Five Great Horror Films About Consumerism

Happy Halloween, everybody!  It's the most terror-ful time of the year!  I hope everyone is either getting drunk on spirits, or gorging themselves with candy.

There are many things to love about this wonderful holiday, but to boil the day down to it's essence:  It's about being scared, and spending lots of money.  With that in mind, here's a list of some of my favorite horror films about consumerism.

1.  DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978)
Let's just get the obvious out of the way, shall we?  In brief, it's the story of a rag-tag group of zombie apocalypse survivors hiding out in a suburban shopping mall.  Unfortunately for them, the mall is just as popular as it's ever been, and the patrons aren't human.

The remake got the setting right, but the attitude was all wrong;  the zombies are here for human flesh, but they also just love the shops.  As one of the main characters says, "This was an important place in their lives".  The zombies eventually become manageable, but the living seem to have some difficulty letting go of their possessions. . .

Bloody, hilarious, terrifying, and tender, this is about as close to art as horror cinema tends to get.  A must see. . .  if you've got the guts.

2.  THE STUFF
"Are you eating it. . .  or is it eating you?!"

So asks director Larry Cohen in The Stuff, the story of a yogurt alternative that perhaps has a bit too much life in it;  it eats people from the inside out!  A wry commentary on the food industry, this parable will make you think twice about being spoon fed.

3.  HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH
The Silver Shamrock company has been delighting kids for years with their Halloween masks.  Only this year, they have a special surprise for the kiddies. . .  masks that will kill them, and their parents, in the most horrifying way imaginable!

The kids have no chance, since they are powerless to resist the irritating Silver Shamrock commercials that you hear every few minutes of the movie.  To parents, they're simply an irritation, and never once does anyone suspect that there's something just a bit sinister about that flashing jack o'lantern.

4.  DAYBREAKERS
Vampires are blood-suckers in every sense of the word.  As such, they've managed to subjugate the world, and drained all of it's precious resources in a relatively short period of time.  Most importantly?  Human blood.  A synthetic version is being worked on, but can it be discovered before the collapse of civilization?  And is it better to save a civilization run by parasites. . .  or change it?

5.  VIDEODROME
Max isn't a bad guy.  He's just the head of a UHF station that specializes in broadcasting soft-core porn.  It's not like he makes the stuff.  But he's gotta find the next big thing, before the competition does.  And when he stumbles across a fractured video feed of a fake snuff film, he thinks he's found it.  But as he investigates the origin of the signal, he begins to question whether the video was actually fake.  In fact, he begins to have difficulties telling the difference between reality and fantasy.

Have fun, kiddies!  And again. . .  Happy Howl-o'ween!!!!

Fallout: New Vegas: Not with a bang but a whimper

Las Vegas is a town of leeches, squirming their wriggling heads out of every taxi cab and 24 hour massage parlor to scream for your money. If you work at a job in which you earn an income that is non-scalable, i.e., the amount of work you do is directly proportional to the amount of money you earn, you can compute exactly what your time is worth in a very objective sense. So your wallet is filled with condensed units of your life force. It’s good to remember this when you’re in Las Vegas, whether the modern one or the post-Great War version from Bethesda’s new video game. The aforementioned leeches that beg and demand your money are siphoning time from your life in the traditional, linear way, but also in a more accelerated way, since they are soliciting these condensed time/life force units from you. This is not so different from any center of commerce, conceptually. The thing that makes Vegas different is that literally everyone is doing this; there is no one without an angle. In a “normal” urban environment, there are people who are not directly trying to siphon money from you. Not so in Vegas. That’s what I like about Fallout: New Vegas. It’s the best Vegas simulator I’ve ever played, because it’s impressionistic. In eschewing the literal dynamics of modern Las Vegas and setting it in a fantasy world, the game captures Sin City’s apocalyptically bleak spirit.

I was trying to escape a sort of slow-motion personal apocalypse the last time I went to the real Vegas. I thought that some solace from my 50-hour work week, where I prostituted myself to a major corporation as a salesman, might be found in the bright lights and long nights. The Vegas Fantasy, for me, is usually a soft-focus, overexposed scene, in which I am flanked by laughing European woman as I break decorum and spin a roulette wheel myself, which the roulette spinner simply laughs off because of my charm, and a mountain of chips spills into my lap along with a glass of top-shelf vodka. The scenes that transpired instead were a bit more modest: many cab rides with a gouty friend who complained about even the shortest foot travel; an uncomfortable density of whores both too young and too old, and feeling somehow slighted at never being propositioned by these literal prostitutes, while consistently being given friendly “tips” and “referrals” by every last desk clerk and cab driver and door man and night club promoter and fellow patron, all of whom, it turns out, are participating in a cabal of kickbacks and commissions, while masquerading as well-meaning fellow citizens out to offer some friendly advice. Now I know that this is how the world operates—walk through a Bangkok market and it’s getting groped by ladyboys whose only English is “five dolla,” or you can opt for a provincial existence and be a number for Madison Avenue demographers to crunch beneath their expensive shoes. But I don’t want the world to operate that way. As a salesman, I had a vested interest in selling product, but I could never find it in myself to bend my humanity itself into whatever shape would be most pleasing for my customer, to lie, to nod impatiently while they shared pieces of their real struggles and aspirations, trying to railroad the conversation back into selling them something. Basically, I found it possible to sell things and still be a human being. But it was really exhausting. So I went to Las Vegas on a five day vacation which involved actually sleeping at night and writing wistful letters to people back home.

The characters in Fallout: New Vegas are wooden puppets who move unnaturally and mostly send you on fetch quests. As people, they lack any accountability, sending you across a town they know inside and out so that you, a stranger, may negotiate with a fellow townie, or steal something, or rough someone up. They treat you like a material asset. This evokes no humanity whatsoever. The token “lotus that grows in mud” inclusion in New Vegas is a medical philanthropy organization that, not surprisingly, sends you to negotiate and fetch on their behalf. The characters in New Vegas treat you like the characters in Real Vegas: as a puppet to be prodded into surrendering your life force.

The population in New Vegas is ultra-sparse in a way that is actually distracting. Even for the post-apocalypse, the New Vegas Strip feels empty in a way that’s either intentionally ultra-bleak or a natural design limitation. You spend maybe 11 hours hearing about the degradation and spectacle of New Vegas, only to find that every venerable casino has about 20 people in it, widely dispersed, playing identical games of blackjack and roulette. And every one of these people either demands something petty of you, or is wholly non-interactive, except as a body to mutilate in the shooting spree you will inevitably inflict on the Strip if you stay long enough. Just like the Real Vegas.

On waking up in your New Vegas hotel room, or in any Fallout room, for that matter, you’re likely to find that you’re surrounded with an impressive array of interactive objects. This is not unlike Real Life. For a moment, the thrill of simply being able to pick up nearly anything and move it somewhere else seems like a bottomless well of fun. That usually lasts about 5 minutes, until the time you realize that a Scorched Book and a Cup and Prewar Money all have the same purpose, which is to say, none at all. Just like Real Life. Most objects in New Vegas, and I mean “most,” as in the statistical majority, have to utility whatsoever. You can pick them up, drop them off a cliff, or hoard them on your person until you are Overburdened with a collection worthless junk. Just like in Real Life.

Traveling through empty rooms full of objects you can’t really use to perform menial tasks for people too lazy or inept or cowardly to help themselves doesn’t really require a simulator. Turn off your TV and step into Real Life. Welcome to the Real Wasteland.

"Scream" Again?

The Scream series has been an easy target for horror fans for some time now.  They're relatively bloodless, and always feature a cast of vapid, disposable "teens", so it's not difficult to understand why.  But personally, I thought the first film was great.  It was metatextual, before that concept was completely played out, and is one of the only horror/comedies that is both genuinely funny and scary.  The ending was epic, and superbly choreographed.  And nobody saw it coming, because horror was dead.  D-E-A-D.  It was just a nothing little slasher film, put out long after the glory days of the genre, and it made a couple bucks in it's opening weekend.  Then the next weekend, it made more money.  A true word of mouth film, this revitalized the genre, for better or worse.  I think that when most horror fans bitch about Scream, they're really just bitching about the waves of imitators to follow.

And then there were the sequels.  Scream didn't need a sequel, but I'm never one to begrudge a producer making money, and thematically it made sense. . .  Slasher films have sequels, right?  And for what Scream 2 was, it was decently made.  They threw in some interesting visual elements, like Sidney in a ballet troupe performing Electra.  I think there were missed opportunities for a more fluid connection to the original film (I remember hashing out the climax of the first film.  "So, since the one killer was in the bedroom, and the other was at the car; who was the third one coming up the stairs?"  Or something along those lines.  Haven't seen any of these films in over a decade), but as slapdash sequels go, it delivered the goods.  The third film?  The less said, the better.  Let's just say that Ehren Kruger is no Kevin Williamson, and that the third film just beat to death thematic elements that were pretty well covered in the first two (Like a film being made in the film, etc).  I've seen worse,  but ultimately I don't remember much of the movie, which isn't a good sign.

Cut to 2010.  In six months, we'll have a new Scream movie in theaters.  Who is the audience for this?  I feel like the horror community has moved on, and the target audience would've been way too young when the originals came out.  Someone who was a baby when the first film was released would be old enough to play the killer by now!  Even more baffling is that it's a sequel and not a remake.  I'm not necessarily advocating remakes, but as long as we're pointlessly remaking critically acclaimed vampire movies a year after their release, why not a fair-to-middling slasher franchise a decade later?

From what I've heard, the production sounds like a complete mess.  Cast members coming and going, script changes left and right (By both Williamson and Kruger).  Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.  And while I again don't fault people for wanting to make money, this is just a blatant cash grab.  How could this movie possibly be good?  We have no emotional investment in it.  The returning characters are just meta archetypes who apparently cannot be killed (Though I'll guessing they'll bump at least one of them off to "raise the stakes"), and a masked killer who changes identity with every film.  Oh, and the new batch of pseudo-teens.  Whee.

Ghostface really does feel like a ghost.  He (or she)'s a piece of nostalgia from a bygone era;  one that no one's really nostalgic about.

Why are horror films traditionally bad?

Movies are an art form, and as such often try to elicit emotional responses from us.  Why is it, then, that if I say a movie was designed to be "heartbreaking", you would have different expectations of it's level of quality than if I were to say that it was meant to be "terrifying"?  There are two easy answers to that question:  Experience, and a certain lingering Puritanism.

I'll address the former first;  Yes, there is a long history of shitty, shitty horror films.  For every Silence Of The Lambs, there are a thousand straight-to-video zombie films, each more inept than the last.  And here's the problem;  horror fans love it.  We (I'm most certainly including myself in this) eat them up, we love them so.  A true horror fan appreciates a broad spectrum of fright, from the divine to the defecated.  We savor every wooden performance, every ridiculous plot twist, and every unconvincing monster make-up.  

And so I present the first killer of quality;  the horror fan.

A balanced diet of cinema is all I'm asking for here.  Cake and soda are fine every so often, but we need to balance them out with whole grains, fruits and vegetables.  And vegetables don't have to be boring;  movies like The Shining taste great, and they give your eyes vitamins that they need.  

The reason studios keep making shitty horror movies is because we keep going to see them, even as we bitch about them!  Here's a thought;  If you, like me, are tired of the overabundance of crappy horror, put your money where your mouth is this Halloween, and check out Paranormal Activity 2 instead of Saw 3D.  I'm not saying that PA 2 will necessarily be a masterpiece, but based on the advertisements it looks like it's at least TRYING to be good, something the Saw series hasn't attempted for several years (and some would argue, ever).

The second hurdle for the reputation of horror films to overcome is more ingrained and widespread;  there's something in our culture which casts the feeling of terror as prurient, and even if we like a horror film, we often feel bad about it afterwords.  Horror films are not the kind of movie you date;  they're the kind of movie that you have great drunken sex with, and then never call again.  Until the next time you get blitzed.  

I've often found that high art is something regarded with a certain detachment.  Perhaps the genres which evoke the most uncontrollable reactions, like laughter and screaming, can't as easily be analyzed with that cool gaze.

As far back as I can remember, horror films have been relegated to the lowest rung on the genre scale, barely above pornography.   It does lend the genre a certain punk rock aura, which does give me some pride as a fan.  But I dream of a more ambitious genre.  I look at the next couple of months of releases, and we have high-end representations of genres such as fantasy (Harry Potter), science fiction (Tron: Legacy) and the western (True Grit), and I wonder;  where's my Oscar season horror film?  Who can bring this genre to a place of respectability that it has never before achieved?

My Favorite X-Men

In the genre of superhero comics, the X-Men have always been my favorite.  There are so many fascinating elements to the mythology, especially for a teenager.  That you could one day, in the middle of class, gain the ability to see through walls.  Or fly.  Or maybe, through no fault of your own, become deadly to those around you.

Much has been made of the comic being a thinly veiled metaphor for the civil rights movement in the 60's, but mutants work very effectively as a blank slate where anyone who feels like an outcast can place their empathy.  They aren't heroes simply out of a sense of social obligation (though that does play a part of it), but because they're walking targets in a world that hates and fears them.  Spiderman is considered a menace, but he can go back to being Peter Parker by day.  Most of the X-Men have trouble hiding their true selves, and the whole point seems to be that they shouldn't have to.

The X-Men are a large enough figure in the cultural consciousness that even if someone has never seen a movie or read a comic, they could probably name at least three X-Men characters.  We've all been exposed to it, in one way or another.  But do you have a particular attachment to a certain era of the group?  I know a lot of people who got into the X-Men through the early 90's cartoon.  Several people first experienced them through the film series.  And there are a few who were first exposed to the X-Men in their purest form;  comic books.

The most critically acclaimed run on the comic series seems to be the Chris Claremont/John Byrne era, which included the classic Dark Phoenix Saga storyline.  Some people got into it when Grant Morrison took over writing duties in the 2000's, turning the school into more of a, well, school.  Joss Whedon fans gobbled up his brief run on the book.

My first issue?  Uncanny X-Men # 234, written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Marc Silvestri.

Yeah.  In a world of comics featuring larger than life boy scouts like Superman, this cover called out to me.  I'm like, "Who is that creepy freak with the demon face and the blades?!".  Little did I know, Wolverine would turn out to be a much more fascinating character than I could have imagined.  I pick it up from my local 7-11, most likely accompanied by a Slurpee and some sort of chocolate confection.  Once home, I nervously rifle through the pages.

I'm first introduced to Dazzler, who is apparently a "mutant" who can convert sound into energy weapons.  Neat.  Next, I learn that her group, The X-Men, is in the midst of battling a bunch of body snatching aliens called The Brood, who look scary as shit.  Also neat.  In short order, I'm introduced to the rest of the X-Men.  Storm, the leader, has weather controlling powers and a badass white mohawk.  Psylocke, who can read peoples minds.  Havok, who can shoot force blasts at people, but doesn't want to because he accidently killed someone recently.  Rogue, a chick with what appeared to be Superman-like powers.  Longshot, a cool dude who's power is "luck"(?!?!!).  The aforementioned Wolverine, who at the end of the issue skewers a guy through the head with his claws (Sweet!!!).  And last, but certainly not least, we have Colossus, a gigantic dude with metal skin!

I was blown away by this.  I'd read superhero books before, but this was punk rock, rebel superheroics.  People got killed!  The heroes were hated!  Everything about this book was extremely cool, and I was hooked for life.

Well. . .  "life" is a bit strong.  I needed to break from my expensive comics habit in the early 90's, so once Chris Claremont left the series with X-Men # 3, I left my favorite mutants behind for quite some time.  Later, I went back and reread the 90's issues;  I hadn't missed much.

I'm sure that nostalgia is a strong part of it, but when I say that I like the X-Men, I'm really talking about the Marc Silvestri and Jim Lee pencilled issues from the late 80's through the early 90's;  Uncanny X-Men # 218 through X-Men # 3.  Not to sound shallow by focusing on the artists like that, but I think that longtime writer Chris Claremont's work became better by bouncing his ideas off of two artists with a bit more edge than John Byrne or Dave Cockrum.  These X-Men were constantly losing, winning, and then losing again, barely holding their ground.  You had the Fall Of The X-Men, Inferno, their passing through the Siege Perilous, and their eventual journey into space to recover their lost leader, Professor X.  These were epic, dark stories, which often had dire consequences, and an omnipresent air of foreboding.

So, that's what I consider to be "my" X-Men.  The punk era, I guess you might say.  It was completely of it's place and time, and I've never seen that tone replicated in an X-Men comic since.

Surrogates (Movie Review)

SURROGATES (2009)
Director:  Jonathan Mostow
Stars:  Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames, Radha Mitchell, James Cromwell

In the future, no one ever leaves their home.  It's unnecessary, because almost every human being has a "surrogate";  a lifelike robot that you can not only control, but with which you can experience all five senses.  Sounds a bit like Avatar, yes?  True that;  and several other sci-fi stories from the last century, including The Matrix.  The difference between this movie and those is that the focus here is entirely on the sociological implications of what it's like for the population of the world to interact with each other entirely through a filter.

If you can't feel that hammering sensation on your head, I'll explain the metaphor;  the surrogates are us, diddling our lives away on the information superhighway with blogs (Cough!), social networks and World Of Warcraft.  Something that started out as a useful tool has become the central instrument in our lives, and I can see the television sets starting to gave the laptops jealous glances.

The plot revolves around a pair of detectives who are investigating the death of someone who was seemingly killed while using his surrogate, via an electrical signal sent through the surrogate and back to the host body.  Until this point, death via surrogate seemed impossible, so the police force and government are doing their best to keep it under wraps.  After all, to do away with their most prominent form of transportation would mean a major shift in social structure.  Somehow, having robots avatars has cured venereal disease (Makes sense) and racism (Highly questionable, but whatever).  Meanwhile, one of the lead detectives (Bruce Willis) is having his own doubts about the surrogate program, having not seen his wife in the flesh in quite some time.

Using a detective story in a world building sci-fi universe has it's plusses and minuses.  It's an easy shorthand for the audience, being familiar with the genre, and also an easy shorthand to the action.  On the downside, it leads to a lot of plot twists in a story that is already having to dump a lot of info in your lap, since as an audience member you're a stranger in a strange land.  Blade Runner did this correctly;  keep it simple.  Real simple.  I'm not saying that Surrogates is difficult to follow, but the twists are taking up time that should either be exciting or philosophical.

Mostow is in Terminator 3 mode here, with fairly blocky direction and ugly lighting.  Why have you fallen so far from Breakdown, Jonathan?  Your hue is red, not blue.  Stay out of the future.  It makes better use of humor than Terminator 3 did;  fluid to the story, and not overbearing.  The action is pretty well done, even if the robots distractingly float like characters from a wuxia film.

It's far from mind blowing, but I found the film to be a fun diversion.  Be warned;  according to most reviews, I'm in the minority on this.  The film is pretty much reviled.

Frederick Opines: MIDDLING

Halloween II (1981) (Movie Review)

HALLOWEEN II (1981)
Director:  Rick Rosenthal
Stars:  Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence, Lance Guest

Michael Myers seems to define himself as a killing machine, but occasionally he decides to grant certain potential victims mercy:  His sister's boyfriend in the first film; the old couple at the beginning of the second film;  Busta Rhymes.  It's difficult to get into the mind of a character who doesn't talk, but I've always wondered if there's any rhyme or reason to this.  Does he get some sadistic pleasure from randomly pardoning people, like Ralph Fiennes death camp officer from Schindler's List?  Or is he some metatextual monster, striking down only the most irritating "featured" characters in his films, while giving offshoot characters a pass?  If so, doesn't he realize that the characters in his universe live only to be terrorized by him?


Halloween II, a film released on Devil's Night 1981 but set on Halloween Night 1978, picks up the second after the first film leaves off.  Dr. Loomis has just filled Michael Myers with several holes, utilizing a gun that holds more bullets than you would think possible, sending him tumbling to the ground outside.  By the time Loomis makes it to the balcony, Myers is gone.  Dun dun dun!  At this point, we are clearly within the realm of the supernatural.  The chase is on, with Loomis pursuing Myers, and Myers pursuing poor Laurie Strode, who spends the rest of the movie either drugged up or hysterical.

As by-the-numbers sequels go, this is effectively well made.  It took some heat at the time of release for ratcheting up the gore factor, but it seems justified in the sense that a shadowy stalk and snatch repeat would seem boring after the previous film's intense climax (I just wanted to use "release", "snatch", and "climax" all in the same sentence, honestly).  There was a concentrated effort to make this feel like a companion piece to the first film, and it mostly works, despite having a new director (Though John Carpenter stayed on as writer, producer, and pick-up director), and a new Shape (I know it's just a dude in a mask, but he looks extremely different.  I think it has to do with how the mask fits him.).  Dean Cundey, critically, returns as the DP, and his shadowy steadicam shots add an eerie ambiance.  They keep the score from the original, though it's a synthesized version that doesn't work quite as well.

The twist involving Laurie's backstory feels like an afterthought, and could easily be removed without effecting the film at all.  I guess they just needed something to justify the story's existence, and to allow Loomis to suddenly be able to track Myers down.

It's admirable that this was also a slasher sequel that was making an earnest attempt to kill off it's franchise star, since they were hoping to turn the series into an anthology.  But, after the financial failure of Halloween III: Season Of The Witch, Michael Myers came back again. . .  and again. . .  and again. . .  Just goes to show that you have to give the people what they want, even if what they want gets extremely repetitive and diluted with each installment.

FUN FACT:  "Romantic lead" Lance Guest, who makes his theatrical debut in this movie, later went on to star in The Last Starfigher. . .  which was directed by the original actor to play Michael Myers, Nick Castle!

Frederick Opines:  GOOD

I bid you. . . welcome!

Hello, ladies and gentlemen!  I suppose an introduction is in order.  My name is Frederick Frog, and I'm the co-creator of Blunderbuss.  The website, not the weapon.  I'm pleased to see you, and hope to see you again many times over.

What is Blunderbuss?  Well, all sorts of things.  We love movies.  We love video games.  We love music.  Fairly standard blogging material, to be sure.  But we also have an interest in classic literature.  Quantum physics.  The love life of Mongolian warlords.  The eyebrows of the world's most famous dentists.  And the price of tea in China. . .  in the year 3007AD.

Look - I'm just a Frog with a blog.  Our kind has a a traditionally shaky relationship with humanity, dating back to the so called "Biblical Plagues" of Ancient Egypt (Really, we'd just heard that that's where all the flies and locusts were gonna be.  Honest!).  Since then there's been a lot of frog oppression, from the carcasses used in science class, to the restaurants using our legs as entrees.  Thankfully, high profile celebrities such as Kermit and Jabba the Hutt have helped to bridge the gap between our species.  We've got thoughts and opinions that we'd like you to hear. . .  and you may find out that they're not so different from your own.

Whatever we write about, be it politics or poetry, our main goal here is for it to be fun.  Even if it's about a subject you know inside and out, we hope to look at it from a new angle.  There are so many weird and wonderful things happening around us all the time.  Sometimes you just gotta stop and smell the swamp gas.