other, not to be objectified but worshipped, and she's no ham. In DAWN, even big tearful farewells or life and death anxieties are--in the American Carpenter-Hawks tradition-- nicely underplayed (rather than being overly underplayed in the British style of PENNY). If only PENNY's writers were up to the challenge. DAWN goes for the jugular with a laid-back shrug, while DREADFUL, like so many other pieces of 'mature audience' horror hackwork, confuse graphic sex and violence with what being truly dreadful really entails.

POST SCRIPT (6/2/14) - Just saw the fourth Penny Dreadful episode and things are picking up, with a detailed evening at La Grand Guignol that managed to weave together nearly all the disparate threads, as well as a climactic absinthe scene that allows the series' hitherto locked closet door to finally burst open. Can't spoil it of course...