In terms of special effects, The Gene Generation phones it in whenever possible, particularly when it comes to scenery. For example, here’s their vision of some sort of Viking air-ship cruising past some battlements toward what resembles a veiny mesa from hell:

If this was 1995, I’d be absolutely enthralled! But it’s not. They can’t even make water look decent. WATER! Probably the most well-established of all commonly-used CG textures; one which is available in multiple free forms in almost every production platform available to filmmakers today. There’s grudging respect to be given to an animator who decides to lone-wolf it on this point and render something in the manner of an old-school animated gif. At best, the effects rise to the Blade Runner PC game. For the nostalgic, all becomes forgivable.

Things don’t improve with each new character: an old Obi Wan steampunk wizard looking guy (Robert David Hall) with a tracheostomy who communicates like those creepy videos in Myst. A burn victim go-go dancer at a Mad-Max themed industrial rave bar. The gambling-addicted brother of the main character (sexy Dragon Lady assassin) with his emo bangs-flop and comic relief bff. With every movement, leather creaks. It creates a sort of fart-y effect which adds levity to scenes which should otherwise possess a sense of gravitas.

Bread, wilted lettuces and… a big fat veiny throbber?

It’s unclear what, if any direction the actors were given. Perhaps they were given the freedom to dictate their characters’ mannerisms and diction and this was overwhelming, particularly to younger actors without years of experience on TV dramas to fall back on. More likely, the horrendous dialog (which jerks you through interpersonal interactions more unbelievable than the entire world they take place in) rendered improvement via delivery impossible. Mostly you just pray for everyone to stop talking so that Bai Ling can kick someone with her giant goth moon boots, or walk around fidgeting with her ridiculous future-weapons.

The Sauron of the movie appears sporadically and it’s unclear who the villain is for quite some time. To complicate matters, all of the “good guys” are unlikeable, stupid, selfish and impossible to feel even compassion for. Thus whenever this dude appears with his wacky-genes sister:

Long-awaited Addams Family / Pirates of the Caribbean crossover pix

You’re just praying his weird incest hippie ass Senator Palpatines the shit out of everyone. I wouldn’t get in the dude’s van but I’d politely clap if he devastated some punks.

In another “Meanwhile…” a contextless and sweatpants-clad hacker rustles about in his nerdcave, working on something we’re not meant to comprehend (a transponder.. to fix the genes.. but he doesn’t know they have THE CHIP! none of this is explained). I feel a certain kinship with him as he labors in front of his Victorian laptop.

cool screensaver bro

]]> http://www.pube.us/2010/09/gene-generation/feed/ 0 http://www.pube.us/2010/09/gene-generation/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Pubes/~3/2hcQikd_rxo/ http://www.pube.us/2010/09/portrait-of-the-young-artist-as-a-dipshit/#comments Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:39:26 +0000 woodoo http://www.pube.us/?p=39 whoever made reefer madness obviously had never smoked weed in his life. he ended up being mostly right, anyway.

insaniac is a good teachable lesson, in the sense that it shows us just how much we take for granted in even low budget films. this movie illustrates definitively why you should never put the cart before the horse. the lesson you need to take away from this movie, even if you’re someone who’s only ever picked up a camera to film a kitten yawning, is that your overblown vanity project needs to have the barest modicum of effort put into it. that driving urge is the difference between fulfilling your need for self-expression while looking like an egomaniac and just looking like an incompetent egomaniac.

there’s a scene in this film where the lead character, autumn, sits bolt upright from a dead sleep and immediately drinks out of a liquor bottle. that’s the kind of film insaniac is. everything in it is uncommitted as the nonsensical title and that’s what i can’t stand about cheaply made films. money is hardly ever the problem; if you’ve got an idea, you can’t quarter-ass it. this is a movie made by someone with a future in medical billing. this is a movie made by a person who dropped out of community college to become a dog groomer.

i’m totally okay with a movie having zero budget. admittedly, it’s completely intellectually dishonest of me to compare the writer/producer/director of this shithouse with the late eric fournier or david lynch, two guys who are genuinely just wellsprings of ideas. however, the entire shaye st. john saga is at least as long as two features and was made on negative budget. the huge difference between this film and those youtube “triggers” is an element of craft; given that both this film and the shaye shorts are beholden to the commonly held notion of dream logic, you might as well discuss lynch as the exemplar.

INLAND EMPIRE is as cheap looking as a feature film could possibly be, but you’re not aware of it at all because it clearly doesn’t matter to david lynch what kind of budget he has to work with. his vision is so singular that you readily allow yourself to invest in the technical imperfection and stilted, inconsistent acting in his films.  you never find yourself talking about the technical details of his films, except to mention how he sees the camera as a vehicle; a conveyance. his concern as a director is disorienting and unnerving you, not impressing you.

i’m okay with people casting themselves and their dowdy friends as characters you’re meant to invest in. i didn’t sit through His Master’s Voice for nothing, in fact, what i most enjoyed about it was the amateurish scenery chewing from drama students using the stanislausky method to inhabit characters slightly different from their actual selves. hmv is unquestionably wretched in a way only a student made serial drama about college students getting superpowers can be. the whole affair is a misguided melange of nerd universe influences, a little power rangers here, a little teary eyed k-drama there, a pinch of insipid anime cliches, a dash of LARP. it’s defiantly unoriginal and banal in an oddly celebratory way.

watching invokes a familiar feeling, a feeling which anyone who questions his own aptitude at any artistic endeavor feels. it’s an embarassing twinge of recognition when he sees something that is so self-evidently terrible, a real life depiction of a creative nightmare. i do, however, admire the exuberance on display in hmv – the kind of overweening earnestness you get from someone trying to make something from nothing. there’s something to be said for believing your own bullshit to serve as motivation to create. the fact that the subject matter is just so facile and uninteresting is what kicks the crutch from under hmv. to find out your striving is less than promethean is devastating.

i’m even okay with irritating, elliptical in-jokes. one of my favorite shows as a middle schooler was a local access show called egg tv, in many ways the essence of bizarre anti-humor that formed my comedic sensibility. egg tv has zero production values. it’s shot entirely in the woods, in alleys, in the various living rooms and dens of the circle of friends that make the show.  the wigs are atrocious, the sound mix is terrible, nobody can act, and worst of all, 9 times out of 10, they don’t even bother out editing out themselves laughing at their own terrible jokes. much like the musical acts featured on the show from time to time, you can tell none of it was rehearsed ahead of time. and yet, if it were produced, directed or written any better, it would be practically unwatchable. as it is, it’s perfect.

insaniac possesses none of these qualities. it isn’t funny, it isn’t charming and it assumes you give a crap about any of the stoned idiots wandering in and out of the film. the most entertaining thing about it is that the movie was obviously shot in some sort of abandoned building as nearly every scene is shot in unfurnished rooms. even the scene set in a “psychiatrist’s office” looks like it’s in a squat. a plastic ficus is what passes for set dressing. a broom closet passes for an apartment. actually, i take that back, a squat would actually be better because it would appear to be lived in. everything in this film just looks like an unrented room in a suburban office campus.

that’s it, really, there is literally nothing else to latch onto in this film. you’d think people who get high all the time could come up with dream sequences that weren’t lame and obvious. i can’t even praise the filmmakers gumption for making a film because it’s so stillborn. the only thing they followed through on was releasing the damn thing. if you have a camera and no ideas, sell the camera. no stars.

this is larry cohen going hog wild with the most money he’d ever been given to make a movie up to that point.  there are a few larry cohen movies that are clearly better than this one. nevertheless, this movie is a master at work. i’d bet that it’s probably the kind of movie cohen would claim he had the most fun making.

there’s no way to talk about this movie without broderick crawford. this is a movie full of hilariously lousy impressions of famous people (nixon, for example, is played by richard m. dixon, on minute 14 of 15) which lends an extraordinary amount of credibility to crawford’s portrayal. the welles-alike playing the young hoover is sensitive and edgy, but it’s just a good performance. crawford is brilliant. part bud costello, part huey long (who crawford played in the brilliant roman a clef, all the kings men), part trucker fag in denial, all weasel. his facial contortions are so pained and frustrated, his psychosexual angst so bare that you could have taglined this film: ‘you will believe a man can die a virgin!’ wisely, though, cohen mostly hints at the obvious, resisting the urge to make something seamier.

aside from the absolutely uncanny physical resemblance, what crawford brings to the role is a sense of comedic timing that makes clark’s script sing and does justice to his sardonic wit. once the script gets the “hey look! it’s famous person” stuff, it’s pretty damn funny and to be honest, effectively engenders as much sympathy as one can have for a vindictive megalomaniac blackmailer. it’s to the credit of the excellent acting on the part of the lead that allows you a modicum of empathy with someone so priggish, just the idea that crawford effectively pulls off lecturing various presidents on ethics to appear at least nominally principled is sort of a feat in itself.

the editing deserves special praise as well, serving not only to tie together all the stolen shots, stock footage and hurriedly dressed period sets, but also to set a lively tempo. it’s very reminiscent of romero’s dawn of the dead, where the constant cutting and crosscutting alleviates the lack of budget to help convincingly portray a world overrun by mindless cannibals. in the same way that film wisely uses its time with the pennsylannia countryside and (then new) monroeville mall, this film utilizes location shooting whenever and wherever it can, from the same theatre where john dillinger was gunned down to hoover’s favorite restaurant. cohen throws out every single shot he can think of, rarely settling on match cuts and two shots whenever he can. interspersed with these expected setups are peephole shots with unsteady cameras, increasing in quantity as the film goes on, as we get nearer the nixon administration. by the third act, the multiplicity of the pov’s creates quite a jittery and paranoid effect that culminates in scenes set at night in the oval office with nixon and his inner circle sinisterly bathed in shadow. it’s really effective.

unquestionably, what holds the film together is cohen’s sense of humor, ably realized by the impressive cast of veteran actors. there’s a great scene in the stork club that takes place after hoover’s aged mother dies. he calls his favorite waiter over to the table to chat with him to make small talk. after giving the waiter a helpful tip about his daughter’s involvement with a subversive organization on her college campus. the knowledge that hoover knows more about his family life than he does scares the guy so witless that after an absent-minded query, the waiter replies “i don’t know no rudyard kipling and i dont wanna know him!”. hoover, drunk and contemplative, recites kipling’s “if” at length, nostalgically, while the waiter appears to be trembling. the moment hoover lets the waiter leave the table, the waiter runs outside in a panic and bursts into tears.

it’s brilliant. it’s the perfect moment in a film that reached way beyond its means. it shows hoover as a fully three dimensional character, in a film where fdr is portrayed in a particularly humorous way as a clownish, aloof aristocrat with a sneer and an algonquin round table high society affected accent. hoover is characterized simultaneously as pathetically sexless, willing to sacrifice any sense of ethics for his principles, witty and self effacing yet unable to laugh at himself, a loyal friend and a dedicated public servant, while being a terrifying, conniving, petty fascist jackal. if the film has any faults, it’s that the strengths directly abut the weaknesses. you’ll have brilliantly snide banter in one scene and tedious exposition in the next. you’ll have a poignant and substantial bit of acting by crawford immediately followed by an amateurish impression of jfk as a braying jackass. it’s a little maddening in a movie that’s so genuinely funny and interesting. it was still pretty damn great but it was either too slapdash or not slapdash enough.

two and a half stars, if ever half a star meant anything. i feel like it needed a dream sequence.

to preface discussion of this film, the anthology film archives reminds me of every film class i ever took. it’s a cool, pleasantly run down venue in a lively neighborhood that probably hosts a boutique eatery that only makes variations on hash browns. i’ve never been, but when william lustig calls, my curiosity is piqued and i must heed.

the context of the screening begs the question: could something as cornpone and wide-eyed as the town that dreaded sundown escape ready-made hipster derision? even before the lights dimmed, i had to brace myself. would i or the audience stop sneering for five minutes and let the film tell its story?

we’re not just inundated with pop culture, worse still we suffer from the affliction of reflexivity. by 2010, shithead young adults like myself are in the advanced stages – we engage every form of media, regardless of context, with a calculated attitude. we go into a movie like this expecting the room, awkward nerd culture dictates a movie is “riffable”, we pay attention only long enough to get our snarky, ironic jollies, click the like button and move on. ultimately, in our post-ironic-reverted-ironic pop milieux, “cult” success venerates misguided, pandering silliness like dr. horrible’s sing a long blog, as if winking at the artifice validated it.

the town that dreaded sundown is included in lustig’s collection as one of the important antecedents of the slasher film, its historical legitimacy cemented in the year 1976. a year that was right at the tail end of the enormously influential and lurid italian giallo films, the same year as the schrader/scorcese monolith taxi driver, the year of vhs, of the concorde, the year of the son of sam, of john wayne gacy, the formation of apple computers, the last hitchcock feature film, the first ramones studio album and the bicentennial; all forming a monstrous constellation.

astrological portents affect mass psyche, if nothing else. if there were someone looking that year, surely they noticed a demon star in the sky signaling it’s own miasmic age, a warning to ready for the psychic spasm that would expel something called “the eighties” and with it, the repugnant, amoral thrills of the slasher. american psycho, for example, cannily repackages these signifiers in its narrative, codifying the shark-like social climber of that decade figuratively, morally and literally as a (pardon the pun) fine young cannibal. in this way, although presciently, this film clearly belongs to a continuum of influences that allow this new subgenre to emerge. allow this one digression.

there’s a few things in this film worth talking about and the most problematic is the use of comic relief, played by the director himself, charles b. pierce, as a buffoonish patrolman assigned to the hunky leading man and grizzled veteran working the case. his light hearted, well meaning clowning is something of a relic, in part due to the fact that horror films often pretentiously eschew humor (something texas chainsaw massacre 2 brilliantly sends up) and partly because the hapless rube schtick is so hackneyed it’s almost conceptually alien these days. its inclusion suggests an intention to sublimate tension or lingering creepiness that permeates the scenes with the phantom killer, to contrast their uncomfortable silence and borderline-sexual panting with goofiness.

the effect is sort of the opposite to modern eyes; the stakeout scene, for example, features a very charged, homoerotic scene where a deputy cops a feel on pierce’s crossdressed patrolman that’s basically creepier than anything our killer in the hangman’s hood does. by introducing an element of inconsequence, pierce does manage to underscore how ineffectual the efforts of the police are, in an odd way, the bumbling hick archetype lets us know for certain the phantom will never be caught. manpower is no substitute for brainpower.

and how about that phantom killer, anyway? he doesn’t possess the physicality of a kane hodder but thoroughly embodies the menace. as frivolous as this film can be, there is something alarming about the blatantly sexual nature of the killers predation on his victims, emphasized by the incongruous soundtrack being replaced with heavy (clearly aroused) breathing. his cloth sack mask is more zodiac killer than jason voorhees, more gimp mask than hockey mask. unlike his slasher offspring, the phantom killer is no supernatural force, only unknowable insofar as the director chooses not to reveal his (unimportant) identity. his presence alone earns the film cult status.

texarkana, tx makes a great setting, too, this movie is set in 1946 and nothing has seemed to change in 30 years except the cars. all the men wear hats and all the ladies wear dresses. the local economy is probably based entirely on high school football and a paper mill. there’s probably one paved road in town, and yet it doesn’t feel like the part of texas where a chainsaw massacre might occur.  there is something cheerful and unpretentious about how the small town of the film resists changing attitudes in such a charmingly naive way. the high school band plays music as if nothing significant occured since j.p. sousa and the experts are big men from the big city, but these things aren’t the butt of an outsider’s joke. there’s no jazz, but there aren’t any lynch mobs, either.

honestly, if not for the more unusual elements of the film owing to its novelty, it would be easy to find this movie tame and totally unscary, even laughable throughout. pierce was no auteur but there is something admirably unvarnished about the effort on display here. it’s nice to see a film that contributes to the well of ideas that constitute a genre of film without dragging around the influence of its antecedents like a boat anchor. it wasn’t black christmas, but it was a fun watch. two stars.

if there’s one fair criticism of the “found footage” genre outside of nauseating camera bobbing and poor sound mixing, i believe it’s that the notion of the found footage feature film is gimmicky. one couldn’t necessarily disagree that the device is a shortcut, an excuse to gussy up a simple story, a gimmick used to hide technical proficiency or a lack of budget for professional equipment, crew or effects. the expectations have changed a great deal – in the years intervening the hibernation of the genre from 1999′s blair witch project to 2003′s the last horror movie, the production values for television reality programming has increased appreciably. cops has been succeeded (but not replaced) by slick, tightly paced docudramas like the first 48. glossy flimflam like unsolved mysteries has evolved into even glossier, neatly packaged stories of mystery, betrayal, sex and murder in shows like forensic files. the rational aspect of the lives of middle class westerners is documented to an irritatingly comprehensive degree. to even bother with the genre nowadays, apparently, you better be pulling some maya deren shit.

there is and always will be something powerful and appealing in the “hood” story as long as there is social inequity. in substituting gang life for a serial killer, a gigantic baby sea insect or malicious spirits, this film begs commonality with something like bangin’ in little rock (and its sequel) in its titillating survey of day to day gang life for an initiate. we are once again bought into a world where bad outcomes are inevitable, where petty power games explode with violence, where fatherless young men are mentored by lost souls and degenerates. the authenticity is meant to be anathema to the bland histrionics of boys n tha hood in which people jerk around like marionettes to the dictates of plot, theme and oh so deep meaning. it’s to this film’s strength that the various characters are allowed to speak for themselves, stories in which, tellingly, they gloss over the cliches.

the problem, of course, is that the film doesn’t bother with this. it treats cliches as though they were worth equal time with the vivid stories told by the real-life gang members in the film. while its clear that the writer/director did a lot of homework and inured himself to the people he worked with making the film, it’s also pretty clear that his decision to yoke this film to a weak plot spoils the whole affair. the goodwill generated by the effortlessly real acting is soured by the disneyland tram ride through the ghetto – see the thuggish home invasion! see the confrontation with a rival set! see how gangsters make rock cocaine! see the kind of fucked up poverty and absence of values and morals that lead to a 13 year old partying, drinking and fucking! don’t just see it: live it! you are there. it’s like big apple tours with crime scenes. it’s the most disingenuous kind of social conciousness there is, it’s cultural rubbernecking. look how “these people” live. is that an expedient to intelligent storytelling or a salve for progressive moralizing?

the personal revulsion i have to “hood movie” cliches is that they were completely exhausted by 1995; when the wayans brothers are making fun of how shopworn your tired plot is, you are deep in it. forget killer of sheep, gang tapes is post-belly. gang tapes came out not long before state property, a charmingly inept but infinitely more interesting movie with similar themes that doesn’t fall all over itself trying to tick off all the ghetto movie prerequisites. that we’ve seen all of this before is bad enough, the fact that less skilled filmmakers made films that most importantly didn’t seem like they were recapitulating popular narratives and preconceptions is worse. sometimes the worst movies are the ones that are just interesting enough to get you to invest the time to see them through to the end but ultimately are not so interesting that you feel that you didn’t waste ninety minutes. maybe that’s the moral here. one star for such a cruel trick.

i don’t really want to pile on conspiracy theorists, either, to do that would be just too obvious. no matter how ludicrous they seem, no matter how loosely packed the tinfoil hat, we love conspiracy shit. we are drawn to them. we mock the 9-11 truthers while seriously, actually believing that jfk was assassinated by three or more people from competing nationalities, agencies and ideologies. we take things like the da vinci code at face value, we believe nostradamus accurately predicted hurricane katrina, we are deathly terrified of old dudes shooting pool and drinking beer. although the idea is terrifying, people in general love the idea of a supreme inner sanctum, the world ruled by a secret echelon who would never leave anything to chance; even as we boo the dastardly cabal responsible for hijacking this or that, our imaginations are aflame with possibilities. it’s what we imagine when we imagine striking it rich, the ability to shape our own reality, to eliminate negative externalities.

yes, the reflecting pool is a terrible film that barely tells a story. it has no characters worth investing in and none of the scenarios (outside of the expository presentation of the “controlled demolition” theory) are even remotely believable. the cinematography consists almost entirely of terrible establishing shots and extreme close-ups. the soundtrack is monotonous and fails to score tension or mood. the cast is entirely made up of dour, hangdog losers that take themselves too seriously. it’s incompetently made but on top of missing all the fundamental elements that make a film even watchable, it lacks a genuine sense of urgency or energy that might convince you to watch it to the end.

indeed, one has to wonder who the intended audience for this film was? i imagine they wanted to fabricate some kind of analogy to the story of alex prokop, the polish emigre writer and skeptic who experienced firsthand the government sponsored machinery of propaganda, suppression and erasure of dissidents in the soviet era. he raises objections to the alternate story as a strawman would, asking the most facile questions possible as though he is reading from a truther blog’s FAQ. the character of paul cooper, who becomes a self-styled 9-11 expert after he loses his daughter on one of the hijacked planes, is definitely the character we are meant to most identify with. he’s got principles, values and common sense. he’s got the drive to find out what really happened, cognitive biases and lack of expertise in any related technical field be damned. why should we be convinced by what these two dullards have to say?

because we’re supposed to, i guess. what’s most interesting about the presentation of the alternate theory in this film is that for all the grandstanding about digging for the real story and how the media organs just parrot the line they’re told is that the “truth” is presented in the exact same way. nothing substantial is cited other than the vague notion that we’re not being told the entire story by various official agencies and mouthpieces. in other words, every news story, ever. the “evidence” is given weight by the fact that prokop’s boss is intimidated by the fbi, he’s sued and his newsmagazine is ridiculed on a bill o’reilly style program. alright, i’m convinced. i give. everybody and everything did 9-11. the terrorists were patsies and the government actually puppeteered a terrorist plot flawlessly. this is actually a masterful piece of agitprop.

the problem with this presentation on the whole is that this narrative is occurring in a movie in 2008, nevermind that it would be awfully quaint even back in 2002. even as a response to the entertainment industry’s collective response to 9-11 in every possible political context (see: the west wing, 300, united 93, the shield, 24, the wire, minority report, the bourne trilogy, cloverfield, the 25th hour and so on) it doesn’t even make sense. nine years on, the average person’s interaction with what we think of as journalism has shifted dramatically. we are drip-fed news and not-news constantly, we are updating and revising our own opinions constantly (and publicly). we self-select what perspectives and information we deem worthy of serious consideration, just by nature of the medium of delivery. what is gained from such a flat, lifeless recapitulation of truther talking points? why even bother with the barely one dimensional characters? the whole point of telling these alternate histories is to primarily to entertain and the rich history of such films and television shows informs us that it’s foolish to think otherwise.

no stars, for po-faced naivete, utterly insipid ideas, unconvincing characters, convictions and complete unwillingness to acknowledge the duty to excite or entertain.

this is where asylum comes in, self styled schlockmeisters with tongues firmly planted in cheek, very much a modern troma studios – noble trash is a really fun idea until you sit yourself down and watch more than 5 minutes of one of their godawful “mockbusters”. paranormal entity is still an interesting case, though, for once the source material is a big hollywood hit that they might actually run the risk of  outspending in their zeal to confuse moms at blockbuster and drunks stumbling over to the redbox in front of 7-11. paranormal activity is, for all intents and purposes, a textbook on how you make a horror movie cheaply, paranormal entity is the movie that scoffs and says “i have life experience so i dont need to take placement exams”.

if you take the premise of activity as the basis for entity, that katie featherstone is tormented by something that ultimately wants to possess her and make her do bad things, entity is almost certainly about something that awakens some kind of fucked up incestcubus that wants to get the mother out of the way so the dead father/definitely possessed son can rape his daughter/sister. right from the start we get the brother, as the cameraman character, acting out the micah/katie dynamic with the character that is supposed to be his sister. he prods her for her innermost thoughts, lingers and dotes on her in a decidedly not-brotherly way, he “accidentally” catches her in less than pants repeatedly, he runs to save her when she calls out for him while the mother character is ignored, rendered catatonic by her husband/son’s powerful psychic urge to molest.

several times in the film, we actually get a little effective bit of business when the brother films himself adjusting stationary cameras, he turns the camera on, the shutter opens and the lens stares at us. we see ourselves and immediately make the connection with the sinister eye. the flat, surveillance style angle we are shown has the immediacy of a pinhole camera angled downward to spy on women using the toilet. we identify with the brother, and he fulfills our wishes by fixating on her body, in one scene literally telekinetically undressing her so we can all get a good look. its one of the only legitmately creepy moments in the film because it’s absolutely earned – in pa, micah (representative of the audience) definitely wants to objectify katies body on camera and katie modestly declines, pe is not the kind of film to deny us such thrills and gives us multiple chances, in skimpy outfits, with and without her consent. just where is this going?

why, rape and murder of course, spoiled by interstitials in the first two minutes of the film after the transcript of a frantic 911 call. interestingly, lots of reviews of this movie point out that that title card is erroneous, which is blatantly false: we are spared the deranged scene of the possessed brother banging his sister because we’ve just sat through (and are implicated in) 75 minutes of merciless eye-fucking. where pa blocks off the room is where the central action takes place, the negative space beyond the door and relative safety of the bedroom is a netherworld. your eye is trained just beyond the door, anticipating the arrival of something your mind might not be able to comprehend. where pe blocks off the action is completely voyeuristic, the sister character fills the frame. as the audience, we’re not looking for a sighting of the demon, the camera is the demon. our desire, the brother’s desire and the demon’s desire are all one in the same. get them titties out.

then we get multiple payoffs, we get her soapy taters in the tub, we get her wandering around in the dark in her bra and panties, when a paranormal-sensitive investigator (read: social worker) is called in to make some sense of it after a serious attack, he’s killed to keep his mouth shut. it comes to a head in the final scene – presumably to cover his own ass, the brother films himself stumbling through a ransacked house to find his ravaged, prone and mostly nude sister inverted on the bed. the obviously staged home invasion wouldnt fool a security guard. the acting wouldnt impress in a middle school play. you are indicted, audience. looking wasn’t enough.

i’m not sure what the filmmaker (the guy who plays the brother) was thinking by conflating the harmless ogling so cheerfully welcomed in these kind of tacky films with incest, rape and murder-suicide, but it sure worked on me. two stars. it was better and creepier than the poughkeepsie tapes.