Netflix understands me

Today Netflix told me that, based on my movie ratings, they had created a special category for recomendations for me.

GORY VIRAL PLAGUE HORROR MOVIES

That's right.

when college professors write horror

I remember reading Stephen King's"The Stand" when it first came out and thinking, "This is a great plot. If only there were some characters this would be a great book."

Now Justin Cronin has written that great book. And its the first of a trilogy! With characters, dialogue, a vibrant imagined society, very scary monsters - everything you could want in a good novel. An entire vividly imagined world. This is wonderful.

It doesn't look like Kim Paffenroth is going to make millions of dollars with "Valley of the Dead" but it is a strange and lovely zombie tail. He re-imagines Dante as a survivor of a zombie apocalypse, journeying through circles of zombie hells. The result is moving and elegant.

Now that I think of it, real writers and academics have everything they need to produce superior horror. Anyone versed in the Bible, Herman Melville, The Illiad and the Odyssey, and Shakespeare already has all the horror tropes. And the skills to make them come alive.

This is a wonderful trend and I hope to see a lot more of it.

Incubus

I lost track of TCM underground for a while. In Alaska it appeared at a reasonable hour, while here in the good old eastern time zone it really is the middle of the night. But I have mastered the DVR and just watched this really strange movie.

Leslie Stevens directed this in 1965 right after Twilight Zone was cancelled. A very young William Shatner has the same trouble with evil young blonds that Captain Kirk would have later.

And this is the only movie ever made in Esperanto. Now that is a strange idea. It does give the whole muddled mess an other-worldly quality.

A great genre book - but which genre?

Sleepless straddles hard-boiled, noir, sci fi, and horror effortlessly. A prion disease that resembles fatal familial insomnia has spread around the world. There are parallel stories of a Hank Reacher like character and an all-too-human young cop trying to make some progress against the inevitable.

A great book, and once again the epidemiology is flawless.

I already know Huston as a great novelist with an amazing range - all of it dark. I was least impressed with his vampire novels, although "Half the Blood in Brooklyn" is a great title. This book was thrilling and I can't wait to read what comes next.

REC 2 is coming!

http://www.rec2themovie.com/

Can't wait. I saw "Quarantine" first. (I see all movies with "quarantine" in the title. ) I loved the pacing. The movie starts so slowly and accelerates almost unnoticed at first, then hysterically until the viewer can hardly breathe. I immediately rented the original Spanish REC and it was even better. The subtitles disappeared halfway through the film - they were totally superfluous as the story pounded along.

Like most contemporary movies, the technical details were perfect. Were filmmakers sitting in on all those bioterrorism and emergency management classes I took?

VOD June 4th.

100% medically accurate

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this elegant and repulsive movie is that there will be a sequel!

And it is elegant, even beautiful. The most disturbing images are lurid paintings of conjoined twins, a snapshot of dogs, simple diagrams on an overhead projector, and surgical markers on human skin. And Dieter Laser's extraordinary face, his tailored lab coat, his beautiful house with its clean lines, white walls, and gleaming tile floors.

The mid portion of the film is genuinely scary. What is more frightening than being restrained in a hospital bed while people do inexplicable things to you? I've seen it done!

The centipede leaves only the male with a voice (which he uses to great effect) and a will. He and the doctor play out dominance/submission scripts while the women are reduced to moans and sobs. If this had occurred earlier in the film I would have turned it off and gone back to bed.

I wondered, until the last scenes, whether this really was a horror film. "Its only a European art film", I told myself. We have a mad scientist, pretty and boring female victims, a spectacular setting that is the inverse of the traditional haunted house. And, at the end, the most horrific version of the "final girl" imaginable.

Not for children, not even suitable for 14 year old boys.

And we'll have to see a sequel before the end of the year!

Do I want to see this movie?

Normally, the thought of a Dutch indie horror film alone would be enough to get me to push the pay per view button. And its a "demented surgeon" movie, too. (The only more attractive possibility is a partially devoured demented surgeon).

Daniel Engber in Slate gives "Human Centipede" a remarkably luke warm endorsement, "This film has less nauseous gore than you'd find in many mainstream American horror movies".http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/browbeat/archive/2010/04/30/the-human-centipede-s-delicate-touch.asp

And there is a guide to watching the movie without vomiting

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/04/vultures_guide_to_watching_the.html

All this was appealing, but then I watched the trailer and it scared me.

Now it is not really true that I will watch anything. I couldn't get through "Hostel", although I loved the "Saw" movies. And if there is such a thing as torture porn I am not sure I know it when I see it.

But there is good gore and bad gore. Bad gore is a scene in "Zombies of Mass Destruction" where the bad guy nails a young woman's foot to the floor. I saw the wretched movie about a month ago and can't remember who the bad guy was. I never cared enough to know who the semi-naked victim was or how she got there. Eventually the nail was pulled out - another wince - and nothing that advanced the stupid plot. Maybe not torture porn, but certainly crap. Boring, yeechy crap.

In the "Crazies", the hero's hand is impaled on the floor with a knife as he is fighting for his life.

He pulls the knife from the floor and uses the point that protrudes from his hand to kill one of the infected women who is about to kill someone. Blood all over and a gasp - does this blood in his wound infect him and doom him? Pause for a beat, then he (and we) remember that the infectious agent is transmitted by the airborne route. A small detail that makes this modest movie brilliant. Same gore, different effect.

So I'll think about "Centipede" for another day. I think the appeal of the Dutch indie will win out. Besides, I'm a grownup. Even if I have paid for the movie I know how to turn it off if necessary.

And the trailer is always the scariest part anyway.

a long story about why my car is covered with bird poop

On Easter morning we did the traditional zombie-movie-with-the nephews thing to see the remake of Crazies.

For years now brother Daniel has been telling me that Crazies (1973) was Romero's finest non Living Dead movie. I told him he was, well, crazy, because the best non Living Dead movie was Martin (1977).

I was not only wrong, I was confused. I must have fallen asleep in front of the TV or something, because I had confused Crazies with an an Italian movie of about the same time and the same plot.

The new Crazies was so intelligently and carefully made, so scrupulous about little details and so genuinely scary that I had to go back to the original. It was pretty good and maybe Daniel was right. Of course in '73, the threat of our own government was more pointed and plausible than it is right now. I was surprised and touched to see a horror movie drift into a re-enactment of Kent State in the lovely Ohio spring.

The 2010 version is remarkably accurate about epidemiology as well as bioterrorism and emergency management principles (in real life I know about these things). There was one scene where the hero killed one of the zombies/infecteds in a way that exposed him to her blood and gave me shudders. Then I realized (and our hero remembered) that we had established that transmission was airborne. So the very bloody scene was disturbing but not lethal - a nice touch of realistic detail.

Oh, the poop on the car. Well, first it is parked under a massive oak tree inhabited by mockingbirds, doves, and at least one parrot. But I can't go to the carwash by myself since Crazies had a novel and frightening attack that took place in a car wash. Faces appearing in the soapy windows and hands reaching through the spongy strips...

Survival of the Dead: Rating 2/5 partially devoured corpses

I managed to handle the "available on-line only" by myself. But I was disappointed in this movie.

If this hadn't been a Romero movie, I would have shut it down (despite the $10 rental fee) and gone to bed. And I would have missed some great moments in a mediocre film.

The first scenes link this neatly to "Diary" as a minor character from that movie becomes the center of this one. Things quickly go terribly wrong as we learn that an island off Delaware is populated by people with Irish names and uncertain accents who depend on horses like Amish farmers. This is a distracting conceit and the movie never entirely recovers.

A long standing family feud creates warring factions in the zombie apocalypse. The island is divided between the "shoot 'em now" and "we are family" factions. Neither side seems too secure in their plans for the uncertain future. The reservists wander around and suffer without much purpose. The pretty countryside looks like Canada.

Some very interesting themes emerge in this mess. As we saw in "Land of the Dead", zombies (at least some zombies) are learning and evolving. Some of the living are hoping and helping.

I wonder about this trend, which is now significant in so many of the zombie arts. Is this connected to the fact that the US is the only country in the world where most citizens don't believe in evolution and the teaching of basic science is suppressed? Is the very concept of evolution so transgressive that it has worked its way into the zombie narratives?

Way to go Zombies!

And (spoiler alert) the most shocking moments of this movie are zombies devouring non-human species.

Zombieville USA

New app on my iPhone. Of course I can't actually play it. Within seconds my head is eaten. I mastered pinball and Pong in my youth, but I might be too old for gaming.

Cody, of courser, was at level 16 in the time it took us to drive to the beach today.

Then things got scarier

Then things got really scary at a drive-in in Newark NJ in 1968. Lurid fires - industrial or arson - ringed the entire horizon and frogs screamed in the swamps. I was there with my parents, alone in the back seat. This is odd behavior for a 14 year old and I don't remember how it came about. We saw a boring feature called "Slaves".

We were getting ready to leave when something about the opening frames of the second feature caught my father's attention. He put the speaker back in the car window and announced that were staying to watch it.

Grainy black and white and a car on a lonely road. After the glossy and over-produced mainstream movie we had just seen, this was intriguing. The people looked weird, not like movie stars at all.

Then all hell broke loose. I screamed, pulled my jacket over my head, and peered out reluctantly from behind its curtain. "Maybe we should go," I said. My mother in the front seat said "Bernie, this is terrible. Let's go".

I don't think of my father as a movie lover, much less a horror fan. But he insisted and we stayed, terrified and amazed. The zombies eating guts, the trowel in the cellar. The ending - how could a movie end that way?

And everything changed. Imagine seeing "Night of the Living Dead" at midnight without any preparation whatsoever. No reviews, no trailer, no reports from friends. And watching that movie break every convention of the films I loved on Chiller Theatre.

I remembered that sensation when my fourteen year old cousin Cody and I settled in for video night a few weeks ago. Fourteen year old boys are the perfect companions for all horror movies. Cody is a unusually fine specimen with a keen interest in zombies. He had said to me, "You know, there is this guy named George Romero..." and I knew I had found a friend. I'm trying to take advantage of his enthusiasm - any day now he will be too busy or too cool to watch movies with me.

He had seen most of the Living Dead series, but not the original and not Diary. We watched them back to back - an experience I recommend. And in both movies I waited attentively for my favorite movie phrase - partially devoured.

What a good name for a blog.

And now Survival is here and I am trying to figure out how to access "video on demand". I might have to call Cody for help, And it won't be like that night long ago in New Jersey.

When did it start?

I think it all started with Zacherley in 1964. We had just encountered the wonder of cable television. In Horseheads NY (now there's a creepy name) we had TV all the way from New York City. Things we had never seen before, like the Clay Cole Show with a 17 year old Mick Jagger fronting the Stones.

Fascinating and alarming local news from places we had never seen.

But mostly there was Chiller Theatre, Zacherley, and the great old Universal horror films.

I think that was the begining, and the reason why a hard-working, responsible, aging woman with gray hair is still enraptured by monsters and slashers, vampires and zombies.

Especially zombies.