Here Comes The Devil

I was just having a conversation with a friend about the current resurgence of late 60's early 70's style filmmaking. It started with grindhouse and a new found love of exploitation flicks. I can see the appeal. i can completely understand how people crave the absurdity and extremism that grindhouse offers. What I haven't yet pinned down is the emerging love for the more esoteric, underground art film style of surrealism that seems to be cropping up.

This underground genre is characterized by obsessive attention to detail, disjointed timelines, strange or poetic dialogue, bold and unsettling imagery, use of many production tricks (like slow-motion, unsynched sound and picture, unusual camera angles, etc.), quirky characters, seemingly unsolvable mysteries, unclear or non-linear plot lines, and unflinching confrontation of every taboo topic imaginable.

I've managed to sit through a few of these modern gems (Beyond The Black Rainbow & Kiss of the Damned) and have yet to fall in love with anything the way I love the classics (anything Jodorowsky did, Warhol's catalog, any Kubrick flick, the bizarre world of Ken Russell, the list goes on and on).

Because I am a true movie masochist - I keep watching crap - even when I know that's what I'm going to get. On that note, here's my latest self-indulgent torture effort (courtesy of Magnet Entertainment, again).

Here Comes The Devil

Part surreal epic, part rape revenge movie, part extreme murder-porn, these guys really wanted to capture the entirety of underground cinema in just one movie. Allow me to describe the opening scene:

The movie starts, unceremoniously, with a lesbian sex scene.
Then!
There's a knock at the door.
One woman leaves to answer it, the other follows when she suspects something is wrong.
Wrong indeed.
A crazed man with a machete is beating her lover. He cuts off his victim's fingers just as the woman cracks him in the head with a lamp.
He grabs the severed fingers and runs away to the mysterious hillside where he strips naked, throws a box of severed fingers to the ground, and begins fucking a hole in the ground.
Cut to black.

What comes after that moment has very little connection to the opening scene. Because why would it?... Fools! This is a surrealist art film.

What else do we have?
Weird musical score? Check.
People behaving enigmatically? Check.
Obsession leading to murder and then bloody shower sex? Check.
A mysterious hill-side cave that appears to metaphorically represent female genitalia? Check.
Dream sequences filled with flashing lights, colors, and water? Check.
Devil-possessed incest? Check.
Zombies? Check.

All of that said, have you ever watched a Spanish soap opera? This movie has the same overall aesthetic of one. It's a combination of the production values and the actual cinematography.

I'm certain that this movie will never achieve cult status. As sure as I am that the filmmakers took themselves very seriously and truly believed they were creating an artistic, frightening, thought provoking, life questioning masterpiece.

You can watch the trailer here:

Rebuttal: 17 Disturbing Horror Movies You Will Never Watch Again

When I'm not watching movies, I'm reading about movies. I stumble across all kinds of articles, blog posts, book excerpts, etc. in my quest to absorb as much movie knowledge as possible. Now, I'm snotty and loud-mouthed and opinionated but I'd never begrudge another human their opinion. Seriously. You're absolutely welcome to have any opinion about any thing you want. However, I must warn you, if I think your opinion is stupid, I'm absolutely going to say so. I've recently stumbled on an article completely brimming with so many idiotic opinions that I'm actually compelled to craft a response. Here's the gist of the original article: there are some horror movies out there that are so disturbing , you'll only ever want to watch them once. I've have taken her original list and refuted her claims without pulling her entire article over. You can read the original article here . Let's start at the beginning, with her opening statement

Escape From Tomorrow

I love creative people who are willing to take risks with their art. I appreciate the refusal to do things by the rules. I'm also terribly impatient with mediocrity. Enter Escape From Tomorrow . Created by a team of rogue filmmakers, the movie was shot in the video mode of high-end still cameras. Actors shared scripts and shooting locations across their smartphones. Shot on location at Disney World, the parks were completely unaware this was all going on right under their mouse ears. I wanted to love Escape From Tomorrow. More than that, I wanted to be completely taken with its ingenuity and creativity and - oh yes - its originality. And there is really a simple brilliance to their covert plan; all families are roaming around the parks, taking videos and chatting on their phones. Just blend the fuck in, act like you belong, and you won't get caught. Too bad the movie can be summed up as: ambitious but Rubbish. As you can imagine (or possibly know), there was a ton of con

What Is Genre And Why Should I Care?

There are terms that always seem to come up when talking about films: director, actor, plot, theme, score, etc. These terms are all self-explanatory; no one ever asks, ‘what’s a director?’ However, there are other terms that are equally common but less clear: genre, sub-genre, auteur, oeuvre, etc. These terms are more abstract then ‘director’ or ‘actor.’ It is entirely likely that someone will ask, ‘what is genre, anyway?’ This question specifically is what I will be answering with this paper. The answer to the question ‘what is genre,’ is multi-layered: genre is a means of classification. Genre is a means of communication. Genre is a means of understanding films. Genre is a means of relating to films. To one person all movies rated “PG” are a genre – possibly one also known as “children’s movies” – while to another all movies with similar topics treated in similar ways are a genre: i.e. movies dealing with frontier life depicted in a nostalgic manner are a genre often kn

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