What's Eating You: FOOD OF THE GODS, EMPIRE OF THE ANTS, JAWS OF SATAN, FROGS

Bert I. Gordon, one of the few schlockmeisters whose career spanned both the 1950s 'big bug movie' craze (Beginning of the End, Amazing Colossal Man, Earth vs. the Spider) and the 1970s Jaws eco-horror phase, comes to Shout trailing clouds of toxic bughouse glory in two new Blu-rays this week. Food of the Gods (1976) and Empire of the Ants (1977) are now deep black spanking HD new and they may just save your life --in event of giant pest invasion you at least know what not to do. Flanked with B-sides equal to their terrible majesty (Frogs for Food, and Jaws for Ants), they come to us in deep lovely HD blacks and sparkling color, after nigh under forty years of washed out who cared VHS grays. That's a good thing, for when all else fails (and it sure does), we can admire how now pink natural light beams through the willows and fields of murmuring hemlock. Shout treats these tawdry gems with the same reverence Criterion affords Kurosawa: those shadows in which normal size snakes and large ants hide are now so super deep they're darker than the starkest midday shadows, and the colors and finery-- oh oh my children. I like big bugs and I cannot lie, you know this.

Shout knows it too, for they preserve the subtle grain of real film stock so HD or no these still look like 70s movies. And that's what matters, for there's no reason for these two double features to exist--they are abominations in the eyes of God. But some of us, of a certain age and misanthropic disposition, need them. They deliver a kind of deeper vertigo-inducing version of nostalgia, a post-childhood dread Pavlovian trigger that gets us deep where other monster movies cannot reach.

All nonbelievers beware, however: for there are two problems with these films' coming to Blu-ray. First: the contrast between rear projection and overlays is even more very glaring than ever before: the splices and outlines between the humans and the amok nature backgrounds glow like filaments. Second: seeing any animal--even lower life forms like snakes and rats--killed, stunned, betrayed, abashed or even annoyed... is abhorrent to modern sensitized sensibilities. Partially because of movies like these (see my rant on Day of the Animals), part of the 70s naturalist horror kick, we've learned to care about nature. Now Humane Society stooges monitor every animal shot--even the rats and insects get body doubles for crushing scenes--but I sincerely doubt the mysterious BIG had one. And the look of stunned betrayal in the eyes of some of these vermin is crushing in ways it wasn't back in the time of these films' release. To redress the wrong, and spare the sensitive unseemly sights, I've given each film an unofficial PETA rating. First up...

FOOD OF THE GODS

(1976) - Dir. Bert I. Gordon

**1/2 / PETA: D

Food has one of those weird casts that makes you wonder if the great Bert I. Gordon's obsession with giant little things and little giant things is the result of a vision disorder like strabismus that makes it impossible to tell how big or small something is vs. proximity (i.e. are children really small, or just far away?). How else can one explain his decision to cast the ever-squinting, frizzy blonde, cap-toothed, and suspiciously diminutive ex-child evangelist Marjoe Gortner as an NFL quarterback? Why, he's no bigger than a fourth down prayer! Yet there he is, practicing his throws on a frosty field (or is it pollution? Freeze frame!) before trundling off to a remote woodsy island with two of his teammate buddies. They go hunting on horseback - as NFL stars are wont to do, and the ever-dependable Jon Cypher is soon-offed by giant wasps. First they look like toys bouncing on a string and then like superimposed cartoons of wasps (you can see through them), and then--finally attaining opaqueness-- big rubber wasps with their pipe cleaner legs carefully entwined around his backpack.

Marjoe will not let Cypher's death stand! He must have vengeance against the hive! And so the film is off and running. Old Gortner climbs into the self-righteous power trip seat favored by so many self-appointed leaders in crisis situations and is soon battling a giant rooster, more wasps, Ida Lupino as a farmer's wife, and--playing the rote capitalist who wants to monetize the situation-- a bloated, hungover Ralph Meeker in a black raincoat.

Meeker's on the island to get a look at the weird white stuff coming out of the ground like bubblin' crude... the titular food, which might have profit potential as a growth hormone. One thing's for sure, it works! But without a rooster the size of a UPS truck (like the one Marjoe kills while investigating Ida Lupino's barm) there's nothing to keep the rats away, or the giant caterpillars from biting her hand! Argggh!

Gamely moving these big blood-doused rubber worms around in her hand, to try and get them to seem like they're wiggling on their own and that she's trying to shake them off (while she's clearly holding onto them), Ida taps into the same 'go for broke' madness of Bela Lugosi wrestling the rubber octopus in ED WOOD. Her moan of horror seems to encompass the entirety of her fall off the A-list into old age, an almost delirium tremens style moan of low-key horror. So howl, Ida! You have found in your pain the consolation of its full expression; it is only for this expression that the pain was ever for...

...teeth that could blind Erik Estrada

As Meeker's nonplussed secretary, Pamela Franklin disguises her British accent and real-life pregnancy (I'm guessing) by never getting out of her white leather trench coat (above), even indoors. That's gotta be it, for she was such a thin little hottie in The Legend of Hell House, just three years earlier, holding her own against seasoned pros like Roddy McDowall. Here she just tries not to hold back in order to not act circles around ole Marjoe even with clunky dialogue like "I'd like... for you to make love to me." Meanwhile, the much better-preserved Belinda Balaski, as a stranded mobile home camper, pretends to be pregnant, and young husband Tom Stovall worries about her as the giant rats start closing in around their camper faster than a drunken Cornish lynch mob.

But then... endless shots of rats getting shot (for real) with pink paint in the face and body (is it supposed to be blood?) begins to weary the soul. even if it's not fatal and can be washed off, the look of shock and betrayal in their eyes is dispiriting. For mauling Gordon's well-crafted miniature hippie vans and farm shacks with such aplomb, those rats deserved better. As I wrote about Day of the Animals, part of the appeal of these movies (for me at least) tends to be in how the abstraction of the animal attacks (arms about to be bit suddenly appearing to have a pillow crammed under the sleeve; animal trainers doubling for actors; dogs wagging their tales even while growling and baring their fangs) gives the feeling the animals are just good-naturedly roughhousing - the violence implied solely through the rapidfire edits - and if the animals know it's all in fun, so do we, and it makes enjoying the film easier (and no more or less scary). Watching that all-in-fun look vanish in an instant in the startled rat eyes when they get pelted by the pink pellets drains the joy de vivre tout suite from Food of the Gods, that is unless you really hate rats.

That said, many of the better overlays between miniatures, rats, and people still have a kind of chilling immediacy, they feel real and inescapable, maybe because they're big but not so big they can't fit through a window or attack you from ontop of the kitchen counter. Add the (real size) giant chicken and rat heads that menace the cast, the giant caterpillar monsters that claw up poor Ida Lupino's hand, and the hilarious climactic 'flood' when Marjoe blasts open the 'dam', and this bad film shines like pure crap gold, the kind we wouldn't see again until Sharknado. God bless the Gordons, and forgive them for all their sins...especially against the rats... future Indras, all.

FROGS

(1972) - Dir George McGowan

*** / PETA - B

I always thought Frogs rather overrated--most of my horror critic friends love it--but that was on the small screen, wherein its colors felt drab and faded by time and low res cathode rays, its lovely nature reduced to green and brown blurs offset by a sickly yellow for interiors and the tediously flat red white and blue of Ray Milland's birthday party decorations. Now that it's on the Blu-ray, however, the voracious amphibian and reptile and insect footage is beautiful, creepy, and poisonous with ambiguity. The interior mansion shots that used to oppress my childhood with their faded Colonial drabness now glow with a sun dappled pink that gives the whole film a 'twilight of mankind' champagne pop cheeriness.

The lead hunk (you know he's going to be a conservationist) is laconic Sam Elliott (sans mustache) as Pickett, just an easygoin' nature photographer paddling around along the edge of the Florida's Eden State Park, snapping away when his canoe gets rammed by the prodigal son (Adam Roarke) who--with his sexy sister Karen (Joan Van Ark)--is trying out their new outboard motor during a lull in their duties fulfilling wheelchair bound patriarch (and pollutant enthusiast) Ray Milland's regimented birthday expectations at their nearby island mansion. Soaking wet from his splash, Pickett is invited home to change, meet the patriarch, and participate in the 'fun.'

Since he gets a come hither look from foy Karen, naturally Pickett says yes. Soon he's meeting the gang and finding a real kindred soul in Milland. One of the more unique relationships in horror, their connection forms a kind of off-center parallel maybe to Ben Quick and Will Varner in The Long Hot Summer or Col. Rutledge and Marlowe from The Big Sleep, each recognizing in the other a capable outdoorsy plain-spoken hombre. There's also a bisexual vibe in Elliott where we can't tell if Pickett's going to shack up with Karen or Roarke. As seductions and simmering resentments accrue over cocktails, deaths accrue via various (normal size) lizards, snakes, and arachnids outside in the greenhouse or around the grounds as one person goes looking for the one who never came back from looking for someone else. Meanwhile, no one can get any sleep or hook up, for the mansion is also besieged by frogs, croaking away at night, in a deafening cockblock serenade.

Blu-ray image much better

Another plus: so the constant frog song can ring out proud, we're treated to the absence of composer Les Baxter's usual on-the-nose loungey Mickey Mousing. Eerie silences cast a strange reverie-style mood over the proceedings. I'm especially grateful that Milland's wheelchair bound patriarch is more than a one-dimensional capitalist monster. In fact, he's almost heroic in his determination to carry through with the tradition of his birthday, irregardless of how many family members he's losing to the local alligators, frogs, snakes, and spiders. G'head Ray, you golden patriarch, and get that cake!

Meanwhile, they even go for a racial subtext, as the black maid and butler share a coffee at night with the youngest son's black girlfriend and though, true to cliche, they're the first to insist on leaving to the mainland when all the shit goes down, they all go with dignity, common sense and concern rather than cowardice.

The servants' leaving also signifies when the film really comes into its own: sort of like the climax of Orca or Jaws, now it's just the white man and the all-devouring natural world, like it was always meant to be. No witnesses, sides, or seconds, just like the old days. Not for nothing is the clan's name Crockett, for this is the raccoons' revenge for his coonskin cap. The escape for the rest of the clan doesn't go well either: a snapping turtle devours a defenseless Lynn Borden; Sam Elliott bashes the surface of the water with an oar; Adam Roarke swims out to his boat after something chews off the line... And then... well, don't worry - it's too late to change our ways now. Just savor the mix of nice things: the gorgeous willow trees, sun-streaked fog and mist; the dialogue like "pollution control on the paper mill will cost us millions" dropped into normal conversation rather than underlined in thick script marker; the incongruous mixture of wildlife that would only be literally found dead down in Florida (like the New Mexican gecko); the sense of wonder how in hell they effects crew are going to pull off a believable death by a handful of normal-size frogs; and most of all, where that dog came from just in time for the end.  Poor dog. Where did he come from? Dogs never do get a break in horror. The frogs get the best of everything. Also, Milland really needs a different record to play other than lame Sousa record to convey his eternal defiance of nature, but wily old Les Baxter would have his pomp. 

EMPIRE OF THE ANTS

(1977) Dir Bert I. Gordon

***1/2 / PETA - N/A

Shore-swept toxic sludge has a curious effect on local ant-life, as you might guess. But this you won't: the ant queen's pheromones are discussed in a foreshadowing prologue as "a mind-bending substance that forces obedience." What does that have to do with a slumming Joan Collins trying not to break a nail while rooking time share commitments out of a charter boatload of retired and/or attractive freeloaders? Well, Collins' sales pitch is pretty shrill. So maybe she can pick up some pointers from that bigger queen. As it is, rather than seduce and coerce obedience through her pheromones, she bitches at and berates potential customers in a brutal stereotype of the 'lady boss' of the once-gorgeous / still-vain cougar/puerella aeterna archetype, trying to recapture the undivided male attention by trying too hard to spurn it. Spitting out harsh 'quips' like "You are terrific in the sack, and that almost justifies the salary that I have to pay you." Or, to the charter boat captain (Edward Power): "I'm paying damn good money to rent this boat!"

Hey, I'll defend the Joan Collins oversexed bitch in the boardroom capitalist to the end--she's one of the sexiest decade's powerful female icons-- but it would help if the writers had some notion how to make her time share rooking sound convincing. Her sell is so hard it betrays the fact that she yells at herself in the mirror at night because she has no kid to bully and can't make her diamonds cry. Not that I'm complaining. Joan rules! And Empire of the Ants is one of my guilty trash favorites. Shhh! The paltry 3.8 score it gets on imdb.com might be enough to put casual viewers off their toxic feed but I'm betting that would go up to at least a 4.2 once detractors get a load of how vividly this tough old queen has cleaned her antennae for Blu-ray. Even if the dark shadows the drones used to hide in are now less dark, thus exposing the two contrasting film grains, it's still the Plan Nine of giant ant movies. In sum, it is beyond perfect. Even scrubbed clean, those pheromones command obedience!


Now that I've had time to think it over, I'm glad old Bert I. Gordon didn't suss out the subtextual links between Collins and the queen ant, each trying to control the world around them through top bitch manipulation. You can always depend on Gordon to keep things at a very primitivist level as far as adult behavior, missing even the most glaring subtextual veins in his blindfolded jackhammering. In omitting all subtlety and nuance he creates a grand framework for our own projections.

Like all 70s disaster movies, there's a cross section of Americans (Poesidon Adventure template) thrown together on a high-pressure life or death trek. This lets older stars and younger B-listers intermingle and each get a chance at owning a scene while their careers pass each other up and down the hill. There's never enough time to rehearse such a large cast, so the actors all seem like they're genuinely meeting each other for the first time, while at the same time having second thoughts about the whole venture. But there are no cell phones in the 70s on which to call an Uber or their agent, and there's no roads, so no escape. So... without a better suggestion coming from their unresponsive director, the marooned cross section of people who signed on for a 'free boat ride lunch' time share pitch play it like a Love Boat episode: a frumpy middle aged office drone (Jaqueline Scott) who got fired after blah blah years for Mr. Blah, with nothing to show for her years but a blah blah, hits on the grouchy captain; a rich girl (Brooke Palance) wishes her lame husband (Robert Pine!) wasn't such as a rapey coward; cute Coreen (Pamela Shoop) hits on the sulky pretty boy Joe (John David Carson) immediately after Pine tries to rape her.  Talk about bouncing back! And through it all Joan bellows through a bullhorn about where tennis courts will be and serves them more meals than there are hours in the day.

That said, the film wastes no time: the first casualties are swiftly followed by the giant ants storming the boat, which explodes, stranding them all in this remote section of beach, and, well a fire keeps the ants away,  but well, then, it starts to rain. And then, well... dinner is truly served.

As for EXTRAS... Well, considering how under-directed the actors are in his films, it's probably no surprise that Gordon is so awkward and taciturn as an audio commentary guy. It's like pulling teeth getting anecdotes and when they do come they tend to be utterly banal, and often wrong, like his declaration that Welles used Randolph Hearst's real name in Citizen Kane. Or the nonsense (hopefully) story of personally going down to Panama to shoot footage of a special kind of fire ants (but the footage looks like normal nature show stock footage; most ants seem to have been shot inside an ant farm and then matted into the main image, which is fine. I like the effect of seeing them look like they're crawling up into the sky around the terrified humans (above), standing on hind legs (the glass their leaning on invisible). And I also like the big 'actual size' fake ant heads used for the mandible biting scenes here better even than the ones in Them! They're actually scarier for being relatively smaller, the size of a sports car rather than a van. With their jet black eyes and hairy heads down low to the ground, their jagged mandibles seem infectious and sharp. They have a real grim dirty angry menace about them. But I don't think Bert intended any of that, which is probably why it's one of the few things that's effective. Here's a man so dependent on termites he never buys dry wood.

JAWS OF SATAN 

(1981) Dir Bob Claver

*** / PETA = **

Who'd of thought the second best film of the whole lot would turn out to be the most unknown, a bona fide gem of badness, a too-late entry in the Jaws-Exorcist ripoff hybrid race (The Car, Killdozer)? It's also known as King Cobra but Jaws of Satan is far more on-the-nose as to its cross-pollinated rip-off sources (even more specific would be Jaws of the Omen). For as you can guess, the devil this time is a snake, hibernating since being venerated in the Age of the Druids but allowed to return every 666 years to pick a fight with one lucky holy roller. Expository dialogue lets us know that faith-deprived priest Fritz Weaver is conveniently descended from a bunch of druid burning Christians, so is probably the right priest for the honor. "Considering your family history, father, I sure would like to have a look at that coffee cup," says the local tasseographer during a dinner party, perhaps little aware that the then-current rage for coffee filtration has rendered that form of divination fruitless. But soft! The devil cobra is coming and it has telekinetic powers. It can even bite people just by banging its head on an 'invisible' terrarium wall (the director can't be bothered cleaning the plexiglass that separates cameraman and snake so we see all the tiny cracks and smudges). The serpent then stops the train at the town where his old druid-burner descendant nemesis' current incarnation (poor old Fritz) waits, and you can start counting the beats toward the inevitable showdown.

If Jaws of Satan was any good it would be terrible, but since it's terrible, its terrific, because, you see, unlike other actors who channel their anger at their agent into their performance (such as Lupino and Meeker in the above praised Food of the Gods), Weaver refuses to to perform any other emotion than self-contempt and weariness. Every line feels like he's trying to do such a bad job he gets fired so he can go home and soak in a hot tub. "You know, God, he can be quite a 'trip,' too" he counsels a 'tempted' nerdy kid who's clearly never gotten high in his life. Weaver's even less convinced of his own bullshit than we are. What good is it being a materialist priest? Glug glug glug. Guess it's Nack do the toddle... You know, drinking can be quite a trip, too!


Meanwhile, the Satan snake has motivated the local serpent population to rise up from its rocky crevasses and attack the humans. Deaths by rattlesnake bites mount; small cobras show up out of nowhere.

The best sequence occurs in a late afternoon leaf-blown graveyard, where an ancient text is read to Weaver by his credulous monsignor (Norman Lloyd, stealing the film, though no one's even guarding it) and soon Weaver's being chased around the local graveyard by King Cobra, all while all while normal small town life goes on around him, oblivious to his predicament, and he's eventually he's trapped down in an open grave while the snake tries to get at him through a closed gate. Only then doth Weaver seem awake-- and the sequence is so badass creepy it feels kind of natural, like it could happen to anyone. King cobras really do chase their prey like that, so I'm told. People watching from far away wouldn't see the snake down there in the leaves, just you running like an idiot. It's a rare thing to see in a horror film, that sense of horror being all a matter of proximity to indifference.

The other star of the film, the Chief Brody role, is Gretchen Corbett (the spooky girl running around the graveyard in the highly recommended Let's Scare Jessica to Death) as the town's only doctor. Recognizing the big bite on the dead psychic's face is not indigenous, she calls in a good-looking young herpetologist (Jon Korkes) from the big city, but the gross, corrupt coroner has already burned the body, on the mayor's orders! A cobra loose in town could start a panic! And worse, could kill the buzz for the new dog track. It's going to be "the biggest thing that ever happened in this state," assures the mayor.

Damn, what kind of lame state are we in? Dog track? Really?

Applegate, Christina

And there you have it. You know by now that dog track opening is going to be a disaster, that is if the budget allows for enough fleeing extras in the stands (or dogs, for that matter). I don't think we see either. But we do see a very young Christina Applegate as the corrupt financier's daughter. She gets the film's only other spooky moment: wandering around the yard on a dark Lewton-esque night in search of her kitty, the wind rustling the grasses and trees around her. With just the wind in the leaves and her little voice calling for the kitty, it's genuinely chilling.

But the rest of the time, the details are so ludicrous as to defy all explanation. The supposedly independent doctor lady Corbett needs herpetologist Korkes to ride to the rescue when a rattlesnake crawls into her bed (she could easily throw a sheet over it) and when he finally arrives this professional snake handler needs to use five different snake-wrangling devices and a gun to finally dispatch it, only after pretending to struggle with it, for like six minutes, all so they have an excuse to sleep together. Bro, if--even after you have a loop around its neck--you--an expert snake handler--still have to really fight against a rattlesnake's power--and then, wait... wait... finally blow its head off (getting snake blood on the sheets), rather than throwing into a pillow case and releasing it into the garden, and it's the kind of innocuous serpent that even Ray Milland in a wheelchair could kill or incapacitate without looking up from his red white and blue birthday cake, then, well, you're going to be very good in bed either.

wait for it....

So now the couple is together, the evidence of something unusual going on confirmed, but the mayor still ignores them: the dog race track grand opening must not be delayed. The "biggest thing to happen to this state" turns out to be the kind of cheaply rendered event that Aaron Spelling might stage for a Charlie's Angels episode: a dixieland jazz band and about ten extras mill around a sussed up high school track field. Naturally we expect a snake amok in a stadium, people fleeing and trampling children as they fight for the exit, Satan motivating the greyhounds to attack the band, etc. Instead, all that happens is Christina Applegate gets bit by a snake while looking around in the janitor's closet. And that's the end. I don't even think we see a single dog. Nice!

Meanwhile, Weaver, converted by his graveyard scare like a born-again Scrooge, tunes heavenly antennae to yonder caverns for the foretold showdown, shouting "SayyyyTANNnn!" over and over in a perfect imitation of Oron Welles' shouting for his footman in his 1948 Macbeth .

Great stuff. Aside from some real dead snakes and a distasteful episode involving a sleazy would-be rapist biker hired to terrorize Corbett, there's nothing to dampen the overall mood of joyful disregard as the film travels the pre-set pathways of its chosen namesake/s. And then at the very end, after the flames of righteousness have burned the reels away, you can still see the wire that held the snake erect, like a thin little curse finger aimed right at those on imdb who gave this a 3.6. They might be right, but right only gets you so far. Jaws of Sayyyy-TAN goes farther.

Last Year's Masks: THE PURGE, THOR: THE DARK WORLD + ABSENTIA

Mainstream movies have become mash-ups now, their big budgets making an original thought too risky to have except in the abstract. So THE PURGE is HUNGER GAMES + HALLOWEEN divided by LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT + HOSTEL = a dystopian future that uses a mischief night-style no rules (no cops) bloody free-for-all as an excuse for wiping out the homeless, bringing population levels under control, boosting sales of home security systems, settling old grudges and/or hunting 'the most dangerous game.'  It shares HOSTEL's grim nihilistic world view that all humans are really homicidal sadists at heart, and only the rich liberals get to sit it out behind steel shutters. So far so good, but like so many good premises before it, PURGE never dares to side with the violent. It has to all boil down to a rich white noble yuppie family with a poor sweaty black man duct taped to a chair, which then leads to moralistic hand-wringing as to whether surrender him to the masked yuppie marauders outside who had him all trussed up like a pinata before he escaped down their rich street hollering for help and convincing Ethan Hawke's typically naive liberal son to open the shutters for him. The masked yuppies are pissed and so camp out on Hawke's porch demanding their man. Now, that might sound cool but why do they need to wear masks at all on a night murder is legal? And why don't they just hunt down someone else, instead of wasting precious 'Purge' hours wandering around outside like a mix of Whit Stillman preppies and the British drunks in STRAW DOGS, dressed in ur-creepy masks lifted from THE STRANGERS. And finally you're like oh brother, can't we FF to the final bloodletting? (We did).

In other words, despite a novel premise it just falls back on trite civics lessons, it all but ends with the cast wagging their fingers at you for allegedly enjoying the carnage. But unlike say FUNNY GAMES there's nothing at play behind the bourgeois pose, so the wife is a hot, willowy shoulder length hair brunette thing (Leana Headey) in perfectly-fitting white slacks that compliment her perfectly round long-stemmed burgundy wine glass, like she was ordered out of a West Elm catalog, and of course the dad is Ethan Hawke--say no more (only Linklater seems to know how to wake him)--and the nerdy liberal likes to build robot cameras on wheels, so you just know those things are going to come through in a climactic moment later on. There are some nice touches like people putting blue flowers on their porches in honor of the Purge (a kind of Christmas tree for state-sanctioned murder!) and good use of 'tick-tock momentum,' but the shots of masked figures standing silently in the dark backgrounds are by now cliche, and the plot's over-reliance on Voight-Kampf empathy test double fake-out machina climaxery is groan-inducing. FEAR tread a similar climactic territory and bravely stepped outside itself to kick gonzo bananas ass, and that movie was ten times better for the presence of Mark Wahlberg playing up the animus core of the sexual anxiety dread of it all. That film was bright enough to realize the villain needs to be the star. He only gets one night a year to make it work, and so this one night he's the fucking star not you, Ethan!! RAARRGHGHH!

And that's the kind of animus dread the film needs. If, for example, one of the liberal family members had been all keen to do some killing of their own, there might be some counter-currents to the lefty posturing; but there aren't, and sp the only character worth a damn is the main villain played with eerie grace by Rhys Wakefield (he's Australian, no surprise considering his Heath Ledger-ish psycho flair) and he's shut out of the house for most of the film, because you know, the film presumes we'd rather hang with dad than run amok on mischief night. And the idea that Hawke could outslug him in the finale is offensive.

Like so many 'weaker' versions of this story, THE PURGE confuses 'true' morality with hippie do-goodism. Ethan Hawke and writer-director James DeMonaco are trying to make an EL DORADO to go with their RIO BRAVO that was their ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 remake. Dude, you ain't never gonna touch the Carpenter or the Hawks! Carpenter's 1978 original ASSAULT was made on no money but oh, that awesome electronic score, and the realization of true morality, which is a code expressed between people via cigarettes and dwindling shell supplies not finger-wagging and hand-wringing. Dududadah... DUHdududadah... Dududdadah... DaDududaha.

THE PURGE has earned $64 million so far and cost a mere three, and so a sequel is naturally in the works. The only reason I even rented it was I'd gotten it mixed up with YOU'RE NEXT... and that's why you never let a stranger in your house (without first looking him up on imdb).

Then there's the thing with the new THOR movie, THE DARK WORLD (2013). I was excited to see Natalie Portman again because she and Chris Hemsworth had such great chemistry in the first film, but both seem drenched in bronzer, much older than the two years since the last film, and hungover. That leaves Kat Dennings to supply all the human complexity and witty patter and she steals all her scenes, deftly avoiding the bronzer's brush and committee rewrite overthink in the process. The other saving grace in DARK: the complex arc of fraternal bonding and jealousy between trickster archetype Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and adoptive brother Thor. If Hemsworth's Nordic god lacks a lot of the Valhalla character arcing he had under Kenneth Branagh's wing in the first installment (he's now weened of brashness), Hiddleston's Loki is still a fully complex and unrepentant, with extra depth awarded as he's allowed to have loved his mother and be full of equal anguish to Thor after she dies). A sublime mixture of Sex Pistols swagger and Royal Shakespeare posh, Hiddleston wakes Hemsworth from his CGI slumber in their big fraternal moments together.

Alas, Dennings and Hiddleston aren't around nearly enough and a lot of the rest of it seems coasting on fumes it stole from other films' exhaust pipes. Portman especially, clad in steampunk-meets-Renaissance Faire ensembles, posed against pretty, off-world skies and burnished gleaming CGI furniture from the Maxfield Parrish collection, looks like she's just beamed over from Lucas' Star Wars outtakes as a favor. One of the things that makes Marvel movies great is they usually don't open up with long elaborate prefaces about far-away armies battling the forces of darkness like we're supposed to be instantly invested in all that overly familiar backstory scrolling. That's the kind of thing Uwe Boll or George Lucas or Paul W.S. Anderson do, not Marvel... until now.

I'm not blaming anyone for the dull sameness --acting in all that blue screen must be like wading through a swamp. In the first film (it made my 2011 top ten!), director Kenneth Branagh kept the Shakespeare underpinnings alive and resonant below the manly muscles and CGI, but two dudes; Alan Taylor and James Gunn direct this one and together they bury those underpinnings deeper than even the zombie bard himself could reach.

That said, I've been a big fan of these Marvel films overall, the last THOR and most X-MEN (all but #3) especially, reward multiple viewings and never take themselves too seriously or lose their focus on both mythic / political / and personal levels, and keep their heroes and villains in shades of grey (unlike DC's dry civics lesson lecturing and vigilante headlines). Marvel scripts are often things of beauty, boiling vast prequels of exposition down to a few droll quips and no one is all the way hero or villain - the good guys have flaws: narcissism, drinking, insecurity, anger issues, passive aggressive relationship avoidance, and the bad guys have soft spots, stray rays of compassion, fraternal history and charisma --often all that separates them is one or two choices made along the way, the selfish vs. altruistic, a hard choice any of us could fail to make given the circumstances.

That said, THOR: THE DARK WORLD lapses into DC self-importance and narrative-deadening, with exposition of almost DA VINCI CODE-levels, and the whole aesthetic of the 'Dark Elves' looks like the filmmakers think fantasy franchises are there to combine and pilfer from rather than be inspired by. These 'elves' drive vertical tie-fighters and look like Klingon Mordor Palpatine Voldemorts with albino ponytails and masks that make them welcome at THE PURGE. Asgard looks so much like the Emerald City or Mongo in the 1980 FLASH GORDON that when it's zippy force field goes up you just know that shit must be intentional.  Still, the first THOR was made by people who understood how the mythic and personal were the same at the same time, all the time, whereas this film doesn't know what personal experience means, only what happens in other movies. Even Asgard looks different, there's less gravity-defying double sided flat earth wonder --in favor of an elaborate activated charcoal-look, as if everything was strategically petrified and bronzed. Weaponized, with trimmings, rather than in the first film, when it was merely wondrous.

From top: Emerald City, Asgard, Mongo

These "Dark Elves" only have one saving grace: their nihilistic devotion to wiping out all life in all seven dimensions, a noble pursuit reminding me a lot of how I feel when I'm super cranky and hung over and trying to take a nap while kids scream outside my window and trucks back up beep beep beep beep and car alarms go off all up and down 7th Avenue for no reason. Oh to know that some power might just shut it all down, forever. But unless you really make that clear, that kind of cranky motivation, why bother? The motivation for wanting eternal darkness has to be something we can understand, why should we consider these elves anything other than pixels or their cause anything but trite groupthink backstory? Branagh let whole scenes unfold in the first film, start to end: the men went out drinking; SHIELD got in everyone's way trying to understand and control what was going on; there were diners and a sense of place and time. Here we understand less than SHIELD did in the first film, but at least they cared. Where are they now? Why aren't they concerned with time dilation? Does ABC keeps them too busy?

Luckily there is a great finale, involving a big battle that rages across numerous dimensions and planets via holes in the aligned realms, wherein gravity disappears or fluctuates --and all the ancient monuments turn out to have been built during this same alignment to point the way to when it would happen again! Dude, that's some ancient alien shit, explaining how all these megalithic stones were moved without electricity, but they gloss right over it. Onto the big finale! It's rushed and too pleased with its CGI landscapes and steampunk landing gears and red glowing forge grenades, but the final seven plane battle is so tight that I was, there in that overly-heated theater, for just a moment, brought giddily back to the Jack Kirby-drawn and Stan Lee-scripted brain-melters of the Silver Age. And even bad Marvel is better than most. They can't all be directed by Joss Whedon, Kenneth Branagh, Jon Favreau, Bryan Singer or J.J. Abrams. Can they?

From top: Prometheus, Dark World, Potter, Absentia

Speaking of dark worlds, ABSENTIA (2010): Katie Parker and Courtney Bell are two adult but still young sisters, one of whom is pregnant in the process of declaring her husband dead after seven long years in the titular legal limbo; the younger one (Parker) comes to help with the pregnancy, this after some trouble with drugs and now she's allegedly clean. She jogs in the morning and on her route goes through a mysterious tunnel near their apartment that makes her think of Billy Goats Gruff. Turns out, well, I shan't spoil it, but the movie gets the lack of visible monster right, so the terror comes from the anxiety of not knowing entirely what we're dealing with. I saw it alone on Saturday as it just happened to be on Showtime while I was writing the first part of this post, and just listening to the great rapport between the sisters from the TV behind me lured me in. I was alone in the apartmetn and it was getting dark faster than I was prepared for, and the film ingeniously dug deep into my ancient fears, the way only BLAIR WITCH could do before.

There is a certain type of person who sees a ghost, a demon, or an alien and thinks they saw a ghost --they freak out and maybe even call the cops like cops can do anything -- and there's a type of person who, like me, sees a ghost and presumes he's hallucinating. I might have seen a dozen real ghosts, demons, aliens by now and just cited acid flashbacks, a bad flu, lack of sleep or too much of it (as in my well-documented 1991 demon visitation), and this idea is well-used in ABSENTIA: this pregnant wife's therapist has her believing that seeing her missing husband everywhere is just a sign of stress, borne of waiting out the necessary seven years in the missing person file before he can be declared legally dead so she can move on with her life. So even though we see him standing behind the shrink, and we see her see him, she pretends not to see him, presuming it a hallucination, etc. Meanwhile the sister thinks maybe there's some fifth-dimensional portal that troll insect monsters are coming through and abducting humans, but the cops can't write that up in their report, so you must be on drugs... again!

The fear of the unknown plus the excellent termite detail in the sisterly rapport missing from most interactions in DARK WORLD or THE PURGE or any other 'unknown'-courting film combine to deliver a slow simmer anxiety and Parker has this great ease with her body language and slow dawning beauty. You barely notice her at first and then suddenly wham, you're in love with her. ABSENTIA the film is the same way; it doesn't really ape any other horror movie, doesn't hold onto the familiar handrails of its genre like THE PURGE or THE DARK WORLD do. The small human scale, naturalistic low-key lighting, solid sisterly rapport, the trips to lawyer offices that underscore the legal system's inability to protect the present from the darkness, it all snaps shut behind us, leaving only a vaguely ominous two-chord score and such a successful, intense expression of the less-is-more argument it gave me a chill right down to the bone.

 I was so unnerved after the end, in fact, that once it was over I had to race through my dark living room to turn on the lights and pop in one of my 'safety net' movies, in this case my always-nearby DVD of the 1957 classic, THE BEGINNING OF THE END, to get some feeling of reassuring closure. Nothing says you're safe and sound quite like watching Peter Graves empty a tommy gun at rear-projected grasshopper. In 50's monster movies, at least, seeing is never the same as believing, and thank God.