Borderland

Borderland (2007)
Dir. Zev Berman
Written: Zev Berman
Starring Brian Presley, Jake Muxworthy, Rider Strong, Damian Alcazar, and Sean Astin

    BORDERLAND is a film from the second “8 Films to Die For” series, a collection of independent horror films which initially generated quite a bit of excitement amongst horror fans until they realized that oh yeah, most independent horror films are just as shitty as conventional studio ones, and they look cheaper. It’s very loosely based on the real Mexican drug dealer/ cult leader Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo. It has reasonably decent acting for a horror movie, a capable production design, a nice-looking poster, a good horror premise, and it’s not very good. It’s a bit of a bummer to have to say that, since I feel like writer/director Berman was genuinely trying to make something decent. There’s a distinct flavor of ambition here, and a manifestly committed attempt to make a serious, disturbing horror film. But the end result is a listless, cliche-ridden mess, failing to even scratch the surface of a premise that should have been an easy one. I’m hoping that by exploring what went wrong here, we can prevent future directors from falling into the same trap.

    Here’s the premise: Three recent college grads decide to cross the Texas border into Mexico, the theory being that lack of law enforcement in the area makes it easier to casually do drugs, fuck prostitutes, and generally be ugly Americans. We run into problems almost immediately, because these are those Platinum Dune Michael Bay horror movie actors who are obviously way too pretty for us to buy as real humans. Let me let you in on a little secret, future filmmakers. Allowing a day of fastidiously manicured beard growth is not going to trick us into thinking these hunky thirtysomethings are normal schlubby college kids, just like you and I. It’s the male version of those glasses insanely gorgeous girls in romantic comedies wear in a lame concession towards resembling a real human being. Not buying.

    This might be possible to overlook, if never exactly forgive, had we started killing them quickly and in imaginative ways. But instead, we spend almost an hour with these douchey nonentities, wasting valuable killing time and not learning squat about our antagonists. The “innocent religious guy” of the three gets kidnapped early on, and his two friends basically just fuck around trying to get someone to pay attention to them for nearly a full hour. Meanwhile, Jesus-boy is tied up, listening to Sean Astin unconvincingly try to imitate a scary cult enforcer.*

Ooh, scary. Rudy's got a dark side.

    There IS a way to do this kind of thing, of course. Make it a kind of spooky, paranoid thriller which slowly ratchets up the tension as our boys find themselves increasingly alone and obviously outmatched in a foreign place, at the mercy of maniacs they cannot understand. It would be an implied kind of horror, a horror by suggestion. That’s the movie I think they were hoping to make. But instead they made a low-rent psycho killer flick in which almost nothing happens for 90% of the running time. Not a good move. It’s too cliche to pass for real people in a real world, but way too literal to achieve any kind of surreal horror. The characters are too stock to pretend they’re interesting, but too earnestly acted to work as campy killer fodder. So the whole film just sort of sits there, furtively checking in on its characters as they do nothing embarrassingly bad but nothing especially compelling either.

    And there’s your problem. If you or a loved one is considering making a horror movie in the near future, begin by asking yourself this superficially simple but fundamentally important question: where is the tension coming from? If you fail to lock down that simple plot mechanic, you’re gonna have the same problem they have here, which is that it’s ultimately not really coming from anywhere but the basic concept. There’s no narrative tension at all. Our two heroes spend most of their time wandering around Mexico trying to find people to help them out. A good idea in real life, but it makes the script feel almost like a police anti-procedural. More about the details of the way they try to approach the problem, rather than the problem itself. Again, you could do it this way, but it would be hard to find much horror here, and even so you’d have to make the details themselves waaaay more interesting.**

This will teach you to shake the damn camera around so much.

You also might have been able to milk the ticking-time-bomb angle, since their friend is kidnapped early on and the sooner they get to him, presumably, the more likely he’ll survive. But of course, there’s never any clear timeframe or much measure of progress from either the protagonists or the antagonists. Sean Astin seems to just kind of killing time until his boss can pencil in a moment to ritually sacrifice this simpering hick to his African Voodoo Spirit. Without a clear sense of how much time remains, this possible means of evoking tension is rendered moot. Like all these tortureporn movies, it’s sort of grim to watch this poor kid sweat it out, but it’s not particularly tense, since there’s obviously nothing he can do to save himself. Just unpleasant.

Then you might have been able to work the paranoia and overwhelming force angle. This is the one area that the film is able to fitfully cull some interest out of. In its single somewhat arresting scene, one of our heroes --left alone in a hotel-- suddenly finds himself under siege from all directions by an army of faceless, machete-wielding attackers. Since Casey Ryback is not available, this scene works up some solidly nightmarish oh-god-they’re-after-me panic, even if it’s pretty much cribbed directly from ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. This scene works because it suddenly expands the scope of the conspiracy against them, depicts a clear danger, a clear reaction to that danger, and a clear goal for our protagonists to struggle towards. Both the stakes and the action are clearly articulated, so you have something to actually get invested in. Plus, it takes a break from the movie’s tiresome customary literalness and bathes the whole thing in weird green and orange light which has no obvious source but definitely ups the nightmare quality of everything. Had the film taken this escalation to heart and built on it, we might have something that starts slowly but ends well. Sadly, this is not the case: despite this sequence where dozens if not hundreds of cultists swarm a hotel to kill one single dude who is hardly even related to their plot, they never show up again. When we get to the villain’s lair at the end, there’s maybe two dozen people working there, and they run for the hills at the sight of a gun. Weak sauce.

Which finally brings us to the last area we might have been able to milk some tension from: the disturbing nature of the true story they’re ripping off. This should have been the easy part. The ever-colorful murderpedia entry on Constanzo reveals a wild story of drugs, bisexual lovers, murderous gangs, drug-dealing priests, madness, and voodoo. How disappointing that the film seems almost entirely uninterested in most of this, instead favoring a an approach which focuses on his footsoldier thugs. Armies, as a rule, aren’t very scary. I mean, does S.P.E.C.T.R.E’s gang of jumpsuited gunmen really strike terror into anyone’s heart? You’re just not gonna get that personal creepy touch you get from a single murderous psychopath acting on his (or her) own twisted internal logic. Gangs are just a very bland, superficial threat. If we’re gonna get a horror film out of this, we’re gonna need something a bit more deviant.

Man, Rico Suave has fallen on hard times.

Alas, it is not to be. When we do finally get to meet our Constanzo stand-in (here named Santillian for what I assume are legal reasons), he’s a disappointing Andy Garcia wannabe (although with some cool tattoos) who unimaginatively sacrifices a guy by hanging him by his feet and slicing his neck. You call that disturbing? SAVAGES also has a gang of Mexican drug-dealers murdering people, but it manages to be about a hundred times more creatively depraved, without ever bringing up Satanic Sacrifice. This Santillian guy just isn’t cutting it, no pun intended. Where are the gory, lurid details? Where are the freaks? Does everything have to be so brightly lit? And most importantly, this is a drugged-up bisexual murderous voodoo maniac? He’s smarmy and unpleasant, to be sure, but you never get the sense of a truly unhinged mind. He’s more Gordon Gekko than Patrick Bateman.  To make matters worse, seemingly everything is staged and shot to look as mundane and pedestrian as possible, and then made worse by a wobbling shaky-cam, a lack of clear geography of the location, a lack of clear threat, and a weird double-climax where a handful of cultists follow our surviving heroes back home and are dispatched with violence. When they try to play off Sean Astin as the final villain, you know they’re out of good ideas.

So sorry guys, no luck on this one. It strikes me as another one of those unfortunate cases where nerds are trying to shock you, but lack the imagination to come up with someone really transgressive. Combined with douchey, humorless and cliched characters, a unfocused plot, infuriating shaky-cam, and a utter failure to capitalize on a decent horror scenario, and that pretty well sinks the ship. It’s a tedious and joyless affair, but at least it makes a good candidate for autopsy. Independent filmmakers of the future, take heed: horror films are about more than convincing machete kills and claims of true-life serial killers. They’re a chance to construct something which makes use of the best cinema has offer, combining stories and images which play off our subconscious and instinctual fears. You don’t need a lot of money to do it. But you do need to get the fundamentals right, particularly if you’re trying for a serious, grim tone like this one is. You got to want to do more than tell a tale, you got to want to get into our heads. And to do that, you have to think about what really goes on in there. Like George Carlin says of the blues,

“its not enough to know which notes to play, you gotta know why they need to be played.”

*Casting against type can sometimes work nicely in movies like this, but I think people have an unrealistically high opinion of how often it actually comes across as anything more than a distracting gimmick. I mean, it worked for Elijah Wood in SIN CITY, but fuck dude, what's next, are we gonna see the guy who played Pippin play a junkie pimp in a blaxploitation throwback? Astin is fine in this, but come on, he's just not scary. It doesn't help that he's playing a completely vacant thug character in a movie which is resolutely unscary at every turn, but I can't help thinking that another actor could have made this character seem more like a real threat and less like an unpleasant stoner. 

**It probably goes without saying that it also completely wastes its somewhat unique setting on the lawless border between Texas and Mexico, using it as a plot device instead of a chance to get some interesting diversity and local color into its standard horror premise.

Kick-Ass

Kick-Ass (2010)

Dir. Matthew Vaughn

Written by Jane Golman, Matthew Vaughn
Starring Aaron Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Chloe Mortez, Nicholas Cage

So I took another look at this one, wondering if having seen it in the midst of its initial run I was being reactionary in finding it an unpleasant experience. Nerds at large fell hard for this one, finally getting their long-coveted “hard R” superhero movie and feeling very grown up about themselves. The critics, too, mostly praised its kinetic pace and lightly postmodern take on the subject (this was back in the days before postmodern “What if a real person became a superhero?” films actually outnumbered legit superhero films [2018 edit: well, that was fun while it lasted]). But I thought it was a kind of nasty, stupid, ugly little thing just barely concealed in a sugary coat of glossy Hollywood professionalism. Most of the people who seemed to share my point of view were the typical family values censorial puritans [2018 edit: yes, there was a time when evangelicals actually purported to care about values]. But both Roger Ebert and Outlaw Vern agreed with me, which is pretty good company to be in if you’re going to be defending an unpopular opinion. Still, I wondered if I would learn to love this one like all my peers did if I took a little time away from it and returned knowing what was in store.

Nope. Turns out I was right the first time, this thing is a craftily concealed little pill of pure hate dressed up in fun action tropes. I guess I might have known that considering it came from the comic by Mark Millar, who wrote the indefensibly vile WANTED. I consider him to be perhaps the reigning auteurial voice of impotent white beta-male rage, and WANTED is a very nearly impeccable manifesto of school-shooter logic, the kind of movie where the moral of the story can be almost any kind of loony abstraction ("you should never disobey the orders of a magic loom that tells you to kill") as long as the disempowered young white men at its center are given the basic license to achieve erection self-actualization through murderous violence. But the weird thing is, I’m not sure Millar is at fault here, at least not entirely. I’ve never read his comic, but the film seems to me to be shockingly unaware –willfully, even—of what the story it's telling is actually about. If it's an even moderately faithful adaptation, I have to assume that the point its author was trying to make is the exact opposite point the movie seems to posit. Or, I guess the two could both be equally deluded, but for that to be so would require such a titanic failure of self-awareness as to cause the mind to balk.

Here’s the thing: KICK-ASS is about a bunch of bitter, deluded, pathetic, hate-fueled losers who feel better about themselves only when they successfully commit acts of violence against other people. No one here even pretends to have humanitarian motives – they do what they do because it’s a nice confidence booster, to be able to beat people up or murder them and get away with it makes them feel special. And because they’re fighting crime, it’s all nice and morally justified and they can spout some platitudes about justice or whatever and not have to ask uncomfortable questions about why they're so angry and empty inside. That's the entire plot of the movie, more or less.

This would be a reasonably interesting take on the Superhero trope, had they chosen to actually develop this subtext (which admittedly was already better explored in the WATCHMEN movie, and already much, much better explored in the Watchmen comics waaaay back in the 80s). Not exactly a hot take, but certainly a valid point; the entire concept of the Superhero, for all its posing about responsibility and justice and Law and Order, is nothing but a juvenile power fantasy, barely dressed up in the rags of Campbellian hero's journey mythos. Obvious, perhaps, but always worth a reminder, especially for the kind of nerds who would take this movie seriously. The terrifying thing about KICK-ASS THE MOVIE, though, is that instead of exploring what seems like the most obvious thing to draw out of the story --these people are toxic, egomaniacal monsters fueling their boundless sense of worthlessness with comically sophomoric violent posturing-- it’s totally on these guys’ side. It really thinks they’re fucking awesome, and the more violent they get the more awesome it thinks they are.

Which is, I think, what makes it such an unsettling experience to me. It's the kind of film which plays into all the worst tendencies of nerd culture – validating their misogyny, their secret feelings of superiority, their bitter, simmering rage. This is the movie where the geeks are right, girls really do only like jerks. Nice guys might as well be gay to them (and I don't mean that figuratively -- that is literally a subplot here). But if you become a successful enough bully, the girl who previously ignored you can hardly wait to fuck you in an ally (again, no exaggeration. Literally depicted). The subtext is about empowerment, validation, and popularity through violence, and there's no other way to see it. The movie even makes explicit this point. Kick-Ass is a selfish, whiny little prick who's ready to retire after committing one “heroic” act and feeling better about himself. But he has one thing to do first: go tell his crush that he's a hero so she'll fuck him. “What's the difference between Peter Parker and Spider Man?” Kick-Ass sneers, “Spider Man gets the girl.”

Is that really the difference, though? Since you brought it up, KICK-ASS, let's actually talk about Spider-Man a little bit. Peter Parker isn't like Batman, he's not living a faux life as cover for his superheroing. He's actually living a real life, trying to balance his superhero moonlighting with his responsibilities to his family and loved ones, all while grinding by in a low-paying, unflashy working-class job. He's got plenty to complain about, but instead he's sweet and upbeat, heroically taking abuse from people who think he's irresponsible and unreliable due to his anonymous webslinging. He could easily tell everyone that he's Spider-Man and probably do a lot better for himself, but he doesn't.* That's not what it's about. Besides, it's not like Spidey is thorax-deep in women, either. Sure, Black Cat is a babe, but it's Peter Parker, not Spidey, who ends up finding long-term happiness with the likes Mary Jane and (briefly) Gwen Stacy. Not because he's a hero, but because he's a good guy and an unselfish friend. He doesn't get the girl because she thinks it's hot that he beats up baddies -- he gets her in spite of feeling obligated to put his own life second in order to make the world safer. Spider-Man is Peter's burden, not his fantasy. He lives a double-life as Spider-Man because he's cursed with abilities which make him uniquely suited to helping the world.

At the end of KICK-ASS, the title character mocks the classic Spider-Man ethos by musing (in his incessant, self-satisfied narration), that, “With no power comes no responsibility,” and it's supposed to count as character growth that he goes ahead and kills a few people even though he didn't technically have to and probably won't even be substantially rewarded for it. That line should tell you everything you need to know about KICK-ASS's horrifyingly self-serving philosophy, but it also demonstrates perfectly just how little he actually took from the comic books he's constantly prattling on about and using as a smug cover for being a vicious little sociopath. I mean, do you really think Peter Parker would have just led a life of selfish instant gratification had he not been bitten by that radioactive/genetically altered spider? If Uncle Ben had been killed and Peter didn't have superpowers, would he just have shrugged it off and gone into middle management at an investment bank because, "with no power comes no responsibility?" Fuck no. He's in the game to help people, to make the world better. 

And that's something Kick-Ass --both the character and the movie-- just fundamentally misunderstand. For all its nonstop self-congratulatory meta-commentary, the film and its title character get the whole concept of the hero (super or otherwise!) fundamentally backwards, and, to all appearances, don't have the slightest awareness of that fact. KICK-ASS's idea of a hero is simply someone whose self-gratification generally lines up with brutalizing criminals. That's it. The idea that they're pursuing any kind of philosophy of justice, let alone making the world a better place, is paid only the most transparent and fleeting lip service, and mostly ignored entirely. Every so-called hero in the movie is in it for entirely (and explicitly!) selfish reasons, and the movie never for an instant seems to find this fact curious or noteworthy. In many cases, they make life considerably worse for other people. When Kick-Ass learns that an impersonator has been savagely murdered in his stead, it doesn't even occur to him to feel a twinge of remorse or regret for what he's started. He's just glad someone else got killed first so he has a heads-up to save his own ass.

Only one person in the film seems aware that they’re playing a sociopath, and that’s the reliably eccentric Nicholas Cage (PAY THE GHOST, THE FROZEN GROUND, DOG EAT DOG, MOM AND DAD, and also I believe he won an Academy Award at some point?) in one of his court-mandated five great performances per decade. He plays "Big Daddy," an emotionally stunted single father who forces his 11-year old daughter to become a vicious, remorseless assassin, a premise which the movie thinks is just so edgy it can barely contain itself about how daring and brave it is, and it doesn't like to use the word "hero," but you know, what else do you call someone --an artist, say-- with the balls to stand up to those Hillary Clinton PC thugs of the world who wanna tell you how to live your life man, fuck you Tipper Gore I don't conform to your delicate sensibilities, I'm an outlaw, I'm dangerous, baby, look at that, I put an 11-year old killing people with a sword in my movie and you're like, so outraged, GOD MOM WHY DO YOU ALWAYS RUIN MY STUFF? STAY OUT OF MY ROOM OK?! GOD.

As much as the movie wants you to think this guy’s awesome, though, Cage lets you know what a spaced-out psycho he is with his Ned Flanders mustache (he actually adds a fake handlebar to his real mustache when he dawns his crime-fighting persona, a touch of genius I must assume came from Cage), hilariously nutty gay southern drawl (he should have a talk show with Gary Oldman from THE FIFTH ELEMENT) and magnificent vacant-eyed uncomfortable earnestness. He immediately reads as someone who stands outside a bus terminal all day with a terrifyingly artificial smile, softly telling people they'll burn in hell for their mini-dresses and Beatle boots. He's good at killing, but he's a total, abject failure as a father and as a human being. The movie is totally on his side, and falls all over itself trying to convince you how badass he is, but Cage brilliantly undermines the effort by putting just a hint of overblown theatrical flair into his superhero persona. Cage knows how to look cool as a superhero type, but here he (intentionally, I truly believe) makes the character look like a kid playing in a Batman costume, subtly reminding you that this guy isn't so much a serious gritty hero as a big self-absorbed child who happens to own a lot of guns.

                  Nic Cage auditioning for BLACK SWAN 2: UGLY DUCKLING

Other than that, though, the movie is dead set on convincing you how awesome these guys are, and the scary thing is that it’s devilishly good at making the whole thing fun, funny, and kinetic. It’s a pretty good time, objectively, and I have to imagine Matthew Vaughn has a genuinely fun action comedy in him somewhere.** But this ain’t it. This is a serial killer film where we’re supposed to cheer for the killers and think they’re cool. It idolizes violence, makes a tacit (and occasionally even explicit) argument for violence as a necessary tool for self-actualization. Which gives the screen violence an unpleasant, pushy feel, like an aggressive drunk getting in your face about something you basically already agree about. Shit, man, I love movie violence! I didn’t watch every FRIDAY THE 13th just for the sex scenes. But this thing worships the violence so feverishly, and so steadfastly refuses to introspect about the obvious horror story playing out in its narrative that it's actually a turn-off. It manages to make a guy flying a jetpack shooting chain guns feel like a bummer. My god, there's a special place in hell for that.

If it had anything to say about anything at all, that might even be OK. With a film this short on ideas, though, it just feels uncomfortably close to trying to win friends by feeding into people's worst traits and validating their most selfish fantasies. If you let yourself get sucked into its nasty little fable about discovering how special you are by beating people up, I imagine it can be a kind of powerful, seductive fantasy. But watching from the outside is pretty horrifying. And as we've watched exactly the demographic this movie is courting metastasize from angry unfulfilled basement-lurkers into nihilistic, rape-threat-spewing crypto-fascists, it's gotten harder and harder to see it as harmless, irresponsible mayhem. Movies may not cause people to turn bad, but sometimes they reveal a lot about the kind of person who does. And sitting through KICK-ASS is an uncomfortably slick tour through the mind of a very unpleasant person indeed. Not my idea of a fun trip.

*2018 edit: Actually I guess he does go public about being Spider-Man sometime in the mid-2000s in a book written -- ha, of course it was-- by Mark Millar. Anyone know how that turned out?

** 2018 edit: turns out I liked X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, but was pretty mixed on KINGSMEN, which has a lot of the same problems as this one but watered down. I hear STARDUST is fun, though!

Creep (C.H.U.C. double feature with 1972's Raw Meat!)

Creep (2005)

Dir. Christopher Smith

Starring Franka Portente, Sean Harris, Vas Blackwood

This is the first in my two-film series about London Underground Mutant Cannibals, which I have affectionately dubbed C.H.U.C.s (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Chaps). This is a modern take on the classic subject of mutated cannibals who live in the London subway (“Underground”) tunnels, and was directed by Christopher Smith, who’s BLACK DEATH you may remember I recently enjoyed due to its interesting structure and concepts, despite its somewhat uneven execution.

CREEP is, I think, a better made film, but not well made enough to really justify the fact that it’s pretty generic in every regard. It’s your standard trapped-with-a-serial-killer scenario, this time set in the London Undergound which doesn’t seem nearly as creepy as the filmmakers seem to think it is. They have to fall all over themselves to think of reasons someone can’t simply get out (cell phones don’t work, door is locked, security guard refuses to help, pay phone doesn’t work, other guy only helps once it’s too late to do anything) but it still seems like an imminently survivable situation.

Here’s the story: Franka Portente (RUN LOLA RUN) is a German-accented Londoner who falls asleep inside a subway station and wakes up to find the place has closed (nobody checks the platform before they lock the door and leave for the night, apparently). But she’s far from alone; her rapey would-be paramour is down there too, as are two drug-addled homeless kids, a security guard, a stray sewer worker, and of course our titular creep. So it’s a regular after-hours party down there of potential victims, most of whom are dispatched in short order in fairly mundane ways (the Creep, despite appearing to just be a kind of skinny humanoid imbred, possesses super strength and --before we first lay eyes on him-- likes to do things like climb along the ceiling or underneath the subway cars and grab people, which I call bullshit on because once we see him it becomes unclear how he accomplished this feat).  

Portente does a nice job of seeming like an unusually resourceful, logical victim for this kind of scenario, but doesn’t add much to the proceedings aside from being basically competent. Which could be said for the whole film: pretty competent, but doesn’t add much. I just couldn’t get past the fact that every single scare in this film has been done somewhere else much better and frequently more imaginatively. It’s standard in almost every way, never really embarrassing itself but never giving itself much reason to stand out either. The film is more interested in jump scares and gore than it is in building atmosphere or paranoia, so it’s a bit more damning than you might assume that it doesn’t have much to add to the basic genre structure.   

There is one thing which is pretty cool, though, and that’s the implied backstory to our Creep (Sean Harris, looking like Gollum crossed with Mer-Man). As our heroes penetrate the abandoned catacombs beneath the city, they come across a secret, abandoned abortion clinic which houses evidence that seems to suggest that the Creep (who we find out is named Craig) was born there along with many other creepy deformed cannibal children. That raises a number of disturbing possibilities; was Craig’s deformity a result of an abortion gone wrong? Was the doctor secretly keeping babies he was supposed to be aborting for some kind of twisted experiments, or, even creepier, to sort of half-raise as his own family?

Things get even creepier when Craig drags a victim down there and straps her into the ol’ abortion chair. He proceeds to clumsily mimic the actions of a doctor, strapping on filthy bloodstained scrubs, mimicking washing his hands (with no running water), sighing theatrically. He’s watched this being done many, many times, but it’s a perverse parody of actual medicine, just as Craig is a perverse parody of a human. Creepy. Then he grabs a rusty saw and the film gets back to trying to shock you with gore. Meh.

Overall, not a bad effort but not really a good enough one to recommend it very strongly either. If subways creep you out, this might be your thing, otherwise there’s just not a whole lot of interest here.