Dammit, Hitler! It's Not For You!!

Ahhh, Springtime.  That time when the world wonders why it feels a breeze and finds that its blanket of snow is gone.  When assholes indulge in kidnapping and creepy farmers need to feed their basement monsters.

Our movie starts with a creepy farmer getting perturbed and setting off for his work day.  His work day consists of nabbing young women and hanging them up in his barn by the wrists.

Then we hook up with three professional kidnappers who snag a little girl.  Obviously there's ransom involved.

Frying pan.  Fire.  Who cares?

About an hour into an hour and a half long movie, the surviving girl from the first kidnapping escapes and lands smack in the middle of the second kidnapping and chaos ensues.

No, seriously.  That's it.

Even the villain is disappointed.

I'm not going to say this is a bad movie.  It's not great but it's not bad.  It IS entirely too drawn out for a small payoff but the concept, in and of itself, is OK.  It's not "From Dusk Til Dawn" or "The Cottage" awesome but it's well-acted and there are a lot of things in this film that were well-thought-out.

Too bad the plot wasn't one of them.

Yes, I know this is short but I don't have a lot to work with, here.

Meh.

Just meh.

Dihydrogen Monoxide Strikes Again!

In the annuls of teen horror, there is a LOT of cheese.  In 1998, Robert Rodriguez brought us a surprisingly refined plate of warm brie with The Faculty.  Unfortunately, he also brings us this poster which got really old after Scream, Final Destination and every OTHER teen horror film used the same fucking layout.

Our story begins at Herrington High School with the football coach (Robert Patrick) going completely schizoid and, after a budget meeting, attacking Principal Drake (Bebe Neuwirth in her goth-y, 40s pinup, Bettie Page bangs face).  He gets a little help dealing with Drake by way of Mrs. Olsen (Piper Laurie) and a pair of scissors.  And thus our story of alien invasion takes off.

All she needs is a riding crop and a nipple-less leather bra.

Then we get to meet our main characters.  The nerd, Casey (Elijah Wood and his gigantic blue peepers), the head cheerleader and lead mean girl, Delilah (Jordana Brewster), the football player, Stan (Shawn Hatosy) and his friend Gabe (Usher Raymond.  Yes, THAT Usher.), the drug dealer, Zeke (Josh Hartnett), the psuedo-lesbian goth chick, "Stokes" (Clea Duvall) and the pretty, Southern new girl, Marybeth (Laura Harris).  They're all "Oooooh, it's the 90s and I'm all grungy and self-reliant even though I'm an emotional wreck and I would totally take myself out Cobain-style if it wouldn't cause my parents any undue hassle."

Sometimes I cut myself to relieve the pain!

So, yeah.  Casey finds some weird thing on the football field where he had been resting after a morning full of torture by the football team.  I figure he was working on the logic of "the last place they'd look" but whatever works.

Anyway, he takes it to his biology teacher (Jon Stewart) who discovers that water revives it.  On top of that it replicates itself and it bites.  And this is what we learn when we expose ourselves to previously unknown life forms.

Just a little nip...

Casey and Delilah get a front row seat to the school nurse (Salma Hayek) getting attacked and go to the police.  We all know how THAT goes.  Useless.  Fucking useless.  Casey gets accused of seeking attention, his parents toss his room for drugs and he gets to be all angsty about his sanity being questioned.  In the meantime, Stan gets cuddled by a deteriorating elderly teacher who warns him that the aliens are out there and they want everyone.

He manages to tell the others who, for some reason, work well together even though they all kind of hate one another.  Going back to Professor Furlong, Zeke asks about the creature.  Furlong gets weird and tries to convert Zeke who then cuts off Furlong's fingers with a paper cutter and stabs him in the eye with his own little homemade psuedo-cocaine which, because it's a dessicant, kills the aliens.  YAY!  They have a weapon!  Fight on, American teenagers!!

I don't know about you but this makes me fear public pools.

Suffice it to say that this little gem combines the best of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing and rolls into a self-loathing little ball of 90s slacktivism.

It's GLORIOUS!  The paranoia of alien invasion combined with the natural fear of teachers exhibited by the outcasts of school society who have no reason to believe that teachers are going to protect them at all (in a pre-bullying awareness American society) is poignant.  The acting is over-the-top and the plot is gleefully post-50s monster movie making this film one of my favorites. 

Compare and Contrast:  Class of 1999.  Also awesome in utterly familiar ways.  Plus?  Pam Grier.  I rest my case.

Shut Your Face Hole!!

One of the most maddening concepts in horror fiction is the idea of "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream".

Given a name by Harlan Ellison, this is the idea that you are trapped in such a way that you are not able to move or speak but you are still able to experience the world around you and your mind is still active.  Forever.  Or at least for a long enough time to make your actually getting free a moot point because by then your family is likely gone and you have to use your new powers of bugfuck insane to make new friends and that's totally not going to work.  This totally counts in the case of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix because I'm fairly certain his mind works on a glacial timescale.

You suck, Keanu Reeves.

Although Ellison gave this trope it's name, it's actually been around for a while.  Dante's Divine Comedy tells us of the folks who betray their superiors and benefactors who are entombed in ice for eternity.  Hans Christian Anderson, of all people, told the tale of The Girl Who Trod On The Loaf whose punishment was to be a statue in Hell.  Even the beloved land of Oz gives us several instances of this considering that in Oz, YOU CAN'T DIE.  

Johnny Got His Gun brings us a young soldier injured in war who can eventually tap out messages in Morse Code but when he asks to either be displayed as a horror of war or euthanized the military tells him that neither fall under regulations.

You want to put that where?

In film, though, we get examples like The Hunger, where Miriam Blaylock's lovers age rapidly but can't die unless they are killed.  Since Miriam loves them, she won't kill them.  Instead, she encases them in coffins in perpetuity.  Bitch.

We also get The Human Centipede in which the second link in the chain is left alone when the third link dies of blood poisoning and the first kills himself, probably because he is living with the knowledge of pooing in another person's mouth like some German Scheiße flick.  Speaking of Germans, the German splatterfest Anatomy shows us how creepy those "Bodies" exhibits really are and Asami Yamazaki uses injectibles to induce this condition in Ôdishon  (Audition).

One of my favorite comedic examples is Death Becomes Her.  It's an odd example because the girls are able to move and express themselves but, at the end, where their bodies are so brittle that they shatter on falling down the stairs, they are left as talking heads with no means of propulsion because their souls are staple-gunned to their bodies and cannot move on.

Do you remember where we parked the car?

All of this can be boiled down to claustrophobia.  Well, not quite claustrophobia.  You're trapped but it's within your own body.   Claustrophobia implies that you can move.  The inspiration for this can be any number of things, though.  Stephen Hawking's Amyotrophic Later Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease) allows him a brilliant mind but an utterly useless body that has no means of communication except his external electronics that are controlled with his eyes.  Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva is a disease where if your muscles are damaged, the damaged tissue gets replaced with not more muscle but BONE.  Eventually, your joints are encased in bone so you cannot move and you die of starvation or suffocation because you cannot move your jaw to eat or breathe.  Even your every day, run-of-the-mill coma or persistent vegetative state is thought to trap a conscious mind in a non-working body.

It doesn't have to be a disease, either.   Hell, people kinda get this way when they're stuck in a cell phone dead zone.

Just so you know, "twilight anesthesia" does leave you just a little bit conscious but there are still times where FULL anesthesia just sort of wears off and a patient can feel EVERYTHING.  They have machines that can detect this but they're often taken away because they get in the way of the surgery.  

And, finally, there's tetrodotoxin.  This source of the zombie mythos and the reason that Fugu sushi is so fucking expensive is derived from the puffer fish and causes muscular paralysis and a comatose stupor that lasts for DAYS while you're fully conscious.

All in all, this particular trope is a fate worse than death.  

I may never nap again.

OK, that's a lie.  But I'm DEFINITELY not going near any puffer fish.

Not Sure if Wonderland or Just Cray-Cray...

OK, so, the whole Alice in Wonderland thing as a metaphor is a little played out but we're never gonna get rid of it so as long as things aren't utterly literal, we'll just have to deal with it.

Alyce Kills, however, is pretty fuckin' literal.  And that hurts me.

There's kind of not really a lot to this one.  Alyce, a young woman in a dead end job with no prospects who's behind on her rent and has a cheating boyfriend, goes out on the town with her bestie, Carol.  Said bestie takes her to get wasted on cheap liquor and red velvet cake and promises of girl-on-girl action that never materialize because they have the girl version of whiskey dick.

Aren't they adorable?

And then promptly pushes said bestie off of the roof of her apartment building. 

It was totally an accident but she pretty much snaps.  She doesn't die right away but that does nothing to assuage Alyce's guilt.  At all.  In fact it makes her feel worse.  She spends the rest of the movie going mad and following the white rabbit (drugs) down the rabbit hole with the help of Carol's former dealer who spent a great deal of time trying to figure out exactly who she is and a steroid-riddled fuck-toy with back-ne who likes to punch.  Alyce apparently likes it so who am I to judge.

That's gonna stain.

Suffice it to say that this one is a little off.

I'm not saying that this is bad and I kinda dig both the idea and the lead actress but it's something that I thought I was in the mood for and I wasn't.  I think I need to wait until I'm in the mood for psycho-thriller and watch it again.

You might want to give it a go, though.  Let me know what you think.

Didja Miss Me?

I Have Returnethed!

New stuff tomorrow, kids.  Get into it.