When crafting a modern day horror movie...especially one from the "Slasher" genre, the recipe is fairly simple; take a bunch of clueless but quirky characters of varying ages and set the stage for these characters to interact in a definitive location like a suburban neighborhood, a weekend resort or an abandoned amusement park. Mix into this group of archetypes a troop of daredevil, sex starved teens who are ready to take their clothes off at the drop of a hat and face the devil himself just to get their rocks off. Of course some of these characters will be concerned parents who've left the house for the weekend and others will be the aimless cops who are so inept that they are practically tripping over dead bodies. Oh and of course...you have to create an enigmatic killer. The proverbial "Slasher".
One could say that Alfred Hitchcock treated American cinema to its first bonafide "slasher" in the character of Norman Bates in the seminal motion picture, PSYCHO. But Anthony Perkins schizophrenic mama's boy was more of a twisted mental patient with cross dressing tendencies. I believe when maverick indie film maker John Carpenter first set out to create the chilling backstory for Halloween he had something more sinister in mind...something that would provide the horror/moviegoing audience with a dark mythology that would keep us preoccupied for years.
In the original film Halloween, we are introduced to an eight year old suburban child named Michael Meyers who decides one night after his teenage sister has just finished having sex in her bedroom with her boyfriend...that he will plunge a gleaming butcher into her back and her heaving bosom multiple times until she falls to the ground...lifeless. He does all of this while dressed as a circus clown. As he leaves the scene of the crime, his parents pull up to the family home shocked and awed at the vision of their precious son and a lingering clue of what horrors wait for them inside the house. Michael is taken at that point by a state facility and declared mentally insane. He spends the rest of his formative years being examined and questioned by psychiatrists...none of them come close to breaking through his eerie silence that he legendarily maintains throughout his tenure at the asylum. He encounters one doctor who seems to initially have pity for him, Dr. Loomis, but who also ultimately becomes convinced that Michael is pure evil and has to be contained in solitary confinement at all costs. Unfortunately, due to a series of doomed events...there is a security breach at the hospital Michael is being held at. A number of inmates escape the asylum with Michael among them. Of course for purposes of this very scary story...Michael decides to return to his native Haddonfield, Illinois where he will continue his unholy yet random killing spree... on Halloween Night. His seemingly indifferent selection for human destruction leads him down a street populated that evening by teenage baby sitters and their horny boyfriends. It is at this point that Michael Meyers begins his classic hack and slash through more meat than your local butcher with zero compunction. Although his fateful odyssey of death brings him to a final confrontation with a young lady named Laurie Strode...a resourceful young woman who manages to outwit, outlast and survive Michael's night-stalking home invasion giving a slightly unhinged Dr. Loomis time enough to fill Michael with a fusillade of bullets. Yes, the nerdy...unwanted...and painfully awkward Laurie Strode defeats the "boogeyman" at the conclusion of Halloween...but at what cost?
This new Halloween film goes on to address this very interesting question and a few others too. It goes without saying that the first Halloween movie went on to become the template for American Horror movies and the "Slasher" became the new breed of Hollywood monster. There would be many woeful sequels and copy cat franchises over the years but none that ever quite captured the original impact of Carpenter's Halloween. The new producers, Blumhouse, have decided to scrap all continuity established by the moribund stream of sequels, and have said this is meant to be a direct follow up to the original. As a Halloween purist...I am happy with this direction and it allowed me to free my mind from the cumulative nonsense that cramped the style of this A-1 franchise with each successive cash grabbing sequel. They should have named this Halloween 2018...Halloween: The Revenge of Laurie Strode. Make no mistake....this is a straight up "revenge" flick. So much so that I could almost imagine them including James Brown's The big Payback in one of the opening scenes where Jamie Lee Curtis as Strode is partaking in a little target practice with her shot gun. As I was watching I saw shades of previous Cameron heroines like Ripley and Sarah Connor but it was never a blatant cut and paste from either of those works. Laurie Strode is a full bodied character who is on a mission to reclaim her own sanity by fantasizing about killing the person who took it from her. This movie is distinctly its own thing and the premise that our sleek but aging heroine has suffered most of her life from PTSD because of a vicious encounter with a serial killer 40 years ago is brilliant.
Halloween 2018 is a unique animal in today's horror culture because of its star power. Jamie Lee Curtis, David Gordon Green and Danny Mcbride sound like an odd trio for a horror movie but are committed and passionate disciples of the franchise. Curtis' taut tripwire performance is the meat and potatoes of this film and when she is on screen, she is riveting. There are all the recognizable beats, devices, tropes, twists and cliches that make this genuinely a "slasher" flick but Curtis lifts its pedigree. The same can be said for the well balanced writing of Mcbride and Green's voyeuristic camera. This film is filled with professionals using their artistry to tweak those gimmicks and and devices we've seen a million times to great effect...with the result being a rousing horror film that is not perfect but flirts with grandeur.
The story this time around pits the battle hardened Strode against a newly agitated Meyers who apparently is one of the luckiest serial killers in modern history being that he escapes his high security facility every twenty years around the end of October. We get a chance to see how Strode's fractured psyche has alienated her from almost everyone who gives a damn about her and there's some depth to most of the family scenes. I found myself wishing that Strode's daughter and son-in-law would get an up close and personal meeting with The Shape (Michael Meyers) because they were being so insensitive about her lingering trauma...but they soon get a taste of what they claim she should "get over" and it was very satisfying. There are a few senseless plot devices and twists that could have been eliminated...The High School Halloween dance and the heir apparent to Dr. Loomis but I have suffered worse in lesser films. The good part about what I have divulged is that these disappointing story turns actually lead in to very scary scenes or sequences. One particular scene involves a young couple walking home from the Halloween party and they have the tremendous misfortune of running into Michael. The way this scene was shot and blocked will chill you to the bone...as will other scenes of violence and horror stealth. This flick is very satisfying when it comes to straight scares. Michael is back to being a presence again and not just a lumbering, brainless vacuum with a butcher knife. He is scary as hell in this movie...as he should be, after all...he's the reason we buy the tickets.
The humor in this film is tasteful and for the most part gels perfectly with the otherwise dark elements...it's a palette cleanser that permits you to catch your breath between the scary bits. One sequence in particular involves a little kid who is wiser and more resourceful than the teenager who's been tasked with being his sitter for the evening. I truly laughed and was terrified at the same time during this scene. This flick does run the gamut of emotions and sensations. The movie's endgame takes place in Laurie's secluded, fortified big game trap of a house.!!!SPOILER!!! It's a creepy and nail biting game of cat and mouse which winds up kind of concluding with a whimper but it's a solid ending with hopefully no chance of spawning a sequel...at least one that includes Michael Meyers.
Rest in peace, Michael Meyers. You scared us well.
Rating: FUN and SCARY! Enjoy the Halloween season, grab some popcorn and a date and go see this film. Don't think about it too deeply...it's a slasher movie!
Saturday, October 20, 2018
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
STEPHEN KING'S IT KNOWS WHAT SCARES YOU...
After seeing "IT" last week, I carefully considered Stephen King's vast archive of fear that he has compiled since I started reading. Pet Sematary is absolutely my favorite and the scariest book I've ever had the pleasure of being terrified by. Dead Zone was beautifully haunting and prophetic. Cujo was the most primal of all the King books for me and touched on my greatest fear, a rabid dog. The Shining is a brilliant reworking of Poe's Usher but in the end becomes its own thing. Salem's Lot visuals and the idea of a town overrun with vampires seems simple but is still incredibly unnerving. I've read plenty of King and can admit that sometimes he carries on too long about certain subjects, he can sometimes go off on lengthy tangents but at the core of all his tales is an idea...a single concept that provokes fear. He is uncannily in tune with his own fears. And he is good at articulating what those fears are. For instance, when I was a young buck...I insisted that the covers at the foot of my bed were securely tucked in before I fell asleep. Why did I feel this way, and an even better question is why do a lot of other people who I don't even know remember having the same feeling? I can clearly recall my thought was something lurking in the dark of my bedroom or beyond my sight line was going to reach up out of the void and drag its fetid talon across the bare bottoms of my feet. Ridiculous thought, right? But nonetheless its one that many of us had as children at bedtime. Being dragged by your feet by some amorphous creature out of your warm bed is a thought that Stephen King has long considered. As adults, we've learned that there are things waiting for us in life that are much more frightening than Dracula or The Creature from the Black Lagoon, but Stephen King's particular vocation is to remind us of those irrational fears our minds conjure in the middle of the night. This is where "IT"shakes its money maker.
The novel "IT"was given to me as a birthday gift in college. I was literally stricken with fear at the sheer size of the tome. Being that it was over 1000 pages...I read the first ten pages and quickly secured it to the far reaches of my bookshelf. There was no way I was ever going to read this book especially during the first semester of my freshman year of college. Over the course of the school year I would read huge sections of the book, never quite completing the read or getting lost within the labyrinthine corridors of the book's fairly complex plot line. This is not your average horror story. This is a story about fear itself and what is does to us. One recurring fear that appears in most Stephen King works is the loss of a child. He seems to be preoccupied with precious innocence of youth and the darkness that can envelope a parent or sibling when this young life is extinguished by real life horrors or the supernatural. In IT, the character Georgie is the unfortunate catalyst of a 27 year curse that claims his life and becomes a lifelong obsession for his older brother, Bill. Georgie is pursuing a sailboat that his brother Bill constructs for him out of newsprint...the paper vessel sails swiftly out of his sight and down a sewer grate. Georgie peers into the sewer only to discover a vile clown looking back it him. Pennywise is the clown's name and at first he attempts to engage Georgie in a friendly conversation but as this particular scene continues, we recognize that Pennywise is some kind of twisted supernatural predator. This one event drives the rest of the story, bringing several kids together who will ultimately challenge Pennywise, the demonic sewer clown.
I waited for awhile to write this because I wanted to make sure I was genuinely enjoying the movie IT and not just experiencing a faux exuberance. Nowadays, when someone tells a story worth listening to at the multiplex...it's a rare event. You can get lost in a maze of lukewarm remakes, reboots and cinematic universes. I can honestly say that "IT"is a worthwhile experience even though it's a remake due to the fact that Stephen King's writing is timeless; his stories are relevant to any generation and warrant reinterpretation. Andres' Muschietti creeped me out completely with "Mama", a Guillermo Del Toro horror flick, not because he knows how to stage jump scares or blast the volume at the precise moment...but he understands fear involves the delicate balance between reality and our nightmares. With this celebrated King story...he ups the ante with his now iconic take on Pennywise. I heard somebody say that "IT" was a combination of The Goonies and The Exorcist. I would tend to agree...it runs the gamut of emotions included in both of those movies and you will walk out of the movie theatre with a brisk chill you didn't feel before you walked in.
The novel "IT"was given to me as a birthday gift in college. I was literally stricken with fear at the sheer size of the tome. Being that it was over 1000 pages...I read the first ten pages and quickly secured it to the far reaches of my bookshelf. There was no way I was ever going to read this book especially during the first semester of my freshman year of college. Over the course of the school year I would read huge sections of the book, never quite completing the read or getting lost within the labyrinthine corridors of the book's fairly complex plot line. This is not your average horror story. This is a story about fear itself and what is does to us. One recurring fear that appears in most Stephen King works is the loss of a child. He seems to be preoccupied with precious innocence of youth and the darkness that can envelope a parent or sibling when this young life is extinguished by real life horrors or the supernatural. In IT, the character Georgie is the unfortunate catalyst of a 27 year curse that claims his life and becomes a lifelong obsession for his older brother, Bill. Georgie is pursuing a sailboat that his brother Bill constructs for him out of newsprint...the paper vessel sails swiftly out of his sight and down a sewer grate. Georgie peers into the sewer only to discover a vile clown looking back it him. Pennywise is the clown's name and at first he attempts to engage Georgie in a friendly conversation but as this particular scene continues, we recognize that Pennywise is some kind of twisted supernatural predator. This one event drives the rest of the story, bringing several kids together who will ultimately challenge Pennywise, the demonic sewer clown.
I waited for awhile to write this because I wanted to make sure I was genuinely enjoying the movie IT and not just experiencing a faux exuberance. Nowadays, when someone tells a story worth listening to at the multiplex...it's a rare event. You can get lost in a maze of lukewarm remakes, reboots and cinematic universes. I can honestly say that "IT"is a worthwhile experience even though it's a remake due to the fact that Stephen King's writing is timeless; his stories are relevant to any generation and warrant reinterpretation. Andres' Muschietti creeped me out completely with "Mama", a Guillermo Del Toro horror flick, not because he knows how to stage jump scares or blast the volume at the precise moment...but he understands fear involves the delicate balance between reality and our nightmares. With this celebrated King story...he ups the ante with his now iconic take on Pennywise. I heard somebody say that "IT" was a combination of The Goonies and The Exorcist. I would tend to agree...it runs the gamut of emotions included in both of those movies and you will walk out of the movie theatre with a brisk chill you didn't feel before you walked in.
Wednesday, January 4, 2017
SAY HELLO TO THE BAD GUY....A NEW BLOG for POP CULTURE FANS
Good day or evening, POP CULTURE fans...this is the inaugural blog entry of something new. This blog will be known from this day going forward as THE BAD GUY BLOG. The address is hello2thebadguy.blogspot.com. In this blog, I will do as I have always done in my previous blog, Luciushammer.blogspot.com, flip and rip on the latest offerings of multimedia entertainment as it pertains to comics, movies and tv. I'm really a comic book writer struggling to produce a quality, independently published series of books that focus on black superheroes but since that is a very expensive undertaking, I am building a comprehensive website and online presence that will also focus on creating "entertainment content" from a different perspective. What perspective you may be asking yourself right now?
From the unique and maybe shocking perspective of an irreverent black writer's mind.
There...I said it. Now there is no turning back. I've made the statement and I've played the race card. So many folks out there say that "color" doesn't matter and while I agree, it shouldn't...it almost always certainly does. For years, I have been considered to be somewhat of a radical by different colleagues, co-workers and even fans of my writing...I have chosen to be very outspoken when it comes to my number one passion besides my family which happens to be storytelling. Well my interest in storytelling has led me to this critical juncture in my burgeoning career as a comic book creator. My overwhelming motivation to write comes from my insatiable thirst to see characters of color get a fair shake. Most of my diatribes about comics, movies and tv will in some way revolve around "race" because not only do I find "race" fascinating but it happens to be my current situation that I am a brother in the greatest country in the world and now might be the perfect time to chronicle my adventures.
You might think my blog is only for black readers or just people of color. That's where you would be wrong. If you are a POP CULTURE fan of a different color, you may find what I have to say sometimes to be challenging and it may even occur to you that I am just flat out wrong. But I will initiate the conversation, I will provoke interaction and speculation. And I will maintain respect and decorum while doing so. I have realized that my experience as an African American is not only a key piece of our country's DNA...but my opinions, criticisms and reflections are also tantamount to this incredible multicultural swap meet we call the United States. I want readers of every color, every nationality, religion or sexual persuasion to read and use my articles. Because the knowledge I drop is based on my travels as a brother between these lines of red, white and blue. And in seeing the ideas that you are normally used to viewing refracted through the Caucasian lens...you will soon discover that there are new adventures to experience if you look at the Rubik's cube from another angle.
I've decided the subject of my first essay will be about the strange treatment of African American Males as Superheroes at the Big Two. It is something that I have been witnessing and examining for a long time and now the time has come to speak on it. My ideas are of course my own personal reflections but it appears to me that Black Male protagonists are neutered somewhat in their fictional roles and not permitted the same kind of liberation that white characters have always enjoyed. Now is that because of the publishers' mandate in particular, or is that because of the limited cache of cultural experience available to a white writer trying to effect an authentic voice while writing Black Male Superhero fiction? Another thing to consider would be the comic book industry as the white male's final frontier...their last bastion of absolute control. Is it so outlandish to believe that the predominantly white fraternity of male comic book creators have boxed out creators of color and their potential influence over the medium? I don't know, but in a world fraught with many different pitfalls and agendas...I sometimes feel the oppressive vise of a system that limits the creative expression of not only it's employees but it's fictional characters. My dream has always been to somehow penetrate the droves of would be writers and artists and find myself writing a definitive run on Black Panther or perhaps Dr. Fate or Hawkman (reimagined as characters of color) but somewhere in the back of my mind I know that my ideas would be far to progressive and ethnic...incendiary and provocative even for mainstream comics. I have recently been supremely underwhelmed by the current incarnations of great Black superhero characters and I have the feeling it has everything to do with the powers that be and the artifice of "diversity".
But it would also be irresponsible of me to ignore the efforts and output of the Black creative community. I recall a line from Oliver Stone's The Doors where Ray Manzarek is telling a young Jim Morrison that "we have to make the myths..." and I'm not even convinced this was ever truly said in real life but in this case it's very appropriate. Creators of color, critics of color and audiences of color...it is highly important that we tell our own stories and financially support our own mythic structures in literature as well as film. White writers and artists are not responsible for creating characters of color. I have welcomed many concepts that have been offered to me as vehicles of escapism as a person of color; Blade, Luke Cage, The Falcon...Black Lightning...Misty Knight. But the time has come for others to step forward with a more clear, and definitive perspective of the African American experience seen through the lens of the Superhero.
This is just the beginning of a brand new dialogue.
So until we meet again...say hello to the bad guy.
From the unique and maybe shocking perspective of an irreverent black writer's mind.
There...I said it. Now there is no turning back. I've made the statement and I've played the race card. So many folks out there say that "color" doesn't matter and while I agree, it shouldn't...it almost always certainly does. For years, I have been considered to be somewhat of a radical by different colleagues, co-workers and even fans of my writing...I have chosen to be very outspoken when it comes to my number one passion besides my family which happens to be storytelling. Well my interest in storytelling has led me to this critical juncture in my burgeoning career as a comic book creator. My overwhelming motivation to write comes from my insatiable thirst to see characters of color get a fair shake. Most of my diatribes about comics, movies and tv will in some way revolve around "race" because not only do I find "race" fascinating but it happens to be my current situation that I am a brother in the greatest country in the world and now might be the perfect time to chronicle my adventures.
You might think my blog is only for black readers or just people of color. That's where you would be wrong. If you are a POP CULTURE fan of a different color, you may find what I have to say sometimes to be challenging and it may even occur to you that I am just flat out wrong. But I will initiate the conversation, I will provoke interaction and speculation. And I will maintain respect and decorum while doing so. I have realized that my experience as an African American is not only a key piece of our country's DNA...but my opinions, criticisms and reflections are also tantamount to this incredible multicultural swap meet we call the United States. I want readers of every color, every nationality, religion or sexual persuasion to read and use my articles. Because the knowledge I drop is based on my travels as a brother between these lines of red, white and blue. And in seeing the ideas that you are normally used to viewing refracted through the Caucasian lens...you will soon discover that there are new adventures to experience if you look at the Rubik's cube from another angle.
I've decided the subject of my first essay will be about the strange treatment of African American Males as Superheroes at the Big Two. It is something that I have been witnessing and examining for a long time and now the time has come to speak on it. My ideas are of course my own personal reflections but it appears to me that Black Male protagonists are neutered somewhat in their fictional roles and not permitted the same kind of liberation that white characters have always enjoyed. Now is that because of the publishers' mandate in particular, or is that because of the limited cache of cultural experience available to a white writer trying to effect an authentic voice while writing Black Male Superhero fiction? Another thing to consider would be the comic book industry as the white male's final frontier...their last bastion of absolute control. Is it so outlandish to believe that the predominantly white fraternity of male comic book creators have boxed out creators of color and their potential influence over the medium? I don't know, but in a world fraught with many different pitfalls and agendas...I sometimes feel the oppressive vise of a system that limits the creative expression of not only it's employees but it's fictional characters. My dream has always been to somehow penetrate the droves of would be writers and artists and find myself writing a definitive run on Black Panther or perhaps Dr. Fate or Hawkman (reimagined as characters of color) but somewhere in the back of my mind I know that my ideas would be far to progressive and ethnic...incendiary and provocative even for mainstream comics. I have recently been supremely underwhelmed by the current incarnations of great Black superhero characters and I have the feeling it has everything to do with the powers that be and the artifice of "diversity".
But it would also be irresponsible of me to ignore the efforts and output of the Black creative community. I recall a line from Oliver Stone's The Doors where Ray Manzarek is telling a young Jim Morrison that "we have to make the myths..." and I'm not even convinced this was ever truly said in real life but in this case it's very appropriate. Creators of color, critics of color and audiences of color...it is highly important that we tell our own stories and financially support our own mythic structures in literature as well as film. White writers and artists are not responsible for creating characters of color. I have welcomed many concepts that have been offered to me as vehicles of escapism as a person of color; Blade, Luke Cage, The Falcon...Black Lightning...Misty Knight. But the time has come for others to step forward with a more clear, and definitive perspective of the African American experience seen through the lens of the Superhero.
This is just the beginning of a brand new dialogue.
So until we meet again...say hello to the bad guy.
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