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Ever love a movie except for its ending? For me, that movie is The Mist. It’s an adaptation of my all-time favourite Stephen King story of the same name, from the 1980 anthology Dark Forces (but better known as part of the short story collection The Skeleton Crew). I love the spooky, imaginative tale so much that I interviewed the director of the movie adaptation for a cover story on the movie, when it came out in 2007. And I’m a fan of Frank Darabont’s horror projects in general: his other King adaptations: The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption; his scripts for The Blob remake, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and The Fly II; plus, he’s the guy who brought The Walking Dead to T.V. And I love The Mist, right up until he departs radically from the book with a new ending.

Earlier this week, the L.A. Times ran a piece on a screening of the movie at the Hero Complex Film Festival in Hollywood, with both Darabont and star Thomas Jane in attendance. They discussed the “angry, bleak” ending of the movie, which (SPOILER ALERT) has Jane’s character, along with his young son and some other survivors, driving off into the monster-filled mist, having escaped the mayhem at the grocery store where other survivors had turned on each other. This part is essentially the same as the book.

The novella, however, ends with the travellers driving through the mist and finding shelter for the night:

 

There is a restaurant here, a typical HoJo restaurant with a dining room and a long, horseshoe- shaped lunch counter. I am going to leave these pages on the counter and perhaps someday someone will find them and read them. One word. If I only really heard it. If only. I'm going to bed now. But first I'm going to kiss my son and whisper two words in his ear. Against the dreams that may come, you know. Two words that sound a bit alike. One of them is Hartford. The other is hope.

 

The movie, on the other hand, sees our hero, David, his son, Billy, and three other survivors drive to David’s house, where they find his wife dead in a spider web. They continue driving but run out of gas on the highway, just as a huge monster (so big it has other creatures circling it) passes in front of them. They immediately decide to kill themselves, with David shooting everyone in the SUV, including his son. He doesn’t have a bullet for himself, though, and starts screaming. Seconds later, a military convoy arrives through fog with a truck full of survivors. Swallowed by the irony, David falls to his knees and loses his mind as military men look on.

 

In the Times piece, Darabont describes sending the ending to King, telling the author that he would change the end if he didn’t approve. But he did and, as Darabont recalls, “thought that every generation there be a movie that dares not give audiences what they want.”

 

It is an amazingly ballsy, non-Hollywood ending, but it’s also complete B.S. for several reasons. A) Given the circumstances, why would you be so stupid as to run out of gas in the middle of the highway? You wouldn’t find a gas station or shelter long before that? B) You wouldn’t consider any other options before immediately defaulting to suicide within moments of running out of gas – especially since you just spent the last 90 minutes of the movie fighting for the survival of your friends and your son?!? You wouldn’t at least wait a few hours, just to see if an opportunity for escape presented itself?

 

Now, it’s easy to say, “Well idiot, is that any more likely than a mist full of monsters?” but it comes down to a film’s internal logic. We believe that this world exists, and within it our heroes, up to this point, have acted like one would expect most humans to: logically and reasonably if scared as hell. Screenwriting gurus have long pointed out that action stems from character, and if your characters break, well, character, you lose your audience. You see it all the time in movies: the hero suddenly develops a formerly unseen ability that gets him or her out of a jam, or they make an illogical decision in order to get to the next plot point. We want – no need – to believe in the struggles of our heroes, but the deal is that they need to allow us to believe in them.

 

But even all this doesn’t irritate me as much as the fact that this new ending goes against the theme of the movie, which is ambiguity – something that’s laid out very clearly by the title of the movie: The Mist! A mist is a fog, something that brings with it a lack of clarity, which is why the uncertain ending of the novella is prefect. There is no resolution, just grim hope. It’s more courageous to give your audience an uncertain ending than a grim but false one. John Sayles got it right with his 1999 film Limbo, which ends with its heroes stranded on a foggy island as a plane comes in for a landing, but they don’t know if the people in the plane are there to rescue them or kill them because they’ve uncovered their crimes, hence the title. (Given this re-edited ending of the film, done by a fan, I'm not the only one who wished the film hewed more closely to the printed story, either.)

 

You’re probably wondering how I can count The Mist as one of my favourite horror movies if the ending is such a problem. Well, there’s an easy fix... I just hit the stop button when our heroes make their escape into uncertainty.

 

Sometimes no resolution is the best ending, but most of us don’t like that in our stories – perhaps it’s out natural curiosity, or that we desire so much to see our heroes all the way through their journeys. But I’d rather imagine the possible outcomes than to think that the protagonist I’ve followed so closely for 90 minutes suddenly acts so out of character that I just want to leave him in the fog.

 

-Dave Alexander

It’s every wannabe feature filmmaker’s dream: make an inexpensive yet innovative short that gets noticed at a film festival and leads to a feature film. Mama, the three-minute short by Andrés Muschietti is the perfect lesson in how to do it right.

His 2008 film was seen at a festival by Guillermo del Toro, who agreed to produce a feature-length version, which was released in theatres last year and was a huge success, earning nearly $140 million worldwide on a $15 million budget. That short, with an introduction by del Toro is a special feature on the feature-length Mama DVD/Blu-ray, which comes out next week. It’s also been released on online, and you can – and should – watch it below because it does everything right.

 

Making a three-minute-long horror film is exceptionally difficult, because it’s really tough to build tension in such a short time. You really have to focus in on a single idea, and Mama hits the ground running when a young girl wakes up her sister in a panic, warning her that “Mom is back.” Immediately one wonders why young ‘uns would fear the one person who is supposed to care for them; it quickly becomes apparent that “mama” is a threat, and within the first 30 seconds we’re neck-deep in tension and intrigue.

Having made short films myself, I’ve often had the conversation with other, more experienced, filmmakers about how, as a storyteller, you can create something that works on its own as a short but is also set up to potentially be something feature-lemgth. The shorts that work best as a short are often like a joke, with a set-up and a punch line – or in terms of horror you might say a set-up and a pay-off. The ones that can work as both a short and potential feature still focus on one idea, but also give you a taste of a larger world that would be worth exploring. Mama, for example, doesn’t just have two girls hiding from a boogeyman; because the monster is “mama” and she’s back again, Muschetti suggests an expansive, and particularly frightening, backstory. For the feature, he and the other writers presented not only the ghostly mama monster, they gave her a comprehensive backstory steeped in tragedy that unfolded over many years (i.e. a proper mythology), created an unlikely family with its own problems for her to go up against, and then put the two little girl characters in the middle of it all. Despite a particularly cheesy ending, it works very well as a feature.

Showing the audience something new is also key to any film, and here we’re given a new spin on the monster. The “mama” ghoul is somewhere between a zombie and a Japanese ghost, but the addition of that sickly black hair that floats in the air as it were in water, and the herky-jerky, broken doll movements add a particularly creepy touch we're haven't quite witnessed before. Muschetti is also smart enough to not show too much of her, which keeps her mysterious. He clearly knows the machinations of the genre that he’s working in.                                 

Of course, if you’re looking to get into feature filmmaking, your festival short also needs to display some real skill behind the camera, as well. Muschetti tells his story in a single shot (technically a few different ones stitched together) that goes from an upstairs bedroom, down into the house and back up again. More importantly, it’s not a flashy, obvious attempt at showing off, but a more subtle method of keeping the viewer in the moment. It’s just the kind of thing that might catch the eye of a filmmaker like del Toro. (He would also surely appreciate the telling of the story from a child’s point-of-view, as his own films Mimic, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth do the same thing.) The film is also solid in terms of lighting, sound design and all those other elements that tell the world you can create something that would look, sound and feel good (or, in this case, terrifying) in a theatre for 90 minutes.

So, if you’re trying to kick-start your own feature career via a calling card short, or you’re just wondered how someone you’ve never heard of suddenly gets millions of dollars and Hollywood support to make a feature, three-minute Mama will teach you a thing or two. Heed her lessons.

 

-Dave Alexander

Canada's west coast was hit by a flurry of costumed activity this past weekend as the 2013 Fan Expo Vancouver came to town. I was lucky enough to be there for the two-day show with my day job gig as Editor-in-Chief of Rue Morgue magazine, meeting some of the other tens of thousands of fans, hosting celebrity panels and, as you'll see, taking some pictures of the action. For those of you who couldn't joins us at the Vancouver Convention Centre, here's a little taste of what ya missed.

As the convention was being set up on Friday, a Lego Hulk was unveiled. Would he smash himself before the weekend was over?

 

Actor and special effects legend Tom Savini meets a fan holding a Dawn of the Dead poster.

 

Not only does this Ring Wraith costume look bad ass, given that it got warmer than the fires of Mordor in the convention hall, you have to be supernatually tough to wear it.

 

Jen Soska shoots a sly glance during the American Mary panel. The Vancouver filmmaker, along with her identical twin Sylvia, wrote and directed the movie, which comes out next month. The ladies did a panel, along with their co-star Tristan Risk, on the highly original feminist body horror film.

 

There's always time for Pee-Wee...

 

The Three Big Amigos: (From left to right) Peter H. Kent, who's Arnold Schwarzenegger's double, as well as an actor who's appeared in such non-Arnie films as Re-Animator and Dead Heat; stuntman Brad Loree, who played Michael Myers in Halloween: Resurrection; and Ken Kirzinger, who played Jason Vorhees in Freddy vs. Jason.

 

Sometimes an unlikely mash-up costume is in order, like this StormBeaker.

 

Saturday was 4/20 in Canada's most weed-friendly city and Slimer was clearly representing...

 

Michael Rooker clowns around with one of the Fan Expo volunteers. Clearly she shouldn't have tried to touch his mohawk.

 

There's me with Cassandra Peterson, a.k.a. Elvira, just before our panel. She's as funny as is she is beautiful, so this was no tough job.

 

Father and son Ash outfits! There was nothing cuter all weekend than this Evil Dead costume combo.

 

Savini meets the Soskas. There was plenty of love to Fan Expo Vancouver. Can't wait to go back next year.

 

-Dave Alexander

I’m late with the blog, and I blame Roger Ebert. After he died on April 4^th, it didn’t seem right not to dedicate a post to him. Yet, I’ve been wringing my hands on just how to do that for most of a week now. The problem is, what hasn’t been said about the man? Even the President of the United States (a Chicagoan, like Ebert) weighed in on the film critic, stating that “The movies won't be the same without Roger.” You’ve heard about his 47 years as a critic for the Chicago Sun-Times; watched various incarnations of his TV review shows over the years; read that he was the first/only critic to win a Pulitzer Prize and get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; likely already know about him co-writing several Russ Meyer movies, including cult classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls; and you're familiar with his decade-long battle with thyroid cancer has been in the spotlight.

It finally came to me today when I read his final review, for Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder. In the second last paragraph, he gets philosophical about film itself: “Aren't many films fundamentally the same film, with only the specifics changed? Aren't many of them telling the same story? Seeking perfection, we see what our dreams and hopes might look like.”

This reminded me of the fantastic TED Talk that he gave in 2011, after cancer surgery had taken both his jaw and his voice, and caused him trouble walking. Not only did he go in-depth about the actual surgery, how he was undaunted in continuing his dialogue about cinema via his blog, continued columns and voice recognition software; he also discussed with great zeal the actual technology he was using to find his spoken voice through technology. Roger Ebert was not just an award winning critic and journalist; he was also an icon of geek culture.

Before I go any further, I should say that as someone very steeped in horror movie culture, Ebert often drove me bonkers because I felt that he lacked understanding as to how the genre works and would damn some excellent horror movies for doing their job and making us uncomfortable. Yet, there’s no denying his craftsman-like skill as a wordsmith. I may have found myself disliking what he said but he said it very well. I also developed a new appreciation for him as a human being when he decided to be very public about his illness, even after it rendered him disfigured and voiceless. Many, maybe most, of us in that situation would probably retreat into hermithood rather than face the public, but he showed a lot of guts. Maybe more than one might expect from a guy who was so wholeheartedly a nerd.

Increasingly, we live in geek’s world, but long before computer experts got rich shaping our everyday lives,before it was mainstream to dress up and go to a comic book convention, and before the word “geek” itself became so ubiquitous, Ebert was one of the most public nerds out there. Overweight and often overdue for both a new set of glasses and a haircut, he was on television geeking out over cinema. He had famously passionate discussions and heated arguments with his reviewing partner Gene Siskel over the movies. Decades on TV with Siskel (until he died in 1999 of complications during surgery on a cancerous brain tumor), then guest hosts, and then Richard Roeper made those animated geekouts about movies normal. Ebert made it OK to get that passionate about pop culture. Like most of us, through film he saw what his hopes and dreams looked like.

Movies are, of course, an escape and one that’s particularly meaningful to those whose everyday lives fall so short of glamourous that at best we see ourselves as rhinestones in the rough. Having grown up an overweight kid with asthma, I understand that all too well. Movies, comic books, computer games were all essential escapes. Ebert was talented and fortunate enough to make a career out of being cinematically geeky. (On a side note, I’d always wondered what other films he might have authored if he’d pursued screenwriting. He dialogue for Beyond the Valley if the Dolls is fantastically literate, and the whole thing feels like a sex, drugs and rock 'n’ roll wish fulfillment fantasy of a guy on the outside looking in.)

So it’s no surprise that the more physical challenges he faced, the more he embraced the movies. He wrote voraciously, right up until he died, and in his now-famous “A Leave of Presence” post at rogerebert.com, he writes excitedly about revamping his website, developing an app, his film festival, a documentary being made about him, and so on. Ebert wasn’t just a movie geek, he was a techno-geek too. He was taking that passionate dialogue onto the latest platforms while simultaneously making the most of new technologies so he could continue communicating that love through his computer and its voice program.

Appearing often in public, on The Oprah Winfrey Show and onstage for his TED Talk (part of which is read by his computer surrogate, and part by others), Ebert's public face had literally changed, and he even joked about looking like the Phantom of the Opera. He lived openly with his prevalent disability and normalized it, which is a wonderful example to set. He owned it, just like he owned being a film nerd, and understood, to borrow the final words of his final review, the importance of being able to "reach beneath the surface, and find the soul in need."  And that’s just one more reason Roger Ebert will have eternal thumbs up for being such a geek icon.

 

-Dave Alexander

With all the talk as of late about the new Star Wars movies going into production, it's the ideal time to reflect on the far reach of George Lucas' 1977 space opera. Specifically, I'm thinking of the scores of rip-offs, which the universe has no shortage of whatsoever. From Roger Corman's low-budget Star Crash and Battle Beyond the Stars; to a bunch of Italian wannabes (The Humanoid, Captive Planet, Star Odyssey, etc.); to the operatically crummy Dünyay Kurtaran Adam (a.k.a Turkish Star Wars), which outright steals footage from Star Wars and soundtrack music from Raiders of the Lost Ark, it seemed like every producer was taking the concept for a spin (more examples here) and failing miserably, for the most part.

But none are as epic in scope as Japan's 1978 kick at the 'droid, called Message From Space, which is being reissued on April 16th by Shout! Factory. Made for six million dollars by the famous Toei studio, it was, at the time, the biggest budget movie mounted by the country, and it's easy to see why. Just trying to describe the plot is a monumental task given everything crammed into the story like someone attempting to stuff an entire buffet into a plastic lunch box.

OK, here goes...

There's this planet of space hippies that has been conquered by the silver-skinned, outrageous-helmet-and-cape-wearing Emperor Rockseia XXII and his army... oh, and his wheelchair-bound mother, Dowager Empress Dark, who's played by famous Japanese actor Hideyo Amamoto in drag. Hippie tribe leader Kido spreads eight magic glowing seeds into the galaxy to find those who can free their planet. Some of the hippies follow the seeds into space on a flying galleon -- yes, a galleon, which is apparently the space equivalent of a VW van. The bad guys pursue.

Meanwhile, a couple of Dukes of Hazzard-like space pilots hot dog their ships through an asteroid field while being pursued by a space cop, who even sports a traffic cop helmet and moustache. They all collide, crash land and find some of the magical seeds. A bratty princess-type who saw the flying aces and called the officer, joins 'em.

Them we jump to another plotline involving a hard-drinking general who's set to retire with his spunky robot sidekick. Veteran actor Vic Morrow played the character with appropriate Han Solo-like swagger, and was presumeably hired as a marquee name for the American market. But soon he finds a seed in his drink, thereby roping him into the larger plotline. At the same bar where our general is drinking, a shady comic relief-type finds yet another seed as he's trying to escape a gangster that he money to (wait, why is that familiar?). Annnnnyhow, all seed-holders thus far hook up and then come across the space hippie's galleon, just as the bad guys arrive, forcing them to flee. A bunch of New Age-y exposition and hilarious overacting are used to explain the plot, they eventually end up at a witch's hovel, there's a double-cross, more fighting, much more exposition, more seeds found, and on it goes.

Eventually all the heroes find each other, including a sword-wielding warrior played by the immortal Sonny Chiba (The Streetfighter series, Kill Bill), in order to link up their seeds and engage in a final battle with the dark empire, in an attempt to destroy Rockseia's fortress.

 

Sword fights, mystics, laser gun battles, ace pilots, a sass-talking princess, a comical robot, an evil caped dictator, some familiar orchestral cues and a giant space station that can only be destroyed by flying spaceships through a tiny portal and blowing it up from the inside -- Message From Space oh so shamelessly apes Star Wars. But that doesn't quite do it justice. No, this is a bloated, garish mash-up of Star Wars, samurai movies, Godzilla films (due to the miniatures, no giant monster here) with a few touches of Japanese ghost story (namely the bad wigs) and theatrical costume drama.

No surprise that it's particularly difficult to follow (and damn, if only this DVD reissue had subtitles to help cut through the bad dubbing), nor that it was a huge flop in North America. Yet, if you take delight in bad sci-fi, Message From Space is one of the best of a bad bunch, and the DVD liners notes are packed with great tidbits about the movie, such as the fact that it actually beat Star Wars to Japanese theatres by two months. You really kinda do have to see this film to understand just how hard it tries. It hard to believe that it was co-written and directed by Kinji Fukusaka, who co-directed the war movie Tora! Tora! Tora! and the ultra-violent Battle Royale.

Consider it a galaxy far, far, and even a little farther, away.

 

-Dave Alexander

In hindsight, it was slacker-perfect for me to ditch my afternoon university courses to see The Big Lebowski on opening day, even though I had little clue what the film was about. The trailer promised a bizarre, psychedelic genre mash-up that was vaguely about a kidnapping and, uh, bowling, for a Film Studies student like me, this was the latest work from the Coen Brothers – who were coming off of the masterpiece that is Fargo – and that was reason enough to see it. I managed to wrangle a buddy who was equally enthusiastic about the Coens’ work and we sought out a matinee at a theatre in South Edmonton, which has long since been torn down.

There were a handful of people in the theatre and we laughed the loudest, by far. That next week was spent arguing with others at school who either didn’t like it or just didn’t get it. With the film celebrating its 15^th anniversary this month, there have been dozens of articles by critics discussing it as a pop culture phenomenon and admitting that they weren’t big on it at first, but have since seen the light (a light that I imagine is a kaleidoscope of bowling alley-neon colours). I’m no predictor of what’s going to be hot, but I loved The Big Lebowski the moment I walked out of the theatre and kept reciting lines from it. (Read my little blog bio for further proof of this Dudeppreciation.)

It stuck with me, and a couple years later, as it was becoming a “thing,” I organized a Big Lebowski party on campus that included a costume contest, two bands (one called The Dudes, who are still being way awesome, and the other called The Little Lebowski Urban Achievers, which was a one-off cobbled together from local musicians tasked with covering songs from the soundtrack), a bar special on white Russians, a slide show from the movie and I even had T-shirts for sale that were emblazoned with “Urban Achiever.”

I called the party The Dude’s Night Out, and while researching for it, I’d discovered Lebowskifest, the travelling Lebowski-themed festival started by Louisville, KY dudes Scott Shuffitt and Will Russell, which began in 2002. I knew I needed to experience this Dudesplosion firsthand, and I successfully convinced my editor at Spin (which I was freelancing with) to send me out to Vegas for it. The night began with a screening of the film in a hotel convention room, which came complete with white Russians and many a costumed fan (including one who’d borrowed his grandmother’s electric wheelchair in order to come as Jeffrey Lebowski!) cheering and yelling out lines. At the end of it, James G. Hoosier came out and talked about his experience playing Liam, Jesus Quintana’s hilariously non-descript bowling partner. A non-actor, he got the role after answering an ad posted at his local lanes. He was dumbfounded by the attention, as I would discover later when I interviewed him for the article. After the screening, a bunch of busses delivered us to Sunset Lanes, the biggest bowling alley I’d ever seen. There, I interviewed Jeff Dowd, a.k.a. “The Real Jeff Lebowski,” upon whom The Dude is based. He talked exactly like the character, drank white Russians and rocked a worn-out Hawaiian shirt. It was surreal, but things got stranger…

By midnight, the lanes were full of costumed Lebowski nuts, throwing rocks, quoting lines and getting drunk. The costumes were amazing: anything from the movie, including a Digby Sellers in an iron lung (more of a cardboard box, but hey…). There was someone who went as Larry Sellers’ homework after painstakingly pausing the video and transcribing the text onto a huge sheet of cardboard. And there was more than one rug costume. The night ended with a group of “thugs” pissing on it in the parking lot of the alley. (Proof of these Dudenanigans are here.)

It was then that I realized where this whole Lebowski thing was going: major cult movie stardom. In the decade since then, there have been dozens of Lebowskifests, multiple books published on the film, toys, scores of different T-shirts and general pop culture permeation. It’s a Dude’s world, and we just abide in it.

But becoming such a pop-culture phenomenon that continues to grow fifteen years on is extremely rare, so the question is why? What makes the film so popular? I’ve been reading a bunch of the recently published pieces marking the anniversary of the movie and I’ve spent an unreasonable amount time thinking about it myself (often while imagining flying through the film on a rug). While I may not be able to get you a toe with green nail polish on it, I can help you get a handle on why The Dude endures. Here are ten reasons:

 

 

1)      The movie speaks to certain demographic in a way that few others do. The slacker is a tried and true comedy staple but instead of making fun of him, like most films do, The Big Lebowski mythologizes him and made it cool to be an aimless, pot-smoking artsy type.The appeal here is obvious...

 

2)      Technically, it’s amazing. The direction, the editing, the cinematography, the costumes, the sound design, the lighting, and so on are all the work of a very talented crew. The film is exciting as a sensory experience.

 

3)      The dialogue is infinitely quotable. Well, duh. If you’ve never taken joy in uttering the phrase, “The Dude abides,” “Give us za money, Lebowzki” or “Shut the f**k up, Donny!” you probably hate fun, yourself and maybe even life. It’s that simple.

 

4)      The whole film is strongly character-driven. The nihilists want their money, Jeffrey Lebowski wants Bunny, Maude wants a child, Walter wants revenge and The Dude wants his rug, but they all have clearly defined, very passionate needs, which allow them to go to comedic lengths to achieve their goals. Whether it’s Walter’s plan to screw the nihilists, the nihilists’ plan to cut off the The Dude’s Johnson, or The Dude’s determination to investigate Jackie Treehorn, everything goes comically awry when the characters overreach and their strong personalities clash.

 

5)      The film makes us think about a larger world. The Big Lebowski is so re-watchable is that is constantly references something bigger that can be discussed when the movie is over. How did The Dude’s landlord get to be in an experimental stage show? What does a guy like Donny do when he’s not bowling? How did the nihilists go from playing in an art band to committing a felony? Who is that guy hanging out at Maude's place,anyhow?

 

6)      It ages really well. In a stroke of comedic brilliance, the Coen Brothers set their movie in the not-so distant past, during the first Iraq War, so it doesn’t date itself; it’s already intentionally dated as a snapshot of the past. We feel nostalgia, rather than the urge to make fun of the aesthetics of the era.

 

7)      It actually gets better with age. In many ways, The Big Lebowski is a cultural salve in that it reminds us of a simpler time, before 9/11, when “fighting terror” was something that was done overseas. The Zen vibe of the whole film  (“Verrrry Duuuuude…”) is increasingly attractive in a time when we’re full of angst over terrorism, diseases, environmental destruction and other overwhelming real world problems. On the worst day, you can slip The Big Lebowski into your DVD player and enter a world where a missing rug is the major concern.

 

8)      The gags are a mix of non-sequiturs and builders. Many of the jokes build on themselves to ridiculous proportions, such as the homework scene, which begins with a stern talking to and ends with two smashed cars. At other times, random stuff comes out of nowhere to take you off guard, such as the Jesus Quintana pederast flashback, Maude’s sex-swing painting or The Dude’s fantasy about bowling that turns into a Busby Berkley-style musical number.

 

9)      Perfect timing for the cultural zeitgeist. The film wasn’t a hit initially, which made it that much more special amongst fans, who then had a hand in shaping it as a legend. This happened, as Peter Howell, critic for The Toronto Star points out in this article, just before the internet really took off, which allowed it to build slowly, instead of becoming an instant-obsession that’s soon forgotten, such as Snakes on a Plane. He laments the fact that this may never happen again, but I’d point out that the internet that facilitated the physical (e.g. conventions), more meaningful interactions that allowed fans to share and build on their love for the movie. T.V. series, such as Firefly or Supernatural, which came after this, have built a huge cult following as well, proving that if something’s good, it’ll find an audience to love it deeply, internet of not. The fact that Lewboskifests can tour the country and gather fans via the website is solid proof that the Internet creates, fosters and enshrines cult objects, allowing them to last for into the future.

 

10)  Finally, the movie has heart. Specifically, I mean the scene where Walter hugs The Dude after his friend chews him out. That one moment is key to the entire movie, as it makes us fall in love with these guys on a deeper level than if it was only their antics. Yet, unlike most comedies, it doesn’t try to force an unnatural dramatic moment on us. Judd Apatow (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up) is also good at this, though his films are anchored entirely in the real world, whereas The Big Lebowski is on its own planet. That one hug, though, brings it all together to remind us just how human our heroes are.

 

After all, sometimes there is a man…

 

[Note: the incredible poster you see above was done by Ghoulish Gary Pullin]

 

-Dave Alexander

With Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful topping the box office, you may be in the mood for more Oz, and there’s no shortage of tales out there. L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) wrote the original book in 1900, titled The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and followed it with thirteen sequels, plus another 26 official books set in the same world and written by other authors came out in the ensuing years. Most people know the legendary 1939 Julie Garland version of the movie, but there have been many different versions of The Wizard of Oz made for film over the years. Here are some of the oddest…

 

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910)

This first (or at least the earliest surviving) crack at putting the book onscreen is a thirteen-minute narrative mix of the novel and the popular 1902 stage production. Like the play, it doesn’t have the Wicked Witch, and our heroes instead fight Momba the Witch and her foot soldiers before getting to the Emerald City. It features a bunch of actors in animal costumes and – although this was not that uncommon in the days of live music accompaniment – this silent film has a few “musical” numbers where characters play instruments and dance around. The sets, costumes and the scarecrows acrobatics are fun, even if you have no idea what kind of tunes are moving him.

 

 

His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz (a.k.a. The New Wizard of Oz; 1914)

This 50-minute film remains a curiosity in that it’s the only thing Baum ever directed. He also wrote it and the script actually formed the basis of his book The Scarecrow of Oz (1915). An origin story for The Scarecrow, it also features The Tin Man and The Cowardly Lion, though the latter really only has a cameo. And as in the 1910 version, the big bad here is Mombi. The movie fared poorly upon release and was subsequently re-released under the title The New Wizard of Oz.

 

 

Wizard of Oz (1925)                  

This silent film credits Baum as screenwriter but is way, way different from his novel. This one has a love triangle between farmhands and Dorothy; an evil monarch named King Krewl; The Tin Man, played by Oliver Hardy in an early role, becomes a bad guy; and The Tin Man, Cowardly Lion and Scarecrow are only costumes donned my farmhands for various reasons.

 

 

The Wizard of Oz (1933)

There’s no Cowardly Lion in this eight-minute cartoon version of the story at all – as he fell out of favour after being minimalized in the aforementioned stage adaptation – but there are plenty of strange hybrid animals. The film, which introduced the idea of showing the real world in black and white and Oz in colour, sees Dorothy, the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Toto travelling to Oz, where they meet the wizard – who appears as the Alpha-Bits Wizard would if reimagined by Robert Crumb. After doing some goofy magic tricks, he has a chicken lay a bunch of chicks that are part of other animals, including elephants (giving the whole thing a bizarre Island of Dr. Moreau vibe), before making an egg that grows about three stories tall. Baum’s eldest son, Col. Frank Joslyn Baum, is credited as the writer, and, well, maybe he should’ve stuck to the military…

 

 

Turkish Wizard of Oz (1971)

Ayşecik ve Sihirli Cüceler Rüyalar Ülkesinde

“The Turkish Wizard of Oz is, without debate, the single stupidest production in the history of motion pictures… and also the most entertaining,” exclaims this review of the movie from Film Threat. Known for their no-budget rip-offs of popular Hollywood movies, the country was responsible for this riff on the 1939 version that’s as nuts as it is crude. Here, Dorothy is named Ayse and she’s a farm girl with hideously penciled on eyebrows who gets transported to Oz, only to be accompanied on her adventure by seven lecherous dwarves dressed as toy soldiers. The Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion’s looks are constructed from dollar store junk, and the Scarecrow is a terrible flamboyantly gay stereotype. But the funniest/hardest things to watch are probably the tortuous musical numbers, which are sloppy and hilarious. A perfect so-bad-its-good cult oddity.

 

 

Oz (1976)

Truly a product of its time, this Aussie rock musical based on The Wizard of Oz features way too much glam rock, which is to say: it features glam rock. Ugh… Dorothy this time out is a sixteen-year-old groupie on tour with a rock band. When she suffers an injury that sends her to an alternate reality, she’s pursued by the ruthless rapist brother of a guy she accidentally killed. As Wikipedia notes, her companions are reimagined here as “dumb surfer Blondie, heartless mechanic Greaseball, and a cowardly biker [named] Killer.”

 

 

The Wiz (1978)

This epic flop saw the story reimagined for a contemporary black demographic. Not even having Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon and Network) directing; a screenplay by Joel Schumacher (St. Elmo’s Fire, The Lost Boys and Falling Down); an all-star cast featuring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Lena Horne and Richard Pryor; and the fact that it’s based on a successful live theatre production saved this from being exceptionally cheesy. It’s irritatingly silly, Ross – in her 30s at the time – was way too old to play Dorothy and Jackson’s costume made him look like cross between a teddy bear and a zombie. It’s dated enough now that it’s kind of become a bit of a cult hit and had a special edition 30^th anniversary release.

 

 

Return to Oz (1985)

When Fairuza Balk was just a little girl she starred in this unofficial sequel to The Wizard of Oz, produced by Disney. Restless after her previous Oz adventure, Dorothy can’t sleep and is sent to an asylum for treatment. She escapes during a storm and wakes up back in Oz, which has been destroyed. Her quest sees her trying to rescue her former cohorts and restore Oz – if she can survive Momba and the Nome King, that is. The film features characters from other Baum books, including Tic-Toc, a mechanical soldier, who looks better than the lame-looking Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion. The movie is chock full of imagination, danger and frightening baddies, notably the wheelers, which are creatures with wheels for feet, sent to pursue Dorothy and company. It’s a fantastic kiddie flick that gets forgotten all too often.

 

 

-Dave Alexander

 

 

"Down by the bay,

Where the watermelons grow,

Back to my home,

I dare not go,

For if I do,

My mother will say…"

 

When I was kid, my grandmother would keep me occupied during car trips by singing “Down by the Bay,” the classic Raffi song, in which you make up a rhyme at the end of each verse, such as “Did you ever see a bear, in his underwear?” or maybe “Did you ever spy some ants learning how to dance?” The sillier the lyrics, the better, of course, and usually they involved an animal of some sort. I don’t, however, recall the line, “Did you ever see a parasite, eating everyone in sight?”

Too horrifying for a kid, but it does describe the plot of The Bay – the best horror movie of last year that you didn’t see. It’s also one of the most unlikely releases of last year: a found footage mockumentary directed by Barry Levinson, who has never done horror before and is famous for titles such as Diner, Tin Men, Rain Man, Good Morning, Vietnam, Wag the Dog, Sleepers and Sphere. Produced by the guys behind Paranormal Activity and Insidious, The Bay (which hits DVD this week) sees him far out of element. But like the critters in the movie, he thrives in this new environment.

The story unfolds through found footage that was confiscated by the government and subsequently recovered, scientific file footage, security camera footage and home video, along with first-hand Skype accounts from survivors, notably amateur news reporter Donna Thompson (Kether Donohue). With her cameraman and sound guy, she’s covering July 4^th celebrations around Chesapeake Bay, including the annual crab eating competition, which ends with its participants getting sick. Soon, it seems everyone in town is developing rashes, stomach aches and bleeding. We follow Donna as she tries to uncover what’s really happening to the town, as it descends into chaos.

Interspersed with footage of a panic-stricken hospital waiting room, police scrambling to answer emergency calls and the infected erupting with parasites, we’re shown other footage that gives the backstory. We see a chicken farm dumping steroid-rich piles of chicken manure into the water, a research team discovering fish ridden with aggressive isopods that have mutated, and home video of a family on its way to the town for the celebration who discover the place virtually empty except for some corpses. By the time the Center for Disease Control and Prevention decides to act, the creatures are growing to incredible sizes and bursting out of people in some really disgusting ways.

Levinson keeps things unbearably squeamish by taking us through the various stages of infection before revealing the skittering little creatures in their full gross-out glory. The pacing of the film is spot on, as well, going from unease at the spreading sickness, to panic at the thought of an epidemic, to full-on terror by the last 20 minutes when it’s clear that the government is intent on containing the threat and covering things up.

The tale follows a classic structure, and by the time we meet the mayor, who refuses to do anything to harm either big business concerns or the holiday hoopla, we’re firmly in Jaws territory. But you don’t have to be in the water to get bitten in The Bay; just drinking it can infect you, which is particularly unnerving. And while that may be stretching the invasiveness of the parasites, the movie is that much scarier because the science is based very much in reality. (You’ve seen pics of those hideous sea lice that attach themselves to the tongues of fish, right?)

As this recent article on the state of Chesapeake Bay points out, the body of water is experiencing some recovery from decades of overfishing and being treated like a toilet bowl, but has a long way to go. It makes the area an ideal setting for an environmental horror movie like this one. Levinson, whose left-leaning politics are most apparent in Wag the Dog, may be more interested in bringing us an environmental message than simply thrills, but the fact that he does both so well demonstrates that he knows how to get under our skin – very, very literally…

Did you ever know a Barry who showed you something scary?

Down by The Bay…

 

-Dave Alexander

The suburbs are under siege right now by ghosts, demons, even aliens – but they’re all part of the horrors of being middle class it seems. When a certain type of horror movie becomes popular, it’s because it speaks to contemporary fears, and right now we’re seeing a wave of (mostly) found footage films about middle class American families in the suburbs being terrorized by forces from within their homes.

The Paranormal Activity series (2009-present), which has earned around $700 000 000 worldwide so far with four films and another on the way, sparked the trend. It presents a couple of average middle class families being terrorized by a demon that’s not only wreaking havoc on their property, it’s possessing kids and adults alike. Then there's Sinister (2012), which sees a family move into a house with a sordid past and invoke the wrath of a murderous, child-snatching demon. Also: The Amityville Horror: The Lost Tapes is an upcoming sequel to the 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror, which will utilize found footage as a team of investigators examine the infamous home at 112 Ocean Avenue where the De Feo family was murdered. Plus, a straight-to-DVD rip-off of both the Amityville Horror series and the Paranormal Activity series, called The Amityville Haunting, was released in 2011 and uses a similar found-footage conceit, with family members recording the haunting as it unfolds.

In the non-found footage category, there’s The Haunting in Connecticut (2009, with a sequel slated for this year), which claims to be based on a true story and has a family moving into an affordable house that they soon realize is haunted by a malevolent force. The trailer for the movie begins with the narration, “Why do bad things happen to good people? We didn’t ask for this, and we didn’t deserve it.” And of course there’s Insidious (2010, with a sequel currently in production), in which a middle class family with three kids moves into an old house full of spirits; a demon kidnaps one of the kids, trapping his consciousness on another plane of reality. The family moves to another house, but the spooks follow and the father must enter the spirit world to rescue the boy.

The latest entry in this new subgenre of haunted house movies is Dark Skies, which opens this week. Once again we have a middle class suburban family with kids that's threatened by a force from within. The twist is that the threat is extraterrestrials, but essentially they act like ghosts, appearing and disappearing from the shadows inside the home, occasionally being glimpsed on cameras the father has set up, and they're able to take over the bodies of family members. It’s a derivative movie borrowing mostly from Paranormal Activity, a good deal from exorcism movies, as well as taking tidbits from films such as Signs, The Mothman Prophecies, Room 1408 and The Shining. But what’s important are the similarities to the aforementioned films and what they tell us about contemporary anxieties.

There have been numerous articles in the news the past year about “the disappearing middle class” that discuss how – due to various economic forces, government policies, the outsourcing of work overseas and, in the U.S., healthcare costs – the rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer while the middle class struggles to survive. While other articles dispute this, regardless, there’s certainly a fear that deepened following the recession of 2008 and the mortgage crisis that saw countless families in the U.S. lose their homes.

These anxieties are reflected in this new genre cycle in several ways, and the home itself is the most obvious. The families in these movies are average, 30-something couples with at least two kids, whose existence largely revolves around achieving and maintaining large, comfortable suburban houses. Leaving these places is the last resort, so the families investigate the problems themselves, seek out specialists to drive the threat away, and even violently defend the home themselves. In Dark Skies, the father is out of work and the couple struggles to make mortgage payments; in The Haunting in Connecticut and the Amityville movies, the families take the houses knowing that they have sordid histories because the price is right; and in the Paranormal Activity films, the families stay in their houses long after any member of the audience would carry on admist slamming doors, flying knives and being dragged around by invisible entities. It's a lot to endure, but hey, so is finding another house at the right price.

This refusal to leave the home is also tied into the loss of control, and a large part of that is embodied by parents, most often fathers, not being able to protect their offspring. Children are endangered, possessed or abducted time and time again, demonstrating a sense of fatalism, that there are higher forces at work chipping away at the American Dream and the integrity of the family. When Virginia Madsen’s character proclaims in The Haunting in Connecticut that, “We didn’t ask for this, and we didn’t deserve it,” she might as well be talking about the housing crisis. The breadwinners are no longer bringing home the bacon, so to speak.

Medical bills are also a major concern in many of the films, as the children in Dark Skies, Insidious and The Haunting in Connecticut are faced with medical bills that are yet another heavy burden on the taxed families. Even if your child survives the physical effects of these intruders, chances are you'll go bankrupt.

Literal security comes into play too, as Dark Skies, the Paranormal Activity movies and Insidious all have scenes in which alarm systems malfunction and fail due to otherworldly interference. In fact, technology – mostly cameras but also baby monitors, walkie-talkies and televisions – malfunction, as well, revealing that the gadgets of the middle class consumer culture offer little comfort when the going gets tough. (One can also make a case for it being a commentary on voyeurism in the modern age, but the reality of the documentary-style consumer-level camera footage is really more of a budgetary choice for producers.)

And finally, there’s the foreboding sense that the nightmare is both inescapable and unending. The parents in Dark Skies are told that they were chosen by the aliens for no particular reason, and the supernatural threats in Paranormal Activity, Sinister and Insidious plague the actual families themselves, rather than being localized to a particular spooky, old house. These families can’t escape by simply moving. Almost all of these movies are in the process of getting the sequel treatment, which means the horror goes on and on and on.

Welcome to the suburbs, the 21^st century version of hell. We didn't ask for this, and we don't deserve it...

 

-Dave Alexander

It’s Valentine’s Day, and it’s time to celebrate something we all love on the occasion of its 25^th anniversary: Die Hard. The 1988 action movie that launched Bruce Willis’ career and four sequels – part five, A Good Day to Die Hard, is out this week – has inspired all kinds of fan love. So, if you just can’t get enough of bad guy buster extraordinaire John McClane, I’ve put together a five ways to further indulge your love of the franchise that brings out the yippee ki-yay in all of us.

 

Read Nothing Lasts Forever

That’s the title of the original book that Die Hard is based on, by crime writer Roderick Thorp. Published in 1979, it was a sequel to his book The Detective (which was adapted into a movie starring Frank Sinatra) and inspired by a dream that the author had after watching the 1974 disaster thriller The Towering Inferno, which features a burning skyscraper.

In the book, our hero is a former WWII fighter pilot and retired NYPD police detective named Joe Leland, who’s visiting his daughter at the headquarters of an oil company where she works. It’s her Christmas party, but before they can leave, German terrorists led by one Anton Gruber take the office workers hostage in order to take down the company. Joe slips away (barefoot) and takes on the terrorists with the police-issue Browning pistol that he still carries. (The book came back into print late last year after being unavailable for two decades.) 

As a kid, I had a habit of reading the book version of any movie that I loved, and when this was reissued in the late 1980s under the title Die Hard, I gobbled it up and was confused as to why the characters had different names, but I loved how gritty the story was in this incarnation. Thorp’s tale is bloody and hardboiled, with Leland fighting not just the bad guys and his own wounds, but also his age and a more fragile mental state. The ending is darker too, but I won't spoil it. Willis, now in his 50s, is about the same age as the character was originally portrayed.

 

Listen to Music Inspired by the Film’s Heavy

Die Hard’s merciless, pompous German terrorist villain Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) has developed his own following, particularly among bands that have named songs after him. Hardcore group Graf Orlock has not only a track called “Hans Gruber,” the band’s labels sells a shirt based on it, featuring Hans and the quote, “The benefits of a classical education.”

Thrash band Genetic Mutation also has a song called “Hans Gruber,” featuring, “Yippee ki-yay, motherf**ker.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQiS_p21mOQ

For something slower, with an indie vibe, Laserfang rocks an eight-and-a-half-minute track titled, you guessed it, “Hans Gruber.”

 I also dug up an obscure German dance band named Belestandes Materiel, which released a song called “Hans Gruber” and an emo-y indie group called Wintermute that penned a track called “The Fall of Hans Gruber.”

 

Watch Die Hard Movie Fans reviews

The shtick: two regular dudes hanging out in their living room, dressed up like John McClane, review new movies, rating them on how they stack up to Die Hard. For example, they compare the tiger in Life of Pi to Hans Gruber; think about how The Hobbit, as a prequel, reminds them of what McClane’s life was like before the events of Die Hard; wonder how McClane would do in a fight against Liam Neeson in Taken 2; and get completely baffled by Les Miserables

 

Read or Write Some Die Hard Fan Fiction

If you dare… This is about as far down the fan rabbit hole as you can go, and given the Die Hard-themed slash fiction entries on FanFiction.net, that phrase takes on a whole other meaning. Titles include Hostage of Obsession, An Abnormal McClane Christmas, What Really Happened to Hans Gruber?, Die Hard Literally and A Bigger Set of Balls. For mega-, open-minded DH fans only.

 

Watch Die Hard Parodies

My personal fave is this trailer from the The Ben Stiller Show, in which Stiller stars in Die Hard 12: Die Hungry. It takes place in a supermarket and features lines such as “scum-check in aisle six.” Bob Odenkirk and Janeane Garofalo also appear. Stiller does a hilarious Willis.

 

Almost as good, though more dated, is the Woody Allen-Die Hard mash-up from Mad TV, called Die Hard Woody Allen. These fan-made ones, from Greg and Lou and Rigor Tortoise are worth a watch too. And, of course, there’s always this thirty-second version of Die Hard performed by animated bunnies…

Lastly, have a happy Valentine's Day... with a vengeance.

-Dave Alexander