This week: Pollyanna (1967); artist: Marek Freudenreich
Ed Says: My girlfriend picked this one.
Monday, December 3, 2007
Polish Film Poster of the Week (12/3-12/9)
This week: Pollyanna (1967); artist: Marek Freudenreich
Ed Says: My girlfriend picked this one.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Polish Film Poster of the Week (11/26-12/02)
This week: Star Wars (1978); artist: Jakub Erol
Ed Says: Feast upon the black soulless eyes of the android! (And, once again trainspotters, the date quoted is when the poster was designed, not the original release of the film.)
Postmodernism in Robert Kolker's "CINEMA OF LONELINESS" (3rd edition)
Robert Kolker’s A Cinema of Loneliness (3rd edition) is haunted by three things: Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction, and the ghost of the postmodernist present. Much like the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity, Kolker treats these concepts as three separate entities but really believes they are all manifestations of the same thing. In the introduction to the 3rd edition of his book, Kolker immediately distinguishes the modernist filmmakers he is discussing from the postmodern ones that sprang up in the dozen years between editions. Modernists (like Scorsese, Kubrick, Altman) “cared deeply about film: reacted, alluded, parodied, embraced, and learned from it. Film was a way of articulating the world and their responses to it…” whereas the postmodernist recent filmmakers display an “indiscriminate embrace of pop-cultural images” and “seem to have less a view of the world than simply a view of film” (xiii-xiv). This is, of course, a common complaint about Quentin Tarantino, whose Pulp Fiction is identified here as “the acme of postmodern nineties filmmaking” (249).
Here Kolker is trying to justify why Pulp Fiction was successful while other roughly contemporaneous attempts at bringing postmodern techniques to genre films were not:
“The postmodern insouciance, violence, homophobia, and racism of Pulp Fiction were perfectly acceptable because the film didn’t pretend seriousness and therefore didn’t mock it… But those films that simply mocked or suggested that they were smarter than the audience suffered a postmodern implosion. The audience maintained an independent subjectivity, refused to be shifted into an entirely sarcastic mode, and ignored the films” (281).
The films he cites, Hudson Hawk and Last Action Hero, just weren’t very good, and that is probably the real reason for their failure. However, his comparison of such films to Pulp Fiction reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of postmodernism. Hudson Hawk and Last Action Hero are both merely arch, ironic parodies of the action genre, produced for comedic intent. Pulp Fiction is attempting an altogether more complex proposition.
Pulp Fiction doesn’t ask you to keep your tongue firmly in cheek but rather to give yourself over to its passionate convulsions. As a viewer, we both know that we are in movieland—are able to joke about that fact and allude to the work’s place within film history—and find ourselves lost within the fictional world we are presented. We can know that Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace are recycled archetypes from film noir and yet still be charmed by their not-quite-romance, because it reminds us of ourselves, of situations we’ve been in. Contemporary theorist Steven Shaviro writes in Doom Patrols, “To a postmodern sensibility, there’s no contradiction between cool and hot, irony and passion, playfulness and commitment… or camp distancing and involvement to the point of delirious obsession.” It’s not that postmodernism has overthrown the sincerity of the modernist project for unserious play. The postmodern artist takes modernism at its word and continues the metatextual investigation into the nature of his/her medium, and how fictions interact with each other and the world. The fact that the form these investigations take often become unmoored from the possibility of such designations as ‘realistic’ or ‘believable’ can be scary and threatening to viewers (and critics) who are invested in “the thematics of modernism,” defined by Kolker as “the expression of lost order, a vision of a diminished human subjectivity and agency, a sense of history as loss and melancholia…” (17).
In that same first chapter of Doom Patrols, his “theoretical fiction” about postmodern culture, Shaviro writes, “Postmodernism is distinguished, then, not by any tendency to meditate on ruins and to allegorize its own disappointments; but by a propensity to invent new organs of perception and action.” When Tarantino—as a postmodernist—looks at the past, he doesn’t see a supposed utopia of canonical high art, he sees history for what it is: a series of ruins whose secondhand influence we are still feeling in the present. That’s the real reason why Kolker is so upset with Tarantino, why he continually brings him up in order to criticize him throughout his book. Kolker’s beloved modernists (the subjects of the book) are crying out in loss and trying to make the culture whole again through their films. Tarantino is grabbing things from everywhere and juxtaposing them to show how they are different, how culture is not singular but a multiplicity.
Kolker misinterprets other important elements of postmodern theory when he writes, “The popularity of Pulp Fiction was based on its simulacrum of novelty, and simulacrum, the imitation of something that never existed in the first place, is a beloved quality of the postmodern” (249). The concept of simulacra as it being used here was widely popularized by Jean Baudrillard in his Simulacra and Simulations. As anyone familiar with Baudrillard knows, his work is highly critical of the cultural movements referred to as postmodern, and a simulacrum—which he terms a copy of a copy which “bears no relation to reality whatsoever”—would hardly be “beloved” by him. Baudrillard is filled with the same sort of modernist paranoia that Kolker studies (and is afflicted by), so it’s strange that Kolker would use Baudrillard’s terminology while misinterpreting its intent. Even when he cites a theorist whose work he would do well to absorb, he misinterprets its meaning: he mentions Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers to support his slagging of Tarantino’s whole oeuvre wherein “Pastiche becomes a kind of poaching, and a poaching of surfaces at that” (249). Jenkins’ book is largely about fan fiction and its main thrust is how plagiarism can be an art form.
In the preceding paragraph, Kolker similarly uses the term “pastiche” to suggest that Tarantino is somewhere between unoriginal and plagiarist: “[In Pulp Fiction] The flourishes, the apparent witty banality of the dialogue, the goofy fracturing of temporality are a patina over a pastiche…essentially made of…Mean Streets and The Killing” (249). Strangely, this quote works beautifully as a critique of Tarantino’s earlier film Reservoir Dogs, which is too much a part of a particular genre (the heist film) to engage in the type of textual play Pulp Fiction does. The characters in Reservoir Dogs are all participating in the creation of a closed fictive world, whereas the ones in Pulp Fiction are drawn from a wide pool of genres. The boxing film, the blaxploitation film, the Vietnam veteran film, the hitman and gangster films—all of these are sources for the characters in Pulp Fiction, and the fun comes in watching them bounce off of each other. In setting archetypal characters from different genres off and against each other, the conventions of those genres are exploded. The characters, free from their usual formulas, are set adrift, and through this accumulation and piling-on of simulacra, begin to once again behave sort of like real people.
When Jules tells Vincent, “Let’s get into character”—ending their foot massage conversation so they can go work—he is acknowledging not only that they are hitmen in a movie and that they must now stop talking like Seinfeld characters and start talking like gangsters, but also going beyond metatextual play to make a point about life: most of us, everyday when we go to work, must play the role we are assigned. We aren’t really ourselves when we’re there, and when we walk into our place of work we must “get into character.” Which is why Kolker is wrong when he writes, “That’s why Pulp Fiction was so popular…because the narrative and spatial structure of the film never threatened to go beyond themselves into signification” (250). And he goes too far when he says that because Tarantino is essentially “doing” Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing throughout his first trilogy as a director, “we learn little about a Tarantino aesthetic…and don’t learn much about his three films” (249). Every frame of every Tarantino film is filtered through his aesthetic, that’s how you can tell he’s the one who made it. Kolker is complaining more about the fact that what is revealed about Tarantino by his films is a certain blankness of character—he is a cynical person with a dark sense of humor who experiences life mostly through films—than that nothing at all is revealed by them. Which brings us back to Kolker’s original complaint about postmodernists, that they “seem to have less a view of the world than simply a view of film.”
Throughout Cine
ma of Loneliness, Kolker has invoked Oliver Stone as a proper and good postmodernist alternative to Tarantino. I believe this assertion is incorrect. Stone is not “[Arthur] Penn’s postmodern double,” (63) which is essentially the premise of the first chapter. Stone is a modernist—he’s just younger than the other ones studied here. In his discussion of Stone’s film of Tarantino’s script Natural Born Killers, Kolker incorrectly credits Stone with “going in directions that leave his sources behind” (65) when he uses a pastiche of film stocks and employs a shot from the point-of-view of a bullet that is very cartoon-like. This is all in Tarantino’s script. The difference is that in his script it is only a celebration of different film stocks and of cartoony camera angles: a riff on form for its own sake, indulging in the propensity for “poaching of surfaces” bemoaned by Kolker. Stone, however, takes the technique back to its roots in modernism, “anchoring it to the body of cinema of which it is a part and by so doing foregrounding its existence as a film, an artifact with a history” (32).The only other Stone film to consistently use pastiche as a visual technique is JFK, a film whose premise owes a massive debt to postmodern novelist extraordinaire Don Delillo’s Libra. In David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram,” he writes about a movement in postmodern fiction which “uses the transient received myths of popular culture as a world in which to imagine fictions about ‘real,’ albeit pop-mediated, characters.” Wallace lists Libra, which is a fantasy-version biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, among the chief examples of this form. By taking the concept of Libra—a refraction of the JFK assassination into, in Kolker’s words “an interrogation of the images and narratives of politics… It invites us to imagine alternative fictions” (69)—and then grafting it onto the real world story of Jim Garrison, a man whose head was filled with “alternative fictions,” Stone again takes a postmodern text and drags it back into a modernist sensibility. The point of Libra was that the Warren Report, the Zapruder film, and any other account of JFK’s assassination are just as fictional as a novel. Either Stone missed the point, or Kolker’s interpretation of it does.
Kolker’s complaint about a certain “premise of postmodernism, that the images and narratives of popular culture gather meaning only within the contexts and the reception of popular culture, without the need to test them against any other reality” (69) is moot in this context. The idea is that in a world where a President’s death is experienced as television, there is no reality, only popular culture. This theme is expressed intrinsically in Tarantino’s work. Stone, maybe despite himself, expressed it in Natural Born Killers and in JFK. Kolker does understand it, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it, or let go of his modernist worldview and accept it as a valid artistic statement.
Works cited.
Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988): pg. 166.
Kolker, Robert. A Cinema of Loneliness, 3rd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Shaviro, Steven. Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism (Serpent’s Tail High Risk Books, 1997).
Wallace, David Foster. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997): pg. 50
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Polish Film Poster of the Week (11/12-11/18)
This week: El Dorado (1973); artist: Jerzy Flisak
Ed Says: What's better, let's have a vote: a hat made of a "whisky" bottle or the crutch-as-shotgun pose?
Thursday, November 8, 2007
TOWARDS A GENDER ANALYSIS OF THE PINKY VIOLENCE FILM: part 4
(Note: You can find the preceding part of this essay--and links to the two previous parts--here.)
4. A Woman’s Place
There is a sequence in Criminal Woman: Killing Melody that invokes not only the two major elements of pinky violence I’ve discussed so far—the specter of rape and torture & titillation—but a third one also: a woman’s place. Reiko Ike’s character Maki is running a Yojimbo –style double-cross on two yakuza clans, but it is unknown to them that she is behind the scenes pulling the strings to force them into war. In a scene following two or three similarly softcore in their content, Maki seduces one of the yakuza and he takes her home. After watching her shower, he pulls a gun on her and takes her back to his clan’s headquarters to torture her into telling him who sent her.
The torture itself is presented in nowhere near as sexy a fashion as in Girl Boss Guerilla, but as it follows several scenes of rough, panting foreplay, it serves as something of a climax to them. Maki refuses to talk no matter what the men do to her. Miki Sugimoto’s character, Masayo, steps in to take over. The two of them, unbeknownst to the yakuza, knew each other in prison and have a begrudging respect for each other based on the fact that every time they duel, they come to a draw. Masayo knows exactly who Maki is, and she also knows that she’ll never talk, no matter what they do to her. So she takes the opportunity to exact a bit of revenge on Maki. She says that a woman can torture another woman better than a man, then presses a lit cigarette into each of Maki’s nipples.
Here director Atsushi Mihori cuts in a few reaction shots of the goons watching. Unlike the torture scene in Girl Boss Guerilla, where the reaction shots are used to implicate us (the viewer) in the torture of this woman, and throw our own titillation back in our faces, the reaction shots in Criminal Woman: Killing Melody serve only to reinforce the idea that we are supposed to be turned on by what we see. Despite the utter unsexiness that is (for me, at least) inherent in the image of a woman’s breasts being singed with a cigarette butt, the looks on the faces of the goons indicate that the situation is highly sexually charged and they are deriving enjoyment from it. As a male viewer, I am unconciously taking some cues from the men onscreen vis-à-vis my reaction to what is being presented. However, as these men are the badguys (and low-level ones at that), perhaps I am meant to react negatively to their positions.
As Masayo continues to torture Maki, she leans in and secretly hands her a knife. While helping the men oppress her, she slips her the tool of her own liberation. Maki will later use this knife to escape from the same man she seduced earlier when he comes to take from her what she had once freely offered. In an earlier scene, Masayo walks into the bar where Maki’s gang have set up shop. She declines their offer to join up with them against the yakuza boss Oba, who she reveals as her lover. She says though she isn’t in love with him, “I still belong to Oba, after all.” She is only with him for the money, but she doesn’t allow herself to act in her own self-interest until he is dead. In this way, she is similar to the girls in Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess.
The girls of Worthless to Confess meet and bond in the same fashion as those in Killing Melody: behind bars; the film follows the same first act structure, as well. Our heroine meets and proves herself to the others in jail, before we cut to some time later when she gets out. In Killing Melody, Mako gets out of jail bent on revenge and the other girls pledge to help her. In Worthless to Confess, Rika, played by Reiko Oshida, leaves the girls’ juvenile detention center with only the vague goal to live a straight life from now on. She finds that her friends from inside are losing that same battle.
Unlike those in some other pinky violence films (e.g. Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter) the men in Worthless to Confess don’t necessarily assert their ownership over the women. The women, of their own accord, are willing to sacrifice themselves for men, whether they are good men or not. Mari’s husband is sick, and she’s willing to get naked to support him. Midori’s husband is a degenerate gambler, and she’s willing to steal from her father to support him. Rika is willing to do “anything” for her employer, Midori’s father, which she has to prove (to the yakuza shaking down the old man) by getting naked. At the last moment, Rika is stopped from showing herself, though she is willing to. Rika is probably the most positive female character in any of the films I’ve been discussing here. Director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi famously decreed that Reiko Oshida would never have to take her clothes off while playing her—but that doesn’t stop the script from forcing Rika to prove she’s willing to take her clothes off.
The representatives of the older generation in the film pay lip service to traditional values. But, unlike many Japanese films of a prior generation, Worthless to Confess doesn’t pay much attention to this conflict. One girl’s mother says “You girls need to work hard and become good wives,” and the girls just smile and say sure, sure, knowing that those old values don’t really apply anymore, and there’s no sense arguing about it. Despite their casual dismissal of those old-fashioned values, all of the girls stick by the men in their lives out of a deeply ingrained sense of duty, as does Masayo from Killing Melody.
When one of them says, “Giving up now won’t do my man proud,” before joining in a bloody raid on the yakuza, she echoes a character from Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom. In that film, the only prominent female member of the faculty, Ms. Michiko, says, “It’s a wife’s duty to clean up her husband’s mess.” Her husband is being blackmailed for sexual relations with underage students of the school, costing the Chairman of the district a ton of money. To right this wrong, Ms. Michiko offers her body to the Chairman. He takes the deal and what follows is the most lasciviously presented of any sex scene I’ve yet scene in a pinky violence film. When director Norifumi Suzuki has Ms. Michiko look directly into the camera as the Chairman is rubbing her with an electric massager, the film actually becomes pornography.
Check back in soon for the conclusion to this first stab at a gender analysis of pinky violence.
4. A Woman’s Place
There is a sequence in Criminal Woman: Killing Melody that invokes not only the two major elements of pinky violence I’ve discussed so far—the specter of rape and torture & titillation—but a third one also: a woman’s place. Reiko Ike’s character Maki is running a Yojimbo –style double-cross on two yakuza clans, but it is unknown to them that she is behind the scenes pulling the strings to force them into war. In a scene following two or three similarly softcore in their content, Maki seduces one of the yakuza and he takes her home. After watching her shower, he pulls a gun on her and takes her back to his clan’s headquarters to torture her into telling him who sent her.
The torture itself is presented in nowhere near as sexy a fashion as in Girl Boss Guerilla, but as it follows several scenes of rough, panting foreplay, it serves as something of a climax to them. Maki refuses to talk no matter what the men do to her. Miki Sugimoto’s character, Masayo, steps in to take over. The two of them, unbeknownst to the yakuza, knew each other in prison and have a begrudging respect for each other based on the fact that every time they duel, they come to a draw. Masayo knows exactly who Maki is, and she also knows that she’ll never talk, no matter what they do to her. So she takes the opportunity to exact a bit of revenge on Maki. She says that a woman can torture another woman better than a man, then presses a lit cigarette into each of Maki’s nipples.
Here director Atsushi Mihori cuts in a few reaction shots of the goons watching. Unlike the torture scene in Girl Boss Guerilla, where the reaction shots are used to implicate us (the viewer) in the torture of this woman, and throw our own titillation back in our faces, the reaction shots in Criminal Woman: Killing Melody serve only to reinforce the idea that we are supposed to be turned on by what we see. Despite the utter unsexiness that is (for me, at least) inherent in the image of a woman’s breasts being singed with a cigarette butt, the looks on the faces of the goons indicate that the situation is highly sexually charged and they are deriving enjoyment from it. As a male viewer, I am unconciously taking some cues from the men onscreen vis-à-vis my reaction to what is being presented. However, as these men are the badguys (and low-level ones at that), perhaps I am meant to react negatively to their positions.
As Masayo continues to torture Maki, she leans in and secretly hands her a knife. While helping the men oppress her, she slips her the tool of her own liberation. Maki will later use this knife to escape from the same man she seduced earlier when he comes to take from her what she had once freely offered. In an earlier scene, Masayo walks into the bar where Maki’s gang have set up shop. She declines their offer to join up with them against the yakuza boss Oba, who she reveals as her lover. She says though she isn’t in love with him, “I still belong to Oba, after all.” She is only with him for the money, but she doesn’t allow herself to act in her own self-interest until he is dead. In this way, she is similar to the girls in Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess.
The girls of Worthless to Confess meet and bond in the same fashion as those in Killing Melody: behind bars; the film follows the same first act structure, as well. Our heroine meets and proves herself to the others in jail, before we cut to some time later when she gets out. In Killing Melody, Mako gets out of jail bent on revenge and the other girls pledge to help her. In Worthless to Confess, Rika, played by Reiko Oshida, leaves the girls’ juvenile detention center with only the vague goal to live a straight life from now on. She finds that her friends from inside are losing that same battle.
Unlike those in some other pinky violence films (e.g. Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter) the men in Worthless to Confess don’t necessarily assert their ownership over the women. The women, of their own accord, are willing to sacrifice themselves for men, whether they are good men or not. Mari’s husband is sick, and she’s willing to get naked to support him. Midori’s husband is a degenerate gambler, and she’s willing to steal from her father to support him. Rika is willing to do “anything” for her employer, Midori’s father, which she has to prove (to the yakuza shaking down the old man) by getting naked. At the last moment, Rika is stopped from showing herself, though she is willing to. Rika is probably the most positive female character in any of the films I’ve been discussing here. Director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi famously decreed that Reiko Oshida would never have to take her clothes off while playing her—but that doesn’t stop the script from forcing Rika to prove she’s willing to take her clothes off.
The representatives of the older generation in the film pay lip service to traditional values. But, unlike many Japanese films of a prior generation, Worthless to Confess doesn’t pay much attention to this conflict. One girl’s mother says “You girls need to work hard and become good wives,” and the girls just smile and say sure, sure, knowing that those old values don’t really apply anymore, and there’s no sense arguing about it. Despite their casual dismissal of those old-fashioned values, all of the girls stick by the men in their lives out of a deeply ingrained sense of duty, as does Masayo from Killing Melody.
When one of them says, “Giving up now won’t do my man proud,” before joining in a bloody raid on the yakuza, she echoes a character from Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom. In that film, the only prominent female member of the faculty, Ms. Michiko, says, “It’s a wife’s duty to clean up her husband’s mess.” Her husband is being blackmailed for sexual relations with underage students of the school, costing the Chairman of the district a ton of money. To right this wrong, Ms. Michiko offers her body to the Chairman. He takes the deal and what follows is the most lasciviously presented of any sex scene I’ve yet scene in a pinky violence film. When director Norifumi Suzuki has Ms. Michiko look directly into the camera as the Chairman is rubbing her with an electric massager, the film actually becomes pornography.
Check back in soon for the conclusion to this first stab at a gender analysis of pinky violence.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
TOWARDS A GENDER ANALYSIS OF THE PINKY VIOLENCE FILM: part 3
Click here to read part 1: introduction and here to read part 2: Girl Boss Guerilla, Torture & Titillation.
3. Sex Hunter and the Specter of Rape
Girl Boss Guerilla sometimes compromises the viewer's identification with the girl gang who are its protagonists by switching point of view when it comes time for the demands of the exploitation film to be met. However, its heroines are allowed to win, the tragic demise saved for the one likable boy in the plot. And the film ends on a note of sisterly unity, the Red Helmet Gang riding out of town the same way they rode in. The girl gang in Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter are not privileged in such a way. They are constantly protesting their independence and strength, and the men in Sex Hunter are always telling the girls that they own them, or fighting other guys for them, or rescuing them. Despite their protests, the girls are pretty ineffectual and non-central to the plot, which turns on a boy-boy rivalry ostensibly over race but really over who is loved by head chick Mako (Meiko Kaji).
Sex Hunter is basically a teen melodrama. It participates in many elements of the genre established by Rebel Without a Cause, with one important difference: there are no parents in the equation. Indeed, there are no authority figures at all. The difference between a film like Rebel Without a Cause and this one is that Sex Hunter is not interested in setting up an opposition between society and the teenager and depicting the protagonist’s struggle for acceptance. Instead, it presents actual delinquents, real tough chicks that hang out with criminals, do drugs, and commit petty robberies. The moral universe is defined by the participants of the subculture—not by society or any opposition to society. The film doesn’t make any moral judgments on the characters (at least the ones we are supposed to be rooting for) but as a viewer it is sometimes difficult to maintain the same neutrality.
Sex Hunter, to its credit, is a rather complex film, and director Yasuharu Hasebe manages to load it with ideas. The aforementioned “rivalry ostensibly over race” cries out for an analysis by someone who is much more conversant with the sociopolitical situation in Japan in 1970, especially as regarding race relations. My interest in the film—and the true concern of its villain, Baron—lays elsewhere. Baron’s intention is to run all of the “half-breed” children of American G.I.’s out of town, by force if necessary. He declares this goal after the girlfriend of one the Eagles (Baron’s gang) falls for a ‘half-breed.’ Baron tells of a childhood scene, witnessing his sister being raped by G.I.’s, as an excuse for his vehemence. Baron’s rival Kazuma is a half-breed also on a mission determined by love for a sister. He has come to town to find his long-lost sister, armed only with the memory of what she looked like as a child and the fact that her name is Megumi. There is a scene early on in Kazuma’s quest that, as mentioned above, seriously shakes the neutrality of the viewer’s moral judgment.
Outside of the club where Mako and her gang hang out, Kazuma confronts a girl named Megumi he thinks may be his sister. She tells him to get lost and pulls away from him. Just then, Mako and the girls walk up. Thinking they’re interrupting a sexual assault, the girls grab ‘Megumi’ and throw her in the back of a parked car, telling Kazuma, “Do it. We’ll watch for you.” When he recoils, having not intended to rape anyone, one of the girls says, “Shit. You’re a wimp.” So we have, again, this juxtaposition of ‘sister’ and ‘rape,’ and we have the disturbing complicity of the supposed protagonists in the rape of another woman.
Matt Kennedy, president of Panik House, a company who released several pinky violence films on DVD in the U.S. before going out of business, says on the commentary track to Girl Boss Guerilla, “Rape is always presented in Japanese film as a cause and effect punishment. It’s not used necessarily salaciously… It also doesn’t have the same horrific stigma as it does in the U.S. and Europe. It’s just a cultural difference. I’m not quite sure how I think about that as I say it, but it’s definitely a cultural difference.” A major plot point in that film involves a character handing over his sister to his yakuza superiors to be punished by rape. Near the end of Sex Hunter, Baron is incensed that Mako and her gang have sided with Kazuma and the half-breeds against his Eagles. In retaliation, he pimps the girls out to some businessmen for what he later describes as a “gang rape.” I cannot say that the small percentage of pinky violence films—or Japanese crime films in general—that I have seen thus far necessarily support Kennedy’s statement. However, the idea of rape is always present in these stories, looming like a specter over the female characters.
These pinky violence films are fascinatingly contradictory contraptions. They are undoubtedly “sexploitation” films: motion pictures that are produced and marketed with a high degree of female flesh on display. But they are also often about exploitation of women as well. Male domination over and use of the female body is a recurring plot point, as well as an economic imperative, throughout these films. Female Yakuza Tale hinges on the use of the vagina as a transportation device for illegal drugs. Lynch Law Classroom shows how the patriarchy uses one part of the female population for sex and turns them against the part of the female population they can’t use for sex. In Sex Hunter, the more Baron is confronted with the fact of his physical impotence, the greater his need to control and dominate women, and lash out violently at his surroundings. Eventually the Eagles degenerate into rapists—presumably to give the girls what they didn’t get when they escaped from the businessmen—and though Baron can’t participate, he oversees the scene and exhorts his right-hand man to join in. When his buddy says they are all acting like a bunch of “impotent losers,” then reveals that he, too, is a half-breed, Baron goes off the deep end and kills him.
Check back in tomorrow for part 4: A Woman's Place.
3. Sex Hunter and the Specter of Rape
Girl Boss Guerilla sometimes compromises the viewer's identification with the girl gang who are its protagonists by switching point of view when it comes time for the demands of the exploitation film to be met. However, its heroines are allowed to win, the tragic demise saved for the one likable boy in the plot. And the film ends on a note of sisterly unity, the Red Helmet Gang riding out of town the same way they rode in. The girl gang in Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter are not privileged in such a way. They are constantly protesting their independence and strength, and the men in Sex Hunter are always telling the girls that they own them, or fighting other guys for them, or rescuing them. Despite their protests, the girls are pretty ineffectual and non-central to the plot, which turns on a boy-boy rivalry ostensibly over race but really over who is loved by head chick Mako (Meiko Kaji).
Sex Hunter is basically a teen melodrama. It participates in many elements of the genre established by Rebel Without a Cause, with one important difference: there are no parents in the equation. Indeed, there are no authority figures at all. The difference between a film like Rebel Without a Cause and this one is that Sex Hunter is not interested in setting up an opposition between society and the teenager and depicting the protagonist’s struggle for acceptance. Instead, it presents actual delinquents, real tough chicks that hang out with criminals, do drugs, and commit petty robberies. The moral universe is defined by the participants of the subculture—not by society or any opposition to society. The film doesn’t make any moral judgments on the characters (at least the ones we are supposed to be rooting for) but as a viewer it is sometimes difficult to maintain the same neutrality.
Sex Hunter, to its credit, is a rather complex film, and director Yasuharu Hasebe manages to load it with ideas. The aforementioned “rivalry ostensibly over race” cries out for an analysis by someone who is much more conversant with the sociopolitical situation in Japan in 1970, especially as regarding race relations. My interest in the film—and the true concern of its villain, Baron—lays elsewhere. Baron’s intention is to run all of the “half-breed” children of American G.I.’s out of town, by force if necessary. He declares this goal after the girlfriend of one the Eagles (Baron’s gang) falls for a ‘half-breed.’ Baron tells of a childhood scene, witnessing his sister being raped by G.I.’s, as an excuse for his vehemence. Baron’s rival Kazuma is a half-breed also on a mission determined by love for a sister. He has come to town to find his long-lost sister, armed only with the memory of what she looked like as a child and the fact that her name is Megumi. There is a scene early on in Kazuma’s quest that, as mentioned above, seriously shakes the neutrality of the viewer’s moral judgment.
Outside of the club where Mako and her gang hang out, Kazuma confronts a girl named Megumi he thinks may be his sister. She tells him to get lost and pulls away from him. Just then, Mako and the girls walk up. Thinking they’re interrupting a sexual assault, the girls grab ‘Megumi’ and throw her in the back of a parked car, telling Kazuma, “Do it. We’ll watch for you.” When he recoils, having not intended to rape anyone, one of the girls says, “Shit. You’re a wimp.” So we have, again, this juxtaposition of ‘sister’ and ‘rape,’ and we have the disturbing complicity of the supposed protagonists in the rape of another woman.
Matt Kennedy, president of Panik House, a company who released several pinky violence films on DVD in the U.S. before going out of business, says on the commentary track to Girl Boss Guerilla, “Rape is always presented in Japanese film as a cause and effect punishment. It’s not used necessarily salaciously… It also doesn’t have the same horrific stigma as it does in the U.S. and Europe. It’s just a cultural difference. I’m not quite sure how I think about that as I say it, but it’s definitely a cultural difference.” A major plot point in that film involves a character handing over his sister to his yakuza superiors to be punished by rape. Near the end of Sex Hunter, Baron is incensed that Mako and her gang have sided with Kazuma and the half-breeds against his Eagles. In retaliation, he pimps the girls out to some businessmen for what he later describes as a “gang rape.” I cannot say that the small percentage of pinky violence films—or Japanese crime films in general—that I have seen thus far necessarily support Kennedy’s statement. However, the idea of rape is always present in these stories, looming like a specter over the female characters.
These pinky violence films are fascinatingly contradictory contraptions. They are undoubtedly “sexploitation” films: motion pictures that are produced and marketed with a high degree of female flesh on display. But they are also often about exploitation of women as well. Male domination over and use of the female body is a recurring plot point, as well as an economic imperative, throughout these films. Female Yakuza Tale hinges on the use of the vagina as a transportation device for illegal drugs. Lynch Law Classroom shows how the patriarchy uses one part of the female population for sex and turns them against the part of the female population they can’t use for sex. In Sex Hunter, the more Baron is confronted with the fact of his physical impotence, the greater his need to control and dominate women, and lash out violently at his surroundings. Eventually the Eagles degenerate into rapists—presumably to give the girls what they didn’t get when they escaped from the businessmen—and though Baron can’t participate, he oversees the scene and exhorts his right-hand man to join in. When his buddy says they are all acting like a bunch of “impotent losers,” then reveals that he, too, is a half-breed, Baron goes off the deep end and kills him.
Check back in tomorrow for part 4: A Woman's Place.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
TOWARDS A GENDER ANALYSIS OF THE PINKY VIOLENCE FILM: part 2
Click here to read yesterday's introduction.
2. Girl Boss Guerilla, Torture & Titillation
The breast tattoos sported by the Red Helmet Gang in Girl Boss Guerilla are a perfect visual illustration of the central organizing principle of the pinky violence film. The heroines are always strong, and independent (often to the point of being literal outlaws), but they are also always made to display their bodies and be exploited for the very fact of their femaleness. At the beginning of Girl Boss Guerilla, the gang of girl-biker protagonists are annoyed by some biker boys who are following them. The girls lead them to an empty lot and kick their asses—but not before leader Sachiko whips out her naked breast to display the tattoo on it. The tattoo is a symbol of street authenticity—the yakuza that the Red Helmet Gang will eventually come into direct conflict with also decorate their bodies with this kind of tribal marking. But the fact remains that Sachiko’s tattoo, because of its placement on the breast, is also a symbol of femininity—possibly denied femininity. In order to signify her authenticity to these guys before beating them up, she must reveal her body to them.
Later, we see the biker girls of the Red Helmet Gang inducting a new member: they are all naked from the waist up and three of them hold the new girl down while Sachiko tattoos her breast. It is the first of several scenes in Girl Boss Guerilla when the audience is confronted with the cross-section of titillation and the visible fact of pain inflicted upon a woman. This is a major motif in the pinky violence film; rare is the film that doesn’t contain at least one scene of torture. The title of a genre-typical film like Female Yakuza Tale: Inquisition & Torture gives away its intentions. The trend is taken to insane levels in Girl Boss Guerilla director Norifumi Suzuki’s Terrifying Girls High School: Lynch Law Classroom. In that film, though, all of the violence is inflicted by other girls—albeit at the instruction of the all-male faculty.
In Girl Boss Guerilla, the female-to-female violence is not of the same type as in Lynch Law Classroom, where the Disciplinary Committee chases down individual girls and subjects them to bizarre and imaginative torture techniques. The violence between women in Girl Boss Guerilla is all of the “catfight” variety. Three such scenes—where two girls face off in a one-on-one duel to settle a score—happen in fairly rapid succession, the first two in back-to-back scenes. The first is merely brutal, with the girl from the Red Helmet Gang choking the local girl until she gives in. The very next scene presents the same situation with two different girls—and punches up the sleaze factor considerably. Sachiko rips the shirt off of the other girl (who is wearing a long, tight, and possibly leather, skirt to a gang fight) and the other girl attempts to do the same to her.
The climax in the series comes a few scenes later with the face-off of the two stars of the genre, Miki Sugimoto as our heroine Sachiko and Reiko Ike as the returning boss Nami. Sachiko slaps Nami and we cut to the middle of a river, apparently Nami’s chosen spot for a rumble. However, the possibility of the scene having the mood and tone of a wet t-shirt contest— despite the similarity in content—is severely complicated not only by the music, but also the presentation. It is not uncommon in Japanese film to get a sequence scored to a musical performance featuring one of the actors in the film, and pinky violence is no different. In Girl Boss Guerilla, this fight is chosen for the centerpiece musical moment. The song is a mournful one, the female singer intoning, “No matter how senseless the fight, I’ll accept/Even a woman must follow the code/A girl boss, a drifter…” Meanwhile, the visuals are becoming more and more romantic, the fight becoming less defined, explication giving way to more abstract representations of physicality. As the song fades out, the girls stop fighting and begin giggling, sitting together, soaking wet in the middle of the river. In the next sequence, they are friends.
It soon becomes apparent that not only does Miki Sugimoto’s character Sachiko only give respect to other women after an equal display of violence, but that the same violent display must precede her attraction to a man. Sachiko’s relationship with the boxer Ichiro is the only overtly sadomasochistic relationship I’ve seen so far in my contact with pinky violence films. After Ichiro saves her from the yakuza guys beating her up, Sachiko tells him, “I want you.” He rebuffs her but she insists. He says, “I’ve never heard of a girl rapist.” She responds: “I’ll attack you,” and there is a quick cut to a hotel room where she throws him on the bed. Ichiro gets up, punches her in the face and starts ripping her clothes off, saying, “I’ll do the attacking here.” This is followed by a lovingly and intimately photographed sex scene between the two of them.
In the same way that the catfight scenes and the S&M love scenes build into romantic climaxes, Girl Boss Guerilla presents a series of scenes in which the men of the yakuza punish the girls for overstepping their bounds. The whole Red Helmet Gang is rounded up and beaten with sticks in a scene that turns out to be mere foreplay for a much more brutal and intimate beating of our heroine alone. The camera lingers over images of Miki Sugimoto’s body being endlessly assaulted with a series of wooden stick-like weapons of different types. She’s hanging from the ceiling, naked but for her panties. By the time she has been tied to the table and they begin to beat her there, the viewer has been seriously confronted with a contradictory rush of arousal and disgust.
But then director Norifumi Suzuki does something remarkable by doing something ordinary: he cuts in two reaction shots. They are off-kilter, from a low angle (possibly through Sachiko’s eyes) and careen from extreme frame left to extreme frame right, or vice-versa. Each presents a yakuza henchman leering salaciously, one chewing gum and giggling, the other rolling a cigarette suggestively around in his mouth. What is striking here is how the point of view has so swiftly and inextricably shifted. The viewer (provided he is male) is confronted with two images of himself, and it is not a pretty sight. Immediately after being sort of punished for sort of enjoying the torture of the woman we’re supposed to be rooting for, Reiko Ike’s character Nami bursts in and saves her, completing the reversion of point of view back to the girls.
Check back in tomorrow for part 3 of the pinky violence gender analysis, The Specter of Rape.
2. Girl Boss Guerilla, Torture & Titillation
The breast tattoos sported by the Red Helmet Gang in Girl Boss Guerilla are a perfect visual illustration of the central organizing principle of the pinky violence film. The heroines are always strong, and independent (often to the point of being literal outlaws), but they are also always made to display their bodies and be exploited for the very fact of their femaleness. At the beginning of Girl Boss Guerilla, the gang of girl-biker protagonists are annoyed by some biker boys who are following them. The girls lead them to an empty lot and kick their asses—but not before leader Sachiko whips out her naked breast to display the tattoo on it. The tattoo is a symbol of street authenticity—the yakuza that the Red Helmet Gang will eventually come into direct conflict with also decorate their bodies with this kind of tribal marking. But the fact remains that Sachiko’s tattoo, because of its placement on the breast, is also a symbol of femininity—possibly denied femininity. In order to signify her authenticity to these guys before beating them up, she must reveal her body to them.
Later, we see the biker girls of the Red Helmet Gang inducting a new member: they are all naked from the waist up and three of them hold the new girl down while Sachiko tattoos her breast. It is the first of several scenes in Girl Boss Guerilla when the audience is confronted with the cross-section of titillation and the visible fact of pain inflicted upon a woman. This is a major motif in the pinky violence film; rare is the film that doesn’t contain at least one scene of torture. The title of a genre-typical film like Female Yakuza Tale: Inquisition & Torture gives away its intentions. The trend is taken to insane levels in Girl Boss Guerilla director Norifumi Suzuki’s Terrifying Girls High School: Lynch Law Classroom. In that film, though, all of the violence is inflicted by other girls—albeit at the instruction of the all-male faculty.
In Girl Boss Guerilla, the female-to-female violence is not of the same type as in Lynch Law Classroom, where the Disciplinary Committee chases down individual girls and subjects them to bizarre and imaginative torture techniques. The violence between women in Girl Boss Guerilla is all of the “catfight” variety. Three such scenes—where two girls face off in a one-on-one duel to settle a score—happen in fairly rapid succession, the first two in back-to-back scenes. The first is merely brutal, with the girl from the Red Helmet Gang choking the local girl until she gives in. The very next scene presents the same situation with two different girls—and punches up the sleaze factor considerably. Sachiko rips the shirt off of the other girl (who is wearing a long, tight, and possibly leather, skirt to a gang fight) and the other girl attempts to do the same to her.
The climax in the series comes a few scenes later with the face-off of the two stars of the genre, Miki Sugimoto as our heroine Sachiko and Reiko Ike as the returning boss Nami. Sachiko slaps Nami and we cut to the middle of a river, apparently Nami’s chosen spot for a rumble. However, the possibility of the scene having the mood and tone of a wet t-shirt contest— despite the similarity in content—is severely complicated not only by the music, but also the presentation. It is not uncommon in Japanese film to get a sequence scored to a musical performance featuring one of the actors in the film, and pinky violence is no different. In Girl Boss Guerilla, this fight is chosen for the centerpiece musical moment. The song is a mournful one, the female singer intoning, “No matter how senseless the fight, I’ll accept/Even a woman must follow the code/A girl boss, a drifter…” Meanwhile, the visuals are becoming more and more romantic, the fight becoming less defined, explication giving way to more abstract representations of physicality. As the song fades out, the girls stop fighting and begin giggling, sitting together, soaking wet in the middle of the river. In the next sequence, they are friends.
It soon becomes apparent that not only does Miki Sugimoto’s character Sachiko only give respect to other women after an equal display of violence, but that the same violent display must precede her attraction to a man. Sachiko’s relationship with the boxer Ichiro is the only overtly sadomasochistic relationship I’ve seen so far in my contact with pinky violence films. After Ichiro saves her from the yakuza guys beating her up, Sachiko tells him, “I want you.” He rebuffs her but she insists. He says, “I’ve never heard of a girl rapist.” She responds: “I’ll attack you,” and there is a quick cut to a hotel room where she throws him on the bed. Ichiro gets up, punches her in the face and starts ripping her clothes off, saying, “I’ll do the attacking here.” This is followed by a lovingly and intimately photographed sex scene between the two of them.
In the same way that the catfight scenes and the S&M love scenes build into romantic climaxes, Girl Boss Guerilla presents a series of scenes in which the men of the yakuza punish the girls for overstepping their bounds. The whole Red Helmet Gang is rounded up and beaten with sticks in a scene that turns out to be mere foreplay for a much more brutal and intimate beating of our heroine alone. The camera lingers over images of Miki Sugimoto’s body being endlessly assaulted with a series of wooden stick-like weapons of different types. She’s hanging from the ceiling, naked but for her panties. By the time she has been tied to the table and they begin to beat her there, the viewer has been seriously confronted with a contradictory rush of arousal and disgust.
But then director Norifumi Suzuki does something remarkable by doing something ordinary: he cuts in two reaction shots. They are off-kilter, from a low angle (possibly through Sachiko’s eyes) and careen from extreme frame left to extreme frame right, or vice-versa. Each presents a yakuza henchman leering salaciously, one chewing gum and giggling, the other rolling a cigarette suggestively around in his mouth. What is striking here is how the point of view has so swiftly and inextricably shifted. The viewer (provided he is male) is confronted with two images of himself, and it is not a pretty sight. Immediately after being sort of punished for sort of enjoying the torture of the woman we’re supposed to be rooting for, Reiko Ike’s character Nami bursts in and saves her, completing the reversion of point of view back to the girls.
Check back in tomorrow for part 3 of the pinky violence gender analysis, The Specter of Rape.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Polish Film Poster of the Week (11/5-11/11)
This week: Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1978); artist: Janusz Kapusta
Bonus: Another, much creepier, poster done by Janusz Kapusta the same year, this one for the Lily Tomlin/Art Carney vehicle Late Show.
TOWARDS A GENDER ANALYSIS OF THE PINKY VIOLENCE FILM: introduction
A few months ago I was introduced to the Japanese exploitation genre known as pinky violence at Cinebeats. In that article, Kimberly Lindbergs traces a brief history of the sociopolitical environment Japanese women were facing in the late 60's and early 70's. I searched around for other material on the genre and found this great article by David Wilentz, which covers mostly different films from the ones I will be discussing. In it, Wilentz writes that these films "seemed to prove that the quickest path to female empowerment is paved with misogyny and bloodshed." This is a prescient observation, and Wilentz goes on to argue--as do most other commentators on the subject--that the pinky violence film cries out for a gender-based discussion. This essay, presented in five parts over the duration of the week, is my attempt to lay some groundwork for that analysis.
1. introduction
As the 1970’s dawned, several lines of development in Japanese film converged with world cultural changes to allow for the unique environment necessary for the birth of the exploitation genre known as “koshoku rosen” or pinky violence. In the booklet included with Panik House's Pinky Violence Collection boxset, Chris Desjardins, author of Outlaw Masters of Japanese Cinema, defines pinky violence as "a Japanese pop slang term for ultra-violent movies featuring female protagonists and varying degrees of softcore sexuality." The ‘pinky’ half of the equation comes from the pinku eiga, a particularly Japanese brand of sex film that came to be in 1962 with the appearance of Flesh Market (Nikutai no Ichiba). In retrospect, the early pinku eiga look extraordinarily arty when compared to contemporary American equivalents and extremely tame when compared to contemporary European equivalents.
At the same time, major Japanese film studios like Toei had begun to treat stories of the yakuza (Japanese organized crime groups) in a similar fashion to the traditional samurai film. These were called ninkyo eiga, or chivalry films, and were most often period pieces set in the years from the turn of the 20th century to the 1920’s. Meanwhile, director Kinji Fukusaku was busy trying to inject a level of realism into treatments of modern-day yakuza with pictures like Wolves, Pigs and People (1964) and Japan’s Violent Gangs—Boss (1969). A new term for this genre defined by its documentary-like nature, jitsuroku eiga or “true account film,” was coined when Fukusaku began basing such films on true stories in Battles without Honor and Humanity (1973).
As the 1960’s continued, Japanese film studios faced a similar predicament to that faced by American studios in the 1950’s: the ubiquity of television. The content levels of both sex and violence were ramped up in order to draw the public back to the theater. Mixing the two made for spectacular financial rewards and by the end of the decade both Toei and Japan’s oldest major studio Nikkatsu had gotten in on the action. The pinku eiga spawned a violent strand, exemplified by Toei’s eight Joys of Torture films (1968-1973.) Each film in the series was directed by Teruo Ishii; they were an inciting incident for the pinky violence films, and Ishii himself would go on to direct a full-blooded pinky violence film with Female Yakuza Tale (1973). Nikkatsu, meanwhile, were throwing their hat in the ring with the sukeban film, soon to become another major element of pinky violence.
Sukeban is a Japanese word meaning “delinquent girl” or (more literally, as it is a contraction of “suke” and “bancho”) “girl boss.” Toei had apparently originated the genre in 1960 with the Bad Angel (Zubeko Tenshi) films, but none were successful until Nikkatsu’s Stray Cat Rock (Nora Neko Rokku) series began in 1970. It is here that my study begins. The pinky violence genre mixed elements of both types of yakuza film, jitsuroku and ninkyo, with the more violent pinku eiga, and had main characters who were sukeban.
The following is an opening—and obviously limited—attempt at a gender analysis of the pinky violence film based on the six examples of the genre I have seen thus far. The selection of the films was based on availability and personal interest. As I see more films in the genre, my perceptions of it may change. But with the six films I've seen so far, five different directors are represented, as are all four of the women considered the major stars of the genre (Reiko Ike, Miki Sugimoto, Meiko Kaji and Reiko Oshida). The chosen films cover a four-year period, spanning the genre’s beginning and acknowledged highpoint. They are:
Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (Nora-neko rokku: Sekkusu hanta) (1970) dir.: Yasuharu Hasebe
Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess (Zubekô banchô: zange no neuchi mo nai) (alt. English subtitle: Unworthy of Penance) (1971) dir.: Kazuhiko Yamaguchi
Girl Boss Guerilla (Sukeban Gerira) (1972) dir.: Norifumi Suzuki
Female Yakuza Tale: Inquisition & Torture (Yasagure Anego Den - Sokatsu Rinchi!) (alt. English title: Story of A Wild Elder Sister - Widespread Lynch Law!) (1973) dir.: Teruo Ishii
Terrifying Girls High School: Lynch Law Classroom (Kyofu joshikoko boko rinchi kysoshitsu) (1973) dir.: Norifumi Suzuki
Criminal Woman: Killing Melody (Zenka onna: koroshi-bushi) (1973) dir.: Atsushi Mihori
In the days that follow I will attempt to open up areas of inquiry and create several lines of flight towards a gender analysis of the pinky violence film. I will be discussing, amongst others, the following elements of the genre: torture & titillation, the specter of rape, and a woman’s place.Check back in tomorrow for part two: Girl Boss Guerilla, Torture & Titillation.
Sunday, November 4, 2007
24 WORDS PER FILM (#15)
Reign Over Me gives Sandler a brilliant excuse for his idiot-manchild persona, Cheadle a leading role, and us a “colossal” videogame 9/11 grief counselor.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Polish Film Poster of the Week (10/29-11/4)
This week: Jaws 2 (1979); artist: Edward Lutczyn
Ed Says: Well, that's one way to interpret the titular "two."
And, for our bonus, an even more amazing image by Mr. Lutczyn:
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Willie List Bonus: Top 5 Horror Comedies
Man, do we love our zombies. And, apparently, we think they're pretty darn funny, too. I encouraged those who voted in the 31 Flicks That Give You the Willies poll to include a list of their Top 5 Horror Comedies. Take a look at the results:
5. Dead Alive (aka Braindead) (1992; Peter Jackson)
4. Dellamorte Dellamore (aka Cemetary Man) (1994; Michele Soavi)
3. Bride of Frankenstein (1935; James Whale)
2. Shaun of the Dead (2004; Edgar Wright)
1. Evil Dead II (1987; Sam Raimi)
Whether you like your zombies super gorey (Dead Alive), artfully composed (Dellamorte Dellamore), British (Shaun of the Dead), or being fought by Bruce Campbell, we can satisfy your needs! Just don't come looking for anything that's not a zombie. You could even make a case that Frankenstein is one of the living dead, if you were so inclined. And, lest you think this is a fluke, I present the the runners-up, another five films full of dead people coming back to life:
6. Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948; Charles Barton)
7. Re-Animator (1985; Stuart Gordon)
8. Young Frankenstein (1974; Mel Brooks)
9. Return of the Living Dead (1985; Dan O'Bannon)
10. Planet Terror (2007; Robert Rodriguez)
What does this say about us as a society and a film culture?...
P.S.: For the record, I voted for Dellamorte Dellamore, the Burbs, Planet Terror, Bubba Ho-Tep, and From Dusk Til Dawn.
5. Dead Alive (aka Braindead) (1992; Peter Jackson)
4. Dellamorte Dellamore (aka Cemetary Man) (1994; Michele Soavi)
3. Bride of Frankenstein (1935; James Whale)
2. Shaun of the Dead (2004; Edgar Wright)
1. Evil Dead II (1987; Sam Raimi)
Whether you like your zombies super gorey (Dead Alive), artfully composed (Dellamorte Dellamore), British (Shaun of the Dead), or being fought by Bruce Campbell, we can satisfy your needs! Just don't come looking for anything that's not a zombie. You could even make a case that Frankenstein is one of the living dead, if you were so inclined. And, lest you think this is a fluke, I present the the runners-up, another five films full of dead people coming back to life:
6. Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948; Charles Barton)
7. Re-Animator (1985; Stuart Gordon)
8. Young Frankenstein (1974; Mel Brooks)
9. Return of the Living Dead (1985; Dan O'Bannon)
10. Planet Terror (2007; Robert Rodriguez)
What does this say about us as a society and a film culture?...
P.S.: For the record, I voted for Dellamorte Dellamore, the Burbs, Planet Terror, Bubba Ho-Tep, and From Dusk Til Dawn.
31 FLICKS THAT GIVE YOU THE WILLIES
I asked the world to send me a list of 31 films that scared the pee out of them. Many more people than I would have thought possible heard, and answered, the call. 183 films were nominated and voted on. The resulting list is not perfect, but it is a fascinating picture of what our little community considers canonical horror cinema. In the coming days I hope to post a runners-up list. And the Top 5 Horror Comedies is yet to come!
Incidentally, I chose not to vote. Hardly any of the films on my nominating list made it and I didn't feel that I had seen enough of the nominees to vote fairly.
And now, the 31 Flicks That Give You the Willies...
31. Bride of Frankenstein (1935; James Whale) 285 pts.
That iconic haircut and a goofier, more lovable monster (and script), garnered this sequel fifty more points than the original Frankenstein.
30. Aliens (1986; James Cameron) 286 pts.
I've never really thought of this as a horror film. It always played more like an action movie; the 'guys on a mission' thing. Adding to that effect, for me, is the classic problem of the horror sequel. If I already know what the monster is, what exactly it is creeping around in the dark, how can I be afraid of it? Great flick, though.
29. Poltergeist (1982; Tobe Hooper) 288 pts.
Poor Tobe Hooper. Even with Poltergeist, everyone will always say he's a one trick pony.
28. Seven (1995; David Fincher) 289 pts.
I've always secretly believed that everyone was so freaked out by this movie because they knew, deep down, there was something about their own personality that would compel Kevin Spacey to kill them in some creative and hideous way.
27. Night of the Hunter (1957; Charles Laughton) 290 pts.
One of the most beautiful movies ever shot in black and white, a plot that puts kids in danger (a perennial thriller trope that almost never fails to bloom into something creepy), and a pair of iconic knuckle tattoos. Need I say more?
26. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956; Don Siegel) 292 pts.
Imagine if your best friend, all of the police and the other townspeople, even your own best girl turned into... Commies! Man would that suck.
25. Carnival of Souls (1962; Herk Harvey) 302 pts.
Bob Turnbull writes of this gem, "Proof positive that limitations in budget don't have to limit your imagination." (Read the rest of Bob's thoughts on the films on his own list here. Final Girl's take on the film, and a bunch of gorgeous screen shots, can be found here.)
24. Carrie (1976; Brian de Palma) 310 pts.
R.A. Naing at Direct Cinema writes of De Palma's breakthrough success, "A stunningly orchestrated, stylistically audacious study of female adolescence, teenage insecurity, and religious hysteria, this is without a doubt one of the best horror films ever made. Simply transcendent." All that, plus pig's blood and young Travolta!
23. The Ring (2002; Gore Verbinski) 317 pts.
For a while it looked like Hideo Nakata's original Ringu was going to be in the top 31 as well, but it came about 15 points short of making it.
22. (TIE) Eraserhead (1977; David Lynch) 327 pts.
The Fly (1986; David Cronenberg) 327 pts.
Two creepy movies directed by two creepy Davids. I like to imagine the two of them on a picnic together, both fascinated with the ants crawling all over the lunch they have spread out between them.
21. The Brood (1979; David Cronenberg) 347 pts.
Cronenberg strikes again with another tale of the body in revolt against itself and the natural world.
20. Rosemary’s Baby (1968; Roman Polanski) 364 pts.
R.A. Naing at Direct Cinema writes of this film, "Everything you've heard is true. Polanski's film is one of the few perfect horror films ever made." Me? I can't watch this movie without flapping my arms around and yelling at the screen in frustration as Mia Farrow makes one ridiculous decision after the other.
19. 28 Days Later (2002; Danny Boyle) 381 pts.
A lot of people blame this movie for pushing zombies back to the forefront of pop culture. I don't... care. (Here's what Final Girl has to say about the film, and here's me on Danny Boyle's career.)
18. (TIE) The Wicker Man (1973; Robin Hardy) 391 pts.
Eyes Without a Face (aka Les Yuex sans visage) (1960; Georges Franju) 391 pts.
The former is an imperfect movie with some lasting images and mild creepiness. The latter is a singular work featuring a villain pushed to horrific acts by totally understandable causes and a protagonist whose unseen countenance is covered by the creepiest mask ever NOT worn by a serial killer.
17. (TIE) Nosferatu (1922; F.W. Murnau) 413 pts.
The Descent (2005; Neil Marshall) 413 pts.
That's right, Murnau's insanely creepy vision of the vampire--the most animalistic and downright scary bloodsucker ever put on film--received exactly the same amount of votes as that movie about the spelunking girls from a few years ago.
16. The Evil Dead (1981; Sam Raimi) 421 pts.
Stacie Ponder wrote of this film, "Sometimes, it's just so simple: five friends, a creepy cabin in the woods, an eeeeeevil book bound in human flesh and inked in human blood. Writer/director Sam Raimi took that simple premise and a $3 budget and managed to create a horror classic- one of the most twisted and dangerous films of my youth." Read the rest of her piece on why the first is the best of Raimi's trilogy here.)
15. The Blair Witch Project (1999; Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez) 450 pts.
If there is such a thing as a one-hit wonder in the film world, this was it. People only remember the marketing campaign, but this film--one I don't particularly like--still sports a killer ending that is worth the wait.
14. The Haunting (1963; Robert Wise) 464 pts.
A great, old-fashioned idea for a ghost story executed in a great, old-fashioned manner.
13. Don’t Look Now (1973; Nicolas Roeg) 469 pts.
The shocking moment near the end of this film still divides viewers. Is it a brilliant scare-you-out-of-your seat left turn, or does it ruin the slow burn and emotional intensity of what comes before it?
12. Suspiria (1977; Dario Argento) 482 pts.
Witchcraft and other such spookery have never been my thing. Nonetheless, Argento's composition and use of color are just as beautiful here as in the slasher films I love him for best. Plus, there's that scene where they're really mean to the blind guy, and that's pretty creepy.
11. The Birds (1963; Alfred Hitchcock) 483 pts.
Not to step on any toes here, but... this one I just don't get. They're frickin' birds, man! What's the big deal?
10. Jaws (1976; Steven Spielberg) 526 pts.
Everybody who nominated the original blockbuster felt compelled to mention that it was originally just a scary movie with a shark you barely see. Though I mock these Spielberg apologists, they have a point: success and time tend to cloud genre associations, as if a popular movie is an island unto itself, completely separate from its generic lineage.
9. Dawn of the Dead (1978; George Romero) 645 pts.
The message inherent in this film is still so relevant that it was remade 25 years later and didn't have to be updated in the slightest.
8. The Thing (1982; John Carpenter) 661 pts.
Nobody who ever sees this film will forget that dog, and to me, that is what horror films are all about: indelible imagery that sticks with you and burns into you, recurring at the strangest moments.
7. Alien (1979; Ridley Scott) 675 pts.
Space + claustrophobia + icky crawly spitting grossy things=no one hearing you screaming.
6. The Exorcist (1973; William Friedkin) 723 pts.
As a child I had no conception of what this movie was about, but the image on the box alone was enough to make me tense up as I walked by it on the rack. I imagined 'the Exorcist' was the villain, and I wondered what he wanted to do to me with whatever was inside that bag he was carrying.
5. Psycho (1960; Alfred Hitchcock) 747 pts.
The "mother" of them all. Get it? Because, you know, it's like the movie that got all that blood flowing through American cinema and there's a character called Mother in it. So it's sort of like a play on words. Ha, ha...
4. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974; Tobe Hooper) 784 pts.
To me, nothing in this film is as scary as the shot of the chicken in that little tiny birdcage. Plus, it's a known fact that everything is scarier when it's shot on that 1970's yellowish sepia film stock.
3. Halloween (1978; John Carpenter) 824 pts.
There had been slasher films before, but none nailed the mindless evil psycho villain character quite like this one. And the score is so simple and brilliant that just two or three seconds worth of it gets the goosebumps going.
2. Night of the Living Dead (1968; George Romero) 862 pts.
A brilliant ending necessitated by financial woes; a social message implied by the mere fact of casting a black protagonist. Oh yeah, and the movie that gave us the modern American conception of the zombie, of which there have been infinite variations. Now let us all lurch and hunger, together, as one.
1. The Shining (1980; Stanley Kubrick) 997 pts.
For once, justice is served. I have long said that The Shining is the greatest horror film in existence and it won't soon be surpassed, for beauty, for chills, or for an ability to provoke thought. (My own personal relationship with Kubrick's last great film is detailed here. A brilliant analysis from Exploding Kinetoscope can be found here.)
Thanks everyone who participated, and especially to those of you who are spreading the word, and to those who were quoted in this post.
Incidentally, I chose not to vote. Hardly any of the films on my nominating list made it and I didn't feel that I had seen enough of the nominees to vote fairly.
And now, the 31 Flicks That Give You the Willies...
31. Bride of Frankenstein (1935; James Whale) 285 pts.
That iconic haircut and a goofier, more lovable monster (and script), garnered this sequel fifty more points than the original Frankenstein.
30. Aliens (1986; James Cameron) 286 pts.
I've never really thought of this as a horror film. It always played more like an action movie; the 'guys on a mission' thing. Adding to that effect, for me, is the classic problem of the horror sequel. If I already know what the monster is, what exactly it is creeping around in the dark, how can I be afraid of it? Great flick, though.
29. Poltergeist (1982; Tobe Hooper) 288 pts.
Poor Tobe Hooper. Even with Poltergeist, everyone will always say he's a one trick pony.
28. Seven (1995; David Fincher) 289 pts.
I've always secretly believed that everyone was so freaked out by this movie because they knew, deep down, there was something about their own personality that would compel Kevin Spacey to kill them in some creative and hideous way.
27. Night of the Hunter (1957; Charles Laughton) 290 pts.
One of the most beautiful movies ever shot in black and white, a plot that puts kids in danger (a perennial thriller trope that almost never fails to bloom into something creepy), and a pair of iconic knuckle tattoos. Need I say more?
26. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956; Don Siegel) 292 pts.
Imagine if your best friend, all of the police and the other townspeople, even your own best girl turned into... Commies! Man would that suck.
25. Carnival of Souls (1962; Herk Harvey) 302 pts.
Bob Turnbull writes of this gem, "Proof positive that limitations in budget don't have to limit your imagination." (Read the rest of Bob's thoughts on the films on his own list here. Final Girl's take on the film, and a bunch of gorgeous screen shots, can be found here.)
24. Carrie (1976; Brian de Palma) 310 pts.
R.A. Naing at Direct Cinema writes of De Palma's breakthrough success, "A stunningly orchestrated, stylistically audacious study of female adolescence, teenage insecurity, and religious hysteria, this is without a doubt one of the best horror films ever made. Simply transcendent." All that, plus pig's blood and young Travolta!
23. The Ring (2002; Gore Verbinski) 317 pts.
For a while it looked like Hideo Nakata's original Ringu was going to be in the top 31 as well, but it came about 15 points short of making it.
22. (TIE) Eraserhead (1977; David Lynch) 327 pts.
The Fly (1986; David Cronenberg) 327 pts.
Two creepy movies directed by two creepy Davids. I like to imagine the two of them on a picnic together, both fascinated with the ants crawling all over the lunch they have spread out between them.
21. The Brood (1979; David Cronenberg) 347 pts.
Cronenberg strikes again with another tale of the body in revolt against itself and the natural world.
20. Rosemary’s Baby (1968; Roman Polanski) 364 pts.
R.A. Naing at Direct Cinema writes of this film, "Everything you've heard is true. Polanski's film is one of the few perfect horror films ever made." Me? I can't watch this movie without flapping my arms around and yelling at the screen in frustration as Mia Farrow makes one ridiculous decision after the other.
19. 28 Days Later (2002; Danny Boyle) 381 pts.
A lot of people blame this movie for pushing zombies back to the forefront of pop culture. I don't... care. (Here's what Final Girl has to say about the film, and here's me on Danny Boyle's career.)
18. (TIE) The Wicker Man (1973; Robin Hardy) 391 pts.
Eyes Without a Face (aka Les Yuex sans visage) (1960; Georges Franju) 391 pts.
The former is an imperfect movie with some lasting images and mild creepiness. The latter is a singular work featuring a villain pushed to horrific acts by totally understandable causes and a protagonist whose unseen countenance is covered by the creepiest mask ever NOT worn by a serial killer.
17. (TIE) Nosferatu (1922; F.W. Murnau) 413 pts.
The Descent (2005; Neil Marshall) 413 pts.
That's right, Murnau's insanely creepy vision of the vampire--the most animalistic and downright scary bloodsucker ever put on film--received exactly the same amount of votes as that movie about the spelunking girls from a few years ago.
16. The Evil Dead (1981; Sam Raimi) 421 pts.
Stacie Ponder wrote of this film, "Sometimes, it's just so simple: five friends, a creepy cabin in the woods, an eeeeeevil book bound in human flesh and inked in human blood. Writer/director Sam Raimi took that simple premise and a $3 budget and managed to create a horror classic- one of the most twisted and dangerous films of my youth." Read the rest of her piece on why the first is the best of Raimi's trilogy here.)
15. The Blair Witch Project (1999; Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez) 450 pts.
If there is such a thing as a one-hit wonder in the film world, this was it. People only remember the marketing campaign, but this film--one I don't particularly like--still sports a killer ending that is worth the wait.
14. The Haunting (1963; Robert Wise) 464 pts.
A great, old-fashioned idea for a ghost story executed in a great, old-fashioned manner.
13. Don’t Look Now (1973; Nicolas Roeg) 469 pts.
The shocking moment near the end of this film still divides viewers. Is it a brilliant scare-you-out-of-your seat left turn, or does it ruin the slow burn and emotional intensity of what comes before it?
12. Suspiria (1977; Dario Argento) 482 pts.
Witchcraft and other such spookery have never been my thing. Nonetheless, Argento's composition and use of color are just as beautiful here as in the slasher films I love him for best. Plus, there's that scene where they're really mean to the blind guy, and that's pretty creepy.
11. The Birds (1963; Alfred Hitchcock) 483 pts.
Not to step on any toes here, but... this one I just don't get. They're frickin' birds, man! What's the big deal?
10. Jaws (1976; Steven Spielberg) 526 pts.
Everybody who nominated the original blockbuster felt compelled to mention that it was originally just a scary movie with a shark you barely see. Though I mock these Spielberg apologists, they have a point: success and time tend to cloud genre associations, as if a popular movie is an island unto itself, completely separate from its generic lineage.
9. Dawn of the Dead (1978; George Romero) 645 pts.
The message inherent in this film is still so relevant that it was remade 25 years later and didn't have to be updated in the slightest.
8. The Thing (1982; John Carpenter) 661 pts.
Nobody who ever sees this film will forget that dog, and to me, that is what horror films are all about: indelible imagery that sticks with you and burns into you, recurring at the strangest moments.
7. Alien (1979; Ridley Scott) 675 pts.
Space + claustrophobia + icky crawly spitting grossy things=no one hearing you screaming.
6. The Exorcist (1973; William Friedkin) 723 pts.
As a child I had no conception of what this movie was about, but the image on the box alone was enough to make me tense up as I walked by it on the rack. I imagined 'the Exorcist' was the villain, and I wondered what he wanted to do to me with whatever was inside that bag he was carrying.
5. Psycho (1960; Alfred Hitchcock) 747 pts.
The "mother" of them all. Get it? Because, you know, it's like the movie that got all that blood flowing through American cinema and there's a character called Mother in it. So it's sort of like a play on words. Ha, ha...
4. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974; Tobe Hooper) 784 pts.
To me, nothing in this film is as scary as the shot of the chicken in that little tiny birdcage. Plus, it's a known fact that everything is scarier when it's shot on that 1970's yellowish sepia film stock.
3. Halloween (1978; John Carpenter) 824 pts.
There had been slasher films before, but none nailed the mindless evil psycho villain character quite like this one. And the score is so simple and brilliant that just two or three seconds worth of it gets the goosebumps going.
2. Night of the Living Dead (1968; George Romero) 862 pts.
A brilliant ending necessitated by financial woes; a social message implied by the mere fact of casting a black protagonist. Oh yeah, and the movie that gave us the modern American conception of the zombie, of which there have been infinite variations. Now let us all lurch and hunger, together, as one.
1. The Shining (1980; Stanley Kubrick) 997 pts.
For once, justice is served. I have long said that The Shining is the greatest horror film in existence and it won't soon be surpassed, for beauty, for chills, or for an ability to provoke thought. (My own personal relationship with Kubrick's last great film is detailed here. A brilliant analysis from Exploding Kinetoscope can be found here.)
Thanks everyone who participated, and especially to those of you who are spreading the word, and to those who were quoted in this post.
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