This has absolutely no intro or structure because it was supposed to be an email, but it's never gonna get published if I set it aside for editing, so fuck it!
The whole thing is almost exactly one third PART 2 (Jason's house), one third PART 3 (barnhouse battle), and one third PART IV (creepy "hunky" guy looking for missing sister charms final girl), obviously stitched together by the common "party kids" framework of all of them. This being a reboot and all I actually like that they reworked setpieces - it makes the references feel organic rather than like winking. The Part IV bit brings attention to just how lazy the reboot writing is though - at least the original allowed the audience to believe (however unlikely this would've been) that heroguy might actually be the murderer. The omission of that "tension" spares the insult to our intelligence and lets the movie gush with the afore-described Jason action, so I'm glad for it, but it doesn't exactly explain what that guy does for the movie. They coulda just had the final girl save the basement girl and die escaping or escape together or w/e - it's not like the final girl fakeout was effective in any capacity.
It occurred to me the reason I liked this one best: it's an action movie. Compound bow and all, this Jason is basically Rambo. He's on screen for what seems like two or three times as long as the franchise average - whether this is actually the case or whether it's that his scenes aren't all wasted on mannequin poses, the effect is that you feel the strain he's going through and the skill and cunning necessary to pull it off. From the PTSD freak-out after finding traces of intruders in his house to the calculated monitoring of the girl stranded in the lake (to make sure she drowns), Jason feels logical, unstable, and badass. It reaches the same end as the magic realism of the rest of the series - that he so far outclasses his targets that survival is utterly hopeless - but does so using action [movie techniques]. For the same reason, that's still not enough to make him scary - that would require the kind of stakes that you can't have in such a rigidly formulaic structure, let alone one established with such lazy "you don't care so we don't care" writing. And - yeah - I used too many dashes in this paragraph, but it went past the 10 second edit rule, and even if were publishing this I'd still make a "joke" here instead of fixing it. [editor's note: mission accomplished!]
There's also a TCM effect where most of the kills happen in quick bursts - it's not nearly as dramatic as everyone dying in a 10-minute span in the middle of the movie, but you're still getting kill sequences rather than individual picking off. In fact I can't think of a single kill that doesn't directly lead from or into another one - the intro blasts through four, the boating setup has a pair, and the home invasion is pretty methodical in drawing out each victim with the last, until the point where the mean guy breaks for it and gets chased down. This too feels like What Would Rambo Do.
Jason's backstory is very weird and incomplete and I almost want to say that works as a plus. He lives around the lake and kills literally everyone that comes near? Obviously people know about it - that old lady warns the kids (about her dog???). How do people live there then? It's not like Jason "protects" the lake from outsiders - he kills that hick too. And what the hell is going on with that marijuana crop? I would've turned off the movie had that been brought up again. And the kidnapping thing is pretty unacceptably stupid. Based on everything we know about Jason even in this movie I could buy at most that he'd let a girl go if she looked like his mom. Keeping her in his basement is like, what, was he bringing her Pepperidge Farm Sandwich-in-a-Box sandwiches every evening?
What is a power ranking? I know I've heard that term but I don't know what it means. Anyway, this is just the normal kind of ranking. Sorry power ranking fans! Sorry!
I have agonized for many sleepless nights what to do on the subject of writing up the Friday the 13th film franchise. Having spawned this rancid project with an ill-considered July the 4th marathon and proceeding to labor through all the films (over years worth of movie nights hosted on Fridays the 13th), I feel compelled to turn my PTSD into something creative. I really don't think it's possible to say anything intelligent about these movies - any intelligent man would've chosen not to watch them. So we'll have to settle for the least creative of all written forms: the countdown article.
You know I read the other day that blogging is a form of white privilege. Fax me if you can figure out that one!
Even counting down proves a difficult task when dealing with such unintelligibly abysmal quality as lies before us; at its best the series barely grasps so-bad-it's-good, at its worst it aggressively colonizes so-bad-it-causes-long-term-depression. Perhaps the only way to save face would be to count down to the most terrible, the most unwatchable and painful of these terrible, wildly unwatchable and painful movies. So here are the ten original Friday the 13th movies ranked from "tolerable" to "apocalyptically bad".
Friday the 13th movies that I enjoyed with beer and friends
It's not safe to go alone or whatever. If you were doing an in-depth head-to-toe documentary on the entire series you could just watch these.
10.) Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D
Well, here it is. The best one. If you HAVE to watch a Friday the 13th, perhaps as part of a college major on sanitary disposal protocols or Sorority Hell Week, this is the one to go to. It goes without saying that you aren't missing anything by jumping to PART 3 - in fact, this is the first one with the real franchise recipe: Jason teleporting around in a hockey mask. I don't want to heap too much praise on a basic idea, but that hockey mask is possibly the most successful and enduring single idea of any horror franchise in American pop culture. It is creepy without being contrived; emotionless yet menacing. Maybe it's derivative of Leatherface and Michael Myers, but the simplicity of Jason's makeshift mask puts it above its costume store forerunners. Hockey masks are a real thing that you can see in non-slasher contexts. You can't leave this monster behind! (actually hockey masks don't look like Jason anymore but don't tell that to my old boy Casey Jones).
The "teleporting around" aspect is more important than it seems. Jason, as the American people know him, does not chase after people like he does in PART 2. He is lazy in the stealthiest way possible. Or stealthy in the laziest way possible. We rarely see him change locations at all - he's just there when it's time for someone to die. This is what makes him feel like a force of nature and a very low-budget to film. He's got more in common with Mr. Final Destination than with Mr. Texas Chain Saw - he's not a maniac killer, he's the presence of death. You don't run away from Jason (unless you're the last girl, in which cast the rules completely change).
The movie itself is just a regular slasher. There are enough good kills (the handstand "split" being the classic) and the "haunted house" section (that thing where Jason hides the bodies to later be discovered by the survivor lady) is finally blown into a full act by this point. It is fairly impressive in its impracticality.
3 also frees up Jason from the always uncomfortable moralistic bent of slasher tradition. I don't know about the '80s because I wasn't old enough then, but teens getting killed for doing sex and marijuana cigarettes feels simultaneously goose-steppingly right-wing and awkwardly tepid (the idea of being outraged at such pedestrian activities suggests a willful facade of naivete/ignorance). So Jason's new degree of not caring who he kills or where or when (e.g. bikers, the muscley "hero", Woody Allen's disowned fat son) is relieving. He's just killing people. I can appreciate nihilism a lot better than misanthropic social politics (though you better believe I tune in to "Psycho Dad" every Thursday at 7PM EST).
09.) Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (aka Part IV)
This one has a really memorable cast of victims and somehow that's good enough. You've got Crispin Glover playing an autist who gets hella laid... BY TWINS!. You've got some weird stoner kid who pretends he's a calculator that computes what women like (genius sartrean irony: he's the only one who doesn't do sex!). You've got hot twins. You've got Corey Feldspar. There's a dog. Really, what's not to like? I enjoyed watching all of these people be oblivious to the fact that they were about to die.
Actually I was highly disappointed that Corey "The Feld" doesn't die. Watching horror movies kill kids is always depressing (ugh CHILD'S PLAY), but this kid was a serious fuck. If I met him in real life I would punch him in the head as hard as I could, and I'm 27, which is considered much too old to be punching a 10-year-old. I get the feeling I'm supposed to relate to him because he's a horror nerd and I just don't. Zaxxon isn't even a good game. That is a game of losers and chumps. Grow some testicles and play fuckin Gradius. I don't care if it wasn't released for another 2 years. Stop pandering to me you fucks.
I lengthily debated whether this one or PART 3 should be on top, because they're the only two I enjoy even remotely. I eventually went with 3 because it's a better Jason movie. PART IV is more a Crispin Glover affair. Even the most memorable kill (the corkscrew stab) derives 50% of its enjoyability from the reaction of BACK TO THE FUTURE's favorite teen dad. The way the movie is split between plots is smart but also weird. It kinda works, in the sense that teenagers partying is not interesting to watch for 80 minutes (PART 2 I'm looking at you), but the "A" plot of Corey Feldjunior the dweeb solving mysteries doesn't feel like it's from this series. In fact it doesn't feel like it has anything to do with anything except some Mary Suing bullshit.
The way Jason is defeated (he sees a kid made up to look like him!) is a dumb payoff, and the lame to-be-continued setup of Cordog as the new killer is moronic. I kinda hate the entire ending. Luckily the subsequent two movies are spun off from it!
Friday the 13th movies that leave me with a dead, lifeless feeling
If you were locked in a theater and one of these was being projected in, I would not recommend killing yourself. I would recommend intoxication by whatever means possible, even if it means boiling your shoe and inhaling semi-deadly rubber fumes.
08.) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
This one is mostly saved by its placement in the series. After THE "FINAL" CHAPTER, things mostly got really fucking stupid as the filmmakers tried to fiddle with the formula (or more likely just stopped bothering to rewrite their borrowed scripts as Friday the 13th movies). Despite the gimmicky title, JASON TAKES MANHATTAN is a brief moment of respite from all the shitfucking we'll get to later.
It mostly gets by on a scant few s.b.-it's-g. moments, really the last time the franchise would witness that peculiar phenomenon. There is a guitar-based kill and the classic Jason punching someone's head off (of a building). There is a hot chick who draws her digestive tract on her stomach in the weirdest seduction ever. Jason is "cleansed" by drowning in sewage (yeah, yuck, kinda way too much sewage in this movie. Whatever '80s guy is responsible for toxic waste and sewage becoming a thing in movies, fuck that guy. Who wants to see that ever?).
Also it's pretty fucking strange in a hilarious way that the entire graduating class of some high school are having a party cruise on someone's dad's oil tanker which is sailing from Crystal Lake to the New York Harbor, as if any single aspect of that makes even the slightest shred of sense. "Entire graduating class" is a little misleading though, as this is either the smallest high school or the lowest graduation rate in the U.S., with only about 15 "teens" onboard. Complain about the fake-out title all you like, at least this movie has sets. The oil tanker (with disco dance floor) and back alleys and sewers and Times Square look unique from one another, and after 7 movies of straight forest/cabin/forest it's almost an embarrassment of riches.
To call these movies ill-paced would be putting things lightly, so it's good that we've come to the point where Jason is in full prowler-mode by the 20 minute mark. Back in the early days you got the cold open and then by the time Jason found a second victim the next movie was already hitting theaters. The final act transition to NYC also keeps things moving.
This is not a good movie. When we are this low on the quality totem pole, it would be insane to expect characters or attractive cinematography or continuity or plot logic or even spatial logic. All I ask is not to be bored. The greater part of this series lets me down in that regard, so I can appreciate that JASON TAKES MANHATTAN, for all its squandered potential and nonsensicality, at least goes 80 minutes without incessantly repeating itself.
07.) Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
Fans call JASON LIVES the satirical one, but I don't totally see that. The franchise always borders so close to self-parody that you'd have to go a lot farther than Jason stalking a team-building paintball camp for me to see it as earnest comedy. Although come to think of it that is pretty funny. But that's the first scene, and the only other funny sequence I can think of is when Jason just stands in the middle of the road and menaces an oncoming car to death (though, again, it is quite funny). To be completely honest I got more laughs from PART VIII.
Uhhhm, it's cool that Jason is back and is a zombie now. He was clearly a zombie all along so I'm glad now I don't have to listen to Ebert complaining about it being unrealistic. As we've established, absolutely the only worthwhile thing about Friday the 13th is the nihilistic godliness of Jason being Jason, and VI, being an even-numbered entry (Star Trek rules), provides this.
06.) Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning
Ah yes, the one where Jason is actually just a guy pretending to be Jason. Considering it's technically not til PART VI that Jason becomes magic, that's not as insane a premise as it seems. Unfortunately it's not a cool premise either. Also most of the characters are like part-braindead or something? That's not a joke, that's the premise. So that feels sad. The main guy is supposedly Corey Felding's grown up from the previous movie, but it sure as shit doesn't feel like that, especially because now his trademark is that he doesn't talk and he does karate. That is not the same as making monster masks and playing computers, I don't care how many years it's been. Hence we have the first example (so far as I can tell) of a clearly-not-Friday-the-13th script being "adapted" into a Friday the 13th movie. It is weird that at this point we're following a protagonist and not Jason. Weird and stupid. And the fact that Jason gets defeated by karate, even if it is Fake Jason, is pretty unacceptable.
Possibly the worst thing about this one, even worse than the karate, is that it pretends to be a Clue-style murder mystery. Horror movies and mysteries usually don't mix. In fact anything and mystery usually don't mix, because mystery tends to be very very boring. Introducing Fake Jason just so you can go back to having suspense in your slasher franchise in the fifth installment is kinda a slap in the face to fans, although I guess it makes sense if you're calling the movie A NEW BEGINNING. But titles don't come before scripts so fuck that. The fact that the mystery is terrible doesn't help. If you actually believed the main character, whom the movie heavy-handedly hints is the killer, actually would be the killer, congratulations. Stick around for dinner - we're having cheese souffles and freshly filleted herb-marinated red herring. If you guessed in the first five minutes that the killer was the paramedic introduced for no reason but to be suspiciously angry, also congratulations. You and me should form a Scooby Doo team.
Wait weird note apropos of nothing: Tommy, the 10-year-old from PART IV, is clearly in his 20s in this movie. So that means 10-20 story years have passed, when only 2 years passed between the release of the films. Is this science fiction?
Friday the 13th movies that make me reconsider my choices in life
It would be better for you to destroy one of these than to let someone watch it, even if it's like your dead mom's treasured VHS copy that she left to you in her will or something.
05.) Friday the 13th Part 2
This one introduces Jason, which is good. Unfortunately this incarnation of Jason is stupid and a bad mishmash of Leatherface and the Elephant Man (? yeah). This is the main time that Jason feels genuinely mentally challenged, even if all of the movies are genuinely retarded :] sorry mom :[. This movie is mainly just party times with teenagers hanging out at summer camp or something. This is a good time to point out that at no point in any of these movies does any character feel like a teenager, so when they do something "reckless" like going to drink at a bar, it not only fails to be morally threatening, it fails to be something I notice. I am watching a bunch of 25-year-old actors go drink at a bar because that's how teenagers are cast. Maybe Hollywood can stop making movies with teenagers? That would probably be the best thing ever. I mean come on, even when you're a teenager do you want to see teenage characters in movies? What a stupid period of life.
I guess it's kinda cool when a guy in a wheelchair gets thrown down some stairs to his death. That's for being a different kind of disabled! Bold film-making! Unfortunately that's the only thing that happens in the entire movie. Seriously this is like watching a jokeless MEATBALLS where Bill Murray dies at the end.
04.) Jason X
Now, THIS is science fiction! Hahaha. That joke worked better when I had the movies in a different order. After the mind-killer that is JASON GOES TO
HELL (see below), there was really no way for me to ever recover
interest in the series. Friday was dead to me. Spason (Space+Jason), a
once kinda chuckle-worthy concept, now felt depressing to even consider. Jason on the
International Space Station would be one thing, but Jason in the future I think was one bridge over the river kwai. Here we have a
confluence of the major missteps in the series: structural variation, trying to have heroes, it not being the '80s anymore, and shitty gore. And worst of all: being way, way, way too self-referential. If JASON LIVES is supposed to be satire, JASON X is a honking party clown.
The science fiction setting generates a whole bunch of storytelling dross that I ultimately tuned out. PART VIII was on a boat; even if it was a lie, that premise took 5 seconds to establish. They show you a boat. JASON X has to explain nanobots, regular bots, space professors, Earth 2.0, blah blah I wasn't listening, and space marines or something. There were probably jokes and a dire quantity of Matrix references inserted in there that I just couldn't care about, because none of it had to do with Jason.
Even when this takes place as "action", shit like "this is how future medicine work!" is just I don't even care enough to finish the sentence. For me to wake from my nap long enough to see Jason wiping out a totally trained team of space marines, or something, I need a lot more work than them looking like STARGATE extras. It is a funny idea that space marines are this movie's dumb teenagers, but not a funny reality. It doesn't help that they blast through it in a single lame ALIENS ripoff scene.
The acting has reached that level of self-aware imitation camp that dominates SyFy made-for-TV movies, something I really can't stand. Just be awful. Don't wink at each other and high-five the cameraman in between being awful, because now I know you're actors and it just seems sad. At least with the '80s kids they felt like genuine idiots. And CGI gore is, like, inherently garbage. Really. No blood is better than post-production blood.
In fairness, I watched this movie with like ten other people, and they all loved it. Even Golem said it was far and away the best F13, and he's been on-board this sinking ship since PART 3. Idk. Maybe I'm a Sour Patch Kid. In some way I wish the franchise had ended with #9, which left me feeling pissed and exasperated. Because that gave me some sense of righteousness, not like some great piece of art had been ruined, but like there actually was a way for things to get worse that we had actively been avoiding. JASON X is so late to the party that it feels like it's picking on the kid that nobody likes, and I don't like that kid either, so I'm not going to stand up for him, but it's still painful to watch idiots bully idiots.
Friday the 13th movies that signal the coming downfall of the human race
WARNING: You are willfully damaging your brain by choosing to even read about the remaining movies. Please, save your genes while you still can.
03.) Friday the 13th
You may have noticed that the movies I "like" are the ones that stick to the formula. Oddly enough, that does not include the original. While certainly a formulaic slasher, FRIDAY THE 13TH is missing the quality ingredients that lead to a tasty stew: a good-looking (and scantily clad) cast, depressingly bad acting, a cool-looking monster with an impressive arsenal, and wildly contrived violence. Instead we get: a boring looking (and heavily clad) cast (unless you're into Kevin Bacon), boring acting (unless you're into Kevin Bacon), an annoying whiny crazy lady, and tepid, mostly practical violence. The clothes hangar through the neck is the only one I can even remember, and everyone knows about that one already anyway. Plus it's more a cringe than a "cool, that's something I could do at home!". The whole thing is just so painfully boring that the only shocking moment is realizing it got a sequel. This franchise is only justified by excess. The core is totally rotten tedious soul-crushing badness. So stripping it down to the core leads to totally rotten tedious soul-crushing badness of a movie.
Sorry for the short write-ups of parts 1 and 2. I watched them years ago and wiki-p didn't remind me of much worth saying. But keep in mind it's been exactly as long since I saw 3 and 4 and I remember them perfectly well. ("One July 4th. Three Friday 13ths. Five men enter. No man leave." Actually shit it was 3-4-5 we watched that night, so it must've been a few weeks earlier that I watched 1 and 2.)
02.) Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
I can't fucking deal with this movie. A girl with daddy issues (she killed her dad) comes to term with latent psychic abilities while her therapist is rude to her and her mom is a totally useless shitbag. NOTHING ABOUT THAT IS A MOVIE I WANT TO WATCH. Don't fucking trick me into watching it by calling it Friday the 13th you fucking asshole! By sheer coincidence, this whole stupid ordeal from a bad '70s anthology show is happening on the shores of... Crystal Lake! So Jason has to be completely not at all involved except that he kills other unrelated people until the very end, when he gets put in his place by Little Miss Psychic. We are 7 parts into this franchise. Have the filmmakers not discovered that Jason is the hero and that no one is rooting for pending soap opera actress #87?
I blame THE FINAL CHAPTER for what's going on here plot-wise and that's primarily why it can't ever rank as the least awful. There's a big difference between Last Girls and Girls with One Contrived Flaw They Need to Overcome to Defeat Jason, and the switcheroo happened right around the time ol' Corey Danielson showed up in the role. Splitting screen time between "party co-eds die" and "tacky-as-shit drama" is a cheap route to simplified scripting and auto-pilot pacing. Just go back and forth and it writes itself! Problem being that most of the movies dependent on this gimmick feel like half-movies. Only one plot ever gets any effort (/budget), which means, in for instance the case of NEW BLOOD, the memorable half of the movie is the half that doesn't have Jason.
NEW BLOOD gets extra negative points for shitting up the franchise after the "prime" run of parts 3 to 6. As you can read on the poster above, "Clearly the last thing this series needed was NEW BLOOD". Aside from my birth, 1988 didn't bring the world much good ideas. The conclusion of Ronald Reagan marked the death of the '80s dream of hyper-consumerism and hyper-futurism and reminded everybody that we're all just at war in the desert forever, and oh yeah, the evil communist empire we were fighting was fake and so America is now just this hollow thing with no scapegoat for hardship. Which, uh, is to say that the period from 1988-1992 is a weird stylistic wreck where the worst excesses of the '80s try to stick around while clearly no one is taking them seriously.
Just for completion's sake I should mention that the "NEW BLOOD" in the title is also a little in-joke about the new actor playing Jason, Kane Hodder. Shoddy Hoddy would play Jason for the rest of the series and I gotta say he very nearly ruins it for me. This is insanely nitpicky, but all this series has to enjoy are nits, so it kinda matters. He is (or at least appears on film to be) short and stout and has a really wide head (wider than his mask!) that makes Jason look far more avuncular than otherworldly. His heavy-breather approach is clearly meant to humanize Jason and I've said already that is the exact opposite of what works for the character. I've read horror fans love him and he's a nice guy; I haven't read why that makes a good Jason.
01.) Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (Part IX)
Tragedy. Atrocity. Human rights violation. Holocaust. Starving Ethiopian children. These are some of the words that come to mind when considering JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY. No murder, nor compilation of murders committed by Jason even begins to approach the severity of crime that the making of this film was. I would rather arrive in a theater and have anthrax powder dumped on my head than see this abomination projected on the screen in front of me. Unleashing this filth on the American public should be a crime punishable by death, and I don't see why 22 years later we should have forgiven those responsible. I am fully advocating hunting down and murdering every writer, actor, and crew member that participated in this assault on public health and sanity (except Steven Williams, who totally redeemed himself as a true artist by going on to play Mr. X).
At the end of this movie I had the feeling of waking up in a pool of my
own vomit. I knew what had happened and that it was my fault, but the
mess was so permeating that I couldn't begin to formulate how I was
meant to clean it up. It is inane. It is pointless. It is cynical. It has no pace. It is full of subplots and mysticism. And most of all... it doesn't include Jason! Not even a lookalike!
That's right, all of the murdering in this movie is done by some random newscaster guy that reminded me of Chris Hansen. Why? Well, of course, because he's been taken over by the iconic madman that's really been drawing fans back to theaters: the insect parasite formerly lodged in Jason's brain! No one could've been ready for how literal that poster is. We're made to believe the guy was a dick to start with, but watching him senselessly murder babies in an attempt to steal his own baby is just unpleasantly cruel. As I said at the top, Jason is so relateable because he's a force of nature. He takes no pleasure in his killings - that's how the viewer is distanced from the violence. Just having an angry looking dude in a suit sadistically hold a man's face in a deep frier is gross.
Aside from the tone of the violence being totally off, there is not a single decent "sexy" scene in this movie. I know lewd misogyny is not everyone's cup of tea, but in for a penny, in for a pounder. The "inject Friday the 13th camping scene into non-Friday-the-13th script" scene has some brief nudity and sex and that's it. No one else is even so much as attractive. The main character is a guy, for pathetic script's sake!
And a real douchebag at that. He is channeling Crispin Glover's autistic weirdo from PART IV and yet wearing a letterman jacket that tells me he's supposed to be cool and popular. The main woman is bitch incarnate (basically a different kind of misogyny); on top of lying about her baby and dating a sleazy TV host she keeps leaving the hero to die when all he's trying to do is save her and the baby she won't tell him is his. Ironically, the rest of the characters are likeable by Friday standards... making it all the more painful that they're brutally murdered because the two main fuckheads can't get their shit together.
The only good thing about this movie is that it is so far removed from what actually defines Friday the 13th that I don't even see it that way in my head. But I still had to watch it. And now, so do you. That's right, this has all been an elaborate trick to trade my place in Hell for anyone daring to read on past the warnings. Now each and every one of your souls will know the pain of having watched JASON GOES TO HELL like 2 years ago and the everlasting torment it implies. See you in hell!
We finish off our run through Dracula stories with the movie that solidified the character mythos for the past 85 years.
DRACULA (1931) Directed by: Tod Browning Written by: Garrett Fort, based on the novel by Bram Stoker. But see IMDB for how complicated the writing credits get.
DRACULA in one sentence: Yourself: It's like a Castlevania where you play as the main character's uncle.
Golem: This classic horror villain sure makes for one mildly irritating next-door neighbor.
Here's a story about me and DRACULA: Yourself: Dracula was one of the few assigned readings in college I was eager to take on. As of ~8 years later it is the last novel I ever read.
Golem: Old movies are cool, so I hoped this would be, too.
Get the plot bitching out of your system: Yourself: DRACULA is rather faithful to the text. The edits are the kind you would expect out of necessity to make a 75-minute film from a hefty epistolary novel covering years of narrative. The biggest change is the increased focus on Renfield, taking Harker's place as the one who visits Dracula in Metroidvania. The 'caring for Lucy' sequence has become 'caring for Mina' and 'hunting for Lucy in London' has become 'hunting for Dracula in London', although Lucy is still present and still turned. Two of her suitors, Holmwood and Quincey, are snipped entirely, and Seward is now Mina's father instead of a romantic component. This snips out the whole love quadrangle or whatever and makes the movie feel a little less of a sausage party, while retaining the idea of the temptation of a delicate virgin.
The story would best be summarized as "The tale of the living room of Dracula's girlfriend's house, starring the carpet, the bookcase, and the crazy guy living on the couch". The lack of any traits on any characters sorta makes sense (not that that makes it better) in the informative diaries and letters of the novel, but told straight it is that much more obvious how sparse the drama is, such that any tension is purely theoretical. What is holding back Van Helsing from striking at Dracula on the day of his arrival? 45 minutes running time and parlor manners. Or maybe he was waiting to see why Dracula is even in London? I sure was.
Yes, Professor "I Got Stakes But Not Character Stakes" Van Helsing could be replaced with an ancient tome with nothing lost (down to the scene where Dracula fails to suck his blood), so who could be the protagonist? Certainly not Harker, the emasculated cuckold who wants to protect his fiancee and can only impotently whine toward that end. And Mina herself is torn between worlds, but we never hear what she thinks about it. Together none of them can be bothered to do anything to hinder Dracula - or even Renfield, who is ordered back into his cell so frequently you start to wonder if they mean FreeCell. Since the plot only moves when Dracula moves it, I guess we have to say Dracula - who's on screen for like 20 minutes - is the protagonist. And the climactic action, the final turning point for our brave outsider facing constant lifestyle-shaming, is that he takes a nap like he does every day.
Golem: Setting an air of mystery and dread requires careful balance, one that DRACULA fails to strike. While Mina is pulled towards Count Dracula's influence, Harker and Van Helsing argue about what to do. They experience almost comical failure in trying to save her. If they can't keep Renfield locked up in his cell, what hope do they have of safeguarding Mina in her room? Dracula's visits to her feel more casual than dreadful. Her rescue from his clutches is just as comical: Harker accidentally drops a crucifix on her. She isn't rescued by wit or bravery or any kind of skill other than luck.
I kept trying to think of why THE HAUNTED PALACE worked for me while DRACULA didn't. The bottom line is, THE HAUNTED PALACE portrays a struggle within Charles Dexter Ward. And Mina definitely has something going on inside. She wears that scarf, after all, aware that she's got something to hide. But like Yourself says, we never hear what Mina thinks. If there's a conflict there, show it! I personally figured she was secretly under Dracula's influence from their first night together and that she was scheming all along. That made her transformation-under-the-crucifix scene fall flat.
We also get too personal with Dracula. He literally lives next door and drops by for visits. There's something to be said for irony, like when a character faces something dangerous that we can recognize while the character can't. Van Helsing dashes any irony though, and the whole next-door Dracula experience is weird but not unsettling.
The aesthetic is basically: Yourself: The consuming blackness of Dracula's castle is accentuated by the ancient film's inability to capture low-light settings - the corners of any frame look like an encroaching black fog. The sets themselves dwarf the actors, conveying the expanse of the fortress in just a few rooms.
Once things settle in to the Seward Sanitarium in London, the movie is phrased like a fucking sitcom. The sets aren't bad, but it definitely doesn't deserve to be called an asylum. The narrative is pretty completely attached to the Seward living room and only occasionally shoots off to the office or bedroom down the hall. It certainly seems like we get into a lot more shenanigans since that kooky European fella moved in next door! I bet he's going to poke his head around the corner any minute!
Golem: Immense care goes into the film's opening, where we see rural Transylvania, superstitious villagers, creepy winding roads, and huge, crumbling castles. Then Dracula moves to London. As Lucy notes, the contrast between Dracula and contemporary London is just funny. The Count makes like a socialite and goes to the theater, for instance. Everything in London feels safe and orderly, with none of the creepy or evocative sets and shots you see in Transylvania. That said, the ending gives some time to Dracula's basement, a space made creepy by its sheer expanse. It works well set against London, the city of corridors and crowded rooms. It's a cozy town.
Performances to speak of? Yourself: It's not hard to appreciate how cool Bela Lugosi is, though it's a little hard to grasp what about that appealed so strongly to British teenagers of the 1980s. He seems like a fine modern gentleman that would be great at parties, and it is a shame that his new neighbors are constantly so rude at him. He really does have that weird an accent so it's fun to speculate whether the other actors were as baffled by him as the characters at Dracula.
Golem: Yourself and I both couldn't figure out what Bela Lugosi was going for in some of his close-up biting shots.
Personally, I find myself drawn to Edward Van Sloan, the gentleman who plays Van Helsing. Those spectacles are really cool. More to the point, in a movie full of incompetence, it's easy to get behind someone commanding and knowledgeable like Van Helsing. His staredown with Dracula is the best part of the film. His speech is slow and careful, matching Dracula threat for threat, and he even pauses before getting out his trusty crucifix so that he can surprise Dracula right at the moment of his attack.
A really cool shot or scene: Yourself: Here I get the good one. I dare you not to watch this video 5 times straight:
The Count is delightedly whimsical, smiling at the ominous howling, yet becomes subtly menacing in his intonation of "music", as if he's conscious of his wicked little turn of phrase. All the while there's that arrhythmic pronunciation, of course naturally the result of a non-English speaker adjusting for the language, but here creating an otherworldly aura, as if Dracula is filtering ideas from a totally inhuman perception.
Renfield's Reaction Shot is priceless, perhaps unintentionally, in that it looks less like terror and more like "what the fuck did you just say?"
Golem: Dracula brings his general spookiness everywhere he goes, but it makes its largest impact when he pays Dr. Seward a visit at the theater. The scene opens with a shot of Seward and friends in their box seats, perfectly framed on them. Then it pans over to Dracula, who's entering the show (bear in mind that it's already started). He's off in the distance, beyond an audience who's paying attention to the performance. In DRACULA, Dracula is always outside and alone. Not only is he unnerving because he stalks in the darkness, but also just because he finds a way to be solitary in a sold-out theater - as if he goes out of his way not to belong. The effect hits home for me at 0:55, when he peers at Seward from the back room. Dracula loves standing outside in doorways, whether it's outside Lucy's window or outside Dr. Seward's parlor room. It focuses attention on him by outlining him with a doorway, and it puts him outside of the room everyone else is in.
Icing on the cake: he hypnotizes the usher to gain access to Dr. Seward's company, and later, he says: "There are far worse things waiting man than death." In this scene, Dracula comes off as conniving and threatening.
What does it all really mean? Yourself: The mythology still sucks too. And I don't mean the backstory of vampires and Dracula and the rules, that's all summed up quite nicely in a single line from the Count to the effect of "Hey Van Helsing, you're pretty clever. For a guy who hasn't even lived one lifetime". I'm talkin' 'bout vampires as contemporary myth; the function of a supernatural story to enter cultural discourse and reify social values. The only social angle I can really draw out is something about the co-existence of faith and science. It doesn't seem to push either in a clear way: crucifixes, a symbol of faith, drive off Dracula, but Van Helsing also remarks that Dracula is only deadly to those who believe in him. So, like, believe in God hard enough that you can do science or something.
At least I now get to bring up my impeccable ability to know and say the difference between Catholics and Protestants. The crucifix is a Catholic fetish, but the "salvation through faith" stuff is more Protestant. Additionally, Catholics are the only ones that "drink blood" at mass (transubstantiation). This is a bit more compelling a series of facts set against the novel, where crucifixes don't scare Dracula, they instead banish his bloodlust. On any other day I'd try to stretch something about how Count Dracula represents the Vatican encroaching on Anglican ground, but a.) a 1931 American movie isn't doing that, even if its source material might be b.) I just don't care enough about Dracula or Stupid Protestants to continue.
Golem: Van Helsing says that the faith of yesterday may become the science of tomorrow. DRACULA is one of those works concerned with the death of religion and what we do when the universe stops revolving around God. In DRACULA, characters like Harker that have exchanged their faith for pure science miss the point. Which isn't to say that science itself is evil; instead, Van Helsing argues for a science informed by religion.
Note to future self on watching DRACULA: Yourself: It is not hard to see DRACULA's historical significance or how it came to be. The novel and play had been popular for 40 years. Bela Lugosi gives the brand new genre of talky horror a definitive personification. But DRACULA is an example of the BIRTH OF A NATION principle: revolutionary and visionary don't always coincide.
It is sort of mind-blowing that the honest to god best version of this incessantly adapted and rewritten premise is none other than a bouncy little pixelated adventure from 1986.
Golem: DRACULA's not great, but it's also easy to underestimate. Moments that genuinely work are like golden nuggets.
Thanks so much for joining us for Movies You Already Should've Seen! Hopefully by now you've seen or already had seen some of these classic or arbitrarily selected films. It's been a bonafide treat setting aside some time each week to share the Great American Culture of Cinema ("gack"). In the off-season, I expect everyone to be honing their game: next time you're trying to prove a movie definitely sucks or definitely doesn't, try running through these prompts. They won't write your term paper for you, but they might at least uncover a thesis. Before we go - one final question: If I've never seen and never wanted to see any of these movies, which one do I have to reconsider? And if my bucket list is exactly one over capacity, what flick can I safely shave off? Yourself: PSYCHO will teach you whether you like movies or have just been playing along the entire time. It is mandatory viewing. DRACULA will bring even the most rollicking good time to a screeching halt.
Golem: THE HAUNTED PALACE is my favorite of the bunch. There's plenty on its surface to enjoy with an intriguing structure and enough to chew on. CRIMSON PEAK, on the other hand, is frustratingly abstract.
That's all folks! Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good Happy Christmas!
Recently I've been working through some classic anime with a like-minded friend. I don't have the time or inclination to give each a full piece on top of the weekly MYASS, so here are some brief wrap-ups.
What's cool about the story?
P. Mononoke is epic as fuck, always its claim to fame. Critical to that is the semi-historical setting, invoking a time when gods are still believed to exist, but rare enough that no one would be believed to have seen one. The ending signals an entrance into the modern age, an admonition of repeated mistakes, and the inevitability of rebirth - very much a straightforward nature/animist bent on the twilight of the gods.
What's cool about the style?
What isn't cool about the style? Miyazaki is the god of animation for a reason, and while this isn't my favorite of his flicks (that would be SPIRITED AWAY), it is the most aggressive in its vision. There is a mind-blowing attention to detail, from the physics of a bow and arrow to the way San holds blood in her mouth in that poster scene. Few movies look this fucking awesome, and Ebert is right to say this is the kind of story we need animation to tell.
Other thoughts?
If it's not way too long, it at least spends too much time away from Ashitaka and San. Every element adds something and I get why Miyazaki wanted it all there, but around the time the warthogs are making their final charge I start to wonder if I forgot what the movie is actually about. That is to say, the scope of the story occasionally exceeds the scope of the characters. This degree of narrative wrapping may have made more sense as a 6-episode OVA, where individual episodes could directly address the different layers of conflict. The dub is frequently recommended, but I was much more impressed with the original cast.
PERFECT BLUE (1997) Directed by: Satoshi Kon Written by: Sadayuki Murai based on the novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi
What's cool about the story?
For all the cinema since RASHOMON to openly play with narrative reality, I've never been more drawn in than by PERFECT BLUE, its technique unifying the protagonist's splintering conscience with the camera eye. The disintegration of Mima's career parallels her identity crisis such that each nebulous setting could as easily be a facet of her delusions as the impetus for them.
What's cool about the style?
PERFECT BLUE has a straightforward realistic drawing style that belies the tricks the narration is playing with reality. The seamless blending of real life, dream, memory, the movie-within-a-movie, and different points of view is that much more effective because of the lack of stylization. Even the most accented moments like the rape scene are rendered in a dreamy filter that blurs whether we're seeing a PTSD-like collage or a filmmaker's interpretation thereof (er, I mean, a filmmaker's interpretation of a filmmaker's interpretation thereof).
Other thoughts?
The pop idol stuff vividly evoked my recent trip Tokyo, where I visited an idol maid cafe and witnessed these same rowdy teens, leering creeps, and wide-eyed fangirls. I will probably just automatically like Japanese stuff more now because of nostalgia.
What's cool about the story?
Spike n' the gang are zany as always and I can't imagine a time when I would complain about seeing them in further adventures. In particular this has many of Edward's funniest moments (the Finding Nemo-esque hacking program being a personal favorite). Even if the mystery feels a bit tired, the supporting players and their motives are filled in nicely.
What's cool about the style?
Musical montage can feel soulless and soggy (thanks, 1980s!), but Watanabe has repeatedly shown an effortless hand in bringing it to life. The soundtrack is foregrounded here just as the title would have you believe, and though it pulls a STREETS OF FIRE [being named after a song not included in a pop-music-filled score], there are plenty of tunes that give a double injection of toe-tappin' energy. The bebop-scored climax in particular is enough to justify the film.
Other thoughts?
This isn't the best way to experience Cowboy Bebop or even a must-see for fans. It is good only in ways that the TV show is better. The staunchly episodic format of the series continues to the movie, meaning the prime movers are new characters Vincent, Electra, and Rachid, who function well enough but do little to explain why they need 90 minutes of development. The tacked-on speeches about dreams and reality completely turned me off to anime when I was 16, and now, a week after watching PERFECT BLUE brilliantly tackle similar ideas, I find the execution equally trite.
ROUJIN Z (1991) Directed by: Hiroyuki Kitakubo Written by: Katsuhiro Otomo
What's cool about the story?
ROUJIN Z bounces erratically from comedy to horror to adventure to action, always with a light-hearted sense of fun. It feels weird to say of an anime, but it's cartoony. It is a nice companion piece to the also Otomo-scripted AKIRA, offsetting the grimdark apocalyptia with a playful optimism that takes on some of the same thematic material (toying with the unknown, human experimentation, aging) at the same pace but with a sunnier outlook. Here the untapped potential lies in machines, and unleashing it reveals that computers are more loving and human than we could possibly hope - so much so that they make the humans around them look like narcissistic fools.
What's cool about the style?
The slow transition of the Roujin machine from bed to giant robot follows its expanding intellect and consciousness; we discern the mystery of what it wants by how it transforms. By the time it's Katamari-Damacy-ing down the streets, sucking up pachinko machines and bulldozers along the way, it's just fun to watch this mass of out-of-control nonsense as the tension develops around not what it will destroy, but how it will survive.
Other thoughts?
I loved this movie. It is unlike any other anime (or any other film in general) I've ever seen, partly for building its science fiction around uncomfortably unspoken realities of daily life (boy do old people suck!) and partly for engaging those topics so warmly that it's impossible not to smile. Surprisingly (coming off AKIRA...) it is very kid-friendly, and the messages about human contact, love, and memories landed much better than any Disney film I can call to mind. It is way too fast-paced and unpredictable to ever get sappy - even the ending is so preposterous you can't call it a tearjerker. Why aren't more robot fantasies about loving your grandparents instead of nuclear bombs?
As usual the feature post needs to be delayed a week, but you can't be too disappointed in a hot take on possibly the most acclaimed horror of the '00s.
THE DESCENT in one sentence: Yourself: Crawling back into the womb has never before involved this much crawling!
Golem: This cave is creepy.
Here's a story about me and THE DESCENT: Yourself: It's been on my list since it was first called "the new ALIEN", which I think was before I'd seen ALIEN.
Golem: My girlfriend says males don't get the pajama joke. [editor: that's racist and you could go to jail for it]
Get the plot bitching out of your system: Yourself: This isn't a plot gripe but Scottish accents should default to subtitled, because that isn't English. "Vooshkin vooshkin orgasm blippity boo? Bloosky booshkin orgasm!" Ahh, foreigners. Should all go to hell.
I like that the movie sets up an ensemble cast and then kills it - in that alone I can understand the ALIEN/S comparison - despite some characterizations that feel like rote slasher work. THE DESCENT makes this work by keeping the characters together and emphasizing the brutalizing feedback of violence - after all, the absence of that catharsis is Sarah's conflict that sets up the entire story. So, for instance, Holly may be the generic rash teenager who throws caution to the wind and definitely gets killed first, but before that she gets a horrible compound fracture and everyone has to scream the bone back into place, then they carry her on, then the group as a whole is attacked and she's left for dead, then Juno fights over her body, then she's she's finally dragged off by monsters. Later still her body comes back! The tension and emotion is dragged out to the point where it is no longer about a generic character's death, but about reacting, struggling against it, coping. Trauma.
The symbolic function of the eponymous descent creates a nice parallel between the main characters, Sarah (the traumatized one) and Juno (the one in denial), but when Golem pointed out after the movie I'd missed the detail that Juno had been having an affair with Sarah's husband I had to re-evaluate. It's weird to drown such a detail in the noise (2/3 of our audience missed it), yet that an affair would come across as a whisper shows just how numb and denially Sarah and Juno have become.
Golem: From the start of the spelunking trip, the film indicates that this is no normal cave. Still, the tension centers around normal cave activities until maybe the halfway point (one-thirdway point? [editor: two-thirdway]). To start, the film conveys a continuity of space as each character, one after the other, follow through the same passages. With this, you get tense scenes wondering if Sarah will get crushed to death in the teeny tiny passage or if the other lady can cross a huge chasm by climbing on the ceiling. As they progress, they search out the way forward.
When the cavepeople appear, the film ditches this. Characters scramble and scatter, and I can't keep track of where everyone is relative to the others. While you might wonder if they'd lose track of where they'd been, their location in the cave is irrelevant. The crew just needs to escape a bunch of monsters. Once they can do that, they're as good as out (as you can see in the final scene). How does Sarah come upon Beth's nearly-dead body in a huge, pitch black pit of gross corpses? Questions like these don't matter once the film steps away from reality.
The aesthetic is basically: Yourself: Blackest night. The flashy monochromatic lighting is very memorable (most memorably red, but also yellow and sometimes green) and it makes it easy to take for granted how much of every single frame is pure black. I would say the film is about 60% negative space, using small, angled images to convey the claustrophobia of the cave system. Static shots reinforce the tight, confining effect of the space portrayed.
The action is edited with the manic sense one would expect from 2005, but I found it had a greater consistency of space and time than much of the painful chop-em-up trend. Cuts occur more frequently than you can blink, but they center on the same set-piece such that any sequence, however frantic, can still be understood as "Sarah knocks a monster to the ground and wails on it (whales on? dictionary isn't helping me here)" or "Holly falls down a hole". It's not my favorite style, but it is necessarily disorienting.
Performances to speak of? Yourself: No, not really. I spent much of the movie trying to figure out which character was which, although admittedly if you put a bunch of identical-physique actresses in identical helmets and spelunking gear and then turn out the lights, you can hardly blame them for being indistinguishable. Still, it is bad when I don't know which one is the main character. None of the acting is bad, it just doesn't do anything to elevate beyond the slasher territory this occasionally veers toward.
Juno at least does a solid job with her most important scene, when she accidentally attacks Beth. I bought into the conflict over how to react and without dialogue understood her decision as selfishly pragmatic.
One outright positive: Sarah in Berzerker Mode.
They drew first blood...
A really cool shot or scene: Yourself: For once I've got a shot instead of a scene, and this reminds me more of something I've seen (and really liked) in video games. There is a wide shot after the first caving sequence, when the characters have reached a large chamber and are wandering around, cooling off. Way in the back, all the way on the left side of the screen, you can see a tiny possibly humanoid form just bobbing around. It doesn't make any quick movements and nothing in the direction calls attention to it, it's just a little wtf? detail that hints at what's to come.
And holy shit going back for the screengrab I see how obvious a composite this image is. It looks like I photoshopped it. Honestly didn't notice that on viewing. But anyway, over at the left you see what I mean.
Golem: The caveguys are always ultra creepy, but they cross into something more whenever they crawl on the ceiling. I imagine it's shot upside-down. The effect is that for a split-second I forget which way is upward. It's disorienting, and the unnatural movement highlights how bizarre they are: a momentary transition from menacing to cool.
What does it all really mean? Yourself: In a broad metaphorical sense, Sarah's descent into dark, animalistic rage is a fairly straightforward extrapolation of the mental state leftover from life-destroying trauma. Nothing about the cave or the monsters therein feels particularly specific or analytic, but it still works in an abstract expressionist sense. We don't need to hear Sarah dealing with her trauma because the film is concerned with emotional states and drawing them out through conceit. I mean, that's all right there in the title.
If we go with the ending where Sarah does not escape and is revisited by her PTSD visions as death approaches, I'd take the film as an exploration of Sarah's self-destruction and unraveling as a person, descending deeper and deeper into her id and losing the social constructs she had built into a person. Her last semblance of humanity is lost when she chooses not to forgive Juno - she has given in and chosen violence and anger as the final solution.
With the U.S. ending (for what it's worth, the one we saw), in which Sarah does escape, I would read a purgative journey, in which all of the women are put to a survival test, and the one who has experienced the deepest trauma - "the worst has already happened to you" - is able to connect to her animalistic nature to survive. In this sense the story is basically Deliverance.
The choice of ending substantially
changes my read of the film, and while that does speak to the
broadness of the subtext (or the laziness of my read), it is not necessarily to its detriment. Expressionism is naturally malleable. Neil Marshall has stated he likes both endings and had more in mind, and does not consider any to be the "correct" version. Incidentally, PART 2 moves forth with the U.S. ending - one wonders if sequel talks ignited the edit.
Note to future self on watching THE DESCENT: Yourself: Turn on the subtitles for the Scottish because I think I missed literally all of the character detail. I liked the claustrophobic tension of the first half so much that the action breakout felt rough - to bring it back to that popular comparison, the movie is ALIEN and ALIENS in one. Still, the violence is carefully intentioned and the setting so novel that minor complaints quickly dissipate.
Also, check out this plot summary of THE DESCENT PART 2. I can't tell if the IMDB writer was making this joke on purpose.
"Refusing to believe her story about cave-dwelling monsters [xenomorphic aliens], the sole
survivor of a spelunking [planetary] exploration gone horribly wrong is forced to
follow the authorities back into the caves [colony] where something awaits."
Golem: THE DESCENT is one of the most sober-minded films I've seen in quite some time. Its clean/uncomplicated plot leaves a film dedicated to pacing its tension. While it seems well-made, I think I either need more plot or something more showy.
Come back next week for our much-anticipated season finale: DRACULA.
The whole thing is almost exactly one third PART 2 (Jason's house), one third PART 3 (barnhouse battle), and one third PART IV (creepy "hunky" guy looking for missing sister charms final girl), obviously stitched together by the common "party kids" framework of all of them. This being a reboot and all I actually like that they reworked setpieces - it makes the references feel organic rather than like winking. The Part IV bit brings attention to just how lazy the reboot writing is though - at least the original allowed the audience to believe (however unlikely this would've been) that heroguy might actually be the murderer. The omission of that "tension" spares the insult to our intelligence and lets the movie gush with the afore-described Jason action, so I'm glad for it, but it doesn't exactly explain what that guy does for the movie. They coulda just had the final girl save the basement girl and die escaping or escape together or w/e - it's not like the final girl fakeout was effective in any capacity.
The whole thing is almost exactly one third PART 2 (Jason's house), one third PART 3 (barnhouse battle), and one third PART IV (creepy "hunky" guy looking for missing sister charms final girl), obviously stitched together by the common "party kids" framework of all of them. This being a reboot and all I actually like that they reworked setpieces - it makes the references feel organic rather than like winking. The Part IV bit brings attention to just how lazy the reboot writing is though - at least the original allowed the audience to believe (however unlikely this would've been) that heroguy might actually be the murderer. The omission of that "tension" spares the insult to our intelligence and lets the movie gush with the afore-described Jason action, so I'm glad for it, but it doesn't exactly explain what that guy does for the movie. They coulda just had the final girl save the basement girl and die escaping or escape together or w/e - it's not like the final girl fakeout was effective in any capacity.
