GAME REVIEW: DEPRESSION QUEST (2013)

an interactive (non)fiction about living with depression
by Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, and Isaac Schankler

Music by Isaac Schankler

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Text on the screen, disquieting music, minimalist visuals consisting of abstract Polaroid-style photos of computer keyboard keys, room texture, and other mundane things.

Read the text: it's a second-person narrative (like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure Novels) of a twenty-first century city dweller coping with a mindless cubicle job, a mother that judges him for his lack of ambition in life, a careerist older brother named Malcolm, a sweet-natured girlfriend named Alex, and a hard drive full of half-realized creative projects. Depression suffuses this narrative like a narcotic heat haze that drains one's energy, and fills the mind crowding out pleasure, joy, and hope. Depression is an oppressor which squats in the mind, issuing a kind of defeatist internal monologue which deflates one's ambitions while also mocking the afflicted person's inability to heal themselves.

That's the insidious thing about this mental illness: it's not something you can just shake off, but the condition also makes it seem futile to even try to ask for help.

Just below the descriptive text are a series of choices which you can click on which will take you to another block of text. You can have anywhere from three to five choices, usually, but the top one or two are almost always crossed off, even though you can still read them. This seems to be the game's way of simulating the despair and self-recrimination which comes with depression: "I know I should make this choice, but I can't bring myself to do it. I'll never be well or even normal." Usually, these choices entail something highly idealized, like "Buckle down, shake off the bad feelings, and get to work!" or something like that. In the depths of depression, you know something's wrong, but you cannot help but compare yourself to unrealistic examples of confidence and success. It is the proverbial vicious cycle.

Below the choices are three status lines: one describes in a few sentences your overall level of depression and functionality; another tracks whether or not you're seeing a therapist and how that is affecting you; and a third tracks whether or not you're taking any anti-depressant medication. These three factors change as you click through the various chunks of text, perhaps eventually deciding to seek therapy, or choosing to do a course of anti-depressant medication. Or not.

Depression Quest is very much a Choose Your Own Adventure text game for adults. Instead of adventuring through a Cave of Time, exploring the vast insides of UFO 54-40, or trying to thwart an invasion by Space Vampires, here you must navigate a life afflicted by depression. There is no challenge in the usual sense of the term. There are no fighting combos, military strategies, or puzzles to master or solve. The decision tree is quite basic, but I found the text, which is highly generalized in its descriptions giving the story the overall sense that it could be taking place in any number of American cities, unexpectedly moving. The way the game gives you a range of choices, but crosses through some of them I thought was a rather brilliant way of suggesting the inner suffering of a person afflicted with depression, yet struggling to make good choices in life. It has been said that we can only choose from a range of choices which we actually know about, but how painful is it to see other, appealing possibilities yet be unable to explore those choices? It isn't exactly great literature, but it does give a reasonably realistic sense of what it's like to suffer from depression.

Which is what the creators of the game expressly intended. According to the Depression Quest website, this game was created to give people suffering from depression a sense that they are not alone and that healing is possible (if not easy), and to give a general audience a sense of what it's like to live with this mental illness, and what the daily struggles are for a person in such a situation. The noble goal of this game, which is available to play online for no charge (donations optional), is to create a sense of empathy, hope,  and understanding within the mind of the player.

And once you play through it once, play through it again, making different choices, and experiencing other consequences and outcomes. It is quite fascinating to explore.

Depression Quest is rather crude compared to the latest next generation console games like Bioshock Infinite, Borderlands 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Skyrim, and others, but consider this: what if a game like Depression Quest got an entire company behind it, with an army of programmers, artists, musicians, voice actors, motion capture performers, writers, psychiatric consultants, and all the research and development assets that a major gaming corporation could muster? Right now, most games, even deep, highly detailed open world games with rich RPG fantasy environments have little to do with trying to creatively portray reality and reality's struggles. They are primarily escapist power fantasy entertainments.

 And that's all well and good. Nothing wrong with gaming just for fun. I myself love fantasy, science fiction, and ultraviolent shoot-em-ups with exploding heads, guts coiling about my blade, and oceans of blood everywhere.

But . . . that stuff does get old, doesn't it? I get kind of tired of seeing video games create scenarios which can only exist within a post-modern, anti-realist, self-referential computer fantasy world entirely without any relevance to what actual homo sapiens deal with on planet Earth right here, right now.

 Wouldn't it be intriguing if one of the large gaming companies hired the people who created Depression Quest, and put vast resources at their disposal.  Just for one game. Gave it the full production treatment with no compromises in realism and empathetic vision. Even if this new, next-gen version of Depression Quest didn't make any money it would be a truly worthwhile experiment. It would perhaps be the first time a major console game actually went beyond the usual fantasy escapism art (and it is an art) of most video games and into a realm of realist video game art-which would be a new artistic breakthrough for the medium.

It'd be a helluva thing. Here's hoping.

Just another puppet . . .

VIDEO GAME REVIEW: RICHARD AND ALICE (2013)

Developed and Published by Denby Raze

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Two people, Richard and Alice, are incarcerated within a rather cushy prison. They have flatscreen TVs showing vintage nature documentaries and old school anime; clean water for the shower and the toilet; computer with prison intranet email; and each of their cells are single occupancy. No overcrowding, no gangs, no violence, and the guards deliver the meals on time. No abuse from the prison authorities, either. Richard and Alice's prison cell doors face each other across the hall, so they have company, if not potential physical contact.

They get to talking. Richard's a former soldier locked up on charges of desertion. Alice is a homemaker accused of murder. They both miss their children who are still on the outside. They would prefer to have their children with them. Inside the prison.

The outside world is a dangerous, depraved place. Anthropogenic global warming has polarized world climate patterns into extremes of hot and cold. In England, Richard and Alice's part of the world, every day is snowy, at the least, and some days it's a full on blizzard. Civil society has broken down due to shortages of fuel, food, electricity, medicine, and potable water. Violent bandits who call themselves the Polar Bears roam the snowy wastes, raping, murdering, and pillaging at will. The only place where there still seems to be law and order is within the prison, and even that may be starting to break down.

Richard and Alice is a point-and-click adventure/mystery game that functions primarily as a vehicle for narrative, similar in this respect to 2011's To the Moon. None of the puzzles are particularly difficult. Fetch quests for items are confined to relatively small locales. Everything is eminently logical (with a couple of exceptions, perhaps . . .), with none of the near-mystical puzzle design of a game like Myst, nor any of the harsh techno-logic of the hardest puzzles of 2012's Resonance. Hardcore gamers looking for extreme challenge and difficulty will not find it here. Richard and Alice is not an action or role-playing game. I would liken the experience of playing it to reading a short story, or maybe watching a movie. It reminded me of the 2008 movie version of Jose Saramago's novel Blindness. 

So if you want to experience a dark science fiction story told via the medium of retro 16-bit (maybe even 14-bit) overhead perspective graphics, effectively atmospheric music, and sharply composed dialogue, Richard and Alice delivers the goods for the most part. The story does stumble in a couple of places, and I wasn't crazy about the visuals. There is almost no character animation in terms of facial expressions or emotions, and this works against some moments and scenes. The dialogue and music mostly pick up the dramatic slack, but I think more expressive character portraits would've helped.  But the game doesn't compromise in the areas of tone, mood, and theme.

Oh, and there's no voice acting. It's all text, and you have to read it. This didn't bother me, since the dialogue is quite good (and authentically British I might add), and I like to read. If you don't like to read, well, that's your problem.

Richard and Alice is the first commercial offering from indie developers Denby Raze. It has narrative juice and thematic integrity, good music, not-so-spectacular graphics, sharp dialogue, and it's short. Some may feel they are not getting their money's worth paying to play such a brief game. I would rather play a short game that says all it needs to say then exits the stage, rather than dragging things out, and I do think Denby Raze has every right to make money from their creative efforts. But some may feel they've been shortchanged. Caveat emptor, all that.

I have done my level best to say as little about the actual story content of Richard and Alice as possible. It would be pointless to give anything away, as this game hinges on its turns of narrative more than anything. But if you do play through this game, ask yourself this: is the ending of Richard and Alice the absolute ending, all she wrote, the rest is silence, that's all folks? Or is it just the first act?

Personally, I'm kinda hoping it's just the first act. We only really get to know one of these two characters. I'd kinda like to learn about the other one, too. I'd come back for another installment even if the graphics were the same. These Denby Raze guys got a strong line on dialogue, theme, and story, so here's hoping we see more from them down the line.

MOVIE REVIEW: BULLET BALLET (1998)

Written/Directed/Edited/Camera Operated by Shinya Tsukamoto
Music by Chu Ishikawa
Costume Design by Hiroko Iwasaki
Produced by Igarashi Maison

Starring
Shinya Tsukamoto as Goda
Kirina Mano as Chisato
Takahiro Murase as Goto
Tatsuya Nakamura as Idei
Kyoka Suzuki as Kiriko

A Kaijyu Theatre Production

...


"In dreams, you can kill people, and never get caught. Tokyo is just one big dream. A dream."
--as spoken by Idei in the movie Bullet Ballet

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

In Tokyo, a woman named Kiriko (Kyoka Suzuki) decides to shoot herself in the head with a Smith and Wesson Chief Special, a mean little gun to be sure. She has a good job. She shares a comfortable apartment with her long-time boyfriend who works as a commercial director and brings down a good income. This suicide, and the violent instrument which allows it, seem strangely arbitrary. It seems that maybe Kiriko decided to shoot herself just to see what would happen. Because she happened to lay hands on the right tool, the gun. She probably wouldn't have done it if there had been no firearm to hand. She probably would've just taken sleeping pills, ended up in the hospital, and maybe some couple's counseling. But the gun in hand . . . no coming back from that.

Gun metal black and white, hand-held camera on a long zoom--the streets of Tokyo seem to quake and jitter with some immanent, highly unstable energy. An upper middle class man named Goda (Shinya Tsukamoto) goes looking for a gun, hitting up people he observes conducting narcobusiness on the streets, and insisting that he's got the money to pay for a Smith and Wesson Chief Special. But he's not too sharp about it, and various drug dealers and pimps tell him to his face that he's basically a fucking idiot, that you don't do business cash in hand where everybody can see what's going down. Eventually Goda gets ripped off  by a small time crook who sells him a water gun full of dirt. Goda doesn't have a clue about how to make moves in the street life. But he is determined and resourceful. He likes to work with his hands, make things. Goda can't buy a handgun, not even on the black market, in a country where private gun ownership is basically illegal, so he resolves to build his own gun.


Poor Goda. If only he were stalking American suburban communities, where even good middle class children can cop assault weapons and exercise their murderous power fantasies over their fellow children, their parents, whoever they happen to want to punish for their misery, paranoia, and alienation. Goda, my man, you need to give Japan the slip, and hop a plane to Eagleland, the Land of the Free, where the right to bear arms in the War of All Against All is backed up not by dimebagging street dealers, but by oligarchic corporate lobbies like the NRA, who preach the Gospel of Universal Armament. USA, my friend, where it's easier to wage Forever Wars foreign and domestic than it is to get any kind of universal healthcare working--this is the place for you, brother! Your severe and obsessive nature will find not only expression in this land of lunacy but . . . a kind of balm of acceptance. You'll just be one more loony for the bin here in America.

But Goda's a hardcore Tokyoite down to his gritty soul, and a trip to the USA is never considered, although he does spend some time on the Internet trying to figure out how he might smuggle a gun into Japan illegally. Gun enthusiasts in chat rooms with online handles like "John Wayne," "A Better Tomorrow," and "Ringo Kid," tell him he should order all of the components from separate manufacturers and assemble them himself. One dude tells him he should buy a model gun and modify it to shoot for real. Goda decides to go the DIY route and scavenge parts from junkyards. He has to consult with a machinist for some specialist work, but for the most part he does the job himself. He even mixes his own gunpowder, handcrafts his own artisan ball-tipped (how retro!) cartridge ammunition.

(Hey, wouldn't it be amusing to see Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen manufacturing their own weapons in an episode of Portlandia? Sometimes the vegan brownies and the custom-refurbished fixed-gear bicycle aren't enough. Sometimes you gotta get tough. Instead of putting a bird on it, you just might have to put a bullet in it!)

Goda's able to pursue these hobbies because he has a cushy day job as a director/editor of television commercials. But his obsession with seeking out the Gun, the power of life and death, Zeus's own bolt-thrower for the twentieth century and beyond, starts to spill over into his money gig. Instead of cutting clips to sell cars or sake or whatever, he starts putting together montages of war--WWI trench slaughter, nuclear tests, aerial bombing campaigns, artillery tests on houses, and all of it anchored to a repeated image of a hand firing a snub-nosed revolver. Goda is chasing this idea that he can have destruction in his fist, power over life and death, and be a one man army. With a gun in his hand, Goda's twisted logic seems to dictate, he can be the one to wage a war--a Nation of One waging World War 3 against stark reality.

The commercial director's obsession with getting armed recalls Travis Bickle's legendary transformation into a killing machine as Goda stalks his plush apartment with his handmade gun, firing into the mirror, and so on. But the highly internalized nature of Goda's quest for destructive power seems to echo Tsukamoto's earlier movies Tetsuo the Iron Man and Tetsuo II: Bodyhammer. In the Tetsuo movies, normal humans are mutated into hyper-aggressive freaks bristling with cannon and serpentine drill penises--biomechanical machines of war, murder, and rape.

In Bullet Ballet, the action is more realistic, but the movie provides highly stylized imagery of shadows and light, of self-burning and mutilation cut to Chu Ishikawa's pounding industrial-grade music suggesting psychological derangement as opposed to a more fanciful  full body transformation. Goda wants to become the Iron Man, the Bodyhammer, the Nation of One, but, since he's caught up in a more mundane version of cinematic reality,  all he can do is pick up a gun or burn himself with a piece of metal. He can never quite get human cells and metal to merge.

Ah, poor Goda . . .if only you had an enemy to focus your aggression upon. If only you had a side to take, a war to fight, an army to join . . .

One day, perhaps before the beginning of this saga, Goda sees a girl on the subway platform seemingly about to throw herself in front of an oncoming train. Goda intervenes to pull the girl back from the abyss, and she attacks him, giving him a nasty bite on the heel of his hand. This girl's name is Chisato (Kirina Mano). Chisato works as an occasional prostitute and drug dealer with a gang of young punks who work suit-and-tie jobs during the week, and engage in small-time gangsterism on the weekends. Goda becomes obsessed with Chisato because . . . well, she is kind of cute with her micro-skirt and leather jacket. But it's also the suicidal thing. Goda sees in Chisato someone who has embraced the dark side, someone who nakedly courts death, and seeks out opportunities to get into street fights. Winning and losing aren't a big deal to Chisato. Goda has been a striving careerist all his life. It's love at first bite with Goda and Chisato.

 Goda starts stalking the underground club where Chisato hangs out, but he runs afoul of the rest of Chisato's gang who think the guy's some kind of too-old-for-the-scene creepazoid. In particular, young punk  and would-be gang leader Goto (Takahiro Murase) really starts to hate on Goda. For one thing, Goto thinks he's Chisato's steady (he isn't), and for another Goto starts to realize that Goda might be tougher than he looks. Don't discount the bourgeois strivers, young man, they got plenty of pent-up depravity to spare.

Goto's not the real leader of the gang, however. That would be the diabolical Idei (Tatsuya Nakamura), who owns the underground club where the young punks gather to rob salarymen, have sloppy sex, and shoot heroin. Idei supplies the drugs and the real estate, but he doesn't seem to want to expand or become a power in the underworld. Idei is a kind of anti-gangster. His game isn't so much to become the next Scarface as it is to incarnate a hipper, more rock'n'roll version of Shoko Asahara. Idei's trip is to see just how fucked up things can get before it all comes crashing down around his head. Life is just a violent dream with no purpose or possibility of escape so do what thou wilt. Idei is less a gangster than a cult leader disguised as a gangster.

Goda gets sucked into the gang's street wars with rival outfits which take on an expressionistic, phantasmagorical  look of shadows and smoke all illuminated with the searing flashes from a robotic welding arc. The gang rumbles happen like storm systems rolling across the land--they're just arbitrary manifestations of rage and violence, stage managed for maximum theatricality by the brilliant Idei who always knows the right aesthetic moment to shut things down for the evening. In the nightmare world of Bullet Ballet the human  propensity for violence takes on a perversely recreational air. Everybody ought to go join a gang and find an Enemy. It's just the thing to do, you know?

But some of these players are seeking a more authentic form of darkness. Chisato and Goda are both playing with the fire of self-destruction. So is Idei, but Idei wants the whole world to burn with him. Goto is still caught between bourgeois values and his desire to go whole-hog with everyone else's suicide trip. Goto, for all his macho posturing, isn't a true killer. But maybe that's because he hasn't found the right target . . .

Bullet Ballet is a black and white masterpiece of madness, self-loathing, and grandiose fantasies of self-destruction. Although it seems to be the first Tsukamoto film to take a more realistic approach to exploring his essential themes of radical transformation, the city of Tokyo, and the consequences of violence, Bullet Ballet creates its own sinister reality. The various crazed, self-torturing characters bounce off each other, exchanging obliterating impulses, outlooks, and roles seemingly on contact in this insane drama of interpersonal warfare.

MOVIE REVIEW: EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL (1969)

Written, Produced, and Directed by Werner Herzog
Cinematography by Thomas Mauch
Original Music by Florian Fricke
Film Editing by Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus

Starring
Helmut Doring 
Paul Glauer
Gisela Hertwig
Hertel Minkner
Gertrud Piccini
Marianne Saar
Brigitte Saar
Gerd Gickel
Erna Gschwendtner
Gerhard Maerz
Alfredo Piccini
Erna Smollarz
Lajos Zsarnoczay
Pepi Hermine

Review by William D. Tucker. 

In a bleak land, a man in a suit barricades himself into his office. The man in the suit ties another man to a chair as a hostage. The hostage just snickers to himself  as though he's playing some prank. Outside the gated  building which contains the office, a group of seven or eight people demand the release of the hostage. One woman demands that she get her shoe back which, I guess, she left inside the gated building. I get the impression that she lost it in some kind of rush to leave the building, but I'm not sure. The protesters throw stuff at the building and jeer and make jokes. The man in the suit threatens that he'll do something terrible to the hostage. The overall impression is that this is some sort of institution for the insane, maybe the criminally insane, but it's never entirely clear. One is left with a "lunatics running the asylum" vibe, but things become even stranger.

For one thing, the place isn't portrayed as being in any particular geographical locale. It's a German language film, yes, but no references are made to German cities or history or society or politics. The movie seems to take place in some desolate region where the institution is the only human outpost for miles and miles. No clear reasons are given for the uprising (if that's what's going on) of the inmates (if they are in fact inmates).

The institution is possibly meant to be self-sufficient. There's a barn with chickens, pigs, and animal feed. There are also plants, possibly a garden. The institution is surrounded by a barren, rocky landscape with only a few dead, twisted trees sticking up out of the ground. The institution seems to be isolated from any kind of larger civilization. However, there is a road running by the place, and at one point a woman driver stops to ask for directions. Maybe the institution isn't some isolated human outpost in a desolate world at all. Maybe it's just the people at the institution who've come to see themselves as apart from the world.

The rebellious inmates tease each other, have food fights, and torment a pair of stick-sword wielding blind men. The two blind men even duel each other with their wooden swords. It made me think of the blind swordsman Zatoichi--and then it hit me: did Zatoichi ever fight another swordsman who was blind? I still need to find the answer to that.

At one point, the inmates try to journey across the rocky wasteland, but they seem discouraged, and go back to the institution.

Potted flowers are lit on fire. A car is made to move in an endless circle with no driver at the wheel. Chickens and pigs are killed for fun and not for food. The inmates threaten to burn down the gated building, the barn, the whole place.

The climax of the film comes when one of the characters decides to just run away from the institution, until they encounter a dead, twisted tree. This character confronts the tree, accusing it of pointing rudely, and refuses to budge from the standoff until the tree stops pointing. I was left with the impression that this character and that tree were going to be in some sort of stalemate for all time if that's what it takes.

To say that Even Dwarfs Started Small depicts a world gone mad is not helpful. Yes, I had those words on my mind throughout the movie, but what happens on screen also seems to suggest that certain kinds of  conflict, by their very nature, demand the consent of all parties. If someone decides they no longer believe in the overall situation, then they might just be able to leave, to run off into the horizon. But you would probably have to be insane to do that.

All of the actors in the movie are dwarfs. The world of the movie seems too large for the people who inhabit it. It's as though all the people who were bigger than the dwarfs died and left them with a world filled with buildings and technology built at a scale beyond convenient use. It's a scale with a certain kind of cruelty involved, and maybe that's the source of the madness which engulfs everyone.

Even Dwarfs Started Small begins with an interrogation scene which suggests that, at some point, a larger authority of some kind eventually intervened and squashed the inmates' rebellion. But the movie never returns to this opening scene. We are left with a framing device where part of the frame has been obliterated. It's as though the madness of the inmates has even reached back through time, to the beginning of the movie, and obliterated the intervention of the authorities. Madness confounds all cause and effect. There's no reinstatement of the status quo, and one is left with feelings both exciting and unsettling.

MOVIE REVIEW: FRAGILE MACHINE (2005)

Produced by Aoineko 

Art, Animation, Direction, and Music by Ben Steele
Story by Ben Steele, Darren Dugan,Cliff Hockersmith, John Pickney
Music by John Banks, John Hockersmith,Cliff Hockersmith, Ben Steele, Jay Steinberg

Voice Cast:
Xi as Leda Nea
Molly Pickney as Goho/Mary Nea

...

"If a technological feat is possible, man will do it. Almost as if it's wired into the core of our being."
                  ---Major Motoko Kusanagi in the movie Ghost in the Shell (1995)   

" Only her soul is real."
                  ---narrator in the movie Fragile Machine (2005)

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

There's a cyborg woman, alone in her high tech apartment. She looks like a cyborg, that doll-like appearance familiar to anyone who's ever seen the anime Ghost in the Shell, but it's kind of hard to tell. This is a computer graphics movie, and so all of the human characters look like she does: cyborg dolls, simplified, stylized, maybe even mass-produced. Are they products or people or both? This woman is named Leda Nea, and she sits up in bed, and contemplates the futuristic metropolis she is part of--once again, similar to Motoko Kusanagi, the Major, from Ghost in the Shell. There are some children's toys in the apartment, and this is a departure from Ghost in the Shell: the Major was a committed loner, a hyper-individualist who wanted to transcend her own being, confound the categories of male and female biology and gender identity, slip the bonds of collectivist military/corporate/bureaucratic culture, and explore the new depths and new heights of a transhumanist existence. Leda Nea has children's toys but no child. The implication is that she is quite alone and, in another difference from the Major, not by choice. She once had a little daughter, but now she's gone.


We see a shimmering ultimate dream city built out of computer graphics and  photographic references of cities from the real world (looks a bit like Los Angeles, maybe some shots from Tokyo and Seoul)--a mixture of the real and the digital inhabited by doll-like video game avatar-people. The city has been constructed by the impenetrably named Göln Remedios corporation as a combination city state/executive headquarters/work site/massively scaled social engineering experiment. Göln Remedios built the city to be one with the company, and all who work there are both citizens and employees. Göln Remedios's main business concerns seem to be robotics and AI, but now they have embarked on a new venture: the merger of artificial and biological systems. The virtual people who live in this city seem to already be cyborgs in the sense of being humans whose lives are dependent upon high technology, and their uniform, doll-like appearance may even be meant to suggest some kind of assembly line/vat grown origin for the city state's population as a whole. The company has everyone under intense surveillance: visual, audio, biometrics--every man, woman, and child has been rigorously quantified down to the ATCG units of their genetic makeup. GR has an entire population as a pool for experimentation, and it wants to take robotics, cybernetics, and AI to the next level. They want to locate the human soul, in situ, extract it, and insert it into an artificial robot body. The company wants to achieve the impossible synthesis of science and spirituality, magic and technology, and, in the process, give birth to a new being and a new conception of nature. To that end, they choose an experimental subject: Leda Nea, who is revealed to be a scientist working on something called Project Zero for GR.

Leda Nea receives a new dictate from the company. She will report to a laboratory facility, sign a legal release form (in a mostly digital, heavily cyborged future, you know something sinister is afoot when your bosses have you sign an actual piece of paper . . .), and be subjected to bizarre and horrific experiments which will rip the soul from her biological body and put it into a robot body.

The process by which the company plans to remove her soul is rather vague: do they mean the soul as a poetic way of referring to the central nervous system? Or is the company actually trying to capture the irreducible spirit that is spoken of in religious and metaphysical traditions? Is it both? Is a "soul" electricity, chemistry, fluids, neurons in unique configurations? Or is there something more, something transcendent, transpersonal, some spark of divine mojo-substance? Maybe it's none of these things, just a fantasy. We're talking about a movie, after all. But the movie insists on its own reality, and that fictional reality seems to posit the soul as all of the above: CNS, spirit, nerves, brain, blood, electricity, chemistry all bound up together in a fantastic braid of consciousness, spirit, and being.

GR, in the grand tradition of such sinister megacorporations as Yoyodyne, Soylent Corporation, Umbrella Pharmaceuticals, Tyrell Corp, Weyland-Yutani, Cyberdyne, and Omni Consumer Products is about to unleash a disaster of biblical proportions. What, exactly, is the business plan here? Oh, that's right, they're going to spearhead new markets in soulular extraction processes. Gotcha. Gonna make bulk cheddar in that arena, no doubt. But then again, is GR's plan really so insane when measured against the cancerous infinite growth fantasies of predatory real world corporations?Why not soul extraction? A soul deserves better than such an imperfect vessel as the human body. In fact, you could say that putting a soul inside a custom-designed robotic body is doing God's work by building a more perfect temple for the spirit. And, now that I think about it, once the process itself is perfected and passes into the public domain, you'll probably see the birth of "organic" and "indie" soul extractors and "artisan" and "hand-crafted" robot body boutiques. I'm already looking forward to this future!

The dark arts of soul extraction, as portrayed in the movie, resemble some kind of Frankenstein meets Torquemada by way of Bush/Cheney Era torture policy and Jack Bauer kind of torture: stripped naked, Leda Nea is hooked up to wires and tubes and violently shocked. Leda flails about a padded cell (visual reference to the chamber where the Eva Unit goes berserk in Neon Genesis Evangelion), unable to dash her brains out, and thereby end her suffering, she has no choice but to have her soul removed and loaded into a robot body that's strongly reminiscent of  the sex bots from that Bjork video All Is Full of Love.

Leda Nea, in her new robot body, is isolated in an Edenic garden prison where she tries to escape and is pursued and killed by sentry robots only to be reborn as a vengeful spirit complete with Tetsuo-esque psionic powers of mass destruction. Leda Nea obliterates the city but, in an intriguing twist, she does not annihilate the technological basis of GR's city state. Rather, she seemingly heralds a new kind of life-form: bizarro serpent-angels stitched together out of robot body parts and powered by sparks of the divine essence.

Or something like that. Fragile Machine takes a turn for the apocalyptic, but instead of total destruction of the techno-order, it's more like a synthesis of spirit and robo-technology. The surreal imagery of the gravity-defying  robotic serpent-angels is something to behold as they twist their way through the clear skies above the drowned city which is now being reconstituted as a new civilization at movie's end.

Fragile Machine is a spiritual science fiction apocalypse--a fantasy of how a corrupt world ends, and a new world is born from the heart of a transcendent savior entity. The corrupt world is identified with mindless conformity, rule by transnational megacorporations, and the ruthless quantification of and experiments upon human life. Like many apocalyptic mythologies, it sets up a number of dualistic conflicts: Leda Nea is a rebellious woman opposed to the cold, oppressive masculinity of the GR scientists and their drone sentries; a lone individual battles the colonial corporate citizen; plants and animals are at war with robots and technological infrastructure; and, most importantly, the irreducible soul or spirit is portrayed as being in conflict with the pitiless, Orwellian systems of surveillance, quantification, and corporate-capitalist processes of standardization, mass production, and profit driven economies of scale.

These are all familiar themes found in many science fiction films, TV shows, comic books, animation, and literary works. What's interesting is how Fragile Machine uses these dualistic oppositions to portray a new synthesis of technology and spirit. After all, this is a computer generated movie. Although the production is quite small and independent minded, it still uses hardware and software developed by large scale corporate entities, so it is interesting that the movie's thematic progression reflects the physical means of production: a synthesis of independent moviemaking vision and corporation-derived tools results in a movie which suggests the monstrous edifice of GR may only be redeemed if it is put at the disposal of a single, autonomous soul with a transcendent vision. It's an intriguing mixture of the religious motif of apocalypse with stock elements of dystopian science fiction.

 You can also think of it as a mash-up of different tropes and visuals from different strains of science fiction: cyberpunk, dystopia, transhumanism, Asimov's Laws of Robotics, stories of robots becoming sentient, Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, and various anime and live action works such as Ghost in the Shell, Akira, The Matrix, Robocop, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dark City, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and, of course, Metropolis and Blade Runner. The movie wears its influences on its chest, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. This is the kind of movie where the more you get the influences behind it the more you can get out of it, I would say. This is appropriate to the spiritual dimension of the work, as well. Think of this movie as a sermon in the church of cinema, a kind of theological commentary on various themes in the "sacred texts" of science fiction movies, TV shows, literature, comic books, and animation.

 It also incorporates the aesthetic values of CG videogames and cinema--Final Fantasy, Parasite Eve, Resident Evil, and even Xenogears all come to mind. Fragile Machine is the cinema of people who grew up with immersive videogaming experiences--people who fully recognize the artistic qualities of videogames, and derive as much satisfaction and influence from gaming narrative products as more traditionally minded filmmakers would from Kurosawa, Bergman, Ozu, Resnais, Imamura, Fellini, Godard, Truffaut, Antonioni, Leone, Kubrick, early Coppola, Scorsese, Carpenter, and/or Romero.

Fragile Machine is definitely a visual spectacle, incorporating destruction and violence, but it does not wallow in the mayhem like some movies and games do. It's digging for something deeper by attempting to articulate a spiritual/metaphysical vision that, paradoxically, seems to grow out of the advancement of seemingly non-spiritual, non-supernatural information, engineering, cybernetics, AI, and robotics technologies. The movie seems to portray the infusion of spirit into technology which results in a being which is both spiritual and technological in nature.

As a skeptic, I resist Fragile Machine's dive into the supernatural, but on a purely aesthetic level, I admired the eclectic mix of science fiction and apocalypse. I don't think the movie is meant to push some sort of religious agenda. It's a movie first and foremost, at most a sermon in the Chruch of Cinema, and a dazzling make believe story. But I would be intrigued to see Aoineko and collaborators tackle more of a hard sci-fi story that doesn't lean on the supernatural elements as much.

MOVIE REVIEW: SIGNS OF LIFE (1968)

Written, Produced, and Directed by Werner Herzog
Cinematography by Thomas Mauch
Music by Stavros Xarchakos
Edited by Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus and Maxi Mainka

Starring
Peter Brogle
Wolfgang Reichmann
Athina Zacharopoulou
Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Sometime during World War II, three German soldiers recovering from injuries are assigned to light duty guarding an ancient fortress on a Greek island. The ancient fortress is full of stone faces. The trio of soldiers finds themselves with nothing of consequence to do. One of them is a scholar of ancient Greek, and spends his days deciphering the writing inscribed on old stones. Another one amuses himself with trying to exterminate all the cockroaches infesting the island. And the third, Stroszek, decides to get married to a local Greek woman. The three soldiers and the Greek woman create among themselves a wonderful little community. You wouldn't even know this was a WWII picture if it weren't for the military uniforms. These four spend their time loafing, drinking, eating, and idly fantasizing about insignificant things. Nothing much seems to happen until Stroszek loses his mind.

Stroszek goes mad when he is confronted with a vista of windmills while on patrol duty assigned to him as busy work. Maybe he is possessed by the ghost of Don Quixote. Stroszek decides to seize the ancient fortress and threaten to blow up an ammunition storage house located on the grounds. The German army, shocked and confused by all this, tries to figure out how to contain the situation.

Signs of Life is the strangest World War II movie I have ever seen. But maybe it's not really a World War II movie as I usually think of it. On the DVD commentary track, director Werner Herzog says that he wanted to make a film featuring Germans who served in World War II not because they believed in the Nazi ideology, but because they faced execution if they did not serve. Removed from the situation of having to fight for Germany, the three soldiers behave in much the way anyone would if they were tourists on vacation in the Greek islands or some other breathtakingly beautiful place.


So why does Stroszek go mad? Maybe it's something to do with how the war has already worked its way inside him, into his soul. This madness of war has perhaps combined with his resentment, shame, and anger towards the state of his native Germany, and so he seizes the fort and puts himself in opposition to his own army. Like Don Quixote, he becomes a man without any particular national identification, but rather someone who seeks to go beyond the limits of an oppressive social structure, and to seek unlimited adventure free of the restraints of reason and reality. Madness liberates Stroszek even if his rebellion is ultimately doomed to failure. For a little while, at least, he is totally free to be the master of his own vision of life and heroic struggle.

Signs of Life is one of those movies that you could call deceptively simple. It's not very long, just barely an hour and a half, and it seems to tell a very strange story in a straightforward way. Stroszek's madness is the most dramatic thing that happens, but many of the early scenes of the movie show the idle good times of the three Germans and the Greek woman as they live on the fortress grounds. These early scenes invite the viewer into the lazy, enchanted rhythms of their lives in a way that reminded me of the beach interlude in the Japanese gangster film Sonatine.

In Sonatine, yakuza seeking to escape the fallout of a violent gang war take refuge on a little used stretch of beach where they begin to relax and play childish games and stage silly dances. The hardened thieves and killers seem to shed their old lives and revert to a more innocent state. The old ways reassert themselves when an assassin shows up to kill one of their number.

Signs of Life also involves a similar disruption of an idyllic state. Three men and one woman thought they could, maybe, escape the harsh realities of a world convulsed with mass slaughter. Maybe they could have, but then one of them woke up to a strange spirit of rebellion, and the idyll was no more.

MOVIE REVIEW: HUNGER (2008)

Directed by Steve McQueen
Written by Enda Walsh and Steve McQueen
Director of Photography Sean Bobbitt, B.S.C.
Film Editor Joe Walker
Production Designer Tom McCullough
Sound Designer Paul Davies
Original Music by David Holmes with Leo Abrahams
Produced by Laura Hastings-Smith and Robin Gutch

Starring 
Michael Fassbender
Liam Cunningham

Review by William D. Tucker. 


1981. Maze Prison, Northern Ireland.

Night: there's a protest in the streets, people banging the asphalt with pot lids.

Later: morning: there's a middle-aged man in a house on a quaint little street in Ireland. His dutiful wife makes him a heart attack breakfast, and then he goes out to his car, gets down like he's doing push-ups, but, no, he's just checking under his car for a bomb. No bomb. He looks up and down the street. Presumably, he sees nothing. He gets in his car, drives to work.

This middle-aged man is a cop of some rank. We see excerpts from his day having to do with his job which mostly involves beating imprisoned Irish Republican Army soldiers with his bare knuckles, but we don't see much of the actual beatings until later. The man's knuckles are bloody, raw. He stands outside in the snow, sucking down cigarette smoke, his uniform shirt showing visible sweat stains. He seems to be carrying a terrible anxiety within him that could break out at any moment. Maybe that anxiety fuels his violence.

When you're angry, you don't feel anxious. But what about those moments where there's no one to beat? What happens when you're alone with your anxiety, maybe even your guilt? He's less a cop, and more of a prison guard/torturer. But this man is no villain, no fascist pig, no incarnation of evil. He is a human who is being worn down by his job, by the ongoing stress of being a violent agent of state power. He is, in the bold moral perspective of the film Hunger, just as degraded by the oppressive tactics of the British government as the imprisoned Irish Republicans using their piss and shit as tools of protest inside their cells.

This is all a set-up, in a sense, to dramatize the hunger strike of Bobby Sands, but it is more than that.

Yes, this movie is on the side of the men in the cells, but it also shows how state violence degrades its agents and perpetrators, and how murder is unleashed on both sides of a bitter, intractable conflict.

That middle-aged man? Well, (SPOILER WARNING) he gets a bullet in the brain from an IRA assassin. His violent death is not presented as a victory. This man, prior to his death, was shown as a torturer, as someone who did horrible things to helpless human beings. But he was also shown to have a wife, an aging mother, and inexpressible guilt, fear, and anxiety feeding into borderline paranoia. This character is not sanitized, nor is his death presented as something to be cheered by a safe, comfortable audience in a theatre, or sitting before a laptop or flatscreen TV. His death is portrayed as cruel and irrevocable.

When you watch Hunger, you will most likely come away from it profoundly impressed by the level of violence and filth, and by the rawness of actor Michael Fassbender's performance as hunger striker Bobby Sands, a historical figure I was totally ignorant of before watching this movie. Bobby Sands, in conventional storytelling terms, is arguably the protagonist of the story, and yet he does not appear onscreen for almost a half hour. This isn't a long movie, either. It's 96 minutes, so that's basically an hour and a half of movie plus the end credit roll.

During that first half hour, the Maze Prison is established as a hell on earth, except it is a hell created by human beings, not gods and devils. The guards and police officials supply the violence, torture, and interrogation, and the prisoners cover the walls of their tiny cells--two men to a cell--with layers of shit. They eat only a little bit of the food provided for them, and then they throw the rest in a corner to rot. The prisoners sculpt their mashed potatoes into funnels to channel jug-loads of piss back out onto the floor where the guards patrol. As an audience, we are treated to these tactics of protest, but we are also shown the other side, the clean-up. Some poor bastard has to put on disposable protective gear, splash cleaning fluid all up and down the piss-flooded hallway floor, and then mop it. Every now and again, maybe once a month, the prisoners are dragged out of their cells, deloused, given new clothes, and a guy with a pressure-washer has to go into each cell and spray that shit off the walls.

My absolute favorite scene was the one where the policeman on pressure-wash duty goes into a cell and sees a repugnant, yet sublime, shit spiral on the wall, and, before he starts to clean it off, he actually lifts up his safety visor to behold the thing with his own eyes. In that moment, I felt bad for that guy. It didn't matter that he was on the side of the oppressor. Here was a human being forced to do a terrible job. A human being who doesn't make much money, and would probably rather be with his wife or girlfriend or his friends at the pub. But instead he has to pressure-wash layers of human feces from the walls of a hellish prison.

But in that moment, too, there is some kind of weird communication of an artistic vision. Because it's not just a wall smeared with shit in that moment. This poor, confined soul took the time to make a terrifying spiral out of his own shit. The prisoner transformed his gesture of defiance into art. The police on clean-up duty sees that, when he lifts his safety visor. It's just one of those things that has to be seen with the naked eyeballs. I'll bet the smell got inside his helmet, too. This was an aesthetic experience that could never be had in any gallery.

When Bobby Sands is introduced into the story, he is portrayed as a fighter, and the movie goes to great lengths to show that his hunger strike is a conscious, tactical, and strategic decision. His logic is that if he is willing to show both sides of the conflict his willingness to die that this will galvanize the Irish Republican resistance fighters, and force the Thatcherite British government to recognize the IRA as a political entity, and not just a criminal organization.

 His strike is taken up by others within the prison. So he's not alone in laying his life on the line. The movie doesn't shy away from asserting that Bobby Sands's decision to give up his life also results in the willing deaths of other hunger strikers. Bobby knows this, and acknowledges that he believes in the necessity of having men die to pursue the ultimate political ends of the IRA.

Bobby is challenged by a compassionate priest who visits him, gives him cigarettes, and valiantly tries to talk him out of his protest. This scene, this confrontation between Bobby and a priest (played by Liam Cunningham) is masterfully staged and acted in a way which I will not reveal. It represents a jarring departure from what has gone before, but you just have to see it for yourself. I admired director Steve McQueen's choice in how he stages this confrontation.

The technical side of this production is masterful throughout. Notice how there's almost no conventional musical scoring on the soundtrack. Rather, McQueen and his collaborators use realistic sounds pared down to their essence to create the visceral reality of each scene, whether it is a brutal beating of naked prisoners by a gang of armored cops, or a lonely cop taking a smoke break in the snow. In one key scene, the only soundtrack is the insistent back and forth of human voices in a large, empty room. Naturalism is the key to every element of the technical design of this movie. Even the hallucinations of a human mind breaking down from starvation are rooted in grim, physiological reality.

Bobby Sands is the protagonist of this movie, but he isn't presented as a Hollywood historical hero like El Cid or William Wallace. Sands's death is not portrayed as a transcendent sacrifice. There is no stirring music, nor propaganda montages of the people rising up to throw off the yoke of the oppressor. It is a realistic, and horrifying portrayal of what happens to a starving human body. But it is contextualized by the overall brutality of the Maze Prison, where inmates and guards alike are dehumanized on the front lines of a tragic, and drawn-out struggle.

MOVIE REVIEW: THE THING (1982)

Directed by John Carpenter
Screenplay by Bill Lancaster, adapted from the short story "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell
Cinematography by Dean Cundey
Edited by Todd C. Ramsay
Special Makeup Effects by Rob Bottin (with an assist from Stan Winston)
Special Visual Effects by Albert Whitlock
Music by Ennio Morricone, John Carpenter
Produced by David Foster, Lawrence Turman, Wilbur Stark, Stuart Cohen

Starring
Kurt Russell
A. Wilford Brimley
Keith David
Donald Moffat
Charles Hallahan
Richard Masur
David Clennon
T.K. Carter
Joel Polis
Richard Dysart
Thomas G. Waites
Peter Maloney

...

"When a man bleeds, it's just tissue. But blood from one of you Things won't obey. It's a newly formed individual with a built-in desire to protect its own life. When attacked, your blood will try and survive--and crawl away from a hot needle, say."
--Macready (played by Kurt Russell) in the movie The Thing.

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

150,000 years ago an alien craft crash lands somewhere in Antarctica.

Cut to: 1982. An American research station somewhere in Antarctica. A Norwegian man with an assault rifle chases a dog into the middle of the American facility, firing like mad. He seems to want to kill the dog. One of the Americans is wounded. The gunman rants and raves in a language none of the Americans can understand. In self-defense, the captain of the station fires a .357 round through the mad gunman's eye.

It's determined that the Norwegian came from a nearby research station established by the Kingdom of Norway. Did the Norwegian camp go stark raving mad? Were they cooking some bad drugs over there? Did they go stir crazy or what? Why would anyone want to kill a harmless dog?

Maybe that dog isn't so harmless.

In fact, it harbors a predatory life-form from another world. Something that can take on any shape--once it has consumed it and replicated it via its icky, but sophisticated, biology. This . . . thing has come from distant worlds, and has absorbed all sorts of lifeforms in its journeys, or so it would seem. It has now started to absorb human and canine life forms. It has no interest in communication. Only in absorbing forms, knowledge, and getting the hell out of Antarctica. Maybe it'll imitate a bird, and fly right the Christ outta there.

Soon the Americans are wondering: who's human? Who's the thing? How do you tell a perfect imitation apart from its original?

The answer, it would seem, is in the blood.

Unless, of course, the thing has perfectly imitated human blood. Then what?

What if its goal is to absorb and replicate itself across the whole surface of the earth? How do you contain such an enemy? The thing seems to operate like a bacteria or a virus--some kind of infectious agent for sure. The thing is some kind of plague threatening to wipe out humanity.

Or is it? Maybe when it perfectly imitates you it perfectly re-assembles you, and it only manifests aggression if it feels threatened. Maybe we need to cool down, and not start breaking out all the guns and flamethrowers and so forth.

But what if this thing really is looking to assert total control? We can't just let this thing go. We gotta find out who is human, and who's the thing.

Two enemies, human and the thing, wage a war in Antarctica to see who survives and who dies. Who gets to rule the planet, and who gets reduced to ashes. The only language that both sides seem to understand seems to be a pidgin mixture of aggression, cunning, violence, and manipulation--war, in other words. Prisoners are taken. Harsh interrogations conducted. No one can be trusted. Subtle personal resentments float to the surface: Am I dropping the hammer on this guy because I think he's an alien imitation, or because I think he's kind of an asshole? Remember, these guys have been cooped up in this research station for a long time.

Maybe there is no Thing. Maybe the only contagion brought into the American camp was the virus of fear. Fear takes root, and you see whatever you want to see. Weapons are drawn, fingers pointed, sides chosen. Humans have been doing this to each other since our primal beginnings with no end in sight. Do we really need some ooga-booga make believe alien bullshit to set us against each other to the knife? People abuse and kill each other over invisible things all the time--politics, ideology, nationalism, religion, economics, jealousy, racism, homophobia, misogyny--maybe the Thing is just one more flake-o notion that has entered the heads of human beings in their ongoing quest to find novel reasons to oppress and slaughter each other.

And what if The Thing is real? Well, we can't truly say it's evil if we're objective about it. It just wants to survive. It's a being from another world. Or maybe a colonial aggregation of beings from across the cosmos. Who the fuck knows? In any case, if the Thing is real, I find it impossible to judge its actions in moralistic terms. The Thing wants to survive. So do the humans. They cannot communicate in civil fashion, and so it's gotta be total war. Too bad. A tragedy, really, when you get right down to it. What could have been a stirring saga of First Contact becomes Intergalactic War I, with, I'm sure, many sequels to follow.

But it makes for one hell of a show.

John Carpenter's The Thing . . . After this movie, Carpenter was only competing with himself. Artistically, I mean. Which is all that really interests me, here. Sure, it was a box office disappointment at the time of its release, and Carpenter himself has expressed disappointment that this movie didn't go over as well as he had hoped at the time--but that's all in the past. Without question, The Thing found a long, sinister afterlife on VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, and now, I assume,  Blu-Ray.

And on broadcast television, too, albeit in a heavily censored bullshit version, but many great filmmakers have had to endure the indignity of having their movies chopped, edited, and violated at every level to conform to the bogus morality of regularly scheduled network programming.

 I watched The Thing in a censored version and I could not take my eyes off the screen. I was riveted. I wasn't scared, exactly, I've only ever really been afraid of being abducted by aliens, to be perfectly blunt with you, but I felt like I was watching, I dunno, 12 Angry Men, or Glengarry Glen Ross, or something. It was clearly a science fiction/horror genre picture, but it wasn't schlock. It wasn't played for camp or splatter moments or breast shots. It was about a group of pissed-off humans, all male, trying to root out an insidious alien invader with the power of masquerading as homo sapiens.

 One of these humans(?) has a flamethrower and  several bundles of dynamite and is not taking any shit from anybody. He's forcing the other men, at flamethrower-point, to submit to an improvised medical test that resembles some kind of cult-like, ritual initiation rite. Each man must slice his thumb, let his blood flow into a Petri dish, and then the man with the flame thrower will hold a length of wire in the ignition fire and then, once the wire has been heated up, it will be pressed against the blood samples. If the blood samples just burn and sizzle, it's all good. But if something else happens . . . and what would that something be, exactly? Part of the interest of this scene lies in its deep uncertainty. Just because the guy with all the weapons has dreamed up some test that he thinks is gonna proves who's human and who's the thing doesn't mean the test will actually fucking work. And what if Mr. Blood Inquisitor sees a positive result that's nothing of the kind? Innocent people are gonna burn, for sure . . .

I'm talking about the blood test scene which anyone who has seen The Thing knows about. This was the very first scene I ever saw from The Thing. Or maybe it wasn't quite the very first thing I saw of The Thing. I think, maybe, I had been flipping channels, and noticed this unusual movie about a research team in Antarctica dealing with some kind of alien invasion situation--intense, bearded dudes in winter-wear speaking in low, strident tones about evil doings, Kurt Russell talking into a tape recorder about how no one can trust anyone anymore, Wilford Brimley losing his shit and going all James Cagney on people with a snubnose .38, but I didn't pay too close attention. I skipped around the TV, and, at some point, I came back to the movie at its most intense moment: the blood test scene.

I don't remember what, exactly, compelled me to stop and watch the movie from that point onward. But I think it was the seriousness of the performances. The actors were behaving as though they were actually frightened and angered by their situation. They seemed to have fear, rage, and paranoia playing across their faces at different moments. They didn't act like the kinds of morons you'd expect to populate a typical body count picture. I think it was the seriousness of the actors' performances that drew me in more than anything, but who knows? Whatever it was, I was hooked. I watched the movie 'til its end. And, at that time, the 1990s, I hated watching movies that had been censored for broadcast television. What was the point? If a movie is unacceptable to the networks, then don't show it, I say. TV stations could come up with their own crappy shows to fill timeslots, and probably get more reliable advertiser participation, too.

Think about it. Non-controversial, braindead situation comedies and cop-worship shows are pretty much a sure thing if you want the average television viewer to achieve brand identification with whatever lame product you're pushing. Well, I guess that was true in the 1990s. Now, it would be the increasingly Orwellian depravity of Reality TV, but let's not go there.

The Thing was compelling cinema even in a heavily compromised form. John Carpenter's film was so well-crafted, that it wasn't totally ruined by censorship. Now that is movie-making power right there. But where does the power emanate from? Craftsmanship. Carpenter's deepest game, in my estimation, is his commitment to the basics of storytelling: script, actors' performances, shot composition, soundtrack including both score and sound effects (the "soundscape" if you will), special effects, editing--the whole engine of cinema is geared towards expressing a dramatic situation with utmost clarity. Even the ambiguities and ironies present in Carpenter's movies are expressed with utmost clarity.

Theme is important, too. I think Carpenter's one of the more interesting thematic filmmakers in how he approaches doing horror and science-fiction scenarios. In Assault on Precinct 13 the theme had to do with decent, competent people from both sides of the law caught in the middle of a violent revolutionary struggle between insurgents and an oppressive police state: how do you survive and protect those who depend on you in an impossible situation? Halloween was about how a blind force of destruction manifests in human form in the midst of an anodyne suburban community, and the terror that grows out of normal people's obliviousness to the presence of such an evil force. The Fog was about the sins of the past manifesting to punish future generations. In the Mouth of Madness follows out the idea of what it would be like if the usual laws of mundane reality were displaced by the operating logic of a horror novelist's imagination gone completely berserk. Ghosts of Mars was an interesting blend of Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog: an amorphous spirit of homicide asserts itself as a ghostly insurgency to punish a future human settlement on the red planet. In all of these movies, the horrific idea at the center is illustrated in specific, concretely realized terms. As the viewer, you don't see quite as much as you think you do in terms of mayhem and gore, but the nature of the threat becomes clear, as do the struggles of the humans trying to survive the onslaught. Carpenter's movies apply logic and rationality to irrational, supernatural forces and the results are pleasingly outrageous, but comprehensible.

The Thing takes on the theme of paranoia. Broadly speaking, it uses two contrasting approaches to illustrate this theme: economy and excess. Which is appropriate if you think about it. Paranoia itself is both economical and excessive. Paranoia focuses your mind like a laser even while it takes aim at the entire world which has turned murderously against you. Keep your guns loaded, the eyes in back of your head peeled, and keep a tight routine, because the hit could come from anyone, anywhere, at anytime. Using simple logic, the paranoiac can cook up whole cosmologies that definitively prove the whole world is aligned against him or herself in a grand conspiracy to ruin your day, your era, your lifetime, and maybe even subsequent lifetimes depending on the nature of the Enemy. The paranoiac pursues simple solutions to complex problems.

Remember Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver? Just get some guns, do some push-ups, and shoot some people and everything will be okay in the end. You might even get a date with Cybil Shepherd in the end. And if that doesn't work, well, you can blast the girl away, too, with your .44 Magnum. Hey, your personality may be defective, but your weapons usually work like physics. No big thing. They all had it coming.

The Thing isn't quite the same as Taxi Driver, but it does explore similar terrain of paranoia-induced violence, and the terror that grows out of the failure of communication, civilization, and hope itself.

In terms of technique, The Thing hinges on using economical shot set-ups within a widescreen frame that are filled with agitated human faces in close-up, suspicious humans pointing fingers and making accusations, and then all of this is overtaken by gooey excess when the wriggling alien horror of The Thing makes its presence known. All pretense to civilization goes out the window, and those that are human desperately maneuver to muster a defense against the alien invader. It's a visceral realization of the sci-fi trope of humanity forging a coalition against an extraterrestrial entity for survival purposes that touches on the longstanding tribal tendencies of human beings.

We don't think of ourselves as tribes in the 21st century. We use other titles for our typical groupings: nations, political parties, sexuality, gender, subculture, religion, race, job title, student, townie--all are categories used by the powers that be to divide us into in-groups and out-groups. If you're in the in-group you're supposed to be opposed to the out-group(s). And, of course, the out-group isn't an out-group to those who are in it--they're another in-group from their perspective.

The same could be said for the alien whatsit in The Thing: from its perspective its just trying to survive. The fact that it kills and absorbs people is just tough shit for the humans. Maybe if there was some way for the alien and the humans to communicate they could arrive at some sort of understanding. Instead of unlimited violence climaxing in total destruction, this could've been a story of First Contact and not Apocalypse. A truce could be called with truth and reconciliation between human and extraterrestrial.

(Now think how differently Taxi Driver would've played out if Bickle had gotten some counseling, if he'd had a single friend to confide in (aside from his doofus colleague masterfully played by Peter Boyle), maybe get some anti-depressant meds, get some therapy for his shellshock, find a way to work through his deeply imprinted combat stress--Travis Bickle could've turned his shit around. Sure, he'd maybe have some conservative tendencies, some social awkwardness, but he could've gotten over things. He could've been empowered to move on with his life. And Taxi Driver would've been a terrible film. There's a reason why Taxi Driver is a classic and no one gives a shit about Awakenings.)

Unfortunately, civilized approaches to healing and reconciliation do not make for compelling cinema. Madness, paranoia, conflict, death, and destruction make for powerful storytelling. Nothing is more compelling than watching a situation go from bad to worse and beyond. It's what Poe was getting at when he defined the spirit of perversity in "The Black Cat." We have a will towards escalation, towards conflict which is driven by our desire for total power, total control over all uncertainty in existence. Whatever it is that frightens us--a thief, a murderer, a political ideology, an ethnic group, an animal, a culture, a nation, a language, a religion, a philosophy, an outlook, a disagreement about fashion or policy or economics--our impulse is to shun the thing which upsets us.

 And if we can't avoid it, we denigrate it, try to find like-minded people to join us in condemning the hated thing, and, if things go far enough, we will try to destroy whatever it is we hate and fear. Right and wrong don't have to enter into it. Just think about all the genocides, ethnic cleansing, and no limits civilian slaughtering bombing campaigns, and random assholes with assault rifles and body armor popping off in schools and movie theaters--the spirit of perversity, the will to lash out with violence at whoever and whatever happens to be handy, never mind whether or not such targets have any actual culpability for the perpetrator's troubles--they're convenient, they will therefore become blood sacrifices to the murderer's fear, hatred, and paranoia--whatever dark gods sit inside the star chamber of his twisted heart. Even if the perpetrator has some sense that what they are doing is a doomed course of action, just as the narrators in "The Black Cat" or "The Tell-Tale Heart" have a premonition of their own destruction, they are compelled to walk the path of annihilation and jump into the fire themselves in the end.

Or maybe they lash out, get a little dinged-up, spend some time in the hospital, and then are up and about again as a ticking time-bomb with a brand new timer . . . kind of a spoiler for a movie I shall not mention by name.

The Thing invokes the self-immolating spirit of perverseness, of paranoia, from Poe, but combines it with the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. John Carpenter has stated that Lovecraft is an important influence on his work. Lovecraft's central idea is that human beings are completely at the mercy of cosmic forces beyond their comprehension, much more ancient, powerful, and deadly than any human civilization, even one with fanatic ideology and nuclear weapons (ex. USA, USSR, China, Russia, etc.).

After all, anyone who has read Lovecraft's 1931 masterpiece At the Mountains of Madness knows that the Great Old Ones(a name Lovecraft uses to refer to those terrible, cosmic powers of darkness) had atomic weapons long before homo sapiens wormed its way out of the muck across billions of years of cosmic evolution, and split the atom. At the Mountains of Madness tells the story of a group of human explorers who journey to Antarctica and discover a vast, cyclopean city gone to ruin, within which they uncover a strange hieroglyphic language which reveals the secret origins of humanity and the Great Old Ones.

The Thing echoes some of the ideas from At the Mountains of Madness, even though it is more directly adapted from John W. Campbell's 1938 short story "Who Goes There?" Lovecraft's novella was published in 1931 and Campbell's short story came along in 1938, so I wonder if Campbell had absorbed any Lovecraftian influences . . . I have no idea. But I feel pretty confident in saying that John Carpenter, consciously or not, crafted his movie  in a way which blends Poe, Lovecraft, and Campbell's literary themes and combines them with some of the techniques of his previous movies such as Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, and The Fog.

Earlier in this review I put forward the possibility that maybe the Thing is just in the minds of the humans. Maybe there is no Thing. I don't think this is what Carpenter intends for his movie to be, but it is an intriguing idea to me. As I watched the movie again this past weekend, I couldn't help but wonder if these guys are all losing their minds due to isolation, stress, sexual frustration, loneliness, and simmering resentments over slights both real and perceived. It's an all male group. Some of them seem to be veterans, ex-military people--could combat stress be a factor here? Are these people just more inclined to go looking for an enemy when feeling threatened? Like I said, I think Carpenter means for his movie to be taken on its own terms, but I tend to want to go overboard in interpreting movies I've seen dozens of times, so maybe I'm the one losing perspective here. This is a movie which skews more towards Lovecraftian cosmic horror than Poe-style psychological horror.

The cast is excellent. Kurt Russel is billed as the star, but it's really an ensemble piece. All of the actors take the job seriously, and none of them play for camp or self-parody. Probably the most disturbing performance comes from Wilford Brimley. Watching this guy, with his unflappable outer shell, finally start to lose his shit is a kind of mini-saga of horror and madness all its own buried within the larger movie.

The cinematography, an element of economy, by Dean Cundey is perfect, each frame composed for both clarity of what's going on within a given scene and also to give a sense of growing unease. Watch this movie with the sound off, and just take note of how the color scheme changes and evolves as it goes on, and how one shot is cut with another one. The editing is subtle and unobtrusive even when the Thing makes its wriggling, consuming, chaotic self known within that precise widescreen framing.

Which brings me to the element of excess: the disgusting and horrifying creature effects by Rob Bottin with an assist from Stan Winston. I don't even want to talk about it. You should just see for yourself with no prior knowledge. The Thing bursts out, like some avatar of Lovecraft's Azathoth, the idiot god of chaos and destruction--or maybe not. Maybe I'm just reaching for shit here . . .

Back to economy: Albert Whitlock's outer space visual effects provide a quietly menacing introduction for the idea of alien horror from another world in the title sequence.

Ennio Morricone and John Carpenter both throw down for a sneaky, suspenseful original score that doesn't overstay its welcome. You would think if a director could get Morricone for the soundtrack he would want to squeeze another one of those lush, Sergio Leone scores out of him--and that would be a mistake. The Thing doesn't need leitmotifs and wall-to-wall bombast. It needs a defter touch. Note the mournful, but suspicious, quality of the piece which underscores the investigation of the Norwegian camp. I find it unexpectedly moving. The movie is cruel and relentless, but that bit of music suggests a kind of sadness inherent in the waste left by violent all-out conflict.

Maybe The Thing isn't a horror movie in the usual sense. More and more, I think of it as a kind of tragedy about two sophisticated life forms forced to meet under dire circumstances, and the war that results from an inability to communicate or understand one another. Definitely not another braindead body count picture.

MOVIE REVIEW: THE FOG (1980)

Music/Direction by John Carpenter
Written by Debra Hill and John Carpenter
Cinematography by Dean Cundey
Edited by Charles Bornstein and Tommy Lee Wallace
Produced by Debra Hill, Charles B. Bloch, Barry Bernardi, and Pegi Brotman

Starring
Hal Holbrook
Adrienne Barbeau
Jamie Lee Curtis
Tom Atkins
Janet Leigh
Nancy Loomis
John Houseman
Charles Cyphers
Darwin Joston

Review by William D. Tucker. 


The Fog. Here's another John Carpenter movie that I didn't get the first time around. Once again, it was a victim of my own narrow tastes the first time I saw it.

 I've never really liked ghost stories. Ghosts aren't scary to me. Why? Ghosts, like all things supernatural, do not exist. But even if they do exist, what's the most that they could do? Move the furniture around? Muck up the walls and ceiling with some ecto-plasm? Put up a wailing racket? Ghosts, even if they did exist, are harmless, lame, laughable, and boring. Movies about ghosts, with some exceptions (like Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters 2, Kwaidan, Hausu, Poltergeist, the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Frighteners, and The Exorcist--and yeah I consider Pazuzu to just be a particularly aggressive ghost), are not interesting or scary to me. Why fear that which has never been real and never will be real? Hard to suspend disbelief over stuff like that.

You know what's scary to me? An asshole with an assault rifle and a massively distorted sense of entitlement. Ebola. Nuclear weapons. Cancer. A country that would let George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and all their crew have another four years. Torture. A country buffet on a Sunday afternoon. Prisons. My fellow human beings. You know, things from real life.

If you want to make an interesting ghost story, then you gotta have some kind of compelling reason for the dead to come back to life. Because once you're dead, that's it. You only get one shot, and then it's all over. No Konami code in this life, people. One shot, make it count. If you're gonna be breaking the rules, and rising from the dead and all that nonsense, you must have a fire of some kind inside your rotting mind. Some unfinished business. A grudge that won't quit. Can't be any petty bullshit. Gotta be for real if you're gonna be violating the laws of nature and all that.

And what about the living? How do they respond to the intrusion of the supernatural into material reality?

The Fog basically consists of decent, average human beings living in a California coastal town under assault by a ruthless supernatural force. But it takes its time. It sets up the environment of the coastal town, and offers a representative sampling of the population there under threat of destruction, and then slowly unleashes its ghostly terrors. For me, when I first saw it, it was way too slow.

At the time (I was a teenager) I was into Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Dawn of the Dead, Hong Kong action movies, The Evil Dead, Aliens, The Thing--I wanted anger, and blood, and heavy weapons firing nonstop. I wanted braindead macho motherfuckers getting 86ed and taking the whole world with them in a welter of blood and bullets. I wanted the red meat alien carnage of Aliens and John Carpenter's merciless masterpiece The Thing. I got off on the notion of shopping mall assholes turned into zombie bullet-catchers like in Dawn of the Dead. Measured against all this, The Fog was a Thornton Wilder play. Our Town with ghost pirates.

Watching it again, I find that I was just too uncivilized in my adolescence to appreciate the fine craftsmanship of The Fog. Now, I kind of get it.

Like I said, it takes its time. Carpenter uses the first half hour or so to put his widescreen framing to subtle, effective use by cutting from one location of a quiet, kind of lonely California coastal town to another, while weird things happen. Windows shatter. Electric and electronic devices go haywire. An old-timer played by John Houseman does a deadly serious recitation of a ghost story to a group of kids. A whiskey priest played by the one and only Hal Holbrook discovers a dark secret within the walls of his church. Adrienne Barbeau's radio DJ ties all these scenes together with her husky, welcoming voice. Other characters are introduced, and Carpenter takes his time to set up all the players in this drama.

When I was a teenager, I failed to appreciate this more measured approach to telling a story. No flashy, self-conscious displays of verbal wit. No gunfights in slow motion shown from numerous camera angles. No torsos bursting with extraterrestrial hunger. Just a mood of quiet doom slowly creeping through a small town in the dead of night.

When the horror finally does manifest itself, it's much like the Shape in Halloween. You don't see nearly as much as you think you do even when the killing starts. One important difference between the supernatural agents in The Fog from the Shape is that here we have a rational motive for their actions. The Shape is just a force of blind destruction sans emotions sans logic sans survival instinct. If you wanna get Lovecraftian about it, you could say that the Shape was a manifestation of Azathoth, the blind idiot god of total destruction, whereas the entities within the fog are agents of retribution taking up a cause out of the past. They are a manifestation of an irrational, supernatural force that actually has a rational motivation for its actions--a nifty paradox to find in a horror flick.

 Another interesting contrast: The Fog, like Assault on Precinct 13, takes up the the theme of vengeance. But there is a difference between The Fog and Precinct 13. The Fog is about vengeance for sins in the distant past, and Assault on Precinct 13 is about sins of the present. And, also, Assault on Precinct 13 is about human beings using non-supernatural methods--assault weapons, fanatic ideology, teamwork--whereas The Fog is about a supernatural entity with a somewhat limited ability to disrupt material reality to achieve its ends. The entities within the fog can disrupt electrical generators, cause windows to shatter, and can destroy telecom systems, and, when they get close in to their human targets, they can manifest humanoid forms armed with sickles, spikes, knives, swords, and very powerful strangler's hands. It's a hydra-headed force of destruction that is similar in its tactics and strategy to the enemies found in Assault on Precinct 13 and Ghosts of Mars. 

I really dig The Fog, now. I've grown up enough to appreciate it. It has a slow build to a terrific climax, and a strong cast: Hal Holbrook, Andrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Nancy Loomis, Janet Leigh, John Houseman, Charles Cyphers, and Darwin Joston. It emphasizes character, mood, and suspense over blood and gore. Watching it is more like reading a story by Poe or Lovecraft, or maybe something by Stephen King. It's good fun.

MOVIE REVIEW: HALLOWEEN (1978)

Music/Direction by John Carpenter
Written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill
Cinematography by Dean Cundey
Editing by Charles Bornstein and Tommy Lee Wallace
Produced by John Carpenter, Debra Hill, Kool Lusby, Irwin Yablans, Moustapha Akkad

Starring
Donald Pleasence as Dr. Loomis
Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie
Nancy Loomis as Annie
Nick Castle as The Shape

WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS. IF YOU'VE NEVER SEEN THE MOVIE HALLOWEEN (1978) DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW. HALLOWEEN IS A WORTHWHILE MOVIE, ESPECIALLY IF YOU LIKE HORROR MOVIES, AND IT IS BEST WATCHED WITH ZERO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE OF WHAT HAPPENS IN IT AND WHY. READING A REVIEW OF A MOVIE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR WATCHING A MOVIE AND FORMING YOUR OWN OPINION. 

OR NOT. 

MAYBE WATCHING MOVIES IS A HUGE WASTE OF TIME NO MATTER WHAT. WE COULD BE SPENDING ALL THE TIME WE USE WATCHING MOVIES ON TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SLOW DOWN THE EFFECTS OF GLOBAL WARMING, OR SPENDING TIME HAVING SUBSTANTIAL  CONVERSATIONS WITH OUR LOVED ONES. 

I SUPPOSE IT'S JUST MUCH EASIER TO STARE INTO A SCREEN OF SOME KIND AND NOT CARE ABOUT THINGS. BETTER TO CONSUME STORIES MADE UP BY OTHER PEOPLE THAN MAKE UP OUR OWN STORIES.

 COMING UP WITH THINGS--THAT'S HARD WORK. 

YEAH, I'M KINDA CONFLICTED ABOUT STUFF.

Review by William D. Tucker. 

When I first saw Halloween, I didn't like it. I thought it was tedious and anti-climatic. So there's this masked guy with a knife ambling around acting like a fucking creep who's supposed to be some kind of pyscho-killer-embodiment-of-pure-evil, but barely does any killing. The movie sets Mike Myers up like he's some kind of anti-christ, but the dude acts more like he's got brain damage than some kind of murderous intent.

 I felt bad for Mike Myers. Here was a guy inhabited by a spirit of darkness, has all kinds of homicidal designs, and he can barely get it up. What's his problem? Is it the drugs, Mike? They got you on some bogus meds down at the mental ward, bro? Don't tell me you started partying with the cocaine, son, that shit will fuck you up. Is it alcohol? Did you go through some kind of a divorce, or just a rough patch with the old lady? Feeling trapped by your own talents? Let's work this out, my man. To me, Mike Myers came across like 21st century Charlie Sheen: a man with so much self-loathing for his own talents that he revels in not putting them to worthwhile use.

Maybe I should set this up a bit: Mike Myers is a silent weirdo who killed his sister when he was a  six year old kid. He's been locked up in a state mental institution all his life. An intense, pistol-packing psychiatrist named Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) comes to the state mental ward to drive Mike to a court hearing of some kind but finds that Mike has busted out of the joint. Dr. Loomis goes looking for Mike in the psycho's hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois. The idea is that Mike has some kind of fixation on returning to the house where he murdered his sister. Along the way Mike starts to target some teenagers for slaughter, and it all takes place on Halloween night--rather convenient that. Makes for a great title, and a ready-to-go marketing campaign.

Most of the movie is from the perspective of a young woman named Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis). Laurie and her friends are in high school and they're picking up some spending dough babysitting kids on Halloween night. Laurie and her friends talk about boys, babysitting, and other mundane adolescent things. They are largely oblivious to the macabre history of the abandoned Myers house in the middle of their neighborhood, and they continue to remain oblivious even when Mike shows up and starts stalking them. Like I said, mostly Mike just comes off as a creep, some kind of perv who wants to harass young women.

Dr. Loomis decides to post it up in the old Myers household, a .44 Bulldog in his trench coat pocket. (I guess the doc is channeling his inner Dave Berkowitz) He figures Mike'll show up, and he'll give him two in the chest, save the tax payers the cost of another court hearing. What kind of  goddamn psychiatrist is this guy? Shouldn't he be dispensing meds, not slugs?

Early on Dr. Loomis describes, with all his psychiatric authority, that Mike Myers is "pure evil." Pure evil? What kind of medievalist bullshit is that? Mike needs serious help, doc! And you're writing him off with a bunch of superstitious mumbling moralistic mojo?! No wonder Mike is so fucked up. If I had some baldy-headed gun nut telling me I was pure evil since the age of six, I'd want to put on a mask and go stabbing people, too, give the guy what he wants, maybe shut 'em the fuck up. You want evil, Doc, here's some evil for your cueball ass!

Yeah, I know, I know: the movie shows Mike's murderous mask-wearing tendencies even before Dr. Loomis got his hooks into the kid. But maybe that opening scene is just how Mike remembers things after years of indoctrination from the good doctor. Lots of ambiguity in this movie when you really dig into it.

Anyways, Dr. Loomis is supposed to be some kind of hero, a kind of dragonslayer in a trench coat, but mostly he's inert, sidelined. He just stays in the old Myers house while Mike stalks teenagers, kills a few, and then shows up at the end to showboat with his big gun. The cruel irony is that he empties his six-shooter into Mike's chest, sends that sick, slasher fuck tumbling over a balcony, and then . . . Mike just disappears. Not only did Dr. Loomis not save anybody with all his pretentious huffery-puffery about pure evil and all the rest, but his big ol' gun with its bad ol' slugs didn't even slow Mike down.

Up yours, Dr. Loomis. Game, set, match goes to Mike Myers.

Maybe Dr. Loomis needs a post-game talking to: "Listen up, cueball: maybe you should try a little compassion and understanding with your patients next time, instead of powertripping on gunslinger/dragonslayer fantasies. Maybe the reason why Mike Myers stopped talking is because you never listened in the first place ya' chatty bastard. You ever consider that? Now, I want you to do six thousand push-ups, three hundred laps around the track, and maybe you can hook me up with some Vicodin next time you swing by the office. Okay? Sounds good."

Okay, okay, I admit it: I did like the ending when I first saw it. If I'm really honest, it was only mildly anti-climatic. In fact, I loved the fact that Mike Myers wasn't stopped with .44 magnum slugs, and that Dr. Loomis was shown up for the empty set of clothes that he was from the beginning . . . and I say this as a fan of Donald Pleasance. Nothing against the actor, it was a silly character to begin with, and Pleasance played it to the best of his abilities.

But I didn't get the movie as a whole. Why was Mike wandering around Haddonfield like he was unsure about what he was there to do? Was part of his game to torment Laurie and her friends, not just kill them? What did Mike have against Laurie and the other teenagers? They had no connection to his past. They never did him wrong. He was just lashing out at them randomly, no logic to his violence. I suppose one could say he was some kind of sex-murderer, that the knife was Mike's way of raping his victims as he murdered them, but Mike never really came off as a sexual predator when I watched it. And I didn't like the fact that Mike's crimes were so random. It didn't scan with me when I saw it as a teenager.

A lot of people have said that Halloween has some kind of sexual sadism going on, that the masked man can't stand that young people are enjoying having sex and so he has to show up with his knife and kill the joy. That rationale never really rang true with me. For one thing, Mike's murders are fairly indiscriminate, and all-too-efficient. He comes across as more of an assassin than a rapist. He sticks you with his knife not to violate you, but to end you. He's the Shape, after all, a cutout serving a force of pure destruction. His homicide is robotic, not domination oriented. There really isn't any sophisticated psychology or twisted desire going on under that mask. Just a will to destruction. If the military could mass produce this guy they wouldn't need recruits. Need to get Umbrella Corp working on that project.

(Imagine that: a whole army of Mike Myers duplicates, marching on whatever country is our enemy of the moment. Maybe that's what those Resident Evil games were suggesting with those bulky trench-coated mutants with the chain guns . . . hmmm . . .)

No, I really didn't get Halloween the first time I saw it. And I wasn't inclined to give it a second chance. John Carpenter had already made other movies that I liked a whole lot better. Like The Thing.

No, it didn't help that I had already seen John Carpenter's The Thing before I saw Halloween. In fact, watching The Thing at an early age has not been terribly helpful to most horror movies I've seen during my lifetime, even other movies directed by John Carpenter. Once you've grokked the best, it's hard to go back. The Thing is probably one of my all time favorite movie experiences. In fact, The Thing is so good that I loved it even though the first time I watched it  was in a heavily censored broadcast TV version. The Thing, even in a compromised form, was an exquisite fictional expression of the theme of paranoia. Now that's film making: your craft is so strong that it can't be weakened by the pinhead moral guardians running prime time television.

The Thing had it all: a strong, committed cast, precise widescreen compositions, dead-on editing, a sublime Ennio Morricone soundtrack, outrageous monster and gore effects, and clever dialogue. The Thing was a masterful balance of two contradictory approaches: economy and excess. The plot, characterizations, and thematic elements are all there in just the right proportion until the alien horror claws its way into the widescreen frame violating all sense of scale, proportion, hope . . . be not deceived, people. The Thing is Carpenter's masterpiece. Halloween was just an exercise, albeit a very popular, long-lived one.

But after watching Halloween again recently I must confess to actually admiring it, now. It is a subtle piece of work, maybe Carpenter's most subtle film in his whole portfolio as an artist. If The Thing is Carpenter's definitive expression of the theme of paranoia, then Halloween is something like a statement on how everyday people can be totally oblivious to the invasive presence of supernatural evil. Mike Myers isn't really Mike Myers, when you break it down. Nor is he anti-christ, Satan, Pazuzu, Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, or some murderous agent of the state--he's beyond all these things. He doesn't need a name, or a sexual urge, or a God, or a Devil, or an ideology to commit his crimes. He is homicide incarnate. He's the Shape, a superflat killing machine whose humanity switch got shifted into the off position by some unnameable, Lovecraftian force of of darkness when he was six years old. You can't negotiate with him, you can't kill him, you can't touch a heart of darkness with appeals to mercy or common decency. Really, it's not even a heart of darkness. There's no heart to be found. Rather, it's a pure void trying to manifest itself as best it can. First it uses its bare hands to break a neck. Next, it acquires a knife to pierce a beating heart . . . follow out the logic on that one if you dare.

So, yes, I've come to appreciate the thematic richness of Carpenter's movie.

But let's look at the nuts-and-bolts craftsmanship, maybe the area where Carpenter has brought his deepest, most consistent game as a filmmaker. The widescreen compositions in Halloween are his most subtle of all his movies. They manage to be both mundane and menacing in the same instant. He imbues an autumnal suburban setting with both realism and amplified dread. It's hard for me to pin it down in words, but here's an exercise: watch the movie with both the lights and the sound off, and just take a look at how Carpenter frames his shots. The blend of the everyday and the scary-weird is uncanny. The editing is also sharp. Although this is a slasher flick, he doesn't go for the cheap shock. He goes for seamless, relentless momentum, setting you up for a trap you can't escape.

The acting is strong, too. Jamie Lee Curtis and Nancy Loomis as the two main teenage protagonists are  credible, unforced.They handle the dialogue well, and, most importantly, they are totally oblivious to the horror invading their lives until it's too late. Donald Pleasence's Dr. Loomis isn't so much a great psychiatrist as he is a man obsessed with eradicating a great evil that he has no chance against. Yes, I mock the character above, but when you break it down, Dr. Loomis has seemingly lost his marbles, too. Spending all those years in the presence of the Shape must've drove him over the edge . . . Pleasence is one of those actors who is always worth watching. Even in his bad movies. The man cannot hide his inherent intelligence and charisma. So it's especially cruel that such an appealing actor is pitted against an unbeatable foe.

The Thing is still my favorite Carpenter movie, but I have now gained a true appreciation of Halloween as an exercise in a more measured, disquieting approach to telling a horror story. I'm pretty bloodthirsty as an audience member when it comes to horror, but I have no patience for braindead slasher bullshit or tedious, substance free torture porn grandstanding. I think part of the mojo of Carpenter's approach as a director is that, in his best movies, he sticks close to his characters even as they face off against outrageous monsters and weather storms of reality-shattering lunacy. A class act.