For those of you who read Spanish, I can highly recommend Revista Cinefagia, a website (it’s called Cinephagia Magazine, but I don’t think they actually publish on paper) reviewing all sorts of movies, but mostly Spanish-language ones. I found them when looking for reviews of crappy Mexploitation horror movies (they review both Vacaciones de terror and another crappy 80s Mexican horror movie, Cementerio del terror), but they actually do a lot of different stuff, from international cult and horror cinema to mainstream Latin American movies, and they do it really well. The reviews that I’ve read are all smart, clever, and generally get the point.

Like many reviewers, they’re at their most entertaining when they really hate something (their review of Batalla en el Cielo is funny, for instance), but there’s plenty to read in their impressively long list of movie reviews. Oh, and they also review porn, including Eon McKai movies, something few critics are willing to do, but more should.

I’m tempted to send them a complimentary copy of Comando Zorras, now.

Wonderfully cheesy Mexican movie channel De Pelicula is running a Halloween horror movie marathon. All Mexican horror movies, all the time, this whole weekend. It’s not as bad as you think… it’s much, much worse.

I just watched Vacaciones de terror, a movie considered something of a classic by people I know (who never call it just by the name, but always say “Las vacaciones de terror, con Pedrito Fernández“). It’s directed by René Cardona III, grandson of legendary Cuban-born Mexploitation director René Cardona, who directed almost 150 movies, including several Santo movies, the Luchadora movies, and La horripilante bestia humana (aka. Night of the Bloody Apes), as well as acting in El Barón del Terror (aka. The Brainiac), amongst others. René Cardona Jr., father of the director of today’s movie, worked on more straight up trash cinema, including the entire series of La risa en vacaciones, one of the most successful lowbrow comedy series in the history of Mexican cinema. So René Cardona III is the last in a long line of schlockmeisters, as well as having some sort of family obligation to deal with vacations in his movies.

The story of the movie is fairly straightforward. A family gets a cheap fixer-upper summer house in the Mexican countryside, but all is not what it seems, as the youngest daughter finds a diabolical doll who takes control of her and supernaturally attempts to kill the rest of the family. The doll accomplishes this mostly by moving its eyes, which is always accompanied by a “scary” synth chord, and mostly makes furniture topple over slowly, or in some cases, cutlery fly about. The aunt falls mysteriously ill and has to go to the hospital, accompanied by the uncle, leaving the now demon-possessed kids in the hands of their niece and her eighties-haired boyfriend. The boyfriend has come upon the one thing that can stop the diabolical doll, namely a shiny medallion. Being Mexican, he’s done the obvious with the medallion: Hanging it from the rear view mirror of his crappy truck. This turns out to be fortuitous, since the doll remote controls his truck and tries to kill him with it, but the medallion stops it (after he stupidly tries to outrun the truck for a while). He then gets back into the truck and drives it through the wall of the house, which does no good at all, since he’s soon impaled by several pieces of levitating cutlery, and then sucked into a smoking mirror (well, he’s pressed against the mirror for a while, then disappears).

The girlfriend hangs around for a while screaming, the uncle tries to return from the hospital, but has diabolical car trouble, and then the idiot girlfriend remembers that the boyfriend said something about the medallion being their only hope, so she gets it and presses it against the doll, then throws the whole thing in the fireplace. This makes the house catch fire, and then explode several times, while everyone barely escapes alive. The final scene shows the house for sale, now in its original dilapidated but not burned down and blown up condition, and the diabolical doll reveals itself to another little girl.

This movie was incredibly horrible, like some sort of retarded, slow-moving version of The Evil Dead, without anyone being raped by trees. Lucky for me, there’s a sequel, which I might get to see some time, called Vacaciones de terror 2: Noche de brujas, and as a bonus, that one features children’s artist Tatiana. I can’t wait.

Mexploitation Cinema (with the long subtitle) isn’t associated with this blog in any way except for similarities in subject matter. While I call the sort of movies I’ve participated in here “Mexploitation”, Doyle Greene uses the term more strictly, applying it to horror/monster/wrestler movies produced in Mexico from 1957 to 1977. I think that limit is somewhat arbitrary and unnecessary, but it’s chosen to correspond to Greene’s central thesis, that these movies reflect values and preoccupations common in Mexican society during this period.

And what do you know, that thesis works pretty well. Although Greene uses quite a bit of scholarly critical jargon, he makes a clear and quite convincing case for linking the themes and monsters in the movies to issues of Mexican national identity, xenophobia, politics, and oppression. The main arc of the narrative is that from forging a modern, urban Mexican national identity in the 1950-60s, to the political oppression and violence of the late 60s and 70s.

The tone is dry and academic, but that can be quite entertaining, when applied to movies that are as blatantly ridiculous as many of Santo’s efforts. Greene dissects and analyzes the action and symbolism of several such movies in detail, but can’t seem to avoid bemusement at the puerile plots and stilted dialogue.

All in all, this book isn’t for everyone, but given that it’s pretty much the only serious analysis of a locally important subgenre, it’s definitely worth reading for those interested in Mexican low budget movies.

Back to the horror stuff with a quick review of this Japanese horror movie that’s been remade in the US. The remake, Pulse looks really bad, and has gotten horrible reviews, but people keep telling me the original is quite good.

Kairo isn’t really much of a horror movie, though. It tries to be a philosophical look at loneliness and alienation in modern Tokyo, with computers and the internet as an important ingredient. And then there are ghosts, and a zombie-type apocalypse. The mood and tone it tries to strike is of one of fevered nightmare, unease and decay.

And yeah, it’s dream-like, but it’s one of those annoying, slow-moving, frustrating and repetitive dreams where you get nowhere and can’t get anything done. The pace is excruciating, and when it finally does move, it makes little to no sense. Like many J-horror movies, concepts are demonstrated and insights revealed through endless expository dialogue. What insights there are feel trite and banal, like pretentious student film by students oblivious to their own limitations, and the script makes little sense, don’t come together, flows badly or not at all, and the setups and payoffs are so trivially obvious and by the book that they had me rolling my eyes and scoffing.

It’s not all bad, though. Some of the actual horror sequences (of which there are few) are creepy, but not hard to watch scary and tense like some other, more successful Japanese horror movies. Visually, it’s nice, although the “we don’t have a big budget, let’s just break out 3D Studio and After Effects” look of all the special effects gets annoying after a while.

All in all, this might be worth watching for mood. It might be better on opiates, I don’t know, and I’m not going to be bothered to watch it again to find out.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind is promoted as a sort of literary thriller, along the lines of Umberto Eco’s Focault’s Pendulum or The Name of the Rose, and people also seem to compare it with Borges a lot. Those comparisons aren’t exactly wrong, but I think they sort of miss the point.

More than anything else, The Shadow of the Wind is about synchronicity. The young protagonist, Daniel Sempere, goes to the “Cemetary of Forgotten Books”, is entrusted with a novel by mysterious author Julián Carax, and soon, events in his own life start to echo those of the Carax’ life. The novel in the novel is also titled “The Shadow of the Wind“, which should give you some idea of the direction in which this is headed. A mysterious man has been burning all copies of Carax’ novels, and is after the one Daniel has, which might be the last. The mysterious man uses the name Laín Coubert, which is the name of the devil in one of Carax’ novels, and so on and so forth. There’s also a large helping of references to 18th century gothic horror, romance, and adventure novels, especially later in the book, which of course are exactly the genres Carax wrote in.

The large story arc is interesting enough, and it’s skillfully executed, although some of the “mysteries” are not too hard to figure out, and the main mysteries to be revealed are more the details of how things happened, instead of the larger revelations it seems Ruiz Zafón wants the reader to experience. In the end, however, this doesn’t matter too much, since a lot of the joy in the book is in the details, especially, perhaps, in the humorous ancillary characters, such as Fermín, the ex-revolutionary turned homeless drifter under the Franco regime who Daniel and his father take in and give a job in their bookstore. I found myself looking forward to any sequence where he would play a prominent role, since his hilarious anecdotes and outrageously brazen solutions to problems are the book’s high points.

The ending is not entirely unexpected, and perhaps a bit pat, but by then, you’ve been so thoroughly charmed by the characters (not to mention Barcelona, which is as much a character in the book as anyone else) that you don’t care too much. Highly recommended, especially if you don’t take it too seriously. It’s not as intellectual as Eco or Borges, but it’s at least as enjoyable, especially if you love books.

The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft And Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, by Jason Colavito (Prometheus Books, 2005), is a strange book. From the title and a quick check of the summaries available, I thought it would be more about Lovecraft’s work and its influence on pop culture in general. It’s not, not really.

It’s mostly a debunking of ancient astronaut theories and related fringe “science”, such as the work of Erich von Däniken. That’s fine, although it’s not so interesting, at least not to me. I read von Däniken back in the day, and found it sort of intriguing, but weak, and it’s been a long time since I considered any of it as anything but fantasy. Linking ancient astronaut theory back to a possible origin in Lovecraft’s fiction sounds like an interesting idea, though, and even though that’s a much more narrow analysis of Lovecraft’s influence than I was hoping for, it still seemed interesting. And to an extent, it is.

But the book fails on a number of points. First, and most importantly, the “linking” of ancient astronaut theory and the like to Lovecraft’s works just fails. The author keeps claiming there’s a link, but never shows much for it, and indeed, from his examples of parallels to other works, it seems much more likely that ancient astronaut theory had some of the same influences as Lovecraft, such as the writings of Blavatsky and Charles Fort, or the ancient civilizations craze of the late 19th century. Lovecraft used it as inspiration for fiction, while others have used it as inspiration for writings they pass off as fact, of course, but otherwise it seems obvious. Colavito is committing the same mistake as people who think humans descended from chimpanzees, while in reality humans and chimps have a common ancestor.

Even that would be excusable, though, since the book could be read as an investigation into the links between fiction writing and fringe science anyway. But there are other problems. There’s the never-ending smugness and feeling of intellectual superiority that oozes off every page, like the author is a particularly precocious and nerdy member of a high school debate team. He used to write for Skeptic magazine, which is full of this kind of arrogant attitude (and that’s probably why people in general don’t listen to them). It’s like hearing Penn Jillette’s debunkings on Bullshit, slightly amusing, but you get the feeling it would actually work better if he calmed down a bit and tried to be more objective, instead of frothing at the mouth. And that’s for a half-hour TV show, imagine a whole book of it.

Which brings me to the third and perhaps biggest problem. Colavito has that particularly American right-wing libertarian point of view, where society is seen as in decay, “everything is relative”, we’re overly politically correct, and people can study GAY HISTORY in universities! Imagine that, surely western civilization must fall. He links this to the rise of ancient astronaut theories, since apparently the gays have tricked people into not believing in science. It’s not surprising he’s a Lovecraft fan, since Lovecraft also ranted endlessly about the moral and racial decay of society and whatnot. He conveniently glosses over the racist and xenophobic aspects of Lovecraft’s fiction in an early chapter as well. Colavito sees western society as being in decline, the “rot” having set in “shortly after” the revolutions of the 18th century. All that because some people believe in UFOs? Let’s get some perspective here. How much scientific knowledge did an average person have in the late 18th century, as compared to now? Fundamentalist religion and superstition was almost universal back then, and that’s generally improved a lot now. It’s ironic that Colavito, as an obvious atheist and believer in science, can skirt so dangerously close to arguments we’re most used to coming out of the Religious Right.

All in all, this is an ok book, if you can get by the problems above. When it sticks to the facts, it’s interesting material. Just don’t read it without a healthy dose of skepticism towards the author and his motives. If someone’s claiming to be the only person who’s honest, unbiased, and without an agenda, just telling it as it is, that’s who you should scrutinize the most.

Brick is a weird little thing, a teen movie crime mystery where people speak slightly updated forties lingo, and the main character, a quiet loner, takes on aspects of the Man with No Name from Leone’s Dollars trilogy.

Yeah, it’s weird. What’s weirder is that it works really well. Brendan gets a call from his ex girlfriend, Emily, where she asks him to help her, and then hangs up as if she’s scared of something. A while later, she’s dead, and he’s infiltrating a drug ring to find out who and what killed her. His advantages are that he’s smarter than most, and that he’s a little nuts, totally fearless and uninhibited, and not afraid to get violent. He doesn’t mind manipulating people to get what he wants, either, all in keeping with the noir antihero.

That’s a pretty standard noir setup, but the characters are mostly high-schoolers (except for the Assistant VP, played by Richard Roundtree, of all people, who stands in for the stock noir police detective who thinks the main character is useful, but untrustworthy). The result is odd, a lot of the humor (and the movie is quite funny at times) stems from breaking the tone of the hard-boiled crime drama when parents pop their heads in and serve the kids some apple juice, or make small talk.

In general, though, it’s the teenagers who rule this movie’s world, and they’re just as ruthless and manipulative as you might expect from a noir movie. The plot isn’t amazingly complex, but it’s good enough to keep your interest. What really sets the movie apart is the acting, especially Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Brendan, and, most of all, the dialogue. It’s modern enough to not sound weird, but it has some 40s slang thrown in, which works surprisingly well, but the great thing about it is the rhythm. It’s a sort of clipped, truncated, hyper-realist version of how people really talk, minimalist, but with a jazzy rhythm, like David Mamet writing noir. I really, really loved it, so much that even though I enjoyed the action sequences, I found myself waiting for another scene of dialogue between Brendan and his nerdy sidekick Brain.

Of course, our hero doesn’t really get what he wants, but he gets even, and is left with nothing more than he started with, except perhaps for a sense of having done the right thing. Antiheroes can’t end up happy, that’s just the way the story goes, and Brendan seems to be aware of it, and accepting it stoically, in the end. The movie is very recommended, especially if you’re interested in what can be done by a first-time director on a modest budget, as long as the script is well-written.

I just watched the uncut, unrated version of Alexandre Aja‘s The Hills Have Eyes, a remake of Wes Craven‘s 1977 movie of the same name.

I haven’t seen Aja’s previous movie, Haute Tension, which seemed like pretty standard slasher fare to me. The Hills Have Eyes, however, is much more than a standard slasher movie. I mean, it’s definitely a slasher movie, very similar to Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but it cranks it up to such extremes that I couldn’t help but be impressed, and I don’t even like slasher movies. It also helps that the script, while fairly simple, is well-written and in general makes sense. People don’t do overly stupid things, and with the exception of some overly broad caricatures of the American nuclear family, these people and their actions are believable. Which, of course, makes it even more uncomfortable to watch what happens to them.

The plot is simple, a family takes a “shortcut” in the desert and ends up beset by bloodthirsty deformed cannibals, the result of nuclear testing in the area.

There’s not much in the way of mystery here, but the buildup works well, you really, really hate the bad guys, and want to see them die horribly. Which, after a while, you get to do. The violence is extreme, both in terms of subject matter (large-caliber weapons pointed at infants, extremely brutal (but not graphic) rape), but also in how it’s shown, which is unflinching, no-nonsense, and very gory. There’s little dwelling on the violence here, it just happens, and it’s quick and horrible. Visually, it’s nice too, in 2.35:1 aspect ratio, which, as Sergio Leone proved, does the vast desert landscape justice. The colors are muted and dusty, and the whole thing is shot with a very fast shutter, making it strobe a bit, but nicely conveying chaos and confusion in the action sequences.

If you have the stomach for it, I think I can recommend this movie. It’s uncomfortable on a level approaching that of Irreversible, but Irreversible was boring, pretentious, and badly made, while The Hills Have Eyes is a very competent effort.

I saw Silent Hill about a week ago. I’ve never actually played the games, but what I’ve been told about them makes me think I’d like them a lot. Director Cristophe Gans made the moody and very cool Le pacte des loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf), which, although the script wasn’t wonderful, was very well executed, I thought. And, of course, Roger Avary wrote the script. Roger Avary is interesting, perhaps most famous for working in a video store with Quentin Tarantino, and then writing work on Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Pulp Fiction. I’ve always wanted to like him and his movies more than I actually do, since he seems like a smart and cool guy, but Killing Zoe was a derivative nihilistic bore, and The Rules of Attraction was competent and at times funny, but didn’t live up to the source material at all, so I had my doubts.

And I was right. The movie is stylish and very cool, and at times really creepy, especially creepy looking, but what the hell is going on in this script? The dialogue, especially in the first act, is just screwed up. It’s stilted and unnatural, the sort of thing that makes you go “people don’t talk like that!” every few minutes. The set-up is weak and uninteresting, and you just want people to go to Helltown USA so people will speak fewer annoying lines, and get into the action.

When the main characters arrive in Silent Hill, things make a turn for the better. The first time the darkness falls and the town changes into some twisted nightmare hell version of itself, it’s awesome, and it gets better every time it happens. The effects are very nicely done, both the makeup and the digital stuff. It’s not directly scary, but it’s creepy and makes you jump, which is decent. People continue doing and saying things that make no sense, but it’s ok, you forgive it because of the other things that are going on.

Then, when the mysteries start being resolved, the group of wannabe witch-burners from Monty Python and the Holy Grail show up, wanting to burn some witches and claiming they were turned into newts. This goes on for a while, until you get mightily fed up with them, and they kill one of the secondary characters. You want them to die for being such an idiotically bad and cliched exaggeration of fundamentalist christians (such an idiotic group to begin with that you’d think it’d be hard to exaggerate them), and you get your wish.

The climactic scene is one of my favourites in the movie, a sort of Dante’s Inferno by way of Hellraiser and Japanese tentacle porn, with strands of sapient barbed wire snaking through a church, grabbing people, invading their orifices, and tearing them apart in detail, with characters unable to do anything but stare slack-jawed at what they’ve unleashed. Almost everyone dies, which means that almost everyone annoying dies, so it’s a nice pay-off.

The aftermath is also decent, but by then you’ve stopped caring.

This movie is a typical example of one of the ways screenwriting can fail. As a treatment, this probably looked very good, the general story they’re telling is not bad at all, it’s marginally original, well put together, and so on. But when writing out the actual scenes, something went horribly wrong, and every character became wooden, the dialog became stilted, and people’s motivations and actions made no sense. The devil’s in the details, as they say.

All in all, it’s probably worth seeing, for the nightmare visuals and climactic scenes of pandemonium, if nothing else. For anyone who’s not a horror fan, it’s going to be a waste of time, and even horror fans will likely feel at least a bit let down.

A couple of weeks back, my (roughly) semiannual Amazon.com order arrived, some 30 books this time. I figure I’ll try to review at least some of them here, so here are my impressions of the ones I’ve read so far.

His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman (Dell Laurel-Leaf Books box set)

This is very interesting, a trilogy of dark fantasy for “young adults” which is outspokenly anti-religious (or at least anti-organized religion), and is quite heavy on metaphysics based on or extrapolated from modern particle physics. Philip Pullman has been on record criticizing C.S. Lewis for the moralizing and christian propaganda in the Narnia books, and although I remember the Narnia books fondly, I have to say that Pullman is a much better writer than Lewis, and has much more interesting things to say.

It’s fantasy, of sorts, and steampunk, and some SF, and alternate universe fiction, and several other things, and it works quite well. The criticism of organized religion is right on, although it gets a bit heavy-handed and obvious in the third book. The third book in general has a few problems, especially the second half of it, where the ending seems anticlimactic, and the loss forced upon the protagonists by fate seems unnecessarily cruel. But all in all, it’s quite good, and far better than most things written for young adults, including the Harry Potter series (which I like, but it’s not as interesting or well-written). There are some awesome ideas here, from knives that can cut between universes to armored sentient polar bears, but also very well-written sentimental passages, and meditations on destiny, free will, loss, and death.

Black Hole, Charles Burns (Pantheon)

I bought this mostly because Sean T. Collins has been constantly raving about it, and it’s an interesting book. It’s a graphic novel, but bound in a normal novel-sized hardcover, which makes the art smaller than it would be in the hardcover or trade paperback bindings usually used for longer graphic novels, but it’s fine, the art is crisp and clear black and white, and looks gorgeous on the heavy paper.

The story itself is a sort of body horror concept, teenage alienation in seventies Seattle manifest as “the bug”, a sexually transmitted disease that brings about bodily transformation that varies wildly from person to person. That sort of psychological state manifested in the body story sounds like something Cronenberg would have written, and it appeals to me because of that. The story isn’t really about that, though, the bug is the backdrop against which the characters work out their lives and relationships. There’s also a serial killer picking off infected kids, but that subplot didn’t seem particularly necessary or interesting to me. All in all, it’s interesting and quite good, but I’m not going to be raving about it like Sean has been.

Teach Yourself Film Studies, Warren Buckland (Teach Yourself)

My formal knowledge of film studies is lacking, so I decided to get a few books to try to remedy that. This is the first and most basic, and while it’s a good introduction and high-level overview, it was really too basic for me. It introduces core concepts, the main directions of film studies (mostly the difference between genre theory and auteur theory), has a chapter on documentary film, and one on film reviewing, and that’s about it. If you’re more or less in the dark about the whole thing, and want to see if it’s interesting, this is probably a good book, but it is very basic indeed. For me, it mostly confirmed and refreshed my memory of things I already knew, like the fact that I mostly disagree with auteur theorists, and think their priorities are misguided.

Coming up next, Carlos Ruíz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, which I just started reading. I got it on the urging of my girlfriend, and so far, I have to say it’s very promising. I see it’s been compared to Focault’s Pendulum, Auster’s New York trilogy, The Club Dumas, Borges and Márquez, so this should be right up my alley.