NEW YEAR'S WATCHING: ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (2005)

Remakes of John Carpenter’s films so far haven’t really yielded anything considered a total success in that they were both critically and commercially successful. Even though Rob Zombie’s awful Halloween remake somehow has its defenders, the 2005 remake of The Fog is universally derided, and rightfully so (though both made obscene money at the box office). Meanwhile, the maiden voyage of the Carpenter remake trend was 2005’s Assault on Precinct 13, directed by French filmmaker Jean-François Richet (the similarly underrated Blood Father with Mel Gibson) and boasting a pretty excellent cast of Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, Gabriel Byrne, Brian Dennehy, Maria Bello, Drea de Matteo, John Leguizamo, and lots more recognizable faces. It came and left theaters quickly, doing moderately well with critics, who apparently were the only ones who saw the thing, which is a shame, because—remake of a beloved cult film or not—it’s pretty damn entertaining.

Like any good remake should do, Assault on Precinct 13 takes the basic concept of the original, maintaining the setting, the characters, and the siege-like component, and throws it all into a blender along with some shake-ups to the story. This time, instead of gang members descending on a decommissioned police precinct, it’s a horde of corrupt cops trying to assassinate gang leader Marion Bishop (Fishburne), who has done his fair share of dirty dealings with those cops and has the power to put them away for good—if he survives New Year’s Eve and testifies against them in court. (Bishop was the name of the hero in the original, played by Austin Stoker; though Fishburne steps into the villain role, it’s without the name “Napoleon Wilson,” which I guess didn’t sound as bad-ass thirty years later.)  Naturally, once the corrupt cops descend on the police station, which lacks any kind of communication lines since the place is no longer “on duty,” and with a blinding New Year’s Eve snowstorm isolating them even further, the precinct’s cops and crooks must band together if they want to survive the night.

The screenplay was handled by James DeMonaco, who had just written the very successful hostage thriller The Negotiator with Samuel L. Jackson and then-beloved Kevin Spacey. Interestingly, DeMonaco would become a force ten years later in Hollywood alongside Blumhouse by writing and directing the Purge series, which DeMonaco had said from the very beginning was inspired by Carpenter and his penchant for siege and anti-order films. Obviously, the original Assault on Precinct 13 was a very low budget affair bordering on grindhouse cinema, made by an unknown and untested director (who in typical Carpenter style also wrote, edited, and scored the film) and starred a cast of unknown or obscure actors. Meanwhile, 2005’s remake is big, glossy, and made with as much spectacle as director Richet can get away with while remaining faithful to the claustrophobic setting. Carpenter has admitted over the years that the original Assault on Precinct 13 was a loose remake/combination of Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead, referring to it nearly as a zombie movie, and the redux maintains that same kind of claustrophobic environment where hope for rescue dwindles by the hour.

Appropriately, Richet and DeMonaco are very aware of Carpenter’s overall career as a horror director, even though he’d wandered away from that genre several times to make action-thrillers (Escape from New York), comedies (Memoirs of an Invisible Man), dramas (Elvis), and, as Carpenter likes to put it, “girly movies” (Starman). Because of this, even though this Assault on Precinct 13 is still well within the action-thriller genre, it unfolds almost like a slasher movie, in that several members of its ensemble cast are picked off one by one in violent ways, with many of them not being characters (or actors) you’d ever expect to see bite the big one.  

Ethan Hawke jumps from genre to genre as well, never hanging his hat too long in any one place, though he seldom played the role of action hero even in his youth. Besides the terrible Getaway and the obscure but decent 24 Hours to Live, Assault on Precinct 13 sees Hawke in a rare full-on popcorn action role and you can tell he’s having fun with material that doesn’t require as much psychological pathos as the parts he ordinarily likes to play. (He was phenomenal in last year’s First Reformed, for example.)  Like the geekiest of directors, Hawke respects and enjoys different kinds of films, and he puts in a laudable amount of effort to make his character of Sgt. Jake Roenick more than just your typical apprehensive hero.  As for Fishburne as the “bad guy,” well, as most actors will tell you, it’s always much more fun to play the villain, and he knows it, and he does it well. Fishburne’s intensity and swagger has always cast an intimidating pallor over many of his roles, even when playing the good guy, so it’s not exactly necessary to suspend disbelief when seeing him in this kind of role. 

Carpenter has been sly over the years when asked for his opinions on remakes of his films, saying that though the remakes were based on his movies, those remakes belong to other filmmakers and it wouldn’t be his place to comment. (Me thinks this was mostly his way of having to avoid publicly calling Rob Zombie’s Halloween a piece of shit considering they were friends, even though he basically did that very same thing later on.) Still, Carpenter had kind things to say about Assault on Precinct 13, saying in an interview, “I thought it was terrific. I thought the cast was sensational. I just loved it.” 

He’s not the only one.

HÄXAN (1922)

Generally, when it comes to genre films from the earliest part of the 20th century, two films often come into the conversation: 1920’s The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (an all-time favorite) and 1922’s Nosferatu. Given the era, both are silent, black and white, and hail from Germany. Also released during this time, and not too far away, is 1922’s Häxan (meaning The Witches), which hails from nearby Sweden. Though all three films have a lot in common, Nosferatu and The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari get much of the credit for invigorating the horror genre and film in general; meanwhile, Häxan never got as much love and exposure, which is a shame because it shows just as much ingenuity and creativity—if not more so—but also tells its story in a more provocative and less typical manner. 

Written and directed by Benjamin Christensen, Häxan is broken up into chapters, of sorts, and lives up to its often-used subtitle, Witchcraft through the Ages. Instead of telling a linear plot, Häxan explores different eras and aspects of witchcraft through what could be described as visual essays, relying on incredibly creative on-set special effects and in-camera illusions (as to be expected, being that Häxan  is nearly 100 hundred years old). Though largely a documentary, Häxan presents as a horror-tinged docu-drama with actors standing in to represent various character archetypes who loomed large in the different aspects of witchcraft, magic, and the so-called black arts, which, naturally, were blamed on the influence of the devil (who appears, and is played by director Christensen).

In many ways, Häxan’s approach is relevant even today, in that the film looks at real-life maladies like mental illness, which throughout time was blamed on witchcraft, and warns that misinterpretation, ignorance, and even fear of these issues have the potential to lead down the wrong path. Unfortunately we’re still dealing with this even in our so-called civilized, technologically advanced modern era, in that people with real mental illness are supposed to just “get over it,” or be treated like social pariahs instead of trying to put more effort into what it is, why it is, and what can be done to help.

Häxan is broken up into four parts, each exploring different aspects of mysticism and presenting them in distinct ways. The first part plays almost like a slideshow at a museum, showing different artist creations in the form of paintings and woodcuttings that depict man’s fear of the devil, hell, and his so-called concubines on earth. By the end of the fourth part, Häxan nearly becomes a narrative, following the experiences of inmates at a mental institution, whose barbaric treatment by hospital personnel draw very specific and purposeful parallels to how people (mainly women) were treated during the medieval era once they were accused of witchery. 

Though Häxan evolves as a film over its running time, the finger it points at the problem remains firm and steadfast, blaming, above all, ignorance as the main culprit in how poorly man has treated man since the beginning of recorded history. As a piece of filmmaking, it’s assured, confident, and well made; as a documentary, it’s interesting, insightful, and eye-opening; but as a social piece that reflects the time in which it was made, it’s bleak and even a little depressing, because while it was meant to serve as a warning to future generations to increase their understanding, it instead serves as a reminder of our reality, in that we’re just as ignorant as we ever were—just that our ignorance has since changed forms. 

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]

RAMBO: LAST BLOOD (2019)

One of the most consistent complaints I’ve seen regarding Rambo: Last Blood, the newest entry in Sylvester Stallone’s long-running Rambo series, was that it “didn’t feel like a Rambo” movie, and in the most superficial of ways, I would agree. Stallone’s shaggy hair is long gone and it feels odd to see him lording over a home that he’d spent the previous 40 years feeling that he could never go back to. Beyond that, though, the claims of Rambo: Last Blood feeling like an outlier is, to be blunt, a misguided outlook. Thanks to pop culture, when you say the name “Rambo,” it conjures certain images that come not from 1982’s First Blood, the legitimately great original where John Rambo kills ZERO people, but the increasingly goofy sequels that veered further and further away from the whole point of the character, which was created to embody the horrors of war-caused PTSD and to highlight the distrustful, aggressive society Vietnam War soldiers came home to. Appropriately, even the naming convention of all the sequels seemed to mirror what the sequels were doing. 1985’s Rambo: First Blood Part II tried to maintain some of the pathos from the original, personified by Stallone’s steely question, “Do we get to win this time?” 1988’s Rambo III drops the “First Blood” portion of the title altogether because, by then, all pathos and subtext was gone in favor of your generic ‘80s action movie that was most certainly a direct response to 1985’s massively successful Commando. And then came 2008’s Rambo, just one of many long-delayed sequels to drop all roman numerals in hopes of luring in a new generational audience who have no idea there are previous films in the franchise, while the brevity of the title also alerts franchise fans that they know exactly what they’re getting. Rambo: Last Blood is probably the most appropriately titled of the sequels, because despite what you may have heard, it’s the sequel that feels the most like First Blood, while also taking one very wide step back from it. 

As tends to happen with all “action” movie franchises, each subsequent sequel feels the need to outdo the previous one’s sheer size and spectacle until the situations become so outlandish that they take you out of the movie. Look no further than the Die Hard or Death Wish series, the latter of which was based on a film that didn’t come close to being an action movie. The Rambo franchise is a perfect example of this. No, Rambo: Last Blood doesn’t feel like the previous few Rambo flicks because the character isn’t engaging in war in some kind of militaristic capacity. He’s not in some third-world country saving POWs or well-meaning missionaries. He’s back at home in Arizona, on the Rambo family ranch, doing his best to quell his demons and focus on the only family he has left – caretakers of the ranch, Maria (Adriana Barraza) and her granddaughter, Gabriela (Yvette Monreal), whom Rambo considers to be his  daughter. It’s when Gabriela becomes kidnapped by human traffickers in Mexico while trying to find her birth father that Rambo: Last Blood essentially becomes Taken mixed with a western while still falling back on John Rambo’s utter hopeless view on the goodness of man and the world at large. 

Rambo: Last Blood, actually, begins on a melancholy note, in that, though John Rambo has been trying to come home ever since the war, even when he finally did, he never really did. His PTSD still looms large, and he spends most of his time in the labyrinthine tunnels below his ranch, alongside his cache of weapons bought and made. While this could simply be a coincidence, or meant to mirror the foxholes in which he’d spent his time as a soldier in Vietnam, it could also be the most direct connective tissue with First Blood, during which he spent a large portion of the second act hiding in an underground cave because it was the only place he felt safe from the world – this along with his homage Home Alone-like booby-traps that litter the third act, and which he'd similarly crafted to use against some angry Washington State cops  almost 40 years prior. Yes, the family angle—the personal, take-revenge angle—doesn’t gel with the character of John Rambo as we know him, but it does gel with this idea that Rambo doesn’t believe the world is capable of good and isn’t worth fighting for; there’s always some kind of instance where injustice weighs heavily on his heart and he can’t not act – he can’t not react and achieve justice for those that weren’t strong enough to obtain it on their own, and who were taken hostage by the evils of the world. 

Being that this is a Rambo flick, and being that it boasts a screenplay by Stallone, it maintains the typical amount of overwrought dialogue and sensibilities audiences have come to expect from him (along with an alarming dip into xenophobia, in that, apparently, all of Mexico is a death trap and should be avoided whenever possible). As a writer, whether throughout his Rambo or Rocky series, Stallone has always been willing to write from the heart, even if he’s making a particular character say or do something corny or unrealistic. He’s always been willing to risk covering his characters in cheese so long as they were coming from a genuine place. Rambo: Last Blood is a continuing example of this philosophy, and there’s an earnest attempt to elevate the material into a drama with action elements rather than the flipside. (Unfortunately, most of this whispered, overwrought dialogue comes from his character, and Stallone’s old age has worsened his lisp to the degree that some of his lines are nearly incomprehensible.) By doing this, audiences who wanted a shirtless Rambo firing double AK-47s into enemy faces were likely disappointed, but those going in with an open mind—who remember and point to First Blood as the truest embodiment of the John Rambo character—stood a better chance of appreciating the experience. I think it’s less that Stallone no longer understands the character, but more that he understands who John Rambo has become in his twilight years. A search-and-rescue mission doesn’t necessarily jive with the Rambo aesthetic, but if John Rambo were facing that conflict head on, Rambo: Last Blood is pretty much what John Rambo would do. He is a warrior on loan to the world, stepping in wherever necessary and bringing his adept skill at taking lives along for the journey. That’s who John Rambo is.

Rambo: Last Blood had been in development since 2008’s Rambo (it currently boasts twenty-eight producers), and went through a couple different early iterations, including one really wacky plotline that saw Rambo being brought in by the U.S. military to hunt an escaped, genetically-engineered panther (this is real), which was based on the book Hunter by James Byron Huggins. (Stallone owns the movie rights and has been trying to adapt it since the mid-‘90s.) Rambo V’s production was plagued by so many false starts, at one point with Stallone saying the movie was probably never going to happen, that it seemed unlikely his version of the character would ever return. In spite of that, Rambo: Last Blood survived a critical drubbing to become the second-best opening of the series at the box office, and you know what that means… Is Rambo: Last Blood truly the last blood? Well, as Hollywood likes to say, never say never. According to Wikipedia, “Stallone has expressed interest in having Rambo take refuge in an Indian reservation for the sixth Rambo film.” If it takes another ten years to develop this sequel, it’s likely that Rambo: Last Blood will live up to its title after all. 

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]

AMITYVILLE: THE AWAKENING (2017)

Oh, the Amityville Horror series. How many of you are there now? Eleven? Twelve? Way more if we count all those bogus distributors legally exploiting the “Amityville” name?

And how many of you are actually “good”?

Counting the 1976 original…not a one. And Amityville: The Awakening definitely isn’t going to change that.

Amityville: The Awakening began life way back in 2011 as Amityville: The Lost Tapes, a Paranormal Activity-ish take on the most marquee-famous haunted house horror series there is. This version ultimately didn’t come together and was heavily revised; ditching the script and concept in favor of something more traditional, Maniac remake director Franck Khalfoun pretty much started from scratch. What resulted was something definitely traditional — in fact, too traditional — resulting in a very standard haunted house chiller.

Khalfoun gets absolute credit for at least introducing a novel concept into the Amtityville mythos — even if it’s a riff on the Australia ‘70s chiller Patrick — in the form of a comatose member of the family who may or may not be invaded by the evil spirits of 112 Ocean Avenue. Khalfoun also attempts to softly “reboot” the Amityville name by acknowledging the existence of The Amityville Horror franchise as simply that — DVDs for a handful of the original films (and the remake, which “sucks”) make cameos — and this feels clever and necessary for about two seconds until you realize that Amityville: The Awakening is going to hit all the same beats those previous films did, anyway, right down to how the original and the remake conclude.

Four years ago, the concept of Blumhouse and Jennifer Jason Leigh collaborating on a micro-budget take on The Amityville Horror would have been a cause for excitement, but the finished product lacks the ingenuity and eye for creative talent that Blumhouse has brought to previous productions. And poor Jennifer Jason Leigh is totally wasted in the “mom” role (and you can tell she’s not into it), while real lead Bella Thorne’s atrocious acting only moderately improves when she’s walking around her creepy old house with no pants on, or doing her biology homework with no pants on, or putting her baby sister to bed with no pants on. (And for the nth time in movies like this, her character is a pariah at school and referred to as “freaky girl,” even though Thorne is absolutely gorgeous.)

Moments meant to spur horror are instead hilariously over the top and only effective in causing bursts of laughter — the film gets its creepiest mileage by having Cameron Monaghan, who plays the comatose veggie, lay in a hospital bed with his creepy unblinking eyes wide open and staring. Following all the DOA jump scares, snippets of profanity-spewing demons, and wondering what on earth Kurtwood Smith is doing here, you, too, will want to put this Amityville house back on the market as soon as possible.

FIRST GODDAMN WEEK OF WINTER

BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)

My first encounter with Black Christmas was under the wrong circumstances. After having gone through a slam-viewing of My Bloody Valentine, Don’t Open Till Christmas, and Happy Birthday to Me, I ventured into Black Christmas expecting more of the same — entertaining murder sequences, silly killer and character motivations, and that late ’70s/’80s sense of fun that seemed to be missing from more modern horror.

That didn’t happen.

As Black Christmas played on, I continued to anticipate schlock to hit the screen, but all this goodkept getting in the way. Instead of exaggerated characters and head-fall-off murders, I kept getting subtle, eerie, and even disturbing scenes, one after the other — and, when mixed together, they were forming something…yeah, good. Great even. I expected coal and instead I got a bonafide present.

Merry Christmas!

From the director of A Christmas Story and Porky’s comes an unlikely and effective horror film made by a director whom one would assume had spent his entire career working in the horror genre. But he was a director who worked in only two genres, horror and comedy, and that makes sense when you realize that the two are more alike than they are different — mostly because they both live and die by their sense of timing.

Black Christmas is more of an Agatha Christie mystery filtered through the sensibilities of a slasher than something more traditional (even though the slasher as a concept was still in its infancy at that time).  The murders are there, of course, and they’re certainly grisly, but a lot of emphasis is made on the who of it all. Who is this person who continues to call and sexually harass the girls, saying the most awful things, but while also referring to himself in the third person as Billy? Added to that is an almost supernatural sense to his presence, in that Billy seems to be having entire conversations with more than one person on his end of the phone — so much that they manage to overlap each other Exorcist style.

Above all, Black Christmas is eerie across the board — from the opening titles set to “Silent Night” to the disturbing phone calls to the unsettling murder sequences. A dead girl with a bag tied to her face sitting unseen behind an attic window is still one of the eeriest images ever birthed from the genre, and this in a low budget slasher that recently turned 40 years old.

For years an urban legend about Black Christmas has circulated the net involving its much more famous slasher sister, Halloween. The legend suggests that Bob Clark and John Carpenter knew each other personally, and had even begun collaborating on a possible project together that Carpenter would write and Clark would direct — a Black Christmas sequel, which saw Billy escaping from a mental institution and wreaking havoc in a small suburban town. Allegedly this collaboration fell apart, yada yada yada, and then Carpenter made Halloween. Mind you, this legend wasn’t chatter on IMDB message boards, but was being perpetuated by Clark himself. Carpenter has gone on record for years refuting this story, stating that conversations with Clark in any kind of professional or collaborating manner never happened, even later describing Black Christmas as “how not to make a horror movie.”

While Halloween being Black Christmas 2 is a dubious claim to begin with, especially when you take into consideration that Carpenter was actually provided for the basic story details for Halloween by its eventual producer Irwin Yablans, the similarities between the two films can’t be dismissed. The unseen killer stalking a group of teenagers on a major holiday is enough to get us started, but even the films share a similar opening sequence — from the point of view of the killer, the audience, seeing through his eyes, creeps around a house looking through windows before entering, unseen, to commit a grisly murder. (The optimistic way to come away from all this second-guessing is that we’ve got not just one but two holiday-themed horror classics to enjoy over and over, so let’s maybe move on.)

Black Christmas isn’t obvious programming for the holiday season — not just because young people being picked off one by one seems like an odd choice for celebrating Santa’s coming — but because of the deeply disturbing undertones about the killer’s history which suggests familial physical and possibly sexual abuse, which has left him with a damaged psyche and severe issues with the opposite sex. But, subject matter aside, Black Christmas is a very well made and eerie little horror number with an undeniably wintry aesthetic. (Thanks, Canada!) During the Christmas season, some households put on Clark’s own 24 hours of A Christmas Story or throw in their DVDs of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (or Die Hard!), but for the more…adventurous of us, Black Christmas feels right at home. Take note, however, that along with its jolly-less tone, Black Christmas isn’t a very pretty looking production. Low budget and not particularly colorful, the film is dark and dour, taking place mostly at night in dim interiors. If you're the type to wander around the house depressed on Christmas, like me, Black Christmas will suit your festivities just fine.

Cinephiles and genre buffs who enjoy counter-programming come the holiday probably have a whole list of Christmas-themed horror that gets frequent yearly play. For me, Black Christmas is one that gets a heavy rotation in my house during those yuletide months. (Because yes, in America, Christmas lasts from end of October to mid-January.) And it’s not just because Black Christmas is holiday-themed, but because it’s a tremendous and sometimes overlooked horror classic that never loses its ability to unnerve. How a static shot of a house set to a traditional recording of a choir singing “Silent Night” can be effortlessly eerie is — much like the unseen killer — a complete mystery, but Bob Clark managed to fill Black Christmas with little moments like this, giving it an undeniable ability to set its audience at unease. 

SHIT LOG

All you need to know is that everything below is real.

From Wiki:

Tió de Nadal

The Tió de Nadal (meaning in English "Christmas Log"), also known simply as Tió or Soca ("Trunk" or "Log", a big piece of cut wood) or Tronca ("Log"), is a character in Catalan mythology relating to a Christmas tradition widespread in Catalonia and some regions of Aragon. A similar tradition exists in other places, such as the Cachafuòc or Soc de Nadal in Occitania. In Aragon it is also called Tizón de Nadal or Toza.

Christmas Logs

The form of the Tió de Nadal found in many Aragonese and Catalan homes during the holiday season is a hollow log about thirty centimetres long. Recently, the Tió has come to stand up on two or four stick legs with a broad smiling face painted on its higher end, enhanced by a little red sock hat (a miniature of the traditional barretina) and often a three-dimensional nose. Those accessories have been added only in recent times, altering the more traditional and rough natural appearance of a dead piece of wood.

Beginning with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (December 8), one gives the tió a little bit to "eat" every night and usually covers him with a blanket so that he will not be cold. The story goes that in the days preceding Christmas, children must take good care of the log, keeping it warm and feeding it, so that it will defecate presents on Christmas Day or Eve. 

On Christmas Day or, in some households, on Christmas Eve, one puts the tió partly into the fireplace and orders it to defecate. The fire part of this tradition is no longer as widespread as it once was, since many modern homes do not have a fireplace. To make it defecate, one beats the tió with sticks, while singing various songs of Tió de Nadal.

The tradition says that before beating the tió all the kids have to leave the room and go to another place of the house to pray, asking for the tió to deliver a lot of presents. Nowadays, the praying tradition has been left behind. Still, children go to a different room, usually the kitchen, to warm their stick next to a fire. This makes the perfect excuse for the relatives to do the trick and put the presents under the blanket while the kids are praying or warming their sticks.

The tió does not drop larger objects, as those are considered to be brought by the Three Wise Men. It does leave candies, nuts and torrons, and small toys. Depending on the region of Catalonia, it may also give out dried figs. What comes out of the Tió is a communal rather than individual gift, shared by everyone there.

The tió is often popularly called Caga tió ("shitting log", "poo log"). This derives from the many songs of Tió de Nadal that begin with this phrase, which was originally (in the context of the songs) an imperative ("Shit, log!"). The use of this expression as a name is not believed to be part of the ancient tradition.

Beating the Tió de Nadal

A song is sung during this celebration. After hitting the tió softly with a stick during the song, it is hit harder on the words Caga tió! Then somebody puts their hand under the blanket and takes a gift. The gift is opened and then the song begins again. There are many different songs; the following are some examples.

"Caga tió,

caga torró,

avellanes i mató,

si no cagues bé

et daré un cop de bastó.

caga tió!"

Translation:

shit, log,

shit nougats (turrón),

hazelnuts and mató cheese,

if you don't shit well,

I'll hit you with a stick,

shit, log!