Black Static #15

The new Black Static was just delivered, and #15 includes my regular Blood Spectrum column of DVD and blu-ray reviews. This issue's coverage looks at eight pages worth of recent and new releases. Although the magazine does not have ratings for published reviews, I have added scores to each title (a good idea?) as listed below, just for some at-a-glance info about what's good or bad entertainment.
 
Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat (1/10)
Street Trash (7/10)
Wrong Turn 3: Left For Dead (3/10)
Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath Of The Dragon God (4/10)
House (aka: Hausu) 7/10
Train (4/10) 
The Day Of The Triffids (6/10) 
Halloween II (1/10) 
The Haunted World Of El Superbeasto (1/10) 
Surrogates (8/10) 
Tony (3/10) 
Dante's Inferno (2/10) 
In The Electric Mist (6/10) 
Long Weekend (6/10) 
Pandorum (4/10) 
Cabin Fever (6/10) 
Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (4/10) 
Wolfhound (7/10) 
Triangle (7/10)

Plus, in the 'terror triage' round-up section - 
Sorority Row (2/10) 
Growth (3/10) 
Room 36 (5/10) 
Whiteout (4/10) 
Stan Helsing (1/10) 
Malice In Wonderland (5/10) 
Borderland (1/10) 
Jennifer's Body (2/10) 
Open Graves (2/10) 
Paranormal Activity (1/10)

Tarantino

Although Quentin Tarantino’s bubble burst long ago, the gasbag continues to deflate - crashing and burning, spectacularly, like the cinematic Hindenberg – throughout the pointlessly extravagant runtime of his latest wistfully eccentric, over-hyped offering, Inglourious Basterds. With each new project, it becomes clearer that self-confessed video geek Tarantino is actually just a frustrated short-film director stuck making features.

The chaptered structure of Inglourious Basterds, and most of Tarantino’s previous films, betrays a creative sensibility that’s better suited to episodic television than big screen epics. While it’s patently true that Tarantino writes engaging, highly quotable, and often quite fascinating dialogues and monologues, the impact of his work lies in lengthy but wholly self-contained ‘scenes’ or suspenseful comedy–drama sequences, not in coherent narrative structures which may hold viewers’ attention for more than two hours. A typical Tarantino film is composed entirely of witty ‘moments’, surprising incidents, and a scattering of clever 'plot' twists. Genuinely compelling storytelling, at feature–length, is not really Tarantino’s forte. Genre in-jokes, and gushingly enthusiastic sub-cultural referencing of numerous foreign or obscure movies, is what he does best.    

Inglourious Basterds is billed as a WW2 ‘western’ and has Brad Pitt leading a team of Jewish American soldiers in guerrilla warfare against German troops, behind enemy lines in occupied France. Unlike the recent batch of, largely respectful, films (including Flame & Citron, Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, Edward Zwick’s Defiance, Rønning and Sandberg’s Max Manus: Man Of War, and the adventuresome Female Agents), concerning European heroes of the Resistance movement, Tarantino’s contribution to this unanticipated cycle of retro pictures is hardly a themed biopic or even a thrilling wartime actioner (reminiscent of secret mission movies like Dirty Dozen, Guns Of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, etc).

Tarantino might well claim to be inspired by Sergio Leone, for the stylised - yet rarely stylish - presentation of various talky confrontations and violent conflicts staged for Inglourious Basterds. However, there are times when the shadow of Mel Brooks falls over exposition or characterisation. Seemingly encouraged by Tarantino to reach for a bathetic extreme, German TV actor Christoph Waltz valiantly overdoes his ‘jolly Nazi’ act in a satirical role that comes dangerously close to stupid farce, undermining his character’s supposedly fearsome reputation as ‘the Jew hunter’.

Burning down a cinema while Adolf Hitler and the assembled German high command watch a new product of Nazi propaganda sounds like appealingly dark humour about the fate of the Third Reich, but its actual effect as the vengeful climax of Inglourious Basterds is just another thoughtless irreverence. Tellingly, the film-within-a-film, Nation’s Pride, the tale of a German sniper who’s become a war hero, is granted more rhetorical significance, being accounted in greater detail, than the routinely grisly scalping exploits of the ‘basterds’ themselves.

As for the ‘alternative world’ (and, therefore, borderline sci-fi) scenario of Tarantino’s wannabe opus, there’s far superior and less bombastic entertainment found in Danny Bilson’s unpretentious B-movie, Zone Troopers (1985), which sees a group of GI Joes discover a crashed UFO in Italy, and team up with a surviving alien to fight the Nazis. Zone Troopers even has a memorable scene where one American soldier punches the Fuhrer! It’s lively honest fun, and simply better filmmaking than Tarantino’s horribly conceited effort.

Retro sci-fi #1

Watching a twin pack DVD of Farscape: Peacekeeper Wars (2004) confirms my suspicions about this rather lacklustre TV series, despite having seen only a handful of earlier episodes from its 1999 - 2003 run. An obvious Flash Gordon / Buck Rogers clone with genre junk-DNA from Blake’s 7 spliced into its humans and aliens (quite terrible muppets!) scenario, it remains terminally derivative, stuck in a space opera limbo – lost somewhere between universes epitomised by Star Trek and Star Wars. The 1980 movie version of Flash Gordon was directed by Mike Hodges in such a way that was creativity amusing but ultra campy; and everyone knew it, and so didn’t bother trying to be anything else. The same goes for similarly trashy TV shows like the formidably absurdist Lexx (1997 - 2002).

However, Farscape - great title; shame about the show! - was not content to be a ‘guilty pleasure’. It quite brazenly attempts a level of seriousness (stealing the surrealism of its finale from the uncanny deathbed closure of Kubrick’s 2001!) and fails miserably; often with dismal ‘acting’ from its main cast which struggles even to be considered as wooden, and several interactions between muppet ‘characters’ and regular actors that inject a distracting tone of pantomime farce, especially unwelcome during the scenes of ‘heightened drama’, into the space fantasy. The world of 21st century sci-fi deserves better media entertainments than this cursedly unimaginative, ultimately disposable, nonsense.

Interzone in colour

Issue #226 of Interzone (published by T3A Press) marks the great magazine's return to printing in full-colour, throughout, something not seen in these pages since #211 (July-August 2007). It certainly does brighten up the non-fiction sections and adds visual impact to the artwork produced for some of the stories. And, in future, I hope that artists illustrating new genre fiction will take advantage of this upgrade - a very positive change - in the overall quality of IZ.

My blu-ray and DVD column, 'Laser Fodder', in this issue has review coverage of District 13: Ultimatum, Godzilla, Year One, Starhyke, Bronx Warriors trilogy (of 1990: Bronx Warriors, Escape From The Bronx, New Barbarians), Moon, District 9, Misfits, Final Destination 3D, plus a round-up of Star Trek (2009), Terminator Salvation, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: season 2, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, and G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra.

Best films of the decade

2000 to 2009 was the decade of great superhero films and epic trilogies, and sometimes those grand trilogies were comicbook movies... Admittedly, I have a strong bias towards SF and fantasy cinema, but – simply put – that’s the kind of stuff that appeals to me the most, so I usually rate genre films more highly than anything else. Favouritism aside, I think all these should be regarded as key films of early 21st century cinema.

Hulk (2003) director: Ang Lee
Getting a filmmaker who’s best known for serious art–house dramas to helm a highly commercial blockbuster was a daring move. However, the risks paid off, handsomely, resulting in the very best film of the last ten years. What Lee created is the first sober epic of superhero cinema, rich in mutated genre themes and supremely iconic images – derived, in part, from the very same influential mythological and literary sources which had obviously inspired the comicbook original Hulk’s creators, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, back in 1962. Honestly, this masterpiece blending of SF adventure and monster-movie remains far superior in every way to unnecessary sequel/ unfortunate remake/ somewhat unsightly franchise-reboot, The Incredible Hulk (2008) – which I did enjoy, of course, but still think is nothing to get excited about if compared to Lee’s instant classic.

The Dark Knight (2008) director: Christopher Nolan
Building on his success with Batman Begins (2005), gifted auteur Nolan delivers the goods with this exhilarating and tightly orchestrated action thriller. A mix of superbly performed characters and livewire confrontations between terrorist-psycho the Joker (Heath Ledger, aiming for legendary status), and Christian Bale’s thuggishly dynamic masked crusader, this eclipses Bond and Bourne, and it presents the new benchmark in superhero cinema, wholly intended for a mature audience, with intense drama of such power that Zack Synder’s flawed Watchmen (2009) could not hope to match it.

Black Hawk Down (2001) director: Ridley Scott
The battle of Mogadishu in 1993 gets a vivid big–screen treatment from a filmmaker at the height of his technical and creative powers. Here’s a horror story of a mission going tragically wrong. It shows what happens when professional soldiers confront a warlord’s vast militia forces, as tactical advantage is lost, and thoroughly outflanked American troops are besieged by Somali belligerence and ferocity. Gritty and messy scenes of modern warfare are unnervingly mixed with a traditional sort of gung-ho US Rangers action, epitomised by Tom Sizemore’s battalion commander, striding purposely through sundry guerrilla strikes in urban mayhem, a fearless portrait of unflinchingly single-minded heroism, staring into the face of so much sudden death and wanton destruction. It’s one of the greatest war films ever made.

Hellboy (2004) director: Guillermo Del Toro
Much as I admire Del Toro’s Spanish fantasy productions – Devil’s Backbone (2001), and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) – I prefer the accomplished mix of quirky humour and uncanny action that distinguishes Hellboy from the rest of recent superhero cinema, although Timur Bekmambetov’s hugely appealing and imaginative Russian offerings, Night Watch (2004), and Day Watch (2007), explore similar generic territories. For Hellboy, the director continues the good work that he put into Blade II (2002), adds doomed romance to existing secret agency and darkly weird otherness tropes, and so this comics-based adventure delivers more levels of madcap fun and winning pathos than either of those equally lighthearted – but much less interesting – Fantastic Four (2005/ 2007) super–team movies. It’s rather saddening to note, however, that sequel Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) proved to be a bit of a letdown.

Mulholland Drive (2001) director: David Lynch
Classification resistant and impossible to pigeonhole, this mystery about murder and identity on the borders of sanity abandons reason but not hope, in a convoluted story that hinges on Lynch’s apparent fascination with Jungian psych, effortlessly blending dreams with harsh realities. The artistic filmmaker’s ingenuity is utterly beguiling, as paired female characters switch from emotional transparency to morally opaque in a realm charting the mechanics of creating films and the overpowering quest for bright mesmerising images, whether the director intends visuals to be revelatory or illusory.

Pulse (aka: Kairo, 2001) director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
And so to Asian films... Many were seen, few are chosen... My shortlist had Grudges, Rings, and other ghost chillers galore, but this SF apocalypse shines through murky shadows and creaky slasher plots with its creepy virtual viral menace, emerging from a realm of cyber hell where spooks might lurk behind every PC screen. It’s the end of the world and nothing’s fine. Avoid the pointless and feeble US remake. Escapism in cinema is always welcome, but confrontation (with or without topical issues) is more intriguing.

Adaptation (2002) director: Spike Jonze
With a brilliant dual–role for Nicolas Cage, and an excellent supporting cast (not to mention Brian Cox as story-maven Robert McKee!), this offbeat deconstruction and dissection of screenwriting and the nature of movies is bursting with searing pathos for profoundly creative struggles that never succumbs to entirely maudlin sentiment or gentle whimsy, but freely explores various modes of documentary realism, bizarre fantasy and - shockingly - almost everything in between! This is essential viewing for any fans of innovative cinema.

Requiem For A Dream (2000) director: Darren Aronofsky
Some films are unforgettable. This one is not usually classified as genre horror, and yet that’s exactly what this scary, downright weird and crushingly depressing drama, about the psychological and physical dangers of addiction, really is. Horror without a pause, bloated with grisly scenes of intense human suffering, amidst socio-economic depravity in a devastatingly bleak emotional landslide of startlingly evocative images.

Martyrs (2008) director: Pascal Laugier
The choice pick from the recent batch of extraordinarily good French shockers (which include Switchblade Romance, Them, Frontiers, and Inside), this serves a maelstrom of electrifying violence, anguish, inhumanity and ultimate misery that makes all those sordid little ‘torture porn’ flicks look rather tame and quite silly. Watch in dismay. See it right through to its bitter surprise-ending for the revelation of a new level in radical horror cinema.

The Lord Of The Rings (2001-3) director: Peter Jackson
I had to include a trilogy in this listing and, because Pirates Of The Caribbean movies were so uneven, and the otherwise laudable X-Men set ended with a disappointment, this ambitious adaptation of Tolkien fits the bill. An undeniably spectacular epic with tremendously good production values, it is flawed and curiously uneven in the pacing of both its narrative and overlong journey, but many sequences offer stunning fantasy entertainment. Taken as a whole, the scale and visual brilliance of this unpretentious saga established new standards of technical proficiency and won critical acclaim for a milestone work of popular cinema. I liked all three extended editions on DVD.