There Are Two Horror Movies Coming Out This Weekend...

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... but you ain't gonna hear much from me on one of 'em. And it ain't The Final Destination I'll be avoiding, that much you ought to know. No, it's Mr. Zombie's second Halloween effort, which I just can't be fucking bothered with. I'll refrain from shitting (too much) on something I haven't seen because I do admire Zombie's good-spirited enthusiasm for the genre and I liked The Devil's Rejects. But... no. Not gonna do it. And in reading this review at AICN, the first I've seen anywhere for the film, I feel justified in my continued grudge-holding. Choice quote:

"Why does everything in Zombie’s films always have to look dirty and unappealing? It’s either filthy bathrooms or cluttered bedrooms to public places looking like a sideshow act. In a strip club segment the club is lit like a funhouse, red and green lights illuminating the grimy walls. In a later Halloween party scene everything looks like a gothic rave. It’s an aesthetic which equals his sense of violence, it’s off-putting. I’m not sure what Zombie’s bathrooms at home look like, but if they look like these Whiskey-a-Go-Go replicas he seems to put in his films remind me never to accept an invitation to his dinner parties."

I suppose it's no more overwhelming an aesthetic auteurial choice than the blank white bedroom walls in Godard films, but at least those spaces didn't make you want to get a tetanus shot, ya know? It's exhausting, Rob: your movies exhaust me. Another point made by this review underlines why:

"That takes us to the equally ugly camera work. Zombie uses a slew of modern kill-me-now cam tricks such as shaky cam, out of focus shots, rain on the lens, or filters and grain at the moments in which most of us would like to see clearly like, you know….the kills."

A good death scene should be choreographed like an elaborate action sequence, like a dance. We need to know what's going the hell on to be affected, ya know? I've capped enough death scenes in my Thursday's Ways Not To Die series to have gotten a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't as I try to reduce what's happening in a death scene down to as few frames as possible, and even in the scenes where death comes out of nowhere and doesn't make any sense - those moments that grab you by the gut and twist it around as if to say, "The world doesn't make any sense, horror comes at any time to anyone" - even those work best when there is some sort of fundamental conversation going on between the filmmaker, the editing, and the viewer.

Look at last week's Way Not To Die post, the death of Dick Hallorann in The Shining, and the way Jack Torrance is proven with a subtle sleight of hand, just a little tricky camerawork, to be both nowhere and everywhere all at once. Like I said on Thursday, we glide through this enormous open space and see nothing coming at us from anywhere until Jack is there out of nowhere all of a sudden killing him anyway. That's terrifying. But if there's no sense of place, no choreography to the surroundings, if it's all quick cuts and grime and endless filthy walls that look the same, what do we have to hang on to? That was one of the biggest problems with Zombie's first Halloween and it sounds as if its followed him on to the second.
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