Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s installment of A Movie A Day.
[The regular A Movie A Day list has been frozen in order for me to do an all-horror line-up for October. I’ve pulled many horror titles from my regular “to see” stack and have ordered many more horror and thriller titles to make sure we have some good stuff. Like the regular AMAD column all the movies I’m covering are films I have never seen, but unlike the regular AMAD column I will not connect each film to the one before it. Instead I will pull a title at random every day and watch whatever the movie Gods determine for me.]
I fucking knew it. I’m told I have to see some of Lars Von Trier’s more well known movies and I should have included THE KINGDOM on the list instead of this movie and I damn well should have listened.
I hate Dogme filmmaking. Hate it. With a passion. Not using, you know, good mics and shooting on grainy black and white doesn’t make a movie feel more realistic. I’m sorry. It just makes it look cheap and half-assed. As an audience member I always find myself just assuming someone who shoots a film Dogme style is either scared, lazy or up their own assholes... sometimes all three.
It’s hard to make a movie. It’s not so hard to take a 16mm camera and point it at shit without lighting it or worrying about recording the sound of the camera rolling.
Dogme filmmaking should stay in high school and beginning college film programs. It’s an interesting experiment, just like pretending you’re a barnyard animal is an interesting acting exorcize, but it’s not what I want to fucking see in a movie.
If you can’t tell by now, this movie pissed me right the fuck off… because it’s not a movie, it’s an experiment that should have stayed between Lars Von Trier and his friends and family, a long fuck-off home movie where he gathers all his friends to do something “different.”
Lars Von Trier plays himself, a director who is working on a project with his writer called THE POLICEMAN AND THE WHORE, a nod to his earlier film THE ELEMENT OF CRIME, which followed a cop and prostitute, and… they don’t really say, but it’s implied that this 200-250 page script they’ve been working on for 2 years gets damaged somehow on the floppy and prints out only the first half of the title page before flaking out.
Unfortunately, they have 5 days to rewrite the script before a producer comes to town to meet with them about it. They soon discover that they don’t remember anything about that story and that it was shit, so they decide to write a new script about plague-times called EPIDEMIC.
From here on out, the writing of the movie, brainstorming of the story and research is intercut with a visual representation of the movie… which is a slightly better looking grainy black and white world where people are now speaking English instead of Danish.
Most of the movie is trash… not trash in the campy sense, but trash in the useless and unwatchable sense, but there are a few scenes that are pretty good.
One of them is in the real world as Lars and his writer plot out the movie by painting a timeline on the wall. Anybody who has written a story or screenplay will get a laugh and can relate to the brainstorming here.
There’s another scene where they drive to Germany to meet Udo Kier and he’s great, as usual, telling a weird story about his dead mother, which leaves him in tears. We get a good 4 minutes of Udo, then he’s gone and the movie goes right back up its asshole again.
One of the movie-within-the-movie scenes is pretty good, too, with a Black priest (who was a taxi driver in the first few minutes of the film) lets loose with something so crazy and politically incorrect that I couldn’t help but laugh… He’s this stoic guy, then pretty much says, “What the hell. All a nigga needs are loose shoes, tight pussies and a warm place to shit.”
Yeah, right? What the hell was that and why was it in this movie? Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for it. It was a moment where I didn’t feel every second stretch itself like taffy, one of the few in the movie.
Then the closing scene is great and if it was the centerpiece of the movie, a plot point instead of a crazy closing sequence, then EPIDEMIC could have been a really solid flick.
Basically, the producer comes over and has dinner with Lars and his wife. They give him the new script… which is only 12 pages long and he’s like, “What the fuck is this?” and asks for the full story. They give it to him and tell him their plans for the end of the movie, something about the priest pulling himself out of a plague cave and praying and the producer isn’t pleased. That’s where the subhead comes from.
So, they bring in a girl and have her hypnotized in front of the producer, putting her into the film “EPIDEMIC” and she really goes for it… describing her surroundings, growing more and more scared and then she starts freaking out, running around the room screaming.
Suddenly, she starts breaking out in boils, which we learned about during the “research” part of the movie as being the first signs of the biggest plagues to hit Europe and she infects the rest of the people at the party. Then the credits.
I love the idea of a girl bringing back a real life plague from a trance state in which she visits a fictional retelling of an epidemic, but that should have been the first part, not the last.
Final Thoughts: I’m sure I’ll get a lot of interesting email from Lars Von Trier fans about this one. I fucking hated this movie, but I don’t hold it against Lars and I will seek out his more known work before I pass any real judgment on him as a filmmaker, but this movie isn’t a film. I’m sure I’ll be told over and over again about how I “didn’t get it,” but I think I did, I just didn’t like what I got. Who knows? Maybe this is the way the average person feels about BRAZIL and fans of this movie and this type of movie will think of me in the same way I think of people who can’t enjoy Terry Gilliam’s early work. All I can say is this movie did nothing for me and it felt like a Herculian task for me to finish the movie… and also, what in the hell was up with the title branded into the film for the entire running time? That I don’t get…
Since I hated this movie so much, found it pretentious and little more than an arty fart film school exercise that shouldn’t have been shown outside of a classroom, I decided to feature a movie and its sequel that are balls-out fun from beginning to end, the exact opposite of the viewing experience I just had.
If you've been reading AMAD this week, you know I'm counting down to Halloween with an additional spotlight shined on some of my favorite overlooked or underappreciated genre flicks. Today I got a two-fer for you:
I love Lamberto Bava (Mario’s son). His work as a director always entertains me and he can find some striking imagery to go along with his fun-first approach to films. While I love A BLADE IN THE DARK (aka HOUSE OF THE DARK STAIRWAY), my favorite of his early work (and any work, really) is the one-two punch of DEMONS and DEMONS 2.
Both are solidly ‘80s movies and they play together like A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS plays with FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE or THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY, but with pointy-teethed demon monsters instead of gunslingers. I mean, all of Leone’s movies feel in the same universe, but he has recurring actors playing different roles in different movies, so they’re not exactly sequels… but they are.
DEMONS and DEMONS 2 work that way. DEMONS is set in a movie theater as a group of people watch a horror movie about a devil-possessed mask. Props from this movie are on display in the lobby and when one foolish cinema-goer puts the mask on, she is cut and infected, turning into a demon.
What we have, basically, is the bulk of the movie taking place in one location, a movie theater, as the non-infected have to team up to fight the bitey horrors. Bava treats the demons like zombies in that respect. You get bit, you die.
All sorts of characters are at work here… gang members, regular folk and, the best by far… a pimp and his whores. Bobby Rhodes plays the pimp and rocks so hard in this movie, turning in one of the genre’s most fun, funny and badass performances. In fact, if I had to fault the movie for anything its that they take Tony the Pimp out of the picture way too early.
These aren’t plot-driven films. They focus, rather, on characters and scares. Lamberto Bava co-wrote both DEMONS and DEMONS 2 with the one and only maestro Dario Argento (as well as the less famous, but very worthy Franco Ferrini) and it shows.
The make-up effects and gore work in both films are fantastic, the demons iconic and scary as shit. Bava is also able to give them brightly-lit eyes in some long shots that really works and is creepy as hell.
And the ending to the first DEMONS is epic… huge and unexpected.
Both films are quality and they play perfectly as a double feature. DEMONS 2 is one of those rare sequels that is just as good if not better than the first.
Instead of a movie theater DEMONS 2 takes place after the Demon infection spreads and focuses on one Apartment complex. Bobby Rhodes is back, but not as his pimp character. He’s a gym instructor named Hank. Also keep an eye out for a very, very young Asia Agento as a little girl trapped in the building.
In many ways DEMONS 2 is scarier than the original, but both are impossibly high in the entertainment value department. They’re fun to watch, a great combination of dark humor, fun characters and creep-outs.
If you haven’t seen either, then I can’t recommend them to you enough. If you’ve only seen the first, the sequel delivers a helluva follow-up. I know it took me a few years to actually get to it as horror sequels usually suck ass, but everybody returns behind the camera and they did it quick enough after the first that it still feels like the same world.
We’re at the end of our horror-thon. I have one more entry, which I will watch and post before heading out to Harry’s Halloween party… as a reminder, here are the films left in the grab-bag:
Check out the HMAD list here!
Now’s the the time to pull the final HMAD!
We close with:
We enter Halloween with a horror comedy. I’ve long heard of this film, but haven’t seen it until now. See you in a few hours for STUDENT BODIES!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
