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So so so WRONG...

3/28/2015

And yet, I laughed my head off.

     We watched "Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead" last night. It's the sequel to a little Norwegian flick titled "Dead Snow," which I haven't watched yet. (It was not a problem as far as understanding the sequel goes. A brief flashback at the beginning tells you all you need to know. There were people, there was snow, there was (probably) a cabin, there were Nazi zombies, there was gold, lots of people died, except the one dude making his way back to civilization at the beginning of this movie etc. etc.) This one definitely falls under the "horror comedy" umbrella. Which is where some of my favorite horror movies live, so right away I'm inclined to like this.

     I'm going to state right out, I enjoyed the hell out of this movie. But it is gross. And it is gory. And it really pulls no punches. Which works really well. An army of Nazi zombie soldiers arises from the dead and begins rampaging through Norway to fulfill their quest for revenge? Well, no, they aren't going to worry about our squeamish attitudes about which people should somehow be "off limits." Gotta give props to the filmmakers for having the balls to go there.

     And the gore? Oh my, how do I talk about the gore. It is cringe inducingly awful. And amazingly inventive. And hilarious. I giggled, a lot, at terrible things, including the absolute worst pre-death pun ever. Is it laughing in the face of our own physical fragility and mortality, is it just a nervous response to uncomfortable things, or is someone's intestines being used for siphoning gas just that funny? I have no idea. For some reason I could watch all the bloody gore without a flinch, but when puke is introduced? Ugh. That's the point I've had too much and have to look away. I've no idea what weird psychological thing is at play there. Maybe it's just that it's highly unlikely I will ever have to deal with people's innards spread about a parking lot, but as a mom (and human being with a gastrointestinal system,) the chances that I will have to deal with puke? Practically guaranteed.

     I'm not going to say too much about the plot (spoilers, you know,) but I will say that I really enjoyed the characters. The plucky misfit band of Americans who arrive to try and "save the day"? So adorable. Also enjoyed the pokes at US gun culture, and our weird "go team!" patriotism, complete with the Norwegians rolling their eyes in the background. And THANK GOD we had geeky/nerdy men and women working together as friends and no weird pining sexual tension thrown in just for the hell of it. They were allowed to be friends. It featured regular type people caught up in this mess and just trying to step up and do the right thing, even though they are terrified. I'm kind of a sucker for that. It also features the most hapless, unfortunate zombie ever in the history of zombie movies. If you didn't think you could have sympathy for a shambling bloody mess of an undead character? Well, you will be proven wrong. As far as plot goes, I will say it has the most disturbing "happy ending" I've seen in quite some time.

     "Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead" was recommended to me by a friend, and at one point I turned to Glenn (the spousal unit) and said,
     "What does it say about me that Paul watched this and thought, 'I bet Julie would like it'?"
to which Glenn gave me a look and replied,
     "Well, he wasn't wrong."
Yup.

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Ch-ch-ch Ah-ah-ah

3/17/2015

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Ch-Ch-Ch...Ah-ah-ah...

     Since we recently had a Friday the 13th, and they recently added a bunch of movies from the Friday the 13th horror movie franchise to Netflix, I indulged in a bit of binge watching. (Okay, really I just watched 2 and 3, but I had watched the first one a week ago, and then had watched New Blood a couple of months ago, when it was the only one on there.

So, in the order I watched, thoughts on each one

      Part 6. (New Blood) Wow, whoever wrote this really, really hates teenagers, and seems to think they deserve whatever’s coming to them. Also, they thought teenagers were having way way more sex than anyone I knew was when I was a teenager. I think this might have been the first one I ever watched. I didn’t realize this one was the first one in which Kane Hodder donned the mask. He is wonderfully, coldly menacing.

     Part 1. This one hates teenagers so much less. So much less. Yes, they still are getting into trouble, and smoking “grass” (hey, that was the nomenclature they used in the movie!) and having sex and playing strip monopoly, but the narrative seems to take much less pleasure in the cruelty of their deaths. There’s glimmers of “the asshole who we can not all wait to see die,” but the kids are also not actively cruel to each other. They are treated like competent human beings, of all things. It makes the deaths somewhat more affecting than they would be in future installments. We may not care deeply about the characters (well, except for Alice, the final girl, of course) but we also don’t hate them either. Watching it with the eyes of a jaded adult, this one is so, so tame, even though it was shocking in its time. It would probably be given a PG-13 rating nowadays. The kids don’t even swear that much. I didn’t realize until I re-watched it recently that there were quite a few red herrings thrown out in the course of the narrative. (I mean, come on, how creepy is Steve Christy when he’s talking to Alice? How many times do we think Ralph is behind the mayhem?) It’s such a cultural thing now, that you forget people watching it at the time, for the first time, didn’t know who The Big Bad was. Watching Betsy Palmer chew the scenery is just ridiculously fun.

     Part 2. Oh, this one is just...so very, very, very full of the male gaze. So full. There’s one character who mainly exists to be 1. Scantily clad 2. Naked, and 3. Dead.
     Often, people who are horror fans get asked that question of...but WHY? WHY do we like watching horror? And over the years, there have been a variety of responses and analysis to that very question. One part of that equation, for me, was that growing up as a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s, horror movies gave me the closest I could often get to a woman in the role of protagonist and action hero. So much of the time, women and girls existed only to fulfill the role of “girlfriend/love interest.” Whereas in horror movies, especially during the slasher boom of the 80s, the main character being a girl, and the one character who manages to persevere and survive until the end was so ubiquitous that there is a name for the phenomenon of the “Final Girl.” And that appealed to me.
     Watching this one, I wonder if there wasn’t also something that spoke to me here in the fear of the male gaze. (Although I would not have had the vocabulary to describe it as such back then.) But in this one, women are watched. They are watched, and most often, when they are watched, they are also in danger. Cameras linger over women getting undressed in front of doorways, in front of windows, leaning into cars dressed in a raincoat and their panties. And most of the time, shortly after they are watched, they are dead. I can’t help but wonder, as we all screamed and giggled our way through these, tucked in our sleeping bags in someone’s basement during a slumber party, was part of the reason these things frightened us because we were starting to realize the real life dangers we would be facing as women? Were we both attracted and repelled by the idea of someone watching? Because as awful and intrusive as the whole non-consensual voyeurism thing is, and how much I absolutely hate the ubiquity of it in all sorts of movies, I think a lot of us could admit to wanting to be admired, to be thought of as pretty, when we were teenagers. I had an inkling that there were ways in which I did not want that to happen, but I would not have been able to articulate why at that point. And in so many other movies, in comedies, voyeurism was largely presented as harmless fun, which is pretty gross. In this movie, we saw that it was not harmless fun. Was this a way to begin to confront and face that fear, that confusion? (As an adult, those scenes of the watcher in the bushes watching an unknowing woman? So much more terrifying than any of the actual gory parts.)

     The plot’s not brilliant, but also not terrible, and I didn’t notice any gaping plot holes. (Well, except for the ever present supernatural/not supernatural questions about Jason’s existence in the earlier films. The logic of “not supernatural” just never quite works.) I like the fact that the Final Girl almost succeeds in using her brains and trickery to defeat Jason. I like less that we made sure to dispatch the previous film’s Alice within the first fifteen minutes. I understand it was a way to make us realize that yes, Jason truly is out there being menacing, and it’s a way to build tension quickly for the audience without having our main characters feel like anything is wrong yet, but...come on, Alice was smart (most of the time,) and tough, and survived. There’s a part of me that feels she deserves her happy ending. Odd to realize that 2 films in, we are still missing the iconic mask. Also, farewell Ralph. You tried to warn them, you tried, you prophet of doom! (My second favorite scenery-chewer in the series.)

     Part 3: And this one screams THE EIGHTIES! Even though the first two were released in the 80s (1980 and 1981) the aesthetics, to me, were still heavily reminiscent of the 70s. But this one... oh my, this one. THE EIGHTIES!!! (With three exclamation points, even.) Here, we have...not quite “that asshole who we all can’t wait until he dies,” but an annoying, self-hating kid, who is...annoying. (His ‘oh nobody likes me’ schtick does not build any sympathy for him.) The acting seems more stiff and wooden in this one. It wasn’t brilliant in the first two, but basically competent. This one has many more moments that feel forced.
     Part 2 was filmed in 3D, so it’s kind of fun to see where that was actually used. (Because even watching it 2D, you can always tell.) Plot wise, eh, a bit more nonsensical. So our Final Girl was apparently attacked by Jason. And she blacked out. And then she came to later. And...we have no explanation for why Jason let her go, or if someone rescued her, or if she escaped and just didn’t remember it, or why he was even dragging her away. And those questions never get answered. But he has apparently now come back to finish the job. This one is all about the ridiculous deaths. (Bisected headstand dude, anyone? Or what about the head-squishing, eyeball popping one? Because, 3D, right? Really, it’s not a proper 3D horror flick until there’s an eyeball flying at you.)
     Also, for the first time in the 13th franchise, we see black people. Who are scary - at least to the main characters when they first encounter them. ugh. Once on their own, they get treated as slightly more complex than “menacing motorcycle gang.” For about five minutes before they are dead. ugh. Some horror movie tropes just need to go away forever. Oh, wait, no, somehow one of them mysteriously lives long enough to distract Jason just long enough for the Final Girl to temporarily escape his clutches. They do that in both 2 and 3 - dude we thought was long dead arrives to (temporarily) save the day. Well, no one ever claimed these were masterpieces, right? But maybe don’t use the exact same trick two movies in a row. There are a plethora of ways to distract Jason, it doesn’t have to be a dude trying to save the day.
     I stayed up way too late watching this one because I was just waiting to see Jason in the mask, and then it was about forty minutes until the end, so I just watched the rest. Jason is much more human in this one than he is in later movies, groaning and grunting, reacting when he is hit, etc. Even occasionally running, which is just so, so wrong. The silent stalking is much more menacing. Also, what is the deal with Final Girls climbing into canoes at the end of these things? I don’t know, that’s not my first impulse as a safe haven. (Maybe they were just trying to echo the first one? I don’t know, it didn’t really make sense to me in that one either, other than it creating cool visuals, and giving us that final “Jason emerging from the lake” scene.)

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So so so WRONG...

Ch-ch-ch Ah-ah-ah

Julie

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