Final Girl Film Club: 'City of the Living Dead'

(Best thing ever, btw: the backwards E's on this DVD cover. Silly zombies, they can't write good!)

My first Fulci! One hears about the ruthlessly baroque gore of Italian maestro Lucio Fulci -- his work even makes a cameo in "Juno" -- but nothing can really prepare one. "City of the Living Dead" (or, as fancy-pants IMDb has it, "Paura nella città dei morti viventi"*) should really be watched with a crowd, so everyone can bob heads to the catchy organ music and scream "Oh my God" during the gore sequences, and most particularly so everyone can say "What in the name of God just happened?" after the head-scratching ending. The Final Girl Film Club is the next best thing.

Plot's not really the point here, but briefly and with spoilers: During a seance, a comely psychic (Catriona MacColl) has a vision of a priest hanging himself in a cemetery and thereby opening the gates of hell. Paralyzed by fright, the psychic is buried alive and rescued by a cigar-chomping reporter (Christopher George, of "Pieces"! (Or as IMDb has it, "Mil gritos tiene la noche." What is with you, IMDb?)). The two of them set off together to find the cemetery and close the gates before all hell breaks loose. While they're getting their act together, lots of craziness starts going on in Dunwich, the town with the cemetery in question. (Nice Lovecraft reference there, Fulci babe.) This movie doesn't make much sense and it's not really good, per se, but it is a blast to watch.

First, the live burial: This entire sequence is just fantastic, starting with the eerie shots of Catriona lying in her coffin. I wasn't expecting this to go the live-burial direction; I figured she'd just be a zombie or something; and when her eyes flew open and she started gasping for breath and clawing at the coffin lid, oh my, the effect was very chilling. The big lesson here is that if you are going to get buried alive, make sure ANYONE rescues you besides Christopher George. He waits about an hour to respond to her shrieks and then nearly puts a pickaxe through her skull. It's worth it for you, the viewer, because the payoff is the fantastic image below.

Meanwhile, particularly unpleasant things are happening in the town of Dunwich. The gates of hell are being unleashed in the form of a zombie plague; I expected the zombies to advance upon the townspeople in a straightforward manner, but since these are the devil's zombies, their ways are more roundabout. They like to appear and disappear, often covered in earthworms (not a lot of gardeners in Dunwich, apparently, since no one is happy to see the worms). Other strange things happen: a mirror cracks and the shards begin to bleed; a cat freaks out; the streets are filled with creepy sounds, like howler monkeys and crying babies.

But mainly it's a plague of zombies, who bring about some very baroque deaths! The most vivid of these is the famous intestine-vomiting scene -- oh, I am so grateful not to have seen this as an impressionable tyke, because I would have been scared of throwing up to this day. (I mean, I still don't like it, but damn.) A girl sees the priest zombie standing outside her car, a nice scare in itself, and within seconds she's bleeding out the eyes. Then stuff starts coming out of her mouth. I actually put down my tea and started repeating "Oh my God. Oh my GOD." If watching the buried-alive sequence is like sipping a fine chilled martini, this is like slamming a shot of tequila. I mean, damn.

Also famous is the drill through the head sequence, which is just what it sounds like! My favorite thing about this is how early you see the drill. By this point, even the Fulci virgin knows he's not going to power up a drill and let it just sit there without poking a hole in somebody. You (and the victim) get to watch it coming, and watch, and watch, and watch. It's a little like the steamroller sequence from "Austin Powers." Again, this is where it would be fun to have a room full of people screaming "Here it comes!"

And then there's the ending. I found a couple Web reviews that referred to the "much-discussed" ending, but I didn't find much discussion. What, ah, what happened there? Johann, Peewee, Final Girl, help!

Also, I loved how game the cast is. They had goofy dialogue and inexplicable plotlines to deal with but they all just seem really committed. I particularly adore the actresses, who nearly all have to bleed out of their eyes at some point, and most of whom have to do something worse; even the heroine is willing to foam at the mouth. Plus all the main cast members get covered in writhing maggots in one memorable scene. (It's nothing like Argento plunging Jennifer Connelly into a maggoty pit in "Phenomena," but I am not getting into the Argento-Fulci discussion right now.) The point is, these people are troupers! Fulci must have been quite persuasive. "You weel wear maggots on your face! Eet ees perfect."

*I guess this means "Terror from the city of the living dead," in case it wants clarifying that the living dead are scary.

So my friend made a movie and it's gorgeous, or, You shouldn't have come here.

There are a handful of movies that authentically replicate the feel of a dream: "Evil Dead"; "Don't Look Now"; "Carnival of Souls"; "Picnic at Hanging Rock"; parts of "Edward Scissorhands" and the 1992 "Last of the Mohicans"; even fragments of the vigorously campy "Night of the Comet." And then there's Robert Beaucage's Spike, which is part nightmare and part love story and part fairy tale, and all dream. I just finished watching it for the third time and I'm anxious to just go to sleep, all swathed in the mood of it (I did that one night last week, and ladies, it was lovely), but tonight I just want to write about it. Around middle school I used to stay up past midnight writing in my diary (my version of rebellion) and this movie puts me back into that exact mood. It's deeply, deeply unsettling. I mean, how does this movie reach that place? How does it know? Even I had forgotten.

I have been dithering with how to write about this movie here, because I wouldn't have seen it if I didn't know the director -- it's not out on DVD yet and I missed its showing at Shriekfest earlier this year. This isn't a situation I've really come across in LA yet, and I've had the little Homer Simpson angel and devil on my shoulders saying "You just like it because it's your friend's movie" and "Shut up, you!" and "Yes sir *poof*" and frankly it's very tiring for a middle child like me. Dammit, I'm not a professional blogger, I'm just a person, and if I didn't like his movie I would just tell him "Well, that was very interesting" (that's what we say back home for "God almighty, get me out of here") and not worry about it here in Emma-land. But all I can speak for is myself, and this movie just gets to me. It's unsettling as hell.

The plot is pretty simple, really. Two couples are driving at night through the woods in a relentlessly quaint vehicle (what is that thing, a Suburban?) and crash, and they find themselves at the mercy of sinister and primal forces. Or you think that's the plot, until it becomes clear there's really only one sinister and primal force, and he's got a major, primal crush on one of the occupants of the Suburban. (If it is a Suburban. I don't know. I try not to get bogged down in this stuff.)

The dynamics change abruptly and decisively: The one guy in the car is severely injured by this hostile force in the forest. His girlfriend goes after him and promptly, in manner of helpless damsel, gets herself bitten by a rattlesnake; perhaps the hostile force in the forest can save her. The other two people in the car, a lesbian couple, get bogged down in a hopelessly fatalistic argument about what to do next. You could get snarky, and part of you kind of wants to -- but the movie is so sincere and so earnest, it defeats your attempts at snark. (Though the dialogue shows flashes of wry self-awareness: "That is the cheesiest line ever." "Marry me!" "Um, what's for dinner?")

What it turns into is a big meditation on relationships. This hostile spiky thing in the forest, it turns out, knows the straight girlfriend -- they grew up together. A bizarre past is hinted at involving her dad, his Harley, and his fear that his daughter might be harmed by her strange little friend. A lullaby is sung: "Your dad sang it, so I sang it to you." It's dark. The damsel's not as helpless as she seemed. Things get confusing.

I've always had a thing about movies shot in the woods, and this film was shot entirely in Angeles National Forest. (I drove up there winter before last, homesick for snow; I got to some snow and walked on it, blissfully, then turned around and went home. That spring the Station Fire happened. It burned up all the locations used in this film.) When the characters go stumbling into the thornbushes, cliffs, undergrowth -- you know where they are. No matter who you are, it's a place you have to recognize. You've been there. They're in the Forest of Arden, Prospero's island (Spike helps you by quoting "The Tempest"), the bramble forest of Sleeping Beauty. It's not just that there are monsters there: this is the primal setting where you find out what you're made of, whether you're Red Riding Hood or just a Star Trek red shirt. As Alan Moore put it in his "Swamp Thing" series: This is the place. This is the story. And you shouldn't have come here.

Yeah, it turns into being about relationships. But is there anything else more enduring or haunting? Before I had ever heard of this movie, I had nightmares about turning into a monster for someone I loved; you know someone's deepest, darkest secrets, and when you leave them it's as if suddenly you had become a daisy-cutter bomb for them, suddenly turning from their sweetest friend into a weapon that can level sharp weapons at their most vulnerable places. It's something only someone in a relationship can do.

And the cruel truth this movie has for you is the worst one imaginable: You can never, in a thousand years, run from it though you may, escape from hurting the person you love. Just by loving them you do them unimaginable harm. But you have as little choice in it as any creature of the forest. This is the story. And you shouldn't have come here. But you can never help it. You'll be back.

Sweet dreams.

Top: Anna-Marie Wayne faces a nightmare; below, Edward Gusts adorns a poster.

The world as we know it

So I finally got around to reading "The Stand." I love Stephen King, I really do. I have never read anything by him that I haven't enjoyed -- "Carrie," "The Shining," "Misery," "'Salem's Lot." I wanted so much to like "The Stand" and I hated it.

This bothered me a lot, not least because it dawned on me something like 300 pages in and I knew I had a long way to go, because it was the uncut version. Maybe I should have started in with the shorter one instead. My first complaint about the book was that it was bloated beyond belief. I can tell from the introduction that he's incredibly proud of the descriptive passages involving heroine Frannie and her nasty mom, who embodies the sort of oppressive suburban strictures that King is excited about taking out with his superflu plague. I appreciate what King's trying to do here, especially as a fellow Shirley Jackson fan -- yeah, these social strictures are unpleasant, aren't they? But oh my God, he goes on and on and ON. Some editor needs to stand on his head and say "Steve, enough!" But people love the uncut version of this book, so what do I know. Just every sequence is like that -- it goes on and on and ON -- and you think there's going to be some major payoff by the end, but no. I was so crushed by this. I don't know what I was expecting (maybe something related to the iconic cover art, above), but it just, ugh.

Has anyone besides me not read "The Stand"? Quick summary: Army-developed superflu takes out civilization. A few individuals are left. They gradually find each other, and find that they are all having dreams of an old black woman in Nebraska; they make their way to her, and find she's real and she's amassing a force to resist the other figure in their dreams, a violent white man. Good people line up against bad people. Except not really, but kind of, at the very end, and then not.

I don't know. If I had never heard of this book and someone had handed me a short version, I might well have loved it. I loved the superflu taking people out (misanthropes love plague) and I enjoyed the awkward social interactions between the survivors, who comes from all different backgrounds. But the eventual society that the survivors form is so weird and crazy and mad sexist, it read to me like a 1960s-era husband's daydream. "What if everyone died and we had to PROTECT THE WOMEN?" This of course led me to thinking about my favorite Ray Milland film, "Panic in Year Zero":



Which pretty much reads like a daydream some henpecked husband has on a fishing trip. "What if we couldn't go back to the city and I had to lead us? What if I had to find us rifles and food supplies and care for the WOMEN?" Well, bleah, is what I say to that.

The best thing about "The Stand" was the idea that you would never, never get away with writing a book like that today. We now live in a world that's rich with apocalypse fiction -- and we owe "The Stand" a great debt, I am sure -- but it is not all about Fertility and Saving The Women anymore. The women will be right up front firing automatic weapons at the rapists and zombies, not huddling in the back all pregnant and scared, thank you.

Oh, and the theology involved with this gave me the utter willies. Maybe it's just, again, a sign of the times: the godlike-old-black-woman trope was tired when "The Matrix" busted it out a decade ago. Does it serve anyone to divide communities into absolute good and absolute evil? The people who don't laugh at your hero's jokes are automatically going to decamp for the evil site? The creeps and the outsiders and the ones who just never fit in, they line up with the dark man? Jeepers. I appreciate that it's just a potboiler, but -- leave me out of it, please.

Happy Mother's Day!

Moms = royalty. Hope all of you have a beautiful day!

Spider baby II

Climbing
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

Finally got some distilled water today and took it out to use on my gasping pitcher plants -- it has been quite warm and dry in LA, and I keep forgetting that they are coming out of dormancy and require moisture! By accident I startled this sweet furry dime-sized creature, who was all snuggled down in the dry sticks of last year's pitchers. She scuttled safely up some old stalks, but my watering had trapped her like a moat. I took her picture and then apologized and moved her to the lemon tree.

Open pitchers

Laaaaaa!
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

Now that their beautiful flowers are fading, the Sarracenia pitchers are starting to open up. They like bugs almost as much as spiders do!

Final Girl Film Club: 'Spider Baby' (1968)

You have to love a movie that was originally titled "Cannibal Orgy." I was first made aware of "Spider Baby" by my marvelously creepy Cousin Merricat,* who had a post about a screening in L.A. a few months ago. Although I couldn't make the screening, the movie sounded great. And then Stacie picked it for this month's Final Girl Film Club, and I learned it can be viewed in many places on the Internet, and "Spider Baby" and I were together at last!

And I do not think we will ever again be parted. What a marvelous film, and enjoyable on so many levels: creepy, funny, beautiful, oddly touching. It even has an excellent theme song, performed by star Lon Chaney Jr.

The plot concerns the three Merrye children -- Elizabeth, Virginia and Ralph -- the last descendants of a wealthy family. They live alone in a crumbling mansion, guarded by their faithful chauffeur Bruno (Chaney), who protects them from the world. But he can't keep them hidden from distant relatives Peter and Emily, who show up one day determined to claim guardianship of the children, and thus a share of the family wealth. But Peter and Emily do not know about the degenerative ailment that has left the children in a state of total savagery. They also do not know about the spiders in the furniture, or the skeleton in the bedroom, or the cannibalistic relatives locked in the basement...

True to their name, the three Merrye children just have a grand old time, and it's a blast to just kick back and watch them running around. Sure, they're killing delivery men and cutting off their ears, but it's just so much fun. Virginia in particular gets a tremendous kick out of throwing a rope web over people and pretending to be a spider; when she brandishes a pair of butcher knives like mandibles and runs at her prey, she suddenly goes from ludicrous to terrifying, and it's a fantastic frisson. And Ralph (Sid Haig -- aha, this is who he is) galumphs contentedly about like a great bald Irish setter. They have a totally sweet relationship with Bruno: he looks after them (is he protecting them from the world or the world from them?) and they trust and adore him.

They're a little old to be children; Merrye syndrome, we're told, sets in at puberty and regresses the sufferer to a "prenatal state" of savagery and cannibalism. So much for the Rousseauian ideal. Besides killing delivery men, they catch and eat cats, kiss their father's rotting skeleton every night, and attempt to saw the feet off a fetching secretary (Mary Mitchel of "Panic In Year Zero"). And when Ralph catches Emily (Carol Ohmart of "The House on Haunted Hill") in her lingerie....

Besides the madcap "Addams Family"-type escapades, though, there's a wonderfully dreamy atmosphere. Elizabeth and Virginia wander in their white nightgowns up and down dark stairs; Ralph navigates the house via a large dumbwaiter; tarantulas spill out of a rolltop desk. The house just feels familiar, like something you read about (the theme of two witchy sisters barricaded against the world is very Shirley Jackson) or dreamed about a long time ago. "Spider Baby" opens the gates to you ... but be careful ...

*not an actual relation, alas

Oh, HA HA.

Happy April Fool's Day, everyone! Last October I finally got around to seeing this 1986 classic (it was one of Cinefamily's wonderful slasher marathons, screening after "My Bloody Valentine" on a holiday-themed night). It's unique, all right. Every slasher movie is essentially a game, with bit players knocked out one by one, routes of escape systematically shut off, until the killer and final survivors meet for a final match. But this is one of the only slashers to make that theme overt: unbeknownst to the main characters, and to the audience (sorry, spoilers, but it came out in 1986 for heaven's sake), it really IS a game.

College student Muffy St. John (Deborah Foreman, marvelously creepy) invites a bunch of her friends to spend spring break on her island vacation home. It's April Fool's Day, and Muffy happens to love practical jokes, so the house is rigged with goofy paraphernalia like joke drinking glasses, joke doorknobs, joke light switches -- stuff that's dumb at first, but eventually Muffy's guests are going to NEED those doorknobs in working order, because it seems there's a killer on the island. Maybe even in the house! Creepy reminders of the guests' dark secrets show up in their rooms. People start to disappear. Muffy starts acting completely spacey and weird. Eventually, clever coed Kit (Amy Steel) and her boyfriend work out the mystery: Muffy has an evil twin sister called Buffy who's been locked away in an institution, but has escaped. Look out!

I can't tell you how weird it is, even knowing the ending ahead of time, to see Kit burst through a door and see Muffy standing there with all her "victims" alive and well. Audiences reacted really badly to this movie, and I can see why (I felt similarly after watching "The Village," although I still love it). Nobody likes being made a fool of, and poor Amy Steel still looks grouchy as it all ends.

There's some interesting tension in this movie between Muffy and another girl named Nan (Leah Pinsent). Nan seems to be particularly hurt by Muffy's weird behavior, and she comes in for some particularly vicious personal pranks involving a rumor about an abortion she may or may not have had. In a bizarre little coda, Nan gets Muffy back in kind for all the April Fool's behavior -- is something going on with these two? Or am I just thinking of lesbians because Amy Steel is here and she's so durn cute? I don't know. Either way it's a fun movie to see with a lively audience. Hooray!

Three dead men ride north

Finally hitched up my skirts, poured a nice tall glass of wine and sat down with "The Last House on the Left" this week. I have been avoiding this movie for many years, on the grounds that it just sounded Very Unpleasant. (The NYT's film critic walked out in 1972!) Sure, it's a horror classic, but why put oneself through it?, was my thinking.

Over the past couple years I've gradually worked up to the idea. First I watched "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," which I had avoided on similar grounds, and adored it. Then I saw Bergman's "The Virgin Spring," the basis for "Last House," and was fascinated by the themes of revenge, redemption and female purity; it's black and white and it's Bergman and it's arty, but it's still fairly brutal. Beloved medieval daughter Karin is raped and murdered by a trio of men who then, unknowingly, seek shelter with her parents; when the parents find out, they take revenge. What interested me the most was the contrast between adored town flirt Karin and her resentful foster sister, Ingeri, who is pregnant out of wedlock and is in thorough disgrace with the household. The dynamic between them is the real driving force of "Virgin Spring," I think.

And "Last House" hews closer to those themes than I expected. Beloved daughter Mari is everybody's sweetheart. Her parents adore her, only making a halfhearted attempt to stop her from gadding around braless and going to concerts by bands with names like Bloodlust. They do not at all approve of her relatively new friend Phyllis, who comes from a bad neighborhood and is taking her to the latest Bloodlust concert, but they let her go anyway. Unlike in "Virgin Spring," Mari & Phyllis are friends, but they exhibit a milder version of the Karin & Ingeri contrast: Mari takes this innocent, exultant joy in the world around her, pointing out the beautiful fall leaves and then her own new 17-year-old bod. The worldlier Phyllis watches her with something like bemusement at times, but Mari's joy is infectious: the girls frolic in the woods, go for ice cream, and then decide to score some grass before the concert, approaching a total stranger to ask him about it as if asking directions from a friendly neighborhood cop. This is where they go wrong. The girls are different, but unlike in "VS," they end up in the same boat.

From here the movie becomes a protracted, sadistic exercise in dread. I just tucked up my feet and poured some more wine and bit my nails and waited and waited. It seems to take forever for Mari and Phyllis to meet their hideous end, and the film cuts mercilessly between their torment and Mari's parents, first fixing her a birthday cake, then sitting up anxiously waiting for her to come home. It's the dread rather than the actual violence that made this so agonizing for me, although when the brutality arrives, Craven films it in a straight-on, almost documentary style that somehow enhances the cruelty. The grainy film stock makes it look like a snuff film. Over on Final Girl, Stacie has a great line in her review of "The Evil Dead": it "just feels wrong." And that's how this feels. It's like something you shouldn't even be *allowed* to watch.

Making it extra horrible is how hard the girls fight and how close they come. One of the last things Mari sees is her own mailbox; Phyllis dies within sight of traffic whizzing by on the road. Both of them make perfectly laudable attempts at getting away. Phyllis (who delivers a haunting "oh, shit!" as the thugs slam the door shut behind them) does a really good job of keeping Mari from completely freaking out, and then picks a great chance to make a run for it. Mari uses smart psychology to get one of them to help her. They almost make it; they should make it; they die for no reason at all beyond their killers' sheer viciousness.

At the same time, it's beautiful. The colors in this movie are amazing: the fall leaves, the bright red blood on Sadie's white face, the magnificent mustard-yellow shirt worn by Mari's dad in the climactic scene of chainsaw revenge. I'm such a sucker for anything horror that's shot in the woods... I love the contrast between nasty goings-on and the bucolic setting. Fairy tales are right: Scary things do hide behind trees (no matter how beautiful the leaves are); there is something waiting under the surface of that still lake. We all know this, deep down.

Also, when Mari's parents start rigging their house for revenge, you just want to hug them; not only is it cathartic, but they are so satisfyingly competent! How I admire movie characters who have a clear plan. I wanted to match this couple up against the mewling, puking pair from Ils.... Dr. and Mrs. Collingwood would've had those hooded home invaders up against the wall in no time, bellowing "And tuck your shirts in, you damn kids!"

And then there's the bizarrely incongruous folk soundtrack -- I counted four tracks that were borrowed by Eli Roth for my beloved "Cabin Fever" -- and the deranged slapstick antics from the incompetent local law enforcement, who seem to have wandered in from another movie. It all adds up to a big bizarre gorgeous raw mess of a movie. When it was over I had one more glass of wine just to celebrate. Then I watched it again.

Edited to add: Arbogast has an interesting essay arguing that the movie is an unintentional blood libel. After watching the movie I'm not sure I buy it, but it's still a good read. Happy Passover!

Pitcher plant flower

Sarracenia leucophylla bloom
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

While I try to marshal my thoughts on "Last House on the Left," here is a photo of my beautiful Sarracenia leucophylla hybrid in bloom. I have had S. leucophyllas bloom with sort of a cherry Kool-Aid smell, and other Sarraceniae flowers have a powerful cat-pee odor, but this one smells like nothing: She is just about line and color. Ah, the color.

Under the thorns

Thorns
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

I loved standing under this silk floss tree watching rain clouds approach this week -- the silvery bark and gold-colored new growth stood out sharply against the darkening sky. Plus silk floss trees continue to just amaze me. I've been here four years and still can't get over the city being full of thorny giants that make lavish pink flowers and fluffy alien seed pods. The LA Arboretum also has a white one and a red one, both extremely beautiful.

New gig

I'm going somewhat legit... I will be writing every Friday for the Times' Daily Mirror blog, a site that looks at historical Los Angeles, about old movies. Most of the posts are about 1920 and 1960, so I will be writing about movies from those years. And my first one is up now, about "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring stone cold fox John Barrymore.

I tied myself into a little stress knot over writing the first couple of posts. It's one thing to put up my own thoughts here, semi-anonymously (even though most of you know who I am, not that I am anyone in particular). But the DM stuff has my name on it. People might read it. Gaak.

So far so good, though. I loved watching the movie. I loved watching the 1960 movie that's going to be next week's topic. I'm trying to branch out a little from writing about horror but -- dammit, that's what I love. Anyway, I'll still be here and still be writing, and I am very excited about the next Final Girl Film Club... but I'll also be over there. Yeep.

"Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem" - Not sure who won, but we lost

A copy of the "Aliens Vs. Predator" sequel wandered into my sphere last night, and like an idiot I succumbed to the temptation to watch it. Now I have a pretty high tolerance for Alien-related silliness. I have found something to enjoy in all the previous movies, even the ghastly "Resurrection" (come on, Brad Dourif was in it!) and the mostly forgettable "Aliens Vs. Predator" (Lance Henriksen!). I cherish my "Aliens Vs. Predator" comic books. I even love the goofy "Batman Vs. Aliens" comic -- it has some really beautiful drawings. Just give me some acid blood and a big skeletal tail and I'm happy. But even I couldn't enjoy this movie. There's just nothing there. This morning I woke up and couldn't remember a single thing about it. Aliens and a Predator chase each other around. There are dull human characters (one named, with vicious cruelty, Dallas -- I hope Tom Skerritt kicked someone's ass for that). It's really dark and you can't see what's happening. I may have slept through part of it.

It's all just so depressing. "Alien" fans had been waiting for so many years for a movie set on Earth. The one really great thing about "Resurrection" was that its ending set that up to happen, with superclone Ripley coming home at last. The first "Aliens Vs. Predator" does take place in Antarctica, but all the action happens in a giant subterranean pyramid -- it's so claustrophobic it might as well be a spaceship. But in "Requiem" the aliens crash-land outside a small Colorado town. You could have aliens jumping out from behind Dumpsters, lurking under your bed, chasing you through your own neighborhood. Yikes! And here it finally happens, but it's so chaotic and dark, and the characters are so boring, that there's nothing remotely scary about it. I miss the big drippy aliens who used to give me nightmares. As Mark Twain once wrote, "I have no heart to write more. I never felt so about anything before."

You are a furred leaf, I think

Butterwort
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

A good example of deadly soft fur is the beautiful Pinguicula, or butterwort. The leaves look like African violet leaves, with the tiniest sheen of fuzz; but if you are an insect and land on them, you cannot get off again. The tiny furry stems are covered with sticky material that holds you in place while the plant's digestive enzymes slowly dissolve you. How awful! This plant mostly eats gnats, but mine has trapped larger flying insects from time to time.

In "Little Shop of Horrors," the man-eating plant Audrey II is said to be a cross between a butterwort and a Venus flytrap, as Peter D'Amato points out in his wonderful book "The Savage Garden."

Seed pod

Seed pod
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

No really, sometimes a seed pod is just a seed pod. From a Queensland lace-bark tree at the LA County Arboretum.

"Ils (Them)": Come play with us

Ah, ze French. They can ratchet up the tension from the get-go like nobody's business, and it is so elegant! "Ils" (2006) has one of the best opening sequences I've ever seen. A mom and daughter are driving at night and have car trouble: directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud take that simple premise and spin it into several minutes of increasingly exquisite agony. By the time the movie proper got under way, I was about to chew off my own arm. The main story, sadly, eventually loses the elegant simplicity manifested in the opener. But still it has some nice moments.

I knew almost nothing about "Ils" going in, only that it was supposed to be similar to the 2008 American movie "The Strangers" except a) without Liv Tyler, b) shorter and c) French. I haven't seen "The Strangers" due to my violent Liv Tyler allergy, but it sounded good. The premise of both involves a couple being terrorized at home by, well, strangers, for unknown reasons. (It's probably best to go into "Ils" not knowing more than that, so if you haven't seen it, beware spoilers ahead.)

Home-invasion stories are the scariest to me. You can haunt the school or the old department store or the mall all you want to, but come scratching around my bedroom window, where I'm most vulnerable, and brrr. The home-invasion premise also appeals to my sense of practicality: Do you know which windows of your house you can open? Where's your flashlight? What can you use as a weapon? Where are the entrances and exits?

Well, Clem and Lucas (Olivia Bonamy and Michael Cohen), a French couple living in a lonely fixer-upper in Romania, do not pass this test at all. They know where their front door is, and that's about it. The movie's a beautiful exercise in sustained tension, but the imbecility of these two -- particularly Lucas -- had me pretty turned off by about midway through. Creepy people steal Clem's car in the middle of the night; then the power and phones go out; then someone waves a flashlight through the window. What do Clem and Lucas do? Race upstairs and barricade themselves in their room, then decide Lucas should go down and "check" to see if anyone's inside. This just violates all common sense to me. Don't they want to just try and find out who these people are? Maybe they just want to take the TV and jewelry and leave? What happened to Clem's cellphone anyway? And how come these people seem to know the house better than Clem and Lucas do? They switch the power off, they beat Clem to the attic... Maybe it's all supposed to be a metaphor for how Clem and Lucas feel as expatriates, but I was too exasperated with them to analyze.

(And why not go on the attack? Even if you don't have a gun, it's *your* house: you know where everything is. Grab a bottle of spray bathroom cleaner, jump out from behind a doorway and aim for the eyes! But no, these two decide to ditch the house -- and their poor dog, whose fate is unclear but probably unpleasant -- and run, Lucas' severe leg injury notwithstanding.)

Once the action moves outside, things devolve in terms of making sense. Everyone goes into the sewers for some reason, and there's a lot of mazelike running around.

Still, there are some spiffy effects along the way. Sound is used beautifully, with the attackers making a mysterious scrapey sound at the most unexpected moments. The house and sewers turn into a series of set pieces -- it reminds me a little of watching "Alien: Resurrection," which I remember as being just a bunch of baroque fight scenes in different cool settings -- but they're nice-looking set pieces. And I enjoyed some classic-film references: a massive old door bends under the pounding from an unseen force, a la "The Haunting"; a pursuit through the sewers ends at an unyielding grid, a la "The Third Man."

The final twist is fine, but not particularly shocking for the healthy misanthrope. People are pretty much the same at any age, if you ask me. Still, it's something an American-made movie would probably steer clear of. Viva la France!

Movies by heart

A conversation over the weekend got me thinking about this: There really are quite a few movies I could recite from start to finish. (And will, if you ask nicely!) Most are accidental; they happen to be the videotapes we had growing up, including somewhat random movies taped off TV, which has the amusing side effect that I only know the TV-censored versions of some of these. Others are among my favorite movies ever. It's an odd mix. Here are the ones I can think of, off the top of my head:

Gone with the Wind
Romancing the Stone
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (censored version! "I feel like total crud, Ferris.")
Sixteen Candles
La Bamba (it's been a while, but I think I could still pull this one out. "Bob! Mi hijo!")
The Sound of Music
Mary Poppins
The Princess Bride
Flashdance (censored version, although I bought the DVD and couldn't find much difference)
Roxanne
Mystery Men
Starship Troopers
Cabin Fever
Sense and Sensibility (the Ang Lee version; within a few years I should have the six-hour BBC Pride and Prejudice down, but am not there yet)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the one with the whales... it was the only one we owned, for some reason)
Star Wars, Empire & Jedi (of course)
The Last of the Mohicans
Little Shop of Horrors (the one with Rick Moranis and the magnificent Ellen Greene)
M*A*S*H (within reason: I don't think I could do every bit of the overlapping dialogue. But most of it, yes)

Looking this over, it is clear that I have not obsessively watched enough movies from the last decade; I need to pick some favorites and learn them. Project!

Sleeping beauty

Venus flytrap, at rest
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

Tiny tiny Venus flytrap -- occasionally addressed as "Mrs. Chompy" -- is on the verge of emerging from her winder dormancy. Look at that beautiful spring green! In the next couple weeks she should start putting up little vertical shoots that will open into lively new traps. She lives next to the compost bin, so a bountiful harvest of flies will be hers whenever she's ready!

Her consort, a Red Dragon cultivar (usually addressed as "Please don't die"), is in a considerably less picturesque dormancy: brown and crunchy. He might be dead, although he looked bad this time last year and he came back. I hope he pulls through, for Mrs. Chompy's sake.

Teeth

Puya venusta
Originally uploaded by Trillium grandiflorum

I never saw "Teeth," the 2007 teen horror film about a girl equipped with a vagina dentata, but every time I tangle with the Puya venusta bromeliad, I feel I should.

My supervisor in the desert garden thinks it's called "Venusta" because of the leaves' silvery/whiteish shade. I think this is about as likely as the Venus flytrap getting its name from its pretty white flowers. (The wonderful Barry Rice debunks that idea in this wonderful entry over at the Carnivorous Plant FAQ, in which you can also learn the history of the made-up naughty botanical term "tipitiwitchet"!)

Final Girl Film Club: Mario Bava's "Black Sabbath"

For this month's Final Girl Film Club, I sat through my first-ever horror anthology! (I have seen most of "Creepshow," but that doesn't count, because it was New Year's Eve and I started in the middle and passed out before the end from too many AEtinis.) This was also my first-ever Mario Bava movie and I just fell in love with him. I want to explore his oeuvre. But first, "Black Sabbath."

This is a spiffy new release which apparently restores a fair amount of footage from the 1963 film, particularly from the first segment. Everyone's dubbed in Italian, even Boris Karloff, who is visibly speaking English in his "welcome to our horrorshow" introduction to the series. The anthology includes three stories, apparently set in three different time periods and places, none of them related at all. Somehow though a similar mood pervades them all -- the same sense of creeping dread. And because they're essentially short stories (although I seriously doubt they're actually adapted from Chekhov, Tolstoy and De Maupassant, as the credits claim), the action moves pretty fast. There's no time for long dream sequences or whatnot as in many of your other vintage horror films. These stories get down to business!

In segment #1, "Il Telefono," a gorgeous woman alone in her plush apartment receives a series of violent and sexual threats via her spiffy red-and-black telephone. She calls a friend for help, and it quickly becomes apparent that the two are... more than friends. Apparently the lesbian-implication footage was largely removed when the film was first released. The segment is campy but sexy, and creepy in a very giallo way -- you get the sense that these women are in peril because they're so gorgeous. While you're still sorting out how to feel about that, matters reach an inevitably grisly conclusion, and we're on to #2!

"Il Wurdalak" (Italian for "The Wurdalak") is the longest and I guess the best-known chapter, starring Boris Karloff as a patriarch who returns to his family after doing some vampire-hunting ("wurdalak" apparently is Olde Country for "vampire"). Perhaps he is a vampire himself! I wanted to like this chapter, just as I want to like all vampire stories, but I am finally confronting an uncomfortable truth: Vampire stories just put me to sleep. I don't know if it's the dreamy mood, or the key role of sleep & hypnosis, or just all the standing around. (Why is there so much standing around in vampire movies?) Last fall I rented Tod Browning's "Dracula" and it took me three nights to get through it; I kept waking up on the couch to the DVD menu. Same for the Spanish-language version, same for "Dracula's Daughter." Maybe I just require vampire tales to be enlivened by campy elements, as in the Coppola version of "Dracula" or "'Salem's Lot." Anyway, although things here are kept moving along pretty briskly, with horseback riding and guns and severed heads, I just about fell asleep. Two things kept me awake: 1) Creepy child vampire!! Crying in a high-pitched voice! Absolutely fantastic. He did not get near enough screen time. 2) The voluptuous heroine is named "Sdenka," which is very Olde Country, and which also sounds like "Stinka." This amused me.

Chapter 3, "A Drop of Water," woke me up quite thoroughly. A hard-drinking, tough-talking single nurse, who appears to live in the 1930s and seems to have a pretty fun little apartment, gets called out in a storm to dress the body of a recently deceased countess. The countess' maid is wigging and doesn't want to do it. So the nurse briskly does her job, listening to the maid go on about vengeful ghosts and how the countess died during a seance. Before heading home, the nurse pockets a ring from the body. Shouldn't have done that!... This sequence is short but fantastically effective. When the countess (played by a ghastly dummy, above) makes her first reappearance -- well, I knew it was going to happen, but I just felt my spine turn to ice. (I would have screamed if Karloff hadn't made me so sleepy.) Water drips from a faucet, a fly lands on a table, a hand reaches around a corner: the tools of a movie ghost story are so basic, but Bava deploys each one so expertly. The man is a master craftsman. I left the lights and radio on all night.

What impresses me is how different these stories are, yet how consistent the mood is. They're a contemporary (well, for 1963) thriller, a vampire tale, and a ghost story. But somehow they all go together. At the end, Karloff appears again in his Wurdalak costume, and the camera pulls back to show you his horse is a fake and so are the trees he's riding through. It's all just a show, a three-ring circus if you will -- you're invited to buy a ticket and have fun. Whee! I'm in. Thanks Stacie. Looking forward to the next one. In the meantime, I want more Bava!