I’m on The Horror Blog‘s Horror Roundtable again this week, where the question is about one’s favourite cinematic animal attack. Go check it out.

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.

I’m in the Horror Roundtable over at The Horror Blog this week. Go and check it out, and The Horror Blog in general is worth reading too.

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.

Yesterday, I went to film a music video. People from Plataforma films called me about it, they didn’t have much of a budget, but needed someone to play a thug (I know, I’m horribly typecast). I’d never been on a music video shoot before, and they were friends asking for a favor, so I accepted. The video was for Naty Botero’s “Te Quiero Mucho”. She’s a Colombian pop singer, and this is her first song, which is currently at number three on the Colombian hit lists. She doesn’t have a web site, but quick googling of her name seems to confirm at least that.

Arriving, I realized the production was full of people I already knew. Miguel Bonilla, director of Comando Zorras, was producing, and several of the people who did art and props on Bolas Chinas were working too. Additionally, I ran into a couple of people from “Supercivicos”, a TV Azteca show that I went to do a little work on about a month ago, but where we couldn’t get the takes they wanted that day, and when they called me again, I was busy.

The video itself is a seventies exploitation movie spoof, where the star gets into a Barbarella-like suit and kicks the ass of some thugs in a bar (that’s us) before we break a bottle over her head and take her to the big boss. The big boss in this case was played by a midget named Chuchín, who they’d put into a shiny black vinyl suit, with a red pirate shirt and a cowboy hat. He was really good actor, though, I suspect that he was the only real professional actor on set. There’s another fight scene (in which Miguel makes a star turn as an actor, who karate-chops his way through the bad guys), and the good guys win.

All in all, it was pretty fun, in many ways fairly similar to Comando Zorras both in feel and basic idea. They were shooting on 16mm, on an old Arriflex, and the production was a bit rushed and basic, but I think it worked well. We did some interiors at the Plataforma offices first, then moved to Barney’s, a bar in Condesa, to shoot the bar fight. Several objects were broken over people’s heads in the duration, first a chair, which didn’t work so well, since it wasn’t really prepared well enough, and didn’t break (ouch). Then one of those fake bottles made of sugar, which I’d never seen in real life before, and which worked surprisingly well. Even the sound is very real.

Since there were hardly any professional actors, the whole crew did stints as actors. The makeup and costume girls were also backing singers/dancers in the bar, one of the producers was one of the bad guys, the camera assistant was the bartender, and so on, which made the whole thing feel like we were playing dress-up, with everyone in and out of various seventies costumes all the time.

In general, it was pretty interesting, and fun to meet the guys again. I also finished early, which is also a bonus.

On Thursday, I went with Øyvind to Rushes to watch the telecine of some material for a commercial. We were leaving a meeting and he asked me if I wanted to come along, since he was going directly there, and I hadn’t actually seen a transfer done before.

It was pretty interesting, but maybe simpler than you think. The hundred thousand dollar Da Vinci unit they use to color correct doesn’t really do much more than what a high-speced PC workstation could do, as far as I could see, and the interface was the typical early nineties “pro visual software” interface, a la Shake, a large screen with lots of buttons and widgets, no windows you can move, and things in tabs. And lots and lots of sliders. The big console the Da Vinci uses is certainly cool, and I’m told you can get those for normal PCs too, but they’re still overpriced (in the 10k dollar range, which is ridiculous for 4 large trackballs and a bunch of buttons and knobs). Brings me back to my rants about why good free software could blow this whole thing wide open.

The telecine itself is a pretty cool piece of gear, though, even though it’s also relatively simple, and overpriced, like much else in movie production. But the results look good (and this was a transfer to SD, even).

All in all, an interesting experience. I hung around the Da Vinci operator and picked up a bit about how the interface worked, and prodded him on how to get the curves right (years of still image correction experience pay off). The best part was the included free food and drinks, though. They make really good sandwiches.

And, hot on the heels of Comando Zorras’ availability, comes the Bolas Chinas trailer, which director Alex uploaded to YouTube. It’s watchable here, but it’s not particularly good. I’ve seen the movie now, and that’s not particularly good either. There’s good material, but the editing and pacing is… off. Very off. Similar to the way it’s off in the trailer, actually. But oh well, there it is.

Yeah, well, don’t get too excited, since it sucks. But, it’s available for rent at Mexican NetFlix-like site MovieNet.

The good thing about this is that I can use that site as a reference to get it into IMDB, so I can get my credit and whatnot.

But seriously, don’t rent it. It sucks.