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The first thing to shock me was the acting.  Peter O’Toole and Malcolm McDowell are total professionals, and while they both give campy, over-the-top performaces, they really wouldn’t be out of place in the various swords-and-sandals epics of the previous decades.  It was odd to find myself thinking that, say, Charlton Heston wouldn’t be out of place in this movie.  I mean, if Peter O’Toole, and Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation were in a movie featuring anal fisting, why not Chuck?  The only thing being torn from his cold, dead hands here would be his dead sister in that almost necro-incest scene!

So Peter and Malcolm deliver a good first impression.  Indeed, if Malcolm McDowell were not in this movie, I am certain that it would be just about impossible to watch.  Bringing up an associated point, there are parts of a good movie in here.  It’s impossible to know what Tinto Brass would have released if Porno God Bob Guccione hadn’t taken away the movie, porned it up, and re-edited the scenes together with little regard for sequence, but there’s ample evidence within the unrated cut that this could have not been a legendary disaster, and one of the most interesting parts of the movies is looking for those nuggets.  For example, many scenes use symbolism.  The most famous example probably being the shots of black birds in bedrooms.  Guccione apparently even understood the use of symbolism, since he left in many of these cuts, but he left them in without any sort of context, hints, or reveals of what these symbols meant.  It’s also evident that this movie was not intended to be cheap schlock from the production.  The costumes and many of the sets are pretty impressive.  If you do some digging (probably a bit deeper than Wiki), you will discover that this movie held a number of production records for its time.  It had a large crew, lots of props, some of the most impressive props ever assembled, and it was shot on location in Rome.  Not cheap.  Definitely not intended to be a cheap thrill to rake in money for Penthouse. 

Even the plot shows promise.  The sequencing is in shambles, and the script was clearly thrown out the window (several times) and rewritten (several times), but it is apparent from early scenes that the movie intended to show the transition of Caligula from kind of normal, if a little paranoid, heir, into a completely insane, murderour tyrant.  I’d assume that was one of the points of Gore Vidal’s original script.  In the finished movie, while this shines through a little, it’s mostly a lost plot with some remnants not fully removed in the editing room by Bob.  Caligula goes from fairly normal to holy shit insane in the space of like two scenes.  Another plot, also half-aborted, but more present than the previously mentioned one, is Caligula’s desire to show the Senate as corrupt and without morals.  I think the only reason this plot point stuck around was because the “without morals” bit lead to some, well, it lead to a scene titled The Imperial Bordello.  I’m not going to say anything else about that.

Not to make this look like Spartacus or anything, mind you, even if Bob Guccione was not around, this movie had fundamental problems that even a dream cut would not fix.  I might even say that Bob Guccione’s involvement, turning this into spectacle supreme, is the only reason this movie is still remembered.  The movie’s inherent, non-porno bad elements are numerous, but they serve the effect of turning the movie into a bona fide fiasco, a trainwreck one could watch all day.  Let’s take a look at some of the elements that bring the good badness.

Caligula started production in the mid 70s, a particularly interesting time for films in general, but probably especially interesting for someone like Penthouse’s Bob Guccione.  Pornography was big.  Bizarrely, pornographic movies had become something of a sensation.  A hip thing to see in theatres.  Deep Throat, by percentages, is still one of the most profitable films ever made due to its theatrical run.  A famous scene in Taxi Driver is misinterpreted very frequently because people don’t grok this trend today.  Travis takes Betsy to a porno.  Most audiences today think this is indicative of just how insane Travis is.  He’s not really that insane though, just a little out of touch.  He applied a trend of the day in an incorrect way; it’s not the same thing as, say, taking a chick to a porn theatre on a date today.  He thought he was being thoroughly modern.  In light of this trend, Caligula being a high class skin flick is really not insanely unusual.  The talent attached is what makes it unusual, but Peter O’Toole was apparently totally oblivious to how much nudity there would be in the movie.  Production apparently kept its cards close to its chest.

Anyway, Caligula has a lot of nudity.  Oh Jesus, that’s an understatement.  There are at least three clean cut orgy scenes and various other perverse sex scenes, but don’t go away thinking that’s the only nudity in the film.  This movie basically didn’t have a pants budget.  It’s ridiculous.  I am sure Tinto Brass would give you some line about how it is historically accurate (I am sure people were doing that all over the place all the time in Rome!), but that really doesn’t make sense given how many historically inaccurate liberties they take with what we know about Caligula’s life story.  So this movie is, basically, ridiculous and naked.

And disjointed.  Bob Guccione’s editing job is infamous.  He apparently had little understanding concerning how the movie was to be put together, and some bits are worse than others.  The big obvious example to me was towards the beginning, with Peter O’Toole, there’s an oddly cut up torture scene mixed in amidst several other scenes, bizarrely out of order.  Going to IMDB will net you some other, similar editing examples.  That’s just the one I noticed without any help.  Even if you can’t reassemble scenes as you can with that torture scene, the movie feels disjointed.  Scenes feel like they are in incorrect places.  Characters act inconsistently between scenes.  The plot jumps all over the place.

There’s also the hilariously inappropriate sex scenes.  Sex is all over the movie, but while re-editing the movie, Bob Guccione filmed a bunch of hardcore sex scenes using Penthouse Pets.  Which scenes these are, well, I’ve decided I am too modest to go into detail.  If you watch the movie, let’s just say you won’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out which scenes were filmed after original shooting.

But, uh, I enjoyed watching it.  It was a completely ridiculous spectacle, and even after reading exhaustive lists of the iniquities committed in this movie, I was still surprised, scene after scene.  I can’t believe I can still find some things transgressive, particularly in a movie that’s approaching 30 years of age.  It’s 156 minutes, and I watched the thing in one sitting, even intending to only watch the beginning.  I can’t even say that about many legitimately good movies.

So, if this post is too long, and you don’t feel like reading it:  I am not a pervert, but Caligula is basically the best movie ever.  Get the new DVD.  There’s the single disc uncut version, and the 3 disc Imperial Edition, which features a new, earlier cut of the movie (that I didn’t watch), and a pair of commentaries from Malcolm McDowell and Hellen Mirren.  I am really interested in hearing those.  They have both disowned the movie, so they have got to be bangin’ commentaries.

There’s been no shortage of ideas for posts, just a lack of time and energy to get them down.  Now, I can’t pretend that the mishaps at the end of September and the Dental Fear have been the only thing that have been keeping me from making updates.  As a person with a cushy desk job, putting things off is something of my forte, so my deeply rooted inertness has kept me from following through on things as well.  Most notably, I regret not completing my reviews of that Masters of Science Fiction series.  In my own defense, that may have had more to do with the show being unspeakably awful than my own laziness.

You know, laziness and inertness sound so negative.  Let’s just say I suffer from an extensively debilitating existential malaise.  Mortal ennui that can only be described as Hamlet-esque.

Anyway, I have some things that have been cooking up.  The extended cut of Death Proof hit a few weeks back, and it’s a shoe-in for the best movie of the year.  I covered Planet Terror, so I have to give Grindhouse’s better half a day in the sun.  Also, off and on for the last several weeks, I have been working on another Tales from the Crypt post.  I know, I know, multiple posts on the same subject in a short periopd of time–I’m not obsessed, I swear, but it is October, and there’s not a better time to give a good going over on some of the best episodes of that particular series. 

There may also be a review of terrible classic Caligula coming up.  No promises on that one.  I haven’t watched it yet.  I’m fairly certain it is interesting bad, but I am not positive if there’s anything to say about it that hasn’t already been said better.  Still, I have been waiting years to see it, and I think it would be somewhat anti-climactic if it did indeed leave me without something to say.  I said before that I have been gaming a lot.  I’m not sure if I want to introduce my gaming habit to my blog.  I view it as kind of embarassing.  In my opinion, my Doctor Who obsession/fetish is less nerdy than the videogame thing.  We’ll have to see how that goes.  A lot of time has been spent on it in the past several weeks, so if I really want to log the use of my time, it is only fair that games get coverage.  Similarly in the nerdy category, I have been on a comics kick.  Mostly classic stuff that any comic-head has read, but I’m sure I can choke something up to say.

The second and third seasons are definitely the best, though there are great (and classic) episodes sprinkled throughout all six seasons. At some point during season four, it seems like the show started to rely on more weird and flat-out comedy or silly episodes than it did in the first three. The first three are pretty much all horror with the odd black comedy or blatant comedy thrown in, and the latter half of the show reverses that formula, I’d say. It’s a sort of subtle shift, as in you don’t notice it as it’s happening, but it’s pretty blatant when you compare, say, an average season two ep to an average season five ep.

There are problems with the show, when you look at it all. The show has a tendency to reuse plotlines, changing up the formula, of course, but still variations on themes. For example, there are at least four episodes among the six seasons (which is about 70 episodes) that use an evil twin formula of some variety or another. There are at least two episodes that use a genderbending plot. And I’m not saying these are ELEMENTS of an episode’s plot, I am saying they are the ENTIRETY of the episodes’ big plot twists. That’s six episodes, without putting much thought into it, that have the exact same twist. Almost a tenth of all the episodes, excluding season seven. There are also at least three episodes that have OMG HE/SHE/THEY WERE SECRETLY VAMPIRES plots where the ending twist is, indeed, that someone was secretly a vampire the entire episode. They do it with werewolves. . .once or twice, depending on if you count one particular episode. It’s close enough for me.

There are also a handful of terrible episodes, or episodes that try to portray a plot that is either totally lame or with elements that are just a bit too much. You can’t blame a show that was on for seven seasons for having some terrible episodes. For what it’s worth, there are only two or three episodes that I would cast with the ultimate insult of being too boring. At least the show was always explicit, even when it wasn’t great.

For all the mentioned shortcomings, it’s probabl hard to not like a good portion, probably even the majority, of the series. All the episodes are based off legitimate EC comics from back in the day, so they had a limited pool of ideas to work off of. To make it worse, they were modernizing and reheating ideas from approximately 30-40 years before the series was made, in a time when there were no back issues, trade paperbacks, or DVD collections. Of course a monthly anthology from then could reuse ideas as much as it would like, and since they were building their fan bases on being transgressive and extreme to teenagers, there were probably a limited pool of ideas to work with to begin with. And once this TV series became a sort of banner show for HBO, they had to keep the ball rolling with more seasons, as long as it stayed successful. So they too were stuck with reusing ideas. Yes, I know, quality over quantity. It’s no real excuse for HBO, and the channel of today would no doubt have had the series quit while it was still totally ahead, but this was the early 90s, when regular televised content was still a new game to them. It took them some time to find their footing, and they really could have made worse mistakes than the ones they made with Tales.

It’s funny seeing the guest stars in their 10-15 year younger forms. Jeffrey Tambor. Demi Moore. The guy that plays Johnny Drama. Arnold. Kelly Preston. Bobcait Goldwait. Miguel Ferrer (twice! Correction, THRICE). His Twin Peaks alumni bud Kyle Mchlachlan. Lance Henriksen. Steven Weber. The list goes on. That’s only like the first two seasons, and since there are only 12/13 eps in a season (aside from the short first season), you can generally count on seeing a recognizable star pretty frequently. Unfortunately, when you weren’t seeing someone you recognized, the acting could be, well, terrible, but again, it’s campy material anyway, so it still works most of the time.

It was a fun walk through memory lane, and it was neat to see what episodes were from which seasons (I had never seen the show in order). It’s nice to see the “trajectory” of the show’s quality, and even when an episode wasn’t that hot, it was neat remembering an episode I first saw a dozen (in some cases more) years ago. Also, all organic special effects rocks. This show was probably one of the last hurrahs of great gory makeup and plastic monsters. It was probably masturbation material for Fangoria readers.

It was also doing the intentionally/ironically cheesy thing a full 15+ years before Grindhouse and Snakes on a Plane were even glints in their individual directors’ eyes. I guess this was one of the first examples of that sort of thing, though I can think of a few potential 70s and 80s precursors, maybe.

For example, in that last act the most jarring part is the stupid gun leg on Rose McGowan. Now, that element made us all scream “badass” when we saw it in the trailer and on the cool, iconic movie poster, but in practice it just didn’t deliver. Rose’s character, a go-go dancer named Cherry, is strapped with this gun leg, given no instruction on how to use it, and is seen a minute later mowing down bad guys, not getting shot, and moving like a pro. To further make this situation absolutely stupid, the gun leg was put together quickly, in the space of a few minutes. The duder that did it is supposed to be some sort of Ur Military super soldier, but even still, why the hell would he know how to turn a gun into a functioning gun leg, let alone do it in a few minutes. It says a lot that Planet Terror’s third act pisses on suspension of disbelief in a genre where that term scarcely even exists. I disbelieve that somebody thought this thin premise for a cool visual would be swallowed by anyone.

Another example of the original elements of the movie being rotten can be found earlier in the movie, when an infected (but not yet zombified) rube turns up in the hospital. A Doctor Bloch (like Robert Block, get it?) checks out the infection, and his assistant is going on about infections from the Gulf War (or possibly the current war–I believe he just says Iraq, but I think the clear reference is Gulf War Syndrome), using this discussion to bring up some picture of “shockingly” infected genitals. Is there anything that draws a response as obvious as rotting genitals? I’m all for gore and viscera, but it says something when gunshots to the head are classier than what that scene delivers. I’m not a squeamish person, and it takes a lot to gross me out, but this, again, was just plain dumb. We all know that dick jokes are one of the lowest forms of comedy, and the same goes for dick gore.

There’s also a scene where a little kid shoots himself in the head. It’s totally uncalled for and has nothing at all to do with the plot. Again, I’m no prude; in many other situations I am all for the deaths of children, but if you’re going to do it in a movie, at least have a point. Killing little kids with no purpose to the movie’s movement means it was just another base, shallow attempt at shock. I bet director Robert Rodriguez figured, “Somebody will bitch about this scene on the news!” Of course, not enough people actually saw the movie for that to happen.

Oh, and one of the characters collects testicles for no apparent reason. Looking backwards, this movie was a whole lot more juvenile than I remember while watching it. I recall seeing the earliest scene with said character, Abby (played by the guy that plays Sayid on Lost), and thinking that his intense desire to collect testicles must have something to do with the zombie outbreak. It’s not just a one scene thing, either; he carried the jar of balls everywhere, too, and due to his position in the story, I figured they would have something to do with a possible cure. Jeez, he even had a special tool for testicle removal. At least Rodriguez didn’t subject us to a scene of survivors munching on raw testicles in order to become immune to the infection. But I bet he thought about it.

Writing it out really made me see the light. Planet Terror was a patchwork mess, getting right all the things that it was easy to get right (because they could be cribbed from other sources), but getting wrong the director’s own, necessary original content. Maybe Rodriguez has made too many of those Spy Kids movies, and now when he tries to do something original for adults, it just comes out as being the “dirty” side of kiddie. We know he’s good at copying good things, as Sin City will attest. He let the comic itself frame the shots there.

This past weekend, in the coveted Saturday at 10PM time slot, ABC aired the first of four Masters of Science Fiction episodes.  Astute cable television viewers will recognize that the title bears a striking resemblance to a certain mediocre Showtime series, Masters of Horror (aka Some People That May Have Been Involved With a Horror Movie at One Time or Another), and unsuprisingly, they share the same brains.  And, so far at least, the same, uh, mediocrity.  And since Masters of Science Fiction is on network television, it lacks all things awesome like cussing, nudity, and graphic violence.  This is clearly not the sort of pony show that ranks higher than two stars on my scale.

The series has had something of a troubled production.  There were originally supposed to be six episodes, but the order got cut to four.  And then the episodes were moved from the fall to the summer, which means the people in charge of schedules didn’t deem it worthy to run alongside the major new season offerings, whether due to quality or content.  In another vote of no confidence, the show has been hidden away, deep in Saturday night, far away  from time slots when people might actually be watching television.  Some people would say (and are saying) that ABC has killed this show by not giving it a real chance to hook in potential viewers.  After viewing an episode, if the rest of these are of similar quality, I think ABC knew this hokum would dig its own hole, and decided to let it die unnoticed rather than in the prime time bright lights, where mean TV Guide columnists would laugh at the size of its puny Nielsens.  Either that or they figured that science fiction nerds don’t have anything better to do on Saturday nights.

Each episode is based on a story by a master of science fiction.  Sounds good, right? Well, hold your horses! I’ll get into episode 1 in a bit, but let’s take a sneak peak at the lineup that will be cockslapping us for the next three Saturdays.  The next episode is titled “The Awakening” by Howard Fast.  Looking at all of the things Mr. Fast has written, it is fairly clear that science fiction wasn’t his primary focus.  He’s probably most well known for writing Spartacus, which inspired the classic quasi-Kubrick movie of the same name.  After that episode, we get something by Heinlein, which I am going to assume is either heavy-handed and dated, or heavy-handed and trying to be relevant about politics (no doubt neatly warmed over to appear relevant to today’s politics).  That last phrase brings us to the final episode, written (screenplay and short story) by Harlan Ellison, who is, indeed, just trying to be relevant at all.

Note:  From a cursory reading of synopses of the available episodes, it seems that attempting to be politically relevant to the United States of today is a common theme amongst all four episodes (Apparently the Heinlein story is about <sigh> civil liberties).  Masters of Horror sometimes does this, most notably in Joe Dante’s “Homecoming,” in which dead soldiers rise from the grave so they can vote against a war-mongering executive administration, but it is important to note that Horror doesn’t go back to the political chest that often; certainly not four times in a row.

This first episode, “A Clean Escape,” was written by John Kessel in the mid 80s, at the height of Reagen-era wackiness, an influence that makes itself known in the episode’s standard issue genre anthology series twist.  While watching the episode, I couldn’t shake the feel that it felt like a play, and it turns out that’s what the story was originally published as.  Most of the story takes place on the same set, with a few scenes taking place in brief flashbacks and elsewhere in the complex that contains the main set.  There are also only two primary characters; everything else is a bit part.  So what we have here is mainly a 42 minute dialogue between two characters, portrayed by Sam Waterston of Law and Order fame, and Judy Davis of, well, she’ll always be of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch to me.  These two players are both capable of giving reliable, often great performances, but here it seems like they are just scraping by, reading and reacting to a script that they haven’t properly digested. 

Maybe because of this, or maybe because of the story’s origin as a play, a lot of the dialogue feels stiff and rather dry, as if Kessel was trying to strike a careful balance between realism and the wonky lines that frequently show up in science fiction.  Each of the performers has a histrionic episode during the course of the episode; in both cases a belabored but generic feeling outburst, something you’d expect from a high school student asked to interpret the material rather than two name actors.  But enough about the performances. Lukewarm as they were,  if the material were worth the paper it was originally published on, the performances displayed in this episode really wouldn’t have brought it down–they are at worst functional performances.  I mean, actors can’t be expected to turn it on for every single performance, especially when it’s a one-shot episode in an anthology series.  Davis and Waterston weren’t doing this for an Emmy, they were here to get paid.  Yikes, I must remember to be nicer about Waterston; he’s probably going to be our next Secretary of Homeland Security, depending on how the political cookie crumbles.

I’m guessing that what I alluded to earlier is in fact the truth: stories for this series were picked for their political veins, not quality of science fiction.  This story, as it stands, is barely even science fiction.  The setting sounds scifi–a post-apocalyptic world, the year 2031–but the story is just a little human drama that happens to take place in the future.  I don’t want to give away too much of the plot (I think I have a tendency to give too much away during my synopses), but Davis plays a psychiatrist, Waterston her anterograde amnesia-suffering patient, and she is treating him in order to help him remember anything that happened after 2007, which is where his memories end.  As far as politics goes, the Relevant Message delivered by this episode would be something about the refusal of certain public figures to accept accountability for their actions. Relevant!

For those that have seen the episode (and again, I won’t post any explicit spoilers, just in case), it is easy to see that the science fiction elements could have easily been stripped from this episode.  Altering the post-apocalyptic setting, a similar story could have easily been told about a Hitler or Pol Pot figure, or if you want to go with good guys, Oppenheimer or Nobel.  Recently, I have seen a number of articles mentioning genre writing’s worth in comparison to “literature,” and I think this story is a good example to show that genre lit can sometimes be considered regular lit if cast in a slightly different light.  Well, maybe it’s not a good example since the story is kind of bad, hackneyed, and the third act has totally dialed itself in by the end of the second.  And the ending cap doesn’t particularly make sense.  But still, there’s a point in there somewhere.

Maybe I’ll follow up and watch the other episodes (I am curious to see how thick they lay on the politics in each episode), but ABC knew what they were doing when they sent this thing to the gallows.  At best, the production values felt similar to the 90s revival of The Outer Limits.  And Stephen Hawking?  Did he need the money?  I am fairly certain the producers cashed him a check to use his name, and then modulated his voice with a Mac for use in the actual episode.  He’s kind of the Rod Serling of the series, I guess.  Not to be too mean, but his voice doesn’t really fit the role that well.  I will go so far as to say that this is the worst thing Hawking has done since he proved that god doesn’t exist. 

Yesterday, the great Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni died at the ripe old age of 94. 

He probably runs the risk of being remembered for film history bullet points; adding and popularizing terms and techniques in the glossary. For instance, Antonioni is largely responsible for popularizing the long take, and introducing it others that would make famous use of it, like Scorsese. More importantly, to most people, he broke film taboo in the 60s and became the first director to film non-pornographic, full frontal female nudity. His name is also really fun to say.

Looking past those accomplishments, there are his films, some of which are masterpieces. Due to Michelangelo’s propensity to use the aforementioned long takes, some feel that his movies move too slowly. I don’t particularly think that is a bad thing; the slow, deliberate pacing, reliance on only diegetic audio (in his best movies), sparse dialogue, and explorations of an aimless style of narrativity highlight the very existential themes his movies often dealt with. Cutting out atmospheric elements, you can probably cram two of his movies into the running time of one, but excising the elements deemed extraneous to some would be like having trail mix without sesame sticks.Anyway, he has a sizable body of work, the majority of it in one European moon language or another.

In the interest of pointing people to the more notable stuff, I have assembled a small list.

L’avventura (1960) - Experience the ennui of upper class Italians as people start to do things and then give up.

Blowup (Blow-up or Blow Up in the US, 1966) - Experience the ennui of being a hip, but ultimately empty, photographer in swinging London.

But all this is beside the point. I can’t knock anything for hating on the United States. Who even likes the US, aside from flesh-hungry, formaldehyde-born river monsters rendered by shaky CG?

The Host, for the first half or so, deftly jumps between being a grimy monster movie and a silly comedy focused on a family unfortunate enough to be stuck in the middle of the situation. It pulls this off really well, believe it or not, and some of the first post-monster attack comedy scenes are really weird, because at first you don’t know if you’re supposed to be giggling or if there’s some sort of cultural divide when it comes to dealing with certain things, ie It’s funny because they’re different than us! A lot of serious flicks have fairly light-hearted setups, but they tend to drop the light-heartedness once things get into gear. This is where The Host differs. After giving you a chunk of tasty, corpse-collecting seafood monster, you get a dose of wacky, slapsticky family fun, complete with comically functional alcoholics!

The movie’s only real flaw is a late game plot twist that well. . .let’s just say the director and writers either think that Americans are very manipulative or very dumb (judging by how cockeyed the American character that brings the stupid is, I’d guess it’s the latter, but since Dumb US and Sinister US are represented roughly equally throughout, you could plead either case). The turn doesn’t really make any sense, logically, but it’s all over so quickly that it is difficult to really ding the movie on the whole for it. Some of the CG work isn’t so impressive, either.

Watching this, I felt that this is what a summer movie should be. It’s got spectacle, humor, drama, distinct characters, and it’s always moving. It’s got a two hour running time, but I didn’t notice. Michael Bay, take some god-damned notes!

Don’t get me wrong: I mean no harm to Zodiac. I enjoyed the movie, but it strongly reminded me of JFK. This isn’t a bad thing. JFK won best picture in the year it came out, made the gubment move faster when it came to declassifying relevant files (I will still be like 40 when they are released), and heck, probably directly helped spawn the X-Files. Zodiac probably won’t do anything that spectacular, but at least it shows that Fincher is still alive and well after Panic Room and an extended break.

One last point of comparison is that both movies, in the end, have inconclusive conclusions. Neither of the movies are “just the facts” affairs but they both go to pains (in the case of Zodiac, sometimes labored pains) to illustrate that the main characters’ hypotheses might/probably are big ol’ piles of horseshit. And they both pull off those conclusions in as satisfying a way as possible. (But let’s not kid ourselves, Fincher is no Stone. Stone’s scope with JFK blows Zodiac out of the water.)

And that’s how I feel about Zodiac. Good movie. Reminded me of a great one. And, boy, has Fincher toned down his style or what? There was only one scene in this movie I would truly call Fincheresque in the 90s sense of the word.