Category: Movies

I’d never heard of Kwaidan (1965) before I checked it out this week. The DVD is released on the Criterion Collection so I knew it had to be nutritional, if not down right crunchy. It’s a pretty darned interesting film especially if you think that Japanese horror started with Ringu.

Kwaidan however, is an anthology, consisting of four separate stories all directed by Masaki Kobayashi, and as such it suffers the drawbacks of most anthology films. That is, at best it’s like a mini-film festival of short films and at worst they’re a bunch of unrelated stuff strung together. Kwaidan is more unified than many anthology films but it does feel really rather long. One suggestion that might sound heretical to cinema-snobs would be to watch each story separately, say, before watching another movie.

But Kwaidan works as a whole piece as well. Speaking personally, the stylistic unity was most effective. There is a gloriously theatrical sense to the movie; that is, it feels like it was mostly shot on a sound stage, one filled with meticulously constructed sets and folks in great costumes. For me, this sense of an artificial frame bolstered the “once upon a time” quality of the ghost stories. It’s a really different sensation than watching a lot of contemporary horror films that feel almost like documentaries and I found it quite refreshing.

I can’t say that Kwaidan is exactly scary but then I don’t find ANY ghost stories scary so much as sentimental. Better to say that it’s creepy and has many very nice, arresting images – exactly what I’d expect from a horror film on the Criterion Collection.

I’ve been contemplating my own list of high brow, low budget horror films recently and I stumbled upon this list by “the pop culture addict” which I think is really quite good. He and I might have a friendly disagreement about some titles, like the Chaney Wolfman and I’d have a few more title to add I think, like… well, I’ll just save those for MY list.

http://www.popcultureaddict.com/movies/horror.htm

Yours truly, the Grim Gnome, doesn’t get out to many movies in the theatre whether due to laziness, stinginess or perhaps because the foul odor of toadstool flatulence I have makes the box-office drones think twice before they sell me a ticket. But I did recently take in a late night screening of “The Host,” that Korean monster movie that everyone is raving about.

To avoid disappointment, remember “The Host” is a monster movie not exactly a horror movie. Don’t expect much sickening revulsion – though my stomach did sort of turn when the character ate a can of some sort of snail-like delicacy. And in another scene a human skull drops to the floor with a very satisfying “kellop.” So though it’s Korean, “The Host” is not Asian extreme by any stretch.

And don’t get too distracted by the questionable causes that give rise to the monster. Or why no one really noticed it until it grew so gosh-darned big. Or what it ate, say, the week BEFORE it made its first attack… Those kinds of things never matter much. I’m not giving away much to say that Americans are responsible and we come off as rather amusingly obsessive, inept and beligerent by turns. In one scene, just outside of a high security military hospital American soldiers are surprised in the midst of an impromptu barbecue.

So what IS important in a monster movie like “The Host?” Maybe it’s how the monster threatens the main character. The main character of “The Host” is a ne’er-do-well father and, again I’m not giving away TOO much to say the monster steals his daughter. What is intriguing about “The Host,” as opposed to perhaps a more Hollywood-ish approach, is that the “hero” enlists the more-or-less reluctant help of his family during the rescue. The family-oriented/group-hero set-up doesn’t make “The Host” exactly an ensemble piece, nor does it feel very insightful to attribute it to a commonplace of Asian identity. Regardless, it felt fresh to see the various family members each confront their own flaw to confront the beast, far cooler than to see a solitary hero strap on whatever firepower is necessary and have a show-down with the beast. “The Host” makes me wonder what kind of monster movies could be made domestically if a less individualistic bias guided the narrative.

Whenever I see a “foreign” movie I am prepared not to understand all of the cultural codes that are at play. I suspect these hidden codes are why some aspects stay strange (I call this the “French-folks-love-Jerry-Lewis” phenomenon) while others just feel fresh. And some things go between the two. A couple scenes in “The Host” exhibit this transition deliciously, for instance, the scene when the family re-unites at a shrine for a younger member who is presumed dead. The histrionic mourning went from sentimental pathos, over the line into something that felt very alien and indescribable and then seamlessly into slapstick comedy. This wasn’t the only moment in the movie that I would like to watch again. Oddly, none of the scenes I want to re-view involve the monster.

OK so I feel obligated to MENTION the monster at least in a review of a monster movie. But let me get this off my hairy little chest first: I don’t like to see monsters and especially not computer generated ones. Take me back to the days of latex prosthetics, stop motion animation and over-acted reaction shots, not to mention virgin sacrifices, public executions and luxurious railway travel. Computer Generated Imaging — how shall I put this politely? — largely sucks. Granted, “The Blair Witch Project” tried to get away with too much but I really, really don’t mind seeing much more than shadows and footprints until the third act. Having said that, “The Host” is a pretty cool design with an excellent mode of locomotion on the supports of the bridge. And the first appearance of the critter is a rather lengthy, full-sun scene which, I have to say honestly, I didn’t mind very much — which is probably saying a lot right there.

Not that you should give two pickled crickets about my opinion, but I didn’t exactly “love” “The Host,” not as much as I was lead to think I might but I did like it quite a bit. And I’ll probably watch it again when it’s out on DVD. You might want to as well.

I’m basicially a child of the late 60’s/early 70’s at least that is the period where I came to consciousness. My earliest date-able memories were the riots in Detroit. I remember watching the Viet Nam war on TV while we ate dinner every night. The latest fad seemed to alternate among hijackings, assassinations and bombings.

I think.

I was a kid and grown-ups like to keep kids in the dark about a lot of things in the hopes kids won’t worry. But the lack of straight information was maddening. I remember watching “Helter Skelter” when it first aired in 1976. I was 13 and I remember having to change the channel whenever my mom came in the room so she wouldn’t know what I was watching. Needless to say, that didn’t make for a satisfying viewing experience and to this day there are parts of the whole Manson case I don’t know let alone understand.

That’s why it’s been really refreshing for me to see a couple documentaries about real-life terror in recent months, namely “The Weather Underground (2003)” and “Guerrilla: the Taking of Patricia Hearst (2004)” I remember sketchy details about both the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army from back in the day. In fact, when Patty Hearst was kidnapped I remembered being grateful that I was the son of a schoolteacher and not that of a plutocratic publisher since I would not make a likely kidnap victim. A couple years later, though, a girl who lived a few blocks away was abducted, raped and murdered. So much for my theory of security through lack of notoriety…

The two movies beg for comparison. Both do a good job of describing some of aspects of American society at the time, at least the aspects that spurred the extreme radicalism of certain groups. The Weatherman movie, I think does a better job of tracing how progressive ideals can splinter off piece by piece into more and more extreme forms of radicalism. By contrast, something that seems evident in the opening minutes of the Patty Hearst movie is that the SLA start off seriously crazy. Granted they develop out of a group that visits prisoners which is all things being equal a laudable task but the SLA’s first public act is to murder a black school official. By contrast, the Weathermen interviewed assert that their attacks were always calculated to destroy property and not people… though I don’t know enough about the facts to know if this was actually true. I tried to explain the Weathermen movie to an older friend of mine, one who was a hippy… heck, he probably STILL could be considered a bit of a hippy and his initial response was to cut me off mid-sentence “The Weathermen? Those murderers?” The Weathermen interviews certainly got a little coy when discussing the bank robberies that funded their operations during the group’s later stages. Both groups at least seem relatively effective at spreading terror whether it advanced a discernible political agenda or not.

It should be obvious by now that my interest in the radical terrorists of a by-gone era isn’t very serious. I haven’t read any books on the subject. I haven’t even looked up the key players on wikipedia (except to find the dates for the TV movie “Helter Skelter”) I haven’t looked very hard because I really don’t think I’m going to find the answer to what I really want to know which is why would it ever occur to anyone to try to motivate change, especially progressive change through fear?