While The Human Centipede (First Sequence) might not have lived up to the hype, The Angriest Critic looks at take two which delivers more shock and gore, to see if it does.
by Adam Rosina
Though Tom Six’s The Human Centipede (First Sequence) was supposed to be last year’s instant shock classic, it was a film that ultimately could not live up to the hype. It failed to deliver on the gore front, giving scant illumination to the particulars of its central medical procedure (sewing three humans together, mouth to anus) or its revolting implications (perpetual analingus and consuming shit for sustenance). Furthermore, if the film were to be saved by technical flair, Six dashed that possibility with his bland, albeit competent, direction. The only place the film did succeed was it’s comedic moments, made possible by lead Dieter Laser’s (great fucking name) drooling, scenery chewing riff on Nazi “Angel of Death” Dr. Mengele. But in the end, it wasn’t up front enough with the gory goods for horror fans, and too outlandishly weird and perverse for pretty much anyone else, and as such was only regarded as a mere cinematic curiosity. When asked about the film’s flaws, Six referred to it as a mere dry run to see if people would accept the human centipede concept, and promised that it’s follow up would take audiences to depths of depravity and on-screen bloodletting previously unseen. Little more than a year later, Six delivers on this promise with Human Centipede II (Full Sequence), which indeed takes the concept of bad taste to shocking new lows.
Starting to feel like The Angriest Critic only hates movies? Sometimes “great genre cinema” comes along and deserves prase like, “easily the most entertaining film of the year.”
by Adam Rosina
Let’s cut the foreplay and get right down to it: Attack the Block was easily the most entertaining film of the year, and this was not a year without a great deal of exceptional genre fare. This Edgar Wright-produced film by British first-timer Joe Cornish is one of the most unexpectedly mind-blowing debut movies of the last two decades, and right up there with the first efforts of Tarantino, Smith and the rest of the 90s indie innovators. I make that comparison without the slightest hint of exaggeration. There’s just so much to love here! It’s an original film, but like many of its contemporaries, it isn’t afraid to wear its influences loud and proud, with an inspired mash-up of The Goonies and Monster Squad-type films of the eighties with Carpenter in his prime. But this is no mere homage, and Cornish is both a writer of great skill and a director with a keen eye for composition. He also manages to bring together an amazing cast of newcomers to deliver startlingly realistic (and often hilarious) performances one would never expect in the midst of a sci-fi horror flick. The creatures are perfectly terrifying and the action, while ever exhilarating, does not cross the line into violent “god-mode” parody. But the best part of this film is its revolutionary spirit, capturing the tensions of a nation and the frustrations of its marginalized youth. In short, Attack the Block is absolute punk-fucking-rock.
The financiers ofDrive must have absolutely shit themselves when they saw the finished film. Here was a project that began life as a Hugh Jackman action/adventure vehicle in the vein of the Fast and Furious series, and what it became, arguably, was an art film. A film where the first 40 minutes are filled with so little dialogue, were it not for the music (which is AMAZING, by the way) one could easily forget they were watching a “talkey”. An action film where there are only two relatively brief chase scenes with which it could justify its title, and in place of choreographed fight sequences, existed only punctuation marks of far-beyond-brutal violence. A film hanging not on the rugged Australian shoulders of bankable action star Jackman, but of a former teen heartthrob (Ryan Gosling) whose greatest commercial success was the Nicholas Sparks adaptation/120-minute yawn, The Notebook. Their only consolation must have been that they’d only sunk about $13 million into this thing (that’s peanuts in Hollywood money). What they thought was going to happen when they hired director Nicolas Refn (the Pusher trilogy, Bronson), a Danish filmmaker who had never made a mainstream American picture in his life and whose films tend to tackle subject matter of a transgressive nature, will forever be beyond me. But the distributors of Drive refused to let go of their dream of standard action fare, and marketed it as such in one of the most misleading promotional campaigns in filmmaking history. So much so, a Michigan woman is actually suing for false advertisement, which, while paint-huffingly idiotic, illustrates their folly pretty clearly. What is likely lost on this microcosm of bean counters and ad execs is that, while Drive did not turn out to be the cinematic junk food guaranteed to put mouth breathers in the seats and god-like amounts of money in studios pockets, it is, without a doubt, one of the closest this last half-decade has come to producing a flawless film.
As Drive is, at its core, an atmospheric character study, what plot there is fairly simple. It’s protagonist, simply known as, get this, the Driver (mind blown??), is a small-time mechanic and stuntman by day, getaway driver by night. The same preternatural skill and calm that makes the Driver great at evading police cruisers also makes for an excellent stockcar racer, leading his boss Shannon (Breaking Bad‘s Bryan Cranston) to petition mobster Bernie (Albert Brooks, of Simpsons and Finding Nemo Fame) for the funds to purchase a car for a joint venture, in the hopes of turning the Driver into a NASCAR star. Bernie acquiesces, to the amusement of his partner, the crude and vicious Nino (Ron Pearlman, who needs no introduction). Meanwhile, the Driver, a quiet recluse by nature, befriends a neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan), and her son (Kaden Leos), striking up something of romance and becoming a father figure to the boy. However, this is not to be; Irene is married, and her husband, Standard (television actor James Biberi) soon returns from a stint in prison, ready to pick up life with his family. The Driver learns that Standard owes money to a local crime figure, putting not only his life, but his wife and their son’s, in danger. Agreeing to assist his romantic rival for the sake of Irene and her child, the Driver prepares to play wheelman for a pawn shop robbery that will help Standard square his debts. Thus the stage is set for things to go from wrong to more wrong to just absolutely fucked beyond any and all repair for our hero, as anyone familiar with Refn’s filmography knew they would.
Is The Ward, John Carpenter’s first foray into straight horror since Halloween, a triumphant return to the big screen or simply horror mediocrity?
by Adam Rosina
Since we’ve been over this before, I’ll make it quick: I love John Carpenter. You know it. I know it. God, the Devil and Siddhartha fucking Gautama know it. Easily one of the most respected, influential, re-imagined (there’s been no less than three remakes of his work, with at least two new ones in the pipeline right now) and imitated fantasists in filmmaking, In his prime (the late 70s to the early-to-mid 80s), Carpenter was a financial cash cow, though not exactly immune to critical scorn over his films‘ violent content. Sadly, the tides began to turn with the release of The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China, films that were panned by critics (viciously) and moviegoers. Carpenter, undeterred, unleashed a string of films (Prince of Darkness, They Live, In the Mouth of Madness) that further discarded traditional notions of horror and took on such intellectually robust themes as social control, quantum physics, and consensus reality, all to the detriment of his box office grosses and the confidence of his financial backers. It didn’t help that the man had a habit of losing focus and letting his films get away from him, turning them into confused messes. Thought-provokingly watchable messes, but confounding enough to convince viewers to cease drinking the Kool-Aid by the late 90s. By 2001, the director had so much trouble securing funding for his films that he was forced into unofficial semi-retirement. But after some long overdue critical re-evaluation and the explosion of his cult fan base, Carpenter was again able to muster the funds necessary to mount a theatrical release. Thus we come to The Ward, Carpenter’s first foray into straight horror since Halloween. In watching it, I was possessed of an emotion no other Carpenter film had provoked in me: Boredom.
If you haven’t had the chance to read my review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 1, allow me to briefly summarize my feelings on that film, all Harry Potter-related media and all Harry Potter fans: DIE. Why all the hate? Hard to say. Maybe I’m just a contrarian. Maybe there’s no reason to it at all, and, like a bull seeing red or a southerner seeing someone darker than antique off-white, I just loose my shit. But perhaps it’s the ubiquitousness of it all. As is the case with spiders, you are never more than 3 feet from a Potter fan, and if you don’t happen to be one, this is just so utterly taxing on one’s patience and sanity. For me, it likely has a lot to do with the fact that I grew up geek. Comic book geek, sci-fi geek, gaming geek (tabletop, not the socially acceptable kind), horror geek; I’ve been all of these things at one point or another (I got better; PROTIP: Drugs help). Point is, I learned at a very young age that if I didn’t shut the fuck up when not in the company of my own kind, I was going to earn a beating. You people, on the other hand, assume everyone is living in Harry Potter Land, and as such never keep it to yourself, whether or not any innocent bystanders give a shit. Bottom line: don’t assume that everyone, even people vaguely familiar with the series, give a shit about you creepy, sad fetishization of a franchise (or your Snape/Draco rape fan-fiction, you sick fuck). And here we come to the central problem with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 2. It doesn’t just assume you’re a fan; it downright hates you if you aren’t. It throws up every roadblock the last film did towards understanding what is going on, and then it doubles down. Because it wants you to fail. Director David Yates actually wants you, the presumably novice Potter viewer, to approach this movie like you would a marathon game of Monopoly: rage, followed by defeat. But my will is strong, Yates. I made it out the other end, and have now come to expose you crimes to the people!
…as Harry, Ron, and Hermione attempt to break into the vault in pretty much the same fashion they broke into the Ministry of Magic in the last film, they… wait, what’s that? You’re lost? I’ve just dropped you in halfway into the paragraph, and I’ve falsely assumed you could follow where I’m going with all this?? Wow, I must be David-fucking-Yates. Look, I have no problem with splitting a massive film up into smaller, more easily digestible parts, but you gotta play a little catch up. Tarantino takes two minutes of the Bride delivering a monologue to get ya where you need to be in Kill Bill Vol. 2. TWO MINUTES. Fuck, in A New Hope, you had zero familiarity with the universe or characters, but that opening crawl tells you all you need to know before pressing “PLAY”. Deathly Hollows Part 2 can’t even bother to throw me a lazy montage of the last film’s plot points. Yates seems to forget that this is no longer a universally understood series the way it was in early instalments, which were pretty formulaic. Now we have a series so entrenched in its own continuity that it demands a primer just to halfway understand it. Part 1 suffered from not giving novice viewers much of a gateway into the world, but Part 2 is downright unforgiving about it. Because, again, it hates you.
A twisted and disturbing superhero film, instantly in the shadow of Kick-Ass and wrongly billed as a black comedy, is it a commercial flop or future cult classic?
by Adam Rosina
Super could not have gotten a more raw deal had it set out to be a commercial flop. Firstly, it came out almost a full year after Kick-Ass, a film that played with the same general premise, that of a normal guy assuming a super heroic identity to fight crime (although here, the protagonist is far less normal than one is initially led to believe). Kick-Ass itself wasn’t a huge financial success, so a film that was seen by many (myself included, initially) to be a two-bit knock off didn’t really stand a chance. Secondly, IFC Films had no idea how to market the film, and ended up billing it as a black comedy. Are there comedic moments in Super? Yes, and when director James Gunn (Slither) feels like playing this up, he has you rolling in the aisles. But the vast majority of the film is conducted with a heavy emphasis on “black”. Indeed, Super is one of the most spectacularly twisted and disturbing superhero films ever released.
Every so often, a foreign genre film finds its way to American shores (usually via bootleg file-sharing) that builds up such an underground buzz about it that it can’t help but bleed over into the mainstream. Audition was one such film, kicking off the “Asian horror” invasion (in quotations because very few of said films, including the above example, are strictly horror, regardless of what people call them). Europe, refusing to be dethroned as the premier exporter of fright flicks, fired back with the likes of Let the Right One In, Antichrist, A Serbian Film, and now, Troll Hunter. These foreign films usually resonate with American audiences for one of two reasons: either they present sex and violence with an extremity that shocks even our usually robust sensibilities (Read: America loves it some gore and tits), or they deliver a story and presentation that is remarkably novel and fresh. Troll Hunter is very much the later. While its mockumentary style may be familiar to US viewers by now, rarely, if ever, has it been used to such successful effect. And as much as the film fits into horror genre, its roots lie equally in the Spielbergian tradition of adventure films (albeit sans Spielberg’s positively fucking saccharine preoccupations), which is likely the source of its crossover appeal. Director/writer André Øvredal takes a familiar type of film and cleverly re-packages it with the “day in the life” portrayal of a blue-collar monster hunter, ups the scare factor significantly and offers up truly unique CGI creations that are culturally, not to mention visually, alien to us.
Troll Hunter opens with three college filmmakers, Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) and Johanna (Johanna Mørck) setting out to make a documentary about a supposed bear poacher operating in the Norwegian countryside. Why in god’s name anyone would want to watch, let alone make a film about some lone nut ventilating bear carcasses with shotgun slugs is beyond me, but this is all really just a vehicle to get the characters to track down the supposed poacher, an aloof man named Hans (Otto Jespersen). After a handful of unsuccessful attempts to speak with him, the students follow Hans into the woods, expecting to catch him red handed on camera. Instead, they encounter him bolting between trees, screaming “Troll!”, as he is pursued by an unseen giant. After the danger has passed, the trio convince Hans to open up about his secretive profession, that of a government-sanctioned troll exterminator. The students elect to follow Hans as he goes about his duties to expose the secret of the trolls to the public, as well as document and honor the national hero they come to view Hans as.
Otto Jespersen’s portrayal of Hans could very well be the film’s greatest asset. I was quite surprised after seeing his solemn and stoic role here to discover that, in his native Norway, he’s primarily known as a comedian. Then again, looking back on the film, many of the biggest laughs come courtesy of Jespersen’s ultra-dry delivery (his response to the question of whether or not a Muslim would have as much to fear as a Christian in the presence of a troll is priceless). Later on in the film, Jespersen delivers a haunting recollection of being forced to massacre a pack of trolls pups with all the remorse and disgust of Vietnam vet. This informs the final troll hunt in a particularly melancholic way, with Hans venturing off not to do battle with a hated foe, but to reluctantly put down a suffering animal. Outside of Jespersen, the three young actors playing the student filmmakers are also quite good, but thematically they exist more as a plot device than characters, and they resonate accordingly. Of note, though, is Tomas Alf Larsen’s very believable nervous breakdown in the troll cave, which does allow his character to rise above the rest, however briefly, before he exits the film (in a particularly frightening fashion). It’s a great Lovecraftian moment where his mind snaps under not only fear of death, but the strain of having to stare these eldritch creatures in the eye.
The third film in Tsukamoto’s series started by the staple underground horror masterpiece, Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Shot in digital HD with a theme song by Trent Reznor, will it compare?
by Adam Rosina
Tetsuo: The Iron Man was, and in many ways still is, the extreme film proving ground. When exploring the labyrinthine world of underground cinema, you either stumble upon this flick or have it forced upon you by an all-too-eager (and likely somewhat sadistic) friend, and how you react to it determines whether you continue down the rabbit hole or retreat back to the safety of mainstream cinema. Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1989 feature-length debut (“feature length” is generous; it clocks in just over an hour) was pure weaponized cinema; a violent speed-freak take on cyberpunk built upon a foundation of existentialist and psychosexual themes. Also, it had a drill penis. Tsukamoto made a name for himself with Tetsuo, and built a career that paralleled that of David Cronenberg (his closest western analogue), making films that slowly moved away from the fantastic and into the realm of the psychological (Tokyo Fist, Bullet Ballet, A Snake of June), while maintaining his focus on the visceral. Tsukamoto returned to the world of Tetsuo in 1992 with the release of Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, an ambitious follow up that, while a good film in its own right, didn’t have nearly the same impact as its predecessor. Which brings us to 2011, and the North American release of Tetsuo: The Bullet Man, the third film in the series and Tsukamoto’s first English-language film, designed to reintroduce the Tetsuo concept to the international film world. Does it succeed in matching the artistic triumph of the original? Not exactly…
When asked what movies I was looking forward to in 2011, Hobo with a Shotgun consistently topped the list. It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of the current “grindhouse revival”, kicked off in 2006 with the aptly-titled Tarantino/Rodriguez double header, Grindhouse. Since then, we’ve seen modern takes on blackploitation (Black Dynamite), biker flicks (Hell Ride), spaghetti westerns (Sukiyaki Western Django) and whatever the hell Nude Nuns with Big Guns is supposed to be. The great thing about these throwback flicks is they’re made to resemble the way you remember classic exploitation films, not necessarily how they actually were. We often forget how subjective our memory is, and while your 13 year-old self couldn’t help but relish in the mind-blowing awesomeness of movies like The Amazing Mr. No Legs or Bloodsucking Freaks, go ahead and watch them now. The strings show, the plots stop dead for 20 minute chunks, and they just don’t work. They’re little gems of weird cinema and still well worth a watch, but charming ineptitude aside, their audacious punch often doesn’t mitigate our adult scrutiny. These latter day exploitation films play like 90-minute versions of old-school B-movie trailers; “…every shot is a money shot.”, to quote Eli Roth. The other great thing about this new wave of trash films is they’re getting even better as they go, in utter defiance of the law of diminished returns. This is especially true of the official Grindhouse releases, with both Planet Terror and Death Proof proving to be good, not-so-clean fun, Machete reaching near operatic heights of insane bloodshed, and now Hobo with a Shotgun comes along, loaded with so much bad taste and brutal-yet-cartoonish violence that it may be the final word on the sub-genre.
Rutger Hauer stars as the Hobo, riding the rails straight into a shit-hole called Hope Town (making him an actual hobo and not just a homebum as the term is often incorrectly applied). Within mere moments of his arrival, the Hobo becomes acquainted with the crime-ridden nature of the city, witnessing local crime lord Drake (Lexx‘s Brian Downey) and his two sons (Nick Bateman and Gregory Smith) performing a brutal execution in front of a fearful mob. Growing increasingly fed up with Hope Town’s criminal element, the Hobo finally acts, preventing young hooker Abby (Molly Donsworth) from being raped by Drake’s son, Slick, and attempts to turn him in to the local authorities. He finds out very quickly that the cops are on Drake’s payroll, and he’s mutilated for his trouble. Abby finds the Hobo bloodied in a dumpster and takes him in, forming a bond between the two. Finally, after witnessing yet another atrocious crime, the Hobo snaps, grabs a shotgun and begins his crusade, dispensing his own brand of street justice.
I’ve never really had anything bad to say about Zach Snyder in the past. I found his remake of Dawn of the Dead passable (it’s a tall order to stand toe-to-toe with Romero’s classic, so he should take “passable” as a compliment), and his next two films, 300 and Watchmen, were admirable adaptations, yet one suspects they succeeded largely by virtue of their adherence to the source material. Granted, Watchmen did deviate from it’s source in relation to the ending, but I’ll blaspheme and suggest that this improved upon the original, doing away with the cheesier aspects of the “Architects of Fear” climax native to the comic (That’s right, comic; If you wanna be a pretentious asshole and call it a graphic novel because you can’t accept that “funny books” can be art, then you shouldn’t be reading them). I’ve never seen his “sword & sorcery & owls” film, Legend of the Guardians, but I hear surprisingly good things. That, too, was an adaptation. Soon one began to wonder what the director would do if allowed to pen and shoot a film purely of his own design, which brings us to Sucker Punch. Here Snyder was given full reign to do as he wished, complete with upwards of $80 million to do it with. What have we (and likely the higher ups at Warner Bros.) learned from this little experiment? Never do that shit again. Zack Snyder cannot create without a blueprint, or perhaps just won’t, because that’s not really what he’s done here. He’s borrowed from countless previous works of film and literature (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Kill Bill and Moulin Rouge to name a few) and generically regurgitated current genre infatuations (gun porn, steampunk, mecha), then half-assedly duct taped it all together with a plot that simultaneously objectifies and sympathises with the victimization of its female cast and his trademark editing style (slow it down, speed it up, repeat).
The film follows Baby Doll (Emily Browning), who is wrongfully imprisoned in an asylum following the accidental death of her kid sister, the result of Baby’s attempt to stop their stepfather from molesting them. Orderly and part-time rapist Blue (Oscar Issac) agrees to fudge the paperwork so Baby Doll will be lobotomized later that week. At this point, the film shifts to Baby’s perspective, and as her mind crumbles under the weight of her predicament, she re-envisions the asylum as a brothel, with Blue cast as a villainous pimp, while she and the rest of the mental patients (Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung) are seen as cabaret performers and sex workers. Baby and the others hatch a plan to gain their freedom, the major points of which are seen as a series of over-the-top battles that takes the girls from the combating undead Germans in trenches of WW I to slaying dragons in a fantasy-themed universe. Throughout their trials, they are aided by the Wise Man (Scott Glen) in their quest to recover the items needed to make their escape, before the mysterious High Roller (Jon Hamm) comes to take Baby away (in actuality the doctor coming to perform the lobotomy).
Though Tom Six’s The Human Centipede (First Sequence) was supposed to be last year’s instant shock classic, it was a film that ultimately could not live up to the hype. It failed to deliver on the gore front, giving scant illumination to the particulars of its central medical procedure (sewing three humans together, mouth to anus) or its revolting implications (perpetual analingus and consuming shit for sustenance). Furthermore, if the film were to be saved by technical flair, Six dashed that possibility with his bland, albeit competent, direction. The only place the film did succeed was it’s comedic moments, made possible by lead Dieter Laser’s (great fucking name) drooling, scenery chewing riff on Nazi “Angel of Death” Dr. Mengele. But in the end, it wasn’t up front enough with the gory goods for horror fans, and too outlandishly weird and perverse for pretty much anyone else, and as such was only regarded as a mere cinematic curiosity. When asked about the film’s flaws, Six referred to it as a mere dry run to see if people would accept the human centipede concept, and promised that it’s follow up would take audiences to depths of depravity and on-screen bloodletting previously unseen. Little more than a year later, Six delivers on this promise with Human Centipede II (Full Sequence), which indeed takes the concept of bad taste to shocking new lows.
