Cinema Suicide

You have no idea what it took to bring me to this movie. I realize how slow things have been around here lately and since I’ve cleared up a lot of things that I felt were slowing me down, I figured I’d return to the old breakneck pace of this one man show but a funny thing happened. It turned out that a fairly intense training schedule, a second unrelated blog, building a site for a friend, writing a script and all this other shit I’d been putting this site off in favor of was all bullshit and most of the problem was that I was, in fact, bored as hell.  Listless, even. Not just in terms of Cinema Suicide but just things in general. Enthusiasm it turns out, is a valuable commodity in these modern times for me. What wasn’t helping was the glaring fact that I haven’t seen anything interesting in a long time. There’s all this middle of the road crap that has come my way lately and there’s nothing harder in criticism than writing about a movie that leaves you with no impression whatsoever. What’s worse, I’ve sat down with some shit that I have hated so badly that I couldn’t find it in myself to watch the whole thing. I fired up Andreas Schnaas’ return to Violent Shit with Karl The Butcher vs. Axe and had to shut it off when it failed to meet my already exceedingly low expectations. I sifted through my review pile trying to find something that would inspire strong feelings one way or the other in a manner that I could articulate in more than three words (‘Fuck this movie’) and finally I settled on The Killer Inside Me, a piece of pulpy noir that I’ve been meaning to sit down with for a long time.

I can’t think of The Killer Inside me without thinking of The Dead Milkmen. Not ever. They have this song on Beelzebubba called Sri Lanka Sex Hotel that I’ve loved since the first time I heard it. It’s a typically Dead Milkmen style tune with a stream of lyrics from the perspective of a complete sociopath out looking for thrills. At one point, he declares “Let’s call the sheriff a cocksucker! See if he’s read The Killer Inside Me,” a line that I never quite understood until recently when I realized that I had this whole internet thing and it was pretty good at looking stuff up. It described a positively sleazy novel. Shortly thereafter, I started receiving solicitations in my inbox hyping up this piece and since I can’t seem to read more than ten pages of anything without falling asleep, I figured it would probably be in my best interest to just watch the movie.

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Shot on video. Man, that right there is kryptonite to me. I cannot tell you how many times I have passed on some horror movie cheapie because word circulated that Movie X had been captured for all time on some kind of video camera, professional grade or otherwise. There are dudes in the horror filmmaking community who made their names in SOV circles but I just couldn’t be bothered to take a look. Videotape handles light so much differently than film and I find the effect jarring. Watching a movie shot on film, even lower grade, outdated formats is like looking at the world with your own eyes but videotape adds this intensity to the light that makes edges too sharp, oversaturates colors and additional frames in the playback make motion seem a little too fluid for comfort. I just don’t care for it.

There are exceptions to this rule, however. If you’re dealing in a product that is just weird enough to pique my interests, I may set aside my prejudices and take a look. Case in point: Sledgehammer. The 80′s is that era most closely associated with slasher pictures but the real gold rush of slashers took place in the early part of the 80′s following the success of Friday the 13th. Low budget slasher movies raked in huge box office returns and everyone wanted in on the action. So much in fact that they were willing to let just about anything slide even if that meant filming some nonsensical body count flick on a VHS camera and sending it straight to market as a relic for the video store age. When crap like Sledgehammer started to slip through the cracks is it any wonder that the slasher wave crashed as quickly as it gained momentum?

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You know? There’s nothing about the Canadian climate that suggests to me that socially or very literally, climatologically, Canada would produce such funny motherfuckers. Dave Coulier notwithstanding, the typically passive stereotype of your average Canadian says nothing to me about the inherent comic potential of Canada’s citizenry. Yet the proof is in the poutine. During the stand-up boom of the 80′s, I’d say 3 out of 5 successful standups were from Toronto or Montreal and quality comedy continues to pour out of The Great White North by the kilogram.

There’s a really unusual cultural divide in Canada, though. I suppose this is true of any nation, where it’s pop-culture fails to spill over into neighboring countries, if it does at all, it makes it into only areas that border the country of origin. In the 90′s, Alanis Morissette broke out in the United States with that whole “You oughta know” shit, a song rumored to be about her breakup with the aforementioned Dave Coulier. It’s terrifying to think that anyone would blow that guy in a movie theater and then wear it on their sleeve in an angry breakup song, but I digress. To us in The States, Alanis was new and edgy. To Canada, Jagged Little Pill was an evolution away from years as a teen pop star and into contemporary radio rock relevance. Down here we had no fucking clue. We all thought she was brand new  and only the keenest among my generation was quick to point out that she used to be on You Can’t Do That On Television.

What I’m getting at is that there’s plenty of entertainment being produced in Canada that still manages to evade the iron jaws of the internet and slips under the rest of the world’s radar. Case in point, FUBAR:Balls to the Wall. This comedy managed to turn up on a couple of scopes but largely went unnoticed. Until now. Fubar’s director is about to break out with a couple of high-profile comedies, one a violent hockey comedy with Stifler called Goon, a movie I’m hoping lives up to my gold standard of sports movies, Slap Shot (Review). Here’s your chance to catch him while he’s young.

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Things have been awfully quiet in the place lately and it’s almost that way by design. I’ve been trying to find something, anything worth talking about here and in the past couple of weeks, when I’m not watching The Wire, writing a script or building a new website, I’ve been sitting through some real garbage that leaves me with nothing to say. There’s nothing worse than that, either. Writing a review of something like Alien vs. Ninja is a real pain in the ass when you spend two hours scratching your head, staring at the blinking cursor on the page, trying to find some way to kick off a review that isn’t a massacre of Sushi Typhoon’s latest excessive cinematic abortion. I’m tired of writing bad reviews, man. Sick and tired of it. I want to find a movie that I can heap praise upon endlessly and feel good about recommending to you, dear reader, because I sometimes find myself on these streams of reviews that leave with bad review fatigue.

Finally, after a two week dry spell, I finally found something I could get excited about. It’s not perfect and I probably won’t heap praise upon it endlessly, but I found that title I was looking for and feel like I ended the drought. Tucker & Dale vs. Evil turned out to be a decent approximation of what I was looking for. A horror comedy making the festival rounds, looking for distribution, made on peanuts and tons of heart.

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Take what you know of torture, and think of what you’d consider the most excruciating thing someone could do to you. There are countless ways torture has been used throughout history. Sometimes these ways may be steeped in traditions hard for an outsider to understand. For each person, the threshold between pleasure and pain varies, and for many, that threshold is a dangerous line between life, death, and obsession. Imagine lying naked and exposed, face down on a phosphorescent table as an aggressive captor repeatedly and aggressively drives a steep, wide diameter steel needle in and out of the flesh on your back. Each thrust of the needle is followed by another, then another, each more sensitive than the last. Does this sound like a form of torture or pleasure? Any right-minded person would probably say torture, but for the deeply twisted minds in Shisei: The Tattooer, there is no greater pleasure.

Irezumi is the ancient art of Japanese tattooing where a steel needle at the end of a long piece of bamboo is plunged in and out of the skin to create an intricate tattoo. Seizo is an Irezumi artist who has long searched for the perfect skin on which to make his art. Bimyo is a beautiful young art student with ghostly pale skin, an obvious match for Seizo’s search for the great canvass. Seizo kidnaps Bimyo and holds her captive in a windowless room he claims to be the inside of his submarine. The room is not a submarine, but rather a subterranean hideaway he uses to manipulate his victims away from escape. Seizo is sadistic, and throws himself at Bimyo in an aggressive attempt to make her a slave to his art. Sadism is at play in this Hisayasu Sato directed thriller, but the waiting for these thrills to actually surface is more excruciating than anything Seizo could hope to do to his victim Bimyo. There’s a better chance of the pretend submarine surfacing.

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I did a lot of yelling about The Walking Dead leading up to its premier. It was an occasion to celebrate, wasn’t it? AMC didn’t skimp on the hype reels and we got to see a lot of what was to come on the adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s comic. As much as it pains me to say this, because I’m so sick and tired of motherfucking zombies, zombies are still a hot commodity. Everyone got wise to the nerdy wit of Shaun of the Dead and suddenly everybody you’ve ever known is a frothy-mouthed zombie fan buying up and reading/watching anything having to do with walking cannibal corpses. It was only a matter of time before zombies hit television. There have been pilots produced with the monster involved but nothing had hit the airwaves until this and with all those juicy screenshots, teasers and behind the scenes clips hitting the web, showing us stuff intended for prime-time cable that had only ever appeared in nasty unrated horror movies on the high shelves of any given video store, could you blame the horror community for finally feeling as though we’re being taken seriously? The uniformity of our optimism was delicious! A gory adaptation of a fan-favorite comic that promised to embrace and elaborate on our precious source material brought everyone together in a way that horror fans weren’t really used to and we all got together on our various social networks, holding hands and singing campfire songs while in anticipation of this show’s release. Honestly, not even the troglodyte comic nerd mafia were pissing and moaning about the various public facts about the show.

And then the show premiered.

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I’ve been spending a lot of time in an MMA gym lately training for this insane, macho mid-life crisis athletic event. The guy training me is this old school martial artist from the area who has traveled around the world to learn this martial art and that and he has put a ton of emphasis on Muay Thai – Thai boxing. He spent a long time living in Thailand, training at a fighting camp and brought back these brutal training techniques to whip fat-ass web developers like me into fighting shape. The results have been pleasing. Though I’m not learning Muay Thai, previous experiences with martial arts left me with a serious lower back injury and a stern reminder that I’m not a kid any more, my time spent in the gym has given me a lot of insight into what it is that gives Thai boxing such a powerful reputation as a crushing, lethal martial art. Most Americanized systems of fighting teach the physical aspect alone, omitting the equally if not far more important role of mental and spiritual preparedness when training and fighting. We sometimes train with this heavy wooden club that looks like a really fat baseball bat. Our instructor explains that in India and Thailand where this club originates, fighters will swing this thing for hours in different ways and while they’re using it to tone and condition their body to move mountains with their hands, in their minds every swing smashes away evil. Seriously! This revelation counted as the coolest thing I’d hear that week. He went on to explain that every time one of these guys steps into the ring, their bodies are ready to fight, for sure, but in their minds and in their hearts, they weren’t about to face off against some other fighter, they were about to fight evil and they were prepared, mind, body and spirit to defeat evil. That, he explained, is what makes these guys so deadly.

Fuck yes.

Even though the evolution of the Ong Bak series has left me with a bad taste in my mouth, I can comfortably say this about them: No martial arts movie in the past has ever communicated the mental and spiritual aspect of fighting better than Tony Jaa’s Ong Bak movies. In a way, these bloody martial arts movies have become the flagship franchise of Eastern philosophy but at the expense of what made Tony Jaa so awesome in the first place.

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