Alphabet TV! A is for.... American Horror Story

Having got bored of the movie offerings at our local DVD rental place (and with my wife feeling hard done by because we tend to watch a lot of my review movies that I pick from a list on Cinemania as well as any I pick at the shop) we decided to give TV series a go. However, as mild OCD is a guiding force in our lives, we decided the only rational way to do this was to start with the A's and work forward, watching one boxed set at a time until we loop around.

It's going well - we're currently watching the closest to a dire series we've gotten, and we're up to L. It also transpires that fitting TV epsiodes into our lives is currently easier than watching movies.

At this point it occurs to me that I really ought to document this in case anyone thinks it's amusing. Therefore behold and wonder at the awesome force of ALPHABET TV.

A is for... Amercan Horror Story

I didn't really have any expectations of this - though I was cynical about the capacity of a series to maintain the scares and atmosphere over a whole run.

I was initially really impressed - each episode seemed to have a new unique scary thing that genuinely creeped us out, and the theme music managed to give us the jitters pretty much every time.

The premise (only mild spoilers, I promise) is that a troubled family move into a house which for some reason causes everyone who dies there to become a ghost. The collection of ghosts are pretty unnerving (at least to start with) but toward the end of the season everything did kind of degenerate into "Desperate Housewives, but everyone's dead".

A noble experiment.

Lobotomy

Way back in 2011, in an attempt to stop neglecting this blog so much, I reviewed a terrible movie I'd watched called Asylum. If you can't be bothered going back and reading it my post in full, the movie was about teenagers being stalked and murdered by the ghost of a sadistic psychiatrist who wielded lobotomy picks as weapons. It was really very bad.

Anyhow, one of the things I mentioned in that review was that it was that the non-stupid bits of the killer psychiatrist's story loosely mirrored the life and work of Dr. Walter Freeman, the American physician who pioneered and did much to popularise the transorbital "icepick" lobotomy. I thought that it was a shame that Asylum ignored this connection in favour of really dumb slasher-backstory, because I feel like Freeman is kind of a tragic figure. He genuinely seems to have been motivated by what he saw as the best interests of people who would otherwise have been confined to state asylums.

The Psychologist has just put up a really interesting article about letters to Freeman from his patients and his responses - it's a really fascinating look at the way lobotomy was viewed at the time, and how it was able to continue for so long.

(Hat-tip to Mind Hacks for the link.)

Pet Hens Fry

Cinemania have my review of the big boxed set Stephen Fry's Inquisitive Documentaries. Is it good? It's Stephen Fry talking about stuff he's interested in, so if that sounds good to you it's very good.

The set includes Stephen Fry In America, Last Chance To See, Return of the Rhino (basically just another LCTS episode), and Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press. They're all good, go check out the review if you want more detail on why (it's MAAAAASSIVE is why I'm not going to rewrite it here).

Magic: part 4 - A practical example

Remember way back in the first one of these where I said I thought the distinction between "Magick" and stage magic was something of a false dichotomy? Here's what I mean: watch the video below - for as long as you can stand at least. Sorry for the random German subtitles - the version I watched initially has now been taken down.

Right. That woman's name is Kiesha Crowther, she calls herself Little Grandmother (here is her amazing personal website) and she is a Magus.

Depending on your personal definition of "Magus" you may well have a number of objections to that assertion. Her video is hokey as all get-out, and clearly bunk. Water is demonstrably not entirely made of crystals, there are almost certainly no "scientists" planning to hand out your personal stock of magic crystals to the people of Fukushima and dump them into the radioactive holding ponds because "love is stronger than radiation", and the idea that you personally will definitely have a large stock of magic crystals lying around is bizarre*. Moreover, if you've clicked through to her site you'll see that she's made a number of very bold claims about her supposed psychic abilities and the high degrees she holds in Native American traditional magics - these are all almost certainly lies as well.

But this misses the point.

A stage magician is not judged on their ability to actually saw people in half and magically heal them on the spot. A stage magician is judged on their ability to draw an audience into a consensus, misdirect their attention and provide a pleasing illusion that they have sawed someone in half. This takes a level of control over human perception which approaches the truly magical in the hands of a masterful practitioner - for a spectacular example check out this guy. Similarly, you can only judge the power of a Magus like Little Grandmother when you understand their true goal. In this case it's pretty simple - money, and the prestige necessary to create more money.

For those of you who didn't manage the whole video try it again, for those who did - pay close attention. Notice how crafted the whole thing is. She really does try to cover as many generically-New Age bases as she can, and even goes so far as to vaguely allude to some sort of Evil Big Government conspiracy to suppress True Knowledge toward the end there to try and bring in the survivalists. This is a magical ritual. She is trying to draw power from her followers to increase her stature and pull in some energy-in-the-form-of-money at the same time. The fact that her self-claimed powers are nonsense is entirely irrelevant because it's all misdirection - it's a carefully constructed mirage designed to hook into the cultural obsessions of largely white, fairly affluent, mostly-Americans, and me circa 1995.

And while she's no Crowley, Kiesha Crowther is powerful enough for her own ends. So long as she maintains her ritual Face Of Sincerity, keeps posing with massive crystals, and refuses to shut up she'll keep on getting speaking engagements and requests to run workshops and do rituals. She wields sufficient cultural force to have at least some of her detractors shouted down and shunned (if you really want you can check out the controversy on the New Age web here, but be warned - it's a hell of a rabbit hole). She's even been smart enough to keep her mythology sufficiently white-bread to leave her a back door out if she ever decides to "renounce" it all and "convert" to a more conservative racket like fundamentalist Evangelicalism.

Manipulation of the gap between perception and reality, resulting in a massive increase of personal power.

Magic.

_______
*Possibly less bizarre if you're one of the "Tribe Of Many Colours" she's addressing in this video, but still.

Mouldy Sushi

Cinemania has my reviews of Dead Sushi and Mold. They're both deliberate attempts to make "good bad" movies, and both unusual in that they (mostly) succeed.

Mold is a homage to 1980s cheapies that manages to pretty much nail the tone (and horrifying-yet-hilarious practical effects) of its terrible source material and riff on it at the same time. The framing device about an American government desperate for a new weapon in the War On Drugs is an almost total red herring, but that's actually no bad thing as the real issues tied up with America's relationship with Colombia would probably have either been mishandled or have detracted from the film's manic go-forward energy.

Dead Sushi is the most-recent full movie* from porn-director-turned-total-insanity-director Noboru Iguchi who seems to specialise in this sort of thing. It's completely nuts from start to finish and, aside from a weird sense of permanent slight misogyny, is a lot of fun. All you need to know is that it involves zombie sushi and climaxes with a flying sushi battleship and an axe-wielding tuna-mutant.

*He directed the "F is for Fart" sequence in The ABCs of Death more recently. This appears to be entirely in character, if you look at his non-porn filmography. Actually, looking at his porn filmography on Wikipedia is pretty fun too, if only because the totally-functional-and-descriptive titles that pornos get are hilarious when translated from one language to another.

The Cherry Psychomaniac and the Darkest Corner of Paradise

Cinemania has my reviews of Cherry, The Death Wheelers, and The Darkest Corner of Paradise.

Cherry and The Darkest Corner Of Paradise both felt like concept overreach to me. They seemed like they had big ideas in the back of their creators' minds which didn't end up actually translating to the screen. In Cherry, this was a meditation on the destructive capacity of human relationships and the "nice guy" myth which got muddied by the general unlikability of all its characters, while Paradise aspired to Taxi Driver but ended up with lots of scenes of a guy walking around in the dark (albeit attractively shot, and with a neat soundtrack) that led up to nothing much.

The Death Wheelers (originally and confusingly titled Psychomania) is an entirely different kettle of fish - an amazing 70s-kitsch time capsule and a great piece of English spooky-pagan horror. Sadly (I looked it up) the charmingly brutal Nicky Henson who plays the lead seems to have come to nothing in particular. This was also the last movie for George Sanders* before his suicide, and there's some suggestion that its poor reception at the time contributed to his depression.

Really the only downsides to Death Wheelers are its over-reliance on now-dated car chase scenes, and (on the version I got at least) the poor sound quality. Otherwise I'd highly recommend it to anyone who's into that sort of thing.

* The voice of Shere Khan in the Disney Jungle Book, amongst many many other things.

Pointless Mysteries

Cinemania has my reviews of Iron Doors and The Hunt.

They're both kinda average, though for my money The Hunt is slightly better. What's interesting to me is where they fall down - in both cases it's a mishandling of a central mystery.

It's an oft-repeated semi-truism that the stuff you make up in your own head is cooler, sexier, funnier or scarier than whatever an artist can depict. This is how H.P. Lovecraft's stuff works (his horrors are typically more suggested than described) why you hardly see any footage of the Alien in the first movie, and why the Goon Show is better than Monty Python.

Where this falls down, however, is when the mystery is more interesting by far than the actual content of your film. The plot of The Hunt presumes the existence of an organisation that exists to run human-hunting games for the rich. From the implications in the course of the movie, we see that this society is ancient and secretive, as well as highly ritualistic. Unfortunately, we never get more than implications - instead we watch a gutter journalist struggle through the forest while masked men shoot arrows at him.

In Iron Doors the central question is who decided to spend a vast amount of money turning a series of bank vaults into a hybrid of Cube and one of the more irritating point-and-click adventure games of the 1990s. There's a vague implication that it's perhaps to do with aliens or something, but that's pretty unsatisfying when the movie opens up the possibility that alien-abduction-by-Fear-Factor-style-gross-out-challenge is actually a thing that happens to people. Why? What purpose do the aliens fulfill by locking an oddly-accented* German banker in a vault until he finally has sex with a random African woman**? I mean, if that plan solves a problem then the problem must be pretty bloody interesting - more interesting by far than watching a guy agonise about drinking piss and eating maggots.

I did an improv workshop once as part of a conference I was at, and the presenters talked at length about "opening the door, and then going through it" - by which they meant having the courage to follow your ideas to their logical conclusions, even if those conclusions take you in strange directions.

Go watch The Cabin In The Woods (assuming you haven't already) for an example of how to do this right. No seriously, go watch it. It will improve every single bad horror movie you have ever watched or will ever watch by its simple existence. Do it.

EDITED TO ADD:
Film Crit Hulk has a great essay on the "convoluted blockbuster" over at Badass Digest which is relevant here - especially the bit about judging whether revealing stuff is more worthwhile than concealing it at any given time.

_____
*Seriously, the box says he's German and the movie is German - but he starts out sounding American then swings between generically-European and Irish for the rest of the film.

** The woman is pretty problematic in and of herself. The fact that she seems to be introduced into the maze for the benefit of the German banker is pretty gross, and I found myself really pissed off by the fact that she got subtitles when she was by herself, but not when she talked to the man.