Affinity #21

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The Collection Project Film of the Day:

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For many years, the sole draw for me of the 1986 sort-of-horror-but-mostly-suspense film The Stepfather (d. Joseph Ruben) was the fact that it was written by Donald E. Westlake, creator of the amoral thief named Parker, and author of any number of classic, brilliant crime novels. When I finally saw the film last year, after it was released, at last, on DVD to coincide with a quickly forgotten remake, I can't pretend that I wasn't let down. Though Westlake gets the lone screenwriting credit, it's no secret that Ruben sort of messed with it afterwards, and it's sort of hard not the think that the basically rote thriller elements of the last third came from Ruben, not Westlake (though maybe that's wishful thinking on my part). Not that Ruben doesn't do a good job actually directing the film -- the reveal of that massacred family at the beginning is superb, for instance -- but the more of Westlake's fiction I read, the more I can't help looking at The Stepfather and thinking "if only", "what if", and etc.

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However, the other thing that happened by the time I got around to watching the film was that I'd become a huge fan of the film's star, Terry O'Quinn, who for the past six years has been mesmerizing on a weekly basis on TV's Lost. O'Quinn is a sublime, effortless actor, and his presence in The Stepfather was almost as big an incentive to watch the film as Westlake's involvement. Unlike Westlake's work, however, O'Quinn's performance is pretty much an unqualified success. The big moment in The Stepfather is towards the end, when Jerry Blake, O'Quinn's character, makes one slip-up while talking to his wife (Shelley Hack) that brings his whole secret world -- as a man who marries into father- and husbandless families, whom he then butchers when his badly skewed, idyllic view of how that family should operate doesn't pan out -- comes crashing down around him. O'Quinn's signature line at that moment ("Waaaait a minute -- who am I here?") is so good, his delivery so beautifully tweaked to expose not only Blake's diseased brain, which we already knew about anyway, but the amount of stuff he keeps in that brain, the stuff he needs to keep straight in order to function, and also the resignation that his plans for moving on are going to have to be speeded up, that the producers of the film, or whoever, did what stupid people always do and blew their film's iconic moment by slapping it on the poster.

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Oh well. It still works like gangbusters, and represents to me one of the finest moments of writing, but primarily of acting, in the psycho-thriller genre, and further points to what The Stepfather might have been had some people not been concerned that the film as originally laid out to them, before the cameras rolled, didn't resemble closely enough all the movies they were trying to cash in on.

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Ah, I'm being cynical. Terry O'Quinn is awesome.

That's a Pretty Funny Looking Centipede

.Here's what I think happened: Tom Six was struggling to think of a truly ghastly and shocking hook for his new horror film, and was coming up empty. Everything, it seemed to him, had been done already. Every conceivable bit of grotesquerie that might make an audience vomit or flee had either already been done in the 70s, or by the Japanese, or by Pasolini all by his lonesome. Disconsolate, Six tried to unwind with a little on-line pornography, when he stumbled across a particular type of video, and thought, "Well now hey..." As a result, we now have The Human Centipede. Thanks a lot, porn.
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The Human Centipede is, of course, the new arthouse shock-horror film that's now being talked up everywhere that might be likely to talk up such things, and Tom Six is its writer-director. The reason the film is on anyone's radar is because of the premise, which is very nearly described by the title. That premise is as follows: in Germany, two hard-partying American girls (Ashley C. Williams and Ashlynn Yennie) find themselves lost in the rain and trees of the semi-rural German countryside when they stumble upon the house of a mad doctor (Dieter Laser), who drugs them both. Adding to his new cache of guinea pigs a Japanese tourist (Akihiro Kitamura) who he kidnaps off-screen, the doctor -- who publicly specializes in separating Siamese twins -- conducts his dream surgery/experiment, and slices and grafts and stitches his three victims together, connecting them mouth-to-anus, forming what he calls a "human centipede".

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And voilá -- instant shock classic, I suppose. Because make no mistake: that premise is the movie. Well, that and Dieter Laser, who I'll admit has an undeniable presence, and provides the film with a better central performance than it deserves. But outside of that the film is curiously inert and unimaginative. Stylistically, it's positively barren, unless by "style" you're willing to count the fact that the inside of the doctor's house is mostly white. I can recall no setting of mood through framing, or pace, or anything that might indicate that Tom Six has a filmmaker's eye. The only thing he brings to the table, if you want to view this as a positive, is that centipede idea, and here's the joke about that: it's not even that shocking. On paper, yes, sure (but also kind of stupid, and strained, and inorganic), but in execution what you end up with is three people on all fours whose lower torsos are swaddled in bandages, and whose faces are connected to the next-one-along's posterior also by bandages. Besides some hint of Joker-style scarring on their cheeks, bandages do the work that, in most horror films, would be handled by the make-up department. The final effect of this is of three people not surgically grafted together, but rather tied together, and not even that securely.

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Please understand, it's not that I desired to see this idea presented in a more robust and direct manner, but I would think that if you're going to have this idea in the first place, and like it enough to base an entire film around it, you'd at least have the courage of your own convictions and go ahead and actually do it. But no, this shocking film is almost ridiculously unshocking, and I was left wondering why anyone even bothered. And it's not even that the film has other things on its mind: there is a particular biologically unavoidable bit of awfulness inherent in this whole human centipede idea that is addressed, and it's handled by having Kitamura, who plays the front of the centipede and therefore is the only one who can speak, say "Oh no, that's about to happen!", followed by a shot of the girl behind him making eye motions that indicate she'd rather it didn't happen. That's it, and this biological imperative is never made apparent as an aspect of their daily torture. Again, I'm glad I didn't see anything like that, but I say to you, Tom Six: This movie was your idea, motherfucker. You shoulder the burden of thinking things through, and showing, or addressing but not showing -- depending on the form, structure, and style (which you don't have) used to make the movie -- what can reasonably be extrapolated from your premise. I shouldn't have to do that for you.

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The final question about The Human Centipede is how we're intended, finally, to take it. Quite a few people are claiming that it can only work if viewed as a black comedy, and I'll grant that Laser's performance does feed that theory at times, but if that's the tone Six was aiming for, he misses for one very simple reason: it's not funny. Not in the "such things shouldn't be joked about" sense, but in the "I didn't laugh when I guess I was supposed to" sense. So with that out of the way, we're left to wonder how it works as a horror film. The answer is "Not that well". Among the reasons for that is the poor execution of the film's only horrible idea, and that colors everything else. I could also argue that the three victims don't exist as human beings, even before they get turned into a centipede, but that would be okay if I ever believed they were truly suffering, which, because I don't find pretty clean-looking bandages to be inherently terrible, I didn't. The closest the film comes to achieving horror is at the very end, when we reach what could probably be regarded as the inevitable punchline. This coda is pretty unspeakable, but we reach that point because one character behaves in a way that is completely illogical, and which in no way reflects their behavior up to that point. So the one moment that might actually have an impact isn't even come by honestly.

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Like I said at the beginning: thanks a lot, porn.

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The Collection Project Film of the Day:

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One thing I've heard more than once from admirers of The Human Centipede -- and so intended, I can only conclude, as praise for what Tom Six has given us -- is "This isn't Hostel." No indeed it is not, because Hostel (d. Eli Roth) is much better.

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There's no question that Roth's film -- about a small group of horny male tourists finding themselves up-for-sale in a Slovakian club that offers human beings as high-priced murder victims -- is a flawed film, but viewed in relation to The Human Centipede it seems positively inspired. Roth has taken a lot of flack over the years, sometimes for good reason, but I think it's impossible to deny that the guy has talent. My frustration with him as a filmmaker is that he sometimes lacks follow-through, but watching Hostel again today I was once again impressed not only by his eye, and sense of tone (the opening credits of Hostel have more style, mood, and sense of creeping dread than the entirety of The Human Centipede), and, more than anything, his ability to craft small moments amidst the over-the-top mayhem. There's the moment when one of the clients of the Slovakian murder club, a German man, realizes that his victim can beg for his life in a language that he, the client, understands (he bought an American, but the guy happens to know German), and the client then loses almost all sense of power. Or Rick Hoffman in a brilliant turn as an American client, whose aggression and sociopathy almost overwhelm his ability to speak. Or the Japanese client (Takashi Miike) , who says of the club, "Be careful -- you can spend all your money in there", as though he were just leaving a casino.

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Hostel is full of little touches like that, and when you get right down to it, I think that's the real difference, because The Human Centipede has no little touches. There's no eye for detail, or humanity, or behavior, and no ear for human speech (Roth has a bit of that, too) beyond the level of competency. Hostel is, whatever you think of it, a real movie, and The Human Centipede exists only so people can say "Can you believe they made a movie about stitching people's mouths to other people's asses?"

I Can't Tell You That, Bru

Today I watched Peter Hyams's Capricorn One for the first time, and I was struck by a couple of things. One of those things was not exactly a revelation, but is worth noting anyway (and which will, in any case, lead me to the second thing) and it is that Hal Holbrook is a brilliant actor. He has at least three big scenes in Hyams's paranoid thriller about a faked NASA Mars-landing. In the first one, Holbrook, as NASA bigwig Dr. Kelloway, is laying out the truth behind the Capricorn One mission to the three astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Waterston, and -- ah well -- O. J. Simpson) who, just moments ago, believed that a bomb was going to go off under their asses and blow them clean to Mars, for real. Skipping ahead to the second scene, Kelloway is conducting a press conference in which he announces that the three astronauts were killed on re-entry (they weren't, because they never went to Mars, but Kelloway is working behind the scenes to make them actually dead). Finally, in the third scene, Kelloway is visiting the sort-of widow (Brenda Vaccaro, also superb) of one of the astronauts, hoping to talk her into attending a memorial service for her husband and the other two astronauts.

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In each scene, Kelloway is working towards his only goal throughout the film, one set up in that first scene with the three astronauts: he wants to save NASA. Dr. Kelloway has dreamed of building from the Mercury and Apollo programs for decades, but a series of setbacks have put the space program in jeopardy. In his speech to the astronauts, laying out the conspiracy, Holbrook plays Kelloway's desperation, passion, uncertainty and guilt so beautifully, with such precision, that it's nearly impossible for me to describe what he does, or how he does it. He lives that scene, as he lives the press conference, when Kelloway is hoping his speech, and the press, can somehow save his dreams, which by this point in the film he can sense are collapsing. Later, when he meets with Vaccaro, Holbrook plays this man, who we now know is willing to kill for what he wants, as a genuine old friend to this grieving woman.

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His scene with Vacarro is, in particular, a great one, top to bottom. Though Holbrook commands the other two scenes I've mentioned, he has less to do at the press conference (though check out his look of hopeful, but defeated, weariness as he delivers the "you tell me" section of his dialogue), and is playing off three stiffs in the early speech to the astronauts. The less said about Simpson the better, and, frankly, the same goes for Brolin (though for somewhat different reasons), but Waterston, a fine actor, seems bored. But not Holbrook, and later, not Vaccaro, either. Both of them are playing their roles in full, not caring, or not appearing to care, that they are nailing each moment, and each word, with everything they have, to the benefit of a high-end B movie.

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Which is as it should always be, of course, and that brings me to my second observation: Capricorn One is a movie seriously divided. Holbrook doesn't have a whole lot of scenes, but in the ones he has, he's given a lot of dialogue, and it's generally very well-written. The screenplay is by Hyams, a hugely frowned-upon filmmaker these days, but there are moments in Capricorn One when you sense a true writer, writing. And then you get goofball shit with Telly Savalas towards the end, you get a plot that collapses pretty badly, you get laugh-inducing slow-motion in the last seconds, and you get Elliot Gould, who probably felt as divided filming his scenes as I felt watching it.

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My hopes were not, I must admit, especially high for Capricorn One going into it, despite being praised by my pal Greg Ferrara. I figured it would be a fun, trashy 70s thriller -- effective, but silly. And it was. What I was wholly unprepared for was the untapped potential that's trying to bust out about every ten, fifteen minutes, whenever Holbrook appears as a good man who does evil things, or any time Gould gets a good scene (he also has a couple of real winners with Vaccaro). This should have been frustrating, I suppose, but I was not expecting performance, or dialogue, at this occasionally very high level, and so, finally, I was more delighted than anything else. Except now that I think back on it, yeah, it's sort of frustrating.

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The film Capricorn One most reminded me of -- and, coincidentally, today's Collection Project Film of the Day -- is Three Days of the Condor (d. Sydney Pollack). That's a film that has an absolutely stunning opening chunk, maybe the first ten or fifteen minutes. In that part of the film, Robert Redford, as a bookish, desk-bound CIA operative, leaves his similarly bookish and desk-bound colleagues to pick up lunch. While he's gone, a group of men break into the office and, coldly, efficiently, and wordlessly, gun everybody down. These characters, Redford's co-workers, have been set up just enough for us to buy into the sedentary nature of their positions within the CIA, and to be curious enough about them to wonder how they'll figure into the larger story. And then they're all dead, in a snap. In my view, this opening is so good, so chilling, that Three Days of the Condor never recovers. From that point on, the film becomes rote, and (worse) preachy, and even the appearance of Max von Sydow can't drag it by its collar back into the world of the movie it might have been. It's true that I am perhaps philosophically disinclined to fully embrace this sort of paranoid thriller, but I still think that Pollack and his collaborators front-loaded their film with all their best ideas (which, really, was an idea, singular), and could never match it.

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I wonder if something similar happened with Capricorn One. It's tempting to say that Hyams wasn't taking himself, or his film, as seriously as Pollack, Redford, et al, clearly did with Three Days of the Condor, but I think the film's best scenes indicate that yeah, he did take it seriously, and good for him. It's just that, ultimately, Kelloway was the one guy Hyams, as a writer, really invested in. Then he went one better and, in a masterstroke, cast Hal Holbrook. The result being that I want to see the film again, but this time put Holbrook as Kelloway front and center.

Gloom

.My wife told me, when we were first going out, that I reminded her of Eeyore. Today, I am proving that assessment to be a fair one. As a result of my down mood, nothing I planned to write this weekend has found itself written, nor will it. However, I have that whole new thing going, and I can't very well start blowing it off a week in. So...

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The Collection Project Movie of the Day:.

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Among the things that make me gloomy lately is the fact that my region-free DVD player is on the blink, has been for some time, and for various reasons I've taken no steps to replace it, resulting in an inability to watch any of my foreign-region DVDs. Out of those, 10 Rillington Place (d. Richard Fleischer) is about as gloomy -- bracingly so, if "bracingly gloomy" is an achievable state -- a film as you're likely to find. It's the true story not just of English serial killer John Reginald Christie (a terrifying Richard Attenborough) and his crimes, but of the ghastly fate of Timothy Evans (an as-ever brilliant John Hurt), husband of one of Christie's victims, and, with his wife, one of Christie's boarders at the now-infamous titular address. Watching the ending of this emotionally brutal film unfold, there's a sense of outrage that is increased by the impotence one feels upon reminding oneself that you're not only watching a movie, but that the true events being depicted happened about 60 years ago, and, brother, that ship has sailed.
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It's a nasty and relentlessly hopeless movie, filmed by Fleischer -- this is his best, from what I've seen -- as a kind of kitchen-sink nightmare that seems to be saying "When you're in the clutches of despair, be careful of who you call 'friend.'"

CENSORED

Even though this happened again, it's no problem. Don't worry about it. Nothing about this situation will keep you from making fun of Christians.


The Collection Project Movie of the Day:

South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (d. Trey Parker) is, in fact, a pretty funny movie. Satan's "Up There" number still absolutely kills me, and I remember seeing this in the theater, not thinking much of it, and then catching it on video and laughing myself stupid. But looking back on it now, the fact that the film was so widely embraced as sharp piece of satire seems pretty unsurprising. Which is not to say that it isn't that, but Trey Parker and Matt Stone are going after a pretty big, and pretty easy, target, which is censorship, with added shots at the military, and celebrities, and so forth. The big ones are censorship and parental responsibility, and I feel like that was all pretty low-hanging fruit, even at the time. Doesn't change the fact that it's funny, but I wouldn't call it necessarily brave. Still, critics, by and large, had the South Park film's back at the time, and it's considered something of a classic now. Parker and Stone have gone on to better things, and smarter, less obvious satire, since then, and have taken one or two stances that have taken real guts. The shit has hit the fan more than once, and the outrage tends to be strangely muted. Quiet murmurs of "Oh, that shouldn't be" followed up by a flurry of "Yes, but" qualifications tends to be the order of the day.

Stone and Parker need to change networks, or go on-line exclusively, or something. Anything to get away from this hypocrisy.

You Gotta Have an Opinion!

Do you think God came down from heaven and sto--
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That part still makes me laugh, and clearly it’s still one of Pulp Fiction’s iconic moments. But while Marvin’s death is usually discussed, if at all, as one of those troubling crossroads where violence and comedy meet, what it signals to me is the moment when Tarantino’s film becomes brilliant.

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Let me add, hastily, that by no stretch do I consider Pulp Fiction to be Tarantino’s best film. It, and Reservoir Dogs previously, haven’t aged as smoothly as I would have liked, but since Pulp Fiction is the film that knocked everyone on their ass, before most of them knew who Tarantino was, it tends (like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights), in my view, to get over-valued. Those opening scenes between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, for instance, tend to grate on me more than they used to. Not that I think Tarantino has anything to prove – the two Kill Bill films and Inglourious Basterds, not to mention Jackie Brown, have done more to confirm his vast talent for me than any Pulp Fiction-related nostalgia ever could. But I think Pulp Fiction gets a bit of a pass from some people, because they remember what it was like to see it for the first time.

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Still. Marvin’s head coming apart signals the beginning of the slow reveal of the film’s structure, and that fractured storytelling – much aped, often poorly, since the Pulp Fiction’s release – is still well worth celebrating. The story isn’t randomly jumbled up, and it’s not done so for some arbitrary reason, like it wants to “keep people guessing”. There is that revelatory moment in the diner, while Vincent and Jules are eating and talking, unwinding after the madness they’ve just been through (all that happened before noon!?), when the film repeats Tim Roth’s “Garcon! Coffee!” line, and the audience realizes what’s coming, and that opening with Roth and Amanda Plummer was not just some statement of attitude, but had a real narrative purpose. And we all began to feel giddy – expecting, let’s face it, more hilarious violence – but that’s not what we get. Later, when it’s all over, you start to think: Wait, when does Vincent die? Jules is already out of the picture by that point, isn’t he? He’s left the hitman business. Vincent hasn’t, and now he’s sprawled out in Butch’s bathtub, stitched up the front with his own gun. Huh. It would appear that, in Vincent’s case, the tyranny of evil men has had the Lord’s vengeance laid down up him. Not so Jules.

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This could have all been communicated in a linear fashion, but in no way would it carry that same resonance. The Kill Bill films unfold in the same way, with, if anything, even more audacity, but, for many filmgoers of a certain age, Pulp Fiction offered a certain kind of soulfulness in its winding narrative that was particularly unexpected, and still highly valued.

The Collection Project: You Don't Know What Fear Is

Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright was not anywhere near as stage-bound -- or backstage bound -- as I expected it to be. The film is about a woman named Eve Gill (Jane Wyman) who, with the help of her worldly father (Alastair Sim) tries to prove the innocence of a man named Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd), who is an actor, and who Eve is in love with, and who, in turn, is trying to protect the person who he says is the true killer, famous stage actress Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich), who is also the victim's wife. So that's two actors, and Eve herself is an acting student. Furthermore, much is made of Charlotte's willingness to go back on stage so soon after the brutal killing of her husband, and Eve uses her theater skills to aid her in her amateur sleuthing, which forms the core of the film's action.

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But what I expected from the film -- based on nothing but speculation, and a sort of hope that such a film from Hitchcock would be good fun -- was some sort of murder mystery, perhaps of the And Then There Were None variety, set in the wings and dressing rooms of a London theater. Most of Stage Fright's plot exists away from such a setting, except for a few scattered scenes here and there, and the climax (which in not-atypical Hitchcock fashion calls back to what you'd think would be a throwaway gag in the opening credits). Outside of that, mousy little Eve Gill is bouncing back and forth between her home, her father's home, Charlotte's home, and various pubs and cafés in which she meets a police detective named Wilfred Smith (Michael Wilding, to whom Alan Cumming bears a striking resemblance). I'll admit to being slightly disappointed by this fact, as I wanted to see the movie I'd made up in my head and then assumed Hitchcock had made, rather than the one that has existed independent of my ignorance of its true contents for sixty years.

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Of course, the film itself is quite good -- a blatant lark on Hitchcock's part, but Hitchcock's larks are quite a different thing from the larks of other filmmakers, who tend to only make such films when they feel like slumming. I've gathered that Hitchcock was a bit down on Stage Fright in later years, because he had misgivings about the "false flashback" device that sets Eve on her ill-advised path. Not to give too much away -- well, okay, this is going to give away quite a bit -- but in Stage Fright Hitchcock upends both his often-expressed fear of the police (which never got much of a full-blown expression in his films anyway, and existed most completely in answers to interview questions), and his empathy for the Wrong Man. It's this latter bit that is central to the false flashback, which Hitchock apparently deeply regretted because it was basically a lie. Some version of the "false flashback" -- in which the audience is led to believe one particular thing to be true about how the characters have reach the point at which we meet them at the beginning of the film, only to have that proved entirely false in the last minutes -- survives, and even thrives, to this day, and nobody who now uses it seems to be too bothered about it. And frankly, Hitchcock is one of the few people who can really make it work, possibly because Stage Fright is less an exercise in suspense (though there's some especially nice stuff in that regard at the end) and more of a series of fun, funny character moments, played well by a strong ensemble cast, all of which is anchored by a not-particularly-tricky thriller plot. Alastair Sim, Jane Wyman and Michael Wilding are all very good, and a pleasure to hang out with, and they're what lift the film.

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But the weak link? Marlene Dietrich. She's simply not that good in this film, and no, I didn't like "The Laziest Gal in Town", either, at least not the way she sings it.

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It's interesting, then, that some version of what I expected Hitchcock's film to be can be found in Michele Soavi's lunatic Italian slasher film Stagefright. Which is not to say that I expected to see a slasher film from the Alfred Hitchcock who made movies in the 1950s, but I fully expected, had he lived well into the 1970s, that he would have gotten there (just look at his plans for the never-filmed Kaleidoscope Frenzy). Besides, Italian thriller and horror directors often owe sizable and acknowledged debts to Hitchcock, with their often out-sized suspense set-pieces.

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This Italian take on the genre -- giallo films, as if I needed to tell you -- is not something I've historically gotten along with, outside of isolated moments, a scattering of Mario Bava films, and pretty much the entirety of Dario Argento's Tenebrae. The problem for me is often based on a sloppiness of storytelling, and an inability to believe that what I'm watching on-screen is ever happening to actual people. The genre's advocates, who are legion, would probably tell me that I'm missing the point, that the films are all about style, but I don't much like the idea of having to ignore half of the reasons I go to movies in the first place. Up to this point, one of the greatest offenders in all of Italian genre filmmaking was Michele Soavi's Cemetery Man, a highly-regarded film that, to me, was simply loaded with bad jokes and spookhouse lighting, and a tone that reminded me of Peter Jackson's early splatstick films, which I also don't like.

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So you can imagine both my dismay and delight to discover how much I enjoyed Soavi's Stagefright. Not that it's such a tightly plotted piece of work, but it is a sparely plotted piece of work. It's quite simple: a down-at-the-heels theater company is putting on an absolutely bugnuts-looking musical based loosely on a local serial killer. That serial killer escapes from the mental institution, finds his way into the theater, and begins killing everybody. That's it, so Soavi is much more free to let his film live on its truly bizarre and endlessly striking imagery, as the killer -- wearing the dark suit and owl-mask used for his character in the musical -- hacks his way coldly through our cast, without having to worry about ignoring another aspect of his film, because there isn't one.

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Soavi is not exactly Hitchcock, but one moment in the film made me think of one of Hitchcock's most icily humane moments. In Soavi's Stagefright, the killer makes his presence in the theater (the cast and crew are locked up under police supervision while they rehearse) by joining in on a scene being prepared on stage that involves the killer in the show murdering a woman in her bed. The actress playing the victim, Corinne (Lori Parell) believes she's playing the part with Brett (John Morghen), but of course she's not, and after the killer has stabbed her repeatedly and let her drop to the stage, Soavi shows her lying there, gushing blood and struggling to breathe, her eyes glassy and confused, as, in the background, the other actors and crew come rushing to her aid. This is a bleakly human moment in what is not a particularly human film, and it put me in mind of Marion Crane as she collapsed in the shower, her life swirling away from her, never quite sure what had just happened.

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But it's that owl-faced killer that really sells Soavi's film, as there is not a moment he's on-screen where the image of a man in an owl mask attacking people with knives and chainsaws that isn't also supremely effective. It's a genuinely bizarre choice, that owl mask. As it exists in the musical the company is trying to stage, it's just kind of stupid (the only explanation for it is that the musical is called The Night Owl), but once it's being worn by an actual murderer, it takes on a nightmare quality that you don't come across every day. The moment when a character shines his flashlight through a hole in the floor and illuminates that owl man carving a woman up with a chainsaw, or later, when he seats himself among his grisly trophies in one of the most grotesquely creepy scenes I've ever encountered, I knew I was watching truly unique horror imagery, the kind that many try to manufacture, or buy, or steal, but which Soavi just lets be.

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