I drink your blood ('nuff said)

You know that warm feeling you get when you think about the horror films of your youth? How great, cheesy, and fantastically gory they were? The ones of your youth really had it right, didn't they? They really knew how to balance all the best parts of a fantastic horror movie. That's a great feeling, isn't it?

Well, now go back and watch one of those movies. Just watch a single one that you thought was great and simply classic when you watched it. You were young enough to dive into the sense of wonder you felt without the skeptic cynicism tainting the experience and the film for you. Now, it pales in comparison to smaller elements from more recent films, it just tries too hard, and achieves so little ultimately.

Sure, there are some films that live up to both your nostalgia and pre-cynicism (Evil Dead 2, Halloween, Re-Animator, etc.), but they are certainly rare. What's great about "I Drink Your Blood" is that it immediately elbows it's way into that category.

This film puts a hand on the shoulder of Nuke 'Em High and asks the Billy Jack series to give it a nudge against The Lost Skeleton of Cadavera in the stands at the Friday Night High School Football Game. When they're making out underneath the bleachers, I Spit On Your Grave interrupts jealously.

As you watch the film, there is the strongest sense that it knows exactly what it is. The movie is self-aware in that every aspect of it works like the perfect little gear in the machine. What results is a fantastic horror film that is both gory and cheesy and finds an implied humor in-between the two. This is not a film where nothing happens for most of the screen-time. Every scene is either handing you bad-acting gold or giving you a solid gore handshake over a business deal.

Those elements spring from the simplest of scenarios. It all revolves around a fun-loving group of devil-worshipers who hurt an old man by sharing their illegal drugs with him and unwittingly eat some rabies-pie baked with a slight hint of "grandson revenge" in the crust. Their ensuing murderous rage sets the stage for greatness.

In other words: watch this movie. Soon.

You're Welcome

Troma-tically Insane

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein


I don't get it. That's about the most personal admission I can make about Troma movies.

There are elements that I get, on principle. Bad acting? I'm a fan. Incomprehensible plot? Count me in.

There's just something about their own self-congratulating that I can't get behind. The charm revolves around these movies patting themselves on the back for being bad movies, while doing their best to be a bad movie. That's fine for a single film. But for every single film under an entire banner of films, that is just a bit much. Even the Godzilla films tried to do something differently as each "series" passed.

Seriously though, watch Sgt. Kabukiman. I promise that there will be multiple moments where you ask yourself how in the world these scenes were rehearsed (if they were), planned out, and shot. That is great, great fun. But it's exactly the same sense of wonder you had when you were watching The Toxic Avenger for the first time, or Class of Nuke'em High. The feeling doesn't change, and that's why watching more and more Troma movies just doesn't make a lot of sense. Sooner or later, laughing the laughs just seems like giving Godzilla a buck for stomping Tokyo. It's simply what he SHOULD do for the money, not what you're paying him to do.

Psycho's do not explode when sunlight hits them! (sadly)

First of all, do you understand what is a REAL horror movie? Imagine this: a politician breaks every ethics rule in the book WHILE being an asshole and is caught on tape. That same "public servant" then becomes a reality TV star because far too many of us want to see a broken, ethically pliable stereotype of a politician (Blagojevich) succeed in some reality psuedo-games (The Apprentice).

To be honest, that's what I want. But I want it all the way. I mean, fuck these reality shows that try to create a conflict between groups of people strung together out of some fabricated social connection. Let's do those shows the right way! Let's do them like From Dusk Til Dawn.

Let's get the run-down first. Well, after one of the best. fucking. openings. in film history, From Dusk Til Dawn (FDTD) moves quickly from buddy outlaw movie (think Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid meets Fear & Loathing) to action horror movie (Feast) in just about 30 minutes. It's a total head-fake of an opening, and that's how reality shows should be.

The subjects should have no idea what the show is "about". If you must, tell them a lie. If you can't get away with that, tell them nothing at all. Hell, tell them they're getting together with like-minded people who are interested in coagulating their power into a cheese of social influence. I'm sure they'll bite.

These unaware groups should wander into a spectacularly lit playing-field (coliseum) which offers some variety of indigenous weaponry hidden to the contestants (maybe guitars in a music shop or bottles and pool-sticks in a bar, as in this film). This is where it will all go down.

In the film, the humans happen to find themselves in a vampire bar just in time for dinner. The new reality show will mirror FDTD and put one self-interested group in a dog-pit with another. The two will then resolve their issues (without intervention) as nature intended, thus saving the rest of us from either worshipping them or suffering their eventual offspring.

From this basic concept we would end up with fantastically-gripping shows like The Hipsters vs. The Popped Collars in a battle for the Social Networking Badge and "Who Is More Useless to Society?" starring Celebrities and The Beauty Pageant Parents. We could be entertained while solving many of society's issues - satisfying our blood-lust with the real thing rather than supplanting it with simply sending the losers back to the lives they led before their instant fame. Dammit, these people need punishment!! And it might as well be dished out by another equally contemptible group, right?

It's just too bad that a bad-ass Clooney-type won't be able to step in at the last minute and make sure no one wins.

Grab some psilocybin before you Return to Oz

In honor of an older Alice returning to Wonderland (or Underland, as the case may be) in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, I've tasked the Netflix delivery dog with fetching me Return to Oz. In this "children's" film, Dorothy has developed a psychosis from her verbal diarrhea about her visit to Oz and must undergo shock therapy in order to become a regular little girl without an imagination. Thankfully, she drowns instead. Upon her drowning, she returns to Oz and meets some new friends in order to destroy the Emerald City.

The decision to incorporate (and thus possibly introduce to a young audience) a technique that still haunts the psychiatric community because of its barbarity seems like an odd one, to say the least. What results is a film that should be a bigger hit to the drug crowd than the original coupled with Dark Side of the Moon. It's a little like Labyrinth if it had been cross-pollenated with Dark Crystal in The Neverending Story's poppy fields and snorted with a healthy dash of Willy Wonka's river tunnel.

Thankfully, viewing this film raises some pertinent questions: Was there an R2D2 clone in the Oz books? Did George Lucas sign off on that? What are the ethical implications of bringing a mishmash of inanimate objects to life (with a jar full of the Powder of Life) and then watching as they fall apart due to your negligence when assembling them?

Listen, I hate movies that are so safe that they hit every trope in Hollywood's playbook and close with the flowery description of how everything worked out fine for everyone (in case there isn't a sequel). At the same time, there are certain expectations you bring to genre's of film that simply cannot be tossed willy-nilly in favor of "experimentation." I don't want every movie be Luke Skywalker becoming a Jedi, but there is a certain truth that is only accentuated by provocatively subverting it. What I'm talking about is the amalgamation of a number of disparate elements that probably should come together in a specific fashion. Music, success, failure, main character traits - these things all interconnect in a specific way when we see certain types of films. The "children's" genre is no different. It must (as one line of thinking goes) avoid certain elements of life that parents of its time would find especially objectionable and incorporate elements which parents would like their children to hold in esteem and aspire to. If those elements shift as time passes, the films must reflect that, right?

Maybe this film (and by extension Where the Wild Things Are) just means that we are a bit further down Wonka's river tunnel than our parents were - that we've opened our minds to the real weirdness that being a child involves and we wish we could be a part of that again.

Sounds about right to me.