Tits and Gore

If ‘78 is often considered the Year of the Vietnam War Movie because of the box-office and awards-season battle between Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, it’s informative that there is comparatively little critical work involving Coming Home, whereas The Deer Hunter has graduated to the pantheon of the classics. And I am not the guy who is going to tell you that they are in the same league. But where The Deer Hunter excels by virtue of its epic storytelling, Coming Home takes a more intimate path, and it’s an ultimately rewarding journey.

Of course, Coming Home is a very different examination of Vietnam compared to The Deer Hunter. It’s less a war movie than a post-mortem of a war movie, examining the casualties of war without ever putting the viewer in country. Surprisingly, it’s a film about relationships, and the ability (or inability) of veterans and their loved ones to communicate in the wake of the war. There’s an interesting, magnetic polarity at work; as Sally finds herself jaded by successive degrees as she comes to terms with the reality of the war, Luke is lifted out of the morass of post-war apathy and depression by Sally. Indeed, the film is most effective when it follows their uneasy intimacy to unexpected places. When Luke and Sally consummate their love, we are talked through the involved minutiae of have sex with a paraplegic man, which for me was the unquestioned emotional apex of the film. If anything, the difficulties begin here, since this moment of catharsis is only at the movie’s halfway point.

Where the film falters is in its extreme inconsistency of tone. There are quite a few moments of comic relief, but where one may succeed in easing the audience’s tension, the next may be simply jarring. The speed with which Sally seems to abandon her fervent love for Bob is also a bit difficult to swallow, the obvious physical attraction of Jon Voight over Bruce Dern notwithstanding. Why does she so spontaneously take up with an abusive disabled man immediately in the absence of her naive but much-loved husband? That Sally shows charity to a stranger from high school and not her husband despite the fact that both have been seriously wounded in battle (even if one is a physical disability and the other mental) seriously undermines the film’s message about America’s social responsibility for our veterans.

Still, Coming Home is amazingly complex in its portrayal of the variety of veteran experiences, and the three capital-letter Powerhouse Performances from Voight, Dern and Jane Fonda are unforgettable. The soundtrack is stunning, not simply because of its scope (Dylan, The Stones, The Beatles, Hendrix, Simon & Garfunkel) but because of the filmmakers’ ingenious use of these songs to heighten emotions and accent moments while shifting in and out of background and diagesis. There is a whole paper just waiting to be written about the use of music in this film! But I digress; my review grows long!

Though comparisons are inevitable, I left Coming Home with a hesitancy to hold it to the same standards as The Deer Hunter. Both are invaluable documents of wartime experience, and both feel uncomfortably urgent as the Iraq War extends off into infinity. Coming Home may have structural problems and a messy emotional arc, but it manages to stay on the rails and deliver an eloquent examination of the personal costs of war.

Honestly, I didn’t expect much from The Ruins. I didn’t expect to be scared or even freaked out. But there was something about this flick. Maybe it’s that the characters don’t really make any mistakes. Usually, in what Mike has coined “The Don’t Go On Vacation” flick, you have stupid Americans who ultimately possess no redeeming characteristics, and yeah, they get slaughtered, but it’s all in fun and you don’t really feel that bad for them. But this is amazingly different since these kids seem a lot like me on vacation. Maybe they’re a little impetuous, but really, I wouldn’t turn down the opportunity that they have. And sure, you’re a shitty American if you can’t habla a little Espanol on vacay to Spanish-speaking countries, but no one expects you to know Mayan.

It’s really like there are four tragic heroes. Each of the four main characters has some obvious tragic flaw, but they also each act fairly intelligently, at least for a horror flick. And the horror was Japanese-style creepy. The whole the-monster-is-inside you, near zombification of the characters, is perhaps the freakiest type of horror, and The Ruins pulls it off quite horrifically!

Oh, Jean Rollin… What does it even mean when I say that this is probably my favorite Rollin film? As with his contemporaries Joe D’Amato and Jess Franco, you don’t go into a Rollin film expecting excellence - you expect abstract, face-melting sleaze! If you are like me, you will struggle through vast fields of mediocrity from these directors in search of those few glorious moments of utter, mind-blowing transgression. But does Grapes of Death deliver? Cheesy, creative gore? Check! An endless parade of impressively-endowed nekkid wimmin? But of course!

Make no mistake, the camerawork is often impressive, utilizing natural light to the fullest. There is a series of amazing tableau shots and beautiful, surreal tracking sequences through the ruined French countryside. There are even a couple sincere shivers, such as the reverberating scream of a blind girl, Lucy, being dragged off to her death. But let me be honest - the real thrills are to be found in the utterly bizarre shock centerpieces! Sure, it’s a little creepy when Lucy’s screams echo through the burning French village; but get ready to drop a fucking load in your pants when she is subsequently crucified nude to a chateau door and decapitated by her boyfriend while he moans, “Luuuucy! I looooove you!” Then he makes out with the severed head. With tongue. Oh! Jean Rollin!

In the abstract, Grapes of Death is interesting if only because it holds the distinction of being the first French zombie film. Granted, I only know of one other French zombie movie, 2004’s They Came Back, but to me it’s fascinating that a film as epically weird as Grapes of Death came out the same year as Romero’s sublime Dawn of the Dead, the standard-bearer for this tiny, beloved sub-genre. True, Rollin’s antagonists seem more like really depressed people with leprosy than zombies, and there is no great philosophical or sociological corollary on display, but there are some fantastic set pieces that will certainly please the zombie aficionado in your life.

We went to see the remake of Halloween, and this is the first time I’ve seen the original. So yeah, I’m that person. I’m that sixteen-year-old who thinks Sheryl Crow wrote “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” From Mike’s extensive disclaimer (about how lots of techniques and style choices would seem trite because they are everywhere in horror films now, but this was the first), I was worried. But after watching for awhile, I really started to get into the time period and the style, and I think it’s one of the best horror flicks I’ve seen.

From the very start of the film, the highly voyeuristic camerawork, which intentionally fails to provide an “antecedent” or reference for the point of view, is not only jarring, but it also sets up the entire style of the remainder of the film. Ignorance provides the basis for the horror in this film. We don’t know why this young child turns homicidal on Halloween. We don’t know why he wears a mask. And lots of times, we don’t even know where he is.

Whereas the recent remake fills in some of these gaps in information, the original uses the simple idea of less is more to its advantage, creating a creepy mood by forcing viewers to fill in the blanks for themselves. I think many modern horror films could benefit from this technique.

Before viewing Coming Home, I expected it to be a political and social commentary on the Vietnam War. But Coming Home presents an array of problems with American life generally—not just with war. From marriage to patriotism, this flick uses emotion to drive its thesis: that Americans should do a better job of questioning reality.

The first is the idea of the perfect husband and wife. Characters (and presumably, Americans) seem to feel like a perfect marriage is both required and exhaustingly unattainable. Several times at the beginning of the film characters make reference to Sally Hyde as “the captain’s wife,” with an intonation of simultaneous envy and disgust. Luke Martin is particularly harsh toward Sally at the beginning of the movie, though toward the end he is a stalwart supporter of Sally, both in her independence and in her attempt to revitalize her relationship with her husband; he understands her situation and motivations. After the compelling sex scene between Sally and Luke, Sally reveals that Luke has just given her her first orgasm. This doesn’t speak well of the traditional American marriage at that time. A man paralyzed from the waist down gets a woman off the first time he’s with her; whereas, her fully-abled husband couldn’t provide that sort of intimacy in the decades that they had been together. It’s striking. It’s almost as if these people have to be broken (whether physically or emotionally) to let their guard down enough so that they really need pleasure and seek it out in the open and productive way that actually leads to comfort and, well, orgasm.

The marriage problem also translates to a problem of sexism, which leads also to a problem of masculine insecurity. Several times throughout the film, Sally and Bob talk about how Bob doesn’t want Sally to work. If Sally worked, Bob would feel like his masculinity, his motivation for being the perfect military man, would be negated. In the scene when Bob and Sally Hyde see each other for the first time since Bob is sent home, they relate in a very telling way by talking to each other through a chain-link fence, while walking toward the gate. Though they can see each other, there is a meshy barrier between them, preventing that previously discussed intimacy from being realized. Also, they are moving, like they’ve been moving through life. It’s like they’ve been so busy moving toward a goal, toward perfection, toward being a good couple, that they haven’t had a chance to just stop and BE together, to just touch each other and look at each other. Getting caught up in the idea of their life together has masked the sadness of the reality of their unfulfilling life together.

Coming Home also effortlessly takes on the problem of patriotism in the United States. There are seemingly endless references to the inhumanity of the American soldiers—of their turning people into “gooks” and ears used to make necklaces and heads on poles to intimidate the V.C. But all these images are less compelling than one of my favorite scenes in the film; it features a man reading his speech about “What July 4th Means to Me” in what seems like a voiceover while we watch group after group of crippled soldiers in wheelchairs interacting, playing games, just hanging out, trying to find joy in what remains of their lives. Is patriotism an end in itself? I feel like patriotism and religion fill the same hole in people’s lives, but it takes paralysis or death for a person to realize that the hole can’t really ever be filled. How does it help to believe in god and/or country when you’re dead or broken? It simply doesn’t.

Coming Home protests. It says, “Think about how your life really is, not about some ideal that’s ultimately unattainable, and even if attainable, unfulfilling.” I think it’s a pretty noble message.

I think this might be the first flick we’ve reviewed for the site so far that actually contains tits and gore in that fun filmic unit sort of way. And boy, the gore! Maybe it’s because these folks were French, and they can tolerate more gooey, stinky things than your average American, but this gore was so gross! I actually had to cover my eyes and turn away a couple of times, mostly due to severe gooeyness. The first instance of extreme gooeyness was the sad zombie dude on the train. His face was really leaky even at the beginning of the scene, but by the end, he was yanking off different pieces of his goo face, and it was just absolutely disgusting. This continued and just got more disgusting as the film played out.

Besides Grapes of Death being really gory in a pus-heavy sort of way, it’s also particularly creepier than your standard zombie movie because the zombies are so much more coherent than they usually are. Since they know what’s going on in these disturbing moments of clarity, yet still have the zombie’s intrinsic homicidal impulse, I almost felt guilty watching their blood-thirsty escapades. Or dirty. Yeah, I felt dirty watching the characters go after their relatives, while plaintively muttering, “Je t’aime, je t’aime” in their sad little zombie voices.

And speaking of dirty, many of the scenes in Grapes of Death reminded me more of porn than other zombie flicks. In particular, in the final scene where our protagonist finds out her boyfriend has been turned, the way the blood shoots and drips onto her face combined with the angle of the camera looks more like a cumshot than a tragic denouement. Interesting.

On an unrelated note, as a foodie, since thinking of France makes me immediately think of wine, I thought it was really funny and clever that the zombification delivery system was tainted wine. Cute.

In John Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York, a military-type badass with an eyepatch infiltrates a quarantined area on a political mission for a government he doesn’t (and shouldn’t!) trust. In Neil Marshall’s new picture Doomsday, a military-type badass with an eyepatch infiltrates a quarantined area on a political mission for a government she doesn’t (and shouldn’t!) trust. Throw in a healthy dash of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, a little 28 Days Later, and a weird curveball’s worth of Gladiator, and Marshall has created a monster - an amalgamation of other people’s genre triumphs (well, roll with me on Thunderdome) that somehow manages to be lumbering, dumb, and ready to throw a little girl into a lake.

The kicker of it is, Marshall is (was? will be again?) a fantastic director - I feel comfortable calling his first feature, Dog Soldiers, one of the best werewolf films of all time, and his 2005 picture The Descent is without question the best British (if not flat out best) horror film of the new millennium. But Doomsday is so unforgivably bad that, try though I might have to enjoy it, I couldn’t help but be crushed under the weight of its ample absurdity - and this is coming from me, whose academic focus is firmly rooted in exploitative trash.

It’s clear that Marshall is shooting for a Carpenter-style pulp-actioner, but he makes the fatal mistake of playing it utterly straight. Whereas Carpenter’s Escape movies, or for that matter They Live or Big Trouble in Little China, deliver serial-style thrills with a generous side-order of nudges and winks, Doomsday shambles on humorlessly, destroying what could have been enjoyable scenes with grim determination. And for a movie this insane, a movie that asks so much from its audience, levity should be essential.

Doomsday doesn’t just jump the shark. It jumps the shark, then finds the shark’s mom and fucks her up the ass for half an hour. In a film full of silly mini-premises that run from clever to barely-tolerable, you will eventually experience what will henceforth be known as The Twist, capital letters, a “surprise” so fucking unbearably stupid that it defies all defense. It is not an overstatement to suggest that I was desperate for this movie to end.

Right before we hit The Twist, Adrian Lester (whom I resolve to still like despite his role in this catastrophe) prophetically throws his hands up and says, “Fuck it!” I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the film’s motto, if it was embroidered on the wrap jackets of the cast and crew. If you want to see what Marshall can do, pick up The Descent and prepare to be blown away; should you find yourself eyeing Doomsday, even out of sheer curiosity, I urge you to follow Lester’s example, and fuck it.

What I experienced tonight was truly amazing. Sure, Mike and I were both worried even before we decided to see it. We like Neil Marshall. We like Dog Soldiers. We really like The Descent. So, yeah, we were worried. It’s the same way pregnant women get excited but hope the kid’s not retarded or ugly.

For awhile everything was going fairly well. Not great. But not horribly. Things were rolling along in that not too uncomfortably scary way that The Descent started, and I was expecting Marshall, in M. Night Shyamalan-style, to replicate the format that had worked for him before—to twist it up a bit, pull out all the stops half way through, rock me to my core, and make me crap my pants a little. And then it happened. And I wanted to crap my pants, but for a different reason. Somehow, in some sort of ill-advised homage to Lord of the Rings, 28 Days Later, and Braveheart, Marshall instead, and unfortunately, delivered a mixture of Nothing But Trouble, Waterworld, and Queen of the Damned (remember? with Aaliyah? yeah…). Right, I’m embarrassed for Neil Marshall. And I feel a little cheated. Why, Neil Marshall, why did you do this to us?

Okay, so honestly, I’ve never been the biggest fan of action, and martial arts rank right up there at the top of the list of what I don’t enjoy. That being said, since meeting Mike, I’ve reevaluated lots of things—from winter to the idea of spawning—and action flicks couldn’t be that far behind!

So when we first started watching Drunken Master, it was really annoying, like a combination of the Three Stooges and Rush Hour. But it got better. The slapstickiness of the first half of the film was offset by actual humor in the second half. I can see how this flick has influenced lots of future action films, and I’m looking forward to seeing this influence as we finish with 1978 and head forward to the present!

I’m a Jackie Chan junkie, and so it was a pleasure to watch Drunken Master, the film that catapulted Jackie to stardom when it was released in Hong Kong in 1978. It takes the familiar martial arts story of Wong Fei Hung (a role also played by Jet Li during his early career in the Once Upon a Time in China movies) and turns it on its ear, making Wong a big fucking jackass who likes stealing food and groping women. It’s a pretty typical HK screwball comedy high concept, albeit translated onto a very atypical historical figure!

Druken Master definitely suffers from a weak first act, although there are some excellent fight sequences as the story develops. Even at this early stage in his career, you can see Jackie’s trademark, lyrically-choreographed kung fu and stuntwork taking shape. There are also some sincere, huge laughs, mostly once then-66-year-old Simon Yuen takes to the screen as Jackie’s titular drunken mentor. This was one of Yuen’s last roles, and you’ll have a hard time believing some of the acrobatic stunts he pulls off in his advanced years, although there are a few noticeable uses of a body double.

Like most fight films of the period, the plot is mostly an excuse to usher in the next kung fu exhibition. Thankfully the fighting is uniformly excellent (as well as the comedic training sequences, which show off Chan’s admirable physique), particularly the final battle, where Chan seamlessly utilizes eight different forms of drunken kung-fu to dispatch his foe. Of particular note is that this is also one of the few chances you will have to see Jackie consistently get the shit kicked out of him. His stunt falls are truly inspirational, with more spins and somersaults than you can imagine.

Though not one of my favorites, Drunken Master offers a welcome look at Jackie’s early development, featuring some great laughs and just about the most kung-fu per minute of any martial arts film you’ll ever watch! If you really want to get into the spirit, have some drinks handy for your screening; in the immortal words of Simon Yuen, “Power and wealth are to no avail - let only our drinking prevail!”