Through the Woodsman: DOG SOLDIERS, THE FINAL TERROR, WITHOUT WARNING, THE HALLOW

The woods --alternately uncanny and familiar--are a 'free' way to draw value from trees that's less damaging than clear-cutting. Shit in the woods = archaic. Lost in the woods = easy to happen. Conclusion: shit in the woods and if only the bears hear it, you know you're fucked. I got lost once in the heart of NYC, just trying to get across the upper wild swaths of Central Park one lonesome afternoon. If you've been up there in the wilds of the Northern sections you know how creepy and forlorn it can get and how fast; I wound up going in a big ass circle for a full hour. Nothing more heartbreaking than walking ever more quickly with a mild panic generating in your stomach only to find you're right back where you started, still no one in sight to ask for help or direction, just some snooty squirrel that stands there staring, mocking you.

Blair Witch Project is still the high benchmark for that kind of unease. Those kids might have literally been a mere half mile from a highway and never known it. Once we lose our orientation in amidst the deep woods, it doesn't matter if civilization is right around the next hill or a hundred miles away; we're on our own.

DOG SOLDIERS

(2002) Dir. Neil Marshall

***

You think it's easy to be a straight male, age 11-55, when it comes to movies, TV, and commercials? Watching a movie on Syfy like Underworld: Awakening for the 100th time, and still not liking it, but sticking with it because it quenches some weird fanboy desire for monsters, sexy pale skin brunettes, violence, and car crashes (a need catered to with pandering directness, punctuated with bro-demo-angling commercials for fantasy football gambling sites, and chips flavored to taste like bacon). Kate Beckinsale, all smokin' crystal blue eyes, in a skin tight leather catsuit wielding twin .45 automatics: it's all for us, SMs age 14-55: for our stunted adolescent minds.  No matter how much our higher self sighs in disdain, we can't resist.

Hoping to galvanize rather than indulge, director Neil Marshall's 2002 debut is a Hawksian, darkly comic male group camaraderie version of his better-known female camaraderie DESCENT (2003). It's a gory, playfully macho, riveting, terse, gory, slightly cheeky 'werewolves vs. British infantry squad on maneuvers' sort of SOUTHERN COMFORT meets the initial 'moors' sequence of AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON sort of thing. Like THE DESCENT, it ends with an all-out balls-to-the-wall brawl, dwindling down the numbers on both sides until only the true toughies remain. While they last, the cast is tops, especially the cool-in-a-crisis, Max von Sydow-esque Pvt. Cooper (Kevin McKidd) and the bullet-headed badass Sgt. Harry Wells (Sean Pertwee, a kind of Michael Caine, Jason Statham, and Bob Hoskins bolted together with oily lug nuts). Their manly rapport and gives the film an adrenalin savagery-switchpoint boost. Hawksians wit, esprit de corps and armament savvy ("three-round bursts!") provides an outside-the-box form of survivalist enlightenment that overflows the boundaries of both the werewolf and survival-behind-the-lines genre parameters. Some choice dialogue worthy of Leigh Bracket ("I hope I give you the shits, you wimp!") flows in natural, overlapping style (clearly the result of diligent training and rehearsing as an ensemble). There's even a Hawksian woman (Emma Cleasby - top)--a local who takes the boys to the rustic soon-besieged cabin--who'd be right at home in THE DESCENT and it's great to see a strong woman rescue a squad of men rather than the reverse.

Mark Thomas's orchestral theme is mostly good though gets a little to bouncy for horror and at times seems remarkably similar David Julyan's in THE DESCENT... Marshall clearly needs to hear all the great retro-analog synth stuff being done these days, they would have helped, his nonetheless underrated and very Carpenterian DOOMSDAY). The special effects are first rate, creating a blackly comic Howling-esque body horror element without sacrificing terse vivid something-at-stake realness;  and the thick old growth of mountainous Luxembourg (filling in for Northern Scotland) makes ideal territory for such isolated do-or-die standing, and Marshall's gritty 16mm camera swoops around capturing events with an intriguing if washed-out low-light immediacy that evokes early films by Cronenberg, Stanley, Craven, Raimi, Barker, and Romero, and compares well against all of them. Final note: considering the shoddy treatment of dogs in horror films, I thought I should mention that the shifty MI-6 guy (Liam Cunningham) who tries to make Cooper shoot a dog to toughen him up in the intro (and kicks Cooper out of his elite squad when he won't) gets his canine comeuppance, so don't let that moment throw you.

WITHOUT WARNING

(1980) Dir. Graydon Clark

**1/2

There's a few things we need to get straight right now: I know this post is collecting cool woodsy horror flicks, and no one loves scary woods in movies more than me. But honey, this film's woods--supposedly dark and deep and perfect for hunters--looks like the scrub where all the cheap LA cop shows film bodies being dumped and cars pulling over to hand-off ransom money. There are almost no trees, just dry desert shrubbery, yet these woods hold not only bivouacking cub scouts led by a Patton-paraphrasing scoutmaster (Larry Storch), sets of necking teens, a greasy Cameron Mitchell using a very anachronistic blue collar Brooklyn goomba accent while trying to make a grouse-killer of his pacifist son, and a pre-Pedator alien who's been hunting the most dangerous game, using a nearby groundskeeper shed as his trophy room. If you watch Final Terror (reviewed below)--with its great old growth and beautiful stark photography--as I did, right before this, the thoroughly second-rate look of Without Warning can be a tough adjustment. Carpenter cameraman Dean Cundey knocks out a nice magic hour and the occasional Steadicam fleeing (and a funky bat shuriken POV), but couldn't they at least get a permit to shoot at Bronson Canyon like everybody else? And while David Caruso is one of the first-killed teens (during sex in a "lagoon" lower right), his death is mostly off camera! Why else are we here if not to see him die? Worse, the script includes enough strangely-emphatic anti-hunting oratory to count as passive-aggressive screed, even if the landscape looks like all it might yield is a stray golf ball or a shopping cart full of cans as far as game.

But hey, once-top drawer B-list stalwarts like Ralph Meeker, Jack Palance, Neville Brand and Martin Landau enter the story, via a Bodega Bay-ish bar of colorful drunks and eccentric locals, all of whom refuse to believe the outlandish story of our frantic college boy hero, well, things get quite tolerable, and so vividly rendered by Cundey's camera you can smell the blend of musty naugahyde, cigarettes and stale beer. And as much as the other older actors may be phoning it in or hamming it up (Landau especially is awful), Palance-as the big game hunting gas station herald who sees the chance to hunt the alien as a kind of two-way intergalactic Most Dangerous Game--is terrific. Palance never phoned it in or shouted it from across the street in his life, and here he's in his B-list element.

Thou shalt not suffer a ginger in a magic hour pond to live! 

But now to the one real liability (or strength depending on your frame of mind): the teenage male lead, Christopher S. Nelson, a kid who makes Zach Galligan seem like Humphrey Bogart by comparison. One can imagine an acting teacher showing this film as an example of "What Not to Do" in film acting. You can see the way he overthinks and sabotages himself time and again. Sometimes he'll fall into the swing of a scene almost by chance, helped along by the skill of the good actors around him--he'll just 'be' in the scene and not consciously trying to remember his lines---then you see the thought cross his eyes, oops, I forgot where I was! And with a sudden frenetic lurch he starts 'acting' again and you can feel the crew slap their heads and roll their eyes, and then just decide well, 45 takes are enough - we'll roll that one. Such spastic terribleness works when his character is supposed to be wildly unsteady, hysterical with fear, such as laughing maniacally when the windshield wipers knock off the monsters, or paralyzed by nervous confusion (and he does a good job in a scene spinning paranoid tales of world domination to stall paranoid psycho Landau) but everywhere else it seems more like he's auditioning for a student film or trying to make his acting teacher kill himself. He's very pretty though, and, I hate to say it, but Landau's performance is almost just as bad!

Hard to believe? See this film! And realize the way older character actors were valued in the late 70s-early 80s in ways they're not now. Once, nearly every old star could still get work for scale as expository landlords on TV movies or old timer sheriffs on cop shows, or barflies mouthing old timer-style exposition to frightened kids. As long as they weren't too proud--in Dinner at Eight parlance--to play the beachcomber, they were working. But where are they now, aside from dead?

Final girl Tarah Nutter rocks cute braids (above) but her character is such a useless cringing liberal you'll want to jab her with an NRA button 

Things really pick up in the last few reels, even if it never quite gets to its feet. The idea that Invasion of the Body Snatchers-meets-Red Dawn 'nam paranoia would turn Landau into a second threat ("Sarge, you are not in the army no more." shouts the barkeep) is pretty original, as far as it goes, so it's too bad the posters show off the alien right off the bat, squashing the big reveal. But hey, if you've seen Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster as many times as I have, you may appreciate the strength of Without Warning's destitute delusions. Many of my fellow writers saw it and loved it as kids in the early-early 80s on late-night cable (at a time where there often weren't even movie descriptions in the TV Guide, let alone spoiler-alert posters). I never saw Without Warning back then, but I can pretend.

If only I could pretend its canyon scrub was actual woods.

THE FINAL TERROR

(1983) Dir. Andrew Davis

**1/2

If, to savor WW's Corman-like deadpan self-aware humor and adherence to a beloved formula, you sometimes need to let go of any sense of atmosphere, coherence, or quality, it's just the opposite with The Final Terror. Andrew Davis (The Fugitive) not only directs, he does the cinematography, and very well, so there's a total harmony between atmosphere and actors one rarely sees outside, say, John Boorman. This is partly because Davis shipped his cast and crew up to Northern California's old growth forest for his film, and what could be too dark (especially in muddy VHS) or too washed out due to the canopy is--instead--just right on Blu-ray: gorgeous yet ominous, claustrophobic yet Wagnerianly vast.

It’s the tale of some young park rangers rafting downriver with their girlfriends and enjoying a week of freedom from parental restrictions (sleeping bag fornication unfettered) that--as might be inferred-- turns mighty terrifying as someone starts killing them off. A religiously uptight local boy-- played with the usual zest by a miscast Joe Pantoliano--is their chief suspect but, well, I can't spoil the events further except to note that the real message at work isn't the usual slasher covert return to conservative values (i.e. sex leaves you very vulnerable to attack, so return to repression) but the reverse, a realization that no uptight slasher can stand a chance against a crew of outdoorsy young people with some basic training (National Guard, ROTC) under their belt if they stick together.

In other words it's almost a a 'response' to the slasher craze rather than a part of that craze. It's certainly quieter. The cast is a-brim with both future stars (Rachel Ward, Daryl Hannah) and semi-familiar faces (Lewis "Perfect Tommy" Smith, and Mark "Is that a pledge pin? On your uniform?!!" Metcalf) but some unknown named John Friedrich steals the show after he avails himself of too many of the killers' psilocybe cubensis mushrooms and starts oscillating between being the group's military tactician savior and biggest liability (shades of Patton!). He'll evoke Harold Wayne Jones in The Crazies for you one minute, and the next you'll wish there were more guys like them in these kinds of movies, dudes who illustrate how he who protects you from outside evil can't save you from the evil of themselves.

I don’t want to give too much away, but you know that, queasy feminist that I am, if I can enjoy a film in this disreputable subgenre it’s only because there’s no sexual assaults, unnecessary cruelty, terrible gore effects, or shitty dialogue. Final Terror does not have those things... in spades. If it has little else either, hey, the old growth woods look literally dark and deep; the skulking killer's camouflage leaf jacket blends so well into the surrounding vegetation that it’s startling when a filthy hand emerges to smooth a sleeping girl's hair in the early dawn; Susan Justin’s weird piano and atonal synth score hits the right notes every scene... except one... and Daryl Hannah.

THE HALLOW

(2015) Dir Corin Hardy

***

Irish horror--drawing on their national arts funding, eerie emerald-colored landscape (often enhanced with green tints and filters), and dark Celtic folk tales--is on a roll these days and THE HALLOW is a worthy example. Bojana Novakovic and Joseph Mawle star as new parents moving into a woebegone house at the edge of a foreboding Irish forest and the ominous trouble starts the moment mom takes down the window bars. The locals tell the dad--a botanist intent on researching local tree blight--not to wander too deep off the path through the woods, and to take nothing he finds home with him. But he needs samples, and it looked like blight, so no woodland sprite might object to some tree blight being scraped off. But is it blight?

Not according to the legends.

But who believes auld legends these days? Only the spooked locals with their allegedly ignorant tradition. So the wife takes down the bars and charms from around the windows to let in what passes for sunshine in Ireland and dad finds, as you might imagine, some mighty strange black mold samples to bring home. That night they're besieged by an array of Irish faerie lore-originated spooky tricks, the worst of which is the swapping out human babies with weird changelings, raising the human kids in the woods (like the changeling in MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM so coveted by Oberon) and generating weird suspicion betwixt the couple, and tracking mold all over the walls and floor.

They told ye not to go into those damn woods, ya bómán! Ye auld Leathcheann! 

The feature debut of Corin Hardy. The Hallow is not quite the resounding announcement of 'I am here, I am now!' horror genius we got with Jennifer Kent's BABADOOK or Robert Egger's THE WITCH or David Robert Mitchell's IT FOLLOWS, but it's close enough, and the monsters are interesting fusions of trees, mold and people (like the 1951 THING coupled to the hyper-evolutionary mutation ability in the remake), and the idea of the changeling is very subtle and creepily represented, as Clare must decide if it's her infanticidal husband (mutating from woodland fairy venom infection) or the baby (which she dredged up from the bottom of the lake) who's still 'real.'

Despite semi-strange interludes toward the end (which decency forbids me to explain) everything is fairly believable and all fast moving in the kind of tight kinetic 'all in a single long late afternoon-through-to-dawn' (tick-tock) momentum. You might come away only mildly plussed when all's said and done but it's quite a ride. I didn't get up to refill my drink or have a slash once during the whole 90-minute running-time. The lighting is moody and the acting terrific - I mean Novakovic and Mawle are committed, and at times seem like--institutionally-speaking--they literally should be. They're more terrifying than the monsters crawling through their vents, and their veins, and vice versa.

And like all the films discussed here, the woods are a major element --psychologically and diegetically. Filmed with an ingenious palette of murky green colors seemingly culled from the depth of darkness, they've never looked so creepy and gorgeous. Best of all, there's no gibbering rapists, claustrophobic abductions or sadistic cruelty, all which I'm bloody sick of. I like my horror to be supernatural and trading on deep unconscious drives rather than brutal true crime torture porn. Our world is bad enough on its own! No wonder the trees want to leave.

But in Ireland, aye, the trees seem to be coming back... le bhfeice!

October Capsules: OCULUS, SHIVERS, DETENTION, HOWLING, MIMIC 2: HARDSHELL

OCULUS 

(2013)  Dir. Mike Flanagan
***1/2

A brother and sister reunite at the house where, as kids, they watched their dad and mom lose their shit, thanks to a haunted mirror. Now they've returned to the empty house to sort that mirror's shit right out. To prove it;s haunted, sister's got the whole joint wired for sound; cameras are set up and timers are set to keep the siblings from drifting out of reality, because the mirror has a habit of causing hallucinations, flashbacks, and homicidal insanity if there's no one or thing to jar you out of it.  The younger brother, having been in an institution ever since 'what happened' to them as kids, explains away the happenings as stress-born cover memories, to which his his sister says "they really did a number on you in there, didn't they?" And if nothing else, it's pretty awesome to hear rote psychiatric skepticism blasted open in such a direct and intelligent manner. With great creeping camerawork that services the slow-ride suspense instead of just the usual 'sudden' shocking and mickey mouse telgraphy, this is one spooky, cool film, the best since last year's THE CONJURING. Turns out you don't need a big empty hotel in Colorado to convey the ease with a sensitive family can dissolve into cabin fever psychoses, you just need a big spooky mirror that can distort reality. And when the children in the flashback even begin to notice their future selves watching them like ghosts from the future, and the horrific encounters in both past and present reach a fever peak, you know OCULUS is onto something genuinely new and creepy. Haunted house 'past crimes' have never seemed more immediate; the idea of four walls holding in psychic trauma and malevolent forces seems palpable, as if the image on a videocassette has left the tape, shimmied back along the spindle and is now and watching itself in reverse order.

Director Flanagan also avoids the whole 'hallucination-or-was-it?' schtick, delivering some pure monster moments along with the madness, effectively (and correctly) illuminating the futility of ever knowing what's real even when evil spirits aren't fucking with you. DR. WHO fans will appreciate seeing 'companion' Karen Gilan stars the older version and Annalise Baso as younger is harrowingly raw and viivd -her cute little redhead alien face and orange hair are perfectly lit and she could teach a master class on showing every step involved in channeling terror into adrenalin-spiked courage (you can feel every turn of her courage being screwed to a sticking place). Heartbreaking, exciting, and genuinely spooky all at once, OCULUS gave me a literal spine tingle. And it doesn't need a dram of cheap shocks or torture porn trauma to get there. Filmed, for some ignoble reason, in Alabama.

SHIVERS 
(1975) dir. David Cronenberg

***

This weird first Cronenberg feature hasn't been available on DVD for awhile, but it's been on both Netflix and Amazon streaming recently and mustn't be missed, despite its cheap, grimy look. Far more disturbing than an outbreak of flesh eating zombies (which are too abstract - very few people think about cannibalism all day at work), is a contagious parasite that delivers inhibition-shredding insanity that converts the infected almost instantly into lewd sex-crazed maniacs. It's like if someone spiked the water supply with incredibly high levels of MDMA so everyone who had even a sip went crazy and started rubbing up on every passing person, be they family members or complete strangers. Not just pretty people in their 20s-30s, but the elderly, 'normal' types, and even children, the bulk of the real world we see (and are seen) by every day.

It's not MDMA (or ecstasy) in this film - that drug didn't even exist in 1975-  but an ugly free-roaming parasite that looks like an uncircumcised kidney, created by a doctor who wanted to turn the world into one large orgy. Taking to heart that (beloved of Cronenberg) med school adage that sex is the invention of a very clever STD, this parasite pays off in flooding the host's brain with inhibition lowering / libido elevating / clothes shredding / wife alienating insanity. Since it's breeding by traveling between sexual partners and it has a whole vast modern Montreal apartment high-rise to roam around in (each with a mail slot on the door), people can bedroom hop around without ever stepping outside. The eventual habit of everyone to run up and down the narrow halls in a big groping pack, knocking on random doors and taking over and turning on those who answer the door, or coming onto strays down in the laundry room or the foyer, reminds me a lot of my when someone would show up with a bunch of acid, ecstasy (called 'x' in those days) or shrooms to sell in my old dorm of Flint Hall in Syracuse, circa 1985. One well-stocked visitor could reduce the whole building to a mass of writhing, breathing, groping arms and tentacles. With no one having a car, or even a parking spot, we could roam the vast hallways like it was all one big crazy open house, everyone's door open and different drugs or weird sites in each room. As we say in AA, I really related.

Spiked with livid, funny gross outs as the kidney things hop from mouth to-locked-in-willing-or-unwilling mouths, the film's a 'careful what you wish for' example of 70s singles swinging rather too successfully. It takes a minute to get started, but once the two doctors get on the scene, and Lynn Lowry shows up as the nurse (Lynn, you rock eternal!), and a thing crawls up Barbara Steele in the bathtub, well, things get great, I mean, Romero's CRAZIES-level great, which came out two years before SHIVERS and it's a film I think Cronenberg acknowledges as an inspiration by casting Lowry. Eventually the paltry budget and sometimes harsh lighting even work to the film's advantage: the performances are deceptively brilliant, more and more so as the circumscribed roles are shed to reveal the true chthonic uncivilized wild savages we all are generally only in our deepest subconscious. And Cronenberg really gets what it's like to be inside 'the hot zone' of an outbreak, where just getting to a phone across the hall can take hours as one interruption and calamity builds on the next. Eventually the paltry budget and harsh lights even work to the film's advantage, giving it a flat 16mm instructional film feel (it really should be shown in every high school health class - teen pregnancy would drop off to zero).

There's only a few familiar faces in the cast, but the two doctors (Paul Hampton and Joe Silver) are cool--you believe they really are doctors (and admire the way the Hampton just shoots people and beats them to death with a crowbar) and the scene were Steele and the emotionally overwhelmed wife (Susan Petrie) of the giant-lipped patient zero+1 (Allan Kolman -- a kind of a Sid Haig meets Jamie Gillis, i.e. perfect casting) hook up may curl your toes as it did mine. Other atrocities include incest, kids being led on leashes (a nod to that memorably disturbing shot in Go Ask Alice?), elevator groping, rapes, terrible catering, homosexuality, all sorts of crazy orgy scenes and an eventual indoor pool party that would shock Mae West. A real trendsetter, it made a lot of bread in the US under AIP as They Came From Within. And cinema as we know it would never be the same. If any film should be remade, and probably never will be, this is it. As Chris Rodley put it

"One experiences a tremulous sensation that suggests one might have reached the end of the unconscious. There it seems to be, thrown up on the screen in all its perverse and truly repulsive splendour, unmasked and unashamed." (40)

DETENTION

 (2011) Dir. Jospeh Kahn

***

Sharp wit and slashing rejoinders are not dead in this post-modern high school deconstruction comedy for the 'Twitter generation.' This hybrid of CLUELESS and SCREAM 2 proves itself the SCARY MOVIE for the smarter kids, zipping by in layers too fast for a single viewing (though in presuming repeat viewings it perhaps presumes too much). The presence of diminutive HUNGER GAMES "hunk" Josh Hutcherson should lure enough girls to at least give it a few hits, though, and tomboy Shanley Caswell is refreshingly wry as the 'second biggest loser at Grizzly High' with whom Josh has a long shared connection. But now she's upset that he's going out with the alpha hot chick Ione (Spencer Locke), angering her ex-boyfriend the big dumb jock Billy (Parker Bagley), who wants to fight Hutcherson but keeps erupting into FLY-like symptoms. See, he touched a meteorite as a child and spent most of his elementary school life with his hand in a television. You heard me!

I can see Godard and Antonioni loving this movie, especially the scene where the kids watch a bootleg copy of CINDERHELLA 4 while in detention to see how to survive their situation, resulting in the best screen-within-screen infinite chronosynclastic infindibulum meltdown since SPACEBALLS. Stunt casting includes Dane Cook as a dickhead principal and... no one else, but there's a time-traveling bear mascot and enough cheerleaders to make this a bizarro sister to the other semi-self aware Netflix high school horror comedy, Lucky McKee's ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE, and enough trans-dimensional portal usage to make it the callow tweaker cousin to JOHN DIES AT THE END. Writer/director Joseph Kahn's previous feature was 2004's TORQUE which I also liked a lot for its gonzo over-the-top deadpan in-on-its-own-joke dumb comic product tie-in momentum.

MIMIC 2: HARDSHELL
 (2001) Dir.  Jean de Segonzac
***

Most direct-to-video sequels aren't worth a damn, but here's one with a cute redheaded badass high school etymology teacher (Alix Koromzay) navigating treacherous urban streets and fending off insect suitors by using sewing scissors as mandible talons to rend their exoskeletons in twain. Koromzay clearly decided to treat this like A-list material and the result is a great example of a director and star using producer indifference to wiggle past the patriarchal groupthink that sinks so many sequels before they start. Instead, Koromzay goes all out in depicting a super strong woman still so sexy she has a whole coterie of devoted, smitten inner city students with whom to hole up in the high school while giant insect mimics hunt them and a cabal of governmental agents seal off the building with plastic tarps. So what if there's a smudge of direct-to-video sequel cheapness? It's the ideal third or fourth entry of any all-night horror binge, one where your defenses are down and your pheromones are at peak between-shower pungency.

THE HOWLING 

(1981) Director: Joe Dante
***1/2

For my money this is the best lycanthrope study since WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1934), the one with Henry Hull and Warner Oland fighting over a Tibetan flower, not the one with David Naughton arguing with a decomposing Griffin Dunne in a Piccadilly cinema. Maybe I just don't care much for werewolves that get hung up on the letter of the law, like Landis' AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, which came out the same year as HOWLING and there was much to-do in the press at the time about which make-up artist did the better transformation. Rick Baker is a genius, sure, but he and Landis makes Naughton's transformation unbearably agonizing, the moon inescapable, the beast itself a real wolf puppet on all fours--he takes it all way too literally. Joe Dante and Rob Bottin on the other hand know it's a goddamn metaphor so don't get hung up on the 'real' parameters. The HOWLING wolves move way beyond such hang ups, looming tall like monster gargoyles. Following in the shoes of Dante's patron saint, Roger Corman, HOWLING taps into the lupine side of 1970s sexual swinger and EST-ish energy, it's funny and scary and trashy and witty all at once, and then adds De Palma meta-refraction and audio mimesis procedural delirium, Carpenter ominousness, Cronenbergian clinical immediacy, and a plethora of great bit roles by folks like Dick Miller, John Sayles, Kenneth Tobey, Kevin McCarthy, John Carradine, Slim Pickens Forrest Ackerman, and Corman himself (below, waiting for the phone).

The story grabs you from the start: pre-E.T. Dee Wallace smoldering gamely as a TV reporter / newswoman heading off to interview a possible serial killer at a downtown SF adult book store while her crew monitors her every move worriedly from the warm safety of the station, or tries to--but then they lose her signal. Some bad shit goes down before it's over and she ends up with amnesia prompting a pop culture therapist (Patrick Macnee) to send her to 'the Colony,' his Northern California Pacific beachfront encounter group, where patients/residents make beach bonfires and grill lots of meat. A combination of sinister swinging couples and shady locals, including John Carradine howls at the moon and Elizabeth Brooks is a major smokin' badass as the wolf mother elemental nymphomaniac who comes onto Dee's mustachioed husband (Dennis Dugan) after he's separated from his hunting party. You may find yourself questioning your loyalty to the non-lycanthropic human race when she cooks Dugan's shot rabbit. Later they get it on by the bonfire, the powers of desire and orgasm shifting and churning their inner wolves while Dee Wallace nightmares it up alone in their cabin.

Lifelong Dante fans are born in these weird moments, especially once the entwined lovers switch to animation.

Like Cronenberg's films of the same era, the sex and the horror entwine in deep Jungian-Freudian knots, and as I said, these werewolves aren't running on all fours or just a guy with some fur --they're freaking big, vicious, unstoppable killers who can regrow limbs. They're more like "skin-walkers" than than the traditional full moon brand, and far more interesting, and even scarier despite LONDON's smoother snout grow and superior overall make-up (HOWLING uses one too many inflatable gas bags under cracked latex--perils of HD).  But instead of all the dated too-on-the-nose "Moon" pop songs, HOWLING rocks a great moody Pino Donaggio score, almost none of the usual trite 'dismissal of the supernatural as poppycock' stuff, and no sudden unsatisfying ending or Peter Grant-style dream sequences. Instead there's prodigious use of the gorgeous misty old growth forest, Northern California coastline, and great womanly rapport between Dee Wallace and fellow Colony guest Margie Impert (and in the city, Belinda Belaski as her producer/assistant), the kind of maturely sexy sisterly rapport that just doesn't seem to exist in movies anymore, not since Mary Tyler Moore ended... for all of us. 

And--despite LONDON igniting my then-crush on Jenny Agutter--HOWLING is sexier. Brooks is like the creepy older sister of GIA-era Angelina Jolie, proving that--in late 70s/early 80s horror films--(unprotected) monster sex with a genuinely creepy carnivorous wolf lady could still be guilt-free. And even E.T's future mom Wallace displays a great carnal immediacy that enhances rather than detracts from her courageous intellect, non-bitchy authority, and (unfortunately poodle-like) nose for news. If she had more roles like this in horror--not mothers but sexually experienced competent professionals of the 70s encounter group liberated vein--she'd be a genre favorite unrivaled. If only these types of films kept on being made, and the cultural zeitgeist that spawned them still in action. But life goes on, or facsimile thereof. Even now... for all of us. Cut to commercial. 

Twilo When I was Young: TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN Part I

"Sexuality is a murky realm of contradiction and ambivalence. It cannot always be understood by social models, which feminism, as an heir of nineteenth-century utilitarianism, insists on imposing on it... It cannot be "fixed" by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society." - Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae

"I can't help it / if you might think I am odd
If I say I'm not loving you for what you are
but for what you're not." -- Bob Dylan, "I'll Keep it with Mine"

 Haters love to dismiss the Twilight films, sight unseen, but they do so at their own peril. The New Sincerity, you can't escape it, any more than my parents' collective rattletrap beachfront condo can escape the wrath of 2012's rising tides. Will you be drowned in the pool of tweenage tears, or stand up and be counted, neck seared by the puncturing flames of angst along the water's edge? I have my answer. I am walking on air.

When I flew down to visit my mom and grieve my late father this weekend, pictures of all white jogging outfit-clad Kristen Stewart rubbing her flat white belly were all over the USA Todays and NY Times papers floating around the airport. In the rush of pressurized cabins and the endless boarding calls, these pictures took on an unheimliche aura that I found irresistible.  Then, watching ECLIPSE and NEW MOON on my mom's huge flat screen in our off-hours, I could appreciate the films' sublime mix of gorgeous scenery, operatic brooding, and mythic family dynamics. The latter in particular is so strong --the sense of belonging or wanting to be belong, or about to be initiated into a pack of cool older kids--and so central to any alienated youth fantasy's success you'd think it would be a regular feature of teen movies, but you'd be wrong, and that in itself shows what idiots most filmmakers are. Like overpaid hack Joe Ezterhaz's Catherine Trammel, who is given Lecter-like powers of manipulation thanks to her 'Bachelor's in Psychology', Mormon author Stephanie Meyers wins by default, because her fantasy world is genuinely Jungian, not Freudian, not smarmian, not dickheadian. It never snickers or leers, and even when confronted with a bunch of muscled Native American males, there's never a wolf call. Just as the douche bags and dillweeds never make it past the chicken wire fence of our psyches, so too is the Pacific Northwest of Meyers' imagination a perfect mirror of a genuine dreamworld. That it's a 15 year old girl's dreamworld and not mine matters not. In dreams we are all ageless, and gender is as flexible as set and setting, we all dream Tiresias. All that matters for true myth to function is that the chivalry of Camelot meet the wild woods of Hans Christen Andersen; that the nightmare projections of lonely girls making out with their tear-stained pillows in the dead of night sometimes come to life in white-as-a-sheet complexioned animae; that cool music by Bon Iver and Mazzy Star-studded chanteuses find ultimate visuals in the misty mountain hops of the Pacific NW.

As an older viewer I identify neither with the Edwards nor the Jacobs, but with the moldy old-growth forest bearing witness to their duels; the Merlin-Green Man bearing fathomlessly patient witness to the unfurling events from the vantage point of the fern camera. And since most straight guys in their 40s like me wouldn't give the Twilight films a viewing even if they were forced to on a plane, I take it as a duty to flaunt my championing, even as I question the 'rightness' of it. I'm not sure I'll ever actually pay to go see Breaking Dawn in the theater, but I salute its existence eventually on DVD rental. And when I'm old and enfeebled like T.S. Eliot I'll probably buy the complete set on blu-ray to watch all alone in long sittings when I'm emotionally disturbed and afraid to leave the house. But until then, come with me into my past writings on this great series. First, ECLIPSE:

"...the realization of modern myth requires teenagers to resonate, as all fairy tales involve the very young. Never forget that in the days of King Arthur, the oldest person–Merlin–was probably in his early 30s...  Considering the sexist neoconservative consumerism-product placed orgasm-oriented flicks that predominate so-called ‘women’s pictures’ or rom-coms, TWILIGHT alone understands the supernatural power that can be had in rejecting bland hand-me-down values. The pro-virginity aspect is the 21st century Antigone move, the way not being a virgin was in the 1920s. I know very well the way a woman you haven’t had sex with can inspire like no other muse, and the way a 100-year old lecher in a teen idol’s body can wreak merry havoc on pouty-lipped teenager brain stems, and I know these things to be true, and that as an artist or writer, that kind of inspiration should always trump the pitiful and misleading call of the proprietary orgasm. Edward knows it too…. sigh (Bright Lights, 1/11)

Then, on the first two films and the general 'concerned mom' backlash over the second film I wrote the feature length (for Bright Lights Film Journal)

"Eternal virginity via sacrifice in the Twilight-verse thus equals the preservation of youth, of sparing a beautiful creature the passage into the world of cruel, devouring nature. This is essentially what Edward works towards in refusing to punk Bella out to the vampire way of life, to prevent her from having any traumatic or otherwise significant experiences, to keep her isolated from "the real." Yet the imaginary level he exists in hinges on promises of danger, sex, and being turned into a vampire for it to hold any interest at all. For Edward to, in a sense, "exist" in Bella's life, she must stay virginal; the blood he drinks is supposedly from animals or something, but it's clear his spiritual power is derived from keeping Bella sustained in perpetual adolescence." - "Someone to Fight Over Me." (Bright Lights #68, May 2010)

I bring in this Neil Diamond song as 'Shilo' is an excellent anima example, Shilo as the Edward to Neil Diamond's Bella: "When no one else would come / Shilo, you always came."And of course, Twilo (left) was a once very popular, now closed, mostly gay but extremely hetero friendly all-night dance club - the place to go when the rest of New York was finally closed, and the pink dawn was breaking, and you were still too high on ecstasy and/or cocaine and/or acid and/or shrooms to consider going to sleep.

That breaking dawn vibe of your heart beating like mad at the thought of bedding one of the three girls still up with you and how to sneak away from the others, and where the hell your keys are but you're so high you don't care, that's what the Twilight films conjure up for me, that and the aching soul vibe that my mom's LP of Neil Diamond's 12 Greatest Hits gave me as a six year old in the 1970s, where Kate Jackson was my Shiloh, and she always came, after I had to go to sleep though (Charlie's Angels came on past my bedtime)

And, from 1/7/08 (The Beautiful and the Darned) after the first film came out:

"TWILIGHT it must be remembered, has nothing to do with "real" high school or "real" horror films - it's a fantasia of maturity deferment; a snapshot of how pregnant with dangerous, giddy possibility the world seems before one gets their first "bite." It's permanently frozen at the moment of rapture/rupture, right before the disillusionment of the first sexual experience (see also: THE VIRGIN SUICIDES) with a guy who promises you the world, then splits. The idea of an ageless vampire here becomes an excuse for the eternal virgin prepubescence; an eternity dwelling at the edge of the cliff that all your friends are now beginning to dive off of (and looking kind of busted when they resurface, if they ever do).

"Aren't movies primarily vehicles for escape? In the case of TWILIGHT, what the girl demographic is escaping from is their own wooden stake penetration, the pink dawn of the mighty crowing cock. Who can blame them? I remember my revulsion at seeing hairy 1970s nudist magazines being circulated in elementary school. Could people really be doing these things with their... ? It seemed unsanitary, violent and most of all, painfully humiliating. The giddy night of the prom starts out flowers and anticipation, it ends up pig's blood and Trip Fontaine splitting before you wake up in the wet grass of the football field.

"What eased the fear of this sullied maturation when I was of TWILIGHT age? Pamela Sue Martin as TV's NANCY DREW, Kate Jackson in CHARLIE'S ANGELS...much of TV at the time fostered a dependable sexlessness, the promise of an eternity of hand-holding and chaste confessions of love and adoration, as opposed to a humiliating orifice merger."

  Finally, from 1/20/09, Tortured Longing is the New Coke:

"TWILIGHT fuels the fire of sadomasochistic alchemy wherein torture becomes pleasure, denial becomes acceptance, submission becomes freedom. Through recognition and release of the associated fear, not having becomes having it all. The girls of TWILIGHT ween themselves off desire through recognition of its impossibility. They’ve been set free, like Jonathan Pryce at the end of BRAZIL, looking out at the clouds while one of his torturers (Michael Palin) sadly realizes, “he’s gotten away from us, Jack!” These TWILIGHT girls have gotten away from us, Jack. They’ve found a streak of neo-Victorian repression that leads them clear away from Big Brother and his sublimation dream wheel."

And PS - there's nothing gay about... THE IMMORTALS!