criterionforum.org

I'm not sure how much they count as a whole as horror, but Kalat's Godzilla book is as genius as you'd expect.

The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film is seminal, maybe the beginning of modern horror film criticism. Of course, when you can't find it, you can just check out the chapter on horror films in From Vietnam to Reagan, and maybe track down "Symbolism of Evil", which was recollected in Britton on Film.

domino harvey wrote:I'd like to include some worthy books on the genre for the first post. If you know of some, please either PM me or post about 'em. Thanks!

This may not be what you're looking for, but Bunnicula is a very good book about a rabbit who is also a vampire.

The Celery Stalks at Midnight or GTFO

If it wasn't out of print and fetching over $200-300 on Amazon I'd definitely recommend Stephen Thrower's book Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci, even if you are not a particularly big fan of the director. It is naturally very horror and giallo related but it also goes into great detail about the rest of his career, including the awful looking comedies, the sci-fis, Contraband and the White Fang adventures (and the way that many of these other films outside the genre, the comedies seemingly excepted, show a similar kind of ruthless approach towards violence by the director).

And while I've never seen it, or could really justify the similarly hefty pricetag to get it, apparently a lot of people swear by Tim Lucas' book Mario Bava: All The Colors Of The Dark as being almost insanely comprehensive.

After all the classy films I've been watching lately, I needed some cinematic junk food

Curtains (Richard Ciupka 1983) I've seen a lot of bad movies for this project, but few have been as stupefyingly awful as this Canadian slasher. It's amazing, the film does everything wrong. Every. Thing. A gaggle of aspiring young actresses are conjured to the isolated estate of egomaniacal director John Vernon, where they are picked off by an assailant wearing a "totally creepy" hag mask. All of the actresses look alike, to the point of utter confusion most of the time-- not that it ends mattering who is who. Indeed, the film only bothers to give two of the ladies identifiable attributes ("Personality" would be overly generous) and no points awarded for guessing which is victim and which is villain. Along the way to being murdered, all are emotionally savaged and denigrated by Vernon to the point of nausea. The film's kills are nonsensical and poorly done. A particularly dumb offing: one of the screaming anonymous ciphers is dragged out of an ingenious hiding place, even though no possible means of deduction or knowledge of architecture could have resulted in her discovery. And let's not forget the strange appearances of themed dolls, even if the film itself does. Cheap, lurid, unwholesome filth of the worst kind, I'd sooner sit through the entire Friday the 13th saga played at Inception-score-speed than watch this again.

DeadTime Stories (Jeffrey Delman 1986) I've spent my entire adult life wondering about this one after seeing some memorable VHS artwork as a kid (my memory doesn't even match up to anything the internet can provide, so maybe I made the whole thing up), but even without suffering the lofty expectations borne from 80s promo art this would be a total piece of shit. Negligent uncle tells three inappropriate appropriated fairy tales to a whiny kid afraid to go to sleep for fear of a monster, kid gets eaten by monster at the end anyways. None of the three stories are in any way tonally similar, unless awful counts as a tone now. The first plays things straight with some Grimm-lite garbage about witches bringing their dead sister back to life. The second is Little Red Riding Hood with Red sporting a red jogging suit and the wolf a werewolf who got his meds switched with Granny's. And last and certainly least is a gobsmackingly unfunny comic updating of Goldilocks with Goldi being a chipper Carrie-type who runs into a trio of dimwitted criminals, the Baer family (led by Oscar-winner Melissa Leo, whose obnoxious perf here is still more restrained than in the Fighter). Based on her performance, I am confident that the "actress" playing Goldi has never actually experienced or even seen a human being take a shower. On the plus side, the film does have an awesome/terrible theme song, which you can experience here without suffering through the rest.

the Final Terror (Andrew Davis 1981) This apparently has some cachet with slasher movie fans but I thought it was one of the more incoherent films I've seen from this subgenre. This lost in the woods "thriller" is confusing in premise (I was never quite sure about the relationship of the characters to each other or why they were in the woods to begin with) and the execution is even more inept (it certainly looks like it was filmed by people lost in the woods). There's some recognizable talent involved: Daryl Hannah and Joe Pantoliano are on hand, and Davis of course went on to a fairly successful mainstream career, but I doubt any of them would admit to having been a part of this.

Madman (Joe Giannone 1982) Better than average Friday the 13th ripoff. This one disguises its low budget well (Has there ever been a film like this that was so well-lit, or shot with so much coverage?) and despite lifting some memorable moments from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Home Sweet Home, there's still a lot to like about any slasher that opens with an extended diagetic musical number explaining the premise.

Trick or Treat (Charles Martin Smith 1986) Surprisingly well-made slasher, no doubt thanks in part to Robert Elswit's involvement. Indeed, for the first forty minutes or so this promises to be something special. The premise was timely: a young metalhead, mourning the death of his favorite shock rocker, is given an acetate copy of the musician's last, unreleased album and while playing it backwards is able to converse with the singer from beyond the grave. It's a genius idea, taking the worst fears of the overprotective persecutors of "music porn" and making them real, made all the more daring by aiming it at the very audience that would be the first to scoff at such accusations. But then the film isn't quite sure what it wants to do with the idea and it becomes another Freddy Krueger-esque nonsense-a-thon. A couple notable cameos: Gene Simmons, amusing as a Wolfman Jack-aping DJ, and Ozzy Osbourne, highly questionable as an anti-metal televangelist.

knives wrote:I'm not sure how much they count as a whole as horror, but Kalat's Godzilla book is as genius as you'd expect.

The second edition's even better. I'd recommend his J-Horror book even more strongly, though, it's a cheap paperback and it's easily the best survey/critique I've read on the subjecct.

Other FAB Press books to recommend along with Beyond Terror would be Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike and Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto, both by Tom Mes.

Some more important horror books:

See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy by David Kerekes and David Slater - sadly I think it is out of print but this is the most definitive book on the whole video nasties furore which includes the expected Sight and Sound style synopses of the films (the official and 'dropped from the list' films) followed up by in-depth discussion of each, but also goes into great detail about the rise of the VHS recorder (apparently during the early video recorder era it appears that the Fritz Lang directed, Barbara Stanwyck starring Clash By Night from 1952 was one of the few mainstream releases available on tape in the UK!), traces the tabloid uproar over the films and the impact of the implementation of the new laws (shocking stories about seizures of entire video collections, people being raided and taken to the police station and so on).

A very important double bill next:

Immoral Tales: Sex and Horror Cinema In Europe 1956-1984 by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs (1995) - this is a great overview book of European horror cinema, charting the rise and fall of various European countries, followed up by chapters devoted to key figures such as Jess Franco (Stephen Thrower is apparently working on the comprehensive Franco book at the moment, which should overwhelm this, but this is a good place to start), Jean Rollin, José Larraz, Jose Bénazéraf, Walerian Borowczyk and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Full of posters, reviews of specific films and analysis.

followed by

Mondo Macabro: Weird and Wonderful Cinema Around The World by Pete Tombs (1997) - This is the slimmer but more jaw-dropping and eye-opening companion to Immoral Tales that takes in horror cinema around the rest of the world. Comprises chapters on the Phillippines, Indonesia, three chapters on Hong Kong, two chapters on India, Turkey, Brazil (Jose Mojica Marins aka Coffin Joe), Argentina, Mexico and finally three chapters on Japan. I think this is one of the most important books on horror cinema, though it might be because I was introduced to many of these films through my copy of this book and its in depth synopses and the lurid imagery contained within! I remember Herr Schreck once talking about the film where a girl is possessed and by night becomes a flying vampire head trailing organs underneath it, which I was introduced to by the write up in this book (it is under the self-explanatory title Witch With Flying Head!). If you have ever wondered what Star of David: Beauty Hunting contains, the importance of the Ramsey brothers to Indian horror or what the Category III Hong Kong films were all about, this is a handy primer.

It also territory after territory underlines that loss experienced all over the world in the mid to late 70s as Hollywood blockbuster cinema and television almost wiped out many indiginous local industries specialising in 'entertainment' films, as they simply could not compete to the same extent (much as in the European book there is a constant theme of filmmakers moving from the horror film to films with more of an emphasis on sex, because that was where the funding was, then to hardcore and eventually a similar kind of dissolution/independently financed/almost private works as the industry collapsed).

Many of these films, especially in Mondo Macabro, I imagined that I would never get the chance to see. I'm not sure how shocking or surprising the content of either of these two books would be now that many of the films they cover are available in some form, but Mondo Macabro in particular I credit as being one of the touchstones of my film education. These books for me were really the pre-DVD, pre-internet sign that there was a whole world out there that I never knew existed. And just around the beginning of the DVD era, Pete Tombs was also one of the figures behind first the Channel 4 in the UK late night TV series Eurotika from 1999 and Mondo Macabro in 2001, which were basically the television equivalents of the two books and which got paired with rare television screenings of films such as Naked Werewolf Woman, Female Vampire, The Curious Dr Humpp and Alucarda!

Then when the Mondo Macabro DVD label was formed in the US many of those episodes turned up on the DVDs, though by now the Mondo Macabro label has itself forged off into less well covered territory!

I'd also highly recommend that non-fiction Stephen King book about horror cinema, Danse Macabre, if only for the brilliant section where King analyses The Amityville Horror as an economic horror film, one that is almost entirely about a family trapped in a house that was beyond their means and which they cannot easily sell and move out of, which is the aspect that drives them all crazy above and beyond the ghosts! Or the way that he illustrates the difference between a 'horror film' and an ordinary thriller by giving the synopses of a number of films and having the reader guess which is the horror film and which is not (I confess I got blind sided by the borderline case of Wait Until Dark!)

Finally as a book which is easily available I'd throw in Kim Newman's Nightmare Movies. The new edition contains a reprinted version of Newman's original book from 1988 (plus annotations and amemdents in footnotes) and then follows it up with a new section of the same length on the trends in horror cinema since that time (chapters on Hannibal Lecter-style serial killers, 'torture porn', Japanese horror, and so on). Highly recommended even if I have a tendency to argue with Newman's opinions on many of the films, but like the one-sided arguments I have with the Biographical Dictionary of Film, that is the mark of an engaging work I suppose!

Regarding the "Can a documentary be a horror film" question from early in the thread, I've stumbled upon quite a doozy that will definitely be placing on my list. Easily one of the most perversely fascinating and scary documentaries I've seen, Surviving Edged Weapons (Dennis Anderson 198X) is a Canadian-produced police training video from the eighties that instructs officers how to, yes, survive edged weapon attacks. So why is this feature length training video of any value to non-police officers? Because it is the very essence of a splatter film, boiled down to an unending series of vignettes portraying the dangers, both obvious and surprising, in edged weapon attacks. I didn't go into this documentary with a fear of such things, but I sure as hell ended it with one!

The film seems like it will be fairly innocuous at first-- we get a peek at man's first use of edged weaponry in our caveman days, then some actual officers give some talking heads about their real-life experiences. Okay, whatever. But then the film treats the presumed police viewer with a never-ending compendium of unforeseen dangers, reenacted and staged by Hollywood-level special effect crews in a no-nonsense and unglamorous way, which only makes it all the more horrifying. The first such segment is so blunt it's almost comical-- a detective knocks on a suspect's door. The assailant opens the door just a crack-- and shoves a fucking sword through the cop! And the hits just keep on coming: a man at a routine traffic stop ostensibly retrieves his ID and instead hands the officer a small pencil-like knife into his cheek-- this is followed by a fascinating montage of all the different kinds of edged weapons a driver could conceal from an officer. A biker unscrews his gas tank, revealing a hidden knife attached, which is quickly sunk into an officer's hand. Suspects are shown attaching fishing hooks to the cuffs of their jeans to cut officers trying to pat them down. Baseball caps conceal razor blades on the back, allowing the assailant to simply grab the hat's bill and slaughter their victim single-handed. In a fascinating segment, the space needed between a blade-armed suspect and an officer with a gun is explored, piece by piece, finally arriving on a safe distance far wider than I'd have guessed. Every way of holding a knife is named (gotta love that there's something called the "Hollywood" grip), cataloged, and then taught against. Advice on what to do after you've been stabbed (how to position your body, how to keep the assailant in custody while wounded, &c) is also helpfully included. And two dozen other scenarios and segments, too numerous to catalog here.

The film is constructed in a professional, intelligent manner that renders it as good and worthy a documentary as any others specifically for mass audiences would be-- it's maybe even a little better in that in appealing to a specific audience, it can treat its subject with a confident shorthand that gives it an air of automatic authority-- even if all the portrayed scenarios are complete fiction (which they very well may be). I'm stunned this never got a commercial home video release, as I am positive it would have been a hit with the gorehounds of the eighties. And it's educational! And fucking horrifying!

Someone's put the whole feature length film up on YouTube in nine parts. Be warned that for some reason the first seven parts are squished into the wrong aspect ratio-- I had to download them and use VLC to correct the AR in playback, so that's a viable option.

For a little light relief after the police training domino's post about instructional videos reminded me of Forklift Driver Klaus!

colinr0380 wrote:For a little light relief after the police training domino's post about instructional videos reminded me of Forklift Driver Klaus!

Did they get Andreas Schnaas to direct that or something?

I like to see that short as an indictment less of the gormless Klaus but of the guy who tells everyone that they have passed their tests for forklift driving and hands out the licences at the beginning!

(Although I suppose the opposite view is that at least the nameless warehouse company keeps their employees on after they have lost both hands in a freak accident! Or killed a number of people during their workday!)

domino, I watched a bit of that police video but it was making me too paranoid about knife crime to go any further!

EDIT: You know, talking about real life instructional videos reminds me of the old BBC series 999, which recreated horrible life threatening accidents in vividly reconstructed detail. I had never watched the particular episode but I always remember during a PE lesson at school we were being given javelin lessons and the teacher brought up an episode of that programme in which a girl running to collect the javelin she had thrown slipped on the wet grass and ended up impaling herself on it! (You apparently have to safely approach the javelin from the side rather than running directly at the pointy end sticking upwards to avoid that happening!) I have no idea if the teacher was just pulling our legs and trying to make sure the advice stuck by attaching it to a horrible story, but it definitely worked in my case.

Although I've never actually touched or thrown a javelin for going on fifteen years, so it seems pretty useless advice now... :-k

colinr0380 wrote:domino, I watched a bit of that police video but it was making me too paranoid about knife crime to go any further!

As ringing an endorsement of the film's effectiveness as any!

And I remember that forklift video from back in the early days of pre-YouTube internet, when you had to carefully navigate questionable sites that would post funny clips like that or Bubb Rubb alongside videos of fistings, soundings, and other sexual ephemera!

domino harvey wrote:Regarding the "Can a documentary be a horror film" question from early in the thread, I've stumbled upon quite a doozy that will definitely be placing on my list. Easily one of the most perversely fascinating and scary documentaries I've seen, Surviving Edged Weapons (Dennis Anderson 198X) is a Canadian-produced police training video from the eighties that instructs officers how to, yes, survive edged weapon attacks.

This sounds like a great find, and it sounds like exactly the sort of thing I was talking about when I mentioned my hypothetical list of really scary films that aren't actually horror movies. Which is not to say that I'm not delighted you'll be including this documentary because: a) I'm pro-diversity; and b) it'll make me less self-conscious about including something like Alan Clarke's Elephant on my own list.

The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973): Yes, for some reason I was one of the three people who hadn't seen this yet. All of the years spent hearing how amazing the movie is couldn't have done me much good in terms of over-raising my expectations. Yet despite my early fear that the whole thing was going to be as silly as its first ten or fifteen minutes, it slowly turned out to be an excellent movie, creepy and disturbing in completely unexpected ways, especially for this genre. I think what I appreciated was the cheerful matter-of-factness with which the inhabitants approached their religion. The expected route would've been a lot of ominous and secretive behaviour, black cloaks and hidden meetings full of dark chanting and strange rites. Instead, everyone treats it as normal, and indeed after a while it comes to seem more normal than the chastity and inflexibility of Seargent Howie. My favourite moment in the film is when Howie sputters at Lord Summerilse about the women being naked as they practise the fertility rites, and Lord Summerilse bemusedly says, "of course they're naked. Would you jump over a fire with your clothes on?" And yet the film still understands the logical end of celtic paganism: that if you spend all of your time earnestly worshiping deities for the bounty of the harvest, what happens when the crops fail? If you start out with small sacrifices, you'll eventually find yourself having to make bigger and more outrageous ones.

The people of the island are not treated as monsters nor even delusional. They are all perfectly logical, but the sincerity of their beliefs can only lead them to certain unpleasant conclusions. As the pagan festivities reach their logical end the moral (and civic) authority of Sergeant Howie crumbles visibly. By the time Howie is shouting that his god will make him live forever and that all should follow his example, we see how much of an empty totem the words have become, how without their authoritative context they seem as ineffective and self-fooling as the pagan rights had seemed earlier. In a clash of religions, as paganism begins to assume the authority christianity had initially assumed, the religions end up revealing their equivalencies: when Howie destroys the pagan symbols atop an alter, he replaces them with the symbol for his own religion's human sacrifice; shots of pagan rituals like the maypole or swallowing toads are counterposed with flashbacks of Howie taking the sacrament, the symbolic consuming of the sacrificial victim. And, indeed, Howie's own virginity comes to have an equal meaning in the pagan religion as well, making him not just a perfect christian but a perfect pagan, too (the one who will bring back the crops). As Lord Summerilse points out, Howie will not only be their pagan sacrifice, but also a martyr in his own religious tradition and therefore a christian sacrifice as well. And I think we are meant to draw some parallels between the two religions' shared fondness for cleansing people in fire.

The pagans in this movie are not placing themselves in opposition to christianity the way they often are in horror films (they are cheerfully unconcerned with it), and that allows any religious dualities to crumble all the more. Any religion in power will come to seem natural and that out of power strange and irrational even when they're not doing terribly different things. All it takes is to flip the coin to show how odd and irrational Christianity can be and yet how perfectly normal its adherents feel it to be. So with the pagans.

With all the talk about maypoles and May day, I ended up rereading one of my favourite poems, Herrick's Corinna's Going A-Maying, which bears some interesting comparison with the movie. In that poem, oppositions too break down, as the civic license of a christian nation to engage in pagan fertility games produces all sorts of strange ambiguities in Herrick's imagery: the boundary between urban and natural spaces dissolves as each space blends into the other; and traditional morality becomes refigured, with sin no longer proscribing sex but arising from one's tardiness to celebrate it. Traditional symbols of christian worship become equivalent with pagan ones to the point that nature, fertility, sex, youth, and celebratory energy become, in the poem's imagery, themselves holy, indeed partaking of traditional christian holiness. Traditional christian (and poetic) symbols become repurposed, with a spotless white gown becoming a symbol of sin and a gown stained with green a symbol of proper religious and civic fealty. A christian nation commanding an official celebration of a pagan holiday is an inherently contradictory and ambiguous thing, and Herrick brings out its strangeness in his poem's imagery as he goes through the familiar carpe diem theme. The Wicker Man in much the same way charts how pagan and christian beliefs can bleed into each other and lose that traditional sense of being diametrically opposed. But of course the two have not been given official license to blend, so the result is horror rather than celebration.

I was reading this very interesting piece on Balabanov's Cargo 200, and it had some interesting observations about the nature of exploitation cinema that I thought pertinent to this thread:

The term "exploitation" is a loose one, looser than "pornographic," which we at least know when we see it. The criterion I use is that a film depicts suffering without taking responsibility for it. Instead of creating any sort of compelling empathy or alienation, it goes for banality, shock, or moralizing. The last is perhaps the most ubiquitous: this need to shame and to indict the patron for what is really the creator’s doing seems to have been a cultural constant from Aristophanes to the Bible to Last House on the Left.

Despite the horrors of its last twenty minutes, Cargo 200 is emphatically not an exploitation film. This is not because of any political content per se, though the film can easily be read politically and allegorically. But Balabanov has carefully denied any relevance of Cargo 200 to Russia today. These issues are ambiguous, especially for a foreign viewer. Balabanov’s politics are hard to discern and may well be suspect, but on the level of craft and creativity Balabanov is far more sophisticated than others who have worked in the arthouse exploitation racket. You know who I mean: Haneke, Noe, Von Trier, and their brethren. Scenes of degradation, torture, rape, violence, and immense cruelty (directed primarily, though not exclusively, at attractive female actors).

Their motives are different: Haneke is a banal moralist, Noe a histrionic misanthrope, Von Trier a naughty provocateur. But none of them can justify their methods when asked the most fundamental questions that art in any medium must answer: is it merely meeting our expectations? Is it jerking us around? Or is it at least opening up some space where things are not quite as definite and proscribed as they are in our daily lives? Cargo 200 creates such a space, and a singular one. What I offer is a defense of the literal contents of Cargo 200 at the aesthetic level.

Cargo 200 still horrifies, but it is not a masochistic exercise for the audience, nor does it linger on the most unpleasant moments. Up until the later scenes in Zhurov’s apartment, the violence is momentary, never lasting more than a few seconds. There is never time to look away. It’s not meant to make you flee the theater. The horror is parceled out sparingly, to unsettle with a lack of shock.

Exploitation requires that a traditional structure be used as a coat hanger for shocking and prurient content. What Balabanov has done, rather creatively, is take as his basis a work of exploitation—for Sanctuary is indeed high-grade exploitation, just as Faulkner intended it to be—and removes the exploitation, resisting pandering to the base enthusiasms of viewers.

Boy, that's a pretty reductive dismissal of three well-known auteurs in favor of a supposedly superior work, using overarching and highly debatable summations of their oeuvre in order to then discard them out of hand as inferior. I can't engage in his arguments because the bias is presented as dismissive at an audience-level, and it's one thing to say von Trier sucks, it's another to imply I suck for liking him.

One of things I'm learning from this list project is how oversimplified my own views were on the subgenre of slasher films. I dismissed them out of hand as being base masturbation fodder for disturbed/repressed viewers, but the more examples I see, the less that reading works. I don't give the extreme readings in the opposite direction much weight either, though-- staunchly feminist reclaiming of many of these films overreach and remain unconvincing. There's simply some fascinating grey middle ground that most of the films exist within. As contextual items, products of their time and the market, they're often illuminating, not just in explaining a generation I was just barely born into, or in highlighting the cannibalistic novelty that results from Xeroxes of Xeroxes of Xeroxes, but in getting me to challenge my own preexisting biases and flip attitudes.

domino harvey wrote:Boy, that's a pretty reductive dismissal of three well-known auteurs in favor of a supposedly superior work, using overarching and highly debatable summations of their oeuvre in order to then discard them out of hand as inferior. I can't engage in his arguments because the bias is presented as dismissive at an audience-level, and it's one thing to say von Trier sucks, it's another to imply I suck for liking him.

I don't see where it's implied you suck for liking von Trier, and frankly von Trier makes out better than the other two ("naughty provocateur" seems about right, or at least a description von Trier would welcome). Haneke, on the other hand, gets quite a drubbing later in the article, but I'm fine with that. It's a legitimate reaction to his work. I do kinda think it's worth considering if, under this rubric, those three turn out to be exploitation filmmakers, but that's really a side issue.

The real interesting point is whether you can define exploitation cinema as one whose filmmakers attempt to place the responsibility for what they have created on other people, like the audience for instance, especially as part of a moral sermon. While it could be interesting to debate whether Haneke and co. are guilty of this, I'm more interested in considering whether this is a valid way to define exploitation, and what it means for those films you do identify that way, whether they are still worth one's time.

The most purely exploitative film I've seen for this project, Martyrs, fits this description perfectly: the filmmakers defer their own responsibility for the degradation and cruelty they have invented through crude moralisms. They blame it on society (the director said in an interview he made it because of how awful modern society is, essentially saying that society is responsible for what he has created), and then they blame it on religious people if you are to believe its supporters, tho' the film also wants to half-believe what its supporters claims it's indicting. So its creators take no responsibility for the suffering they have invented, making it not only pure exploitation but morally bankrupt even as it poses as moral. Not worth one's time.

The other interesting point, especially for the horror genre, given what you say about its focus on heritage, is that exploitation doesn't use or invent new structures but rather finds traditional ones and then lures in its audience not with invention but with increasingly prurient subject matter. Makes me think of Human Lanterns, whose Kung Fu structure is as old-fashioned as it gets, but which tries to distinguish itself with as much outrageous perversity as it can fit in there. It, too, is pure exploitation, although it also tries to be (successfully) beautiful and graceful in the manner of a fairy tale or 'naive' fantasy, so it has a degree of sophistication too. So here's one that definitely is worth one's time, but both because it is and it isn't exploitative.

I guess my problem then is that the distinction of "exploitation" strikes me as a highly subjective one. My own personal definition of an exploitation film would be any film who's driving instinct is to provide the basest negative thrills with the minimum of positive and/or artistic filler necessary for narrative coherence. So, to use an example of a film we've both seen, Pieces strikes me as utterly exploitative garbage, because there is literally nothing here of interest except scenes of pretty girls getting brutally slaughtered by a chainsaw. The joys we get from good cinema of any meter are missing: the acting is first-take quality, the script confuses "misdirection" with "complications," and the impetus for the deviant behavior is cliched and easy. But there's gross murders of attractive lasses and the film believes the audience it is selling this to is there for said reason only. Now, the audience that did show up may have expected those positive pleasures I mentioned, so I'm not decrying those who saw the film or even those who did somehow find any sort of narrative or aesthetic interest, but I am decrying the attitude with which it was made. The obvious problem with my approach is as stated already: just because I think it's worthless trash or that the creators set out to make junk doesn't mean it is or they did. Which is fine, but makes me weary of empirical qualifiers for "exploitation."

domino harvey wrote:I guess my problem then is that the distinction of "exploitation" strikes me as a highly subjective one. My own personal definition of an exploitation film would be any film who's driving instinct is to provide the basest negative thrills with the minimum of positive and/or artistic filler necessary for narrative coherence. So, to use an example of a film we've both seen, Pieces strikes me as utterly exploitative garbage, because there is literally nothing here of interest except scenes of pretty girls getting brutally slaughtered by a chainsaw. The joys we get from good cinema of any meter are missing: the acting is first-take quality, the script confuses "misdirection" with "complications," and the impetus for the deviant behavior is cliched and easy. But there's gross murders of attractive lasses and the film believes the audience it is selling this to is there for said reason only. Now, the audience that did show up may have expected those positive pleasures I mentioned, so I'm not decrying those who saw the film or even those who did somehow find any sort of narrative or aesthetic interest, but I am decrying the attitude with which it was made. The obvious problem with my approach is as stated already: just because I think it's worthless trash or that the creators set out to make junk doesn't mean it is or they did. Which is fine, but makes me weary of empirical qualifiers for "exploitation."

Well, you can use the idea of subjectivity to talk away just about any approach to art. My stance is that, while you're right that feeling that a movie is worthless junk doesn't make it so, it also doesn't preclude it from being so. The value is in the coherence of the argument you make for the rubric you use. My feeling is that it's worth pursuing the idea that a deferment of responsibility when it comes to prurient material can be a good indicator of exploitation. While you cannot know another's motives for certain, you can suspect them when the person is constantly refusing to take responsibility for the degraded things they produce, and worse, is using that as an opportunity to stare down at other people in moral contempt.

For instance, with Pieces, it obviously has no ambition other than to entertain its target audience (part of the "merely meeting expectations" the writer of the article talks of), which also means it has no ambition to deal with or take responsibility for the fact that it is appealing to the basest and most lurid form of enjoyment. And no doubt the filmmakers, if asked, would use the "it's just entertainment!" defense. That lack of responsibility for focusing solely on atrocity as a selling point is, it seems to me, exactly what makes the film so empty. The same can be said for New York Ripper, which tries to pass off its own leering violence and prurient disgust of women and sex as a moralistic condemnation of modern society, again blaming others for the things it created and then spent all its time leering at.

I think the biggest problem with the definition in the article is that it seems to ignore the word itself. The self freeing moralizing may be a part of it (I don't think so though), but also trying to exploit its subject and perhaps even the audience is an important element. Otherwise you would need to wrangle in nearly every social picture ever since they deal with the problems of society rather than the individual. In fact I think if we take this definition to its logical extreme any film with any real world implications could be considered an exploitation film of some kind.

Mr Sausage wrote:For instance, with Pieces, it obviously has no ambition other than to entertain its target audience (part of the "merely meeting expectations" the writer of the article talks of), which also means it has no ambition to deal with or take responsibility for the fact that it is appealing to the basest and most lurid form of enjoyment. And no doubt the filmmakers, if asked, would use the "it's just entertainment!" defense. That lack of responsibility for focusing solely on atrocity as a selling point is, it seems to me, exactly what makes the film so empty.

You are more generous than I am, as I don't think the film makes any aims to be entertaining at all and merely wants to get to the prurient stuff (ie the gory parts) as quickly as possible, while spacing said moments out with dull procedural nonsense as the film wears on so as to make a feature-length production without incurring additional special effects costs. Think of the scene early on where a girl is sunbathing out on the lawn and within seconds of her introduction, boop, there goes her head. This scene takes place in an utter void of value. Thus in Pieces even the basic animalistic pleasures to be derived from suspense-targeted sequences such as the rote stalking/hunting moments in slashers is absent or ludicrously enabled here (I'm thinking of the one scene where the assailant is able to get into an elevator with his victim by concealing a full-size chainsaw held behind his back-- the only suspense at work here is of belief).

knives wrote:I think the biggest problem with the definition in the article is that it seems to ignore the word itself. The self freeing moralizing may be a part of it (I don't think so though), but also trying to exploit its subject and perhaps even the audience is an important element. Otherwise you would need to wrangle in nearly every social picture ever since they deal with the problems of society rather than the individual. In fact I think if we take this definition to its logical extreme any film with any real world implications could be considered an exploitation film of some kind.

I think you're confounding "exploitation" with "make use of." Also, I don't think it has anything to do with dealing with the problems of society vs those of the individual. It's about disclaiming your own responsibility for the prurient subject matter you're using to sell your film or jerk the audience around with. That's different from, say, a genuine work of social criticism. Fury obviously isn't creating or exploiting mob justice, nor is it maintaining that actual real-life society is responsible for the specific things that go on in its diegesis. It's just dramatizing a situation to highlight the actual dynamics at work.

Don't Go in the House (Joseph Ellison 1980) Disturbed man sets young women on fire in this competently-made but unnecessary Psycho ripoff. The film wisely only gives the audience one seat-squirming act of violence early on, and it's more than enough (too much, really) to "satisfy." Like Maniac, I don't buy into the wonky attempts to explain the perpetrator's actions through confused psychobabble, and this film has the added displeasure of having the pyro attack women who not only don't "deserve" it, but are just being nice to the guy. What fun.

Final Exam (Jimmy Huston 1981) This early slasher at least tries to set itself apart from the more extreme post-Halloween ripoffs by devoting time to character development. A lot of time. Like, 2/3 of the movie is just the college kids with almost no threat of violence lurking in the corners. This would be great if any of the characters were the least bit interesting. Funnily enough, the film goes through such strains to make the victims into characters that it ignores the killer, who is the blankest cipher I've ever seen in one of these films. No name, no motive, no history, not even a good look at him (outside of his very bad haircut)!

While biding my time through the extended antics of the characters, another venue of value for these sorts of films occurred to me. I remember Henri Langlois saying in the Phantom documentary that he'd heard an interior design college had the world's largest collection of amateur porn because it provided the best insight into the living spaces of average people. In that same spirit, these slasher films, with their small budgets and minuscule resources, give a neat and extensive peak into the everyday fashion trends during filming, and I enjoyed taking in the various choices the cast made, all no doubt steeped in period authenticity. It's a weird thing to praise, but at least it helped me pass the time.

From Beyond (Stuart Gordon 1986) Disgusting but at-times imaginative special effects light show, with a neon magenta color palate that would make for a retina-bursting double feature with TerrorVision. I enjoyed this more than Re-Animator, but it's all still much ado about not much.

Pieces (J Piquer Simon 1983) Unbelievably dumb slasher with no aims above base exploitation. I suppose there's something to be said for having the assailant stalk his nubile victims with a decidedly unportable chainsaw, but it's not a good thing. I had no intention of seeing this one but was won over to curiosity thanks to the film's brilliant tagline: "It's exactly what you think it is!"

Popcorn (Mark Herrier 1991) Another film I've never forgotten due to the awesome VHS cover art. Admittedly, no film could ever live up to this:



But Popcorn is unfortunately a misguided mix of Anguish and Matinee as a college film department puts on a horror marathon at a local theatre, only to run afoul of a Charles Manson-esque "film cult" leader out for revenge (or do they…). This is a frustrating movie, as there are a lot of good and effective moments-- the body of one victim being used as a puppet to misguide others, a very effective latex makeup sequence involving quick-changes, and the villain himself is quite a colorful and unsettling piece of work-- but they're muddled in messy first-draft problems. The smug tone the film takes towards the faux horror flix being screened (though I kinda thought the Attack of the Amazing Electrified Man had fun with its Sam Fuller-esque excess of style, even if it was completely inaccurate for the sort of film depicted) and the obnoxious rowdy audience don't help. For evidence of how much this film just doesn't care about any non-horror related moments, pay attention to the reggae band's extensive use of electric guitars and mics during their performance-- the performance that exists solely to entertain the crowd while the power's gone out.

976-Evil
This is the sort of thing I would have loved if I saw it at 12, but clearly doesn't withstand time. That's not to say it isn't fun. The kid from Fright Night is very entertaining and is so wonderfully oblivious with his character as to never drag it down. Compared to say the kid from Christine this proves to be the more entertaining option. The film itself is a pretty lame Carrie rip off right down to crazy preacher mother and violent last act, but keeps with a sense of humour that keeps it from being a dull failure. Normally I wouldn't use this as a compliment, but the film is so gleefully usual as to somehow go past that in experience allowing for one of the better '80s horrors I've seen. Far from great, but still better than what a combo of the guy who made Payback and Freddy Kruger as director teaming should be able to make.

Last House on the Left remake

I was expecting the worst out of this film being a remake to a pretty awful and stupid movie whose only potential positives would have to be neutered in the present day so colour me surprised when not only was the film significantly better than the original (admittedly not a difficult feat), but a relatively okay movie in itself. A lot of the changes that fit in with how a modern movie has to work actually suits the story very well. This is not to say it's anything more than a slickly produced rape scene, but it looses the terrible comic relief (god Marty why) and has a more interesting character dynamic going on. With that said this is a good time to pose the question of sanitized versus grime which has been the big question since this recent set of digitally processed horror popped up. To be honest I don't know where I stand on this because while I prefer that rougher chemical look I don't think that's enough to excuse the horrible execution of the older film. The film may be prettier, but that keeps the violence as grotesque as it should be. The two women also take a more active role against their aggressors making multiple attempts to escape. In a weird way the film now plays out like an unaware Funny Games.

I guess I'm saying while the film is still bad in terms of being an exploitation film it at least is made well with a consistent tone fitting the horrible nature of the film, not to mention people who can actually act. That's pretty backhanded I guess. That said it says a lot about my that the far more graphic and simple minded original in all of its sickening whole barely made 12 year old me bat an eye lash, yet I was so disturbed by the far less graphic rape scene here to the extant where I had to wonder off and clean the house making a five minute scene last closer to an hour. I don't think its because the film is more effective though it is better made, but rather it probably reveals how much I've grown sensitized to violence.

The Colossus of New York
I was very suspicious of this hammy looking film at first, but a mini rave from our own Schreck gave me the trust to pick this up and I'm very glad for it. This isn't just some dumb '50s sci-fi time waster, but a very touching and dramatic piece which attaches the idea of loss perfectly to the rather rote Frankenstein story. Despite the wonderfully short run time the film feels patient observing and exploring the motivation of the characters. Without a bit of knowledge to their past the whole of their person, for each and every person, becomes like a piece of family. I'm probably harping on this rather small aspect of this lovely tapestry because over the past week I've dug into several modern films for this project that all suffer from the same tired over explanation. The worst of these was probably Disturbia which goes out of its way to give and show every little motivation of the characters which takes away much of the movie quality and in fact takes away the whole experimental genius of Rear Window. I digress though, Colossus in addition to its expertly cinematic way of developing character is simply chilling in how it deals with the way people are crushed by their own humanity. The idea that something as important as the empathy needed to be touched by loss can when tainted by as minor and every day thing as pride can bring about destruction. For all of the positive things one can accomplish it can all be taken down by a bullheaded invasion of motivation. Our complexity can save lives, but its also the reason for our most horrible events.