HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE) - 9/10:
To all my fellow streetwalking gorewhores: AFTERMATH this isn't. It is however a suggestively bowel churning exercise in disturbingly sadistic body horror that will leave ether soaked lumps of coal in your chest and drop a a match down your throat. The feelings this film illicit and/or instill are comparable to Jack Ketchum's Girl Next Door or even the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, films that can't match others in terms of grotesque visual flair, but make up for that with a diseased brain and corrosive soul, which is almost a more substantial experience on the senses then a graphic depiction of an open wound, because it gets under your skin and stays there, saturating your bones with its venom.
Its beyond refreshing to see a genre piece that isn't a charmless remake or a tired zombie/vampire rehash or a who-the-hell-asked-for-this? resurrection (SCRE4M????). It does loose some points for the sluggish first act riddled with stalker/slasher cliches... but it completely redeems itself with the second half, focusing on the mad Surgeon and the "head" of his creation. Well acted, well shot, conceptually intriguing, and bleak bleak bleak. to give the film low marks because of a lack of gore or because it "coulda been sicker, brah" is a childishly negligent oversight in film viewing. it ain't all about Cannibals and Holocausts, people.
SCOTT WALKER: 30 CENTURY MAN - 10/10
A beguiling insight into one of music's most brilliant, troubled minds. Walker is one of the few artists who you can honestly say is peerless, and this film charts his evolution from the teen idol melodrama of the Walker Bros to the charnel house of nervosa that is 2006's the Drift... hands down one of the most frightening albums ever recorded.
FRANK MILLER'S WILL EISNER'S THE SPIRIT - fetishist fascism / latent misogyny:
Someone stop Frank Miller before he violates anymore beloved characters to placate his ego.
When Robert Rodriquez did the SIN CITY film, he made it a point not to do "his version" of the book, but to do everything possible to translate everything about Miller's books to the screen, truly bringing them to life in a way no other comic adaptation has been able to duplicate (fuck you again, Zack Snyder). Miller, ironically, has done the opposite; taking Will Eisner's beloved costumed crime-fighter and throwing him into power-lines, replacing him and his colorful cast of rouges and allies with insultingly stupid archetypes that litter his own one-dimensional psychological landscape.
This is essentially the cinematic equivalent of postmortem molestation. If it was a character Miller hated, or a character not already fully realized, i could understand this atrocious take, but this is a character and by proxy a creator that he admired... that he used as the basis for his career-defining run on DAREDEVIL (he's even admitted that Electra, from her looks to her origin, were a direct ripping-off of Sands Sareff). Why would you seemingly go out of your way to mangle something you care about, stripping away its identity until it's no more than a crude parody of your own work at its absolute worst?
well... at least the girls were gorgeous.
2 comments:
Glad you dug HUMAN CENTIPEDE. I watched it last week and enjoyed it. Your comparison to THE GIRL NEXT DOOR is on point. I was legitimately disturbed by this movie, and it takes a lot for a film to do that. It had nothing to do with the subject matter or seeing a line of people connected ass-to-mouth, but it had to do with seeing the characters suffer. Especially that final scene of the film, which was pretty fucking heartbreaking. Brutal stuff and a lot better than I thought it was going to be.
exactly. it's more about sadism, humiliation, and the inherently destructive nature of creation then it is about an ATM Chain. it almost reminded me of some of the weirder Universal Monster Movies ( Bride of Frankenstein, maybe the Black Cat), blended with early Cronenberg movies and the cruelty of the most perverse Asian films. the lead actor reminded of Bela Lugosi and Karloff than he did Christopher Walken (the most common comparison i've heard).
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