What Caviglia Did On Her Summer Vacation!: An Introduction

As has been briefly mentioned here, and as everyone is both buzzing and complaining and celebrating about: this June is madness. Theater abounds. Nearly everyone I know is involved in something. People are having birthdays, Same Sex marriage is now legal in Gotham. I'm at work on various projects, some involving pictures, some involving words, some involving both. And then there's the constant business of keeping it all afloat, AKA paying the bills. So there's been little time to spare to write it all up and I'm vaguely overwhelmed with the task, truth be told. But, never on to shrug off a challenge, here I go!

The following posts are a much boozier, artier, gorier version of the typical "What I did with my summer vacation" essay. At left is a picture I drew at Jazz & Sketch last Thursday at the Society of Illustrators (two minute pose, lovely model). Here at The Cabinet, we refuse to be either bored or idle in this City of our Dreams!

Jasper Jaxon at Dixon Place and a Minor Ode To the Forgotten Pinup Girls of Yore

It's sometimes a sad old world, isn't it?

Last month, 1959 Playboy Playmate (July if you're curious) and B-movie actress Yvette Vickers was found dead in her house by a neighbor. Now, don't get the wrong idea, there was no scandal per se, she died of heart failure at the age of 82 or so. The thing is, she's been dead for nearly a year the medical examiner said, as her body was actually mummified.

Which, in a startling segue, leads me to my inamorato (the man self-styled Trav S.D.) and his performance of The Ballad of Jasper Jaxon at Dixon Place. The performance was lovely, if I do say so. Jasper Jaxon is based on real life bank robber Elmer McCurdy, who upon his death in 1911 was over-embalmed and was displayed in various traveling side-shows and theater lobbies with various purposes until it was forgotten who this fellow had been or even that he was an actual mummified person and not just a prop. Like all great true American stories it is both tragic and hilarious.

Along with her Playmate of the Month fame, Miss Vickers had a pretty impressive monster movie career. She has the typical career of small roles in big pictures (her debut was in Sunset Boulevard!) and big roles in small pictures. Most well known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, she worked in television through the 1970s and appeared in other B horror movies, including Attack of the Giant Leeches, whose wonderful poster you can see below.

The Ballad of Jasper Jaxon is a long, rambling and extremely catchy song in the style of Woody Guthrie with definite shades of Bob Dylan. There's a certain species of Americana that seems to have fallen out of favor recently in our glittery techno present, and it's an awful shame mostly. In general, a sense of history is slowly being eroded. The internet in some ways both helps and hinders. There's such wonderful access to nearly everything, but the ease of finding whatever piece of whatever what puzzle one comes across, also serves to flatten it somewhat. The screen with which we view everything can decontextualize nearly everything until it's all just floating in a digital present.

Yvette Vickers cheerfully attended film festivals around the country in her old age. The fact that she could have disappeared for so long without anyone noticing breaks one's heart a little. The world is a lonely place for so many people, and one of my biggest fears, as it is for so many childless people, is that an end like that of Miss Vickers awaits us in the future. Both Yvette Vickers and the hapless crook Jasper Jaxon lived strange, picaresque and particularly American lives, only to wind up mummified, stuck in the parts of the newspapers designated for the weird and the uncanny, ready made to be turned, as all good American stories should be, into folk songs and B movies.

The Ballad of Jasper Jaxon will go on, no doubt and I will be sure to let you know of an recordings or return engagements.

Todd Robbins: Play Dead

Many, many years ago, boys and girls, they used to have outdoor rock concerts on Pier 84 on the West Side. I remember seeing tons of bands there at one point: you could drink cheap under-age beers, and there were promoters giving out free packs of crappy cigarettes. I mean, can you picture that happening now? I can't remember everyone I saw there, but I do know I saw The Psychedelic Furs (awful), The Cure, The Smiths and other people I can no longer remember. They were all-ages and general admission shows and afterward, we would walk over to Times Square and go to the (now departed) Howard Johnson's.

It was essentially a diner with a ticky tacky bar at the back, and they'd let you sit there for hours nursing your diet coke. It was late at night and aside from us and some of the usual late night Times Square weirdos, there was always a table of magicians. I can't remember if we recognized Penn & Teller from television or what (this was around '86, long before they were as famous as they are now), but we somehow wound up chatting with them one night.

A couple of years later, when I was 18, I saw Penn & Teller's show off-Broadway with my boyfriend at the time who was (among other things) a juggler who had attended the Ringling Bros's school down in Florida. As you can see, there has been a kind of striking consistency to my life. I was plucked from the audience and levitated (see below).

Fast forward a decade or so, and I'm working at FringeNYC where one of the first things I hear about our Production Manager is that her boyfriend eats light bulbs. When I met him, he seemed terribly dapper and affable and not at all what I pictured when I heard he ate light bulbs. Well, my former co-worker is now Mrs. Todd Robbins, they have a delightful son, and I've seen him perform many, many times over the past decade or so: at FringeNYC, off-Broadway, and at Monday Night Magic. Todd Robbins is something of a carnivalesque Renaissance Man: actor, sideshow freak, Ragtime piano player (he performs frequently with Woody Allen's band), and magician. For a long and entertaining post about Mr. Robbins, go here. If you walk past the sideshow at Coney Island, and you hear a voice beckoning to you from the loudspeakers: that voice is his.

All this self-indulgent prelude brings me to the spooky wonderment that is Todd Robbins's and Teller's Play Dead. I'm embarrassed to say, that last weekend was the first time I'd seen it, as it's been open for some months now. I blathered endlessly about myself, partly because I don't want to say too much about the show as so many of its pleasures are contingent on surprise.

As you enter the Players Theater on Bleecker, you first see a dire warning above the Box Office. That if you are claustrophobic or prone to panic attacks, please alert the staff before entering, as parts of the show are performed in total darkness. Now: I am someone who is claustrophobic and prone to panic attacks and all sorts of general jumpiness. But, this is a spook show and I intended to be scared. And I was. And I was completely and thoroughly entertained. The show is full of magic and scares and tall tales and misdirection and gaffs and frights. In other words, it is a near perfect thing.

I love horror, but as I've mentioned in this blog before, I am seriously distressed by what passes for entertainment, what I like to call "torture porn". I don't understand it and I think it points to a sickness in our culture that people watch such fare as "entertainment". Todd's horror and frights are of a more old fashioned sort, and he demonstrated that if done right, with great authenticity and skill, they can be very scary indeed. At bottom, the show works because Todd is such a terrific performer and teller of tales. This total scardy-cat knew she was in thoroughly good hands when the lights went out.

Even if those hands were covered in blood.

(Photo credits: picture of Todd Robbins by Carol Rosegg, picture of Howard Johnson's via ephemeralnewyork)

Grave Encounters: TriBeCa Film Festival

Grave Encounters, which just had its premier at the TriBeCa Film Festival was directed by a team that has styled themselves "The Vicious Brothers". But, particularly in these days of torture porn and :::shudder::: human caterpillars, nothing about this film seemed particularly vicious. I think of that as a positive attribute.

Do you enjoy those basic cable TV shows in which a group of (so-called) paranormal investigators wander around a hotel or an old Civil War barracks, and stand in empty rooms declaiming, "This is Dave. If there's anyone here, show me a sign. We don't want to hurt you." And they then spend the rest of the hour freaking themselves out and using all sorts of bullshit pseudo-science to prove the existence of hauntings?Yes? You enjoy these shows? Good! This review is written with you completely in mind. If you don't enjoy either horror movies or GhostTV, just carry on.

Grave Encounters, the movie, shows the (purportedly) REAL footage of the very last episode of Grave Encounters, the reality TV show. Let me restate: the CHILLING footage taken by the crew of Grave Encounters as they investigate the supposed paranormal occurrences which have long plagued the abandoned Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital.

BOO!

Were you scared?

No?

You're no fun. Let's continue.

The cast and crew of Grave Encounters lock themselves into the abandoned asylum overnight, and it's all filmed pseudo-verité style. One inevitably compares it to The Blair Witch Project, but as I loathed The Blair Witch Project this wasn't really a problem. The parody of a typical GhostTV episode at the beginning of the film was very funny and the film was reasonably enjoyable as more and more horrible ghostly manifestations plagued the Grave Encounters crew. It was fun to watch them begin to be frightened as their crass cynicism melts away in the face of actual ghosts.

My criticisms are mostly structural. Things go from vaguely disquieting to full out ghost attack far too quickly and too early in the film. It could really have benefitted from a more gradual build. Truly awful things started happening a little too early which doesn't leave the filmmakers anywhere to go. But, it was enjoyable to watch what was essentially an old fashioned ghost story play out.

About ten years ago a friend and I were working for an outdoor rock festival upstate - we were in charge of the dorms they had rented for the staff. They were using the Unification Theological Seminary (i.e. a Moonie Seminary) which is in a truly incredible Gothic Victorian structure that used to be a boy's school. It was really incredibly beautiful, with arched stone walkways with views of the Hudson River Valley, which at night were home to bats which would flap quietly around the columns. Our second night there, Upstate New York was hit with a terrible rain storm. As I took a much needed shower, the lights all suddenly went out. As night approached we realized we were trapped - without a car, without electricity and far from a cell phone tower, we had few choices. We communicated via Walkie Talkie as we guided the festival staff to where they would be sleeping. The night was long and terror filled.

But - we survived.

I don't know that the same could be said of the Grave Encounters crew. All that seemingly remains is this found footage.

Which, honestly, was a little over-conventional. This is one of those films where I would have loved to be able to sit down with the film-makers and help them structure it. Because this sort of story is all based on rising action and it flatlines way too early. But the ghosts and some of the Boo moments are really effective. There are some fun ideas, like when the crew wakes up to find they all have hospital patient bracelets on, and I like that the token female crew member isn't a horror babe, but a pretty normal girl. There's a lovely moment early on when one of the crew is on the phone to his wife, having a mundane conversation, and the wheelchair behind him moves just enough for us to notice, unseen by him, but caught by the camera. They are full of fun ideas, it just feels a little half baked and messy.

If Grave Encounters comes on Chiller one night, you'll have a perfectly enjoyable time watching it, even if it won't particularly change your life.

The Big Bad: First Preview

Penned by and starring Jessi Gotta and directed by Bryan Enk of Sinister Six fame, I am no end excited by The Big Bad, a horror, revenge, werewolf movie.

The first teaser trailer has launched and it looks awesome. I've been seeing still photos on facebook for a while and it's beautifully shot (and everyone knows I love a gorgeously shot horror movie).

I hope at some point in the coming weeks to post an interview with Gotta, so I can share some more information about the film. Some of you may recall she played Winnie in the FringeNYC version of Antarctica. Other friends of The Cabinet are involved in this exciting project as well. Timothy McCown Reynolds, who had a hilarious turn in my chapter of Dainty Cadaver stars, and Fuzzy Bastard himself makes an appearance (of a sort - he plays "The Unseen Man"). So, familiar faces abound. Needless to say, I am thrilled.

Palaces, Freaks and Mae West

Last night, my inamorato and I traveled out to the glorious Landmark Lowe’s Jersey Theatre in Jersey City to meet up with friends and to watch a really odd, yet completely entertaining double feature consisting of Freaks and She Done Him Wrong. I’d never seen Freaks on the big screen and this was my first viewing of the Mae West flick.

First, though, a word about the movie theater itself: It’s a gorgeous, half-restored old time movie palace. Though marred by decay and neglect, it’s still romantic and beautiful. There’s even an organ that rises up through the floor Phantom of the Opra style. Oh, to see the Abominable Dr. Phibes there! It’s just across the street from the Journal Square PATH station, so it’s incredibly easy to get to from Manhattan. There’s really no excuse not to visit.

Back to the movies. As I said, it’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen Freaks. It’s still so wonderful, creepy and dreamlike. I’ve always loved circus stories, and this one is just great. I wonder how much influence it had on Angela Carter when she was working on her brilliant novel Nights At the Circus? It has that strange air so common in the films of the 20s and very early 30s, in which the setting is ill defined, is it America? Is it Europe? Is it modern? Is it Victorian? It’s impossible to tell, as they exist in a fictional film world dreamscape that you could never find on an ordinary map. Also of great interest to me, was seeing Olga Baclanova, one of the stars of The Man Who Laughs in a talkie role as the devious aerialist, Cleopatra.

She Done Him Wrong is a crazily over plotted hour of melodramatic, musical comedy, crime drama. Mae West was a wonder. Her sexual aggression is still completely transgressive and pretty shocking. Cary Grant is handsome as "The Hawk" and, really, I'm bound to be a fan of most anything where a shady character is known as "The Hawk". West spends the whole movie draped in diamonds and sequins and feathers, heavily corseted and in early middle age, she is a wonder. It's a performance that has launched a thousand drag queens, but I wish it had launched more lady performers, too. Women tend to be punished and mocked for sexual forthrightness, so it's not an easy path to take.

As my inamorato wrote a couple of days ago, the Landmark holds a special significance for us, as it was the site of our first date. We had time to kill before the start of the double feature, so we had gin and tonics in the dive next door, where we happened to make the acquaintance of the Landmark Lowes organist. He seemed very nice. Sadly, last night we found out that organist Ralph Ringstad, Jr. passed away in December from a fall. He was still a relatively young man, so his loss is particularly sad. He will be missed. You can see video of him performing here.

Tonight, continuing their weekend long pre-Code Festival, The Landmark Lowes will be presenting a double feature of Morocco (starring Marlene Dietrich) and Baby Face (starring Barbara Stanwyck). Information can be found here. These are two of my favorites, so you can bet that if it wasn't for tonight's performance of Dainty Cadaver, I would most certainly be in attendance!

The Great Ziegfeld! (and Rosemary's Baby)

I recently had the pleasure of watching one of the odder double features of recent times: The Great Ziegfeld followed by Rosemary's Baby.

I was going to try to come up with a clever way to link them, but - nope. I got nothing. Rosemary's Baby I hadn't seen since I was a teenager. Polanski's film is still great. Incredibly creepy and upsetting - in some ways almost proto-feminist (to be honest, one may need a modern context to view it that way, but that's a discussion for another day). Weirdly, my mother knew Ira Levin a little (who penned the novel on which the film is based), as he was married to her yoga instructor in the '70s (groovy). I've been thinking lots about moving lately - the Cabinet Headquarters are lovely, but really only big enough for one outsized ego, not two. So, seeing that apartment in The Dakota in Rosemary's Baby made me salivate. Devil worshipers? Whatever. As long as it doesn't have bedbugs I'd move right in.

The Great Ziegfeld is a giant, over-bloated, long, white washed, gaudy, greatly fictionalized, extravaganza. In other words, it's true to its subject without being particularly "true" in the more traditional sense of the word. The 1936 film was made under the watchful eye of Flo Ziegfeld's widow, Billie Burke, and her fingerprints are visible all over it. I found the earliest scenes in the film to be the most enjoyable, with Flo pitching Sandow, The Strongest Man Alive, to the rubes at the World Columbian Exhibition and conning singer Anna Held into signing with him and all the attendant publicity shenanigans when she does. Ziegfeld is played by William Powell, one of the charmingest SOBs who ever lived. I found most of the musical numbers to be a bit static and interminable, and they definitely looked like they were taking place in 1936, rather than the teens or the twenties.

The Ziegfeld Follies premiered the summer of 1907, and Flo's glorifying of the American girl was an immediate hit. We see the opening night of Flo's storied musical revue, and all the famous Follies stars are there: Will Rogers! Bert Williams! Ray Bolger (who delightfully plays himself)! Of course, in real life, they all joined his show much, much later, and weren't all necessarily there at the same time. Also glossed over was Flo's common law marriage with Held, they lived together as a couple, but never actually wed, a fairly large scandal at the time. The temperamental Held is played in the film by Austrian actress Luise Rainer, who won an Oscar for the role (she was to win her second, for The Good Earth, the subsequent year). Powell plays Flo as a charming womanizer, cheating on Held with a chorus girl turned star - fictionalized in the film, but clearly supposed to be early Follies diva, Lillian Lorraine. Then he meets lovely musical comedy star Billie Burke, the love of his life and all other women fall by the wayside. Or so the Burke sanctioned version goes. In actuality, his affairs didn't cease, and he had that incredibly sexy posthumous Varga painting of Olive Thomas on his office wall for the rest of his life.

If there's one thing I would really have liked to see more of in the film was, unsurprisingly, the Follies themselves. Too much time was taken up with Flo's boring financial difficulties, and not enough was spent on good old fashioned show biz. One delightful exception were the scenes in which Fanny Brice plays herself. But the shows, and the legendary Ziegfeld girls stay firmly in the background.

Luise Rainer is, remarkably, still alive. There was a short TCM documentary included on the DVD and it contains a recent interview with her and she is still sharp as a tack. I looked her up and she had a pretty remarkable life. She started acting (like the Skala sisters and Hedy Lamarr) with the Max Reinhardt Company where she became a major German stage star, in 1935 she was scouted by Hollywood and came to the United States where her second film was The Great Ziegfeld. After winning her two Oscars, her acting career more or less tanked, likely because of a combination of bad advice from then husband Clifford Odets and too high expectations after her back to back Oscar wins. She was a nutty intellectual in Hollywood and everyone thought she had lost her mind when she left California because - as she put it - the well had dried up. Soon after, she played a great part in getting Bertolt Brecht out of Hitler's Germany, and to thank her, wrote the role of Grusha Vashnadze in Caucasian Chalk Circle for her - though she never played it as they had a big falling out. She acted sporadically on stage and in films for the rest of her life. Fellini wrote a role for her in La Dolce Vita, but she quit before filming started. One of her most recent roles was, bizarrely, on The Love Boat in 1983.

Luise Rainer will turn 101 on Tuesday.

Jennifer's (and Megan's) Body

I was really prepared to like Jennifer's Body for a multitude of reasons, mixed reviews or not (and that's mixed, meaning mixed, not bad). It's a teen girl horror flick penned by Diablo Cody straight off her Oscar win for Juno, and directed by Karyn Kusama who helmed Girlfight (which I haven't seen, but about which I've heard good things) and Aeon Flux (which was awful). It stars Amanda Seyfried, who I've always liked and Megan Fox, who I thought I'd never seen in anything, but I was wrong, as she had a small part in the Lindsey Lohan vehicle Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. Which I've seen. Don't judge.

That said, all I know about Ms. Fox is what I've gleaned from the internets over the past few years. Most of this can be summed up thusly:

1. She's great looking.
   
2. She says lots of boneheaded things to reporters and on talk shows.
   
3. She's in a long term relationship with (now married to) Brian Austin Green who played David Silver on 90210.
4. My friend's teenage daughter and her friends adore her (she's soooo fuckin hottttt).
5. People on the internets seem pretty contemptuous and hateful towards her, and I can't quite seem to figure out why.

Back to the film. Ms. Cody's script has a lot going for it, but it feels a little half baked. The beginning is terrific: the film is book-ended with scenes of Amanda Seyfried in a maximum security women's prison. It's shot beautifully (if with a few too many teal/orange clichés for my taste) and starts off creepily enough and has us wondering what could have turned sweet-faced Seyfried into a killer. We then flashback to Devil's Kettle High School, where pretty cheerleader Megan Fox (Jennfier) is BFF with dorky Amanda Seyfried (Needy. No, really. That's the character's name). Even before any of the violent supernatural goings on that we see later in the film, Jennifer and Needy seem somehow psychically linked, almost too close. Needy's sweet boyfriend thinks (rightly) that Jennifer is using and manipulating Needy. Jennifer is a classic mean girl who seems to require Needy to follow in her wake like some sort of wide eyed terrier. What both the movie and Fox do pretty well is show that Jennifer seems to need Needy as much as Needy needs Jennifer. It's an unhealthy, nearly parasitic, uneven, symbiotic friendship.


Megan Fox is a beautiful girl and is talked about in the gutter press as if she was a major movie star. But she's only appeared in six films so far (with a couple more in the can waiting for release). Six. She shot to fame after appearing in the first Transformers movie and after appearing in various states of sexiness in every men's magazine the world over. She also has an extremely well documented case of verbal diarrhea which makes her a completely entertaining interview. After reading a slew of Megan Fox articles over the past couple of days and taking a look at her TMZ coverage from the past couple of years, a couple of things became immediately apparent. Unlike many young starlets, she seems to have a really good bead on both the nature of her job (being a sexy young starlet) and the pluses and minuses of this particular line of employment. The other is that she has the most shockingly boring private life of any sexy young starlet since the job was invented.


Jennifer and Needy wind up in the local shit kicker bar to see a band, Low Shoulder, that Jennifer heard about on YouTube. Before talking to the cute lead singer (Adam Brody from The OC) Jennifer is all trash talking teen girl expounding to Needy that they have boobs, hence all the power. And then after confidently striding up to Brody she... melts. She's a little nervous and stammery the way girls are when they talk to Older Boys. Needy thinks they're bad news, but Jennifer is smitten. Cute! In a band! From the city! Needy is very, very protective of Jennifer, correctly thinking that her heedlessness could lead her into real trouble. While watching the band, the bar explodes into flames. It is hinted at, but never confirmed, that something telekinetic may be at play. The girls escape through the bathroom window, and run into the lead singer in the parking lot, while surrounded by burn victims and screams. He convinces Jennifer to come with him in the band's van. Needy knows this is a terrible idea and tries to talk Jennifer out of it, but she goes. Now, I have to say I really liked how this was handled even if they took a play straight out of the Buffy handbook. What I mean is, we as audience members are truly frightened for Jennifer. The ways in which this could go badly for her are manifold. When we next see Jennifer, she's a monster. Or so Needy thinks. We don't know what's happened to her, or what she is, but she's covered in blood and she's just... wrong. Up til now the movie has been pretty terrific. This, though, is where things start to fall apart.


Oh, Megan Fox. If there's any young starlet in need of a good gender studies class, it's her. I'm just worried everyone from the professor to the other students would be mean to her, as in some ways she's a perfect object lesson in four inch heels. And when I say she's in need of a good gender studies class, I do so because she is clearly fascinated with the ramifications of gender and sexuality as they pertain to both her working life and the world at large. She talks about it all the time in her interviews in a way I've almost never heard before from someone who is in her particular position. Megan Fox is equal parts intelligent and inarticulate, which causes some problems. The following are some quotes:

It's a double standard. To be outspoken, or different at all, is a problem for women. As soon as you curse or, God forbid, make some sort of sexual reference that's a joke, you're labeled a party girl. They don't do that with men, so I feel it would be a lot easier.

When I go to a party, I always feel like I'm chum. Like my agent is just chumming the waters until I'm circled by all these dudes.

I don't trust male intentions, usually, because they don't approach me for intellectual conversation.

If you know how to take control of being a sex symbol, then it can be powerful. But I have no idea how to handle it yet, how to deal with it.

Hollywood is the most superficial thing you could possibly be a part of and if I weren't attractive I wouldn't be working at all.

I personally always find something really scary about watching little girls learning to manipulate their dads by baby talking. Then they grow up and use the same technique on their boyfriends or husbands. That scares me because it's just so sick on so many levels.

Little girls are very much exposed to sexuality through the media and the entertainment industry and advertisements. So when you realize that you have the same power that you've watched women who've come before you have, it is frightening and you don't know what to do with it. I don't think you ever get comfortable with it.

And there's pages more. She's clearly given this stuff a lot of thought, but doesn't quite know what to do with it. In interviews, she actually most often sounds like a regular person, which I didn't realize was so unusual until I realized that the current crop of actors and actresses sound like crazy people. She talks about being lonely. She talks about smoking weed and watching movies. She makes dumb jokes. Sometime she's annoying. Sometimes she sounds bored. Sometimes she's engaging. There's also, by many, or most of the journalists who interview her a "Look! It talks! Just like an actual person!" attitude that must be maddening (although Fox claims she doesn't read her own press, as it would make her crazy). She also complains about her job the way normal people do. Unfortunately (for her), she tells these things to the press, rather than her friends (of which, she claims, she has none), so she gets into all kinds of trouble.


The second act of Jennifer's Body is a mess. We see too much of what Jennifer has become too quickly, sort of destroying suspense. The idea of this pretty cheerleader being a monster and literally devouring boys is very potent and full of potential. But the thematic, horror and plot elements never really come together. The boys Jennifer kills seem arbitrary. The direction seems a little lazy during some of it - oh, and can we please retire the sexy slo-mo babe walk down the hallway at school? It's the biggest cliché ever at this point. We get it. She's hot. That's why you hired the actress you did. Duh. So I feel like I did a lot of waiting around for the climax. Also, there seemed to be something a little off about the tone of the film and the performances. Pitch black horror comedies are really, really difficult to make. Diablo Cody's dialogue is fairly mannered. This wasn't a problem in Juno as director Ivan Reitman had such strong control of the material. He had everyone play it pretty straight with as much emotional truth as possible. Any sort of wackiness or artificiality in the performances would just push it over the edge. I think that's a bit of what happens here. Fox isn't great, but it looks to me as if she's been poorly directed. Pros like J.K. Simmons and Amy Sedaris aren't terrific either. I thought the best performance in the film was from the kid who played Needy's boyfriend. I have a feeling Kusama wasn't paying enough attention to her actors.

I guess what I find so interesting is the extraordinary amount of animosity felt towards this young woman. She was recently fired from the Transformers franchise for mouthing off in the press. In an interview, she compared her director, Michael Bay to both Napoleon and Hitler. This was, to say the least, unwise. She had also been quoted saying some things that might be construed as unflattering to the Transformers franchise (they also might be construed as true) such as finding the plot of the second film to be garbled and confusing, that the stunt work was unsafe, that her own performance wasn't very good, that she doesn't understand how anyone could watch the IMAX version without having an aneurysm. So her option was not renewed. She's clearly a little enchanted with her own outspokenness, but I found (something she also seems aware of) that when watching her in televised interviews it's pretty clear that most of what she's saying is meant to be self-deprecating and are said with far more good humor than is perceived when read. But the most risible thing that I saw being brought up again and again vis a vis Fox, was the question of whether she was promiscuous, or a slut. From what I can gather, this is constantly brought up because of Fox's appearance and because she often appears in mens magazines in her underwear (Fox doesn't do nudity). There is literally zero scandal attached to her personal life. I couldn't find a single photograph of her out in a nightclub or a party, barring things that are clearly work related events. Interestingly, people like Reese Witherspoon and Hilary Swank have much more active dating lives than Fox, but the perception of them as "good girls" somewhat protects them from the truly ugly smears Fox has been subject to. Really, Perez Hilton needs to go away forever.

In the last act, Jennifer's Body picks up again. The climax is satisfying and the coda ties it together nicely. And the end credit sequence is kind of brilliant. But, over all, the film didn't work for me. I don't quite get what I'm supposed to take away from the film. Instead of being gang raped, as we feared, the indie rock band sacrifice Jennifer in exchange for fame and fortune. The catch is that they are supposed to sacrifice a virgin, and small town bombshell Jennifer is anything but, so instead of remaining dead, she becomes a demon. She's portrayed as a mass of foul mouthed insecurities that has a hard time saying no to boys. Her becoming a ravenous demon is so potentially interesting. As I wrote in my Ginger Snaps post, our culture is deeply uncomfortable with sexually aggressive woman (to quote Ms. Fox: "men are scared of a strong, confident vagina"), and if Jennifer's hunger sprung out of need, rather than a vague free floating animosity, it could have been really great.

Here's what I want for Megan Fox: I think she should take a few acting classes and find somebody she can learn from that she can trust. She needs some chops. She said in one of the interviews I read, that people's expectations of her are so low, she's bound to impress. She has also disparaged her own ability again and again, saying that she hasn't done anything, how could she be any good yet? I don't know that I find the woman herself all that terribly fascinating, but seeing how the world reacts to her is. And I like the fact that she cheerfully reports the stupidities that are heaped upon her in Hollywood to all and sundry. I also like that she seems in no danger of meeting any kind of Marilyn Monroe/Lindsey Lohan/Brittney Murphy like fate. Her personal life seems almost comically boring. I think she's a big enough deal that TMZ and the other stalkers feel the need to keep watch, but they are pretty much reduced to reports like "Megan Fox Has Weird Thumbs" (I'm not making this up, there's pages of it). "Megan Fox going the the dentist." "Megan Fox takes her dog to vet! Pictures inside!" "Megan Fox Grocery Shops!" Then, of course, was the excitement of her honeymoon. She went to the beach. She looked happy. Hollywood is a weird, weird place and being a starlet is a weird job. Fox seems to take all of it with pretty good humor. She's been somewhat painted as a baby-Angelina, and there are worse things for her to be, certainly.

BREAKING: Heidi Klum is Suddenly Awesome

As I reported at great length, Heidi Klum went to the mat supporting ever so wronged Project Runway runner up, Mondo. Part of the endless, unpleasant judges deliberation revolved around Mondo's final look: Heidi and JSimp both said they'd love to wear it, Nina hated it, and Michael sneered to Heidi [paraphrasing], "Yeah, right. I'd like to see you actually wear that dress."

Well, she did. At the premier of Darren Aronofsky's ballet/girl/horror movie The Black Swan (which I'm really excited to see). I have some very mixed feelings, though, as the contentious sleeves were removed, somewhat lessening the impact. But still. I'm really adoring Ms. Klum these days, and it's gratifying that the woman who is no doubt on the correct side of history, is keeping her word.

CORRECTION: It was actually Nina who said, "I'd like to see you wear that dress, Klum."

Here's the trailer for The Black Swan. I may even see this one in the theater.




(Photo via mylifetime.com)

Halloween (the movie. the book. the weekend. the horror. )

This post is officially completely tardy.

Back in 6th grade, my somewhat extraordinary teacher Mr. Harrison took our whole class to see a double feature of horror movies one Saturday in October, 1980. The first feature was The Legacy (I think), as all I remember was a big fancy house, and the scene where someone got trapped and killed in an indoor swimming pool, as I found that really chilling. The second film was John Carpenter's Halloween. Let's leave aside discussion of the appropriateness of taking a bunch of little kids to a slasher movie with added bonus toplessness. What matters is the movie terrified me. After seeing it, I would lay awake in bed, thinking if I made the slightest move, something would see, and then kill me.

I've always been a big fan of exposition spewing Brits in Horror movies, from Lionel Atwill in Doctor X to Rupert Giles in Buffy, they never fail to delight me, and I think Donald Pleasance does a bang up job as the expositing shrink who runs around trying to lock up blank faced, scary, unstoppable Michael Myers. But he's not the point, the scary killer is. And there's something about the real world setting and the seeming plausibility of it (not to mention the proximity to where I grew up of the wonderfully named Creedmore Hospital - home to the local criminally insane), made this film particularly horrifying. But, I loved it.

I've already blogged about the excellent spook walk in Sleepy Hollow, and that was pretty much as scary as it got this Halloween (unless you include the truly frightening amount of gin the bartender at The Player's Club poured into our cocktails). My Major Domo and I hit as many events as we reasonably could this weekend, and you can read about our adventures here. We watched a Phantasmagorical magic lantern show, and then because seemingly me and my Major Domo control the world, three days later we saw Terry Borton, the magic lanternist we had just seen perform, on TCM's excellent documentary Moguls & Movie Stars! We are total outliers! On actual Halloween we inadvertently walked right into the Williamsburg Halloween parade as we were on our way to DM Theatrics production of Plan 9 From Outer Space. All delightful, but not exactly scary.

Mr. Harrison was an awfully unusual teacher. He was a former police officer who won the lottery and became a grade school teacher, just because he wanted to. He loved horror and magic and history and dressing up. I think, unlike my brother, I was often pretty lucky in the teachers I wound up with. He used to dress up as a wizard and perform magic tricks. He let our class hang out in our classroom during lunch and play poker. He let me write a paper on Queen Elizabeth I from the POV of a fly on her wall (literally). Sadly, he died of a heart attack two thirds of the way through the school year. To be honest, I have no memory of who replaced him (this was when all my teachers were dying of heart attacks - something like three in one year).

I also decided to celebrate this Halloween season by reading the wonderful Octavia E. Butler's last novel, Fledgling. It was an interesting take on the vampire mythos, as unconventional as possible. The terror in it came from the deep malignancy of racism and hatred, not from blood sucking fiends. She also brings up a bunch of disquieting questions about relationships and free will that are never resolved - as they shouldn't be, as with any real question, there are no satisfying answers. The vampires in her book live in voluntary symbiotic relationships with humans, from whom they must feed, in order to live. The vampires have some kind of venom which, over time, binds the human to the vampire. So, if the human is separated from his (or her) vampire they will die. If something happens to the vampire's human, they experience terrible, crippling grief. Each vampire needs several humans in order to survive, so they form little de facto families. Reading this book in conjunction with Butler's earlier book, Kindred, is fascinating, as it's the best novel about slavery in America I've ever read. He writing about this strange, unequal symbiotic relationship is riveting.

Now, as the season of horror ends, I'm moving on and reading Helter Skelter. It never ends.

Sleepy Hollow is Still Clearly Haunted

We humans have been artificially scaring ourselves since we were tiny little people who sat crouched in caves telling each other stories waiting for Woolly Mammoth season to begin. The human psyche differs from the animal one most in its ability to comprehend abstractions, which leads to the ability to be both frightened and to know (or at least reasonably assume) that no actual harm will befall one. That's the theory, anyway.


This is the season of plastic masks and candy and slutty vampire nurse costumes all doing service to celebrate what started off as the Celtic celebration of the end of summer, Samhain and the Christian All Saints Day. In other words, it's all about death. Leaves fall, it grows cold and the long winter months begin. Even if you don't find the idea of ghosts and vampires particularly scary, the thought of a rural 16th century winter should scare the bejesus out of you. Like I said, it's all about death.



But back to this, the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century. My dashing inamorato and I have been feeding ourselves a steady diet of monster movies, spook houses (well, two) and have an action packed Halloween weekend ahead of us. But mostly I want to talk about the town of Sleepy Hollow and the Horseman's Hollow haunted spook walk. As all of us know, Sleepy Hollow is the small town in the Hudson Valley that was the site of Washington Irving's famous tale of cowardice, bullying and - most importantly! - headlessness. Sleepy Hollow, just north of Tarrytown, is a forty-five minute rain ride from Grand Central Station. There is a 17th century church with vast and beautiful cemetery in which both Washington Irving and Katrina Van Tassel are buried. Across the road is Philipsburg Manor, a 17th century estate. Which is, from what I saw, inhabited by all sorts of spooks and ghosts and devils and tortured souls. And, of course, a horseman without a head.



The Horseman's Hollow "haunted experience" is both spooky, scary and period perfect. The production design, whether it was accomplished by supernatural means, or otherwise is impressive. The walk is also nicely paced. Trav and I went fairly early in the evening and we saw very few of the other people walking through, until there was a slight bottleneck after a (very scary to this easily startled clausterphobe) maze. All the spooks and monsters were a creepy assortment of dead Red Coats, eviscerated farmers, blacksmiths, schoolmasters and 18th century devil worshippers. And things that have no name. Sometimes they are right in front of you cackling with the hollow laughter of the damned. And sometimes they sneak up quietly behind you. I don't think I need to tell you which is scarier.



As you can see above, Trav was nearly eaten by evil Jack Pumpkinhead. The whole thing was absolutely loads of spooky fun and more than worth the $20 admission. I don't want to say too much as half the fun was being constantly surprised. One thing that particularly impressed me is that there weren't any dead (see what I did here?) spots. When one was walking between the major installations, there was always something to look at. You never had the feeling of "waiting for the next thing". And though I felt I spent most of the time walking in the open, I could never see what was ahead. And then, I saw a fleeting glimpse of a mounted figure on a large white charger, and yes, that figure had no head.



For a delightful recounting of the rest of our day in the village of Sleepy Hollow, as told by Mr. S.D., click here.

For information and tickets to Horseman's Hollow in Sleepy Hollow, click here.

For train schedules to Sleepy Hollow (the Philipse Manor stop on the Hudson River Line) click here.

May: If You Can't Find a Friend, Make One

May is one of those movies I feel that no one likes as much as I do. Well, me and Roger Ebert. He was the one who saw it at a festival, championed it, and made sure it received some sort of distribution. The New York Times dismissed it by calling it an ordinary slasher flick which left me wondering if Stephen Holden even bothered to watch it. It's a strange, modern, Frankenstein tale full of desperate need, not a slasher flick at all. I think of it more as a romantic comedy that goes horribly, terribly awry. As I am not a real journalist, this is going to be yet another listicle - this time enumerating the things I like about my Favorite Modern Horror Movie.

1. At the top of my list is the cinematography. This is a low budget indie horror movie made on a shoe-string and it's just gorgeous. The interiors inside of May's apartment are lit so beautifully, it looks like a Rennaissance painting - deep shadows and tones. The DP's name is Steve Yedlin.

2. May's only friend at the top of the film - her doll, Suzy. It looks a little like one of the dolls Dame Darcy makes, but isn't. All she does is talk to her doll, go to work, and sew - clothes for herself and her dolls. Partway through the film one realizes that May believes the doll is talking back - likely in the voice of her mother. This manages to be subtle, disturbing and sad.



3. The movie begins as if it's a strange, quirky romantic comedy. It made me think about the behavior of most heroines of regular romantic comedies an how other people would react to their odd behavior, if they too, were not stuck in a romantic comedy. I think it might be something like this. The object of the strange, solitary May's unfortunate affections is Adam, played by Jeremy Sisto. He's a film student who works as a car mechanic. She, like that other homicidal loner, Dr. Horrible, quasi-stalks her crush object at the local laundromat and engages in awkward conversation. All the scenes between May and Adam are priceless. He's a horror movie aficionado with all kinds of Dario Argento paraphernalia in his apartment who claims to like the weird and dark. But he is just a sane guy who likes horror movies. So when he is presented with actual, real life strange and dark he is rightfully disturbed and runs screaming for the exit.



4. The whole thing takes place in normal Los Angeles. The characters live in normal apartments that young people could afford. May works in a veterinary hospital for a doctor with an incomprehensible accent. The characters go to the laundromat and eat deli sandwiches in the park during their lunch breaks.

5. Their first date ends when Adam kisses May and makes a thoughtless comment about it seeming like she's never kissed anyone before. Of course, she hasn't, so she freaks out and runs away. On their (ill-considered) second date, Adam shows May one of his student films. This is one of the best scenes ever. First of all, it's completely believable as a student short. It's about three minutes long, in black and white, and shows a young couple on a picnic who wind up cannibalizing each other. May sits happily on the couch watching, and then scrunches closer to Adam as the mayhem starts. When he asks her how she liked it, she says, "It was sweet." The brilliance is, the short film is charming enough, that this isn't a completely crazy response (i.e. the couple remains happy as they literally devour each other, it has a goofy score, etc.). So, Adam doesn't seem like a moron for being okay with this. And then, when he presses her for some criticism (as one does), she says, "I don't think that she could have gotten his whole finger in one bite, though. That part was kind of far-fetched." He looks slightly disconcerted.

6. Lots of Breeders songs are used on the soundtrack early in the film. I mean, who doesn't like Kim Deal. And this adds to the quirky romantic comedy feeling at the beginning.

7. A dark haired, pre-surgery Anna Faris is May's co-worker at the clinic. Faris thoughtlessly seduces May, then dizzily turns her attentions to a classic mean girl. May's apparent bisexuality is not presented pruriently. It's really clear that May is so desperate for some kind of human connection that gender really isn't a huge issue.



8. Angela Bettis is really terrific. She's been kind of typecast, playing Carrie in the remake, and playing mental patients in both Girl, Interrupted and on House.

9. It's such a sad story. May's descent into madness is triggered by a simple, happy event: she gets contact lenses that replace the glasses she has been hiding behind since she was a child. It's this that gives her the tiny amount of confidence required to start talking to Adam. At first, it looks as if a new, more integrated world will be opened up for her. Instead, it just leads to horrible disappointments.



10. It's a real, old fashioned, psychological horror movie. It's not torture porn or a dead teenager movie. May is both Victor Frankenstein and the monster. You feel sorry for her and want things to work out for her. And you feel badly for her victims, too, as their only crime is the typical thoughtlessness and casualness of the times we live in. There's a nice little scene late in the movie where Adam sees May in the park reading (an anatomy text), and he tries to be kind to her, but she is too far gone. But, like I said about Ginger Snaps - May is a real horror movie. It's beautifully and intelligently made, but there is A LOT of blood and violence. There is a particularly upsetting scene in a school for blind children (FYI - May doesn't do anything bad to the kids, there's just a lot of broken glass and it's very upsetting for everyone. Lesson learned: if your best friend is a small, fragile doll encased in glass, don't hand her over to a class of blind children. It will all end in tears.). And as indicated, she tries to make a friend. Out of parts. If you don't want to see this, this is not the movie for you.

11. The opening shot. See below:



This is the third in my favorite films of the Aughts series.

Doctor X!

Any film in which Lionel Atwill is the least creepy mad scientist is a very special one indeed. Such is the case in the spooky and wonderfully campy (yet flawed - more on that later) Doctor X from 1932. This rarely seen pre-code technicolor horror gem has a lot going for it. From the early autopsy scene, in which the removal of a pectoral muscle from the murder victim can only mean one thing - cannibalism - I pretty much knew the film would be a really good time.

Lionel Atwill stars as Doctor Xavier (I guess this is before his mutant days) who is assisting the police in solving a series of grisly murders. As the murder weapon is a scalpel that is only used within the medical school Atwill runs, and the students are all on holiday, the police know the killer must be a member of his staff. This medical college is one of the best things I've seen in a movie in a long, long time. It's supposedly situated somewhere in Manhattan, but looks more like German Expressionist Gothic City to me. I'm also unsure as to what they teach. Atwill introducing the police detectives to his staff one by one, may be one of the most entertaining 20 minutes or so I've seen in a while. Each is creepier than the next, and has a disturbing back story to match. Two were shipwrecked and it is implied they ate a third companion. One (who also has a prosthetic hand he screws on and off) is an expert in cannibalism. Another has bizarre facial scarring and his medical coat is covered in blood splatters (unexplained). The next is first seen in a Satanic silhouette. The last zips by in his Strangelovian wheelchair. I can only assume that graduates of the school receive their MSD degrees (Doctorate of Mad Science).

The scene soon shifts to Dr. Xavier's Long Island mansion. Look. I grew up on Long Island, and I promise you that nothing like this place ever existed. The rocky coast evokes Cornwall and the building itself screams Castle Dracula. Guests arrive via hansom cab. It's wonderful and entirely inexplicable. While there, Dr. Xavier concocts the most bizarre sting in the history of film. It involves elaborate wax figures, 40 foot tall glass beakers full of green liquid, the Doctor's spooky butler pretending to be the killer, heart monitoring devices attached to the suspects, and a dramatic reveal of the full moon outside the window. It's basically the most complicated lie detector test ever devised. It's absolutely wonderful to watch and completely ineffective.

I think I should now write about the one major, crippling flaw in the film. This would be the newspaper reporter protagonist (I saw Doctor X as a part of Film Forum's program of newspaper themed films) played by Lee Tracy. I have a strong suspicion the character was fine at the script level, but as played by Tracy, he's inappropriately comic and slapsticky. He bumps into stuff, stammers broadly, spit takes and expresses fear with all the subtlety of Abbott and Costello in the face of Dracula. His performance has nothing to do with the rest of the film and I can't imagine what anyone was thinking. There are other laughs in the film, but they fit in with the sophisticated look and feel evoked by the German Expressionist sets and the old-style mad doctor performances by the largely European cast. As with the drunken publicist in Murders at the Zoo (which also starred Atwill) played by Charles Ruggles, it's as if this reporter has wandered in from a different movie being shot in a neighboring lot. The love interest is the lovely and gorgeously gowned Fay Wray playing Atwill's daughter, and when she bafflingly falls into Tracy's arms at the end, it is far more disturbing and confusing than any of the violent murders or dismemberments seen earlier.

The movie looks great and is well directed, which makes the Lee Tracy aberration even stranger. Again, as with Murders at the Zoo, I'm guessing front office meddling. The director, Michael Curtiz, was no slouch. He went on to direct films such as Captain Blood and Casablanca. He knew how to work with actors and get funny, believable performances out of them.

The ending of Doctor X is beyond satisfying. I won't spoil it for you, but Synthetic Flesh has lots to do with the crimes!

Lycanthropy: Ginger Snaps

Ginger: Okay. Search and destroy. Go.

Brigitte: Okay. Trina Sinclair.

Ginger: Excellent selection. Continue.

Brigitte: Trina Sinclair DOA in the hair dye aisle. Perished while seeking matching barrettes on nothing but diet pills and laxatives.

Ginger: Likes her shorts stuck up her ass crack.

Brigitte: Favorite homework excuse? [unintelligible. believe me. I listened to the line like ten times] ate it.

Ginger: Basic pleasure model.

Brigitte: Your standard cum-buckety date bait.

(pause)

Ginger: Good one.

- "Ginger Snaps"

It's April and I never bothered to do any end of decade lists. It all seems so arbitrary, and I feel like I don't see enough films or read enough current books to make any kind of critically viable sermon from the mount-like top ten decisions. So I'm just going to post here and there about some of my favorite films of the past decade. This post will be devoted to the excellent Canadian teen girl werewolf flick from 2000, Ginger Snaps.

Werewolves are almost universally portrayed as male, which if you think about it for five minutes is super counter-intuitive as the entire idea of werewolves is deeply entwined with the lunar cycle, and who thinks of boys when you think lunar cycle? No one. But there are all kinds of prohibitions at play in turning women into sharp-toothed, hairy, aggressive animals on film. Jezebel touched on a couple of them in a post in February. Werewolves aren't pretty, or more importantly to American movies - they aren't hot. Our culture is deeply uncomfortable with hair on girls, with directly aggressive girls (as opposed to girls who use passive aggressive machinations to get their way), and particularly with sexual aggression in girls. And no one wants to talk about periods in films, right, which would be kind of inevitable with all that lunar cycling. Ginger Snaps knows all this and uses these prohibitions to create one of the best horror movies of the past ten or fifteen years. More than almost any other film I can think of it feels like not just a horror movie about girls, but a horror movie for girls. Boys, seriously - if you are at all squeamish about period blood, this is not the movie for you.

Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald are sisters, less than a year apart in age and possess an almost twin-like closeness and understanding. They live in a horrible suburban subdivision where all the houses look the same and everyone lives in a series of identical, interlocking cul-de-sacs. Ginger is a few months older and more traditionally attractive than Brigitte (as two of the awful boys in their high school say: "You want to do a Fitzgerald?" "Not the little dweeb. The redhead with the rack."), although they are both genuinely weird and alienated in a way you rarely see in movies. The sisters seem to spend most of their time in their bunker-like bedroom talking about suicide pacts and how horrible everyone is except for them. For a school project (I can't begin to fathom what the actual assignment was) they create a series of photographic tableaux of violent death: murders, suicides, accidents.



Late one night, the girls are out in their neighborhood, playing a prank on one of the popular girls who is mean to them (the film is smart about this dynamic, too). Just as Ginger gets her first period, she is attacked by - something. Bear? Dog? Wolf? The girls run through the woods to escape and the thing is run over by a van driven by the local pot dealer who works in a greenhouse. As he says later: Lycanthrope. But Ginger has been scratched and bitten. She doesn't want to go to the emergency room as she's scared she'll get in trouble. Then her wounds start healing with alarming quickness. And then the changes start.

The parallels between lycanthropy and adolescence are obvious, but the way the movie explores them is brilliant. It feels both modern and mythic at the same time - an incredibly difficult achievement of tone that is shockingly difficult to hit, one I go after again and again in my own work and have touched upon briefly elsewhere in this blog. People have been telling the same fairy tales for hundreds of years because they are real. As Ginger's wolfy nature starts taking over, she both enjoys her new power and is scared absolutely shitless by it. Brigitte dashes around, trying to protect her sister both from others and herself, and to figure out what is going on with her, eventually with the help of the pot dealer who, it turns out knows a thing or two about other herbs. Aside from the blood lust and the tufts of hair and the tail (Brigitte helps Ginger tape it down before gym class), she is also suddenly both sexually available and sexually aggressive. Ginger finding her inner hotness is a cliché (in one of the films few lazy moments, she does the traditional babe walk down the hall at school in slow-mo as all the boys check her out), but her aggression is not.

Portraying any sort of sexual aggression in young women is still pretty rare. As Ginger fools around with a boy in his car, her enthusiasm causes him to say, "Just sit back and relax." She immediately snarls back at him that he should be the one sitting back and relaxing, and she pounces. Her aggression is real and it's not played for laughs. There aren't a great many female werewolves to compare Ginger to, but I don't think we can even begin to talk about sexual aggression in young girls and supernatural allegory without talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I read one review a while ago that summed up Ginger Snaps by saying it played like a particularly good episode of Buffy, and they do seem to occupy the same psychic space. I think there are more sexually aggressive young women in the seven seasons of Buffy than were seen in all the rest of the history of television combined. I mean, what other show has the title character embark on an intense sexual relationship that results essentially in a months long hate fuck born of rage and suicidal self loathing during which she blames herself for being a Bad Person but when she fesses up, her friend (likely voicing the feelings of the show's writers) says, "Look, it's always more complicated then that.". Interestingly, there are still people on the internet who blame Buffy (the character, not the show) for emasculating vampires - or maybe men in general, who knows. I loved that they showed men being constantly freaked out by her strength in a kind of primal way. And don't even get me started on the murderous and damaged Faith who seduces Xander, the ultimate beta-male in season three and then nearly strangles him to death. The one time a female werewolf made it onto the show, it was a little disappointing. She was the voice of unrestrained desire, but she was also kind of evil, and was eventually punished for it.

if you start googling terms like female werewolves menstruation, the hits you get most often cite Ginger Snaps and Angela Carter (for real. I'm not just trying to shoehorn in my favorite writer). Her most often read (and her most often taught) book, The Bloody Chamber, ends with three wolf stories. In her most famous story of all, "The Company of Wolves" (later made into an intriguing, but unsuccessful film in collaboration with Neil Jordan), the girl in the red cloak laughs in the wolf's face when he says he is going to eat her up and she winds up in her dead grandmother's bed with him, sleeping between his paws. In her stories, women turn into tigers and wolves and the forests are never safe.

But more than anything else, Ginger Snaps is a story of sisters. The story belongs as much to Brigitte as it does to Ginger. She is smart and resourceful, and the protective love she feels for her sister is truly affecting. It is she that provides the forward momentum for the story as she does everything in her power to make things okay as she sees Ginger slipping away. There is a desperately sad scene late in the movie when Brigitte walks into their shared bathroom and sees her sister covered in blood and in tears as she has tried to cut off her tail. Which sounds silly in print, but it's so awfully sad in actuality. Another kinship between Ginger Snaps and Buffy is they both possess the courage to take one's story to its logical conclusion. Ginger Snaps ends tragically, as it should. There is no reset button.

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For For Getting Our Lips Sewn Shut and Being Eaten By Crocodiles

Murders In the Zoo is on DVD for the first time and maybe it's the Benadryl talking but I thought it was pretty great. I am completely obsessed with Kathleen Burke, the crazily perfectly art deco looking actress. And then I noted that the film was directed by Edward Sutherland, Louise Brooks' first husband. I think he has a type. But really, she looks like a piece of illustration. Unfortunately she winds up being eaten by crocodiles. It's that kind of movie. Okay, she wasn't much of an actress, but it's a total shame she never wound up hanging out with the surrealists in Europe because they would have gone mad for her.

There is also some modern CSI style lab work and an inexplicably hammy turn by somebody named Charles Ruggles. This is pretty much a straight up horror movie. There's the delightfully creepy murderer played by Lionel Atwill, a bunch of people who are there to be killed, and the love interest (the boring couple who survive). But Charles Ruggles gets top billing as the unnecessary and annoying Zoo publicist. Since when does the unnecessary comic relief get top billing? I have a feeling someone if the front office thought the movie was "too dark" and it needed someone more famous, so they shoe-horned in this unfunny comedian.

Lionel Atwill and Kathleen Burke

I really wonder what happened to Kathleen Burke. She got married and retired from the movie business at 25. She did lots of radio until about 1940 (when she was still not yet 30) and then fell off the radar. She died in 1980, and no one's really sure what became of her in the intervening 40 years. Maybe she became a hard-boiled Chandleresque dame. But I suppose it's more likely she became a housewife and led a perfectly ordinary, uneventful life. But I can dream, can't I? Or perhaps at one point I can invent an exciting and fictional alternate 40 years and all questions will answered and all mysteries solved.

Here is the completely grisly opening sequence:



Zoo isn't on Netflix and TCM sadly doesn't have it On Demand. You can purchase the DVD at the TCM store either as a part of their Universal Cult Horror collection (which looks awesome) or individually.