COMICS REVIEW: TRASHED (2015)

 Art and words by Derf Backderf 

Editor Charles Kochman

Designer Pamela Notarantonio 

Managing Editor Jen Graham

Production Manager Kathy Lovisolo 

Published by Abrams ComicArts in 2015.

. . .

"Think of the economy as a giant digestive tract. And we're here at the rectum of the free market to clean it all up."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

This one's about the life cycle of garbagemen. A guy's living at home post high school. He blew off going to college, because maybe he didn't have the best grades, or maybe he didn't see the point of getting albatrossed with student debt, or a combination of both, so he goes job hunting for that entry level fruit, and soon enough he's hanging on the back of a truck. 

At first he's repulsed by shit-filled diapers, writhing maggots, swarms of flies, dead dogs, and cans filled with liquid waste 'cooked' by the summer sun. But you do the same thing day in, day out, and suddenly it's not such a big deal. You can get used to anything. Sure, the inclement weather sucks. And having to lift heavy-ass pianos and all manner of busted up appliances and machinery is a bum deal-but you're young. You've got body to burn. And the rest of your life to figure out how the fuck to escape your hometown, to escape the life of a garbageman. Maybe you'll even be pushed to take the leap into the void of student loans. Or you could decide to work in sanitation for life. Fuck it, right?

Trashed is a fictional story, but it's backed up by real facts and figures about the ever expanding amount of waste that the USofA's ever growing capitalist economy calls into existence. The working class story of the garbagemen is interwoven with documentary style expositions of the grandiose scale of the landfills required to disappear our All-American super jumbo sized mountains of waste, and the delusions necessary to effect such erasure. Recycling is nice, but insufficient. Our garbage weighs in at triple digits of millions of tons. Styrofoam does not biodegrade. Plastic water bottles reproduce exponentially. Disposible diapers lose none of their allure. Electronic waste production probably already exceeds the human birthrate. To say nothing of improperly disposed dangerous chemicals and industrial byproducts. 

Toxic waste gets through the phony barriers lining the 'fills, and into the water supply. Methane gas accumulates and sparks off now and again into explosions. All the figures are underestimates. Politics and capital distort the truth, thus distorting policy, thus passing the shit-caked buck onto future generations. 

And climate change only makes the summers more extreme. The soup in those trash cans boils ever hotter. Yum-yum.

Author Derf Backderf doesn't hide the grim realities, but he also manages to tell an endearing story. Yes, shit is fucked at the systems level; but the garbagemen are resilient. They see their situation for what it is, and they establish a camaraderie around both their hardships and in knowing the dirty secrets of capitalism. They know the solution is to drastically reduce consumption. All metrics indicate that consumption absolutely must increase for capitalism to maintain life functions. Therefore, consumption increases. And so it goes. Shit is permafucked. 

Backderf uses two page spreads to evoke the reeking grandeur of landfills. He uses cutaway schematics to break down the layers and processes of how garbage accumulates. The mixture of fictional narrative and documentary reminded me of the Scorsese movies Goodfellas and Casino. These movies and this comic book all deal with crooked, destructive processes that have a compelling, almost fateful power to them. Of course, Trashed doesn't suggest that the life of a garbageman has the seductive allure of being a gangster or playing on the house's side of the poker table, but there's something appealing about seeing a side of life most would prefer not to think about, right? Why be a normie consumer asshole when you can be a hip insider, eh?

Trashed shows how municipal waste collection works on the macro scale, but also includes highly localized vignettes about how capitalist erasures are also linked to conservative family values. At one point, our garbagemen are obliged to pick up used condoms and beer cans from a little league playing field so Moms and Dads can go on pretending that their teenagers are perfectly pure and unsullied. Beats funding evidence-based sex education in public schools, y'know? Just throw that shit in the landfill, too, while we're at it!

Lots of gross'n'gritty details: roadkill cleanup; racist co-workers; not-so-secret rightwing Nazi scum campaigning for local elections; walking in tall grass to collect piss bottles thrown out the window by drivers on their way to wherever; the quirky freebies-porno mags, furniture,boots-to which sanitation workers help themselves; crashes, accidents, injuries-Trashed is fun in the way it is told, but the fun comes at a cost.

I kinda want Backderf to do a sequel focused on nuclear waste, but that's probably just me. Backderf would be the cartoonist to do it, tho'. Trashed 2: Goin' Nuclear. It could happen. No, I'm never careful what I wish for . . .

One double page spread basically gives it all away: a four hundred foot deep landfill in which you could bury Cinderella's Castle, the Flatiron Building, Big Ben, and the Statue of Liberty. Except you can't. 'Cause it's filled with garbage. With more on the way. 

So . . . now you know.

Shit is permafucked. 

But at least you know. 

That, I suppose, is the secret glamour of being a garbageman. 

Two words . . .

 . . . BUFFET ETERNAL . . .

. . . this is from that era when I was a teenager bad at parking-maybe it was more like I just felt insecure, beat myself up about my parking skills-I hated having to park close to other vehicles or structures, I wanted all the clearance, infinite clearance if possible-and so instead of parking in the official country buffet parking area, I parked in the adjacent K-Mart parking lot, and walked across asphalt and desolate weeds to eat inside the country buffet, which was all nacho cheese, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, shredded cheese, little tomatoes, broccoli, three refills of Cherry Coke, and a saucer of soft serve vanilla ice cream armored in sprinkles-well, post-gorge, I ambled back across desolate weeds and asphalt and inside the K-Mart-this was a particularly lonely K-Mart which I preferred to haunt because although there were quite a few employees-this being in a boom time at the End of History-this was prior to the advent of ubiquitous mobile devices constantly receiving Internet, and so people had not lost the Fine Art of Retreat Into Self-which therefore meant that an abundance of employees meant necessarily an abundance of people keeping the fuck to themselves-like I said I preferred this specific K-Mart for its air of loneliness, isolation, desperation, and perverse elation-the numbing emptiness of unwearable anti-fashions and stupid outdoor barbecue bullshit and folding chairs worse than sitting upon the actual ground or pro-hemorrhoidal concrete I interweaved with an eccentric selection of VHS tapes-I bought an English dub of Godzilla vs. Biollante for $8.99+applicable sales tax here-this was the place to go to deny the empty chatter of church, state, fake friends, false teachers, and unsatisfiable parents, an anti-hangout zone pristine in its sacred vacuity, I could brain-screen my own combo fanfic of Final Fantasy VII/Dawn of the Dead '78 with my own custom black leather getup topped with a helmet with glowing red eyes, katana in one hand, .44 Bulldog in the other-no pretense of salvation or damnation or shame or glory-well, sad to say I brought a fantastical, drastical desecration into the Temple of Truth, even as I approached the motion sensor door, I felt the upchuck aborning, unusually rapid, usually I get plenty of warning, but this one had an Icarus urgency, I applied my willpower, I can keep my feast in its proper place, but at the slightest touch of my Intestinal Containment Doctrine, the puke did rise up, my lips sputtered, a perfectly pink splash upon the nuclear white tiles, I beat feet to the restrooms, splish-splash, I did not vomit It vomited all by itself, splorsh-splursh, I'm pinking all over my pants legs, stumbling forward, a bad zombie movie routine, pinking from above, some kind of punk anti-nuke gesture against the obliterative tiles, of a sudden I'm in the bathroom and well surprised that I have anything left to deposit into an actual damn toilet bowl . . . needless to say, I did not return to that K-Mart for several months. And when I did, of course, there was no trace of my pollution. No one accosted me, "Hey! You're that vomit asshole! I had to clean up your sick! Fuck you forever!" For all I know, I was part of a semi-regular to regular stream of food poisoned losers staggering in from the country buffet next door. Maybe I was just a vehicle for some disgruntled former Big K team member who got hired on to the backline of the country buffet. Poison a few gluttons, send 'em off to pink up the pristine (not so) big box store. That could've been it. Yeah. I was an unwitting conscript of a forgotten, unknowable puke war, just one in a million petty power plays to fill the all-too-Floridian vigilante void of a vicious false prosperity at the End of History . . . the malice runs even deeper . . . no one accosted me because even confrontation is a kind of affirmation . . . best just to ignore the existence of the person, whilst venerating the puke . . . heh, heh, heh, I kinda like that . . . they probably built little shrines to the pinksplatters as counter-fuckyous to their poisoner nemesis next door . . . contemptuous silence for mere pawns like myself . . . you just don't get that kind of sublime meanness anymore. People just spell out their hate on social media, all text, nothing undercurrent, all slogan, all thesis, no nagging mysteries allowed, just false certainties all the way 'round . . . and, no, I never ate at that particular poison buffet ever again. Even for a clandestine conflict junkie like myself being a pink puke fountain was the limit. Just the once was enough. The memory has endured just fine sans re-up.

COMICS REVIEW: WEAPON X (1991)

 

Story and Art by Barry Windsor-Smith 

Lettered by Jim Novak

Edited by Terry Kavanagh 

Assistant Editors Mark Powers and Kelly Corvese

Editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco 

Originally published in Marvel Comics Presents #72-84.

. . .

"Logan could have killed us all . . . I met his eyes for a second . . . filled with hate and fury . . . but I couldn't tell if it was some animal bloodlust . . . or horror at what we have done to him!" 

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Weapon X is comic book science fantasy body horror dealing with themes of out of control rage, human experiments, mind control, and the question of free will. Strong stuff for Marvel Comics in the early 1990s . . . strong stuff even now, actually. Usually, you would have to go to David Cronenberg, Shinya Tsukamoto, or Katsuhiro Otomo for this kind of action, but here it is on paper and in color. Only the lack of full frontal nudity and swearing marks it as a Comics Code Authority Approved book. Weapon X is, unusually for its time, an uncompromised work of mainstream super hero horror comics. 

There's a man named Logan who likes to drink and fight and wander. He spends his nights in flophouse rooms just like the Blues Brothers or in Men's Only accommodations run by fundamentalist Christians like what Charles Bronson sets up in Death Wish 2. Logan is full of rage which fuels his rootlessness. If he has no attachments, no emotional connections, then his conscience need not be troubled if he goes around breaking the faces of other rage-poisoned men in barroom brawls. 

Wake up. Fight. Get shitfaced. Fall asleep. Repeat.

Logan need never step outside of this perfect rage-servicing system ever again. For he is a mutant with retractable claws and a strange 'healing factor,' a power that allows him to quickly heal from any and all injuries short of a direct hit from a ballistic missile. He cannot be easily killed, nor is the average drunken street brawler ever likely to humiliate him with defeat. Logan has nothing to fear.

Or does he?

As it turns out, Logan is of great interest to a secret organization that wishes to capture him to use as a live subject for horrifying psycho-surgical experimentation. Their purpose is to transform him into a living weapon that can be controlled at-a-distance, presumably for assassination purposes like poor Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate.  

But this secret operation has a much more effective technique than flaky Communist hypnosis. This is real science, true penetration into the mind via ultra-technology. And we get to see the whole process play out step-by-step. In Weapon X we get to see things from the perspective of the mad scientists even more than we get Logan's side of things. Yes, it's all comic book stuff. But it's so detailed that after you read it you'll probably come to expect this level of precision from other comic book villains, maybe even demand it. I know I did . . .

Logan is tranquilized, captured, stripped, shaved, and put in a sensory deprivation tank with all sorts of intravenous feeds of powerful painkillers and hallucinogens and who knows what else. Logan's kept in a medically induced coma for an unknown period while the mad scientists penetrate his brain with probes that allow them to view his innermost thoughts on huge telescreens. 

Logan's body is injected with a liquid adamantium substance that's manufactured in a nuclear reactor via processes that verge on the alchemical. This fanciful liquid steel bonds with his skeleton and the retractable/extensible knuckle claws that Logan has chosen not to use so as to conceal his identity as a mutant. After the adamantium bonds with his claws he inevitably causes injury to himself if he extrudes them, something he was choosing not to do prior to being captured. Once he is under the control of the mad scientists, they force him to extend and retract his claws-they force him to tear his own flesh.

They force him to bleed. 

So, it's not just a pure application these people are after-they get off on sadism, as well as total control of a human mind. 

Themes of paranoia are threaded in, beginning with the premise of being an outsider kidnapped by a sinister cabal-who are themselves serving an unseen master-and mutating into grotesque sequences of Logan running endlessly through a nightmare terrain that provokes strange spiky growths to burst forth from his already violated body. This is the horror of being out of control, of being invaded by technology, of losing your grip on reality, and always at the mercy of unknown sadists serving unknowable motives and masters. Taken out of the context of the expansive X-Men mythos, this works quite well as a standalone mindfuck. 

In addition to the compelling themes, we also have definitive visual portrayals of Logan in both his disguise as an alcoholic nobody and as a wild, bestial killing machine. When his rage is fully loosed, he slices scores of heavily armed and armored soldiers, and stands victorious-despite being pierced by many bullets-upon a hill of corpses. Logan, nude, stalks frozen psycho-scapes where he does battle with fearsome bears, tigers, and wolves. All the while, he is surveilled by the cruel, inscrutable faces of the mad scientists and their workaday technical staff. Dark fantasies of retribution are piped from Logan's brain onto telescreens. Eventually, Logan is reduced to being a live video game avatar to be piloted by the mad scientists through terrifying scenarios of primal combat. All of this is rendered in wintry white, lurid red/yellow/pink, chilling blue, and shadowy black. The colors are about what you expect from a comic of the time, but they are deployed vividly. 

I think, too, it must be noted that Weapon X has a single author: Barry Windsor-Smith. I think this is the main reason why the narrative flow is intricate without losing momentum. Dialogue text plays over the barrage of techno-invasions of Logan's body and mind. It's all worked out with precision timing. There's none of the static that's inevitably generated by the bullpen approach of your average super hero comic book of the time. Windsor-Smith is able to weave it all together as he sees fit, without having to second guess another writer or artist. 

Anytime I read another comic about Logan, I inevitably find myself thinking back to Weapon X. I even think of it when I read the ones that were published well before Weapon X even existed. Truly, its power changes Logan's past, present, and future. 

Now that's a mindfuck for you!

Two words . . .

. . . ESCAPE ROOM . . .

. . . your mission is to search the room carefully for clues that will help you to escape . . . from the other assholes participating in this vacuous corporate retreat team-building exercise. 

MOVIE REVIEW: WORLD ON A WIRE (1973)

 

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder 

Screenplay by Fritz Müller-Scherz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder 

From the novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye 

Cinematography by Michael Ballhaus

Edited by Marie Anne Gerhardt 

Production designed by Kurt Raab 

Costumes by Gabriele Pillon 

Music by Gottfried Hüngsberg

Produced by Peter Märthesheimer and Alexander Wesemann 

Starring 

Klaus Löwitsch as Fred Stiller

Mascha Rabben as Eva Vollmer

Karl-Heinz Vosgerau as Siskins 

Adrian Hoven as Professor Vollmer

Ivan Desny as Günther Lause 

…

"Sorry, I've never heard of a Lause."

…

Review by William D. Tucker.

World on a Wire is one of those science fiction stories that asks We the Audience to play the Reality Game: "What if the world as we know it is just an elaborate, interactive deception? What if We the Inhabitants of this deception are just simulated beings with bogus programmed memories and personality constructs? What would we do if we discovered the illusory nature of our world, our selves? Could we become real on the basis of such insight?"

Amusingly, World on a Wire uses artificial sets, discordant sound effects, voyeuristic camera placement, hypnotic music, and overly precise phrasing of dialogue,framing of shots, and timing of montage to convey such a simulated world. The people here are more like the iconographic avatars of Second Life or The Sims-collections of gestures, wardrobe, and obsessively goal-focused patterns of thought and speech, lacking the emotional fuzziness and warmth of a more natural acting style. 

This world is a simulation, after all, and simulations are typically constructed at great expense to achieve some sort of instrumentality, usually economic, political, entertainment, and/or military in nature. Therefore, the idiosyncrasies of emergent, evolutionary humanity are streamlined to suit whatever variables are deemed significant to the project's decision makers. 

Our-the Audience's-video game avatar is a computer engineer named Fred Stiller, who has helped build an elaborate simulated virtual world called Simulacron-3. Stiller's motivations are pure science and the public good. But Simulacron-3 could only be realized via a convergence of corporate, governmental, and idiosyncratic psychological interests. Big business wants a leg-up on the competition via omni-variable economic forecasts. The government most likely desires some sort of intelligence and surveillance level-up, though this aspect is  muted in World on a Wire. The project is being underwritten by tax revenues from the public, who, as per usual, don't seem to have much democratic control over the process. Technocratic daydream believin' elites seem to trump a skeptical public as per usual in science fiction. 

Stiller loses his grip on reality when a colleague is seemingly erased from everyone's memory except his own,  a man named Lause.

Before we meet Stiller, we witness a scene wherein Lause has to make sense out of the sudden inexplicable death of Dr. Vollmer, the chief architect of Simulacron-3. So, We the Audience are led to believe in the objective existence of Lause.

Later, Stiller sees Lause in a nightclub. And then Lause disappears. Moreover, no one seems to remember the very existence of Lause . . . except for Stiller. 

Nowadays, this plays like a blatant "Glitch in the Matrix." Someone or something has rewritten the reality all around Stiller while neglecting-or failing-to change Stiller's memories. 

Stiller cannot deny the reality of his memory and so he pursues this phantom Lause to the uttermost distance, beyond job security, beyond the law, beyond the limits of his own sanity. 

Of course, another reading of World on a Wire is that Stiller is actually losing his mind due to some combination of work stress, undiagnosed mental illness, and maybe some kind of substance abuse. The corporate/governmental intrigues surrounding the Simulacron-3 project are intense. Stiller's boss tries to replace him with a new hire with loyalties to a steel company. The steel company wants privileged access to the economic forecasting powers of Simulacron-3 by means of what amounts to an industrial spy. The idealistic Stiller could be suffering from a growing disillusionment as he bears witness to this chicanery, which might feed into some type of paranoia.

I think the intention here is to get the audience on Stiller's side. He keeps his cool. He's intellectual. Even his frustrated outbursts are carefully modulated. We already know that Lause existed outside of Stiller's memory. We want Stiller to solve the mystery. 

However, science fiction can and does work on both the literal and metaphorical levels. Even if we believe in Stiller, World on a Wire could be read as a commentary on the pressure and duplicity one must endure in a high stakes technology start-up. The confusions over what's real and what's illusion could be a critique of the hype cycles surrounding the advent of any new and fashionable gadget or process or management doctrine. 

If you ever have the time, go to a big university library and browse the stacks with the business school texts. Take note of the titles and trends and fads. As an American, I'm always amused by the volume of titles predicting Japan's impending takeover of global capitalism. Plenty of smart, well educated, well trained people get caught up devising trendy scenarios pandering to the financial titans of the moment. Maybe it is this crooked process that drives Stiller nuts since this is a direct assault on his core identity as a socially conscious champion of pure, unbiased scientific research. 

Mirrors are everywhere in World on a Wire. A biased simulation just reflects back increasingly distorted images of what we desperately wish to be true. And unfortunately, even a distorted simulation can be used to inflate consumer and, more importantly, shareholder confidence. 

World on a Wire also mixes in elements of film noir, hard-boiled detective fiction, and James Bond. Stiller is a two-fisted computer nerd who dresses in tuxedos and pinstriped suits, drives a sports car, and always gets laid. Plenty of fighting and fucking in this techno-thriller. These macho cliches also point up the artificial nature of what transpires with a high degree of self-aware camp. The fact that Stiller's executive secretary also seems to function as a concubine is a clue that there's something weird about this reality that seems to pander to a specific set of desires and corporate fetishes. 

As Stiller gets deeper into things, we have scenes set inside a nightclub where a Marlene Dietrich impersonator sings in the face of impending execution by Nazis who march while singing television advertising jingles. Before she is shot, the Dietrich doppelganger looks at her reflection in a sword and freshens her lipstick. Is Simulacron-3, this carefully crafted simulation, attaining self-awareness? Is it evolving a counterculture with a fuck you attitude to corporate capitalism? World on a Wire has fun with these possibilities. 

Three forbidden words . . .

. . .WAR IN UKRAINE . . .

. . . well, Putin and his instruments don't want you saying 'em, at any rate.

Here's another outlawed set of three . . .

. . . WAR ON UKRAINE . . .

. . . and these are probably also against the murderous whims of Putin . . .

. . . INVASION OF UKRAINE . . .

. . . oh, and here's another trio of trios that'll get you in trouble . . .

. . . ASSASSINATION OF RIVALS . . .

. . . RIGGING OF ELECTIONS . . .

. . .CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY  . . .

. . . so, be sure to say 'em loud and often. 

SOLO GAMING: TANTALIZED BY THE X-PATH!

 

You'll need something to write with, something to write on, and a willingness to pretend.

Think of a fantasy gaming scenario that appeals to you. Could be anything. Sword and sorcery. Giallo. Romance. Western. Erotica. Cyberpunk. Dystopian pastry chef. Mecha. Anything. Think about the setting, the overall sense of the world, and the possibilities it contains. Write down as much detail as you care to, or maybe you can keep track of it all in your head. 

Now, imagine the character you want to play as within that world. Write down as much detail about your character as you care to, or maybe you can keep track of it all in your head.

Here comes the heavy writing part. You write down a scene, and then you give yourself a set of-at minimum-two choices about how your character responds to that scene, and then you choose one of those options as the basis for the next scene which will also end with a set of two or more choices to make. Every three scenes, you must write down an X-Path Scene, which occurs outside the main flow of your player character's existence. 

This X-Path Scene must exist as a complete opposite or negation of whatever the overall trend of the main flow happens to be: if your main flow is good, the X-Path is evil; if your main flow is violent, the X-Path is peaceful; if you are victorious and hyper-competent on the main, then you would be a pathetic loser in the X-Path, and vice versa. 

You have total discretion, since this is a solo gaming endeavor. You can cheat. You can have the main flow and the X-Path crash into each other. You can play without actually writing anything down. You're free. At least, I like the idea of you being free.

Once you’ve written down an X-Path scene, you return to the choices you wrote down at the end of your third scene, pick one, and when you write your fourth scene you must incorporate some element or some awareness of what's in the X-Path scene. If your character is a psychic, maybe they can perceive this other possible self. If your player character happens to hear a radio it could be a news report describing whatever’s occurring in the X-Path. If your character watches a movie, then the movie could have a scene inspired by the X-Path. Or, your character could just have a memory of a movie or TV show they once saw that's like the happenings of the X-Path. There's some kind of bleed or signaling or influence coming from that X-Path into the main flow of your game. This tantalizing sense of this other self, or impossible self, or self you’ve forgotten, or self you despise, or self you desire that's just out of reach. 

Remember, you write down an X-Path Scene after every third main flow scene. Keep this up for as long as you're having fun. Share it with a friend. Or keep it as a secret. Use magnets to display your character's journey upon the refrigerator. Or rip it up and throw it in the trash. At the very least, I suggest re-reading it once, holding onto it for awhile, and maybe looking at it again at a later date. But that's just a suggestion. 

If you want, you can incorporate dice rolls to help you decide which choice you make at the end of each main flow scene. For example, if you have two choices, roll a six-sided die, and if you roll a 1, 2, or 3, then you make the first choice you wrote down; 4, 5, or 6 means you go with the second choice you wrote down. If you wrote down six choices, assign each choice a number all its own. This can be fun, but it's also optional. 

You can use notebooks, loose sheets of paper, long rolls of butcher paper, napkins, index cards, crayons, pens, pencils, paint, your mobile phone, your computer, voice dictation, whatever you want. 

If you don't like writing, or this sounds like more hassle than it is worth to you . . . I totally understand. You are free not to play.

But . . . you may experience a sense of what your life was like if you had played . . . emanating from that X-Path . . .

SOUP'S UP . . .

 

MOVIE REVIEW: THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977)

 

Written, edited, and directed by Wes Craven 

Cinematography by Eric Saarinen 

Music by Don Peake

Produced by Peter Locke

Starring

Russ Grieve as Bob

VIrginia Vincent as Ethel

Dee Wallace as Lynne

Martin Speer as Doug

Susan Lanier as Brenda

Robert Houston as Bobby 

John Steadman as Fred

Michael Berryman as Pluto

James Whitworth as Jupiter

Janus Blythe as Ruby

Corey Clark as Mama 

. . .

"What’s the matter? You don't like dog anymore?"

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

The Hills Have Eyes for the suffering of hapless outsiders who think they are on vacation to Los Angeles but are actually on a nonstop death trip to hell. It's not enough for the hill dwellers to just kill and eat their victims. They must first taunt and torment them until their bodies are full of fear. And then, of course, proper torture and meal prep can begin in earnest. 

A family is traveling to Los Angeles. They end up driving on the periphery of an Air Force testing ground out in the Nevada desert. Stock documentary footage of zooming fighter jets invades the frame and seems to terrorize the family into driving off the road, shattering an axle into the bargain. So much for taking the scenic route.

The family is led by a white racist patriarch named Bob Carter, recently retired from the police. He's one of these guys who still likes to flash his badge and pack a .357 Magnum revolver. I think writer/director/editor Wes Craven is setting this guy up as a pisstake commentary on the Charles Bronson type of self-righteous avenger. Too bad about his heart condition. Not a good health problem to have if you need to run from cannibal killers in the scorching desert heat. 

The retired cop's wife is a fussy Christian fundamentalist named Ethel. In a pinch, I suppose she can pray the cannibals away, or even convert them. I fantasized a deleted scene where she tries to save the souls of the cannibals by hitting them with a handful of those odious Chick Tract comics. 

Bob and Ethel are hauling a travel camper containing the rest of the fam: teenage spawn Bobby and Brenda; adult daughter Lynne and her hubby Doug Wood plus baby daughter Katy; and a pair of dogs named Beauty and Beast. The characterization of most is pared to the minimum. Patriarch Bob gives a cynical, racist speech casually dropping the n-word like a character out of a Joseph Wambaugh novel, and wifey-poo Ethel gets to yammer about Jesus, and that's it. The rest of the Carter-Wood clan is young and functional. 

Now, there is another family in this movie. The family of cannibals. They maneuver among the rocks and crevasses of the desert hills, communicating by walkie-talkies, and coordinating their attacks on the stranded family with zeal and precision. Bob the Elder discovers via his police investigatory skills the grotesque origin of the cannibal family, and this precipitates a campaign of terror. The truth gets you tortured and killed and eaten in The Hills Have Eyes.

But the younger Carter-Woods people are resourceful, and they do fight back-even the dog becomes a vengeful character once its mate is butchered and killed. The stripped down approach to the characterizations also keeps you guessing as to who will live, and who will die. There are no heroes in this film, just desperate survivors. 

I guess that doggo is pretty damn heroic.

The cannibal family is almost cartoonishly depraved, and I suppose that's the point. I wasn't entirely convinced by some of their costuming and make-up. But the modest budget doesn't sabotage the storytelling, the brutal themes, the tension inducing hardscrabble locations, the frantic violence, or the atmosphere of terror and desperation. The Hills Have Eyes is a hardcore horror film that makes no effort to reassure the audience. 

It's also funny in the sicko style that I tend to appreciate. It's got a vengeful canine as a proper character which is funny but also pretty formidable. 

The music is disquieting, hard to pin down, and incorporates creepy voices in just the right proportion to set you on edge.

The cinematography is willfully disgusting and antirealistic-night in the desert is lit like a big box store parking lot, but this only increases the abject despair of the characters. It's grimy and unwholesome, and makes you want to scald yourself with boiling water and scour your body with sand paper when you're done.

As far as I can tell, it is all filmed on actual desolate outdoor locations. You gotta wonder how many broken ankles and other injuries occurred. You see real humans contending with some very tough natural settings. The effect is as unnerving as the crazed cannibals' whispers and snarls. 

The Hills Have Eyes is definitely a post The Texas Chainsaw Massacre flick. You even have a scene where a cannibal waves his machete wildly like when Leatherface waltzed with his chainsaw, but it goes by pretty quick. I think Wes Craven wants to let you know where he's coming from by giving a nod to Tobe Hooper's work, but then keep it on its feet, stampeding towards an abrupt and fatal conclusion. Craven's vision also differs from Hooper's in that the potential for mayhem exists within the Carter-Woods clan as well as the cannibals. 

It all borders on being a strange hybrid of violent action and horror movie. But the fact that the victims of the cannibal attackers are so average, so anonymous, so not-up-to-the-fight keeps it grounded, and thereby short-circuits any sort of action movie escapism functions. 

I have great admiration for The Hills Have Eyes as an expression of grimy, disgusting, despairing horror cinema. 

I really do.

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MOVIE REVIEW: THE BAD SLEEP WELL (1960)

 

Directed by Akira Kurosawa 

Produced by Akira Kurosawa and Tomoyuki Tanaka

Written by Shinobu Hashimoto, Eijiro Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa, and Hideo Oguni

Cinematography by Yuzuru Aizawa

Lighting by Ichiro Inohara

Art Directed by Yoshiro Muraki 

Music by Masaru Sato

Starring 

Toshiro Mifune as "Nishi"

Masayuki Mori as Iwabuchi

Takashi Shimura as Moriyama

Ko Nishimura as Shirai

Kamatari Fujiwara as Wada

Takeshi Kato as "Itakura"

Kyoko Kagawa as Yoshiko

Tatsuya Mihashi as Tatsuo 

. . .

"Wada, still ready to die for them and let them go scot-free? Don't you want revenge?"

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

The Public Corporation has entered into a partnership with the Japanese government to develop a sizeable chunk of land. One of their executives jumps out of a window. His death is ruled a suicide, but suspicions persist that he was driven to end his own life. Or maybe he was even thrown. The police investigate. Journalists ask difficult questions. An unknown informant passes notes to the cops. But hard evidence remains elusive. 

The Bad Sleep Well depicts a world of perfectly rationalized corruption, deceit, and murder to the point where an executive level corporate villain-Iwabuchi-can rip off the public for millions, order the deaths of potential witnesses, and enjoy grilling with his family on the weekends. It doesn't matter that his daughter's wedding is crashed by journalists and cops. The graft is an open secret. But the big bosses never go to jail. Key witnesses end up jumping out of windows or running in front of trucks. The code of silence inflicts shame as a weapon driving men to end their own lives rather than testify in open court against their criminal masters. 

Of course, if necessary, a hired assassin can be instructed to step out of the shadows and blast a troublesome weak link into the great beyond. 

Our villain, Iwabuchi, isn't even the top of the power structure. He's just a highly placed middle man. Sure, he dreams of gaining enough executive clout to move into politics, but by the end of this tale I wasn't convinced he had the Wrong Stuff. Iwabuchi is effective and dutiful to his mostly offscreen masters, but that's also probably why he'll never rise much higher than Vice President. The offscreen power has Iwabuchi right where it needs him. Hey, it's the middle men who do all the work, right?

The informant is a man named Nishi, who has married Iwabuchi's daughter. Nishi's father was the guy who jumped out of a window. Nishi is Iwabuchi's executive secretary. Nishi has positioned himself to tear down the Public Corporation from the inside, but he needs hard evidence he can present to the prosecutor's office. To that end, Nishi engages in elaborate deceptions to ensnare one of the corporate officers so that he can gather the necessary evidence. 

Nishi's elaborate deceptions include a huge cake shaped like the office building where his father was driven to suicide or murdered outright; convincing a crooked executive that he's being haunted by another recently dead colleague thereby driving him insane; and using a bomb shelter as his own private prison to starve yet another business criminal into giving up the locations of incriminating financial documents. Nishi doesn't use a gun, but he’s as ruthless as Mike Hammer or Charles Bronson in his own way. 

Nishi is aided and abetted in his vigilante quest by his best friend Itakura. Nishi and Itakura were assigned duty in a munitions factory during World War II. This factory was bombed into rubble. Nishi and Itakura survived by hiding out in the bomb shelter that now serves as their secret prison. From the ruins of empire are born a pair of anti-corruption avengers, who fight to expose the false prosperity of their age as the product of graft, murder, and entrenched oligarchs . . . !

Oh, if only it were that simple.

After all, the title is The Bad Sleep Well. 

Nishi is hard-boiled, but he feels guilty about deceiving his wife, Yoshiko. But that guilt isn't all-consuming. Although Nishi stops short of full-on murder, he never relents. At one point he castigates himself for not being able to hate his targets enough. One of the darker notions of this film is that Nishi is right. Normal people aren’t wired to operate like Iwabuchi and his offscreen masters. Normal people feel compelled by conscience to tell the truth, to not steal, and to not kill or drive people to self-destruction. Therefore, justice is totally fucked. 

The Bad Sleep Well is shot in widescreen black and white, part of a cycle of works exploring film noir by filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Much of what transpires is driven by terrific performances that range from realism to Gothic expressionism. The heroes have grandiose motivations mixed with somewhat unlikely methods, while the villains are rather low-key, matter-of-fact, just doing their jobs. This contrast suggests the normalization of evil in the world. Kurosawa has no choice but to crowbar a pair of elevated, theatrical avengers into this grimly self-perpetuating reality as a form of defiance. It's not a million miles away from the more blatant fantasies of Astro Boy, Kamen Rider, Superman, Batman, or Spider-Man in its conception, but where it all ends up . . .

Hey, it's not called The Righteous Sleep Well, is it?

No. It isn't. 

My favorite scene is where Iwabuchi speaks to his offscreen master on the phone. As he hangs up, he is literally bowing to the phone. That’s how powerful the force of evil is in this film. Iwabuchi isn't even bowing to a person but an instrument. Which is a strange image: one instrument bowing to another . . .

Alas, poor Nishi . . . did you ever have a chance in a world that runs on such murderous conformity?