When critics are the filmmakers' co-conspirators

Reviewing films while not revealing spoilers, but while still discussing what fundamentally makes a film good (or not so good), is one of the trickiest tasks a critic faces. In fact, a really good critic tries to speak only in a sort of dog whistle code about whether a film even contains spoilers, because the knowledge that the film might contain spoilers can be a spoiler in itself.

So I've already failed in that regard for Apex. But then again, issuing a SPOILER WARNING about Apex would have created that failure, if I had not already created it. (In case you missed it, this is an actual SPOILER WARNING for Apex, so heed it accordingly.)

I just wrote my review of Apex. It'll be last night by the time I post this, but as I write this, I just finished writing it.

And in this review, I was so careful to protect the spoilers that I essentially lied to my readers. 

It's not quite how it sounds. Let me explain.

Apex, Baltasar Kormakur's new movie on Netflix that stars Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton, has a setup that should be quite familiar to most moviegoers. It's such a familiar setup that I needn't cite another recent example, but the movie Fall from a couple years ago, about the two women who get themselves stranded at the top of an impossibly tall radio tower they've climbed to seek thrills, is a good example. It's the sort of film where the main character has an opening tragedy in which they lose a loved one in some disaster related to extreme sports -- climbing is usually the culprit, as it is in both these films -- before having to address the main, second nightmare scenario, also involving some sort of extreme sports. Cliffhanger was this movie also, and I believe there have been 782 others in the history of cinema.

Apex has a second template for the sort of movie it is, though, and that template is one I name-checked in the review. It profiles as the sort of exploitation movie where a character (usually a woman) is wronged, and then goes about systematically killing all the people who wronged her. And that movie I name-checked was I Spit On Your Grave.

The thing is, Apex only wants you to think it is a version of I Spit On Your Grave. It isn't. 

Oh yes, it introduces us to a bunch of malevolent toxic males who would be Theron's tormentors in a movie like that. They're Australian outback hunters who pay too much attention to her and whose threats toward her person are palpable. 

The thing is, these hunters are red herrings, and they disappear from the narrative after the first 15 minutes. This film's apex predator is actually Taron Egerton, who is introduced to us as the only nice guy in the outback who might have Charlize's back if the hunters overstep. Only he's the psycho killer who psychs himself up for hunting Theron down by listening to the Chemical Brothers' song "Go," in what was a terrific scene.

Baltasar Kormakur and company don't want me to reveal this in my review. So of course I didn't. 

But that means I had to set up those poor, unrefined and definitely misogynistic hunters, who are all bark and no bite, as the straw men villains for my entire review.

Witness lines like this:

"It may be that Ben [Egerton's character] is the only one who will help stand in the way of the predators who are hunting her."

And this:

"This means that we want her to emerge victorious on her own terms, not due to her adversaries flubbing some kind of advantage they had. Yet flub they do, such that there are a number of times when she would have been dead if their only goal were to kill her, thereby ending the equal threat she poses to them. That she gets to live through these moments of her tormentors’ advantage is not quite the same as villain grandstanding and speechifying, but it’s close enough to leave a sour taste in your mouth. Our ideal Sasha emerges from this because she outsmarted adversaries who were doing their damnedest to kill her at their earliest opportunity."

Theron has only one adversary in this film, but if I told my readers that, they wouldn't be surprised when "nice guy Taron Egerton" turns out to be a cannibalistic psychopath. (Sorry, probably didn't need to reveal the cannibalism part, but I'm assuming you've only read this far if you've seen the movie or if you don't care if I spoil it.) 

Oh, and while we're at it, here was my one "dog whistle" that suggested the possible spoilers:

"The fundamental setup of Apex is too obvious by half, but without getting into too many details, let’s just say it doesn’t stay that way."

The full review will be linked to the right if you check back later, or possibly now, depending on when you are reading this.

My whole approach in this review is, in a way, an abdication of the unspoken pact I have with my readers. I theory, a critic is on the side of the readers, cutting through the ways the filmmaker is trying to manipulate you into having a certain experience, if we think that experience isn't worthy or if there is a sort of deception in what they are trying to accomplish. 

But we also want to help a filmmaker succeed when they are manipulating the viewer in a positive way, in other words, in a way that will deepen your overall experience, possibly/probably by surprising you. And that's what Kormkaur and company are doing here. 

I did believe, as they wanted me to, that Egerton would be the guy who helped Theron survive the lethal ambitions of the scuzzy outback hunters, and even when he was revealed to be a creep, I thought he'd at least be in league with those hunters. As it turns out, the scuzzy hunters are just a bunch of blowhards who don't like having a woman throw their attentions back in their faces. But they aren't going to do anything about it, and in fact, they disappear from the narrative entirely. (I did think it might have been a smart move if, at the end, when Theron inevitably needs a ride back to civilization, she gets one from one of these hunters, thereby proving that you can't always judge a book by its cover. Instead she gets picked up by a couple of nice young women, which is definitely safer, both in terms of her personal safety and the message of the movie, but probably less interesting overall.)

In any case, I was happy to keep Apex's secrets, even if it meant I had to write my review in such a way as to conspire with the filmmakers on their red herring. When they've earned it, I want to be there to help. 

They didn't earn it big time in the case of Apex. I'm still only giving the movie three out of five stars, or 6/10 on the ReelGood scale. But it definitely got my pulse pounding on occasion, and was a worthy genre exercise. 

The thing is, even if Apex didn't earn a marginally positive review from me, I still think I'd do my best not to blow up the filmmakers' attempt to fool us with a red herring.

I just wouldn't be as willing of a conspirator. 

Horror remakes: I Spit on Your Grave

A few minutes into watching I Spit on Your Grave, the third horror remake I've watched as part of this year's themed October viewing, I thought to myself "Shit, is this even a horror movie?"

Oh sure, there's no doubt that what's happening in this movie is horrifying. But a terrorist attack is also horrifying. And most movies about terrorist attacks are not considered horror movies.

I wouldn't have had any doubt at all -- if it looks like a horror movie, walks like a horror movie and talks like a horror movie, it's a horror movie -- except that I remembered seeing something on its Wikipedia page, or actually the Wikipedia page of the original, that made me think twice. The entry starts out "I Spit on Your Grave (originally titled Day of the Woman) is a rape and revenge film written by Meir Zarchi." No mention of it being a horror movie at all.

Of course, the words "rape and revenge" are hyperlinked. And if you click in there, you get the following:

"Rape and revenge, or rape-revenge, is a horror film subgenre characterized by an individual enacting revenge for rape or other sexual acts committed against them or others." 

Whew. In the clear.

Certainly, I always thought of the original as a horror movie, but not all rape and revenge movies are, in fact, horror movies as I would define them. Do you consider Gaspar Noe's Irreversible a horror movie? No more than you consider every other of Noe's films horror movies, though an argument can be made that every movie he's ever made has actually functioned as a horror movie on some level.

I think the thing you have to recognize is that while many if not most horror movies are out to scare you, some are just out to disturb you. And I guess you can be scared -- about the world, about human nature -- by the things that disturb you. 

And wouldn't you know it, I actually watched it on Halloween of 2009, further establishing its bonafides for this themed viewing month. 

The thing that was most famous about the original I Spit on Your Grave, which drew me to watch it back in 2009, was what a lurid form of exploitation it was considered to be at the time of its release. How I knew about it was that I believe it was one of Roger Ebert's zero star reviews, along with Caligula and Mother's Day (1980) (which is on Kanopy right now so I should watch it). Here is a choice excerpt of what Ebert said about it:

This movie is an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures. Because it is made artlessly, it flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering.

Of course, when I saw it in 2009 I gave it three stars. It had to have some merit, right? Or else they wouldn't have remade the movie, and then made two more sequels to the remake?

I won't be watching those, but I did watch the original 2010 remake directed by Steven R. Munroe. 

I couldn't quite get to three stars on this one, but I do think it has some merit. 

It's been 16 years since I saw the original, but I have to think this was slightly less graphic than the original. It's also slightly more conventional in some of the revenge stuff. 

If you don't know the story, it's a fairly simple one of a writer (Sarah Butler) who goes to a remote cabin to work, but not without having to stop in at the gas station to fill up, where she has a brief interaction with some of the locals. They don't forget her and they work themselves up to going to attack her, where things get worse and worse, including them forcing a mentally challenged man to lose his virginity by raping her. Each ultimately has their turn with her, after which she escapes into the woods, where they catch her again and have their way with her some more.

Yes, vile stuff, Roger, I agree. But not vile stuff with no purpose at all.

True to the second half of the "rape and revenge" subgenre, she makes them all pay in horrible ways. Which, I think, is the justification for subjecting her to such atrocities before that. Not everyone buys that justification, but it works for me well enough because it concludes in a morally upright way. (Ebert would actually wrestle with these same issues in his complicated review of the aforementioned Irreversible.) 

There are a couple reasons why this remake didn't work for me quite as well -- if that's the right way to put it -- as the original:

1) There's something about the movements of the lead character, as she exacts her revenge, that gives her something in common with a serial killer in a slasher film. While I feel like Zarchi's film constrained itself more by a nominal sense of realism, the character Jennifer here starts operating in ways that defy natural description and verge on the supernatural. For one, she escapes their attempt to kill her by jumping into a river from a bridge and swimming off. Although the men look down from above, and it's not a very far distance down to the water, she never pokes her head back up for air, leading them to reluctantly conclude that she must have drowned, because otherwise they would have seen her emerge. Of course, she didn't drown, but we don't see any part of her journal to safety, so there's no plausible explanation for how she pulled it off. Neither is there a plausible explanation for the complicated kills she sets up for the rapists, which give her something in common with John "Jigsaw" Kramer. She dispatches each of the men in a way that mirrors the specific indignity they visited upon her, involving a gun in various orifices, a video camera, what have you. To set some of these up, though, she'd have to become something of an expert trap setter in the few weeks she took to rest and recover, and you just don't believe it. Like a serial killer, she shows up when she wants to, and disappears when she wants to, and then reemerges somewhere else really far away. I don't recall how the original handled this, but I like to think that, as a normal person, she was subject to imperfections in her vengeance tour that put her in danger, even as she exacted her sweet, sweet revenge.

2) Just because you can "like" one movie like this, doesn't mean that Roger Ebert is not essentially right on some level. The original I Spit on Your Grave is not a "good" or well made movie by most standards, but there's no doubt that it occupies a unique place in the history of exploitation cinema. It earns its reputation for poor taste and brazenness honestly, by being something of a watershed moment in the depiction of brutality and rape on screen. You can argue until you're blue in the face about whether this is a "good" thing to put into the world, but some people -- myself usually included -- think that one of the ideal roles of cinema is to shock us. An original I Spit on Your Grave can do this in a way that a remake cannot, and therefore, the original gets latitude that the remake does not. I'm mindful, also, that there are really awful versions of this sort of movie out there. One of my bottom five movies of all time is a terrible rape and revenge movie called Chaos, which is sort of a remake of Last House on the Left, which itself inspired I Spit on Your Grave. (And certainly got there ahead of Spit, I should add.) 

Still, I felt that this movie -- even if a lesser experience overall for me -- may have been made more sensitively and with more nuance. For one, this Jennifer does not have to engage in actual sexual acts in her attempt to seek revenge on the men, which I think does happen with the version of Jennifer Hills (same name) from the original. That alone makes it a little less unclean, a little less problematic.

But one thing I found interesting, and I can't recall if there's an equivalent in the original, is how this film shows the home life of the dirty cop who appears to be helping the escaped Jennifer, but instead is just delivering her back into the lion's den. This character, who I don't believe exists in the original, is the most foul of the five, but they give him a twist you might not have seen coming. They break away from Jennifer's story to show this man at home with his wife, who seems perfectly lovely, and an even lovelier young daughter. That this man would live this dual life -- being possibly even a good family man, and also anally raping women in the woods -- reminds us that evil lurks even within men who appear normal, as banal as Hannah Arendt once said.

Mood Indigo is a bad movie to watch while eating tacos

We take our dinner in front of the television in my house.

We make no excuses. We make no apologies. It's just what we do.

We do have a practical rule, however, that confines us to English-language programming during dinner. When you're looking down at your plate to scoop up new bites of food, you're missing whatever's appearing on the screen for those two or three seconds. If you miss a little visual information, that tends to be okay -- or so we've determined. But if you miss reading the subtitles? You could be lost by the third bite.

That rule meets its toughest test when the viewing on tap for the evening is a foreign language film. We're both so tired these days, what with two kids under age four (who have both been sick for more than a week), that we just can't afford to spend dinnertime watching an entire half-hour comedy as an appetizer for the foreign film. If we don't start that movie close to 7:30 sharp, we ain't gonna finish it.

And so it was that we stretched our rule last night for Michel Gondry's Mood Indigo, which was due back at the library today. I'm most worried about my wife in situations like this, since she tends to more fastidiously assemble the bites on her fork, while I will just shove the food in the general direction of my face, as long as my eyes can stay fixed on the screen. But my wife is nearly fluent in the film's language, French, so I had only myself to worry about, and deemed I was up for the task. As long as most of the food made it in my cake hole, I'd be okay.

But I kind of forgot it was taco night. Or rather, it only came to be taco night about an hour before the movie, when my older son and I went down to the shops to fetch some beef mince.

Tacos require more assembly than most dishes a person could have for dinner, so the "shoving blindly toward the opening" approach wasn't going to work for me. Then complicate things by the fact that not only is it French, but the white subtitles often disappeared into the background, lacking the helpful little black borders around the letters that distinguish a good subtitling job. Then add the fact that this film's opening credits in particular are alive with activity, both visual information and rapid-fire French language dialogue, and you've got a ten-minute period that's even busier than the busiest sections of Amelie.

It's a miracle we made it through.

Glad we did, though, because those first ten minutes feature rows of typists typing on typewriters that pass by on conveyor belts, an eel sticking its head cheekily out a number of sink faucets in trying to escape the chef intent on cooking him, and a piano that makes cocktails, the type of which depends on the tune played.

This was a movie worth seeing every little bit of, and for the most part, we did.

And here are some other things I have to say about it ...

My rare head start

Haven't heard of Mood Indigo? Well, that doesn't surprise me. It hasn't even been released theatrically in the U.S. yet. That won't happen until July 18th.

So how am I seeing it here, on video -- and on video from the library?

Well, Mood Indigo was playing in cinemas here last October. I would have seen it, in fact, except for the fact that I was heavily focused on compiling my 2013 rankings, and I wanted to concentrate on movies people back in the U.S. were buzzing about. No one had even heard of Mood Indigo, so I worried that it had somehow just slipped through the cracks without even getting a U.S. release. A surprising fate for the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, to be sure, but nothing that would qualify as unprecedented.

Then I realized -- we're getting Mood Indigo before everyone else. Nearly a year before, in fact.

It's not common, but this is the known flip side of the discrepancy between U.S. and foreign release dates, which I usually think favors the U.S. Some films -- mainstream films -- get released in places like England and Australia first. Especially if, you know, they were made in England or Australia. Or in this case, France.

Two other films that came out last year in Oz but not until this year in the U.S. are British imports Filth (starring James McAvoy and based on a book by Irvine Welsh) and the Steve Coogan vehicle Alan Partridge (known here as Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa).

What do I love about all three of these films? They make easy adds to my 2014 list, since I still do design this list according to U.S. release dates.

I'm glad I waited on Mood Indigo, the only one of these three I felt a strong urge to see in the theater, because if I had seen Indigo last year, I would have felt compelled to count it in my 2013 list. Now that I've waited, I can rank it the same year as other American critics who see it for the first time this year.

And I also get to see it more than a month before most of the people reading this ... which is a rare feeling indeed, when half of last year's best picture nominees didn't even get released here until February.

Michel Gondry is back

Where had you gone, Michel Gondry?

The director of Eternal Sunshine seemed to be very much on track to continue dazzling indie audiences for the rest of his professional career, following up that 2004 hit with the only barely lesser film The Science of Sleep (2006). But when his next two films with Hollywood actors were the disappointing duo of Be Kind Rewind (2008) and The Green Hornet (2011), he seemed to have really lost his way.

But what concerned me most was when Gondry started making films I had to work to even hear about. The Green Hornet was only three years ago now, but those three years have featured a near return to obscurity for the Frenchman. It seemed that every time I turned around, I was hearing about a Gondry film that I should have been hearing more about. In 2012 he made some feature I had never heard of called The We and the I, and then in 2013 he followed it up with some documentary I had never heard of called Is the Man Who is Tall Happy? Their titles alone suggested to me that this represented a willful return to eccentric inaccessibility for a directed who felt burned by Hollywood. Since I don't even know what those movies are about, I'm going only on impressions here.

Well, I'm not going to tell you that Mood Indigo is some Hollywood popcorn film, but it does feel as though Gondry is getting back to what he was doing in Sunshine and Sleep. And that is most certainly a good thing.

Gondry's DIY, crafts-informed approach to visuals makes a major return here. If so-called "practical effects" are what we long to return to in our monster movies, you could say that Gondry's sets, props and artistic flourishes represent a kind of "practical artwork" that feels tactile and charming.

But what's truly memorable about Mood Indigo is the way Gondry almost entirely disregards the physics of this film's physical universe. Early on, characters master a dance craze that involve their legs curving and arcing like pieces of taut wire. An ice-skating scene features a character whose torso inexplicably elongates an additional 40 feet. Characters frequently lose track of gravity and go flying off either skyward or forward. This is to say nothing of the various inanimate objects that come to life, and animals that suddenly appear in speaking roles designed for humans.

Simply put, Gondry has rediscovered the joys of the impossible that disappeared from his post-Sleep Hollywood work. The result is an effort that does not live up to the impossibly high standards of Sunshine, and may not even be as good as Sleep, but is at least in the same conversation as both of them. It's whimsical with a capital W, but never crosses that fine line that might make it precious.

Nor is this to say that the movie is going where you think it will go, or that its tone will stay this upbeat. That's all I'll say.

The strange death of Boris Vian

Having thought she knew nothing about this movie going in, my wife quickly realized that it was based on a novel by French novelist Boris Vian. Not only had she read Vian, but she had actually read this particular novel, which was entitled L'Ecume des Jours (as is the movie in French -- literally, The Scum of the Days). The English title was Froth on the Daydream ... which I guess did not make a very good title for a movie. (But would make an excellent pairing with the title Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.)

I soon found myself discovering more about, and becoming steadily more fascinated by, this man, Boris Vian.

It turns out that Boris Vian, who died in 1959, had had just one other of his works turned into a movie. My wife told me that it was I Spit On Your Grave, the brutal 1978 exploitation film in which a woman goes on a killing spree avenging her own gang rape.

Not really what I expected from a guy whose other book was being turned into something that seemed like a cross between Jean Jeunet, Terry Gilliam and David Cronenberg.

It turns out my wife was half right. I Spit On Your Graves was indeed the title of the novel, but it was made into a 1959 film with the title I Spit On Your Grave by Michel Gast, not the 1978 Meir Zarchi film. It would seem that the two films are related, but the plot synopsis for the 1959 film on IMDB dispels that notion: "Joe Grant, a light-skinned African-American, heads to a small Southern town to investigate the lynching death of his brother. He draws the attention of a gorgeous heiress whom he learns may have been involved in the killing."

Well, it could have been the famously reviled 1978 version for how little Vian thought of it. Having already fought with the producers about their interpretation of his work and asking to have his name removed, he could stand it no longer during a French screening of the completed film. A few minutes in he allegedly blurted out "These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!" He then collapsed from a massive coronary and died on the way to the hospital.

If that's not putting yourself into your art, I don't know what is.

Something tells me Vian would have looked more favorably on Mood Indigo ... though he probably wouldn't have lived to see it anyway, as he'd be 94.

Literally nothing they won't remake

I enjoy days when I don't have a specific post planned for that morning, because it gives me the flexibility to be shocked enough into writing an impromptu post later in the day.

Today is one of those days, as I just discovered that I Spit On Your Grave has been remade, and will be released worldwide this fall.

Criticizing remakes has been all the rage on the film blogosphere, to such an extent that you are now more likely to see posts that defend remakes. This is both a form of backlash, and a form of anti-snobbery that I think we can all appreciate. I find myself in the latter category, as I feel good every time I re-assert my appreciation for "low culture" and its potential to be extremely pleasing in its own right.

But it doesn't mean I can't register shock every once in awhile about exactly how far things have come.

I Spit On Your Grave? Really?

I've had occasion to discuss the 1978 original a couple times on my blog already. (Check out my label for it if you're interested.) So you already know I find the film interesting -- and that I feel a significant amount of guilt in saying this, because I know many people find it loathsome.

So today's outrage is not because I think the evil of that graphic, bloody exploitation movie is being re-released on the world. In fact, my outlook on it probably shouldn't even be characterized as outrage, but rather, disbelief. There's no morality attached to my perspective at all -- there's simply a surprise about the business decision that allowed this film to be greenlit.

Granted, it's not starring anyone I've ever heard of. (Though looking at this production still, I thought, for a fleeting moment, that Nicole Kidman was the star -- tell me you don't think that looks like Kidman.) Granted, Anchor Bay Entertainment is not exactly a major distributor. (Though I'd certainly heard of them.) And granted, it premiered at horror festivals earlier this year, meaning that it was looked upon somewhat marginally.

But the fact that it exists at all shows you just how far name recognition will get you.

I mean, just look what Roger Ebert wrote about the original: "The story of 'I Spit on Your Grave' is told with moronic simplicity. These horrible events are shown with an absolute minimum of dialogue, which is so poorly recorded that it often cannot be heard. There is no attempt to develop the personalities of the characters - they are, simply, a girl and four men, one of them mentally retarded. The movie is nothing more or less than a series of attacks on the girl and then her attacks on the men, interrupted only by an unbelievably grotesque and inappropriate scene in which she enters a church and asks forgiveness for the murders she plans to commit." He called the movie "a vile bag of garbage ... without a shred of artistic distinction. Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of my life."

As indicated above, I don't necessarily agree with the strident nature of Ebert's comments. But let's just say I never thought I would have to be discussing a remake of it. The movie seems to be particularly a product of its place and time, which is not to say that the late 1970s were a time when hillbillies regularly gang-raped innocent women. Just that it was made at a time when exploitation movies had the potential to exist as fodder for intellectual discussion. Exploitation movies made today would not seem to have the same possible sociopolitical relevance ... though I guess I can't really say that for certain until we're 30 years removed from today.

I just watched the trailer, and it looks pretty legit -- high production values (which the first film did not have) that look completely in line with the post-Saw, post-Hostel standard. It's not such a surprise that it's being marketed as a straightforward horror/torture porn -- I guess that's probably more or less how the original was marketed, but I was only five at the time it came out, so even if I'd managed to see the trailer somehow, I wouldn't have had much to compare it to. It also has a legit writer, Jeffrey Reddick, who created the Final Destination series. With Meir Zarchi, who directed the original, serving as a producer, it's possible it could be a competent film that still has the outrageous quality that Zarchi brought to the original.

Far more likely is that it will blend in with a dozen other anonymous torture porns that appear to promote violence against women. In fact, come to think of it, the worst fate for the I Spit On Your Grave remake is not for it to be too shocking -- it's for it to be too boring.

I guess we'll find out on October 8th.

Sick, sadistic shit

I have a confession to make:

I love movies with sick, sadistic shit in them.

Does this make me a sick, sadistic person? Not at all. It just means that I am generally bored by the mainstream attempts to unsettle me that are offered up by Hollywood. Yeah, that little kid looks creepy and is saying creepy things. But I've seen it all before.

First and foremost when I go to the movies, I want to see something new. I'd rather see a movie that dares to be different and fails nobly, than something that's more solidly crafted but is overly familiar.

Which is why, when I hear about a movie in which a mad scientist surgically fuses three human beings together in a chain, to make one continuous digestive track connecting three people, I try to figure out a way to see it as soon as humanly possible.

The Human Centipede -- or, The Human Centipede (First Sequence), as it is sometimes known -- made it easier for me, by debuting OnDemand at the same time it was appearing for the first time in U.S. theaters. (It was made in the Netherlands and set in Germany.)

Suddenly, I knew what I was doing last Friday night.

One thing for sure is, you've got to watch a movie like this at night. Sick and sadistic -- twisted and gross, warped and nightmarish, skewed and freakish -- doesn't fly during the day.

And I'm pleased to report that The Human Centipede did not disappoint. The subject matter being as gruesome as it is, director Tom Six didn't even need to get all graphic to make us squirm. Once you've got a scientist kidnapping unwitting tourists and subjecting them to procedures that would make Dr. Frankenstein vomit, you don't need to show every little detail. The power of suggestion is strong in a film like this.

And The Human Centipede contains one of the great villain performances I've seen in the past couple years, that of Dieter Laser as the surgeon gone mad. The man was presumably once respected and not insane -- he had a high-profile career separating conjoined twins. But that gave him the intimate anatomical knowledge that would allow him to do the reverse kind of procedure, and he does it with glee. In fact, one of my favorite scenes in the film is when the abomination is first revealed. Everyone is crying, but the three members of the centipede are crying out of fear and despair, while he's weeping in joy. Great moment.

And Laser -- what a weird dude. Just look at him here. My colleague who wrote the review for my site described him as the love child of Udo Kier and Christopher Walken. Here are all three, with Kier on the left, Walken in the center and Laser on the right, so you get some idea what I'm talking about:



I won't talk too much more about The Human Centipede, because it contains some great surprises. I will say this, though: If you go into it for the same reasons I did, you'll be plenty satisfied.

Instead, I'll finish by talking about some other films I saw recently with the hopes of getting some sick, sadistic shit, and whether I left satisfied.

The Collector (2009, Marcus Dunstan). I guess torture porn has become pretty mainstream -- they've made six Saw movies, after all -- but I thought this one might be a little grislier. It involves a serial killer dressed up like The Gimp from Pulp Fiction, who sets up his victims' home as a series of Home Alone-style booby traps, only lethal ones instead of paint cans swinging on ropes. He also sadistically tortures them, if they aren't killed by the traps. The movie was decent, and there were some squirmy moments, but the premise was ultimately a bit too silly, like Saw movies often are -- so much (unbelievable) setup for so little payoff.

Downloading Nancy (2009, Johan Renck). I didn't specifically know what Downloading Nancy was about, only that it was dark and, well, sadistic. Also that some people found it abhorrent, which made it slightly more attractive. If I'd known it was about a woman who cuts herself (as I wrote about here), I probably wouldn't have been as interested, or at least not for the same reasons I was interested in The Human Centipede and The Collector.

I Spit on Your Grave (1977, Meir Zarchi). Another film I've blogged about before (here), I Spit on Your Grave was something I wanted to see because it was supposed to be one of the most notorious exploitation films ever made. I finally got my opportunity last fall. I guess this had the intended effect for me in the sense that I found the gang rape scenes repellent, but the movie satisfying in some way overall. As I discussed at the time, and as you probably already know, the victim systematically kills all the people who raped her, some of them in extremely nasty ways, so it fit the "sick, sadistic" category plenty well. I know I'm supposed to think I Spit on Your Grave is depraved and morally repugnant, but it worked for me.

Battle Royale (2001, Kinji Fukasaku). Forty-four children on an island, with weapons, killing each other until there's only one left. Disturbing, eh? Yes, it was, but it also managed to be reasonably funny in spots as well. I really enjoyed it.

Hard Candy (2005, David Slade). Before she was Juno, Ellen Page was a sexual predator's target who turns the tables on the would-be child molester, ties him up, and ... well, to tell you anything else would be to spoil it. Plenty squirmy, even if some sensationalist moments keep it from being all that it could have been.

Captivity (2007, Roland Joffe). It was the infamously graphic advertising campaign, only a small, chaste percentage of which I even knew about at the time I saw it, that inspired me toward a viewing of Captivity -- in the theater, no less. There were a couple gruesome moments, but not in a good way. This is torture porn at its worst, and it's also poorly made and laughable in spots. I ranked this as the worst movie I saw in 2007.

Funny Games (2007, Michael Haneke). I knew it would be dark, I knew it would be brutal, and I knew it would be nihilistic. What I didn't know is how angry it would make me. This is a depressing, hopeless movie, and Funny Games makes you feel like the target of Haneke's own cinematic game-playing, for his own amusement. Two eccentric youths capture a family in their summer home, torture them and kill them. Funny indeed.

Teeth (2007, Mitchell Lichtenstein). This is the prototype for a sick and sadistic movie -- but like Battle Royale, it's also very funny in spots. The one-sentence plot synopsis says it all: "A shy teenage girl who's an active participant in the local abstinence club discovers she has teeth in her vagina, and those who seek to take advantage of her find out as well -- the hard way." Awesome, gruesome, and as I said before, hilarious. I loved it. Also, afterward, I was singing "Vagina Dentata" to the tune of "Hakuna Matata" from The Lion King.

Zoo (2007, Robinson Devor). A documentary about a man who died while having sex with a horse. 'Nuff said. Sadly, the film was too vague, talking around its subject more than about it, to be as disturbing as one would hope. What was it about 2007, anyway, that there were so many sick, sadistic movies from that year? That makes four in a row on this list.

Antichrist (2009, Lars von Trier). And here's a third 2009 movie. I wrote about this movie also (here). Antichrist is famous for a couple scenes of sexual mutilation that occur in a cabin in the woods where Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg have sequestered themselves in order to rapidly lose their marbles following the death of their young son. I wasn't as shocked as I expected to be, plus, I thought the filmmaker's motivations were artistically suspect -- von Trier is one of the most maddening, egomaniacal directors out there, and Antichrist was a movie he made the way he made it just to be controversial.

I'd love to hear any good examples you have of movies that fall into this category. My comments section is open and accepting contributions.

Not so prudish after all

A couple weeks back I wrote a piece about Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny, the pretentious piece of experimental art that features a graphic oral sex scene -- a scene designed merely to shock viewers into talking about Gallo's film at the water cooler.

In that piece I also mentioned that this two-minute segment of pure pornography disqualified the film from being carried by Blockbuster. (At the time I said that Netflix also did not carry it, but later realized I had mistakenly lumped Netflix' morals in with Blockbuster's morals.)

Blockbuster has long been considered kind of the Wal-Mart of rental companies, in more ways than one. Wal-Mart, of course, is famous for trying to protect its customers from what the company considers morally dangerous segments of popular culture -- most prominently in the form of refusing to carry the works of certain rappers and other edgy musicians. Blockbuster is not nearly so extreme nor so public about its censorship, but it does keep a wide berth of films like The Brown Bunny.

I'm pleased to say, however, that Blockbuster -- the company I've sided with for a variety of reasons that I've cited several times before -- is not quite so grandmotherly as we might have thought.

This weekend I received in the mail a copy of I Spit on Your Grave, the infamous cult film from 1978, which features a brutal gang rape, and then the brutal retribution carried out by the victim. In that same Brown Bunny piece I discussed how Roger Ebert had given this film zero stars, which is what put it on my radar back in the 1980s. Writing about the film a few weeks back put it on my radar again, and I received it on Friday.

I saved watching it until my wife was out of the house. She wouldn't have judged me for watching it any more than she would have judged me for watching The Brown Bunny. Still, there's something about watching a movie you know is famous for a brutal gang rape that feels a bit icky. Best done in the privacy of a single-person viewing, and without going out of one's way to advertise that you actually watched it. Which is why, you know, I'm writing a piece about it on my blog. This is like my super-public confessional, and you all are my priests.

As with The Brown Bunny, I had no prurient interest here -- I just wanted to see what all the fuss was with an infamous film that was likely to shock me. It would make up for all the other times I'm not shocked in the slightest, during hours and hours of middle-of-the-road fare.

As I was preparing to watch it, I was also preparing for it to be a seriously neutered version of the original film. After all, this is not what Blockbuster usually endorses. Although I Spit on Your Grave has the alternate title Day of the Woman, critics at the time -- Roger Ebert in particular -- did not consider this anything close to a feminist film. Even if the main character draws out her revenge against the men who raped her, taunting and teasing them before finally killing them in the most gruesome ways imaginable, there's still the inescapable fact that she gets her clothes torn off, gets sodomized against a rock, and has a bottle jammed inside her. Some of this is suggested -- some of it isn't.

Yet I saw it all. There was no evidence of a clean, Blockbuster-friendly version here. If there were images removed from this film, I don't know which ones they could have been. Anything more than I saw here would have prevented this from getting a theatrical release, even in the more-permissive 1970s. There was full frontal nudity from both genders, and stomach-churning violence intermingled with it. In fact, during the aforementioned scene against the rock, Camille Keaton's shrieks were so loud and horrifying, I had to hurriedly close the windows and turn down the volume so the neighbors wouldn't think I was watching a snuff film. (Part of the reason the film was so controversial at the time, I think, was that Camille Keaton is Buster Keaton's grand-niece.)

And in the end, I think Ebert was a bit extreme with his zero stars. The movie is not super long on plot -- it basically consists of four upstate New York hillbillies catching the woman, raping her in three different locations, and then being picked off by her one by one several weeks later. But it's actually done with a decent amount of artistry -- shot well, edited well, and paced in a way to draw out the agony, but not for sadistic purposes. It seems like director Meir Zarchi's intention is to make the viewer really identify with the horrors experienced by a rape victim, to spell out exactly how brutal and terrifying non-consensual sex really is.

I actually do think there's something feminist here. I understand that merely putting these images into the world is in some way harmful toward women, but there's no ambiguity here about who is evil and who is righteous. And as Keaton's character goes through and delivers these men their just desserts, it's exquisitely satisfying. The film takes on the form of social critique in its portrayal of the men, several of whom lower their guard in her presence because they innately believe that she's truly back to seduce them, rather than exact revenge on them. The men seem to think that rape victims are "asking for it" to such a degree, that a few sultry words spoken in deceit by her are enough to convince them she's insatiable, back for more. It's so extreme that Zarchi's only intention can really be to point out just how morally bankrupt these men are, how programmed to view women as objects they can bend to their will, to the extent that it blinds them to threats to their safety.

The interesting thing about I Spit on Your Grave is that it exists simultaneously as exploitation and feminism. Either way, it's not something a person is likely to forget anytime soon.

And I have the surprisingly permissive standards of Blockbuster to thank for giving me the full, unfettered experience. What I found even more interesting is that Blockbuster listed the film with a slightly altered title -- like many cult classics, I Spit on Your Grave seems to have several different titles depending on various re-releases, in addition to its alternate title Day of the Woman. Blockbuster actually listed the film as I Spit on Your Corpse, I Piss on Your Grave, and at first I was wondering if I would actually get the version of the film I was supposed to get. Not only am I sure I did, but the two new words in that title -- "piss" and "corpse" -- are both words that a skittish company like Blockbuster would usually try to steer clear of. Yet they went out of their way to include these words in a title which, when listed in its more standard version, has only the less-sensitive words "spit" and "grave" in it. That might have been more shocking than anything I actually saw in the movie.

Now if Wal-Mart is the next company to surprise me, then I'll really be shocked.