I can totally laugh at jokes that poke gentle fun at Southern people, because if you can’t laugh at yourself you’re probably taking yourself too seriously. Southern people are dramatic, we indulge in family squabbles, we have crazy-ass relatives who are always setting themselves on fire or outrunning The Law or some other thing that you might see on COPS. I fully acknowledge this, and I embrace my heritage. But, as Jesse Custer himself said, “You don’t start raping tourists because you had grits for breakfast.”
I had no idea what I was in for when I hit “play” on Tucker and Dale. I heard good things, but nothing detailed. And as with many films I take a gamble on, I figured I could just shut it off if I didn’t care for it.
I figured it would be yet another tale of clean-cut, All-American youth taking a wrong turn and encountering inbred, cannibalistic, rapacious hillfolk mutants. And the movie certainly sets up that that is what’s going to happen: we are quickly introduced to a car-full of privileged young College Kids on holiday, passing some reefer around, and the girls are appropriately scantily clad.
But before I got much farther, let me explain something.
Growing up a Southern person, you hear jokes. My mother is from a small town in South Georgia, and my father was born in West Virginia and moved to Florida at a young age. Never mind that West Virginia was actually part of the Union, and, you know, the whole state was created because the inhabitants were Pro-Union – most Americans don’t know or care about that, and I’ve heard more than my share of ‘Ha ha, Southern people are inbred and live in trailers and swamps and rape tourists!’ unjokes.
That said, I can totally laugh at jokes that poke gentle fun at Southern people, because if you can’t laugh at yourself you’re probably taking yourself too seriously. Southern people are dramatic, we indulge in family squabbles, we have crazy-ass relatives who are always setting themselves on fire or outrunning The Law or some other thing that you might see on COPS. I fully acknowledge this, and I embrace my heritage. But, as Jesse Custer himself said, “You don’t start raping tourists because you had grits for breakfast.”
And as I was delighted to find, the College Kids are not the protagonists; Tucker and Dale are.
The setup starts to unravel when College Kids realize they forgot the beer, and stop by a gas station to stock up. The gas station is appropriately derelict and filled with rusty farm implements and animal parts, and some local weirdos are lurking nearby.
After an unnerving encounter with some of the dingy local color, the story begins following these two-the eponymous Tucker and Dale- and everything becomes a lot more interesting. Tucker and Dale have recently purchased a “vacation cabin,” (played by a Backwoods Murder Shack Style #4) where they are looking forward to some drankin’, fishin’, and relaxin’.
YAAAAAAAHHHH!!!
They set to fishin’ and drankin’ that night, but the relaxin’ part gets screwed when they see one of the College Girls take a nasty fall as she attempts to go skinny dipping. They row over to save her and find she’s unconscious. Naturally, when the the other College Kids witness Tucker and Dale dragging her limp, naked body into their skiff, they assume the worst.
The rest of the film is a series of unfortunate events that seem to mercilessly incriminate our hapless heroes. It’s a hilarious takedown of the genre, and I won’t spoil it by going on too much further. But the bees and chainsaw moment is just magical!
Fans of NBC’s 30Rock will recognize Katrina Bowden, who played vapid and ridiculously hot intern Cerie. When I saw her name in the credits I thought ‘oh, they found a hot girl, that’s nice’ and I totally ate my words: she has great comedic talent and plays the highly likeable heroine, Allison. I think she has a great shot a comedy, and I hope she gets a chance to show off that talent more.
The movie has a 7.6 on IMDB, and is highly rated on Netflix. If you’re a fan of deconstructive, intelligent horror comedy like Cabin in the Woods, or Shawn of the Dead, you will definitely like this movie. I can’t say it’s as great as those and has nowhere near the production value, but it definitely belongs in their company for the writing and characters alone.
For one thing, I am astounded at what they get away with on network tv. I’m not a big fan of splatter movies, gore doesn’t bother me, but the show is so visceral in its presentation of the violence. You rarely see violence on screen, but the bodies left behind–WHEW.
You might remember me mentioning in this post from approximately a hundred years ago that I am a huge fan of the Hannibal Lecter character. I still haven’t seen Hannibal Rising (probably won’t), but a friend kept telling me how much I needed to watch the tv show. It wasn’t on Instant, so I was a good little consumer and bought the first season on dvd.
GOSH.
For one thing, I am astounded at what they get away with on network tv. I’m not a big fan of splatter movies, gore doesn’t bother me, but the show is so visceral in its presentation of the violence. You rarely see violence on screen, but the bodies left behind–WHEW.
If you aren’t already a fan of horror and aren’t very desensitized to it, you might strongly consider giving this one a miss. I mean the show is so compelling, but seriously – HORRIBLE THINGS. This makes Game of Thrones look like a Disney movie and I have NO idea how they do it!
It’s magnificent. It’s perfect. As a portrait of Hannibal Lecter it’s – well it’s not perfect, because the Hannibal of the book is a short, unassuming little man with piercing eyes with red highlights, nothing like towering specimen Mads Mikkelsen. But it works. The show is not trying to recapture the book’s character, and Mikkelsen makes the character his own anyway. He is playing Lecter as completely fallen, sort of pretending that Lecter is Lucifer and inherently evil rather than worrying about any of the psychology behind the character. And it works!
But that’s not what I’m talking about today.
So much has already been written about this show and these characters and scenes and symbology and Wendigos and food and plaid suits and so I don’t need to try and plaster my stickers on over everyone else’s. The fandom exists, and by all means go and explore it. I might! I have never written fanfiction before but I just might!
Instead, I give you a list of things that it is impossible (yet fun!) to imagine Hannibal doing. I don’t know why these things occurred to me, but I was amused at the mental images and thought I’d share. Enjoy! [I’ll avoid spoilers in case anyone is interested in pursuing the show!]
Realizing he needs to get his car washed, finding that his normal detailing people are out of town, and having to wash his car himself with cutoffs and a tshirt he got free from the bank. I picture him losing himself in the car care section of Advance Auto Parts pondering which scent to buy. Would he even OWN cutoffs? I mean he makes his own beer, does canning, and a lot of cooking, and I’m sure he does all the maintenance on his murder dungeon himself. I can’t see him sacrificing a good suit while doing all that. Maybe that’s what the killsuit was originally for.
Screwing up a recipe because he’s out of that ONE GODDAMN THING that sets the whole thing off and being SO GLAD he was eating alone that night. Quelle dommage! But he has a freezer full of goodies, so he’s all good.
Handing out Halloween candy. Can’t you that just see that long silhouette appearing in the orange doorway, beguiling scents of hot food drifting out around him? Would he say fuck it and get a grab bag of KitKats and whatnot, or would he present them with something a little more… savory? I feel like he’d do the latter, and like 99% of the kids would be like ‘ew!’ and overprotective moms would chuck it anyway since you’re not supposed to trust strangers…
… but one kid would try. Oh yeah.
Stumbling across a reality show filmed in his city where everyone is horrible and rude and discourteous and he sort of smiles to himself and realizes that if he doesn’t slow down he’ll have to break out the sweatpants from all the people eating lately.
And because it’s about food, a subject I hold to be VERY precious, here is the amazing supercut that makes it look like an amazing cooking show. And yes, there are very identifiable people parts. Just rock with the music and pretend it’s veal!
Lecter’s corruption extends to the audience, too. When some truly awful people (Mason Verger is a drug-addled billionaire and convicted pederast) come after him, Lecter defends himself: Pazzi tries to run some game and gets a gypsy boy and himself shanked, Verger tries to torture him to death and the result is probably the strangest thing Gary Oldman has ever had to do as an actor. And we find ourselves cheering for this predator of humans. After all, he has a moral code and he follows it, even protecting Starling when she is in danger. That is Verger’s fatal error – he thinks that Lecter is as corrupt and evil as he is, when in fact Verger is threatening one of the few people on earth Lecter cares about and respects.
For the record, I have never liked this poster. I get what they are doing: only part of his face is shown, the other side hidden in shadow, reminding us of his duality. One side of his personality is erudite, refined, the consummate gentleman, but we are not to be fooled – we must remember he is savage beneath the facade, as the red, demonic eye indicates. So I get that, but it just doesn’t work for me. I do like how it echoes Caravaggio’s use of light in his paintings, and he often depicted gruesome scenes in beautiful ways, so it has that going for it.
I knew who Hannibal Lecter was waaaaay before I ever saw Silence of the Lambs. He is as much an American cultural icon as Jason, John Wayne, or Tom Sawyer. I was about 12 when SOTL came out, which was a little young, so I didn’t see the film until I was 17 or so, and I was instantly fascinated.
Even though Lecter is a main character in SOTL, we spend very little time with him and never see him in his natural element. Every time he’s onscreen we’re riveted. We want more of this character. If you read Red Dragon and saw the film Manhunter, again your appetite was whetted for more.
So when the book Hannibal came out it caused quite a stir – finally, we would see Hannibal in his natural habitat! Free-roaming Lecter, at last! It promised to be the difference between seeing a tiger in the zoo and seeing one in the jungles of India: no walls, no rules.
The book definitely offered more than we had before – almost too much. The Hannibal parts were good, great even, but all the other stuff – Mason Verger and his bodybuilder sister who was omitted from the movie, the Italian crooked cop, the memory palace stuff, Krendler being a douche, and Starling’s fall from grace – there was just SO MUCH of it. It’s also entirely possible that SOTL as a book was good but not great, and the film turned it into something more memorable. I read the book about 20 years ago but can’t recall much of it- the movie has overridden it, I think.
But when we’re hanging out with Hannibal Lecter in his parts of the book, everything is awesome.
Hannibal-Lecter-in-Florence REALNESS
He hangs out in bistros sipping espresso from those little-bitty cups, demitasses. He wears amazing suits, hats, and sunglasses, and gloves all the time. The two latter are not just because he’s dressed to the nines – they allow him to hide his face from surveillance cameras and ensure he leaves no fingerprints behind. He creates individual bouquets of THE FANCIEST hand cream so he can write a letter to Starling on beautiful paper, sealed in red wax. The scent of the hand cream is intentional – it is a clue she can use in order to find him. He’s acting as the interim director of the Palazzo Vecchio, a museum/libarary in Florence, Italy under the name “Dr. Fell.” Even when he’s hanging out at home, his pajamas or whatever he’s wearing when Pazzi pays him a visit appear to be silk or maybe fine linen. During the scene he’s sipping red wine and treating the museum’s archives like a personal gift shop.
One of the movie’s many themes is corruption, and Hannibal’s corrupting effect on others. For example, an Italian cop in debt begins to suspect Hannibal. His wife has expensive tastes, and the huge reward that Mason Verger is offering for Lecter’s location and capture is too tempting for him to ignore, which leads to his demise. Starling too is corrupted, although she tries valiantly to warn the Italian authorities and Pazzi in particular about Lecter. Verger was corrupted before he even wandered across Lecter’s path, but Verger himself acts as a corrupting influence on his own people: he has his private physician all tangled up in his evil schemes. (Ironically it’s Lecter who frees the man from the private hell he’s made for himself – given the choice between saving Verger and throwing him to the maneating pigs [long story], Lecter shouts ‘Hey Cordelle! Throw him in! You can always say it was me!”).
Once Lecter realizes Verger is on to him, he decides he’s been away dallying in Italy too long, and heads stateside. He boosts walking shitbag Paul Krendler’s Amex and goes on a little shopping spree, and I am here to tell you that if a ‘Hannibal Lecter’ cooking collection existed I would totally ruin my credit buying stuff from it. He purchases copper pots and pans , fancy dinnerware and flatware, flowers, and cooking tools, in addition to some Gucci shoes for Starling. Sur Le Table or Williams-Sonoma ought to get on that. Hell, even just an Amazon Wish List would be fascinating reading.
Thomas Harris and George R. R. Martin should start a catering business. Weirdest dinner party ever.
Lecter’s corruption extends to the audience, too. When some truly awful people (Mason Verger is a drug-addled billionaire and convicted pederast) come after him, Lecter defends himself: Pazzi tries to run some game and gets a gypsy boy and himself shanked, Verger tries to torture him to death and the result is probably the strangest thing Gary Oldman has ever had to do as an actor. And we find ourselves cheering for this predator of humans. After all, he has a moral code and he follows it, even protecting Starling when she is in danger. That is Verger’s fatal error – he thinks that Lecter is as corrupt and evil as he is, when in fact Verger is threatening one of the few people on earth Lecter cares about and respects.
I am excited to watch the tv show with Mads Mikkaelson. I haven’t seen it yet, but all the fandom stuff I’ve seen has me curious to check it out. A friend said that the show has the same kind of cooking eyecandy that Hannibal the movie did, so I’m looking forward to it.
Hannibal the movie is available on Instant Watch. The show doesn’t seem to be, but I’ve heard it is available on Amazon Prime.
Once he’s there, the movie becomes more like a travelogue of beautiful European scenery. Portugal, Spain, France, everywhere the man goes is picturesque. Little bistros and cafes, stone-cobbled streets, huge old houses where elderly shut-ins drink booze and play the violin all day, accompanied only by their memories, giant chateaus full of satan-worshipping yuppies…As an American who has barely even traveled out of my own state, this is pretty much how I imagine Europe all the time. Yes, there is the occasional murder and arson and a poor old woman strangled in her motorized wheelchair… but that paneling! Those wall sconces! The old man’s house in… wherever he was alone playing the violin. DAMN.
I guess I was just in an Old World Weird kind of mood!
[EDIT: The Ninth Gate is actually based on a book called The Club Dumas, which I am currently reading. I’ll post another entry on a book/movie comparison once I’m done!]
The cigarette needs its own credit.
If you take it on its own, The Ninth Gate as a supernatural horror movie is less a slow boil and more fossilization. It doesn’t plod, it glaciates. I do like the film, but while watching I had to mentally reboot my expectations for pacing.
I read about The Ninth Gate in some horror or film magazine probably, and was really looking forward to its release. I can’t recall why I didn’t see it in the theater, but I know I didn’t, I rented it when I was working at Blockbuster at the time. I just remember seeing the wall of boxes and thinking ‘Whoa! There are so many! This must be good!’
Well, the massive media campaign was less about the film’s quality and more about the controversy surrounding Roman Polanski: it was his first foray into supernatural horror since the now-classic Rosemary’s Baby, and also one of his first big American films since (what he probably refers to as) “the unpleasantness.” Ew.
The movie itself is serviceable, even classy. The elements of the supernatural are so mild that they are mere suggestion rather than anything really concrete, and the horror elements have more to do with the depths of human depravity.
In the opening scene, we see one of those type of rooms that movies love to show us: the library of someone disgustingly rich. OLD money rich. There’s more leather on the walls than in the entire state of Texas, everything is covered in gilt and the furniture looks like prime Alpha Vampire vintage. It’s the kind of shit that practically requires a chemistry degree to clean, like knowing what linseed oil is and how it is applied. I heard a maid once tried to bring in some Pledge Wipes but like Belvedere the butler saw it and was NOT HAVING IT and she was immediately sent away without a reference. True story. Somewhere. Probably.
And this beautiful and elegantly appointed scene is only marred when its owner finishes his letter, sets down a pen that probably is worth more than my car, and hangs himself from the chandelier, which I KNOW is worth more than my car. The camera takes a long, slow journey across the room to focus on a conspicuous gap in the library: a book is obviously missing.
Paneling! Elegance! Study! Smoking!
Anyhoo, Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) is a fortyish antique and rare book dealer of questionable morals. Sporting gray temples and spectacles, he exudes the air of that rumpled, bookish poetry/drama/art history professor who totally sleeps with his students, which is what I always pictured Johnny Depp doing were he not acting. Or maybe he’d be happily married and be turning down students’ offers of ‘extra credit work’ for that passing grade, I don’t know, he seems a pretty decent guy. Anyway, we are introduced to Corso (which is just a flat out cool name: CORSO!) helping some folks price their father’s antique book collection. The father in question is still alive, but has had a stroke and is sitting in the room, staring out into space as his children are advised on how best to dispose of his priceless collection. When Corso artfully underbids on some ‘lesser’ tomes, the poor old man’s eye bulges and his fingers clutch uselessly in rage: Corso is basically robbing them blind.
Corso is kind of an awesome character, even though he’s a bit of a sleaze. He puts me in mind of John Constantine from the Hellblazer graphic novels (and they are apparently doing a show that will be truer to the comics than the movie was). However, while Corso has a well-deserved rep as a dirtbag, the only way he’s hurt anyone has been financially.
And of course that changes.
Charged by Boris Balkan (a perfectly cast Frank Langella) to authenticate an incredibly rare book, Corso is seduced and then attacked. He leaves the book with a friend and the friend is murdered and his shop rifled, although the book remains unfound. Troubled both by these developments and the fact that Balkan doesn’t seem to give two shits about his book leaving a trail of bodies, Corso heads to Europe in order to find the other two existing copies of the book. Having worked at Border’s Books and Music in my college years, I can totally believe that people would be willing to kill over a book. YOU try telling a Mom that the last copy of ‘Lord of the Flies’ or whatever from her kid’s reading list just got sold.
Once he’s there, the movie becomes more like a travelogue of beautiful European scenery. Portugal, Spain, France, everywhere the man goes is picturesque. Little bistros and cafes, stone-cobbled streets, tree-lined avenues, hillsides, huge old houses where elderly shut-ins drink booze and play the violin all day while accompanied only by their memories, giant chateaus full of satan-worshipping yuppies… As an American who has barely even traveled out of my own state, this is pretty much how I imagine Europe all the time. Yes, the movie has the occasional murder and arson and a poor old woman strangled in her motorized wheelchair… but that paneling! Those wall sconces! The old man’s house in… wherever he was playing the violin. DAMN.
Along for the ride is a mystery woman about whom everything is inexplicable: her kung fu skills, her suddenly having a moped, her huge eyebrows, her wearing my wardrobe from high school, her name… seriously she has no name. She’s called ‘The Girl’ in the credits. And there’s a reason why, as you’ll see, unless you don’t watch the movie, in which case *SPOILER* she’s actually a fallen angel, perhaps THE Fallen Angel, trying to help Corso for some reason.
This was the only pic I found find where she’s dressed. I’m just kidding myself, she is wearing all this better. Probably would have worn the extra 40 lbs and the fascination with Dragonlance books better too.
She’s in about half the movie, but the only scene anyone seems to want to put up on the ‘net isn’t worksafe.
I even found myself loving Corso’s bag in the film, and after a short Google, discovered that it has its own following! It’s called a musette ml 35, and was a French military bag from WW2.
And once again, the ubiquitous cigarettes.
After first watching the film, I was kind of like ‘What the hell was that?’ I suppose I was expecting another The Prophecy or Lord of Illusions, so the subtlety and reserve in Ninth Gate was lost on me. It’s in the mold of those 70’s horror films where less was more: Rosemary’s Baby (which Polanski also directed), The Sentinel, The Omen. The only thing supernatural I remembered about it was a moment where the Girl seems to be able to glide when she jumps down from a balcony, and a demonic shimmer to her eyes. And of course the ending, but that felt sort of tacked on. I definitely enjoyed it more now, but I don’t think it’s a great movie. It builds great atmosphere and is beautifully shot, and has some really attractive people doing things in beautiful locations, so I think it’s worth the time. I loved the clothes and the cars and such, so it succeeds on that level at least. But if you do not wish to visit a world created by such a controversial figure as Polanski, give it a miss. You won’t be missing too much.
The movie certainly creeped me out. There was the lost in the woods at night thing, the creepy half-heard sounds thing, all the little weird stone cairns left around, and some woven stick-sculptures. But I left the theater thinking that while it was fun and a lark, it wasn’t genuinely scary.
That came later.
On that score, I feel TBWP delivered.
Good horror stays with you. The dark parts of your mind pick and choose things from the images and ideas presented, and tuck them away to germinate, and spread. Then when you’re alone, those things come creeping back out from the cracks and shadows.
I saw the Blair Witch Project in the theaters, WAAAAY back in 1999. I didn’t know what to expect, and if you’ve been following my blog for any amount of time you’ll know I love horror movies and fiction and games, and I figured something like TBWP would be right up my alley!
It was and it wasn’t.
In the theater, the movie bemused me. The camera work was offputting, but these days you could put a smartphone in the hands of a toddler and achieve the same effect. I loved the American gothic setup of the legend, evoking not only the horror of the witch trials but the possibility that, if they were real, they would want vengeance for their treatment. Colonial America was a new world still stuck in the old world mindset, and nothing brings people together like ostracizing others. Even the “characters” had their charm: stolid, level-headed Mike, with his hangdog expression and flannel; laidback and good natured Josh, channeling the ultimate Gen-X male; and shrill, pain in the ass Heather.
God. Heather.
Before I go too much further, I need to point out that Heather Donogue has already taken a metric ton of shit for her portrayal of control-freak Heather. She based her performance on a colleague she had known, who insisted on taking control of situations only to fall to pieces constantly. So she really turned in a great performance at being a massive pain in the balls.
UGH.
The movie certainly creeped me out. There was the lost in the woods at night thing, the creepy half-heard sounds thing, all the little weird stone cairns left around, and some woven stick-sculptures. But I left the theater thinking that while it was fun and a lark, it wasn’t genuinely scary.
That came later.
On that score, I feel TBWP delivered.
Good horror stays with you. The dark parts of your mind pick and choose things from the images and ideas presented, and tuck them away to germinate, and spread. Then when you’re alone, those things come creeping back out from the cracks and shadows.
The first freakout came when I was home alone. I was in my second year of college and home visiting my parents, sleeping in my old room. They were out of town for some reason or another, and as I lay in my childhood bed in the darkness, I suddenly remembered the image from the end of the movie, of Mike, standing in the corner with his face to the wall. My room was on the south side of the house, and there was about seventy feet between our house and the street, so the streetlights cast dark shadows from treelimbs and leaf clusters over the once-familiar interior of my room. My heart raced and my eyes bulged as i lay alone in the dark, sure that if i looked, I would see Mike in my room, standing in the corner with his face to the wall.
The second freakout came a few weeks later. I was in the habit of running at a nearby park in at dusk. The park was familiar, was somewhere I had been dozens of times. But that night it was almost deserted, sinking into darkness as the sun fell down the sky. There had been a storm, and pine needles and sticks were scattered all over the ground. As I was running I looked up into the trees, and a trick of the eye made it seem as if the treetops were filled with the little woven totems shown throughout the movie. DOZENS of them, just hanging in the air, revealing my impending doom. There was a shudder, a squawk, and then a feat of athleticism that I have never again been capable of. I may have run the world’s only half-minute mile.
As I was rewatching the movie a few nights ago I remembered something my French teacher of the same year said of the movie. She was talking about a recent hurricane that had come through. The news had basically warned us this hurricane would be the end of earth, but it turned out to be just a series of heavy thunderstorms, which is always a relief in our, fair but oft hurricane-ravaged state.
“It was kind of like the Blair Witch Project. A lot of hype, a lot of sticks lying around, but nothing really happened.”
Still though, I enjoyed the film and the waves of nostalgia it brought back. And it’s certainly something to study for aspiring film-makers since it made disgusting amounts of money despite being an independent movie.
I had no idea what I was in for when I hit “play” on Tucker and Dale. I heard good things, but nothing detailed. And as with many films I take a gamble on, I figured I could just shut it off if I didn’t care for it.
