I have some mixed feelings about this movie. There were a couple of suspense scenes of pure genius in this movie. Particularly, one at Det. Anna Mari's home where she sees the killer's reflection in a bowl and chases him outside and then returns to her dark house (Horror movie heroines hate well-lit rooms!) and notices her gun missing from where she just laid it on the table. That scene worked quite well. And also the scene where Romo-- the video poker whiz-- follows the beautiful girl through the alleyways of Rome who was paid by the killer to bring him to the Two Doors.
After that, it's downhill. I don't know much about Italian culture-- Im guessing there was a craze on video poker there while the rest of the world fell for Hold 'Em and Omaha-- but there really is no such thing as a video poker whiz. Video poker is a game of pure probability. There is no other skill involved beside playing the percentages over and over. It's rather a dull, simple game. The idea that the police needed someone to "beat" the killer at poker was misinformed. Of course it is a moot point anyways, after further plot developments, seen coming a mile away.
I guess the killer's identity was fairly obvious from the beginning. Det. Anna Mari spurns his advances in the opening scene. Her love affair with the alcoholic British detective is also flat and unconvincing. Some of the clues and false clues thrown in are interesting. The Diologue is even more annoying than usual for Argento. The movie was remarkably less bloody than most Argento films, and this is not necessarily a good thing.
I guess the days of wildly inventive movies with lush colors and a frenetic Goblin score are over. Oh well.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Friday, July 10, 2009
"Flowery" you say?
"Flowery" I think is a good term for a writer who cant handle the intricacies his style demands.
When you are blending a slow or non- action sequence with interior thoughts of a character,or resolving description and sensation and impression into precise language and metaphor, fusing layers of interconnectedness, the "show dont tell" rule is utterly useless, a bogus guideline for hacks and plot-reliant thrillers.
When you are describing an intense scene (scary in our case as horror writers), with fast-paced action then the rule becomes all-important. If you want to be Richard Laymon, or write like him, then you should worship like one would a wrathful god, the "show dont tell" rule.
The balance of the two modes-- ie, how well and how many balls or bowling pins you can juggle-- is crucial to writing something good and meaningful. Otherwise you are just passing off cliched images and trite plot points as something new.
Being "flowery" is NOT necessarily being overly descriptive, but also directly proportional to how inexact your thinking and writing is.
Incidently, to truly disturb a reader, which I feel is of utmost importantance in horror writing, it might actually be advisable to "alienate" your reader sometime. Now, you dont want to BORE them, that's another thing altogether. The most important rule in writing (and IM not saying I succeed personally) is to be interesting to your audience. Also, another point, even though everyone on this board is a horror writer, our potential audiences are very personal, some quite small, others having more appeal to a larger public consumption.
When you are blending a slow or non- action sequence with interior thoughts of a character,or resolving description and sensation and impression into precise language and metaphor, fusing layers of interconnectedness, the "show dont tell" rule is utterly useless, a bogus guideline for hacks and plot-reliant thrillers.
When you are describing an intense scene (scary in our case as horror writers), with fast-paced action then the rule becomes all-important. If you want to be Richard Laymon, or write like him, then you should worship like one would a wrathful god, the "show dont tell" rule.
The balance of the two modes-- ie, how well and how many balls or bowling pins you can juggle-- is crucial to writing something good and meaningful. Otherwise you are just passing off cliched images and trite plot points as something new.
Being "flowery" is NOT necessarily being overly descriptive, but also directly proportional to how inexact your thinking and writing is.
Incidently, to truly disturb a reader, which I feel is of utmost importantance in horror writing, it might actually be advisable to "alienate" your reader sometime. Now, you dont want to BORE them, that's another thing altogether. The most important rule in writing (and IM not saying I succeed personally) is to be interesting to your audience. Also, another point, even though everyone on this board is a horror writer, our potential audiences are very personal, some quite small, others having more appeal to a larger public consumption.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Closet Space
I had a life once. Now Im in this girl's closet. She will be home soon. I had a life once but the world began to eat at my shoulders. And long shadows cast from unseen objects-- things only our Creator can see-- blocked the sun from lighting my eyes. I had a wife, a little girl, a cute cottage in the foothills well away from town, shrouded in trees. My god, the trees..
She will be home soon and Im just sitting back, in the far back, of her closet, padded by piles of sweaters and other clothes. I can just make out how perfectly lined up her shoes are. They look so sad to me there, empty of feet. Purposeless. Soon to be abandoned by their mistress. So straight, so glum, colorless.
I remember how the trees possessed me in winter, with their naked black beauty. How they suffocated me in summer, green strangulation, green everywhere. I think even my blood turned green. My little girl climbed up into a huge japanese maple tree one fine spring day-- the kind of day that warms the loins of lovers and inspires a suicide or two-- and dropped twenty feet onto her neck. It snapped like a worthless twig. Six months later, my wife was dredged up from the bottom of Chickamauga Creek. I sold the house. I moved out to the desert. Away from the fucking trees.
She's a waitress working the night shift at a nearbye cafe in Yuma. Her boyfriend is in prison-- he beat up a drunk outside a bar one night past, and probably would not have stopped punching until the skull turned to a fruity pulpy mess unless I, and a few others, pulled him off the mouthy drunk. You just cant go around insulting everyone you meet and expect the world to back down each time. The world bites back. It eats shoulders..
A grayish light filters in through the slats of the closet door. She is home. I touch the blade of my knife against my cheek. The cold is fire. It's what inspires me, purifies me. The dying of fires, cold rocks. Desert night rocks. One from under which I come. My new home.
I watch the horizontal segments of her pass back and forth, each time dressed in fewer clothes. Until she is only in panties and bra. "We have an unexpected date, you and I.."
Soon there will be three dead by my hand. By my five green fingers. When Im done I will plant myself in the desert and return as a tree.
I will know what it means, finally, to thirst like a tree in the cold dry sand.
She will be home soon and Im just sitting back, in the far back, of her closet, padded by piles of sweaters and other clothes. I can just make out how perfectly lined up her shoes are. They look so sad to me there, empty of feet. Purposeless. Soon to be abandoned by their mistress. So straight, so glum, colorless.
I remember how the trees possessed me in winter, with their naked black beauty. How they suffocated me in summer, green strangulation, green everywhere. I think even my blood turned green. My little girl climbed up into a huge japanese maple tree one fine spring day-- the kind of day that warms the loins of lovers and inspires a suicide or two-- and dropped twenty feet onto her neck. It snapped like a worthless twig. Six months later, my wife was dredged up from the bottom of Chickamauga Creek. I sold the house. I moved out to the desert. Away from the fucking trees.
She's a waitress working the night shift at a nearbye cafe in Yuma. Her boyfriend is in prison-- he beat up a drunk outside a bar one night past, and probably would not have stopped punching until the skull turned to a fruity pulpy mess unless I, and a few others, pulled him off the mouthy drunk. You just cant go around insulting everyone you meet and expect the world to back down each time. The world bites back. It eats shoulders..
A grayish light filters in through the slats of the closet door. She is home. I touch the blade of my knife against my cheek. The cold is fire. It's what inspires me, purifies me. The dying of fires, cold rocks. Desert night rocks. One from under which I come. My new home.
I watch the horizontal segments of her pass back and forth, each time dressed in fewer clothes. Until she is only in panties and bra. "We have an unexpected date, you and I.."
Soon there will be three dead by my hand. By my five green fingers. When Im done I will plant myself in the desert and return as a tree.
I will know what it means, finally, to thirst like a tree in the cold dry sand.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Red Herrings
Argento movies are generally smart enough to play around with the red herring aspect so crucial to murder mysteries. People accustomed to how the cliched idea of a red herring works, might be thrown off and think, well it's too obvious this guy's the murderer so it really isnt him. Then start following false clues that point to another red herring. This was the case in Black Christmas, with Peter, the piano student, and it turned out he wasnt the killer.
In Sleepless, there's an object that the killer drops at one murder scene then it's revealed in another that a character is missing said object. So as an observer we think, hmm, is this missing object a sign that one of the characters in the current scene is the killer or just planted disinformation to throw the observer off? Turns out the object was a clear-cut clue to killer's identity.
When the red herring theme works well, the watcher, reader, is kept off balance. It also helps if there is an interesting story behind everything, well-drawn characters, well-placed clues.
In Sleepless, there's an object that the killer drops at one murder scene then it's revealed in another that a character is missing said object. So as an observer we think, hmm, is this missing object a sign that one of the characters in the current scene is the killer or just planted disinformation to throw the observer off? Turns out the object was a clear-cut clue to killer's identity.
When the red herring theme works well, the watcher, reader, is kept off balance. It also helps if there is an interesting story behind everything, well-drawn characters, well-placed clues.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Sleepless
While not his best giallo-- it's several marks under his better ones, like Deep Red, Tenebre, Phenomena, Four Flies On Grey Velvet-- this movie entertained me and gave me a few chills and cringes. The murder scenes are not particularly original, but they are definitely cringe-worthy. A face gets smashed over and over again against a wall. A woman gets repeatedly stabbed in the mouth with an English Horn. Etc.
Max Von Sydow, as the retired and senile homicide detective, is a bit of a quirky character but I didn't find him wrongly cast here, as one reviewer stated on Amazon. I enjoyed his odd one-sided conversations with his pet bird, Marcello.
While I was 90% certain of who the murderer was early on, there was still enough ambiguity in the characters to throw some doubt there. His camera work was, as is typical for Argento, inventive and phantasmagoric. The camera swirls in and out, revolves around scenes, moves in and out. The lighting is also strategically dim in all the right places.
The ending was a bit goofy, and the murderer's tell-all confession before his death reminded me of a bad impression of Matt Damon for some reason. Bad dubbing and sometimes silly dialogue, almost a trademark of Argento films, didnt distract me enough from the interesting mystery story involving a murderous dwarf obsessed with a nursery rhyme and plenty of believable red herrings.
And a nod for Goblin's score as well. Personally I rank this score in the top 3 scores for Argento films, after Deep Red and Suspiria.
Max Von Sydow, as the retired and senile homicide detective, is a bit of a quirky character but I didn't find him wrongly cast here, as one reviewer stated on Amazon. I enjoyed his odd one-sided conversations with his pet bird, Marcello.
While I was 90% certain of who the murderer was early on, there was still enough ambiguity in the characters to throw some doubt there. His camera work was, as is typical for Argento, inventive and phantasmagoric. The camera swirls in and out, revolves around scenes, moves in and out. The lighting is also strategically dim in all the right places.
The ending was a bit goofy, and the murderer's tell-all confession before his death reminded me of a bad impression of Matt Damon for some reason. Bad dubbing and sometimes silly dialogue, almost a trademark of Argento films, didnt distract me enough from the interesting mystery story involving a murderous dwarf obsessed with a nursery rhyme and plenty of believable red herrings.
And a nod for Goblin's score as well. Personally I rank this score in the top 3 scores for Argento films, after Deep Red and Suspiria.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Meth Dreams Under The Willow Tree
we're all kicking back...at the lake.. by god...drinking a few.. and little Greg, JC Lightnin's boy... starts wading into the putrid lake... then.. WTF.. a giant Gar fish rises out of the muck and swallows him whole..
we kick back again and think.. by god.. that was rather unusual..l
ater we fuck. and laugh. We build the biggest fucking bonfire ever in honor of the boy's memory.
I remember him punching my old lady in the snatch.
Greg's mother tries to drink an entire ocean.
We sleep, we dream sad dreams. We dream dreams that fuck the sun.
In the morning Greg's mother is fucking JC up in the willow tree.
Little Greg, you'll be missed.
we kick back again and think.. by god.. that was rather unusual..l
ater we fuck. and laugh. We build the biggest fucking bonfire ever in honor of the boy's memory.
I remember him punching my old lady in the snatch.
Greg's mother tries to drink an entire ocean.
We sleep, we dream sad dreams. We dream dreams that fuck the sun.
In the morning Greg's mother is fucking JC up in the willow tree.
Little Greg, you'll be missed.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
42 Miles to Omaha
Being uncertain is a bitch. I need to be alone for awhile.
Then I woke up, and I was the last living human on earth, somewhere in middle America. And I loved it.
This lasted for 70 years.. without human hosts contagious diseases went into the deep freeze. I developed a strange habit of digging up graves and having tea parties with decomposed chaps, but other than that, I didnt miss a damn thing about the human race. I took up residence in the biggest library I could find in a city formerly known as Omaha. But I also travelled a lot. The roads were pretty safe. I set fire to Peoria Illinois just for kicks. Somehow I was always drawn back to Omaha.
Then I woke up, and I was the last living human on earth, somewhere in middle America. And I loved it.
This lasted for 70 years.. without human hosts contagious diseases went into the deep freeze. I developed a strange habit of digging up graves and having tea parties with decomposed chaps, but other than that, I didnt miss a damn thing about the human race. I took up residence in the biggest library I could find in a city formerly known as Omaha. But I also travelled a lot. The roads were pretty safe. I set fire to Peoria Illinois just for kicks. Somehow I was always drawn back to Omaha.
I woke up again and I was in a pasture next to a highway. I watched cars zoom by all day. There was a sign on the highway and it said, 42 miles to Omaha...
It took me literally all the flaming day to realize, I was a cow.
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