Thanksgiving, with all the fixings of a short film

"White meat. Dark meat. All will be carved."

....brought to you by
seul-le-cinema's & culture snob's
Short Film Week 2007 blog-a-thon

Back in April of this year came the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino schlock film spectacular Grindhouse, a double whammy homage to the dead art of low-budget camp cinema. Rodriguez first gave the zombie gore-fest Planet Terror (my favorite part: zombies that explode on impact when hit by a truck), followed by Tarantino's talkier revenge flick Death Proof (my favorite part: Rosario Dawson's cowboy boots). But in between, the two directors had to ice the cake with the true grindhouse cinema experience: trailers for more schlock. What's interesting is that these trailers are all spoof.... they're not referring to actual forthcoming films, but instead each are made as a kind of movie within a movie.

So.... some see the much-enjoyed Grindhouse trailers as a bit of easter-egg fun. But, after seeing them a handful of times, I think Rodriguez and Tarantino aspire them to be (and in some cases, have each achieve being) their own short films.

Hence, my favorite: Thanksgiving. If every other holiday gets their own direct-to-VHS campy horror movie, guest director Eli Roth bestows upon us a slasher film for Turkey Day, with everything we could ever hope for in just under two and a half minutes.

What makes Thanksgiving particularly special, though, is its attention to detail of what it parodies. It's no surprise that the best spoofs are those that worship the ground that the originals walk on, and Roth (I imagine) is no stranger to the dusty video-rental shelf of horror schlock. His previous films fall into the unfortunate genre of belligerent torture porn (a sub-sect of horror that does not interest me in the least bit, for it sacrifices story for the most intricate and brutal death one can imagine, ad nauseum), such as Hostel and Cabin Fever. But for Roth to want to bring movies like these to light, he must have been reared on the never-heard-of-'em low budget horror movies that sneak their way onto late-night cable. So, needless to say, a movie such as what the trailer for Thanksgiving purports to be is reaching only to be trash, with a high teenage body count and a lot of fake blood.... hence why this trailer (read: short film) is so hilarious.

Because of this self-awareness, because of this wink to the they're-not-joking-around trailers for movies of grindhouse cinema, because of the loving over-the-top detail, a trailer like Thanksgiving, to me, seems more like a short film. I don't necessarily have an argument for what makes a short film and what makes a campy experiment, but Thanksgiving seems to tell its whole story to us, using the unique lens of format like a movie trailer: Random serial killer slasher stalks Plymouth, Massachusetts and kills members of the Thanksgiving parade, kills lots of high school students wearing letterman jackets, and kills a neighborly grandmother after she's done fixing the Thanksgiving meal. How is this any different, might you ask, than your average uninspired slasher film? Exactly.... except to wink at it and make it absolutely ludicrous is what elevates the material.... this slasher movie (short film) is inspired.

And that's where Roth gets to have his fun.... the schlock horror standards are in place (masked slasher, high school students, gratuitous boob shots, lots of oral sex), so why not throw in a hilarious trying-to-be-deep-voiced narrator? ("This Thanksgiving, there will be no leftovers.") A turkey that oozes blood? Lots of split-second decapitations? A shirtless cheerleader who lands the splits on a trampoline.... with a knife sticking up out of it? Or, my favorite, what to do with the neighborly grandmother after she's been roasted?

I don't have some grand conclusion here about the bending-of-rules of short filmmaking.... I suppose that when I learned about the opportunity to write about my reaction to short films in general, thanks to Ed of Only the Cinema, the trailers from Grindhouse are what sprung to mind first. I'm not terribly knowledgeable about the world of short films and wish that I had a chance to see them more often, because they're as much a mode of storytelling as a novel or a short story or a play or a movie.

Besides, it should be noted, the very first of Grindhouse's (hilarious) trailers, Machete ("They just fucked with the wrong Mexican"), is actually going to be made into a film, directed by Robert Rodriguez. How's that for short film inspiration? Fancy that.

day 4: four days with three scary movies each

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

To be fair, I went into The Blair Witch Project making fun of it. I remember seeing it in the theatre and sort of being bored.... there was a lot of marketing hype around it (this being the first film to utilize the internet as a means of major underground marketing) and it felt silly and self-indulgent to me. In retrospect, I think this is part of the movie's genius. The concept is that we're seeing found footage from three amateur filmmakers who set out to learn about the "Blair Witch", a local scary story, in the woods of rural Maryland. The whole time already knowing that the movie wasn't exactly real found footage, I wanted to be jaded about it and started looking for flaws. But isn't this the point? We're watching the unedited clips from amateur documentarians who, in a way, are making fun of themselves as they go about interviewing town residents and set off into the woods themselves to find the Blair Witch. It is, of course, once they get in the woods that things starts getting spooky.... they get lost or seem to travel in circles. They hear screaming in the night. Their tent gets rustled around in the dark. They find creepy handcrafted symbols hanging in the trees. I guess this all seemed silly to me too.... until they get to the Blair Witch's house, a crumbling old piece of construction with children's handprints peppered across the walls. The last ten minutes or so of this movie are truly terrifying, and I mean that in every sense of the word. The brilliance of how this movie is filmed, as seen from the claustrophobic view of the handheld video camera, is in part what makes it so scary. We are denied seeing what's just outside the realm of the camera, even though we're following the characters as they film.... it's a first-person viewing experience and thereby we are locked into seeing only what the camera wishes to see. The movie's got balls and it sticks to its premise.... it ramps up at the end to a high-pitch freakout and then cuts to black; nothing more, no explanation. Because, you see, it's only found footage, and we can't fill in the blanks of that which hasn't been filmed.


Misery (1990)

Kathy Bates didn't really stand out much as an actress before this film (in this same year she had a two-line part as a court reporter in the wonderful Dick Tracy), and I'm curious to see what she would've been like as a younger actress, because she is truly one of the greatest of our time. The Oscars and their nominations are often not kind to movies outside the drama category, and Misery, for which Bates won a fully-deserved Best Actress oscar, was a surprise to turn up in one of the Big 5 categories because it's an out-and-out thriller. Bates, as psycho fangirl Annie Wilkes, really is that good. Haven't seen the film? I dare you to tell me that she doesn't freak you the hell out. This movie takes fan-based obsession to the next level; based on Stephen Kings' novel (of which movie adaptations of his work are really hit or miss), James Caan plays a writer who's trying to escape the rut of a continuing series of his books. Just so happens after he wrecks his car and goes missing, one of his biggest fans saves him and nurses him back to health.... and then traps him in her home so that she can "tend" to him and dictate how she'd like his next book to go. Kathy Bates really invests in the part, you can see that, and her psychotic calm gets under your skin quite quickly. Some of the most tense scenes in the movie are where Caan's character makes attempts at escape.... but he fails to notice that his wheelchair bumped around some very meticulously arranged figurines in the living room, and Annie connects the dots on his escapade out of his room and goes ape-shit on him. I still can't watch the scene where she manages to keep him wheelchair-bound for quite awhile longer by taking a sledgehammer to his ankles (to the tune of Beethoven piano music).... I mean it, I curl into a ball and cover my face.... I can't watch that shit, it scares the crap out of me. In any case, when the AFI did their "100 Years, 100 Heroes & Villains" TV special, they interviewed Kathy Bates about playing Annie Wilkes (#17 on the villains list).... and she refused to say anything negative about the character. This, I think, is a great testament to Bates' acting prowess; she had to justify and fully believe in what Annie was doing in order to pull off the role.... and she's got her very own Oscar to polish for it.


The Descent (2006)

I saw this movie for the first time in January of this year and it blew me away, in the best possible way; I've found that my favorite movies of all time are the ones that take me completely by surprise, and The Descent is so one of my favorite movies of all time. This is the horror movie that people who appreciate film have been waiting for. It's too bad, though, that in the United States (the film is British, with a British director and mostly British actors) it was marketed similarly to a lot of the throw-away torture-porn horror movie junk of recent years and likely didn't register on the radar of many movie-goers. But this is not that kind of movie.... this is a horror movie with a sense of purpose and art, with an eye for characterization and storytelling, and is beautifully directed by Neil Marshall, who is able to pay homage all throughout to (likely) some of his favorite classic horror films. (It's hard, really, to try and list them all, but among some of my favorites are undeniable winks to Deliverance, The Blair Witch Project, Night of the Living Dead, and Carrie.) Marshall proves himself to have a skillful eye; where most of the movie takes place in tight and closed spaces, he films the outside world with such space that it really dovetails into a beautiful contrast when you recognize it. It would be negligent of me not to note that I probably also like this film because it has hot chicks that kick ass.... what can I say, I'm a fan of that in movies too. Shauna MacDonald and Natalie Mendoza (a pair of strikingly beautiful women, if I do say so myself) give some visceral and fearless performances here, and once they pick up their ice axes to start fighting, I dare you not to feel a tingle of giddy glee. The basic premise here: five daredevil women go cave diving somewhere in the mountains of rural North Carolina, and they stumble across things in the dark that they weren't planning on stumbling across. In so, the film treads through a bit of sci-fi territory.... the villains here aren't psychotic killers or zombies, but rather vicious humanoid monsters who've adapted to living in the dark. The first shot where you see one of these monsters (they're filmed so well that they're terrifying to look at whenever they're on screen) is the one that lingers longest with me, a kind of "wait, is that a man down there?" shot from far away that immediately puts you on edge. One of my favorite aspects of the film is that it eases you into the horror; there's plenty of blood and guts, but you wouldn't think so as the film opens or at least during the first forty-five minutes (the way the opening sequence ends, though, definitely grabs you for the ride). Another is the concept of "the descent", not just a literal reading of the ladies' trip down into the caves, but even on a more metaphorical level as in descending to a more primal state of being.... by having to fight these hungry beasts, MacDonald's and Mendoza's characters become primordial animal killers to protect themselves and their compadres. Apparently the ending was edited for the American theatrical release (which I didn't see), but I know that it's a somewhat "happier" ending than that on the DVD (and original British) release.... the original ending I prefer far and away much more; it adds a kind of bleakness that I think is necessary to the film, and it also visually ties the bow on a recurring motif of flashback to MacDonald's character's daughter. This bleakness, after all, is what sticks with you days and weeks after you've watched the film. So, in closing, I still scream out loud in parts when watching this, even when I know what's coming. One thing is for sure, this movie will turn you against ever wanting to go cave exploring.


Now go watch some scary movies.... Happy Halloween.

day 3: four days with three scary movies each

The Innocents (1961)

My very second blog post ever references this (somewhat forgotten) scary movie gem.... and I probably said it best over there. Deborah Kerr (who just recently passed away and whose film archives are likely being combed to compile a fifteen second "In Memoriam" clip for countless awards shows this coming year) plays a British governess who comes to care for two pretty disturbed little tykes. This is a perfectly freaky ghost story (all the bump-in-the-night creeps are there), filmed in crisp black and white, that has some horrifying reveals in the bright light.... sometimes what we can see clearly can be a lot more terrifying than what is shrouded in shadow (David Lynch uses this technique to shows us some of the scariest stuff he's got in his films). My favorite is when Kerr glances up across the lake to see the distant (and all-too-real) apparition of a woman staring at her (watch it here!). Ultimately these kids are a possessed little lot, and toward the end we get some rather squirm-in-your-seat screentime logged of a ten year old boy making out with his thirty-something babysitter. If you haven't seen this film, go rent it now in time for Halloween and watch it with lights off.


The Ring (2002)

Naomi Watts stars in (what I believe is) the first of the Americanized Japanese-horror-film remakes (see also: The Grudge and Dark Water).... and in this case I think the first is probably the best. Gore Verbinski (better known for directing the Bruckheimer-a-thon Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy) proves himself to be a director with a good eye for mood.... the shots in this film are rich in color, setting, and atmosphere, and he paces the film just right to keep us unsettled the whole way throughout. Even the final sequence of the film worked on me.... usually it's clear that once you think the killer is dead the killer actually isn't quite dead, but I was successfully duped this time around. Despite the presence of the tired expressionless-little-kid stereotype, the film succeeds in taking us around to another creepy little kid who likes to kill people via VHS. Of course, once you watch this tape-from-hell you've got a ticking clock of seven days to live, thanks to the angsty revenge of a little girl who haunts from the bottom of a covered-up wishing well. The surrealist/uncanny reanimated movements of the girl-from-beyond-the-grave/beyond-the-white-noise (filmed at the end, especially, in plain sight) are freaky as hell.... I think that might stand the scary movie test of time alone. Some of my favorite bits have to do with Verbinski's sly fitting-in of "ring" imagery throughout.... sudden flash cuts of "the ring", and (my favorite) the stain left behind from a coffee mug. No joke.


Psycho (1960)

Probably not a shock to find this movie on the list, as it is likely considered the greatest horror/thriller movie of cinema history. I had heard about it a lot before I had seen it, and when I finally did see it I wasn't disappointed.... terrified in parts, actually. The writer in me is fascinated by this film because of the uncharted territory it breaks on a storytelling level.... never before have we seen our protagonist killed after the first act. Quite a brilliant little trick on Hitchcock's part to recruit a screen star like Janet Leigh to dupe us into thinking this movie was going to be about her.... the entire first act is fraught with her backstory and a bit of intrigue about what she's going to do with her life, which comes to a quick close once she meets her maker in the shower. So who do we identify with now? We're stuck with Norman Bates, someone we hadn't exactly planned on following along as our anchor. I don't know of many rule-bending examples of three act screenplay structure that have blown apart the box like this one.... I do have to say though, as a cute wink to Psycho as the granddaddy of modern horror movies, Scream (see yesterday's post) plays a similar trick by opening the movie with blond-and-sunny-smiled Drew Barrymore only to have her strung up by her intestines ten minutes in. Psycho definitely has its freak-out moments.... not only the shower scene (watch it and notice that we don't really see Marion Crane getting stabbed, but instead her visceral reaction to the stabbing.... coupled of course with the frightening strings on the soundtrack), but also the reveal about where Norman Bates' mother actually is. My favorite (and most terrifying) part: when Inspector Arbogast decides to enter the Bates homestead to ask "Mother" some questions and gets sliced down the face and tumbles down the stairs. What makes this particular scene so unsettling is the camera angle at which Hitchcock decides to shoot it at: directly above. Something about this unnatural angle immediately puts you on the edge, and the speed with which Mother comes tearing out of her bedroom with her knife raised freaks me the hell out every time.


....and tomorrow, the final three.... including two of my favorite scary movies of all time.

day 2: four days with three scary movies each

Scream (1996)

Scream may have done a lot of things -- resurrected the slasher film, Wes Craven's directing career, and Drew Barrymore's acting career -- but it also signaled a kind of hallmark for the horror genre: a horror movie that makes fun of itself while still being a horror movie. This meta play would have seemed too elevated for the genre at one time, but it works here to great effect. Not only does it use tired slasher film tropes (while gleefully acknowledging them) but it also uses a not-so-scary Halloween costume as the killer's disguise. (This is perhaps the greatest sleight of hand to the movie trilogy's creepiness.... the fact that this costume can be found everywhere and is so diluted among the droves of Halloween costumes makes the fact that there could be a real killer among them a terrorizing aspect that satisfies.) Scream also welcomed the entrance of the cell phone as a plot device.... no movie before managed to hinge so much on the use of telephone, and from the very first scene the phone is perhaps the greatest weapon. The fact that the mobility of the cell phone adds to the killer's menace is, my guess, a subconscious stroke of genius. Scream (and its two sequels, Scream 3 being perhaps my favorite of the lot) earns itself a spot in film history with its bending of rules.... and is still a joy to watch (with the lights off) eleven years after the fact and after countless other horror movies tried aping what Scream already apes best.


Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

I'm not so much a fan of zombie movies (maybe they disturb me too much, maybe I find zombies to be sort of boring villains on the whole).... but I think First Contact is the first (quality) film to take zombies into space, and so the Borg just might be the best of the zombies. Sure, I'm a Trekkie (yes, I've been to a Star Trek convention, more than one even), but First Contact succeeds on its own; it carries its own weight, transcends the dorky stigma, and is probably the most accessible of all of the Star Trek films. The fact that this film relies on a backstory shown first during the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" television series and makes the leap to film to be the most successful of the Star Trek movies goes to show that the franchise (at the time) was at its zenith. The Borg got a feature-film makeover here, going from the pale-skinned junkyard-part extras on TV to the KY-glossed bug-eyed half-mechanized extras for the big screen (Oscar-nominated for best makeup.... but lost to The Nutty Professor.... why?!). The makeup effects are so convincing and terrifying that I still don't like to watch this movie in the dark. The Borg even get a queen for their hive, played deliciously menacing (and sexy? who would've thought?) by South African actress Alice Krige. There are a lot of things right with this movie (the charismatic acting chemistry between Patrick Stewart and Alfre Woodard, for instance, is magical), but I think the greatest achievement is to show us that Star Trek can tackle horror, and does so by presenting a terrifying and hopeless end to each of us and our culture in the form of bionic zombies. Social statement? Maybe. Quality filmmaking? Absolutely.


Hannibal (2001)

This is a movie I will defend to the end, and I think gets a bad rap simply because it isn't The Silence of the Lambs. Serving as its sequel, though, I think everyone wants it to be the same psychological thriller.... but the story of Hannibal isn't, and its probably hard to accept that it doesn't fall into the same genre as its predecessor. Hard too to see Julianne Moore (stunning here) filling the shoes of a noticeably absent Jodie Foster, who turned down continuing the role of FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling because she found the film too lurid. My argument here is that this wouldn't be the same movie if it wasn't so lurid.... that's part of the fun. This is, ultimately, a horror movie... a horror love story even. Directed by Ridley Scott (beautifully) and written by David Mamet (!), we pick up ten years later with a more hardened Starling and a more playful Hannibal Lecter, with more tricks up his sleeve now that he's assimilated himself back into the world. Ladies and Gentlemen, Anthony Hopkins is my favorite actor. Some people complain that he overstays his welcome as Lecter in this film, and I say every frame he's on screen is a pleasure (with thanks, of course, to some crackling pitch-perfect lines by Mamet). There's so much bizarre humor in his performance that it makes Lecter's horrific murders that much more disturbing. The creepy factor in this movie comes, ultimately, to some unflinching gross-out scenes.... and some fearlessly despicable characters played by Gary Oldman, the counterpoint villain hidden under some nasty facial-scar makeup (who meets his end with his face in the jaws of a hungry boar), and tough-guy Ray Liotta, who logs a memorable performance as a sleazy government cronie who has probably the most disturbing last meal to be shown on film (after he asks what's for dinner, Lecter says, "You should never ask... It spoils the surprise"). A lesser director could have made this film fall flat on its face, but Scott has you buying it line for line.... and I'm in for each course of the meal.


....more scary movies tomorrow....

day 1: four days with three scary movies each

Certainly lists of the "top" movies of whatever genre are already everywhere and already somewhat exhaustive that any such list I would make would only serve my purposes to be applicable to my own likes and desires.

So.... I present you with a countdown of sorts to Halloween with twelve movies (three movies each for the four days leading up to All Hallow's Eve) of twelve movies (in no particular order) that spook the crap out of me. And, more importantly, particular elements of these films that do the trick. These are not all the movies I've seen that do so, of course, but they are all well-liked by me, and on the whole are pretty undebatably terrifying in parts. Besides, I think it's about time I pay my respects to the cinema of the scary.... it's an art form that I think that has been degraded too much by dimensionless and storyless torture-porn in the tradition of the endless Saw movie franchise and other horror schlock of the desensitized era.

....*drum roll*....


Lost Highway (1997)

I suppose it's no secret I'm a little bit of a fan of David Lynch. That said, I bet you were thinking that Eraserhead is the more appropriate of the Lynch canon to be considered a "horror" movie on the whole. To be honest, all of Lynch's films have elements that creep me the hell out (yes, the G-rated Walt-Disney-presents The Straight Story counts). But the creepiest on the whole for me is easily Lost Highway, perhaps one of the richest-filmed but most unevenly plotted of Lynch's movies. The movie suffers on the whole from really not knowing what story it's trying to tell, but there's lots of meaty Lynch-isms everywhere and can be at times quite intriguing. The majority of the creep factor comes from the performance of now-acquitted once-accused murderer Robert Blake who plays, for all intents and purposes, the Devil. Blake's sheer calm creates such an indelible menace that's hard to deny.... the scene, in fact, where Robert Loggia's mob boss character passes the phone to Blake, who has been standing just off screen for minutes without us being aware still gives me the shivers. The 2005 French film Cache is in many ways an ugly rip-off of this film (the inital premise, folks, is identical), but likely succeeds in logical ways that this does not. Unfortunately, thanks to Blake's recent trial-debacle, Lost Highway may not see the light of legitimate DVD release for some time. Because, after all, Blake does play the Devil. But he does it so well.


Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

Barbara Stanwyck, perhaps the screen siren of film noir, stars in a tweaked variation on a haunted house movie in Sorry, Wrong Number, a movie that slowly and painlessly digs its talons into you until you try to pull away. She also picked up her fourth (and last) Oscar nomination for the role. Bottom line: rich/bored/lonely woman picks up the phone to make a call one night and, thanks to a crossed line, overhears a plot to murder. (If this were to be remade, it wouldn't be so much a crossed line as a garbled reception error on a cell phone.) The genius of the movie comes as Stanwyck starts to get more harried as time passes, letting her mind take her in all kinds of directions about how to stop this plan.... her calls to the police and the phone company make her seem like she's raving mad. The greatest revelation though...? Wouldn't you know it, the victim in question of the overheard murder plan happens to be herself. Looking for a good suspense movie in a world that is quickly ignoring the genre? Fire up your netflix for this.


The Birds (1963)

I saw this movie at a young age and it did a good amount of damage. Who would think birds to be a device for one of the greatest horror movies of all time? The movie, Alfred Hitchcock's first to hit the screen after his magnum opus Psycho, is pretty widely known, and that's likely thanks to the fact that it gets under our skin so easily. Basic premise: birds of all kinds (birds of a feather? heh.... eh) swoop down in droves to terrorize a Northern California coastal hamlet. People are pecked to death. People have eyes gouged out by beaks. That's terrifying enough for me still, no less at the tender age of eight or however old I was when I first saw it. Perhaps the most unsettling point of the movie is that the droves of bird attacks aren't explained.... Tippi Hedren, plucky and young and ultra-mod and as damsel-y as they come, decides to buy two love birds on a whim to deliver to some guy she falls for on the spot in a pet shop (as Hitchcock nonchalantly strolls by on screen with two schnauzers). Perhaps she's the cause of the bird attack? Is it the love birds? Who knows. I'm still spooked the hell out to see a bird perched on a jungle gym.


....and three more tomorrow....