Bowen’s Cinematic

Piranha is a fairly enjoyable exercise in titties-n-fish that could have been better. It’s another movie that promises moral anarchy only to back-peddle and hedge its bets. And why? The people who spend their money on something called Piranha want their monsters and their body shots and their drunken fondling and their wish-fulfillment and their contrived survival-of-the-fittest scenarios delivered hard and fast and mostly without anything that could be accused of being tactful or tasteful. The picture miscalculates early on. Early bits establish that a rowdy spring break is about to commence at a lake in an otherwise sleepy Arizona community; with a Girls-Gone-Wild wannabe sleaze-maestro (Jerry O’Connell) and his game, well-endowed starlets (Kelly Brook, Riley Steele) descending upon it to make the most of the kind of eager, drunken debauchery that has presumably already made them a little bit of coin. (Not a lot though, this strikes us as a start-up operation.) O’Connell hires a horny local teen – who has already traded suggestive looks with Brook – to take them to a remote part of the lake where they can shoot the girls, well, going wild. Why would a Girls-Gone-Wild guy pay someone to take him away from the action? away from the picture’s raison d’être?

Probably because a mass piranha sex and bloodbath would be too much for the picture’s budget. The best jokes are saved for the last twenty minutes, and they are admittedly pretty impressive. The director, Alexandre Aja, of High Tension and the surprisingly intense remake of The Hills Have Eyes, has a blunt, merciless way of staging violence that marks him as some sort of talent; though he’s probably a talent without any sort of rudder such as reasoning or point of view, he appears to be a strictly B-movie man in a humorlessly nihilistic vein that seems to have become a specialty of French horror filmmakers. Aja brutally punished his heroines in High Tension, he brutally punished the tourists in Hills, and now he brutally punishes the young’uns here for having the gall to drink and drug and fuck. Joe Dante, of the original (and, truthfully, overrated) Piranha, was lighter and cheekier, and he respected his characters enough not to play favorites: the innocents bought it just as regularly as the guilty. There’s a moment in this Piranha where Aja could have played a similar trick: with the party girls and the little tykes shimmying a robe above piranha invested waters, but this scenario plays out just as you would probably guess. The inexplicably derided Eli Roth, who cameos here, managed more interesting, atmospheric duels of sex and guilt in his Hostel movies, and his pictures, at certain moments, were legitimately kinda hot.

P.S. I didn’t see Piranha in 3D, as the ticket price (north of $15.00) struck me as a rather absurd effort in the name of “due diligence”.

By this point, director George Romero is like one of those jam bands from the 1960s that once had cultural prominence that now find themselves playing their hits from bar to cool little outdoor venue, making some cash and having a few beers and just trying to live with the fact that the outrage business doesn’t really sell anymore. The “rebellion” – and Jesus are we grossly overdo for another one – is in retreat. Greed – economic depression, blah, blah, whatever aside – is still good right now, and people don’t give a shit about things that might have made cultural waves thirty years ago. (Even a rudimentary plot these days basically ensures a movie as a Video-on-Demand followed by release in approximately 2.765 theatres.)

So, for that, I can’t work up much anger over the fact that Romero hasn’t made a good, or even particularly competent, movie since maybe Monkey Shines or maybe The Dark Half, both of which had moments. I had to look him up on IMDB to pinpoint his last decent movie, and, looking at Romero’s films, it becomes obvious that he’s enjoying a late-career mini-resurgence: the new Survival of the Dead is his third picture in five years, a major shift from the seven-to-ten years that could sometimes pass between projects. The zombie movie, largely apolitical (of course) these days, owes its godfather a steady gig at least; particularly given that Romero was reportedly/famously screwed out of much of the financial windfall for his first film, and still masterpiece, Night of the Living Dead – still one of the greatest American movies of all time.

Night of the Living Dead is ferociously paced – a mean, angry, despairing, terrifying movie; which is interesting because Romero is otherwise usually a dawdler. Romero is a smart, clever cult filmmaker, and like many smart, clever cult filmmakers he understands the need to turn his limitations into strengths in order to thrive. Romero’s 1970s pictures have a raw, unpolished vitality – many of them (especially Dawn of the Dead) look like comic books with every other panel torn out. The rhythm, the pace, is never especially impressive, but the decay and the outrage eat at you. (Sorry – came naturally.)

I belabor the strengths of past Romero pictures to get at what is missing from the new zombie trilogy: Land, Diary, and Survival of the Dead. The new pictures are unpolished and crude as well, but not in any kind of dirty/funky/subversive ways, they basically look like the blandly-lit made for cable movies that you might flip through on the Sci-Fi Channel or on ABC when it was producing those awful Mick Garris/Stephen King miniseries. In his new pictures, most prominently Survival, Romero is aiming for a lyricism that he doesn’t seem to have the chops for. There are moments: Survival’s silly final image is also rather sad; and Diary had a great capper as well, but mostly these pictures are cheap and clunky; with other potentially great sequences – like the moment in Survival of a guy swimming zombie waters while enemy snipers try to pick him off – lost in point-and-shoot staging and slack editing.

The politics in Survival of the Dead are less coherent, which is frankly a relief as the politics of the new Romero pictures have become relentlessly literal-minded. The new picture has the most promising set-up of the new Romero zombie movies: two rival Irish clans clashing over whether to kill the dead or attempt to make them useful. Yes, this has been done: in Day of the Dead, and a number of imitators sense, but the idea of a human scenario eclipsing the zombies is an appealing one, and it is nice (for a bit) to see Romero trying a low-fi Western on for size. But you soon realize that the zombies don’t mean anything anymore, and they don’t make any metaphorical sense. In the old trilogy, the zombies were primarily the personification of social unease: the tormented have-nots rising up. In the new movies, they are basically homeless people that characters always want to care for: buffoonish and un-threatening (the best kill in Survival is a steal from Dead Calm). The focus is now less on some sort of revolution than on a decent Medicare plan for the dead. This sentimentality, which makes next to no sense (you’re not really sure which clan you’re supposed to root for, and I don’t mean that in a good way), could almost be unintentional self-parody: that Romero himself has mellowed out, and doesn’t really remember what these things meant to him anymore.

All that said, I still like Romero and will continue to await his future films with affection, even his worst have a zest, a pleasure, for movie making that considerably more polished pictures lack. The Romero imitators are all more technically competent than the maestro, but almost all of them – with the exception of Edgar Wright – lack his soul. The Crazies, a well-reviewed remake of Romero’s crudely effective follow-up to Night of the Living Dead, follows the same predictable pattern. It is well-made. Director Breck Eisner has an eye, he keeps things moving, and the picture has a few set-pieces that could’ve come in handy to break up the monotony of Survival of the Dead, especially a nasty pitch-fork encounter in a hospital. But the picture is entirely pointless and apolitical, which should be impossible given the set-up; and the conclusion, which should come with a jolt of anti-authority outrage, is reduced to a fashionable gotcha moment. If Romero had just a tenth of these wiz-kids showmanship he might really do something again. And these kids – and that includes Zach Snyder who made the effective-but-also-pointless Dawn of the Dead cover – might be able to do something if they ever decided to step up and put away daddy’s toys. But that isn’t how this business appears to work; you’re apparently rewarded for competent work by graduating to even larger, more pointless material.

Unrelated aside: Please check my latest review at Slant, which can be found to your right under the Elsewhere column.

The Human Centipede has, at its center, a potentially sick, outrageous joke, and writer-director Tom Six, wisely, executes it as if were the most banal, casual thing in the world – he understands that strange is never truly strange if it’s underlined and highlighted and italicized. The picture – part mad scientist movie (it oddly recalls Eyes Without a Face in places), part Cronenberg/Miike homage/exercise – completely puts you in the mindset of its villain, Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser), and his complications fusing three people together ass-to-mouth with digestive track linking them, so that they can serve as one creature that will be his dog. This dog, like any other, will be disciplined when it bites, as well as when it fails to obey orders such as bringing the Doctor the paper.

Six works in a consciously elegant style: The Human Centipede has a number of seductive long pans and tracking shots (a relief from the MTV/Fincher wannabe bludgeoning of recent American torture pictures); and Heiter’s home, the almost exclusive setting of the picture, is open and suggestively horizontal, a return to truly widescreen horror (the nostalgia of widescreen horror is also why some overrated The Strangers). Six seems to be saying “I’m not going to let you discount my picture as bargain-bin trash. You’re going to watch these people implicatively eat one another’s feces for no reason at all and you will have to, at least partially, respond and react as if you are watching a ‘normal’ movie”. The obvious joke, the pointless cruelty and disgust, misdirects from the real punchline; which, if you will permit me to reach, is that, with the right mechanical tools (camera, design, production values) any subject can be presented as if it epitomizes shared human experience. In this light, The Human Centipede is more moral than so many lazy, damaging, conformity-affirming romantic comedies and wealth parables.

In interviews, Six is forthcoming about a number of clear influences, a few already mentioned above, but the weakness of The Human Centipede, the reason it doesn’t reach the subversive heights of Miike’s Visitor Q or Audition, or the recent, very disturbing, French picture Martyrs, is that it treads on the surface as, basically, a goof. Six is too satisfied with the set-up as instantly discomforting barroom joke, he doesn’t push the implications of his premise, and so our empathy isn’t challenged, we aren’t punished for rooting for the doctor by, basically, default – the misery of the victims’ situation is never fully driven home, except in the best (blackly funny) sequence with the centipede trying to escape up a spiral staircase. There’s a Psycho scene near the end – wonderful in itself – with police potentially discovering Heiter’s scheme, and, as usual, we find ourselves just a tad queasy at the prospect of our bad guy getting caught, as it ruins the pleasure of watching the character, who is, quite purposefully, our only surrogate. We could’ve possibly used a few scenes with the centipede in its cage, without the contemptuous doctor around to enliven the show.

Six has said that The Human Centipede, subtitled “First Sequence”, was made to introduce people to his gross idea, and that his sequel, Full Sequence, will take the premise further toward its logical conclusions. I wish Six the best of luck, if he gets it wrong, Full Sequence will be just another failed attempt at catching notoriety in a bottle twice. If he gets it right, it has the potential to be unwatchable and madly upsetting, perhaps the (ultra-)delayed challenge to his strangely confident First Sequence. In short, if Six gets his second picture right, he will probably be arrested, somewhere, for something.

I’m revisiting Wolf by accident, as I haven’t ever really been that fond of director Mike Nichols’ movies, which mostly strike me as superficially clever, flip and too full of themselves. I remembered Wolf as a dull, overly apologetic attempt to make the horror film “adult” – a sentiment that, of course, immediately irritates me in its snobbery. I happened upon the picture a few nights ago as I was trying to rally myself to watch whatever I thought would actually be next on this list though, and found myself pleasantly pulled in. For an hour or so, Wolf is exactly what Nichols and screenwriters Jim Harrison and Wesley Strick (the latter of the Cape Fear remake) must have had in mind: a yuppie-in-crisis picture that’s jarred by something more disturbing and primal.

The picture has an admittedly great joke: that a passive schmuck in desperate need of a supernatural cup check be played by professionally self-absorbed bad boy Jack Nicholson. Nicholson has, with the occasional exception, largely become a parody of himself now (and he seems to be having a blast as said parody) but, in the 1990s, he was more inclined to see-saw between coasting legend and actual actor – sometimes in the same performance. Nicholson is authentically quite good in Wolf, he swallows his charisma for the frustrated nerd of the first act, and as the wolf slowly grows within him, builds a steam of contempt that’s authentically frightening for two reasons: 1. Nicholson’s performance, unlike the robotic-stunt Jack of The Shining, keeps it real (Nicholson proves here that he could have been the right guy for that picture), and 2. this new wolf plays on our real assumptions of the actor: resentful of everyone else stepping on his toes, or walking slow in front, or otherwise getting in his damn way.

The picture is set in the book world, and primarily boils down to Nicholson’s rivalry with a shifty protege (it was the early 1990s so, the shifty protege is, of course, James Spader), with a few deviations for variety: Nicholson and his boss’ daughter (Michelle Pfeiffer), Nicholson evening the score with his wife, etc. As he showed in one of his best movies – the hypocritical but shrewd Working Girl – Nichols knows his way around an office, and he’s a wonderful orchestrator of slow-to-the-surface hostility and choked desire. Wolf has a confident build – we’re with Nicholson every step of the way as his bent-over failure slowly regains his footing, and Nichols and Nicholson tap the increasing exhilaration of the character without sledgehammering it – they empower him without going sentimental and/or preachy. The first act is basically a superhero movie with the superhero finally getting to unleash his inner narcissist.

The most problematic part of most horror movies, and probably one of the primary reasons more people don’t take them seriously, is that they, even at their most effective, rarely give you the illusion of true, boring everyday reality giving way to something crazier. You’re tipped off from the beginning, even in the famous u-turn pictures such as Psycho – you might not be hip to Norman himself, but the picture has, from the outset, a tone of unease, you know it is some kind of horror movie. Wolf, directed by a famous name outside of the genre, is a credible work daydream for its first hour – with little moments that disconcertingly buck up at you, such as Nicholson pissing on Spader’s shoes, or ripping a deer’s throat out with his teeth.

The foundation laid, you hope and expect – you need – the picture to jump off the rails in the third act and become a savage monster movie. The initial effects (a Rick Baker number), which are basically Nicholson with mean chops, fit the picture at first, slowly establishing that perversion of the mundane; but they never go further, and neither does the picture, it’s mostly a few wolfies jumping artfully (and, yes, a little laughably) around on wires. This is why we rarely get true horror pictures that capture the crumbling of stability: because the stable guys can’t do disruption, and the disruptive guys can’t do stability.

Shutter Island has the peculiar, sort of impersonal intensity of the other Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio collaborations. In Gangs of New York, you sensed you were watching a dwarfed good movie, a movie somehow lost in the delivery process. In The Aviator, you felt this self-conscious team grappling with a bio that made all of the usual bio moves while hoping to somehow get to something deeper or greater through force of conviction. In The Departed, you felt this very self-conscious team grappling with a gangster movie that did the usual gangster movie things, while hoping to get to something greater through overwhelming force of conviction.

In Shutter Island – guess what – you sense a very talented, hugely self-conscious team trying to do the usual horror movie things, while hoping to somehow go further. Scorsese has always been one to wallow: the difference between the classic Scorsese movies and his less-respected movies with DiCaprio is the focus of obsession: Scorsese’s early pictures were raw and masterly somehow at once: the work of a movie-maven using movies as a path to catharsis (as opposed to most movie-obsessed directors these days who just recycle others’ catharsis). In the DiCaprio movies, Scorsese has become another movie-recycler, of an admittedly extraordinarily high level of craftsmanship. The new Scorsese movies aren’t forgettable, but the obsessions are hollow and the bludgeoning a little silly considering most of the subject matter, the new pictures, unlike appealing Scorsese genre sketches like After Hours or The Color of Money, are too concerned with turning genre clichés into cleansing art. This aim isn’t impossible (Scorsese largely managed it himself in his Cape Fear) but this pursuit is more likely to leave you with clichés that are neither revealing nor fun, just self-conscious of the notes that haven’t been hit.

I enjoyed Shutter Island on its terms, and it’s probably the best of the Scorsese/DiCaprio movies, but it’s the terms themselves that are disappointing: the manufactured intensity begins to strangle the picture early on. The first thirty minutes are chilling, and the first five minutes – which have DiCaprio’s U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels and his partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) exchanging pared, hard pleasantries on a boat headed for Shutter Island – are just about perfect. In these moments, you savor Scorsese’s control and knowledge of older horror movie mood: Shutter Island is fake in just the way you want it to be: with gloriously photogenic movie fog, pleasurably obvious foreshadowing and a tangibly damp sense of doom.

The problem is that, in his drive to make the best horror movie of all time, Scorsese finds himself playing a spruced up version of the kind of hyperbole game that you expect from hacks. Every room in the creaky insane asylum is art-directed to the hills (they could be investigating either a haunted carnival or a wax museum, both of which would be appropriate considering Scorsese’s 1940s noir/horror influences) with every actor (and they are all, of course, sticking-out-like-a-sore-thumb character actors) chewing his or her bad dialogue like an especially hard to swallow piece of taffy. Every scene, once the mystery gets properly rolling, is overlong by at least a third, with certain notable guest appearances that could have been cut entirely: Jackie Earle Haley and Patricia Clarkson’s interludes of impenetrable exposition tell us no more than Ben Kingsley’s similar interludes of impenetrable exposition; the difference, though, is that Kingsley is a brilliant jokester aware of his gifts and of the movie with which he currently finds himself occupying; Hayley and Clarkson are in the more modern, heavier, more-is-more-when-its-actually-less school.

Shutter Island is the kind of bloated auteur picture so rife with intended significance that you find yourself thirsty for those bits and pieces of spontaneity and common sense. Kingsley’s performance is a sly bit of parody that’s still spooky, and Ruffalo, getting good again, emotionally anchors the picture. DiCaprio is effective, and he has a blunt yearning to be a great actor that gets to you from role to role, but I wonder if the picture might’ve worked better with Ruffalo in the lead. DiCaprio and Scorsese fit too well together: they’re both insecure and both too conscious of trying to hammer familiar beats into profundity, while Ruffalo’s effortless charisma suggests life apart from thousands of movies – his nod at the end of the picture, and you’ll know it when you see it, speaks louder than DiCaprio’s frenzies. DiCaprio has a few heartbreaking moments near the end that he nails, but you’re never not conscious of him as an actor “nailing” those moments. Ruffalo might’ve found a more original emotional current in the picture’s darkest turns, he might’ve understood that the most devastating reaction (and this picture piles on every imaginable atrocity – with particularly false, showy flashbacks to a concentration camp, which feature a tracking shot present for no other reason than to identify Scorsese as the director) might’ve been no reaction – a spiritual constipation that would lead to changes in Teddy that, with DiCaprio, we don’t believe other than for their necessity to get to the ending.

Yet, I want to see the movie again. DiCaprio’s commitment, his nakedness, is inspiring (the older he gets the odder he looks, a little like a prettier Cagney, I mean that as a compliment), and Scorsese’s formal control of the medium is still awe-inspiring: Shutter Island is one of the most beautiful horror movies in decades, even if it is essentially pointless (those trying to connect DiCaprio’s self-loathing with the demons of classic Scorsese protagonists are reaching).

A few other rootless observations: Michelle Williams, as Dicaprio’s wife in flashbacks, has a malevolence bathed in a contradictorily gold nostalgia that’s haunting, particularly in the first flashback, which finds her crumbling to ash in his arms – brutal shorthand for those we adore who hurt us anyway. The score, an assemblage of classical selections, is as astute as you’d hope from Scorsese, if anyone here had aimed for fun or coherence they might’ve had something. Despite the brilliant, expensive pageantry, you can’t help but wonder if a director like Stuart Gordon would’ve gotten further with ten bucks, a gallon of paint, and maybe Mena Suvari.

Horror director Ti West has basically flown this course: 1) releasing a debut picture made with resources so limited you cut it more than a little slack (The Roost), 2) following with a second, somewhat more experimental, picture showing ambition beyond the spilling of guts that still didn’t quite work (Trigger Man) and now 3) the release of two new pictures, both on DVD, that find a strange and promising new sensibility beginning to take form.

The House of the Devil is the more prominent of the two pictures; it was greeted with deservedly the best reviews of West’s career and clarified the design of Trigger Man: long pauses that mimic the pace of real life, amplifying the shock of the violations once they indiscriminately occur, a trick associated with 1970s horror that we also recently saw in The Descent and Wolf Creek among others – but Trigger Man is more committed, in a method that can also, more recently, be associated with “mumblecore”, to literally nothing happening. In Trigger Man, I thought West was primarily interested in inflating a serviceable short movie into a feature with the kind of portentous slowness that increases the odds of critical favor. The House of the Devil loiters quite a bit as well (my brother at one point said “I get it. She’s toodling around the house…”) but there’s a point this time: West gets us on his heroine’s wavelength. When Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) finds herself tied and gagged we don’t impassively look on as we would in the Teen Slaughter of the Week, we cringe for her. When something sudden and appalling happens to Sam’s friend Megan (Greta Gerwig in her first charming performance) we recoil.

This picture owes quite a bit to Donahue, she may not be an actress (can’t tell from here) but she has a tough frailty that wins you over. House of the Devil, purposefully similar to Rosemary’s Baby and a bunch of satanic cult movies from the ‘70s and ‘80s, taps a convincing well of financial desperation: everything that happens in the picture springs from that fear that the short-of-money have of everything finally going under. There are haunting touches: canny use of ‘80s music that serves as brief catharsis for the frustrated Samantha, Tom Noonan’s oddly appealing befuddlement that you just know is misdirection but fall for anyway, AJ Bowen’s underplayed psycho, subliminal shots (on loan from The Exorcist) of a monster, a few elegant pans (particularly of the first time we see dead bodies), a pay phone inappropriately ringing, a spot-on retro score that’s touchingly sincere, and a sad, resigned dénouement.

Hesitations? It is stupid, and, once the entire plan has been revealed you wonder why the bad guys let Samantha, yes, toodle, in their house for the better part of an hour, but that’s a large part of the appeal of horror movies in general – we aren’t (hopefully) talking rational fears.

Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever is an endlessly re-edited studio project that West disowned that now finds itself, a few years later, straight-to-DVD. It’s junk, but the surprising part is that it’s occasionally funny, occasionally subversive, very, very disgusting junk. The picture follows the flesh-eating virus from the first movie to a high school prom inhabited by unattractive 25 year-old teens that are parodies of the self-absorption that’s inherent to the nothing-counts-except-getting-laid genre. Every kid in this picture is a schmuck or a prick or both, and we watch as they trade or swallow fluids in just about every way a human could think to trade or swallow fluids. The virus is a social leveler – and it tells you something about the picture’s personality that the one guy who could do something about the whole mess turns and runs away.

The opening: He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) make slow-mo love as their toddler tumbles out the window to his death; the sequence scored to Handel and shot in the sort of hyper-sharp black and white that we associate with cologne or liquor commercials. This is our “prologue” to Antichrist, with four proper chapters and an epilogue following, chronicling He and She’s efforts to reconcile themselves with their fatal carelessness and self-regard. There’s a satiric undercurrent in He, a therapist who seems to have reconciled himself with his role in the tragedy with disconcerting ease; displeased with She’s progress he takes control of her treatment despite the obvious conflicts of interest. He’s therapeutic techniques are certainly more cinematic if considerably more suspect: he takes her to their creepy remote cabin where they alternate between long exchanges rich in sub-Bergman double-talk and glamorously explicit, unpleasant fornicating. Eventually She’s fury is unleashed, and He is forced to account for his smug detachment.

Antichrist is about as absurd as it sounds, and it reinforces something I don’t read as often about writer-director Lars von Trier’s work as I should: the pleading earnestness underneath the obvious, sometimes juvenile, always too-deliberate provocations. It’s this earnestness that sometimes saves von Trier’s movies. Antichrist is silly but also appealingly weird and raw. Critics and the painfully hip movie peeps tend to over-rely on that most damning of write-offs (pretentious) and von Trier seems, in Antichrist especially, to be battling that fear of pretension that can stifle so many self-conscious filmmakers. Von Trier rubs his symbols in your face (the spooky cabin is called “Eden”, the chapter titles are all baroquely literary harbingers of doom, images resemble famous paintings), and has claimed to have made up Antichrist as he went along, to have stuck images and nightmares in intentionally haphazardly. That’s bullshit of course, but it’s also revealing of von Trier’s intentions. Antichrist is blunt, blunt, blunt filmmaking, and it has that infuriating tendency of making fetish of misery, but it also has images that are disgusting, beautiful and both at once.

The much-ridiculed talking animal scene for instance, with a mutilated fox turning its head toward Dafoe and growling “chaos reigns”, is poignant and eerie. What von Trier is getting at is that out fears and turn-ons are more often absurd than not, and that the movies, in their careful, excessive good taste, are missing something vital and personal and sloppy. Von Trier purposefully invites claims of pretension as a method of liberating himself; and Antichrist is, indeed, pretentious, but it goes (just a bit) beyond that. The difference between Antichrist and a number of self-hating artist movies (including certain Bergman and Allen) is that von Trier appears to actually hate and doubt himself; he isn’t (just) using cliché as write-off for his indulgences both personally and professionally. He (and “He”) appears to authentically find women and nature simultaneously arousing and mysterious and contemptible. Antichrist is an art-trope movie where the art-tropes mean, again just a little, more than usual.

That said, Antichrist, despite its huffing and puffing, is easy to shake; you’ll be over it by bedtime. (The recent similarly themed French horror picture Martyrs, on the other hand, lingers. But no one cares because the filmmaker isn’t marketable to applaud/deride.) Von Trier is still tending a specific reputation (even the casting, of Dafoe and Gainsbourg, quote marks things), encouraging that game that critics and filmmakers love to play. Von Trier plays the bad boy, appalled at squares missing the point of his films, while his supporters vent self-righteous indignation, again toward the squares unable to look beyond the explicit imagery and controversy (though you’ll notice that the supporters also focus on the explicit imagery and controversy). And the squares are, indeed, self-righteously indignant as well, at the controversial imagery and apparent misogyny (inappropriate in this case). And, I, once the dust has settled, get to be retrospectively self-righteously irritated with every one else’s self-righteous irritation. Who said von Trier doesn’t play to a broad audience?

Thirst is another horror movie from a polarizing international bad boy, Chan-wook Park (Old Boy, Lady Vengeance), who has considerably more fun than the agonizing von Trier. Thirst is a vampire picture, and Park, aggressively unsubtle, refreshingly chucks all the traditional subtext out the window. The sexual repression, the Catholic guilt, lives proudly on the surface of Thirst, which specifically concerns a priest Sang-hyeon (Kang-ho Song – terrific) who turns vamp after undergoing a near suicidal experiment to find a cure for a disease that makes your flesh bubble up and burst. Park doesn’t hide the ironies: we see Sang-hyeon counseling a suicidal woman in the opening, advising her that suicide is worse than first degree murder and that she must seek God’s help through science (pills) and move on with her life. The woman tells the Father to stick with the blessings and leave the life to her. The Father then volunteers for the death-mission, seeking the martyrdom he condemns to his followers, only to survive and come back as a (not quite traditional) blood-sucking monster. The Father, as he must, discovers sex and all the messy stuff he thought himself above: going monster humanizes him.

Park is ideal for a vampire picture; his show-off filmmaking plays to all of the genre’s highlights. Park’s phenomenal with bloodshed, but, more importantly, he heightens your senses. You feel the Father’s agonizing hunger (both nutritional and sexual): you’re on to every touch, every glance, and the sex is actually hot. Thirst, to put it indelicately, gets that distinct thrill (that too many movies botch) of two people realizing that they are about to screw for the first time. The fumbles at the belt, the hiking up of the skirt, the sliding down of the panties, have erotic, real-yet-exponentially ratcheted electricity. For an hour, Thirst is exactly the horror movie you hoped Park would deliver; free of the metaphorical laboring that sometimes drags his revenge movies down.

Thirst lost me somewhat when it turns to a classical noir scenario with the object of the Father’s lust, Tae-joo (Ok-vin Kim, hot stuff), stuck between an idiot husband and his domineering mother. The problem is that the limitations of the noir, which must always go down the same road, reign in the possibilities of a Park undead preacher on the loose movie. The picture becomes rote, somewhat asexual, and the mayhem loses its pulp-charge; all of a sudden we’re stuck, like the leads, with a boring dysfunctional family.

Thirst is also too long, all of Park’s movies are, but this liability is probably inseparable from the director’s strong suits. Park is a director of fetish and exaggeration; he’s a lingerer, and quite a bit of the energy of his pictures (like Tarantino, whose movies are also, with the exception of Reservoir Dogs, always too long) comes from his clear pleasure in certain images, his alteration of loaded medium shots with too-close close-ups. This story could be told 45 minutes faster, but that might compromise the initial pleasure of its indulgences – its primal immediacy. Park makes Antichrist, in retrospect, look puny and self-pityingly humorless. Thirst is in over-drive, it exists only to turn us on, and that’s refreshingly honest to our hidden dreams and fears, which von Trier over-processes, he’s not as wild as he aspires to be or probably thinks he is.

Paranormal Activity is a Rorschach ink blot of a horror film: your personal fears and hang-ups will play even more than usual into how you react to it; which is, of course, why these pictures, The Blair Witch Project being another obvious example, attract such divided attention. One person’s most terrifying movie of all time is another person’s hour and a half of non-professionals wandering hallways.

As a person who has an issue with hallways, particularly sounds that might have something to do with something awful happening on the opposite, not quite visible end, I found Paranormal Activity every bit as terrifying as its champions have made it out to be. The writer-director, Oren Peli, might be a major talent: he understands the benefits of the no-budget movie purporting to be the found footage of an unfortunate’s horsing around with a camera, and manipulates the possibilities with shocking confidence. The big benefit being that this ultra-close illusion of no illusion scrubs the picture of the usual audience distancing effects such as stars, conventional cutting, location changes, and even empathy (a camera’s impassive stare in the midst of misery can be relentless). Peli’s chief shot is scarier than most horror pictures in their entirety: of the couple, Katie and Micah (Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat) asleep, the bedroom door open revealing a hallway into darkness, all under that ghost-green glare of the camera they’ve set up for themselves, to catch something that Katie claims has been pursuing her since childhood.

On paper, the usual happens (it’s basically a good J-horror movie): weird photographs, lights on and off, thumps, objects moving, but the home-video gimmick lends these tropes an authentic air of violation: we’re put in the house of a couple that may be facing the sorts of dangers that might briefly run through our minds the night our boyfriend or girlfriend might be away for business. And Paranormal Activity has a hard to shake subtext of abuse: Katie, a cute, smart, irritable, real in-her-20s girl, is stuck between a demon and a macho dork who thinks himself a match for whatever might be lurking. I was pro-Blair Witch as well, but I didn’t give a damn for those characters, they were surrogates and nothing more. Katie is performed just vividly enough to take the picture into another realm. With Featherston, Peli manages a feat more difficult than it may at first appear: he maintains the tension even after the ambiguity of the menace has been lifted. And there’s two or three images in this picture with the primal pull of those especially awful nightmares we can never quite remember: particularly of a young woman standing erect in the middle of the room in the middle of the night, staring at her lover as he sleeps…for hours.

This is shaping up to be a decent year for horror pictures, we have a grassroots phenom and a decent zombie movie (and another, Zombieland, looks ok) in Pontypool, a one-set picture in which an unusual air-born virus infects a small Ontario town. The nature of the virus reinvigorates the satirical possibilities for vaguely supernatural cannibalism: a DJ, (Stephen McHattie) a wannabe Don Imus slumming in a nowhere station after a dismissal, discovers that the spoken English word is driving people into a rabid mob state. Director Bruce McDonald (The Tracey Fragments) works in an unusually patient manner, and Pontypool, with its suggestion of double-talk and delusion and jargon having eroded any possibility of normal discourse, strikes the sort of chord that Romero hasn’t in years (and McHattie is terrific). I knew I was falling for the picture when I bought one of the most traditional cop-out devices: a zombie reversal. Pontypool asks you to root for more than gore, and just about justifies that request, it isn’t a major movie (the premise is too rich for something this constrained) but it’s enough reason not to watch another Saw.