It's Only a Movie... It's Only a Movie

Which is the tagline for the film The Last House on the Left, of course. "But Christina," I hear you asking, "what about the job?" Well, I don't know yet. What you ought to be asking instead is, "Christina, what about the weenie-biting?" Oh, I'll tell you all about the weenie-biting. For one thing, it isn't there.

What's happening to this guy? Well, he's certainly not getting his penis bitten off.

The story goes something like this: two girls go out to score some pot and end up going to the wrong place. Four criminals (two guys, a girl, and a junkie in the original) kidnap them, steal their car, rape them, kill them, and leave them for dead out in the forest--the forest where one of the girls just happens to live. You know, on the last house on the left. The four criminals go to the house looking for shelter for the night. One of the girls manages to crawl back home where her parents find her body. The parents then take their revenge. The mother lures one outside with promises of oral sex. Then guess what happens.

Now, I'm not going to insist that the 1972 version of The Last House on the Left was socially-conscious, but after watching two girls get raped and murdered, yeah, it's kind of satisfying to see the rapist get emasculated. In the 2009 version, every part of the movie--the rape and the revenge--was scaled back a bit, which made the entire thing unnecessary and anti-climactic, much like every other horror movie remake this side of Rob Zombie's Halloween. The junkie was replaced by a troubled teen (that kid in Gladiator, I now realize), and there are other strategic changes as well. That's not to say it was terrible. It was actually pretty good, considering, and probably the best horror movie I've seen in a while (and there's been a lot of them). I'm not sure if that's sad on my part or the industry.

The castration scene, which was probably the most memorable scene of the original, was replaced by microwave death. It almost didn't happen, but when it did, it was magical. The placement and timing of the scene was what made it special. I can't imagine what critics had to say about it, and I don't really care. Horror movies are about people getting their heads exploded in microwaves and their hands chewed off by garbage disposals. The Last House on the Left doesn't forget that, at least--not like every PG-13 horror movie ever made. I'm looking at you, Haunting in Connecticut.

Fitting Pieces Together: Giallo, Zombies, and Job Hunting

For those of you that don't know, giallo refers to a type of Italian film, described by wikipedia as being "characterized by extended murder sequences featuring excessive bloodletting, stylish camerawork and unusual musical arrangements." These are typically crime/mystery dramas, although they have come to refer to thrillers and horror films. This week's Netflix selection features Dario Argento's Inferno, the second installment of his "Three Mothers" series: films focusing on the occult but are also somewhat mysterious in that you have to play spot-the-witch. This part of the series is vastly inferior to the first, Suspiria, but much better than The Mother of Tears, starring Asia Argento's terrible Italian accent. Sitting here I can barely remember specific scenes of the movie, which either means I was dead at the time I watched it or it simply wasn't a memorable movie and as far as I can tell, I have a pulse, so it probably wasn't the former. I do remember a man who looked a lot like Billy Drago drowning a bag of cats in a shallow river, falling, and being eaten alive by rats. It happens to all of us.

No, this weekend has been dominated by zombies. First, I watched Night of the Living Dead (1990 version), which was directed by George A. Romero, then Return of the Living Dead, which was not. NotLD was followed by Dawn of the Dead and so on, while RotLD spawned two or three sequels of the same name. You've probably heard it said that people who are scared of zombies are afraid of people, and that's true if you look at movies like Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (though not technically a zombie movie because the people aren't dead; they're diseased) in which the zombies are juxtaposed with the living and there isn't much difference.

Pictured above: Your aunt Maude. Also: LIVE BRAINS!

This all culminated in American Zombie, a mockumentary that promises gore and doesn't deliver. It's real popular these days to make zombie comedies, even though it started with RotLD twenty years ago (1985). I understand the phenomenon; it's hard to do anything original with zombies with people like Romero around, but my patience is wearing thin. American Zombie was uninspired and very obviously playing off the zombies-are-just-like-us scenario. Unfortunately, they did it so well that the movie was actually boring. There was no zombie in this zombie movie.

Tomorrow, I will know whether or not I got the job at CCHD. The results will be published along with a review of Haunting in Connecticut, and surprise! it's not all terrible.

Chinese Movies Are Mostly Bad. Mostly.

Such is the thought running through my head. I mentioned earlier (to Tessie) that a lot of it is due to the lack of or subtle musical cues throughout most of the film, and the fact that most of them end with some kind of swelling, melodramatic number at the very end, usually after someone dies. Almost always someone dies, and I'm not feeling very compassionate today, so what some generous reviewer on Netflix called "the Chinese Brokeback Mountain" had little effect on me. I found myself reading the member reviews for I Know Who Killed Me instead, which is the Worst Movie I Have Ever Seen (including The Grudge, The Ring, and that one Halloween movie that wasn't about Michael Myers).

It's been a long time since I've seen a decent horror movie, really. Both the remake of Friday the 13th and My Bloody Valentine (IN 3-D!!) were pretty terrible. F13 pushed me over my tit-limit for the night (six nipples), and while MBV in 3-D!! had some good gory scenes, I gave the script more credit than it deserved. It pulled the old "this is so obvious that you won't guess the end because it's too obvious" trick. Kind of like the old Fear Street chapter-books by R.L. Stine. It's always the protagonist chick's crazy nerdy stalker.

The next movie on my list is The Last House on the Left. I have said many times that I only want to see if they left in the castration (penectomy?) scene where the mom bites the killer's weenie off. However, the trailer did show someone's head in a microwave, and God knows I haven't seen a good microwave death since Ghost in the Machine--over sixteen years ago. (You know the one--the serial killer dies during an MRI test when the machine is struck by lightning, trapping his soul forever in what the 90s thought of as "cyberspace." Somehow, the chick's address book [back when people had those] gets lost in there too, so the killer starts killing her friends through increasingly complicated methods by sneaking in through their electronic devices. Which, at the time, was limited mostly to dishwashers and other household appliances.)

But in any case, I hold very few hopes about The Last House on the Left. More as it develops.