It's summer time man, and if you're a Nordic in genes and temperament it's not your favorite season (that would be autumn) so that means lots of time staying home (academia!) and watching old horror movies, for that special chill. And horror means women, and if you love dark long flowing hair then you want brunette beauties up in there. Sure blondes are great. But your (Swedish) mom is blonde, and you can't abide seeing a girl who looks like your mom when she was 29 and you were three years old, struggling to get her attention and then she comes at you like a wurdalak to drink your blood. You kneel at the base of her bed screaming and crying in terror, and she finally wakes fully up and you realize she was just moaning from having to deal with your nonsense.
In short, blondes have the power to paralyze their prey but also to earn our sympathy, loyalty, attraction. If you're me, in general (unless you're French), I'm more your friend rather than lover if you're blonde. From the late 80s to the end of the '10s my best buddy--my platonic true love--has been a blonde ice queen (four different ones) and my GF an 'accessible' brunette (don't ask how many). My therapist had reasons why this formula repeated itself so relentlessly (and still does more or less).Knowing this you can imagine that I was sooo looking forward to Swedish director Nicholas Windig Refn's NEON DEMON; but then I read April Wolfe's review in the Voice. I can't even seem to think about that issue without starting to shake in rage. If you're like me, you'd like to know that shit's not gonna crop up in horror movies you're watching, especially if for no reason other than some belabored twist 'social message point.' I blame Law and Order: SVU, HBO, and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Directors use every trick to make their R-ratings earned until we leave the film feeling like we too have been violated, the kind of expert molestation done in crowds where it doesn't even dawn on us what happened until the perp is long gone.
Just thinking about my thinking about it starts to elevate my blood pressure in mounting fratricidal rage. So rather than get all high horsey I'm going to skip ahead and share films these with you, all of which have cool women who don't need to deal with these sorts of traumas in order to win my affection. Endangered? Sure, but not at a naked chained quivering character at the mercy of a misogynist cokehead rewrite by the rich kid Illuminati-pledge producer who has to let us know the scope of his decade-long atrocities and snuff operations, as if just ordinary brutalizing wouldn't get us fired up.
Hence this list: For brunettes can take care of themselves. At least to me. Naturally these laws are all broken forthwith.
12. Alison Elliott as the reincarnation spectra of Irish druid generations
THE ETERNAL
(1998) Dir. Michael Almereyda
***1/2
(1998) Dir. Michael Almereyda
***1/2
If Eugene O'Neill adapted Bram Stoker's "Jewel of the Seven Stars" and set it in modern, swinging times with the help of Hemingway and Lew Landers, I think we'd have the ETERNAL. I found this gem by being into Almereyda's black and white vampire hipster film NADJA and learning he made this one afterwards...Starting in NYC and ending up on a windswept Irish shore, it's about reincarnation and a mummified druid priestess dug out of the peat moss by Christopher Walken and kept down in the basement of the ancestral homestead. Noting her body's been preserved by all the tannin in the peat, Walken's pretty enthralled by his discovery--an ancestor of his family... and therefore Alison's (Alison Eliot) who's been having migraine black-outs and drinking and goes to the homestead in Ireland almost as if called by some unseen force, her fun-loving husband (Jared Harris) and ginger son in tow.
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One of the unique subtexts at work here is an undercurrent of pro-drunken anger --as still sick and suffering from episodes of passing out on stairs, Nora regularly has drinks taken out of her hands by fellow drunk husband Jim who says "none for us, we're quitting" and makes a big show of enjoying life without it all while nipping from a flask unseen. That kind of balderdash makes me want to wretch! The way the drinks pass her wide eyes by, or the way she works hard to seem deadpan when getting offered some whiskey down in the basement once Jim's upstairs with the ginger kid --it's the kind of stuff only drunks like myself probably feel so keenly, and non-drunk directors don't even seem to notice as keenly as others when adapting O'Neill's works. Very few playwrights capture the way every offered drink, every vulnerable liquor bottle, warms the alcoholic's blood like a siren call, and every 'no thanks' on their behalf freezes the blood like a gut punch they're not allowed to wince from, lest they prove just how valid their family's concerns are. (more)
One of the unique subtexts at work here is an undercurrent of pro-drunken anger --as still sick and suffering from episodes of passing out on stairs, Nora regularly has drinks taken out of her hands by fellow drunk husband Jim who says "none for us, we're quitting" and makes a big show of enjoying life without it all while nipping from a flask unseen. That kind of balderdash makes me want to wretch! The way the drinks pass her wide eyes by, or the way she works hard to seem deadpan when getting offered some whiskey down in the basement once Jim's upstairs with the ginger kid --it's the kind of stuff only drunks like myself probably feel so keenly, and non-drunk directors don't even seem to notice as keenly as others when adapting O'Neill's works. Very few playwrights capture the way every offered drink, every vulnerable liquor bottle, warms the alcoholic's blood like a siren call, and every 'no thanks' on their behalf freezes the blood like a gut punch they're not allowed to wince from, lest they prove just how valid their family's concerns are. (more)FURTHER BRANCHING:
See also: Hammer's adaptation of Stoker's Jewel of the Seven Stars: BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB (Valerie Leon, above)
See also: Virginia Christine in: CURSE OF THE MUMMY (1942)
2-3. Lili Taylor + Catherine Zeta Jones
THE HAUNTING
(2001) - Dir Jan de Bont
**1/2
Whenever I feel a close sisterly affinity with an actress I check when and where she was born - sure enough, like me Lili Taylor is a Pisces born in 1967 Illinois. And she's a born mirrorer - meaning she can reflect, distort, match and amplify other people when in close one on one encounters, but we start to lose ourselves the larger the group - we can't reflect everyone after all - and so we begin to vanish. Give us time alone with cool chick like Catherine Zeta Jones, though, and it's like an awesome sexy feedback machine.**1/2
An Aires born 1969 in Wales, Jones has a twin sign reflector skill herself - she's never been outshone in any film - always able to at least match her co-star/s, as if a radiance reflector herself. Put two reflectors together like Jones and Taylor in the first chunk of Haunting- and there's instant lesbian heat that overwhelms Taylor (in the mousy caretaker role) which delights Jones, who's fascinated by Taylor's instant crush on her, but quickly moves on once the rest of the guests arrive. Most hilariously is the way, for example, Taylor echoes the ominous words of the uptight housekeeper ("we lock the gates after dark") while giving Jones a sly grin. If only it was just the two of them, running through the house in all its giddy overdressed splendor (funhouse rooms with mirrors and revolving floors, etc), secret panels, living griffins, imprisoned souls, et al. it would be a total classic. But then comes the boys--Liam Neeson and Owen Wilson--in career lows apiece, as if realizing the film's already been stolen by these two raven-haired demonesses, they decide to just wreck it with their smarmy banality.
For example there's the dialogue, clunky, in their initial meeting- Jones bragging about her Prada Milan boots and so forth but she delivers the lines with a cheeky delight in the place "this is so twisted, Susan Foster Kane meets the Addams Family," And the evil-eyed housekeeper delivering the lines "No one will come here / in the dark" about her strict habit of leaving after dinner, but this time Taylor stands next to her, echoing the creepy words and giving an enigmatic semi-feigned macabre delight - it's dialogue that could have sunk to the floor in weaker hands (certainty the housekeepers cast more for severity than chutzpah), but between Taylor's cool/warm Piscean deadpan and Jones' dusky Welsh relish for red, it works - they know how to match the dark twisted tone of the place.
The men by comparison are just dumb and smarmy. When she's talking about Three AM making her feel like a genius, she's bringing about a general discussion of thoughts and inspiration, while all --- can do is rant about the infomercials he watches. ("That's why god created barbiturates, honey" she tells him). But god also created the VCR, dumbass. Watch goddamn WC Fields and learn how to drink like a man; but the script and acting is fascinating as you get the idea these people really are meeting for the first time and all trying to impress each other, lying and inflating their egos (he tries to win her over by patronizingly third person talking to Liam, "I see a little Jackie Susann in Theo" - i.e. he only has comparison with TV and movies, offering none of his own experience by contrast, and it's very patronizing, and she gives him a "sarcastic chuckle."
All Liam can do on contrast is feeble exposition ("a sleep study - that's why we're here.") No shit.
As I've written, I prefer this film to the original Haunting - I know its' heresy but I'm sorry - Russ Tamblyn's little Bronx gremlin face and one-track greed dialogue is wearying and Julie Harris' spinster shit was old as far back as East of Eden. Compare her act in the Haunting to say, Deborah Kerr's 'unhinged Poppins' in The Innocents and you're reminded that while some Brit actresses lend oomph, warmth and gusto to even their spinster roles, others just drain the life out of everything but their own androgynous Emily Dickinson on Lithium depth, mistaking bland tedium as something that--being true to the character--will wow an audience rather than make them want to punch a hole in the wall.
Also check Taylor in THE ADDICTION (1991) my favorite of hers and of Abel Ferrara's- with perfect fusion between her off-the-cuff whispery thrilled aliveness, Ferrara's druggy downtown cool, and screenwriter Nicholas St. John's doctoral thesis in philosophy while on heroin stream-of-consciousness and the Village at the height of its rock sticker-layered post-punk decadence even as NYU was working like methadone. I was living on 15th and 7th and used to walk past all these spots, hungover or drunk out of my mind, and lemmie tell ya, it was really like that - all the black tailgate partying on the weekends, and so froth - Rastas sellin' ganja (maybe), used record and clothing stores every half-step, awesome. All gone now... god damn it all.
4. Rose McGowan
PLANET TERROR
(2007) - Dir. Robert Rodriguez
****
****
Now that I've had the chance to see the Hateful Eight three or four times, it's become apparent to me just how much that film belongs to Samuel Jackson--how he 'owns' it and centers it and gets the bulk of dialogue. Similarly, seeing PLANET TERROR seven or more times it becomes apparent just how much Rose McGowan's movie this is - how even surrounded by heavy hitters (Jeff Fahey, Josh Brolin, Freddy Rodriguez) she OWNS it, gets the most lines and screen time and range, changes the most, and most goes for broke, delivering a wide-ranging tough as nails 'it's go-go not cry-cry' moxy, becoming a comedian, dealing with losing her leg and becoming all she can be all over one long crazy night, spilling gallons of infected blood while running (with one leg and no crutches) a gamut of regular loss of hope (her crying one-legged striptease for a repugnant Quentin) and onwards.
Part of what makes the film work is its moral twilight where none are good or evil without some part of the other (for example, Marley Shelton plays a terrible mother and wife, but one of the intrepid hero survivors; Brolin is at least a 'great 70s dad' and good doctor ["we're gonna have to take the arm, Joe"] while also being Shelton's murderously jealous husband), Biehn for example focuses on arresting El Wray ("are you a 'wrecker,' Wray?") rather than focusing on the town going to shit all around him, etc. Only Wray himself and Cherry (McGowan), the least respectable on paper (rap sheet on one; go-go dancer the other) are truly the knight-errants. Repeat viewings reveal McGowan's journey is one shared by every college graduate with no prospects - how to make use of your list of seemingly useless talents to find a life purpose, all while the clock is ticking and opportunity windows are close closing. Sometime the less options there are the bigger the yet uncreated role you were meant to fill, and that is what real heroism is all about. Funny that her and Wray's motto is 'two against the world,' when they're the most unselfish ones of their group, and therefore truly their sisters' keeper and the finders of los gringos.
See also:Rose McGowan in
PHANTOMS
PHANTOMS
(1991) **1/2
I suppose most people would think of Charmed or Scream or something when they think of Rose McGowan (1), but me, I think of this, I don't love it but I sure can watch it a lot. It's got several things I like and nothing I don't. Besides strong, cute women in the lead, snowy isolation, guns, the idea of a collapsing Hawksian deputized governmental other (i.e. civilians, military, cops, crooks, drunks etc. working together without shadiness, class distinction, or judgment) working against a common foe and that it starts right in with the slow mounting weirdness, doesn't waste time with tedious small town Americana details (the way a Stephen King miniseries would), and has a cool ancient aliens-style monster, something to root against (I don't jibe with the feel-bad Kramer-esque liberalism of the 'we're the evil aliens' sci fi - ala Day the Earth Stood Still, Man from Planet X, etc.) I love its shades of Carpenter's Thing, and Prince of Darkness (and that its set over one long night), I relate to being all freaked out when a sibling or bestie lures one to their bohunk town for the holidays, finding out it's full of weird evil creatures and errant electricity. I like the ominous pipe groans, the readiness of the girls to gun up at the sheriff's office. And that Liev Schreiber's full creepiness is utilized (rather than trying to pass himself off a good guy which never works --his eyes are too close together).
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My mom used to have a whole stack of Koontz novels she read on the basement steps in case I wanted to read them, which I never did. They always struck me as Readers Digest versions of Stephen King, stripped--I imagined--of New England townie detail and about thickness. Was it the dull covers or that my mom liked him so I couldn't? Either way, when this movie came around to Syfy I watched it and wondered. Now, strangely enough, Peter O'Toole's elderly face here reminds me a lot of how my mom looked the last time I saw her. Coincidence - am I reading too much into it?? Who's to say what's real.
My mom used to have a whole stack of Koontz novels she read on the basement steps in case I wanted to read them, which I never did. They always struck me as Readers Digest versions of Stephen King, stripped--I imagined--of New England townie detail and about thickness. Was it the dull covers or that my mom liked him so I couldn't? Either way, when this movie came around to Syfy I watched it and wondered. Now, strangely enough, Peter O'Toole's elderly face here reminds me a lot of how my mom looked the last time I saw her. Coincidence - am I reading too much into it?? Who's to say what's real.
The cast is pretty badass - Acidemic favorite Rose McGowan, some cute chick named Joanna Going as the tough sisters, Ben Affleck is pleasingly nondescript as the sheriff; with Nicky Katt and Schreiber as the deputies the town takes on a pleasing Actors' Studio patina. like the only person in the whole cast who seems believably from the Rocky Mountain area is Bo Hopkins, stealing a scene with O'Toole in a private plane (when he thinks he's being arrested rather than recruited). Affleck's too young and his hair's to slick and short to be believable as a sheriff, and he and his deputies' vibe mirrors that reflecting in the dissolving military cohesion in Romero's The Crazies in half the time. Schreiber with his serial killer glasses and Michael Keaton-style gum chewing is pretty terrifying as the weirdness of the situation throws him into a manic tailspin, but it would have helped to see him in the beginning as somewhat sane, as it is it seems very improbable anyone but a deranged moron would give him a gun. So sure, it's not perfect. Sometimes being "not bad" is good enough.
4. Melanie Scorfano
WYNONNA EARP
(SyFy - NOW)
***
Sharknado is the kind of movie Syfy premieres, but they also import cool sci fi TV from Canada, where strong female leads come smuggled from across the 49th Parallel. Here's one that's winning fans for its star Melanie Scorfano, an accursed direct descendent of Wyatt Earp, with an ornate demon killing gun to help her finally undo the curse that's been dogging her lineage since the OK Corral. Wynonna's sister Waverly tends bar at the local watering hole so there's lots of drinking, casual sex, occasionally on-point Black Hills-ish South Dakota country accents, and the kickass Scrofano ("crazy chick with a gun!!" she screams over the music at da'club, and for once that claim is believable). She's could be the cooler little sister of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction. Some of the menfolk don't have a full grasp on their twangs, but the main bad guy (Bobo) is at least cool in a Hitchcockian sort of way, even forging a strange bond with Waverly, etc. and there's females in traditionally male roles (like the blacksmith) and both sides have negatives and positives at play making it all very nice and wry (Wynonna shoots unarmed men/demons with nary a qualm - and I like that). That said, it's not quite in the zone yet but for a first season, it's damned good Canadian, without an ounce of cloying sedimentary sweetness, but plenty of sisterhood, drinking, and weird curses, hellfire, and... Scrofano playing Wynonna with a two-fisted but very womanly gusto (rather than girly softness) that's way beyond most American actresses (if any place is stuck in the past, it's surely Hollywood not Calgary).
6. Famke Janssen - WITCH!
HANSEL+GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS
(2012) - Dir Tommy Wirkola
**1/2
Since I have distant ancestors hung as witches in Salem I'm still sensitive on this issue (that's a joke, how could I possibly remember them - 300 years is a long time, even the ancestral curses have worn off) but you can't call a film misogynist for using the words 'witch' and 'hunters' back to back, though when this first came out I certainly did try, and if there's any unsettling aura of gynocide (as there surely was in the depicted Middle Ages) it's not really apparent in the film, except as concerns the lone dickweed Peter Stormare and his good ole boy constabulary, who try to get rapey with our Gemma Arterton (sister witch hunter) and get smashed up real troll-wise instead. Still we learn not to budge jooks by the clubbers (and I just forward through his yucky parts). I would have liked to see her save herself: there's a good witch (Phila Vitala) and the bad ones are super cool and are led by the great Famke Janssen, fast proving herself to be such a welcome beauty that perhaps the entire world is as smitten with her as poor Logan in X-Men (and me, and anyone who every loved the John Byrne/Chris Claremont era of 70s-80s X-Men comics). We'd follow her off a cliff and director Wirkola (who gave us Dead Sno 2 after this) pulls no punches; it's got so many strong females that if it is misogynist it's also a tribute to the inner resilience of womankind. Repress her and you just repress yourself, Stormare, you dickweed. See also Famke's great work in Lord of Illusions, The Faculty, and fuckin' love you, Famke.
See also by Wirkola:
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9. DEAD SNOW 2: RED VS. DEAD
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Marin is aided by three American nerds, 'the Zombie Squad' --Martin Starr (Party Down, Burning Love), Ingrid Haas, and the lovely Jocelyn DeBoer (above center) as a Star Wars nerd, the type who can have her pick of any man at the San Diego comic-con but probably doesn't even realize it, which makes her just the hotter. And everyone plays it dead straight, as nature, science and Nordic tradition demands. Miss it at your own risk. It's in English (not dubbed): the actors speak it, very well, creating an odd juxtaposition if you watch this back-to-back with the Norwegian language first film).
See also by Wirkola:
"Dod Sno" (2014) Dir. Tommy Wirkola
***
The Bride of Frankenstein of Nazi zombie pictures, it starts in the climax of the last one: Martin (Vegar Hoel), the final boy of the last film now has the the dreaded Colonel Herzog's (Ørjan Gamst) arm sewed onto him, and can raise the dead with it. So he resurrects a bunch of Russian POWs executed by the Nazis and buried in a mass grave 70 years ago (but frozen in the Norwegian mountains), to go up against Herzog's crew, who liberate an old Panzer tank from a nearby museum, a tank! A Nazi zombie first!
Marin is aided by three American nerds, 'the Zombie Squad' --Martin Starr (Party Down, Burning Love), Ingrid Haas, and the lovely Jocelyn DeBoer (above center) as a Star Wars nerd, the type who can have her pick of any man at the San Diego comic-con but probably doesn't even realize it, which makes her just the hotter. And everyone plays it dead straight, as nature, science and Nordic tradition demands. Miss it at your own risk. It's in English (not dubbed): the actors speak it, very well, creating an odd juxtaposition if you watch this back-to-back with the Norwegian language first film).
See also with Famke
11. THE FACULTY
(1998) Dir. Roberto Rodriguez
***
This movie came and went in theaters and is easy to overlook, awash as Netflix is in dumped-to-video teen horror films. But I saw this in the theater, and dug the romance between Famke Janssen and the drug-dealing high school brooder Josh Hartnett; there's also a new girl in school (Laura Harris), a mysterious outbreak of body-snatcher's style teacher takeover, and the best use of getting called into the principal's office as a cause for terror ever, and a keenly-felt amount of dread and frustration with parents that just tear apart your room looking for drugs when you make strange claims about alien takeovers. The all-star cast includes John Stewart as the science teacher, Terminator 2's Robert Patrick as the gym coach, Selma Hayek as the nurse, Bebe Neuwirth and Piper Laurie as vice principals, all jumping at the chance to work with Roberto Rodriguez and Scream writer Kevin Williamson (this time he keeps the film references in check, focusing instead on sci fi novel sources (Duvall explains that Finney's Body Snatchers was a rip-off of Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, and Wood theorizes aliens promoted these themes so that no one would believe it when they happened for real, ala Bruce Rux, etc.)The younger cast includes Clea Duvall is the Aly Sheedy-style outcast (in case you didn't make the Breakfast Club connection), and Jordana Brewster is spritely as a bitchy school newspaper reporter cheerleader bemused by photographer Elija Wood's infatuation with her.
The attempts of the new student (a touching Laura Harris) to connect are pretty sweet. She's almost the only human there, her existential loneliness the closest thing to a genuine high school emotion. Aside from stoner crank dealer Josh Hartnett, hottie nerd teacher Famke Janssen, nerdo Baggins, there's Usher! A memorable Marilyn Manson "We Don't Need No Education" runs under the uber-violent football game, connecting the cosmic dread of death with the fascist-pagan ceremonial barbarism of small town high school football. Best of all is how fast the heroes fall prey to the take-over, romances flare up and fade, and it all moves inexorably onwards. Roberto Rodriguez's direction is tight, as it often is when he's not trying to make an auteur statement. This baby came and went in the Kevin Williamson post-Scream gold rush (i.e. I know What You Did Last Summer), by 1999, Blair Witch Project and Sixth Sense had taken over.
See also w/ Gemma Arterton:
8. Gemma Arterton
BYZANTIUM
(2013) ***1/2
Dir Neil Jordan
Speaking of crazy Gemma - Irish director Neil Jordan loves cinema, beautiful girls, cinematic violence and the tawdry vice-ridden tourist traps of the UK seaside, in that order, and here delivers 'em all swirled like frosting on the existential women's picture (ala Suzuki not Cukor) yoked sublimely to the Anne Rice-readymade tale of a 200+ year old vampire and her equally ageless daughter (Saoirse Ronan) . The film has a rare style, so sure and gorgeous it seems--like the daughter unfixed to any one century, out to ensnare the hearts of the real life Edgar Allen Poe, his child wife/cousin, the Bronte sisters, and 15 year-old Twilight fans all in the same razor-studded wire net. Ferocious Gemma Arterton is Carmilla (!), we see her tossed by an uncaring officer into a brothel back in the 1700s, later following him off to the remote Irish coast island (Hy-Brasil?) where anyone who enters a certain cave and bathes in bats or whatever is imbued with immortal vampirism - a secret kept by an all-male Illuminati-style brotherhood who don't want any girls mucking it up, to the point they've had hit teams on her trail since the day she was turned. By 2013 she's still making her way by turning tricks, drinking her johns, as it were, if they get too bold. Saoirse on the other hand plays angel of mercy by only drinking-killing old folks who are 'ready' to go and who all seem to recognize her as come at last. She's kind of a drip, a bit like Edwina's daughter in Absolutely Fabulous, while Arterton is a force of nature. Though hundreds of years old, she's still just as daft as the day she was bit, and it's odd hearing a working class Brit accent on such a creature but it fits the way her voracious brio for her work, the affection for the gentle, lonely clients of her ancient trade and her rabid relish in tearing the bad ones apart, especially if they impugn her mothering skill or threaten her daughter. If it somehow doesn't ultimately seem to add up, say anything new, and you can see the events and resolutions a mile off, that doesn't mean Jordan's as sure of foot as few others, drawing on his experience with merging vivid working class grunginess, historical costume bodice ripping, fairy tale dream poetics, and poetry with sexual tolerance and forgiveness.
9. Arly Jover, Natasha Gregson Wagner
VAMPIRES: LOS MUERTOS
Dir. Tommy Lee Wallce (2002)
***
More than just a name-only sequel, this is directed by JC's number one apostle, Tommy Lee Wallace and it carries more than a shard of the great man's style (which makes it Hawksian twice removed). The big change here is that the main villainous vamp is the super sexy (but in a sleek way not a softcore bimbo way), lightning fast super strong mentally unstoppable Una (Arly Jover) who dreams of one day being able to walk in daylight without catching fire. Slinking around so fast among the blood bags she is invisible to the naked eye, zipping through packed cafes like a breeze, giving playful licks to the neck of Natsha Gregson Wagner, seducing the claustrophobic on-loan black vampire slayer (Darius McCarey) and scaring James Wood's replacement in the Vatican vamp slaying business, Jon Bon Jovi (who's great), and his priest acolyte.
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This semi-sequel to Carpenter's film is way less misogynist and a lot more fun, to me anyway, especially with the addition of Jovi as the lead baddie, and Jover's lithe dancer's body perfectly sheathed in a lovely wrap dress (high fashion meets the mummy, the perfect blend); she doesn't get many lines nor need them but the way, once slowed into view, she moves back and forth like a swaying cobra, turning herself on by tuning into the beating hearts of her impending victims, is a real turn-on, and not in a sleazy way. I was rooting for her every step, as well as digging the cute love story between shoot-first ask-questions-never Jovi and "I'm bit but I got pills"- HIV analogy-trundling Natasha Gregosn Wagner. And is that future Mexican film star Diego Luna (Et tu mama tambien) as the local kid who signs on with a note from his parents? It is, and even with his weird face and strange manner the kid has undeniable screen charisma; you don't know why but you can smell impending stardom all over him. Blood never lies. Wagner is a perfect vampire here and in...
This semi-sequel to Carpenter's film is way less misogynist and a lot more fun, to me anyway, especially with the addition of Jovi as the lead baddie, and Jover's lithe dancer's body perfectly sheathed in a lovely wrap dress (high fashion meets the mummy, the perfect blend); she doesn't get many lines nor need them but the way, once slowed into view, she moves back and forth like a swaying cobra, turning herself on by tuning into the beating hearts of her impending victims, is a real turn-on, and not in a sleazy way. I was rooting for her every step, as well as digging the cute love story between shoot-first ask-questions-never Jovi and "I'm bit but I got pills"- HIV analogy-trundling Natasha Gregosn Wagner. And is that future Mexican film star Diego Luna (Et tu mama tambien) as the local kid who signs on with a note from his parents? It is, and even with his weird face and strange manner the kid has undeniable screen charisma; you don't know why but you can smell impending stardom all over him. Blood never lies. Wagner is a perfect vampire here and in...
MODERN VAMPIRES (1998)
Dir. Richard Elfman - ***1/2From VAMPIRE'S KISS, THE ADDICTION and NADJA in the east, and NEAR DARK and VAMPIRES in the west, the 90s was a high time for hipster vampires working blood as an addiction/heroin/schizophrenia substitute and this little honey of a made-for-cable horror has a lot of that vibe. Following vamp Caper Van Diem (showing a real relish for this kind of morale-free bloodthirsty killer romantic) as he cruises back into LA, earning the ire of Dracula, who's held a grudge against him for reasons made clear later (he bit Van Helsing's sick son, and set the wheels of vampire hunting in motion).
With the director's brother, the great Danny Elfman, delivering one of his better scores of vocalizing and vamping (ala his work on Burton's Ed Wood and Mars Attacks), fusing with wild panther noises when newbie vamp Natasha Gregson Wagner--strutting and looking hot as Hell even in tawdry leather shorts--strikes at her johns and bloodies their cars and nearby alleys. Hot but sufficiently ferocious not to seem chintzy, bruises that seem real - with her shock of (dyed - hence makes the list) blonde hair and disregard for wiping out, cartwheeling drunk into trash piles, Wagner's vamp is the hottest mess going; Natasha Lyonne plays a (human) friend she makes in a club bathroom and goes partying with, to the dismay of her vamp keepers, mainly the hot guy back in town who turned her, Casper Van Diem What's so great is that these vamps don't waste their time hunting deer for blood like the Twilight crowd, they go for the jugulars of human beings with cheerful disregard for their screaming and pleading. Seeing naked bound humans terrorized and bled at the local vamp club as mere background to the dialogue and typical club exposition is wondrously refreshing after so many films where newbie vamps are meant to recoil in horror from their impending thirst, the way someone might stop eating meat after visiting a slaughterhouse.
And damn right you'll be IMDB-ing the name this movie's screenwriter Matthew Bright after this, and once you do and realize he also wrote FREEWAY and DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT, then suddenly you're hooked. Who is this guy and why isn't he revered to this day as the blood slicked intersection of Jack Hill and Paul Schrader? Not sure. He fell off the map a little bit after this and devolved into druggy dysfunction biopics like BUNDY, which is a drag. As far as made-for-late-night-cable schlock goes, this film is a frickin quasi-gold nougat and yet I'd never have known about it if not for Quiet Cool puttin' me wise when I saw it reviewed alongside DARK ANGEL. Bright has a yen for truly dangerous women, and I like that. You can smell the same anger at the relentless Kramer-ism and self-inflicted morality that dogs so many similar pics (and has ever since the censors made Hawks insert preachy diatribes at the precinct in SCARFACE). There's a bit too much Rod Steiger as a sociopathic Van Helsing (the film's one true bad guy, sort of) but there's thee always welcome Udo Kier, Craig Ferguson, Kim Cattrall, and Natalya Andreychenko adding oodles of zesty class as the upscale vampires. And there's three great black actor comics as Crips Van Helsing hires to help him raid nests: armed and extremely dangerous while rife with cool in-the-moment stoner comedy, i.e. Half-Baked and How High, but with a violent, stake-ramming edge that's so off kilter for the usual namby pamby second-wind morality (that says the 'good guys' can't be ruthless killers) that the film feels like it's really getting away with something. Even if the gang bang scene carries a nasty charge, its consensual and either way, this is one bloody unapologetic mess around. When Van Diem preps to leave the final slaughter with Wagner and someone asks what to do he looks at the the dopehead crip vamps running riot in da club and notes that LA "is in good hands." Hahhaha. If this don't make you want to track down Full Moon's other Bright scripted / Richard Elfman-team-up, SHRUNKEN HEADS, then man are you lucky... it sucks but so what?
See also: Joséphine de La Baume and Roxane Mesquida
KISS OF THE DAMNED
KISS OF THE DAMNED
(2012) Dir. Xan Cassavettes
***
Bearded screenwriter Paolo's (Milo Ventimiglio) smoldering eyes meet those of the alluring but stand-offish Djuna (Joséphine de La Baume) at the local video store: movies, connection! But they can only hook up if he chains her to her bed, cuz turned on she grows fangs and glowing eyes. After an impressively short bout of initial disbelief, Paolo's just too turned-on to not unchain her, biting and incumbent vampirism be damned. Hey, it's like when you're so in love you don't bother with a condom. I dig it. This movie gets that, and if vampire heterosexual love seems played out, Paolo and Djuna are so good together, so model-perfect without being smug or arch about it, that it's hard not to swoon. With its impeccable color schemes, all the better to perfectly bring out La Baume's gorgeous red hair and pale skin, the occasional bouts of vivid sex, Steven Hufsteter's mellotron slink and electric Morricone score evoking the Franco-Rollin oeuvre better than either ever managed. this retro-lyrical vampire love story would be a hard thing to fuck up, and this impressive debut from the daughter of John Cassavetes is far from fucked-up.
Anitra Ford and Joy Bang
MESSIAH OF EVIL
(1973) ****
(1973) ****
You can argue the rest of the film is merely a very cool quiet Lovecraft of the Living Dead style melt down with some very cool wall paintings but you'd miss one unique thing - the strange bond between the two girlfriend's of the sleepy-eyed aesthete (Michael Greer) who joins bewildered daughter of missing artist Royal Dano, Arletty (Marianna Hill) in her quest to unravel the weird Shadow over Innsmouth-style events of the small seaside town. Though they all apparently are lovers (as if he's a stand-in for, say, PERFORMANCE co-director Donald Cammell) there's never much sexual chemistry betwixt them, but there's something much more special: a drowsy affection and almost wordless connection. You get the sense these three people have done quite a bit of driving together, seen some crazy shit, and, maybe a month or so ago were deeply enthralled with each other, vibing on a communal three-way artistic road trip odyssey groove, an odyssey that's now coming to its end as organically as it started. Tired from a lot of sex and drugs and monkey grooming, caught up in the rhythm of the sea, they're still close but Anitra Ford, for one (never hotter or cooler dressed with that gorgeous contrast of long, willowy trunk and crazy hot mess of hair) and her associate, little punk Nikki Charmer Joy Bang (whom you can imagine they picked up hitch hiking or something initially but has been way more than a third wheel on their aimless odyssey), are restless and ready to disappear into the night. I like that there's no boring lipstick lesbian smut (or sex at all), and instead, as I say, this languid shared vibe. Ford gets mildly perturbed when Greer loses all interest in her as Arletty rolls into his sights, and so leaves her man and woman behind to go wander into the night. Her confident slow vanishing into the quiet abyss of night is chillingly poetic.... Bang follows awhile later to go to the movies, and is more the unconscious popcorn smacker, but she's young, hey, and I'm guessing the perfect snack before the main feature. In short, though I only got this disc a few years ago, I've already seen it at least six times. It's one of the great horror rediscoveries of my decade.
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Hélène Cattet et Bruno Forlani, the first couple of the Darionioni Nuovo take Argento and smash him into a thousand mirror shards for this hyper-surreal Freudian mind-meld. Granted their unique looping style will no doubt prove irritating after about twenty minutes to people who don't know SUSPIRIA and INFERNO like the black of their gloves, and who don't swoon at gorgeous mazes of art nouveau architecture and Jungian psychosexual mythic color-coded resonance. The plot concerns Dan (Klaus Tange), one of those nondescript middle aged semi pornographically ready executive types French film is full of, returning home after a business trip to find his wife gone and only a series of bizarre clues as to where she disappeared to; apparently it's somewhere inside the massive byzantine, super strange building. As we gawk in awe and wonder what parts of this amazing edifice are sets and which actual building interiors we long to move in, irregardless of the dangers. Going up to the roof for a cigarette (?) he first meets Barbara, and we just know he's found some dark dangerous lure from which there is no escape, the way Forlani/ Cattet and D'Annunzio manage to imply this by little more than a black satin open collar and long dark hair is beyond me, but just meeting her causes a blood chilling sensation like a razor blade dipped in ice water before being run down our backs. A sublime and terrifying anima, we get the feeling that he'll never find her or escape her except on her own terms, and going to bed with her will be a fatal mistake he'd be a fool not to make. How all this is conveyed by little more than a glance and a cigarette on a roof at night I'm I don't pretend to know but it's testament to the filmmakers' understanding of the psyche and psychosis underlying all the better giallos and D'Annunzio's raven haired/pale skin beauty offset by blazing red lips and unearthly confidence, added to the relative rareness of her appearances, conditioning us to shiver with dread at the first sign of her beauty, a harbinger of more inside out slashing, glass-eating, and multicolored gem fingernail gashing to come.
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Anna D'Annunzio as Barbara
STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS
(2013) Dir Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
***1/2
Hélène Cattet et Bruno Forlani, the first couple of the Darionioni Nuovo take Argento and smash him into a thousand mirror shards for this hyper-surreal Freudian mind-meld. Granted their unique looping style will no doubt prove irritating after about twenty minutes to people who don't know SUSPIRIA and INFERNO like the black of their gloves, and who don't swoon at gorgeous mazes of art nouveau architecture and Jungian psychosexual mythic color-coded resonance. The plot concerns Dan (Klaus Tange), one of those nondescript middle aged semi pornographically ready executive types French film is full of, returning home after a business trip to find his wife gone and only a series of bizarre clues as to where she disappeared to; apparently it's somewhere inside the massive byzantine, super strange building. As we gawk in awe and wonder what parts of this amazing edifice are sets and which actual building interiors we long to move in, irregardless of the dangers. Going up to the roof for a cigarette (?) he first meets Barbara, and we just know he's found some dark dangerous lure from which there is no escape, the way Forlani/ Cattet and D'Annunzio manage to imply this by little more than a black satin open collar and long dark hair is beyond me, but just meeting her causes a blood chilling sensation like a razor blade dipped in ice water before being run down our backs. A sublime and terrifying anima, we get the feeling that he'll never find her or escape her except on her own terms, and going to bed with her will be a fatal mistake he'd be a fool not to make. How all this is conveyed by little more than a glance and a cigarette on a roof at night I'm I don't pretend to know but it's testament to the filmmakers' understanding of the psyche and psychosis underlying all the better giallos and D'Annunzio's raven haired/pale skin beauty offset by blazing red lips and unearthly confidence, added to the relative rareness of her appearances, conditioning us to shiver with dread at the first sign of her beauty, a harbinger of more inside out slashing, glass-eating, and multicolored gem fingernail gashing to come.
