16th March 2009

GITS: From The Vault?

Irony abounds this week as the following really is from the vault. Or at least the dark recesses of the internet where old ‘Gore In the Store’ columns -- from an era when about 3 people read the column (as opposed to the current 7) -- go to die. So, in response to some typically industrious posting on the forums, I wish to humbly cannibalise my own ramblings and thrust the following unceremoniously in your eager and willing faces.

“Dead and Buried”: Gary Sherman is one of horror cinema’s great contenders. After a duo of sterling chillers almost a decade apart, the late 1980s signalled a puzzling lull either in his ambition, his drive or the ubiquitous streak of cynical glee with which he pilloried a varied array of cultural staples. But, like fellow low-budget maestro Joe Dante, Sherman was, at his best, capable of tapping into a grandly idealistic and nostalgic evocation of a specific time or place before twisting it deliciously to his own perverse ends, to the delight of horror audiences everywhere.

His 1972 feature debut, ”Death Line” (known as “Raw Meat” in the US), represents this ideology perfectly. With the same spirit John Landis’ “An American Werewolf In London” would exhibit almost a decade later, Sherman’s picture is an hilariously astute observation of swinging London Town’s more eccentric attributes. That they are both pictures made by foreigners is no coincidence. As an evocative snapshot of a particular and peculiar time in Britain (pre-Thatcherite but with Northern Ireland in turmoil and the switch to a new currency still creating upheaval in the economic balance and with a new anarchic and invigorated youth movement very much on the rise), “Death Line”’s hippy protagonists, staid establishment bureaucrats and its ultimate proletariat “villain” -- a CHUD who’s literally from another age -- paint a grimly sardonic picture of a society in a downward spiral.

Of course, it was also a quietly bravura horror yarn with more than a handful of indelible highlights. The idiosyncratic opening credits, the audacious 360-degree introduction to the cannibal’s cave and the creature’s plaintive and pathetic regurgitation of the only words its addled brain can recall, “Mind The Doors”, are vital moments to be cherished alongside the best in Hammer and Amicus.

Eight years later, and Sherman, a native of Chicago, was back on the other side of the Atlantic, this time taking a poke at the pervasive aura the of small town American idyll in “Dead & Buried”. Based on a script by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusset -- whose own peculiar brand of social commentary had underpinned the horror of “Alien”, with its working class trucker protagonists -- the picture fits beautifully within a series of cinematic portraits of small towns run amok, all of which were released in the Reganomic-era. Building inexorably and ever more anarchically on the theme of a disillusioned America that was mined throughout the 70s in such pictures as “Salem’s Lot”, “The Stepford Wives”, “Eaten Alive” and “Motel Hell”, practically an entire film festival could be put together alongside “Dead & Buried”. A fucking brilliant one, at that:

Joe Dante’s “Gremlins”; Fred Dekker’s “Night Of The Creeps” & “The Monster Squad”; “Strange Invaders”; “Something Wicked This Way Comes”; “Fright Night”; “Blue Velvet”; “Impulse”; “The Fog”; ”The Prowler”; “My Bloody Valentine”. All these deceptively sharp little tales took the concept of loving thy neighbour’s white washed picket fences and slung a bullet to its brain and a blade to its gullet/ear/nards.

In “Dead & Buried” the sacrosanct sanctity of a New England coastal haven called Potter’s Bluff belies a homicidal infatuation. The town maintaining its own veneer of perfection with a ruthless zeal buried beneath the unnervingly solicitous welcome afforded newcomers. It’s a device used to equally sly effect in Edgar Wright’s recent “Hot Fuzz” where the carnage that eventually results is equally as wild, devastating and absurdly entertaining.

As local Sheriff Dan Gillis (Treat Williams look-a-like James Farentino) begins investigating the bizarre deaths and disappearances that have become a troubling signature of the sleepy town under his jurisdiction, we encounter with a cavalcade of murderous denizens with which to grapple. Included amongst their number, a pre-“Nightmare On Elm Street”, post-”Eaten Alive”, all-oleaginous Robert Englund, as if the atmosphere wasn’t thick enough with unease.

From the outset it’s brutally apparent the folks of Potter’s Bluff don’t care one split skull for outsiders and in the course of their cleansing, we’re treated to some spectacularly nasty and eerily staged set–pieces. As the townsfolk prey upon unsuspecting travellers, something even more uncanny is unveiled. Those thought missing or dead begin materialising, embraced by the community with no recollection of the sinister fate which had previously befallen them.

In the end it’s more a mystery for the audience than for Sheriff Gillis, who, truth be told, does little resembling the kind of meritorious detective work one assumes would befit a law enforcement officer. Indeed, the latter part of the picture essentially becomes a drawn out and fantastically gothic extension of one of those wrap-up segments in an Agatha Christie whodunit where the arch criminal reveals how, indeed, he almost got away with it, step by bloody step. By the time the final nail is pummelled into the coffin from a most unexpected source, it’s been a delicious evisceration of everything Gillis has held dear and with which we associate ‘apple pie value’ America.

In addition to the elegantly baroque lighting of Steven Poster (who would go on to greater cult acclaim with 2nd Unit work on “Blade Runner” and cinematographic duties for “Donnie Darko”) and an eerily pastoral score by Joe Renzetti, the star of the show is the late, great Stan Winston. An early project for the then soon-to-become legendary effects pioneer (this was a few years before James Cameron propelled him to stardom with “The Terminator” and “Aliens”), “Dead and Buried” cemented his status as a dementedly accomplished craftsman. The picture’s Fulci-esque needle-in-the-eye sequence is gruesome enough, but it’s an early reel trick shot that really takes your breath away. A corpse sits motionless in an upturned, burnt out wreck of a car. As officials and paramedics mill around, concluding the latest grim task to which they’ve been assigned, Sheriff Gillis crouches to take a closer look at the ruined body of the victim. What happens next, a classic rendition of a well-worn gag, resonates through much of horror cinema to this day. David Fincher is certainly a fan -- I won’t explicitly give away why here -- and it’s testament to Winston and Sherman that this gag works just as well as when Fincher did it.

An under-appreciated gem released amid a flurry of similarly strong horror tiles in that truly prolific period during the early 1980s, it’s disheartening to think that Sherman has only sleazy vigilante thriller “Vice Squad”, quaintly gung-ho action spectacle “Wanted: Dead Or Alive” and the less-than-inspired third instalment of the “Poltergeist” making much of a splash on his CV.

Here’s hoping, as with Romero, Carpenter and Craven of late, the muse strikes once more for this creator of at least two under-sung classics in the horror firmament.

Newly released this week (because, like, you *all* need me to tell you what’s on the horror horizon, you ever-plugged in beauties, you) is a smattering of goodness:

“Bad Biology”. Rawshark may have mentioned this one. Has he? He might have. And well he might, I should add, as the return of Frank Henenlotter to filmmaking is something to celebrate. Those unable or unwilling to have been a devotee of horror in the 1980s will perhaps have had Henenlotter pass them by. To put it in (slightly tangential) context: what Hideo Nakata has done for black haired ghosts, Henenlotter did for the independent, grindhouse horror film -- the genre may be familiar, but he made us see it like never before.

Henenlotter took the vibe and trash aesthetic of skid row, gut crunchers like “I Drink Your Blood” (and a thousand other similar picture he beatified on the ‘Something Weird’ label, a distribution outfit of which was is/was a fulcrum) and brought them kicking and screaming into the post-Cronenberg, video age. The astonishingly rancid, gloriously wretched and tantalisingly lurid fables like “Basket Case”, “Brain Damage” and “Frankenhooker” were his legacy, a gift to exploitation fans everywhere.

Singing turd/cocks, exploding whores, enforced vivisection, mutant gang bangs and death by runaway lawnmower are but some of the vital shocks that engorged Henelotter’s absurdly entertaining run of mid-80s comedy shockers. Adding multi-clitoral perversion into the mix couldn’t be more fitting way for this prince of 42nd Street to enter the 21st Century.

“Midnight Meat Train”: I’m a huge fan of Kitamura’s kinetic insanity, though honestly, I long to see what Joe Lynch’s vision would have been for this. Despite a strange substitution of the (delicious, dark and wonderful) short story’s crepuscular NYC subway for the less lurid polish of what seems to be the LA metro system, a polite golf-clap is most certainly required for the successful deployment of CGI blood in at least one of the full-bore kill sequences. For once, via Kitamura’s frenzied camerawork, these pixels attain the visceral impact usually restricted to the 80s “prostheatrics” of Screaming Mad George, Tom Savini or John Carl Buechler. Reassuringly nasty stuff.

“100 Feet”: the new picture from Eric Red, a man whose recent tragic misfortune in life has given way to a new opportunity to come back from brink after nearly two decades in the wasteland of career-hell. Following the magnificence of “The Hitcher”, his co-written screenplays for “Near Dark”, “Blue Steel” (the Jamie Lee Curtis film, not Derek Zoolander’s 1000 yard pout) and the relative endearment of “Body Parts”, it would be a crying shame were this chance not capitalized upon. This picture’s “Disturbia”-meets-“Tales From The Crypt” premise sounds promising and Eric Red is a name spoken with just reverence by most horror fans over 25.

“Red Sands”: if this one sounds similar to “Blair Witch Project” director Daniel Myricks upcoming “The Objective”, just hold on one moment. Horror has a relatively fine modern lineage of war/horror hybrids: one of the best being “The Bunker”; the loudest being “Outpost; and the best cast being Michael J Basset’s “Deathwatch” (Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Matthew Rhys, Kris Marhsall…) Can the horrors of war be wrangled into the horrors that entertain gorehounds and terror fiends with any great aplomb? It’s been done before. Alex Turner and Simon Barrett, he gentlemen behind “Red Sands”, brought us the rather distinguished low budget chiller “Dead Birds” a couple years back, which is enough to make any serious genre fan sit up and take notice.