A few less than profound epiphanies

Tonight watching Fargo (2014- ) the series and At Midnight I Take Your Soul I came to a few minor revelations.

The second season of Fargo is a prequel to the first and uses many of the same themes and tropes. However, Fargo also shares many thematic elements with other Joel and Ethan Cohen projects. Common to pretty much all the Cohen Brothers' films is the theme of simple people getting deeper and deeper into trouble by lying, idiocy or malice. Fargo (1996) the film is most exemplary of this concept, but certainly The Big Lebowski (1998) and Burn After Reading (2008) also heavily play on this idea.

In the second season one of the characters is reading Camus. Although there is a short monologue that includes a polemic against Camus, it struck me that the Cohen Brothers could be said to be Camus-esque directors. Their films always center around the absurdities if everyday life and the multiplied absurdity of trying to make decisions in an absurd world.

*Contains Spoilers*

Writer-producer of the show explains the UFO scene to Entertainment Weekly thusly:

In addition to Fargo being “based on a true story,” can you say what was your inspiration for including the UFO in the first place?

The Coen Bros. sometimes put something in because it’s funny, but that doesn’t mean it’s meant to be comic. … There’s a couple things that felt right about it. One is that it plays very well into the conspiracy-minded 1979 era where it’s post-Watergate, you had Close Encounters and Star Wars. There was a Minnesota UFO encounter [in 1979] involving a state trooper. It was certainly in the air at the time. Alternately in the Coens’ The Man Who Wasn’t There they had a [running UFO thread]; certainly it was more ’50s inspired, but it was part of the cinematic language of their movie. So it felt like it worked for the time period and worked for the filmmakers, and is a way of saying “accept the mystery” — which is a staple of the Coen Bros. philosophy in their films. And I thought it was funny. But obviously it affects the story in a very real way. It’s not just a background element. 

I’m just picturing you in the writers room at some point going: “You know what? I’m going to put a UFO in this season, and just see if I can pull that off.” Because I know you like to challenge yourself and see how far you can push it, and you had to think that if you could creatively pull it off, it would be pretty impressive.

An executive from MGM came to take us all to lunch before the season and they said, “Can you tell us anything about this season?” and I said, “Yeah, we’re going to make three fictional Ronald Reagan movies and there’s a UFO.” There was a long beat and they said, “So can you tell us anything about this season?” Nobody expected Fargo to be about any of those things in the second year. Ultimately what I think is exciting about a fake true crime story is that in actual history there’s a lot that we understand and there’s a lot of it we’ll never understand. The Zapruder film captured the JFK assassination, and we still don’t know what happened. It’s not just that truth is stranger than fiction, it’s that what we call truth is a small part of the historic picture. There are so many elements that usually get weeded out of the story so you can have a simpler narrative. 

I've always thought that FX's shows were heavily editorialized in order to not contradict the conservative ideology of Fox's executives, especially Rupert Murdoch.  This was especially apparent in known liberal Louis C. K.'s show Louie (2010- ) where they spent several boring episodes on a U.S.O. tour that the main character supposedly went on.

Watching At Midnight I Take Your Soul (1964) I realized that what makes José Mojica's films so fascinatingly creepy and uncomfortable is the way everyone relates to Coffin Joe so familiarly. It's as though he's that drunk uncle that all the nieces and nephews are secretly afraid of. I think the grittiness, the psychological terror and the sheer abhorrence of the Coffin Joe character in particular and Jose Mojica's films in general are due to this Freudian subtext. It is as though Mojica's alter-ego Coffin Joe taps into a deeply rooted fear from the first time as a child we learn to distrust adults. This is why Mojica's films are affective and disturbing.

Watch the whole film:

Deathmaster (1972) and the world of Manson Family inspired cinema

I came across Deathmaster (1972) recently, another Manson Family inspired exploitation film but with a vampire spin.  It reminds me of many of the others like Snuff (1975) and the Cult (1971).  My favorite will forever be I Drink Your Blood (1970).  Anyway, worth a watch if you're up for early 70's schlock, hippy exploitation cinema, which I often am.

Rating: 7/10



There is a great List of Hippie Exploitation and Manson Family Inspired Films if you go here.  Excellent commentary on each of the films too.



Love and Terror: Charles Manson and Zombies


In the late 1960s America's innocence had been lost.  The television news was its own horror show, but a real life one.  From the bloody, burned bodies in Vietnam to political assassinations at home, everyone was going a little bit psychotic.  Of course, everyone knows this now looking back.  Hindsight is 20/20.  But back then they couldn't see the cloud because they were in it.  All this was new.  There was no such thing as post-modern cynicism.  They still were doing it although they did not know what they were doing, to paraphrase Marx.  As powerful as the 'mainstream' had become there was a counter-current that set out to be as subversively strange as they could.  Enter Charles Manson.  Charles Manson had spent a third of his life incarcerated by the time he got out in 1967.  He made friends with Bobby Beauseoleil, another musician and later an actor and score composer for the epic Kenneth Anger avant-horror film Lucifer Rising.  According to Anger, Beauseoleil was 'a little too close to the devil.'  Manson and Beauseoleil were a match made in hell.  Charlie would send Beauseoleil and a veritable harem of women to the Beach Boy Dennis Wilson's house (the Beach Boys had covered a song written by Manson on their ironically named 20/20 album).  There they met Terry Melcher, a record producer.  Melcher was friends with Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski, who were married at the time.  Tate had just made a vampire film with Polanski and rumor has it that the pair were into the occult.  As the game six degrees of Kevin Bacon tells us, everyone in Hollywood is connected one way or another.  The point of this narrative is that life imitates art.  The artists got knives and started feeding on other artists in a drug frenzy.  Beauseoliel was already in jail in 1969, but another group of Manson's friends, lead by Tex Watson, went to the Tate mansion in order to 'do something witchy' to Melcher in revenge for not getting the family a record contract.  They wrote 'political piggy' on the wall in blood to make it look like it was Black Panthers that did it.  Manson was afraid of black people, especially the Panther Party.

I can imagine the Manson family watching Dracula or the Wolfman on an old projector at Spahn Ranch, stoned out of their minds on LSD and MDA and fucking like rabbits in the straw.  When their minds were in this vulnerable state Manson would sing to them.  He would sing, "People say I'm no good, Because I don't do like they think I should, Do they really expect you to act like them?"  Counter-culture meant subverting the norm, whether it be religious norms, sexual norms or norms of dress and grooming.

Rabies physically changes the composition of the brain.  LSD and other psychedelics are said to do something similar, even though there's no evidence for it.  It was as though someone had poisoned America's water supply.  When soldiers started coming home from the jungles of Vietnam they were all messed up.  A spirit of evil had gotten into them.  Fear is a dangerous thing.  The peace and love generation was no longer peaceful and lovey.  On Manson's heels were the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Liberation Army and The People's Temple.  They were proof that the hippy experiment had somehow become more violent that anyone had expected.

There were a whole lot of films based on the Manson myth at this time, but my favorite is I Drink Your Blood.  Horace opens the film with the line, "Let it be known that Satan was an acidhead."  If Charles Manson was Satan then this was true.  The cult in I Drink Your Blood bears striking resemblance to the Manson cult.  But not only that, it points to a greater phenomenon that was going on at that time in America.  It was two worlds colliding... Helter Skelter.  The Freedom Riders had seen what the deep South thought of integration of their two worlds.  Their bus was burnt and their leaders were beaten and left for dead.  Yes, small town America didn't want to change even though the times there were a-changing.

In I Drink Your Blood a cult of Satanic hippies from various racial backgrounds invade a small town that is about to be destroyed by a dam.  They aren't very nice to the locals, they rape a young girl and beat up an old man, so the young boy poisons their food with rabies infected blood and zombie chaos ensues.

Who really is the monster here?  Is it the young boy who infects the whole town with rabies?  Is it the rabid zombies themselves?  Or is the monster not even present here?  Isn't the monster in I Drink Your Blood really evil itself?  The followers of Satan (i.e.: Manson - or worse - Marx) are the perpetrators of the initial evil, but really aren't they in fact the victims of evil?  The rabid dog that the boy takes the blood from is the patient zero here, but it is the act (in the Žižekian sense) of tainting the meat pies with the rabid dog's blood that breaks the master signifier and opens the door for the ensuing chaos.  The boy thus is the actor, driving a wedge in reality and opening the door for the negation of all previous master signifiers.  I would argue that it is the boy, the agent/actor, that fits the monster archetype.  Juxtapose that with the good he thinks he is doing and his youthful innocence.

This is not the only film to make the child into a monster.  The J-horror instant classic Ringu also does this.  In Ringu it is the child's innocence that leads to her evil.  Again, it is a Žižekian act, the watching of the enchanted video tape, that breaks the master signifier and results in death and chaos.

This clash of worlds, the dialectic between country and city, white and minority, conservative and progressive is also seen in another Zombie film made around the same time, the George A. Romero classic Night of the Living Dead.  The protagonist of the film is a Mandingo-archetype African-American man.  He is strong, well spoken, tall, handsome.  He is a lot like Barak Obama, who Cornell West calls a "house-Negro."  And he is helping a helpless white woman.  The dialectic comes when a family is discovered in the basement.  The patriarch of the family is a racist redneck.  He tries to subvert the protagonist's power.  He doubts an African-American's ability to lead by insisting that he himself determine the line of defense the group takes (staying in the basement versus boarding up the windows and defending themselves from upstairs where there is an escape route), and thus reveals himself a racist.  Issues of affirmative action and meritocracy arise here.  The African-American man is obviously the best man for the job.  However, by virtue of the color of his skin his legitimacy as the leader is put into doubt.

Zombie films in general reflect this dialectic.  The monster here reveals itself to be the ultimate master signifier, defined by its negation.  The zombies are undead, neither dead nor alive.  However, they are not quite human.  They are humans stripped of their humanity.  Their only drive is the thirst for blood, much like the rabies victim.  Often zombie scenarios are the endgame of a post-apocalyptic world.  The 99% from whatever other backgrounds tend to share and get along when faced with difficult situations.  Thus, the remaining uninfected individuals in the apocalyptic zombie world tend to work together no matter their petty differences.  The zombie apocalypse is the great equalizer.  Kropotkin calls mutual aid a factor of fitness in a world where the fit survive.  That is to say that those communities that tend to work together tend to survive whereas those that do not perish.  I'm reminded here of the scene in Jurassic Park when one of the characters runs to the bathroom and is eaten by a T-Rex.  Jeff Goldblum's character, the Chaos theorist, explains, "When you've gotta go, you've gotta go."  The point is that in these crisis situations any sign of individualism is punished in the most extreme of way.  In order to survive we must work together.  No one is an island.

The Psychedelic UFO Videos of Unarius

I first came across the Unarius cult via Ella Morton's article on them for Atlas Obscura.
Then I watched The Front's documentary on them embedded below:

Then I came across a whole bunch of their films on YouTube:

The are available at the group's official YouTube account.

R.I.P. Fidel Castro - Cuban revolutionary cinema

Descansa en el poder, comandante. Te falta, pero la lucha continúa. Patria o muerte. ¡Venceremos!

Hero of the world proletariat, champion of exploited and oppressed peoples around the world, revolutionary, leader and Presidente Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz has died last night, November 25th, 2016, at the age of 90.  Castro inspired the world through his literacy programs, universal education and healthcare achievements, standing up to imperialism throughout the world, aiding third world revolutions and sending medical help to suffering nations all around the globe.

Under the leadership of the PCC Cuban society has also produced a whole host of great films.  Here is La Habana's list of the 20 Best Cuban Films Ever.


This is the trailer for Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's black comedy Death of a Bureaucrat (1966)


The Cuban artists also made brilliantly colorful, psychedelic movie posters for both Cuban and international movies showing in Cuba.

Finally, I would like to talk about some films that are about Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution.

Che: Part I (2008)/Che: Part II (2008)

Directed by sometimes-indie/sometimes-commercial director Stephen Soderberg, this film is the story of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's (played by Benicio del Toro) exploits in Cuba and Bolivia.  The first part is exciting and uplifting because the Cuban revolutionaries win the war.  Historically, after the Cuban revolution Che continued to be a guerrilla commander, first in Angola and then in Bolivia.  The subjective conditions were not right for revolution in Bolivia and the revolution failed.  Che was captured and executed.  The second part is more challenging because the immanent failure of the revolution gives the whole thing an eerie sadness.

Commandante (2003)/Looking for Fidel (2004)

Commandante (2003) and Looking for Fidel (2004) are Oliver Stone's interviews with Fidel Castro.  Stone defends the Cuban revolution, but is sometimes critical of Castro's administration.  Throughout their conversations Stone occasionally will try to get a rise out of Castro by mentioning some kind of scandalous subject.  Usually Castro brushes this goading off.  Stone, it seems, is sympathetic to Castro's cause and likes to consider himself a friend of Fidel's.  However, he can't help trying to piss him off in order for him to break his sober demeanor from time to time.

Few Netflix Roses in the Briar Patch

For some time now I've had a subscription to Netflix and for some time I've seen their selection decline in quality.  First, Crtierion Collection went to Hulu (and now it's even moved on from there).  Then all these other streaming services popped up and suddenly there were more websites willing to pay more for the rights to stream popular and decent films.  Thus, because Netflix, despite continuing to grow their profits, refuses to pay more for titles their selection has degenerated and much of their fare is small distribution company releases, IFC originals, boring cable television and Netflix originals.  However, there are occasionally a few diamonds that stand out from the rough.  Here are a few I've watched recently:

Carnage Park (2016)

This is an IFC Midnight (their horror designation) release, which basically makes it a Netflix exclusive.  It is directed by IFC/Netflix young-auteur favorite Mickey Keating.  This films starts by evoking a series of tropes from classic and contemporary horror films: Texas Chainsaw Massacre (suggesting in the beginning that it's based on a true story), Insidious, Natural Born Killers, House of 1000 Corpses, Quentin Tarantino, Saw, My Bloody Valentine, Deliverance.  Mickey Keating's previous film Darling was also a pastiche, this time in tribute to David Lynch and Roman Polanski.  This film does have an element of social commentary and there is an exploration of the dialectical contradiction between the human world and nature akin to Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf.  To further prove Keating's loyalty to horror, genre auteur/actor/director Larry Fessenden actually appears in the film.  Carnage Park is a genre fan's film and as a genre fan it was enjoyable.  It was a contemporary take on frequently explored tropes.  Above all the pastiche the sountrack, the cinematography and the editing contributed to a creepy, affective idiosyncracy that sets this film apart and solidifies Keating's status as genre auteur.

Rating: 8/10





What About Bob (1991)

Everyone who thinks What About Bob is a harmless family film, they should take another look at this Bill Murray classic from 1991.   The film is about an agoraphobic mental patient who, though this megalomaniac psychologist, is able to get the courage to become a narcissist.  He proves the success of this unique therapy by, to the painful chagrin of the psychologist, befriending and indoctrinating the psychologist's family.  Abruptly, the family takes Bob's side over their own patriarch.  Bob is inappropriately physical with his psychologist's family and even ends up even marrying his sister which causes him to have a breakdown of his own.  Perhaps Bob has transferred his demons to his psychologist.  Perhaps we are never really rid of our demons.  It is a bleak thought, but maybe, like energy, negative emotions can't really ever be created or destroyed.  Maybe they can only be transferred.

Rating: 7/10

Mascots (2016)

Mascots is a film by mockumentary auteur Christopher Guest.  It is a Netflix exclusive, but, like Bob and David, they seem to be able to get classic creators to revisit the masterpieces that made them famous.  Mascots is an ode to Guest's classics such as Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. [**POSSIBLE SPOILER WARNING**] In fact, Corky St. Claire appears in the film. [**END POSSIBLE SPOILER WARNING**]  Many of the actors are standards in Guest's films like my favorites Parker Posey and Fred Williard.  They also interact with several newer actors such as Zach Woods from the Office and Susan Yeagley from Parks and Recreation.  A very upbeat, light, feel good film, but certainly not without its moments of absurdism.

Rating: 7/10

6 for 3 = Six Horror Films for Three Days of Halloween

Fangoria.com has this article called "31 for 31" and I guess it's a genre fan challenge.  "See if you can watch 1 horror film each day of October before Halloween" kind of thing.  Unfortunately I saw this list too late and now Halloween is fast approaching.  That is why I have made a list of suggestions I call "6 for 3" because who really wants to watch a horror film every day (as great as the genre is).  I suggest a creepy cram session right before the big day so here are my picks:

Saturday, Oct. 29th, 2016:
1. Classic Horror Film 
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Although not the first serial killer film (Georges Méliès'  Bluebeard came out in 1901), The Cabine of Dr. Caligari can certainly be said to be the first horror film.  This film finds a mad scientist hypnotizing a sleepwalker into killing people for him.  There are no visible parallel lines in the film and the inter-titles are in a stylized font.

2. Classic 70s or 80s Halloween Favorite
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)
This film picks up right where the first one left off and plunges us deeper into Clive Barker's world of the Cenobites.  The film is not directed by Barker.  By this time he had grown weary of directing and wanted to limit his output mainly to writing.

Sunday, Oct. 30th, 2016: Devil's Night (see The Crow (1994))
3. Bizarre Foreign Horror Film
Dead Alive (1992)
From Peter Jackson's New Zealand heyday which also included masterpieces like Bad Taste (1987) and Meet the Feebles (1989),

4. Movie I Haven't Seen Before
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

Dreaded Monday, October 31st, 2016: Halloween Day
5. Disturbing Horror Film
Funhouse (1981)

6. Arthouse Horror Film
Santa Sangre (1989)

Shrieker: So Simple a Dog Can Understand

Today's first installment of the remainder of October Halloween season Halloween class horror movie reviews is the 1998 Creature Feature straight to VHS classic dun da da da! Shrieker (1998)

This film should be filed under "so bad their good" blah blah, but I don't like that.  I prefer something like "sincere flop" or "heartfelt nonsense" along with films like Troll II, Troll, and the 1990s classic, starring Friends actress Jennifer Aniston, Leprechaun.

Clocking in at an hour and 12 minutes, Shrieker is a creature feature that teases you with the monster in the first two minutes.  The denouement involves a group of stereotype college student squatters in an abandoned hospital (thanks privatized medicine).  The protagonist is a math major that pretends she's smart but isn't.  The men are clueless mansplainers always appealing to a backward sense of "reason" and "sanity."  The communist, feminist roommate is always pissed off.

The dialogue is forced, but I think that's what I like about this film.  The film says exactly what it intends to say without subtlety.  It is exactly what it is.  It is the story that it is laboriously telling.  IT'S THE SHRIEKER!

While I was watching this film I happened to glance over at our dog.  He was laying in front of the screen, his ears perked up and his eyes were locked on the television screen.  He was actually paying rapt attention to the film.  I started to understand why.  The film was so simple in its form that a canine mind could actually grasp and be entertained by it.

Rating: 6/10