Tantrums and Tarantulas: THE EDITOR, DEATH LAID AN EGG, EVE OF DESTRUCTION

 In the beginning there was just a simple poster, with a lot of strange fake names like Ally Gunning and Ahab Bricks and an image of a moviola running a reel of segmented human intestine or spine or something through the sprockets, a kind of EC Comics final twist panel for a movie as yet unwritten. Commissioned for a Canadian "Nonexistent Film" poster art show, the idea was intriguing enough for a trailer, and then, finally, a feature. That order may seem strange but the crazy horror genre is used to it; Val Lewton famously was given the titles for his films by RKO brass, then had to write a film to go with them --and today they're all classics! And now, comes to DVD/Blu-ray, THE EDITOR.


A zippy, blood and nudity-primary color drenched satiric whirlwind that makes Rodriguez' PlANET TERROR seem pretentious and talky by contrast, its frenetic pace, along with inextricable layers of cinematic self-reflexivity and metatextual breakdown, can make for quite a blurry ride until repeat viewings bring it all into focus, sussing out split personality nuance and allowing room to savor the Argento's INFERNO-esque colour palette, the 70s-80s bedroom racing stripes of a thousand Canadian-present-merging with-Italian yesterdays, and the irresistibly old school analog synth score. Will you make those multiple trips to the Astron-6 quadrant? Will you take my hand, and return it to its rightful owner?

The weirdest thing about this final 2014 film of THE EDITOR perhaps is that it's almost as much a satire of the post-giallos made today as the old ones made yesterday that have become classics and been largely forgiven and absolved from charges of misogyny (charges I too once levied). As DVD and HD widescreens have given visually and aurally psychedelic color-saturated Italian giallos from the 70s and slasher-horror from the 80s a second life--making their films demand re-evaluation by once-sneering critics (such as myself)--they seem newer than most 'new' stuff being churned out today. So it stands to reason there'd be an emerging slew of imitators, just as there were back then. And so Moloch bless us everyone, in our glorious Blu-ray age, great companies like Blue Underground, Code Red, Synapse, and Scream Factory make 70s-80s horror films seem like miracles that still carry a nostalgic jouissance-tingling currency for a generation too young to actually see the originals at the time. Now we're old, but we still remember vividly how freaked out we were when we saw the local TV spots, or heard about them, or looked at the picture inserts in the novelization. That weird older adults-only horror movie frisson cut our soul deep, like initiatory tribal scarring. So now we watch our DVDs of them over and over, half out of a warped obsessive-compulsive disorder, half out of cargo cult-style reverie. So it's natural we want to make our own totemic effigies, just to feel that childhood thrill of terror again, or at least hear some colors and see sound.


So lo and behold, a whole new breed of horror film is erupting, the post-giallo thriller--either straight (Peter Strickland, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani - as seen in my curated Netflix festival entry, Post-Giallo Nightmare Logic ala Netflix) or for THE EDITOR, respectuflly satiric: the Canadian 80s-obsessed filmmaker collective known as Astron-6 use mustaches, intentionally off dubbing and too-watery blood and a layered post-modern style that incorporates such eye-popping sights as a man climbing out through the screen of a moviola. It's kinda misogynistic but no more so than BOARDWALK EMPIRE, and it has the Asia Argento-Jennifer Tilly hybrid  of her moment, Paz de la Huerta (left), who does batshit busted ass crazy pretty well. She would make a grand Martha in a horror movie update of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF or SCORE! Here she plays the sexually supercharged and big-lipped wife of the star, the titular editor, Ray Ciso (director Adam Brooks) and makes Edwige Fenech seem like Annette Funicello. 

Whoa, is that reference too inside? You don't know Fenech from Funicello? Then you may be the wrong audience for THE EDITOR. Best you go home and watch CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS and BEACH BLANKET BINGO, alternating DVD chapters until they bleed together as CASE OF THE BLOODY BLANKET or BLOOD IRIS BINGO. We'll wait.... right here, with our massive finger collections drenched under grueful kliegs.

Back? Good. Now you can love THE EDITOR, to a point, the same point. I forgot to tell you to see THE BEYOND. But how can I tell you to see something I don't particularly like? I love about 1/2 that film but after the third minute of watching unconvincing gore close-ups tarantulas pull at latex, well, it cheapens my love of the genre, for once gore loses its punch, its shock value, what the hell good is it? But I do love those white eyes, that girl in the middle of the road with the dog (even if it leads to a rip of SUSPIRIA), the overall oppressive vibe, the contrapuntal score, and the existential ending. I'm not surprised the Astrons so clearly know THE BEYOND by heart, for like Fulci, their strengths and weaknesses are facing each other but they're one --pure dream logic sensationalism at the loss of coherence, and a gleeful reveling in ugly excess that eventually deadens its effect. So THE EDITOR is mirror reflecting whirl of gruesome splatter, unconsciously puritanical sex, and overbaked abstraction and 80s aerobics, BUT I love its Franco Nero mustaches, and the Negaverse' alternate shadow reality populated by ghosts of the slain, severed fingers and floating FROM BEYOND-esque air eels, and swirling black mists. Man have to be blind not to love that. Though having been to some similar places in my 'ahem' travels, I assure you one thing, Verstronians, the real DMT-verse has more spiral fractals, and the FROM BEYOND-esque air eels are endlessly intwining in a double helix that encompasses the breadth of your now widened third eye perception!

From top: The Beyond (1981); The Editor (2011)

There's only one real main flaw, for me: a kind of tawdry misogynistic strip club brazenness (and by misogyny I don't mean the great scene where the cop shows up at his quarry's table during an argument with his wife [La Huerta] to slap her for him--that's hilarious) that's at odds with the more laid and repressed-but-sexier Italians of the era depicted. In other words, I feel fine showing SUSPIRIA or TENEBRE to a hipster feminist, but wouldn't feel comfortable showing her THE EDITOR. Maybe I'm just the prude, I feel the same way about GAME OF THRONES. And can't help but feel the layers should produce a feeling of disoriented self-reflexive paranoia that's not here the way it was in THE STUNTMAN or MULHOLLAND DR. But hey, aside from that, good on ya, mate. Cuz Udo Kier is in it!!

The marvelous Udo

The gorgeous Jean-Louis Trintignant and gorgeous Ewa Aulin in Italian Guilo Questi's qua giallo

While sensitive souls wait for the day that factory farming is regarded as one of humanity's worst atrocities, for writer-director Giuliu Questi (Django Kill, If you Live... Shoot!) and co-writer Franco Arcalli that day came back in 1968, the same year as Argento's groundbreaking Bird with Crystal Plumage. With weird dialogue that sounds like some kind of enigmatic code --the way Belmondo and Karina sometimes talk in that half-recited way in Pierrot Le Fou, there's something kinda magic about DLAE but it's not in the underlaying weird horror plot about the accidental production of a headless chicken, the full measure of factory farming bio-horror guaranteeing the horrified coop owners a heftier profit margin and Marco (Jean Louis Trintignant) a nervous breakdown. That's just the grotesque nadir of a grisly operation. But this split between the ugly truth and the lofty boardroom is well embodied by Marco, who vents his frustrations at being a glorified trophy husband for older woman chicken magnate Anna (Gina Lollobrigida) by cutting up prostitutes in a secret hotel room and covering scarves with Zodiac killer symbols. Gabrielle (Ewa Aulin, Candy herself) is Anna's hot secretary, and it's implied she might be having affairs with both Anna and Marco, and whomever else wants to go for the seven minutes in heaven. During their cinq-a-septs, Marco keeps pressuring her to run away with him, making all these declarations. She worries he's too broke without access to Anna's pockets. "What different does that make," he says. "We can always steal, can't we?" Ever the Lorelei Lee, our Gabrielle cautions him: "Love is a luxury."

Yeah but Trintignant's playing an Italian, and they don't like to be put off. So he takes it out on the prostitutes, maybe, but he draws the line at the headless chickens created inexplicably by the accidental introduction of Anna's wrong-stepping dog into their feed. "This is the beginning of those mutations I've been working for!" says the scientist. "It will bring radical changes to the production." The chickens don't turn homicidal like the house cats in The Corpse Grinders, but the monstrosity of it all drives him into a humane societal fury!


But this seemingly benign tale is rife wtih weird flashbacks, twists, and ragged editing of an almost Bill Gunn-style sideways termite-Eisenstein brilliance; Bruno Madera's patchwork soundtrack plunging down in the atonal piano mash abyss one scene and all up in bossa nova and Anton Karras zither the next, with shoutings in German over Brazilian violins during the lovemaking. Meanwhile, as Bruno skulks around egg symbols and real eggs, Gabrielle and Anna start dressing up like whores and frequenting Bruno's secret haunts. Or do they? Is anything what it seems here?


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Once upon a time there was much variety in movies, in cop movies, the genre, and then.... there was Beverly Hills Cop, which made so many dump trucks full of money it became the only kind of movie Hollywood would ever make again. That's why in every post I've ever written I talk about the post-BHC and the pre-BHC era. And in the post BHC era, there was also The Terminator, and Robocop, and there was Lethal Weapon... and of course, Flashdance. And so, it was natural to come along and quadringulate the four - the cool fast-talking black guy, the buddy cops who hate each other at first, the automaton, the Jennifer Beals getting wet in spandex and fuzzy leggings and hair while studying to be a yawn ballet dancer (in the post-Saturday Night Fever mode, or PSNF).  There wasn't a girl alive who didn't try to rock the soft focus leggings, kinky hair and headband look. Just thinking about it makes me all weak in the knees. Once again from the top: Murphy, Beals, Gibson, Schwarzenegger. And if you want to get technical, Jennifer Jason Leigh's half-sister Jamie Lee Curtis in the willfully forgotten misfire Perfect (1985 - above). This was the 80s, and if those involved with it have their way, you will never see Perfect in your lifetime. But...



There's an out-of-sync with its era vibe to this six years-late 'cool black cop and MILF engineer vs. amok android genre;' its director died trying to rescue his cat during the 1993 California wildfires two years after it came out, not that such tragedy should affect our affection for a flatly filmed but fascinatingly proto-Carol Cloverian thriller about a chick robot who--as in all terribly written Robocop clones-- finds street crime wherever she goes, forcing her to kill and/or get a robotic concussion which disrupts her neural network, sending her on a one woman vendetta against all the men who wronged her maker in childhood, while trying to shake a feeling of lost confusion.



On the other hand, no one is more lost than Gregory Hines, whose 80s tap dance career somehow qualifies him for hunting indestructible irrational chick robots. Here's an actor who's not about to go brave a wildfire to rescue his cat. Then again, why is he even cast? Oh yeah, Beverly Hills Cop part of the holy 80s quadrangle. And Hines was famous once, the new Sammy Davis Jr. and the past Savion Glover. A footloose and fancy free tap dancer with a trim beard and a face that looks like someone pulled his nose way out and then snapped it back so it hangs loose like his 90s suit, we first find dear old Gregory berating a bunch of hardcore military mesomorphs after they fail a hostage rescue training exercise. Shouting at the top of his lungs, voice barely cutting through the thick testosterone. Is keeping a straight face while this mustachioed Snoopy shouts at them like a fussy choreographer part of the training? That's a hell of a tester. The amok Eve VIII (Renée Soutendijk) should be easy to find and wrangle after that. All Hines has to do is tell his SWAT guys where to shoot and follow her down the traumatic memory lane of her 'image and likeness'-style designer, also played by Soutendijk and named Eve (who gave her identical namesake replicant her own memories; or as Deckard would say, "implants"). What it is, kid. Too bad his guys can't shoot for shit, so EVE VIII ends up decimating entire ambush parties with a single Mac 10 clip. Next time you want to train some inept SWAT guys, better call R. Lee Emery!

Soutendijk, a Dutch actress, was in some Dutch Paul Verhoeven films neither you or I have probably seen, but probably want to (they're OOP in R1).  She's the girl holding the scissors in that Fourth Man poster (left). She makes a pretty solid Nexus 8 model, and as she's a single innocent robot suffering from PSTD going up against an array of supposedly competent armed men and sleazy studs, it's pretty cathartic when she blasts them all to hell. And this time there's no "Humans Killed: Zero" statistic like Arnold's in the same year's T2, Badass.

I admit I recently bought the Blu-ray of EVE, mostly out of loyalty to a drunken half-remembered night when my brother and I caught it halfway through on cable back in 1991. It's not quite as good sober in 2015, but what is? Made before CGI and with a decent budget, it's good enough that when you're craving a witty Terminator-Robocop-style 80s flick from the early 90s, look no further... than Dark Angel (1990).

If you're still hungry after that, pour the Hines. And PS: Going back into a raging inferno to rescue your cat? Regardless of the outcome, simply badass.