24-hours of Netflix Streaming Horror--A Curated List of 16 Weird, Spooky Wonders

The all-night horror marathon --a long-standing tradition wherever Halloween traditions are solidly entombed in the crypt of cinematic history. The idea behind it is simple: the longer you stay up, the more films you watch, the deeper into late night / early morning you go, the creepier it gets as more people fall asleep and the night gradually becomes yours and yours alone and consensual reality fades and you move inside the screen, and your date follows a creepy bunny out of the theater down the sleep arson rabbit hole, no wait, that's you, a half-dreamer / half-watcher and the movie and your unconscious merge and characters in the film look right at you, talk to you, freak you out. You turn around and when you look again you just see an empty couch onscreen, and you're holding a candelabra and walking down a dark hall. And there's no one awake to hear you scream, because you put the volume down low to not wake them.

At college they had one of these festivals every year and after the first few hours they stopped taking tickets at the door and half the crowd went home, weary and irritable. By dawn it was only the hardcore, and the people working the projector. Then I'd sneak in, armed with flask and dilated pupils. There was nothing quite as satisfying as creeping across a deserted campus at the first crack of dawn, coming into the darkened theater to find THE TINGLER had just begun... If you have Netflix though, you can skip having to out your boots on to slog across campus. All you have to do is clear your que and line them up: each film is hand-selected for each particular time of evening, night and morning and afternoon, and to follow one another organically, like a good mix tape. Because if you have a sizable DVD collection as I do, then you know it can become paralyzing to choose the next film, fumbling through your bookshelves, scrolling endlessly through your instant libraries.

It's also annoying when you stumble on a cool list of weird movies online, read about one you never heard of and want to see, but can't find it. So you put it in your Netflix que and by the time it comes you forgot why you wanted to see it! Well, with this list you can forget about the options, the Acidemic Horror festival has you covered (Presuming all or any of these films are still up on streaming by the time you get this) 

And special Note: there's NO torture porn or sexual assault or slapstick, or animal abuse,  just the spine-tingling spookiness (and occasional lesbian cannibalism) that carries the tingling electric current along the soul's angsty wires. So dig, trust, and stay up so late you're up early --and with a little clean-up (exchange the empty whiskey bottles for cereal bowls) no one will be the wiser. Heh.

5:00 PM - ABSENTIA
(2010) Dir. Mike Flanagan

Start with this one, right as the sun is going down-- and don't worry about it's deceptively slow pace at first. Flanagan's film takes it's time getting started but it lures you in via the lived-in natural rapport between Katie Parker and Courtney Bell as two sisters who've moved back in together since one of whom is pregnant, and in the final stages of declaring her first husband dead (after seven long years in the titular legal limbo). The younger one (Parker), recently off drugs, is there to help with the pregnancy; she also jogs every morning and her route goes through a mysterious tunnel that recalls Billy Goats Gruff in a deceptively innocuous way.  Turns out, well, I shan't spoil it, since the terror comes from the anxiety of not knowing entirely what we're dealing with. Special highlights include Bell seeing her dead husband everywhere but being conditioned by her therapist to just ignore him (which reminded me of my past delirium tremens). I saw it alone on Saturday as it just happened to be on Showtime while I was writing the first part of this post in the other room; overhearing the great rapport between the sisters, I was soon lured me in. I was alone in the house 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 and Val Lewton have ever done before. And Parker is so good, warm, intelligent, and gutsy that you just might fall in love, in a sisterly way (more).

And the scary, ambiguous ending will make the next film hit even harder:

6:30 PM - HOUSE OF THE DEVIL
(2009) Dir. Ti West

Ingeniously retro and unspooling in practically in real time across one overcast grey late afternoon into the late evening, it's Ti West's best film so far, and maybe one day he'll make something as good (if he remembers the value of tick-tock momentum) and trusts his instincts. The cast is mixed but Jocelin Donahue as cash-strapped college student Samantha is beautiful, believable, and courageous in her doomed grab for a babysitting dollar, and Greta Gerwig sports some great feathered hair and a cozy college sweatshirt; their late afternoon fast food scene brought the ache of an upstate New York fall winter back to my shoulder muscles after a 20 year hiatus. I could feel myself taking a nap with Gerwig afterwards on some crappy dorm twin bed as the sun went down at five 5 PM (before getting up at 8 or so for the evening's inevitable festivities). I could feel the sense of desolation creeping up like tendrils of cold around her broke buddy Samantha. The evenings upstate are so oppressive they don't need Satan lingering in the edges to be mega ominous, and while the film's not perfect (the men are kind of anachronistically miscast--one's too quiet and wussy; the other too Williamsburg hipster snotty) but cult icons Mary Woronov and Dee Wallace smash through to make up the difference in minor roles. The perfect film to watch in the early autumn evening, still recovering from the last film's chill. By the end it's too dark to go out and you'll be too rattled to break away, so just click the Netflix right on into our next selection:

8:05 PM - BLACK SABBATH 
(1963) Dir. Mario Bava

It's the only one of Bava's films, and the only trilogy, I find truly scary - the good, shivery spine tingle kind, especially the Wurdulak segment, which taps into the way family ties can become nooses you don't notice are strangling you 'til you're too oxygen-deprived to even struggle. Strongly suspecting their father (Boris Karloff) has been turned vampire, the family are too conditioned by their rigid social structure to rebel; and the mama can't resist running out in the cold to comfort her pale dead bambino, even stabbing her husband when he tries to restrain her. Did I spoil it? No man, I didn't. PS: The American version presented here is different from the Italian most fans know by heart from the DVD, in a different order, dubbed into English, missing a lesbian undercurrent, but providing instead Karloff's real voice (not in the Italian version) and "Sdenka" (Susy Anderson) is still sexy; so is Rosie (Michèle Mercier, above), gorgeously lit as she prowls the red telephone sequence. The lighting is so gorgeous it's all in a class by itself.

9:30 PM: ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
 (1976) Dir. John Carpenter

It's the HD version and it sure looks good. There's no supernatural element, but just seeing the cop (the brilliantly named Austin Stoker) driving alone through the deserted eerie battle zone of East L.A as the big red sun sets and Carpenter's simple, brilliant theme make it all ominous enough to qualify. Not to mention a gang member shoots a kid through the eye for asking for sprinkles during an ice cream truck hold-up. There was some real concern in the late 70s that gang violence was going to destroy America, so groove on the scariness of the film's moment and how we never hear any of the gang members say a single word. Even here, before HALLOWEEN, Carpenter knew that once a monster talks, smiles, or even laughs, it's over. The small but perfect cast includes Laurie Zimmer as the last truly Hawksian heroine, and Darwin Joston as the cigarette-strapped Hawksian outlaw Napolean Wilson; Carpenter would revisit the concept and reverse the gender/races in in GHOSTS OF MARS, which would make a great choice on this list, too, so be lookin' out for it. 

11 PM: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 
(1968) Dir. George Romero

Two horror films in a row starring a black man? Are we dreaming? No, just lucky--and is it a coincidence both films are classics worth endless repeat viewings? In fact, I got the whole idea for this post while spending the weekend in Harrisburg, PA (a stone's throw from where NIGHT was filmed) and turning to NIGHT via their cable's 'free on demand' channel as a last resort after everyone else was asleep, and even wrongly formatted and badly digitized, and having seen it countless times, on the big screen and in better formats, it blew my mind. From the start it's been the kind of movie that can reach a viewer right through any televisual limitation, surviving in potency even through a million second generation public domain VHS dupes. Aside from a rather wearying stretch of road with a bald uptight dad going on and on about how "the cellar is the safest place" there's nary a dull moment. Even if you just saw it for the 100th time; see it again, Karras, in here... with us.

12:30 AM: LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE 
(1973) Dir. John Hough

Dark, thick atmosphere, decadent art design; red bathed Bava-esque level of warm, dusky, painterly light; the translucently pale skin of two beautifully alive in the firelight reflection of the rose red wallpaper women; the throbbing echo-industrial drone breathing, the score like one long auditory hallucination, sexy as hell and brilliant, creepy, untamed, assertive--it's ideal for the midnight hour of any festival (see more here) when you might be getting as surly as the characters here (the leader starts bickering, belittling and bullying from the get-go).

Or if, like me, you just saw it.. go for (also in HD) and full of crabby yelling...

12: 30 AM (alternate) DAY OF THE DEAD
(1984) Dir. George Romero

1985 was a year of great zombie contention, according to a hazily remembered source, between Romero and co-NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD screenwriter John A. Russo. The result was two different zombie movies coming out at the same time, back when there were NO other zombie movies, outside of Italy, of course, certainly none that would make it a first run cineplex instead of a decaying drive-in. My punk crew and I saw both in one weekend; we loved THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, which really jibed with our then lifestyle (the whole thing with zombies going "Braaainnsss!" is from RETURN). But we found DAY a downer. Half the film is spent in irritable bickering between gonzo scientists (demanding more test subjects; trying to isolate what makes zombies tick) and a bunch of crazed military guys getting understandably tired of being bossed around by civilians. The pissy yelling and soldier Gary Howard Klar's evil snicker-giggling get annoying, but the idea of Bub (Sherman Howard) the first sympathetic zombie, being trained by one of the lead scientist (Richard Liberty) is tellingly Romero, who's always gone more for the social critique underlying the zombie menace and less the comedic self-awareness and suspense generation of most of his imitators. And perhaps the split from Russo hurts them both equally--the humor and speed could help with the social message stuff and vice versa-- the military and the scientists need each other after all. Meanwhile, a cool Jamaican chopper pilot (Terry Alexander) and and an amiable Irish drunk (Jarlath Conroy) have the right idea: set up some inflatable palm trees around a camper at the edge of the mine shaft and grow ganja. Humanity is saved.

2 AM - THE VAMPIRE LOVERS
(1970) Dir. Roy Ward Baker

Not only does it open on one of the worst matte painting castle exteriors in history, it also stands as a great British horror crossroad, straddling the decades with unrepentant 70s sapphic nudity right alongside all the typical 60s Hammer vampire Gothic trappings: florid dialogue, gorgeous Brit actresses, Peter Cushing, all that. Especially if you have a good HD TV, it's worth its precious 2 AM time slot because the colors are sublime. Once you see Peter Cushing's blazing red tunic in the post-credits dance scene, you're like DAMN. That ballroom looks 3-D, and then in comes Ingrid Pitt as Marcela Karnstein, and then two gorgeous fertile looking virgins just waiting to get knocked over like bloodless ten pins. You can float for days. And the time slot is just right for such 'ahem' moments, as guards are beginning to come down.

3:30 AM - THE AWAKENING 
(2007) Dir. Nick Murphy

So now it's late, and all that's left after VAMPIRE LOVERS is a yen to see and hear more British women--so effortlessly smart, confident, commanding (yet not bitchy), sexual (yet not slutty or self-hating) and relaxed compared with American actresses-- as they engage in candle lit supernatural hallway walking and weird noise investigating. Rebecca Hall--as a professional ghost-debunker lured to her existential Waterloo-- fits the bill. The movie around her aims in the direction of THE OTHERS, THE INNOCENTS, DEVIL'S BACKBONE, and THE WOMAN IN BLACK, and she aims for the stalwart company of Olivia Williams, Rhona Mitra, Kate Beckinsale, and Kierra Knightley. Bullseye on both counts. The setting and photography are evocative: a real old mansion of marble and crumbling plaster, greenish blue hues make it seem forever a cloudy dawn. Dominic West is suitably Rochester-esque as the superintendent. There's a kid with a distractingly awful haircut and a creepy dollhouse. You'll guess the twists a mile off, but that doesn't mean you don't like guessing. Just means you're good at it. So drink deep!

5:00 AM - PONTYPOOL (2008)

Dir. Bruce McDonald

It might not be as cold where you are as up in Pontypool, Canada (for the film's set in the dead of winter over one crazy-early morning local news radio time slot) but otherwise there's a lot of eerie meta sameness if you watch this film as the sun comes up outside: the special feeling when you and maybe none or two of your mates and only a few early risers and very very late-to-bedders are up and about in your time zone. You can at five AM spread you auric tentacles out and bask in the collapse of concrete consensual reality, which is like a whole alternate dimension, neither an asleep dream nor a conscious consensual reality. What really makes PONTYPOOL work so well in this mindset/time is the comfortable sense of being in a warm radio booth in a frozen Ontario small town in the ver early early morning --still dark out, and no one else on the street, for the most part... Disgruntled talk radio host Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) begins to think the locals are all fucking with him as the calls coming in from early risers, each new call being more and more panicked, incoherent, and violent. Mazzy is a bit of a crusty handful and his producer (Lisa Houle) shows the wear and tear of humoring such a charismatic, witty but bitter and paranoid dude on a regular basis. The unfolding morning events are so organic it all unfolds in real time for long stretches without the viewer (me at least) noticing any lapse. As the influx of news and shaky narration causes a breakdown in our perception of reality. Since we never leave the basement station, we're left to imagine most of the carnage in a kind of WAR OF THE WORLDS broadcast in reverse.

In other words, while not being specifically super-duper scary, and always kind of funny (even romantic), at other times nearing almost over the line into full-on literary pretension, there's a sense that something meta is always at stake, something that might leak out and affect even your seeing it. It's like you could call in to Mazzy's show and maybe he'd answer onscreen, and tell you to turn down your TV, and you'd both realize you'd probably fallen asleep. It's okay... it's okay... itsooo kayyyy (more)

6:30 AM - HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959)

Dir. William Castle

William Castle prided himself on being the dime store spooky matinee knockoff Hitchcock, and his palpable love of his audience, spookiness and a good time for all help his films endure, like hazy childhood memories of parking lot haunted carnival rides --cheap and loud, but innocuous, fun, and capable of delivering the perfect aftershock of spooky-nostalgia. This his masterwork, as subtle as a skeleton on a string zooming over the heads of the popcorn tossing kiddies (a process called "Emergo" pronounced "emer-joe") and six degrees of terrific. Like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD it has a punchy energy that endures past any amount of public domain dupe streaking. Netflix's copy is adequate (you don't really want it to look too good) and, take it from me, six in the morning is the best time to see it, ideally with a ten year-old kid who just woke up and is sitting on the floor because you've been asleep, taking up his whole couch. Dude, where are you? What happened?

Elijah Cook Jr. gets drunk and babbles the grisly exposition; Vincent Price plays deadly games with his scheming wife (Carol Ohmart); the elderly caretakers, frozen in papier mache poses of carny ride menace, roam around in the dark on wheels; pistols in little coffins are handed out as party favors; there's two severed heads, and an animated noose. (see my first ever site, Dr. Twilite's Neighborhood, which includes this as part of its 50s Canon)

 8 AM - MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1971)

Dir. Gordon Hessler

The Grand Guignol meta effect is pronounced here, as it was in PENNY DREADFUL after it, and MAD LOVE before it. A movie about people performing dastardly deeds onstage is bound to echo. Here the troupe is re-imagining Poe's classic story: Now the ape is the hero and Herbert Lom gets acid thrown on his face (again?) but the audience of semi-bemused royals presume it's part of the show. If the ape looks familiar, it's because it smashed bones for Kubrick in 1968, spooked Joan Crawford as TROG in 1970, and now here it is, much the worse for moths and wear but still the only sympathetic face in the film (Did England have only one gorilla suit? Was it because Hop Toad burned the other one in 1964?).

Either way, it's a great mask, and it's director Gordon Hessler's finest hour, which doesn't say a lot. Unless you like fake mutton chops, ratty period costumes, a script that's just a few dull eps of THE AVENGERS taped together (without the actual Avengers - just the bad guys and their victims) juiced up with lurid tortures, and boozy British actors pretending they remember their lines and marks. Well, the Demoiselles are stunning and dressed in dusky reds and black lace chokers which radiate lovely haunting power in this HD print (making their acid scarring all the more painful); and even at low wattage, sleepy star Jason Robards is better than most; and the period mise en scene is at least at Hammer level toasty; and the budget relatively big (were they poaching other films' sets?) and there's galore post-modern leakage, which is why it's after PONTYPOOL. And if you fall asleep, well dream your way right in.... into the cage, that is, with Erich, the gorilla!

9:30 AM - BLACK SUNDAY (1965)

Dir. Mario Bava

I could do without the schmaltzy concert piano score or the misogynist torture of the opener, but the rest is great, and it's perfect Halloween fare. Lots of long pans and dollies across acres of ancient castle griffins and Barbara Steele standing or lying with eerie alien stillness and holes in her face. Even the 'good' Steele is spooky looking, like a reverse Rondo Hatton! This was Bava's big American calling card, and it's a perfect breakfast movie once the ugly taste of Catholic metal spikes is out of your mouth. The print used here is just so so, but it might inspire you to get the Blu-ray, to better savor the tactile, brilliant cinematography and dreamy dark fairy tale poeticism.

11:00 AM -HELLRAISER  (1987)

Dir. Clive Barker

This was just an innocent list but it's become about the actresses of Great Britain, more cigarette resonant and unabashedly sexual than most American girls depicted in films. this chick Julia (Clare Higgins) has the balls to ask for a brandy from her husband when she's sick, rather than refusing one with a dainty little 'eh' of a sneeze like a Yank bird; and it's pretty great the way she plays with a sadistic smile after her first kill, traumatized but hardly succumbing to the American tendency to play the glum martyr --though even now she says she's afraid of thunder, and worthless husband Larry is like, "I'll protect you!" not realizing she's already done and seen things that would turn him ashen. To bring his brother (her lover) back from the Cenobiteverse, for example, Julia gamely lures a string of grotty 70s-looking British business men on their three martini lunch hour up to the attic, where she bashes their heads in with a hammer so her love can slowly absorb their blood and put some meat on his bones, as it were. Her stepdaughter meanwhile (Ashley Laurence) is getting wise, and endangered by angler fish-esque demons and shit. She's cool too but with her beyond-morality pursuit of pleasure, unapologetic wit and intelligence, and her mature handling her body, Julia's exhibit A in what's lacking in so many similar American ladies, who tend to be youth-worshipping baby doll types until it's too late to dodge the Baby Jane mirror headlights (click this searing yet lovingly indulgent list that tracks them from Lolita to cougar). Think Julia gives a fuck her man's got no lips or skin? She'll shag him anyway just as he wouldn't care if she was in the thick of her period. Fookin' A. Oh yeah, the Cenobites themselves: not my bag, but I respect the analogy towards the masochism of the horror marathon viewer! If you've seen it lately, HELLRAISER 2 is pretty good too, even #3 is watchable, but it's a steep slope, human!

12:30 PM: LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1985)

Dir. Ken Russell

Keep the British lady thing going with this gem from Ken Russell, the colors on the Netflix are gorgeous. Amanda Donohoe is a tour de force, never camping or vamping but nailing, in every possible permutation that verb can be permuted, the most intoxicating upper crust broad since Stanwyck as the Lady Eve. Her snake goddess is what Auntie Mame always aspired to be but could never shake her ostentatious Americana baggahge. Familiar Scottish face Peter Capaldi is a summering archeologist who unearths a dragon skull; Hugh Grant, in his film debut, is great as the local lord-inherit who inherits too the burden of a giant white worm; the two local blonde sisters at the inn (Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis) are fetching, smart, and crafty; and even the hallucination scene has a disturbing potency-- "she had a bad trip" -- notes Grant, after one of the sisters accidentally touches some of hallucinatory snake venom. No one ever says no to a drink anywhere in the film, thank god. Between this and his Chopin opposite Judy Davis in IMPROMPTU, Grant was melting hearts like only Cary Grant used to before him. There's also the hottest older woman-on-paralyzed younger boy seduction in film since Creedence Leonore Gielgud's in TROLL 2. So forgive the occasional silliness, such as the absurd fangs and charmed dancing of Paul Brooke, be charmed yourself.

2 PM - INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

(1977) Dir. Phillip Kaufman

Let's face it, you're never going to make it this far in this bizarro festival -- the 'you' who began doesn't even exist anymore. A slough of cells, a weariness, probably passing out, falling asleep, and when you wake up, the you back in the cool raro moments at the crack of dawn with HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL are long gone. It's cool. I get it. Move on if you must, but make sure it's still you and there's not a shell of a being that was once or will be you under your pool table or cooling in your sauna, or in your garden, or in the crawlspace, or under your bed. And then put this on the 'stream and join the flow of ditrates and bata. And then read Poe's William Wilson. And weep...

And let's just say the HD print on Netflix looks damned good, which is important as Michael Chapman's photography is of that great 70s urban texture dilapidated period (he also did TAXI DRIVER), filled with great moments of alienation. San Francisco makes an ideal crucible for the dehumanization of 20th century society, the urban disconnect from your closest neighbors, and the cast includes: Leonard Nimoy as a pop psychologist; Brooke Adams and Donald Sutherland as health inspectors on the run; Jeff Goldblum and a pre-ALIENS / post-BIRDS Veronica Cartwright as their mud bath-slangin' friends; and even Kevin McCarthy and Robert Duvall in moments of cameo stunt casting. See it with someone you love and then wonder...

4:00 PM - YOU'RE NEXT (2013)

Dir. Adam Wingard

Let's end on a cheerful, non-supernatural note... Scrappy Sharni Vinson is a great final-ish girl, full of wily Australian gumption in this tale of a besieged family reunion in the woods; it works because it recalls not just classics of the 70s and 80s, but classics of the 30s, i.e. the old dark house full of secret panels, greedy relatives gathered for the will, lightning storms, scary masks, strong female leads, no one who they seem, ironic karma, sudden twisting violence, moody Carpenter-esque synth soundtrack, and a refreshing lack of any moral compass. (MORE)

If you've recently seen any of the above, do substitute GRABBERS, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, SCREAM, SCREAM 2, BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, RE-ANIMATOR, JOHN DIES AT THE END, EVIL DEAD 2 (though it's got some slapstick, fair warning) and/or CABIN IN THE WOODS, CANDYMAN, or WITCHING AND BITCHING, or see them all later. And for God's sake, stay alert, lock your doors, keep watching the knobs and clutching the butcher knife or fire poker, and turn on a white noise machine or Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast to block the spooky noises of trees against the window, because they're not trees....

October Capsules: OCULUS, SHIVERS, DETENTION, HOWLING, MIMIC 2: HARDSHELL

OCULUS 

(2013)  Dir. Mike Flanagan
***1/2

A brother and sister reunite at the house where, as kids, they watched their dad and mom lose their shit, thanks to a haunted mirror. Now they've returned to the empty house to sort that mirror's shit right out. To prove it;s haunted, sister's got the whole joint wired for sound; cameras are set up and timers are set to keep the siblings from drifting out of reality, because the mirror has a habit of causing hallucinations, flashbacks, and homicidal insanity if there's no one or thing to jar you out of it.  The younger brother, having been in an institution ever since 'what happened' to them as kids, explains away the happenings as stress-born cover memories, to which his his sister says "they really did a number on you in there, didn't they?" And if nothing else, it's pretty awesome to hear rote psychiatric skepticism blasted open in such a direct and intelligent manner. With great creeping camerawork that services the slow-ride suspense instead of just the usual 'sudden' shocking and mickey mouse telgraphy, this is one spooky, cool film, the best since last year's THE CONJURING. Turns out you don't need a big empty hotel in Colorado to convey the ease with a sensitive family can dissolve into cabin fever psychoses, you just need a big spooky mirror that can distort reality. And when the children in the flashback even begin to notice their future selves watching them like ghosts from the future, and the horrific encounters in both past and present reach a fever peak, you know OCULUS is onto something genuinely new and creepy. Haunted house 'past crimes' have never seemed more immediate; the idea of four walls holding in psychic trauma and malevolent forces seems palpable, as if the image on a videocassette has left the tape, shimmied back along the spindle and is now and watching itself in reverse order.

Director Flanagan also avoids the whole 'hallucination-or-was-it?' schtick, delivering some pure monster moments along with the madness, effectively (and correctly) illuminating the futility of ever knowing what's real even when evil spirits aren't fucking with you. DR. WHO fans will appreciate seeing 'companion' Karen Gilan stars the older version and Annalise Baso as younger is harrowingly raw and viivd -her cute little redhead alien face and orange hair are perfectly lit and she could teach a master class on showing every step involved in channeling terror into adrenalin-spiked courage (you can feel every turn of her courage being screwed to a sticking place). Heartbreaking, exciting, and genuinely spooky all at once, OCULUS gave me a literal spine tingle. And it doesn't need a dram of cheap shocks or torture porn trauma to get there. Filmed, for some ignoble reason, in Alabama.

SHIVERS 
(1975) dir. David Cronenberg

***

This weird first Cronenberg feature hasn't been available on DVD for awhile, but it's been on both Netflix and Amazon streaming recently and mustn't be missed, despite its cheap, grimy look. Far more disturbing than an outbreak of flesh eating zombies (which are too abstract - very few people think about cannibalism all day at work), is a contagious parasite that delivers inhibition-shredding insanity that converts the infected almost instantly into lewd sex-crazed maniacs. It's like if someone spiked the water supply with incredibly high levels of MDMA so everyone who had even a sip went crazy and started rubbing up on every passing person, be they family members or complete strangers. Not just pretty people in their 20s-30s, but the elderly, 'normal' types, and even children, the bulk of the real world we see (and are seen) by every day.

It's not MDMA (or ecstasy) in this film - that drug didn't even exist in 1975-  but an ugly free-roaming parasite that looks like an uncircumcised kidney, created by a doctor who wanted to turn the world into one large orgy. Taking to heart that (beloved of Cronenberg) med school adage that sex is the invention of a very clever STD, this parasite pays off in flooding the host's brain with inhibition lowering / libido elevating / clothes shredding / wife alienating insanity. Since it's breeding by traveling between sexual partners and it has a whole vast modern Montreal apartment high-rise to roam around in (each with a mail slot on the door), people can bedroom hop around without ever stepping outside. The eventual habit of everyone to run up and down the narrow halls in a big groping pack, knocking on random doors and taking over and turning on those who answer the door, or coming onto strays down in the laundry room or the foyer, reminds me a lot of my when someone would show up with a bunch of acid, ecstasy (called 'x' in those days) or shrooms to sell in my old dorm of Flint Hall in Syracuse, circa 1985. One well-stocked visitor could reduce the whole building to a mass of writhing, breathing, groping arms and tentacles. With no one having a car, or even a parking spot, we could roam the vast hallways like it was all one big crazy open house, everyone's door open and different drugs or weird sites in each room. As we say in AA, I really related.

Spiked with livid, funny gross outs as the kidney things hop from mouth to-locked-in-willing-or-unwilling mouths, the film's a 'careful what you wish for' example of 70s singles swinging rather too successfully. It takes a minute to get started, but once the two doctors get on the scene, and Lynn Lowry shows up as the nurse (Lynn, you rock eternal!), and a thing crawls up Barbara Steele in the bathtub, well, things get great, I mean, Romero's CRAZIES-level great, which came out two years before SHIVERS and it's a film I think Cronenberg acknowledges as an inspiration by casting Lowry. Eventually the paltry budget and sometimes harsh lighting even work to the film's advantage: the performances are deceptively brilliant, more and more so as the circumscribed roles are shed to reveal the true chthonic uncivilized wild savages we all are generally only in our deepest subconscious. And Cronenberg really gets what it's like to be inside 'the hot zone' of an outbreak, where just getting to a phone across the hall can take hours as one interruption and calamity builds on the next. Eventually the paltry budget and harsh lights even work to the film's advantage, giving it a flat 16mm instructional film feel (it really should be shown in every high school health class - teen pregnancy would drop off to zero).

There's only a few familiar faces in the cast, but the two doctors (Paul Hampton and Joe Silver) are cool--you believe they really are doctors (and admire the way the Hampton just shoots people and beats them to death with a crowbar) and the scene were Steele and the emotionally overwhelmed wife (Susan Petrie) of the giant-lipped patient zero+1 (Allan Kolman -- a kind of a Sid Haig meets Jamie Gillis, i.e. perfect casting) hook up may curl your toes as it did mine. Other atrocities include incest, kids being led on leashes (a nod to that memorably disturbing shot in Go Ask Alice?), elevator groping, rapes, terrible catering, homosexuality, all sorts of crazy orgy scenes and an eventual indoor pool party that would shock Mae West. A real trendsetter, it made a lot of bread in the US under AIP as They Came From Within. And cinema as we know it would never be the same. If any film should be remade, and probably never will be, this is it. As Chris Rodley put it

"One experiences a tremulous sensation that suggests one might have reached the end of the unconscious. There it seems to be, thrown up on the screen in all its perverse and truly repulsive splendour, unmasked and unashamed." (40)

DETENTION

 (2011) Dir. Jospeh Kahn

***

Sharp wit and slashing rejoinders are not dead in this post-modern high school deconstruction comedy for the 'Twitter generation.' This hybrid of CLUELESS and SCREAM 2 proves itself the SCARY MOVIE for the smarter kids, zipping by in layers too fast for a single viewing (though in presuming repeat viewings it perhaps presumes too much). The presence of diminutive HUNGER GAMES "hunk" Josh Hutcherson should lure enough girls to at least give it a few hits, though, and tomboy Shanley Caswell is refreshingly wry as the 'second biggest loser at Grizzly High' with whom Josh has a long shared connection. But now she's upset that he's going out with the alpha hot chick Ione (Spencer Locke), angering her ex-boyfriend the big dumb jock Billy (Parker Bagley), who wants to fight Hutcherson but keeps erupting into FLY-like symptoms. See, he touched a meteorite as a child and spent most of his elementary school life with his hand in a television. You heard me!

I can see Godard and Antonioni loving this movie, especially the scene where the kids watch a bootleg copy of CINDERHELLA 4 while in detention to see how to survive their situation, resulting in the best screen-within-screen infinite chronosynclastic infindibulum meltdown since SPACEBALLS. Stunt casting includes Dane Cook as a dickhead principal and... no one else, but there's a time-traveling bear mascot and enough cheerleaders to make this a bizarro sister to the other semi-self aware Netflix high school horror comedy, Lucky McKee's ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE, and enough trans-dimensional portal usage to make it the callow tweaker cousin to JOHN DIES AT THE END. Writer/director Joseph Kahn's previous feature was 2004's TORQUE which I also liked a lot for its gonzo over-the-top deadpan in-on-its-own-joke dumb comic product tie-in momentum.

MIMIC 2: HARDSHELL
 (2001) Dir.  Jean de Segonzac
***

Most direct-to-video sequels aren't worth a damn, but here's one with a cute redheaded badass high school etymology teacher (Alix Koromzay) navigating treacherous urban streets and fending off insect suitors by using sewing scissors as mandible talons to rend their exoskeletons in twain. Koromzay clearly decided to treat this like A-list material and the result is a great example of a director and star using producer indifference to wiggle past the patriarchal groupthink that sinks so many sequels before they start. Instead, Koromzay goes all out in depicting a super strong woman still so sexy she has a whole coterie of devoted, smitten inner city students with whom to hole up in the high school while giant insect mimics hunt them and a cabal of governmental agents seal off the building with plastic tarps. So what if there's a smudge of direct-to-video sequel cheapness? It's the ideal third or fourth entry of any all-night horror binge, one where your defenses are down and your pheromones are at peak between-shower pungency.

THE HOWLING 

(1981) Director: Joe Dante
***1/2

For my money this is the best lycanthrope study since WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1934), the one with Henry Hull and Warner Oland fighting over a Tibetan flower, not the one with David Naughton arguing with a decomposing Griffin Dunne in a Piccadilly cinema. Maybe I just don't care much for werewolves that get hung up on the letter of the law, like Landis' AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, which came out the same year as HOWLING and there was much to-do in the press at the time about which make-up artist did the better transformation. Rick Baker is a genius, sure, but he and Landis makes Naughton's transformation unbearably agonizing, the moon inescapable, the beast itself a real wolf puppet on all fours--he takes it all way too literally. Joe Dante and Rob Bottin on the other hand know it's a goddamn metaphor so don't get hung up on the 'real' parameters. The HOWLING wolves move way beyond such hang ups, looming tall like monster gargoyles. Following in the shoes of Dante's patron saint, Roger Corman, HOWLING taps into the lupine side of 1970s sexual swinger and EST-ish energy, it's funny and scary and trashy and witty all at once, and then adds De Palma meta-refraction and audio mimesis procedural delirium, Carpenter ominousness, Cronenbergian clinical immediacy, and a plethora of great bit roles by folks like Dick Miller, John Sayles, Kenneth Tobey, Kevin McCarthy, John Carradine, Slim Pickens Forrest Ackerman, and Corman himself (below, waiting for the phone).

The story grabs you from the start: pre-E.T. Dee Wallace smoldering gamely as a TV reporter / newswoman heading off to interview a possible serial killer at a downtown SF adult book store while her crew monitors her every move worriedly from the warm safety of the station, or tries to--but then they lose her signal. Some bad shit goes down before it's over and she ends up with amnesia prompting a pop culture therapist (Patrick Macnee) to send her to 'the Colony,' his Northern California Pacific beachfront encounter group, where patients/residents make beach bonfires and grill lots of meat. A combination of sinister swinging couples and shady locals, including John Carradine howls at the moon and Elizabeth Brooks is a major smokin' badass as the wolf mother elemental nymphomaniac who comes onto Dee's mustachioed husband (Dennis Dugan) after he's separated from his hunting party. You may find yourself questioning your loyalty to the non-lycanthropic human race when she cooks Dugan's shot rabbit. Later they get it on by the bonfire, the powers of desire and orgasm shifting and churning their inner wolves while Dee Wallace nightmares it up alone in their cabin.

Lifelong Dante fans are born in these weird moments, especially once the entwined lovers switch to animation.

Like Cronenberg's films of the same era, the sex and the horror entwine in deep Jungian-Freudian knots, and as I said, these werewolves aren't running on all fours or just a guy with some fur --they're freaking big, vicious, unstoppable killers who can regrow limbs. They're more like "skin-walkers" than than the traditional full moon brand, and far more interesting, and even scarier despite LONDON's smoother snout grow and superior overall make-up (HOWLING uses one too many inflatable gas bags under cracked latex--perils of HD).  But instead of all the dated too-on-the-nose "Moon" pop songs, HOWLING rocks a great moody Pino Donaggio score, almost none of the usual trite 'dismissal of the supernatural as poppycock' stuff, and no sudden unsatisfying ending or Peter Grant-style dream sequences. Instead there's prodigious use of the gorgeous misty old growth forest, Northern California coastline, and great womanly rapport between Dee Wallace and fellow Colony guest Margie Impert (and in the city, Belinda Belaski as her producer/assistant), the kind of maturely sexy sisterly rapport that just doesn't seem to exist in movies anymore, not since Mary Tyler Moore ended... for all of us. 

And--despite LONDON igniting my then-crush on Jenny Agutter--HOWLING is sexier. Brooks is like the creepy older sister of GIA-era Angelina Jolie, proving that--in late 70s/early 80s horror films--(unprotected) monster sex with a genuinely creepy carnivorous wolf lady could still be guilt-free. And even E.T's future mom Wallace displays a great carnal immediacy that enhances rather than detracts from her courageous intellect, non-bitchy authority, and (unfortunately poodle-like) nose for news. If she had more roles like this in horror--not mothers but sexually experienced competent professionals of the 70s encounter group liberated vein--she'd be a genre favorite unrivaled. If only these types of films kept on being made, and the cultural zeitgeist that spawned them still in action. But life goes on, or facsimile thereof. Even now... for all of us. Cut to commercial. 

Dystopian Parables for the Masses: DIVERGENT, CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

Jump, baby, Jump! Jump into the Uncanny Valley, where chicks and hunks in black and silver body suit--kissers slicked over with CGI-bearing golden-brownish glow airbrush make-up--pretend to fight an onrush of enforced digital sameness, until the snake eats itself, the Uncanny Valley fills with ones and zeros and is so level the need for actors disappears altogether. They just float on the surface, newly born. And then mom starts singing "Clash City Rockers" (1) because it turns up on a car commercial, "nothing rocks the town like the Clash City Rockers... except the new Toyota Camry." 

Then, and only then, I'll know it's too late... even for me.

I'm old enough, even too old, to accept the brutal truth, which is that the kids today don't know there's even a brutal truth left to accept, which means there's no longer a truth at all, just the brutal. "Clash City Rockers" isn't cool anymore it's 'grampa's music' and hence undesirable, unless kids today are cool enough to realize their generation's music is the kind of squaresville Glen Miller nonsense that rock was invented to counteract. now grown to anthem size, filling stadiums rather than ballrooms. In the70s-80s, we punks and poseurs didn't have to decide if we were goth or emo or strait-edge or hardcore or Edward or Jacob or Erudite or Dauntless. or closeted or 'out' or bisexual: we were all just punks or (more likely) poseurs, smoking ourselves dizzy at City Gardens waiting for The Ramones or Replacements' All-Ages show to start. But today you need to pick your clique and must abide by its rules and brush off the rest, and if you jump bandwagons no one will talk to you and your reward for being a stunted in all other ways but artistic is the agony of another Saturday night spent alone in your room reading manga, until you turn to the make-up table and tart yourself up for Nerdtown.

This here's real

In both the recently released to DVD 2014 films, DIVERGENT and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER, there's a dude who's been brainwashed by the fascist dystopia and ordered to kill the one he loves. And in each, the one he loves doesn't give up on him, even risking their rebel coterie's lives while trying to break through to him because, damn it, you don't give up on your old army buddy or a cute guy who respects your virgin boundaries. Each brainwashed buddy is programmed to kill all those who pose a threat to a deranged Kate Winslet or brilliantly-against-type Robert Redford. But by now you've guessed that even buddy love is stronger than military-grade brainwashing. Love is able to survive even lame 'sensitive' male Subaru voiceovers, it's deeper even than behavioral programming or the ping pong balls of motion capture technology. Even Redford--the goddamned Sundance Kid!--can't change it. 

Taken together these two films paint a nice portrait of where we are today as an eternally teenage wasteland nation, and how it's our obsession with health that makes us sick, how it's our longing for security blankets that leaves us most exposed. Our presumption is that kids today already know who Neville Chamberlain is because they've been to high school or read a book. But we presume in vain. Kids today have no idea who he is, and so never glean the importance of the lesson his liberal utopian pipe dream folly teaches us.

Chamberlin, a pacifist dumbass

For old Neville Chamberlin is history's most glaring example of what not to do when every fibre of your national being wants to make peace at all costs, to live safe today and let tomorrow fed for itself, to waste valuable ammo-gathering time trying to get extra comfortable in your peacetime bubble.

Neville Chamberlain (in case you're one of those kids) was the British prime minister who let Hitler sweet-talk him out of sticking up for Czechoslovakia in exchange for Hitler's solemn promise to not invade any more countries. He came back to England waving a piece of paper guaranteeing "peace in our time."

This was supposedly because Britain was still recovering from the previous world war, but really it's because Hitler wouldn't let Chamberlin smoke in the Reichstag (according to INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS). If he just sparked up anyway, man, right there, he maybe would found the chutzpah to stand up for the Czechs. Well, I saw a picture the other day of a bunch of members of the 101st Airborne at a dance with some dames in the mid-40s, and every single one of them had a cigarette. They're the ones kicked Hitler's ass. Do you think ISIS would even exist if Obama was allowed to smoke in the Oval Office? Instead he's a Bluto-battered Popeye stripped of his contraband spinach at the door. Gotta be healthy, man. No spinach. Popeye's spinach-guzzling youth has left him with a bad case of chronic iron poisoning. 

So now you know about Chamberlin, and how our collective all-consuming horror of illness, death, and decay extinguishes the flame (and smooth filtered taste) of our own shortened life span and conversely poisons the Earth with overpopulation. Resources and living space get scarce and lack of security blanket options gives angry idiots the balls to not mind getting killed toute de suite by our noncommittal drones in the name of some fuzzy cause.

Luckily there's always movies and movies about teenagers fighting back against the hypocrisy of dystopia overreach are big bucks, and that, my friend, is what irony sufficiency is made of.

Nurse, all that glowing stuff is going to have to be removed

But if grooving to a nine figure-budgeted movie spinning in your hardware can make you feel that you're part of a vox populi juggernaut revolution, a Churchill not a Chamberlain, even if only for two hours and ten minutes, facing danger on the screen, dissolving into the breathless pace and riveting action like a true hero... then just remember that while you were so motionless on the couch, six more species died in the rain forest.... and you could have prevented it, for just fifty cents a day. That's less than the price of a cup of coffee.

Keep your logos round and burning

Conversely, here's a little-advertised truth about addiction I've learned the 'hard' way: drug and alcohol withdrawal is brutally painful, terrifying, even soul-crushing, BUT it can bring sexual pleasure as exponentially intense as the pain, exhilaration as intense as the terror. But few know this because a) so often this withdrawal is done in a hospital, where opportunities are scarce; b) first you must truly suffer, convulsing, screaming, vomiting and rolling around on the cool tiles, riding an endless terrifying roller coaster that's all vertical drops and torturous climbs, for like three long days in one endless loop. In a similar way, perhaps, enduring the intensity of withdrawal from the media's cozy hypnosis brings true liberation, but who would be fool enough to know it unless forced to? Stretching your limits is just a nice way to say being stretched on the rack. 

And no one suffers like a teenager, whose stretching is involuntary, a werewolf transformation that takes agonizing years instead of a night or two under a full moon. The one part missing from the TWILIGHT movies that the (last) book went into detail about: the great flaming agony stretching on for timeless weeks that Bela endures in her transition from dying anorexic pregnant teen to hip, naturally-toned rich mom vampire. When you don't endure the trauma, the basic training breakdown, the post-marathon soreness, or the primordial terror of the final few bardos of death or deep meditation, then your transformation, your evolution, is not permanent.  Teenagers trapped in the torturous cocoon of braces, acne, dandruff, virgin angst, and clumsy self-loathing, can't imagine how the much their future self-confidence, straight teeth, clear skin, will depend on it, and how quickly the pain will disappear once theb benefits are known. This counter-intuitive need for trauma, coupled to our fear of it (inseparable from the fear of pain and dying), makes a good dystopian parable for the masses, and why teenagers resonate with them so strongly. Old men need no more dystopian parables, only escape from their oldness in the chimera of myth and chimera of youth. And it is the same resonating myth and escape into (and from) youth that brings old and young together.  No one wants a teenager in their living room, but onscreen everyone can be teenager just for two hours, or--if already a teenager--a hero whose diamond anguish is at last given the properly operatic golden setting.

It is the duty of any nonconformist or outcast in a conformist society to subvert that society, the force of the social repression on the nonconformist forming the response and creating the spatial form of the future: Jesus on the cross, Mandela in the jail, and Gandhi on the hunger strike; but if you want to avoid that pain, you can stay addicted to to the virtual pleasure of the simulacrum and just write a Young Adult dystopia novel or superhero comic or screenplay wherein your protagonist subverts an even more conformist future or alternate reality. And if it sells, and catches on with the teens everywhere, and is adapted into a big budget movie, conformity expands to envelop it, then shrinks back as it digests, and then the trappings from that parable are spit out a decade later in a lame car insurance commercial, as drained of its original meaning as a Times Square New Year in the post-Giuliani era.

On the plus side, by entering the collective fabric it will serve to caution the power elite about going too far in trying to repress and restrict the freedom of the masses. Certainly the power elite fear from these tales the fallout that would come with restricting freedom of speech, for any speech---no matter how anti-authority--can be subverted to power ("Clash City Rockers ride the streets in the new Ford Freedom") Truly it is written in Situationist theory books forced on liberal arts undergrads the world over: a reigning social power can find no surer way of survival than incorporating critiques of itself, ushering in an era wherein compliance as the 'reality' is never even noticed behind the simulacrum screen. In HUNGER GAMES, Donald Sutherland's nervous military dictator thinks suppressing the symbols of rebellion will suppress the rebellion itself, but a media savvy ruler doesn't outlaw symbols, he mass markets them. He flashes the Girl Scout / Revolution gang sign at press conferences. Anything--even Sid Vicious snarling "My Way"--can be digested, incorporated, and eventually spat out into a car commercial. No revolution can win against a government that burns itself in effigy every night on the evening news. What are you going to do to protest, put out the fire?

In order to be free from our addiction to the cathartic thrill of battling Hollywood-conjured dystopia, we must learn to love the pain deprivation brings, which goes against everything capitalism stands for. No expensive wine ever tasted half so sweet as warm canteen water to a dehydrated ocean castaway. Is this not the the core truth of meditation, or stereograms, or the rapturous freedom of the starving, tortured artist hallucinating sausages and flagons in his swirling oils? And nothing's more disillusioning than realizing the spiritual crisis that cost you years of suffering and depression but resulted in artsy growth could have been solved with Effexor, and just as quickly turned into a raving maniacal sociopathy by adding Abilify. By extension, anyone with the right technology, drugs, or patience could turn you into their automaton. With the flick of an artificially-implanted cerebellum switch you could feel your friends are your enemies, and vice versa. Raymond, why don't you play some solitaire?

Thus the brainwashed super-conductive Winter Soldier (above) doesn't flinch or protest when his keepers want to give him an electric shock memory wipe. He just leans back into the chair and opens to receive his rubber mouthguard like an angry boxer thinking only of the kill. The captain meanwhile is thrown into a dilemma when he doesn't quite know who to trust within the NSA-Homeland Security-ish conspiracy web known as S.H.I.E.L.D. He himself is doomed to be incorruptible, no matter how many perish as a result of his principles. I simply cannot give more away, but it's this 'question authority' theme that gives the film its emotional resonance. Fifth columnist academes can say what they want, in Captain America's heyday (he was frozen in 1945 so he could miss becoming Reb Brown -left) we had a genuine uniform-wearing enemy to fight, and that we might actually lose was a real fear that brought Americans together and cured its Great Depression quicker than an Effexor / Neurontin / Wellbutrin cocktail.

And in DIVERGENT, the brainwash comes via a remotely activated chip air-injected into each 'Dauntless' member's neck as part of an alleged location tracking program, a process woven so seamlessly into all the other initiatory processes that no one can hardly complain--any more than an army recruit can complain if forced to do push-ups. The big fear for our plucky DIVERGENT heroine, Tris (Shairlene Woodley) isn't being brainwashed, it's that her friends will find out she's not one of the approved types of persona which act as fascist-brand masonic brotherhoods that all young citizens of this society must join, being allowed to pick for themselves at a big ceremony, because not doing so, not fitting a socially prescribed 'type' means being 'divergent' - i.e. a natural-born nonconformist, the type who must subvert the dystopia, write a book about subverting a worse dystopia, or die a death by slow closeting. Perhaps it's natural to have subversive artists in any society that gets larger than a few thousand people. Native Americans treated their gay tribal members with reverence, for they were signs the tribe was flourishing and needed to slow its population growth. A dystopia would of course not go for that display of difference, and with subversive artist types it's perhaps the same... no room for 'decadent' art in a dystopia. At any rate, Tris fears becoming cliqueless and alone by daring to say no to peer pressure, but can't help being chip (brainwash) resistant and so forced into the capacity of heroine. She's the type of person who, like myself can't connect for some reason to the giddy rush of 'mob mentality' (2). In the big picking ceremony she goes for the daredevil mesomorph soldier brigade (i.e. the jocks or the Wermacht) the 'Dauntless' group, but she's way too independent and peaceful. She's also too athletic and dopey to be an Erudite (the fretful nerd group, or Gestapo); too Erudite to be Abnegation (the Red Cross), etc. But this is a dystopia where your friends literally jump off a roof and if you don't follow them then you're not cool anymore. And you have to succumb to paranoia to not be suspect (if you're Erudite). And you have to let yourself get exploited and scapegoated if you're Abnegation (see also VIRIDIANA).

Sure it's a little trite, but I like DIVERGENT mainly because the twisty high school clique-as-metaphor-for-fascism stuff displays a keen savvy to the way initiation rites are incorporated into the lure of the popular clique. Here institutionalized initiation is conformist just enough that both the personal and political seamlessly interweave, like joining the Riffs, the SEALS, the Heathers, getting your ears pierced, your first tattoo, drinking your first beer and smoking your first cigarette all on the same day. Feeling like you finally belong somewhere is an intoxicating high, especially if you've never felt it before. The dissolution of apartness, of singular lonely ego subsumed into an inclusive group whole, is exhilarating in exponential ration to the amount of lonely bedroom angst you've suffered.

But that high has a price and you're suddenly being shipped off to Vietnam, like Treat Williams at the end of HAIR.

The thing DIVERGENT doesn't get is that having a weak central girl throws off the curve- Kristen Stewart is Antigone-stubborn in TWILIGHT; Jennifer Lawrence genuinely mythic in HUNGER GAMES; the kid in ENDER'S GAME spookily self-confident, but this chick Tris is perhaps--to her detriment--the most 'normal' teenager-like of the bunch. Rocking a terrible poker-face, she lacks the inner fascist to succeed as a Dauntless. She doesn't have a grasp of 'war footing.' She's not Artemis-esque or Antigone-determined or a math prodigy; her puffy face dilates and registers every emotion, which is not good if you're gay, I mean "divergent" in a world hostile to any sort of difference. If you show your true face they will get you. The same ones who urge you to be yourself are the ones who will attack you if your actually do. The core of every teenage fear lies in this idea, that the joy found in belonging to a cool group will soon give way to the terror of being abandoned by them once they see your face register the joy you feel at being accepted at last. This is part and parcel of the feeling teenagers never get over into adulthood: that the parent or god that watches over you is just a trickster demon awaiting the right time to remove its saintly mask to expose that which your whole life was a shield against seeing--his hideous giant demon face coming forward to consume you like one of Kafka's devouring industrial vaters--all the while encouraging you to take off your own mask, to be yourself, at last, to finally show your soul just in time to see it ripped to shreds... 


 In WINTER and DIVERGENT, the moment of exposing the demon face behind the mask is when what was once just rumor and conspiracy theory starts to lock shut (SEMI-SPOILERS AHEAD) around you, too late to resist it, no time to plan a defense, no access to yourself, no chance to catch your breath. What you didn't see coming suddenly comes, not on the horizon ahead but behind, next to, within, and in all directions, making its move only when its sure all resistance has been pre-demonized as terrorism, disarmed, isolated, and confused. 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, and it's too late to do anything about it because we've signed all our freedoms away in the name of order, because we got all scared when the news waved some Muslims at us. God help us, we activated SKYNET just to deal with a couple of dudes with AK-47s and cell phones. General Ripper was right! They've infiltrated our precious bodily fluids! Little tiny Stalins swim in our blood. They're even in the money...

Masks on / masks off 

Now I don't really believe in a massive global conspiracy per se --I imagine the world to be far too chaotic for that--but I don't rule it out. What I do know, though, is that-when it comes to running Hollywood--the industry guys can tramp around their fancy desks high on all the megalomania-infusing coke they want, but deep inside their drawers they know who the real boss is, the capricious Middle American teenager. Their ample expandable income, their drivers' license, their need to get away from parental eyes even for a few hours, the crushing relentless sameness of suburban boredom, all bring them time and again to the multiplex. Why not tie high school subjects like social science and literature to cafeteria mores and social hierarchy to teenage hormonal angst and deep mythic dystopian allegories, so that the films they see double as Cliff notes to the classics in class and of their lives? Maybe the kids are reading Plato in fifth period or leaning about World War Two for the first time, so hey, if you commingle these big historical and cultural currents in with the high school threat of cyber bullies, peer pressure, and the rush of the first law break or sense of belonging to a clique, then you have hooked onto an iconography of coming-of-age mythic suburban metaphors, each multi-layered signifier keyed into a hormonally pained demographic. 

That's myth. At it's purest. In myth there's a way to apply what's taught in school to real life, to do it in a way where the result is fantasy on a larger more 'real' level than mere reality. 

Thus these teen dystopia parables become more and more urgent as the real and public sphere shrinks. Science tells these kids that their future is all used up but as long as their present is spent texting and downloading violet ray dystopian fantasies, they can live without anything so banal and limited in scope as science's concept of time line futures. These kids know that watching someone else fight the power isn't the same as fighting it themselves. But how do you fight a phantom who monitors your every move before you make it? Just trying to get a gun into high school or threatening Congress via your Tumblr will get you all sorts of expelled. But watching someone else fight a raging battle against a CGI windmill version of all the old American evils? That's doodle dandy do or die. 


I know it's cliche to say but, for my generation, things were different. The dystopian-spurred life-or-death need to assert your individuality and face the dreaded finality of conservatism was totally lacking in the John Hughes (and Arnold Schwarzenegger) 80s. There were no cell phones or internet by which to stay constantly connected. As a result, that connection never felt threatened, that was our burden and our blessing. We had no faith to lose, and we knew it. Not no more. If you win a teenager's heart today by expressing their queasy post-digital angst, they'll come back for the sequels, then they'll buy the DVD (even after they downloaded it illegally (you hope), and in 20 years they'll buy it again in a deluxe commemorative edition, and it can run in perpetuity across a spectrum of cable channels... until that car commercial tie-in wrings the last dollar out.

Starship Troopers (1997)

And of course, there are the girls, the ladies, all locked into the golden gloss that makes all them all now look like they're CGI avatars slick with softener, every frame of their face Maximed to abstraction, all the better inject them into the video game vein. But hey, the good news: boys have picked up some slack to become objects, which is like, so like, finally, you know? It's the baby steps, man. Before women can be free of objectification they must first choose a replacement way for us to look at them, and there's but one traditional gender left to objectify. There is a reason, burn, turn, worm, but don't say I didn't warn you about that Uncanny Valley crossing, ladies. This is John Connor coming to you from inside Crystal Peak: let the revolution commence broadcasting on UHF, on the Emergency Broadcast System, on the HAM radio, anywhere it can be safe from the digital detection. Analog only, No digital, man. Analog got the warmth and the resonance, 'cuz nothing stands the pressure of the Clash City Rockazz!

NOTES:
1. The Clash, in case anyone doesn't know, were a prime example of politically left-wing, anti-Thatcher English punk rock, hence their use in car commercials is the kind of thing that runs counter to their message.

2.  I've been there at the start of three riots in my life -- and each time I walked away before the violence began, horrified by the way all my friends seemed to transform into bloodthirsty animals, and feeling strangely abandoned, as if they all disappeared right in front of me, just as would happen later when cocaine came back in vogue in the '98. I simply could not catch the mob or coke mentality anymore than I could 'get' the Grateful Dead. I guess that makes me... Divergent!

Tales from the Benway Pharmacy: BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW, THE MACHINE

If I ventured into the 'flix stream, between the viaducts of Dr. Benway prescribed drug-enhanced science fiction hallucination dream, would you find me?  Or would there no longer be a 'me' to find, and no difference between you, these words, the future, the past and all constructs of self I may adopt and discard over lifetimes? Yeah, it's the second option, because good films dissolve all difference. The screen is just the first in an endless banana peel of self (and vice versa).

I dissolved once or twice into that void this week, thanks to the following two films being available on Netflix and their modulating, droning and pulsing analog synth scores being available on Spotify. By Sinoa Caves and Tom Raybould respectively, these evocative scores make a big difference, especially this time of year, the autumnal Samhain, i.e. Halloween. These two films seem to occur in a realm of permanent ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981) midnight where dangerously liberated prisoners/patients/experimental subjects break out of bizarro world environments, in the process etching out as fine a metaphor for the dangerous liberation offered by psychedelic drugs as anything I've seen since PSYCH-OUT (1968).

So, when you're on an all-night weird movie binge, save these two for the late late show slot, i.e. the high strangeness Interzone gateway stretch between three and six AM, when the straight and sober are fast asleep so their bland consensual reality can't interfere with your psionic reception, because thanks to Netflix, the future is then!

BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW 

2010 - written and directed by Panos Cosmatos

***1/2

A lot of typical science fiction buffs are nerds, man, and they stay that way for one reason: they're scared of psychedelics. Scared to lift the throbbing rock of the known and scoop the writhing worms and scorpions from the muddy void and devour them, they live in a reality circumscribed by the trappings of the social order; the border between their fantasy life (as a fifth-level chaotic good paladin in D&D) and reality (high-school) is very well-marked. The closest they get to living their own fiction is, perhaps, LRP or paintball, but never the 'inside job' of acid or mushrooms.

This cautious avoidance is a wise decision. Unless one feels the psychedelic zone tug them towards it like a magnet, one is probably not invited, and would probably not be treated well. As Bill Lee says in Cronenberg's NAKED LUNCH, "the 'zone takes care of its own", implying: all others beware. Not everyone is meant to have their ego ripped like a bad tooth from their screaming psyche. Their self-centered fears lodged like a giant tick in the back of their skull, each wrench of the psycho-active pliers felt like fire consuming the crown chakra, and only the already in pain would want to stick it out in the chair, enduring the probing and inflamed wrenching, until that sucker is at last ripped out. But for nerds of the sci-fi role playing type, maybe their egos aren't solid enough to be killed. There's no formative I AM life experience to get cocky about, no hardening of yesterday's persona.

Lick the 2001-legged Monolith

Sometimes the sci-fi coterie do make it past their initial fear and enter the void, and if they do, they tend to run in packs, and--when running is done--retreat to the movies (as we all have), spending the come down from the peak watching 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), because it's the familiar made unfamiliar. Kubrick's movie is never entirely familiar no matter how many hundreds of times you see it, and on LSD or shrooms it's a whole other thing. From there, an adept sailor of cinematic madness will wind up leaving England along Commonwealth solar trade winds and winding up at two Canadian horror films: SCANNERS (1981) and BLUE SUNSHINE (1978). Each explore the long term psychic side effects of prolonged exposure to the drug-dealing elder god behind the wizard behind the curtain. In BLUE a particular strand of LSD makes people lose their hair and go on rampages after exactly ten years elapse. In SCANNERS a briefly marketed pill prescribed to pregnant moms has caused a offspring to be born with the power to blow other people's heads apart through conscious projection.

I mention these two films this for a reason, this acidhead tab of Canadian druggie sci-fi history is imperative for a deep lysergic appreciation of the 2010 Canadian homage to that golden era of tripping man's Kubrickian-Cronenbergian-Blue Sunshine maker crossroad science fiction, BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW.

The first feature by Panos Cosmatos, RAINBOW stars Michael Rogers as a batshit crazy psychiatrist named Barry Nyle. His pet patient is a scanner-style mutant girl Elena (Eva Bourne) kept under sedation in a futuristic white room for reasons no expository monologue need explain (we having seen SCANNERS and deduced the drug side effect angle via the psychoactive experiment clinic prologue). During the daily sessions, Nyle tries to provoke any kind of response from Elena, talking molasses slow through a thick protective glass while jotting down 'notes' and going even more insane. He also has special guards called 'sentinauts' (their brains can't be exploded) and a weird white triangle device that can deliver sound vibrational (presumed) shockwaves to knock Elena to the ground and (presumably) jam her brainwaves should she try to escape. Clearly, she must have the power to transmit her thoughts and explode the heads of anyone in the same room if the puramid thing should be turned off.  The uncanny analogy synth score by Sinoia Caves heats and throbs and pitch modulates as the doctor and patient engage in a long drug-addled silent treatments and staring contests. Cosmatos trusts his viewers to connect the dots, to have seen the classics, to have had their egotistic wisdom teeth pulled at the psychedelic dentist, to know that fields of red and pulsing, throbbing analogy synth music is enuff.

To make it all just that much better, the institute is housed in a bizarre retrofuturist geodesic dome, which includes the office/drug den of a terminally-ill Buckminster Fuller-Timothy Leary-ish junky, the founder of the institute (and Elena's father). In a flashback to 1966 we see this guy taking Barry on his deep dish drug trip (the date is important: LSD was legal then and being used by forward-thinking psychiatrists the provinces over). Barry's trip resembles the 'Beyond the Infinite' section of 2001 if slowed down 99% and experiences while meditating as one's face melted off. It's so much like my last few salvia divinorum trips I nearly fell off the floor, but Barry is not like us. He is  reborn in an oil slick, crawling out of a black circle like a reptile from its egg, and latching onto the woman, some woman... I don't know...his wife? Elena's mother? Does he kill her by ripping her throat out with his teeth, or is that an ejaculation? Is she coasting on an orgasm, or is the light going out of her eyes?

Either way, when it's over it's clear the doctor blames himself; Barry's not held responsible... but the hope for the future is done, and though Elena shall be born with all the special extra sparkage having a dosed-out LSD-awakened mother can bring to one's junk DNA, she'll wind up a prisoner in an all-white room in a geodesic dome in the middle of nowhere, the captive of an insane doctor who killed her mother while in the throes of a deep dish LSD freakout.

 Meanwhile there's lots of delicious red walls and filters and the sense that time is melting (Barry pops pills from the Benway pharmacy--another nod to Burroughs) and though he's off-putting at first, Rogers gonzo performance grows on one over repeat viewings; he's committed to his work, he should be committed into the place he works, period. It fits hims snug like in a strait-jacket. Being a shrink seems like a pretty awesome occupation for a druggy maniac: you get to prescribe whatever mind-expanding things you want for yourself and go so deep into the void that reality ceases to exist and you finally get a peak 'beyond the black rainbow' and don't have to worry about a thing, as you have all the Ativan and Thorazine you need to bring you back down to 3D space-time if things get too terrifying.

If you get confused, just presume this is all meant as an analogy to the mysteries of consciousness itself as it may have existed in Canada after the collapse of the psychedelic movement: Elena is the unconscious, the anima- mutated along with the psyche's chromosomes; Barry is the amok ego trying to keep the sinful Jane Eyre attic madwoman lovechild locked up tight; the old man is the repressed superego dissolving from years of drug abuse (nothing nullifies a moral compass like addiction) and watching his high watermark 60s utopian vision for the future gradually erode under the deranged stewardship of his sociopathic protege. No matter how lofty one's intention, the ego finds a way to take advantage of it.

So remember, nerds: baldness = homicidal madness, and if you can't escape quickly, move so slowly no one can see you; otherwise you're dead at the hands of a guy who's so high he can't tell the difference between your skull and a stress ball.

THE MACHINE

2014 - written and directed by Caradog W. James

***

THe low-budget but highly intelligent (if unimaginatively titled) British film THE MACHINE (2014) has great gloomy electronic momentum (no daytime shots ever, which is great), a beautifully retro Carpenter-meets-Vangelis synth score from Tom Raybould, an overall aesthetic that splices the labs of the Tyrell Corporation to ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK's Lee Van Cleef sub basement, And a script that mixes some TERMINATOR touches with CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS (1962) post-humanist philosophy. The captivating Caity Lotz is great in a double role, evoking Elsa Lanchester in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, as both the inventor and the machine. And thanks to thrifty use of lots of Val Lewton darkness, a single, largely empty cavernous soundstage and great artistic (and ingeniously simple) touches like the way the bodies of the artificial beings light up in strange patterns when excited (though the lights are clearly just projected onto their skin), Caradog's etched out ONE of those economic sleeper B-movie gems that can sometimes be unearthed when digging around in Netflix Streaming, ranking it alongside other dusty gems I've found there, like BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO, THE ORGEGONIAN, IRON SKY, BOUNTY KILLER, and JOHN DIES AT THE END. It's short, yet operatic. There's no filler, no corners are cut. Everything fits and it doesn't need trauma or didactic postures to feel justified in existing, though of course there is some of each. Even the bit with the dying daughter sidesteps all the usual cliche'd sentimental pitfalls.

The story begins with bigwig AI engineer Vincent (Toby Stevens --the Richard Branson-ish villain in DIE ANOTHER DAY) interviewing various freelancer-designed artificial intelligence programs via a series of surrealist questions to see which can answer far enough outside the box of logocentric thinking that genuine personality is possible. Ava's (Caity Lotz) program comes closest, and she's cute, sparks fly, so she's hired, and brought down into a deeply buried network of basement level research programs, all funded by the British military intelligence operatives for assassination work in China. Vincent's not a fan of the assassin aspect, but he loves the unlimited funding. It's enabled him to develop software that can scan and duplicate whole personalities via sensitive headsets worn during Voight-Kampf-style questions. Meanwhile, military vets suffering from brain injuries and missing limbs are turned into half-machine monsters, the trouble being they're liable to kill everyone in the room during the slightest existential tantrum. Meanwhile one of them steers Ava towards a possible cover-up conspiracy in the works - these soldiers are being cut off from their loved ones, treated essentially like slaves. She knows too much!

Ava is assassinated by Chinese assassins before Vincent can even work up the nerve to ask her out, not before doing all the tests of course. How convenient! Dennis (DR. WHO) Lawson is the ruthless installation director who wants to make sure this new Eva isn't so independent she'd refuse a direct order, especially since Vincent tells her killing anyone--even Chinese diplomats!--is wrong. She murders a guy in a clown mask during a routine test. She feels bad. Raybould's synth pads swell in mecha-grim portent.

Oh well, it's not hard to guess the rest, and we viewers we don't really give a shit about Vincent's Asimovian ethics, so Lawson needs to to up the stakes via an enforced robot lobotomy and another easy-to-guess subplot with the daughter. But what could be some douche chill sentimental nonsense in non-British hands (such as Guillermo del Toro's) doesn't rankle, and I've got a sensitive rankle meter for that shit.

Slick and dark, but with some genuine AI insight and vintage analog originality to back it up (See also CinemArchetype #13 - The Automaton / Replicant / Ariel), it's a good lesson in how you too can survive the coming robot revolution! Hint: treat the machines with compassion or at least tact, because they'll remember every last kind or derogatory word forever, no matter how far out of earshot you think they are when you say it. They are the past and future, reaching back and forward along your every gesture, like karma's own sweet engine.

Remember us, your future? CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS! 

If you have Spotify, click here for a mix of both the amazing scores of these films.

NOTES:
1. If you don't get that reference, see BLUE SUNSHINE!