by the pricking of my thumb, something bloggy this way comes

A character from John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness peers deep into this Halloween-themed blogpost...

October can be among the best of times for film fans and cineastes, but how's the busy wage-earner/student/cat burglar supposed to stay ahead of the genre curve? Never fear, yo - the Booth is here. Though money may be short, thankfully art is long, and we can help you stay scared in these waning days of the Halloween season with some of our personal horror and thriller faves.

Dex's picks

Creepshow (1982) - A George Romero-Stephen King collaboration from the early 1980s with a cast sent from fanboy-heaven (Ed Harris, Gaylen Ross, Leslie Nielsen, Adrienne Barbeau, Hal Holbrook, David Gale, E.G. Marshall, Tom Savini, and King himself, among others), Creepshow is a loving homage to E.C. Comics, ingeniously conceived, with a witty script from King at the height of his powers. I'm still at a loss as to why it still manages to be so woefully underrated, but I have to assume many horror fans were (and are) no doubt looking for something mind-blowing and intense, put off by the film's light touch - it's a shame, since vignettes three and four of Creepshow, "The Crate" and "They're Creeping Up on You" are among the best things Romero (or King) have ever done.

Safe (1995) - Todd Haynes brings his tale of suburban anomie and bodily dissociation filtered through ecological panic to a slow burn early...and lets it simmer..and...simmer. What will happen? Who knows! We've ruined the planet, we're all alone, we're all doomed, and nothing we do can save ourselves or our loved ones, no matter where we hide or how much money we spend. Happy Halloween!

Prince of Darkness (1987) - John Carpenter managed to make a perfect horror flick for Reagantime - Jesus is an alien, Satan's in a jar, and all around us, devil-possessed homeless and hot California winds - that managed to be stark, lean and far-out and trippy all at the same time, confounding critics and audiences. But next to The Thing (1982), this middle installment of John Carpenter's "Apocalypse Trilogy" remains one of his best pure horror films, something that's still unnerving to see 20 years on.


Joaquin's picks

Peeping Tom - Michael Powell - UK - 1960
Psycho made a bunch of money while Peeping Tom destroyed a director’s career. Equal to Hitchcock’s visual genius yet far more sophisticated in its depiction of homicidal pathology, Powell’s serial killer movie is less interested in toying with spectator/character identification and more interested in revealing cinema’s inherent fascination with sadistic voyeurism and murder. This is by far one of the creepiest films I’ve ever seen.

2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick - USA - 1968
Although this is obviously one of, if not the greatest science fiction movie of all time, I consider it one of the greatest horror films of all time. There’s something about mankind’s unwavering toil to “advance” itself back to a stage of infancy that I find enthralling and truly terrifying. Living inside a talking computer suspended in outer space is my idea of horror.

Thirteen - Catherine Hardwicke - USA - 2003
We live in a sick, sad and twisted nation and it’s all aimed at our female youth. If and when you have a daughter of your own, you will understand why I consider this a horror movie; it scared the bejesus out of me. Be afraid. Be very afraid of your little girl’s teenage years.


Patrick picks

Mother's Day - Total trash, and yet I can't stop renting it every few years after the initial seven or eight times I saw it back in the 80's. The short version: three college friends reunite for a camping trip in an ill-chosen stretch of woods populated by "Mother" and her two idiotic sons who she's trained since childhood to protect her from "Queenie," her beast-like sister who may or may not even exist. The women are kidnapped, brutalized, escape, and exact their revenge, following the classic exploitation formula. But performances, dialogue, and set design of Mother's house are so great (for me) that they rise above most of the competing objets d'trash from the era.

Nosferatu - 1979, the Herzog remake of the Murnau classic. Kinski is as classic as Schreck in the role and Bruno Ganz is way more intriguing. I also like that Herzog changes the end to keep the film in line with the absolute aura of dread that permeates the whole enterprise. See the original, sure, but this one's way more empty and filled with despair for my money.

Day of the Dead - Until the recent couple of Dead films, this was widely considered the worst of the series (maybe still is?). But I love it and have fond memories, partly because my friend and I snuck in to see it. Well, we didn't exactly sneak in, but we were 16 and the film was released without a rating, meaning that no one under 17 could go, period. So we went to Aurora Mall to see it, held our licenses about 6 feet away from the girl working the booth and she (kindly) let us in anyway, even though there's no possible way she could've made out our birthdates. For that I got to see a man torn in half, a group of unpleasant people screaming at each other for two hours, a muddled ending (a dream? not a dream?) and a totally hopeless and bleak vision of zombie apocalypse that in retrospect is quite apropos to the middle of the Reagan era. I love it. Love it love it love it.


Andrew's picks

All I have to say is this:

An American Werewolf in London is the greatest horror flick ever.

Ten recent reviews

Lilith -
Robert Rossen really had a way in his later films with portraying people with mental and emotional problems. Between this and The Hustler, there's a real interest in and affinity for women in serious distress, and he's got a stark visual aspect that corresponds to it. I don't know what the mental health care system was like at the time, but early on in the film it feels just out of wack that Beatty's character could just walk into the job like he does when it's clear that despite being a nice guy, he doesn't have the skills to really do the job. That's probably the chief failing of the film, but in telling his story it's a disbelief I just suspend to see how the story plays out, which is of course tragically and emotionally right on the money, if not 100% accurate in adhering to how things might work in reality (then again, maybe it was a case like his that brought about background checks). Anyway, a really interesting portrayal of people with deep-rooted problems and worth seeing again. Also makes me interested in checking out Rossen's ouevre as it develops from All the President's Men to this, despite the bad reviews abounding on IMDB.

Jamaica Inn -
Hitchcock not exactly in top form though I wouldn't place the blame on him for the film not quite working. In fact, I wouldn't even say the film doesn't work, just that it's not great and that it's not a typical Hitch film. Problems begin and end with the script, I think. We're not given a heroine (or hero) that we can really latch on to - you only like her because she stays strong in the face of some very effective and strongly played villains, from the brutish uncle Joss to the sinister gang leader Thomas to (especially) the utterly repuslive Sir Humphrey Pengallan (played with slavering relish by Charles Laughton). In this, it's not unlike a ton of films where our lead is stiff and wooden and the villains have all the color and remain the center of interest in the films. But it does tend to undercut the plight of our central characters - and thus our interest as viewers - when we don't care as much what happens to them as we care what dastardly things our villains might be up to. Enjoyable in spite of its flaws, I'm glad I wasn't scared off by the bad rep the film has because of it being sandwiched between two far more brilliant works.

Electra Glide in Blue -
A really captivating vision of the fallout of the 1960's and the conflict between the underground youth movement and the establishment, here represented by a few motorcycle cops and detectives caught up investigating the murder of a loner. Robert Blake plays the ambitious cop who comes across the body and wants to use it to springboard his career into homicide but he's checked at every side by his naivety, by an establishment that's far more rigid than he imagined, and by an underground that doesn't want him, no matter how sympathetic he may be to their ideals. It's like the film takes "the Man" and draws him from the point of view of the underground, while not really taking either side. Only Blake is a truly sympathetic character - his associates range from arrogant to mean-spirited to engaging in real abuses of power while the hippies and other normal folks he comes into contact with lie, steal, and murder or are simply crazy. Filmmaking is really stylistically dynamic, with one of the greatest closing sequences I've ever seen - major props to cinematographer Conrad Hall for his work here. It's a shame that James William Guercio never made another film - this is a remarkably strong and assured directorial debut, but I guess that managing the group Chicago just as they were taking off commercially (singer Peter Cetera is great here in a small role as a drug-dealing hippie) had to swallow up a lot of time and probably didn't allow for the rigors of filmmaking. Anyway, really interesting, especially in its immediately post-Woodstock (and more importantly, post-Altamont) look at the counter culture. Helps give a possible (and plausible) explanation to Peter Fonda's enigmatic "We blew it" from Easy Rider.

Memories of Murder -
What I enjoyed most about The Host is that it took a genre pic and took off from it in its own unique way, and this earlier (and better) film from director Joon-ho Bong does the same, upending conventions of the serial killer/police procedural film until it becomes something entirely different. As I've heard Zodiac does and as Spike Lee's Summer of Sam tangentially does, this concentrates not on suspenseful rendering of fact-based, scary murders but rather on how those murders affect those involved in the killings and a recreation of the atmosphere in which those killings happened. As that it's a masterpiece, showing us two provincial cops and their boss stymied by a puzzling rape/murder. They're later joined by a big city investigator in from Seoul who's more used to this type of crime but proves equally unable to solve the increasing number of murders. Things begin to unravel for the investigators as their efforts and those by the government (at the time a military dictatorship) fail to produce proof of an individual responsible for the crimes or to stop more from occurring. Really good stuff all around with tension, humor and drama taking about an equal amount of time in the spotlight.

Fort Apache -
One of the best of the Ford westerns I've seen and possibly the clearest view in his films of the tension stemming from the conflict between the "civilizing" frontiermen and the "savage" natives; or if you prefer, between the call of order and the call of chaos. Those who think that westerns are intrinsically racist would do well to start seeing the error of their ways here - at no point does the film (as opposed to certain characters within it) see Cochise as anything less than a leader worthy of great respect and at no point does it offer a full endorsement of Fonda's tactics - he's mainly portrayed as an arrogant and rigid interloper from the East who has no understanding of the subtleties of cultural interaction necessary for survival on the frontier. I've always liked the way that some directors of the classic Hollywood period use mainstream films to portray and undercut these sorts of social and cultural conflicts, and Ford (along with Hitchcock and Sirk) is one of the best at offering up a situation not to celebrate it, but to analyze and sometimes critique it. Lastly, the entire ensemble is brilliant, with Fonda's rigidly militaristic Lt. Thursday and John Wayne's Capt. York taking the top honors as complex people, but even the small side players giving their all and providing the realistic and illuminating details that make the characters feel real and giving you reason to sympathize with every one (even Fonda). A masterful work.

Encounters at the End of the World -
A friend I saw this with had complaints that this went for poetic moods rather than scientific analysis, but I have to wonder what he was expecting. After all, it is a film by Werner Herzog, very possibly the most quixotic romantic in film history. And here rather than seeking out scientific data about Antarctica he's looking for the "encounters" of the title, finding the kindred spirits who choose to live or work there and talk to them about what drew them there, what makes them tick. If there's a problem with the film for me, it's that he doesn't give them the space to let us meet them fully - cutting off one interview with a rudely abrupt "Her story goes on forever," for example. But it still paints a portrait of the type of person who - like Herzog himself - is drawn to Antarctica not to see cuddly penguins, but to find a way out of the perceived constraints of "normal" society. He also shows enough of Antarctica itself to give the viewer an understanding of why some of them choose to come to "the end of the world." Like most Herzog documentaries it's gorgeously made, it's impressionistic rather than building a strict argument, and I enjoyed it immensely.

Broken Blossoms -
Having only seen Griffith's massive spectacles, this came as something of a surprise with its intimate tenderness and sensitivity. Lillian Gish is fantastic, as is Richard Barthelmess. Story is a fine little tragic love story, and seeing this on the heels of The Bitter Tea of General Yen offers a nice comparison for an Asian/Caucasian love story and the slightly differing attitudes that 13 years makes in the way it can be portrayed (more openly in the latter, though no less tragically). More than anything this shows me the diversity that Griffith can bring to the table and brings his talent alive more than the historical lens I've always watched his other stuff through. Now it's time for me to start exploring his catalog more fully.

Sons of the Desert -
Something light and silly to take my mind off a shitty day at work. Laurel & Hardy are in good form here, with their slapstick working better for me than Laurel's perpetual misunderstanding of words but the situational comedy working perhaps best of all. As soon as the conventioneer they've grown chummy with gets on the phone I knew there was gonna be trouble and I love the way it played out. For that matter, as soon as they started planning out their trip to the convention I knew trouble would ensue and it came through about as humorously as I would hope. Good stuff.

Series 7 -
I wanted so much more from this than the promising idea ended up actually giving me that I was pretty disappointed. But when I take a step back I realize that it did offer up its premise and follow through with it, just that instead of watching some meta-narrative about a reality TV show as expected, I was watching a reality TV show. And I like Survivor a lot better. If this is a comment on anything in particular I must have missed it, but I think that it's more likely writer/director Daniel Minahan missed the part about putting it in the film, allowing the audience to simply extrapolate their own feelings about reality TV onto the film. Disappointing for a film that uses such a potentially rich premise.

La Notte -
Much ado about nothing, like most Antonioni I've seen. Two people who've been married for years find that they don't love each other anymore and Antonioni uses some expert camerawork, a great cast, and 122 minutes to express that (supposedly) shattering revelation. There is a way to express ennui and boredom in a film without making your audience bored and restless themselves. Maybe that's why the camerawork and cinematography are so good, because he knows that at the core, his film isn't saying very much? Lovely to look at, less so to listen to, and probably a tedious bore to discuss later.

the blog knight: war inc, poultrygeist, encounters at the end of the world

Democracy, whiskey, Marisa!

War, Inc. (2008) So-charming-it-hurts leading man John Cusack takes a stab at writing with this minor comedy about major issues - namely war, but ultimately about the bottom line and how corporations and keep it growing: Cusack - think that Say Anything guy, but one who excelled in foreign languages as well as kickboxing - is a killer-for-hire who's asked personally by a cheefully-disgraced former vice-president and corporate CEO (a cheeky Dick Cheney impersonation via Dan Ackyrod) to jet into a newly "liberated" Middle Eastern country to assure that its now-reticient president is offed, as this particular nation was invaded and occupied entirely by private companies, the first ever such effort in modern history, and it needs Cusack's expert touch to make it all work worthwhile for the powers that be. Going undercover as a trade show producer - to celebrate the nation's new and total embrace of the free market - Cusack falls for Marisa Tomei, a sexy, Naomi Klein-ish world-hopping journo who writes for The Nation, and of course it follows that the anti-hero begins to have the kind of doubts his company-provided therapist (who he communicates with through a speaker and blinking blue light) can't mitigate.

War, Inc. is too clever by far, almost like it was made by doctoral students who went to Prague for a summer to research comedy. There are some priceless exchanges - a flashback sequence to Cusack's CIA days with Ben Kingsley midway through the flick and a reoccurring joke about a group of jhiadis who crib shots for their beheading videos from fave European directors easily manages some of the laughs the movie had been earnestly reaching for throughout - but the script could've used a good debugging, and the direction just isn't cinematic. It's not that the film's agenda defeats the comedy, but with the kinds of big ideas that it's toying with, the stuff that's supposed to resemble satire's just too true, and it needed to go whole hog in the other direction, ala Blazing Saddles (1974).

It's still worth a gander, and I still had a good time: see, sometimes the secret to really enjoying a movie is how you watch it - Lynch's Inland Empire (2007) or Herzog's Fata Morgana (1969), for example, requires an act of surrender by an audience, to set aside the need to dominate and own the images they're seeing and just watch themseselves watch them. To be sure, War, Inc. is nowhere near as heavy (or rewarding) a moviegoing experience, but if you arrive expecting Dr. Strangelove, good money is that you'll probably be bored and disappointed; however, if you sit down to watch another summer superhero movie, you may enjoy yourself: with handsome Cusack's brooding eyes, white forelock, all-black wardrobe, and martial arts repertoire, it could be The Left-Wing Knight, or Batman by way of The President's Analyst (1967) (with a wink and a nod at Bananas(1971), shot and edited by the Lone Gunmen and scripted the kids who work at AK Press.

Poultrygeist (2006) - In fact, the kind of dopey, dirty, filthy comedy Poultrygeist revels in is what could've made War, Inc. a helluva lot more interesting: what's weirder is that a movie that's this smart and this funny came out of Tromaville, a mostly bleak little suburb of American horror that's more well-known for cool movie titles (Surf Nazis Must Die (1987), Class of Nuke'em High (1986), and The Toxic Avenger (1985) then anything resembling watchable movies.

While no one - and that's nobody, man, no ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or political leaning - comes out of this movie without an Indian burn or wedgie, Poultrygeist is clearly taking aim at the religion of the Fat American, and I simply can't think of another recent flick that's been as funny, or as smart, or as subversive, or had as savage an argument against our patterns of consumption than Poultrygeist - at least one that's got so many unwashed ass-cracks in it. After The Dark Knight (which, to be fair, I have not seen yet) and Encounters at the End of the World (see below), there may not be a better movie in theaters this summer.

Encounters at the End of the World (2007) - Werner Herzog's latest glorious documentary - maybe his best movie since Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) - defies whatever sort of analysis I can provide in this format: what words I can reach for just won't suffice here...the best I can do is to say that it's simply incredible. Incredible. One can only hope the end of civilization will be as sublime and poetic as Herzog allows in this movie.

Fitzcarraldo
Dir. Werner Herzog
1982
158 mins.

Fitzcarraldo has been near the top of my Must-See list for some time. I could never bring myself to watch it. This mainly had to do with the idea of a 2 ½ hour movie about building an opera house in the middle of the Amazon Jungle. Watching it seemed like it would be hard work, and I didn’t feel like working. I was surprised to find myself sucked into this man’s world and obsession.

Fitzcarraldo wants to build an Opera House in a small Peruvian town in the middle of the Amazon Jungle. To finance his dream he borrows money to buy a steamship to travel to an unclaimed territory of the jungle in an attempt to manufacture rubber from the trees that grow there. With the money from this operation, Fitzcarraldo will finally be able to make his dream come true. Over the course of his journey up the Amazon Fitzcarraldo will deal with inept crewmembers, the threat of savage Native Indians, and a nearly impossible feat. The movie’s centerpiece is stunning visually and in execution. In an attempt to cross from one side of the Amazon River to the other, the 340-ton steamship is hauled over a hill using ropes and pulleys and good ol’ manpower. Inch by inch, the ship makes its way up the steep incline as Herzog lets his camera linger on the massive undertaking. The sound of creaking floorboards and groaning steel add an element of suspense. This is outstanding filmmaking! What Fitzcarraldo finds on the other side of that hill is what’s most surprising. Herzog’s story of obsession results in a Buddhist parable – It’s not about the destination, but the journey.

Klaus Kinski is an absolute wonder to watch as the infatuated Fitzcarraldo. Herzog and Kinski’s relationship is legendary, but their’s ranks with the likes of Scorsese and DeNiro, and Capra and Stewart. They make an extraordinary team.

Herzog continues to crank out pictures about as often as Woody Allen or Michael Winterbottom. That’s good for us. Not every film he makes is great, but he’s still interested and he still loves film and it still shows. There’s a certain completeness about his movies – the audience is never left wanting. I look forward to catching up with other Kinski/Herzog titles I’ve mistaken as hard work.