Thursday, November 16, 2017

Bill's Last Breath

Bill had seen enough of them to last a lifetime, of that he could be sure. It had been so long by then that he had stopped seeing them as human, or, at least, something that had formerly represented them. No, by then, Bill thought of them as nothing more than animals, perhaps worse than that. ‘Monster’ was a bit too strong of a word for Bill’s liking, as he sort of felt it had a hedonistic connotation to it, but the term was certainly closer to the truth than the old man much cared to admit.

The old shack (that’s what Bill called it, anyway) was filthy. There was a time when he thought it made some sense to keep the place clean, maybe even respectable. But, over the course of years, the disrepair and general foulness simply became, well, normal. He supposed that had Norma been around to set it right, then things may have turned out different, but she wasn’t and it hadn’t and that was the end of it.

Cleaning the old shack would have cut straight through Bill’s routine anyhow and routine was just about the only thing Bill Grimes had left. If you hit noon, Bill’s father used to say, and you weren’t half way done with a full day’s work, then you ain’t worked hard enough. He had always been a man of structure, Bill, even before, when his job was just to dig. He liked digging. It was simple, sort of pure in its own way. Norma used to laugh and jest that he just liked getting dirty, like a little kid playing out in the mud after a storm. But that wasn’t it, not really. While even Bill would admit that he did like feeling his course hands against the earth, the real thrill of it came from the effort. The strain. Bill liked how hard he had to work for it. He liked the feeling of looking at the finished hole; the mound of sediment he had disheveled from the place it had been for so many forgotten decades.

There was something infinitely satisfying about moving what was not meant to be moved. Now, couple that with the physicality of it, the hard fought, raw muscle of pushing his shovel deeper and deeper into the cemented ground and Bill had himself the perfect profession. Norma would tease him about the boyishness of his task, but the truth was, the draw was an adult one - made all the more serious by the things that were being deposited in the small chasms he so effortfully generated.

When they had first started to rise, he thought the fact that he had spent the majority of his life burying the dead was ironic. Over time, however, he came to realize the things in question made his profession no more ironic than they did that of an airline pilot or a gas stop waitress. He could have been anything, indeed, millions of people all over the world were everything, and the things still would’ve come, still would’ve brought it all down. Bill, you see, understood a little thing called context, something many others in that great big world of theirs were woefully unequipped with.

No, it was not ironic that when the dead started to rise Bill had already made a life putting them in the ground, but it was somewhat fortuitous. At least, for Bill it was - again, context. He was used to them by then, the dead. He had inherited his current position from his father, after all. Morty had trained his son at an early age and if Morty Grimes was anything, he was thorough. Morty used to say that Bill was born staring at a corpse, as his Ma had passed as he came out, but, if you asked Bill, he saw his first dead body at the ripe old age of 5.

Her name had been Henrietta Malcolm and she had been an old and wrinkled little thing. Pale and sallow, her face looked like it was melting in the heat - and, by Bill’s account, that particular day had been very hot. She had been lying in the mortician’s quarters, her face painted and her form bedecked in a simple, black gown. Were it not for the lack of breath and general, intangible sense of lifelessness that all corpses seemed to Bill to possess, she may have merely been sleeping. Bill stared at the woman, holding his breath that day, frightened but curious. He didn’t know it yet, but that curiosity would never go away. Although a mere child and altogether incapable of understanding that odd interest which was suddenly upon him, it spoke to a greater wonder - the greatest wonder - which would be the driving force behind the remainder of his long and very interesting life:

What is it to die?

Hell, replace “die” with “live” and the question gets even tougher.

Such questions seemed silly then, in the years that followed the horror, but Bill was generally too distracted to notice. Bill didn’t like to think too deeply on life and death anymore, not now that the two were no longer mutually exclusive (that is, if they ever were). No, he much preferred to go about his daily task as he always had: to the best of his ability and with as much gusto as he could muster.


The sun rose that day as it had every day before and as it would every day after. The thought comforted Bill. He rolled out of bed wearing the same dirty, gray jumpsuit he had worn for months by then. He used to wash his clothes. After a while, however, he stopped washing and started changing, occasionally switching out one outfit for another and so on. Eventually, even the changing stopped. Nowadays, Bill wore whatever it was he was wearing until it hung off of him in tatters. Then, and only then, would he seek out replacement garb.

t wasn’t as though clothes were difficult to find. On the contrary, He was close to a strip mall, a place that Norma once described as being “clothes for days”. He had gone there once, not too long after he had put Norma in the grave he had reserved for her upon accepting his position all those decades before, and had gone back to the old shack with a new pair of trousers. He had wept that night, staring at the pants with disdain. He buried them the next day, shallow, atop Norma’s decaying remains. That was about the time he stopped actively trying to maintain hygiene.

There were other perks to hygienic mire besides the suppression of grief, of course. For one, it seemed as though it was harder for them to suss you out. He stood quietly and watched one afternoon as three of them passed him by. They couldn’t have been more than fifteen feet away and… nothing. Not one twitch. They just kept shambling onwards toward wherever it was they were going.

Bill liked to tell himself that that was the reason. Survival. He could have his pick of houses. Several miles down the road were the wealthier suburbs. He hadn’t seen a car in at least six years, and the last one he did see was low on gas and piloted by a desperate woman who had no intention of going back in that direction. But, still, he stayed in the old shack. 

His bed was little more than a cot. And his cot was little more than a soiled mattress, blackened by the earth that stuck to the clothes he so rarely changed. The shack contained two rooms. One held the cot, a sink, a mirror and a chair. The other contained the metal toilet that fed to a long out-of-order septic tank. Bill had discontinued use of his indoor bathroom years ago. He couldn’t even remember using it anymore. No, the trees alongside his old shack were just fine with him. In the winter he kept a bedpan of course, or if it were to storm, but in general the woods were a perfectly acceptable place to do his business.

In the old days that would have been considered quite dangerous, in some cases suicidal. He had vague recollections of arguing with Jerry about such things, back before when there was a group of them at the cemetery. Bill could hardly even remember their faces anymore. In fact, it almost seemed stranger that he had once had companions than the thought that they had never existed at all. It was a possibility, Bill would often tell himself, he could be going senile, remembering what was never there. Remembering people who never were.

But then he’d picture Norma.

Norma was there. That he remembered.

He rose and lit a fire in the small, metal box he called a stove. He cooked and ate his flavorless oatmeal quickly. He didn’t enjoy eating, but he understood why it was necessary. After, he stepped outside and opened a cooler that was so black and dirty that it looked more like a rotting log than anything else. He removed a large metal water bottle filled to the brim with liquid he had sanitized the night before, like always, and strapped it to his belt. Had to stay hydrated. Dehydration, now that’s a real killer.

He made his way out onto the cemetery grounds which now resembled more of an untamed patch of wildflowers in the midst of an overgrown forest than it did a family owned graveyard. There was a time when Bill thought it prudent to maintain the ground, in memory of those that occupied it, but that time had long since past. Crickets chirped loudly and wave after wave of locust evacuated the tall, swaying grass as he moved forward. He didn’t brush the insects from his skin as he had in the early days, rather let them crawl around a bit until they found their way off.

There were bigger fish to fry, after all, Bill thought.

He had to watch his step as many of the jutting gravestones were hidden in the waist high grass. He knew the grounds by heart, intimately in a way that no one else ever would, but, still the land had a funny way of changing, deceiving. He had taken a hard spill once, about three years back, sprained his ankle. Had one of them been around then, well, Bill would’ve bought his ticket. But one wasn’t and Bill didn’t, so: no fuss, no muss.

The sun was low in the sky, but the whole of the grounds was bathed in warm, yellow and orange light. Just gorgeous. Bill stopped at the top of the hill that ran parallel to the old shack and took a moment to really appreciate what had truly become his home. He breathed in the fresh air. That was one positive, Bill thought then, no more people, no more smog. Norma had once said they should feel lucky, most people were driven from their homes when it happened, but she and Bill got to stay put. He supposed she was right.

From his vantage point he could make out the four quadrants that comprised the cemetery grounds. Hundreds of bodies were buried on the grounds. Go back over a century and the records ceased, so Bill suspected there may be even more than that. There was also the closed off portion to the south, gated and out of use. Owners told him in confidence once that the place was used to dump prisoners, executed soldiers, vagrants - bodies that needed disappearing. Unmarked graves, they had said.

Bill hardly saw a difference between marked and unmarked plots. Decades later, they may as well all be unmarked, he often thought. Still, he certainly didn’t want to unearth a skull when digging, so Bill did appreciate the area being cordoned off.

He glimpsed the quarter of the cemetery that he had already completed, the neat mounds of ground soil sitting in row after row of one another. It looked like a macabre satire of the quarter of a graveyard sitting beside it, albeit a fitting one, given the times. Bill grimaced and made his way down the hill.

There had been a time when Bill was startled by the sounds of the world around him, but not anymore. He had expected the end of things to be more quiet, but, on the contrary, the world was as loud as it ever was. Only instead of car motors and humming electrical lines, it was the incessant calling of birds and insects, the howl of the wind in the bolstering vegetation, the rustling of the deer and animal life that had positively exploded in the wake of humanity’s near extinction that rang loudly through his ears at all hours of the day and night.

It certainly made it more difficult to notice them, were it not for the smell.

He had’t seen one in the wild for quite sometime. That’s not to say his work didn’t involve interacting with them, but there was a rather big difference between the one’s stumbling toward you and the one’s Bill was unearthing. Bill’s shovel was exactly where he had left it at dusk the day prior: leaning against a pile of soil that looked much fresher than some of the others. It was dewey and still broken, as though a simple flick of the finger would send most of it flying, like grains of sand in a breeze.

He stepped carefully around the gap in the world beside the dirt without glancing down and walked across the path that separated the grave from the next. He squared his shoulders and peered down at the tall grass. Through the swaying strands he could make out the small, gray stone. There were words printed there, but the name and epitaph met nothing to Bill. He hadn’t known that person and he never would. Norma wouldn’t have cared for that sort of reaction. She used to come down and walk between the graves; she’d read the names out loud as though just saying them to the open air was keeping them alive, real maybe. That’s how this new phase of Bill’s life got started as a matter of fact, and why Norma was just a memory, another body in the ground.

Bill started to dig. Digging the hole was the best part of his day. It was when he was the most focused. When life started to seem, well, simple again. His thoughts didn’t range much beyond one shoveling to the next. The sense of accomplishment as he watched the mound grow taller and taller beside the hole which grew deeper and deeper was the most concrete sense of self satisfaction he was allowed anymore. Even Bill didn’t understand that it was the feeling he felt while he dug that kept him pushing forward; Hell, the digging kept him alive.

Several feet down, Bill’s mind began to wander. It was like a ship drifting slowly out to sea. The thoughts seeped in in uncontrollable waves, slowly at first, but progressively more and more quickly. He did his best to push them aside, to rest once again on the action of the dig, the simplicity of the dig, but for some reason his mind fought the routine. His routine.

The only thing Bill Grimes had left.

He could hear Norma’s voice. See her contorted expression. She heard something. Something underground. They had been alone for so long by then, Bill thought his companion was finally losing the marbles she had held onto for so long. He had gone down to the cemetery to check it out. She pointed to the grave in question. He put his ear to the ground…

He kept digging. He was breathing hard. His chest rising and falling out of rhythm, sporadic in a way that would have normally alarmed Bill. He was getting on in age, after all. Had the world not turned the way it had, Bill highly doubted he’d still be spending his days digging graves, well unearthing them anyhow.

Norma’s voice resounded in his ear, louder this time. She was frantic. He hadn't heard her get like that since the group. That last day, when those things came in the night. When they bit the kid and he bit the rest. Bill never, ever admitted it to Norma, but he knew it would be the kid that killed them, all of them. He knew it, because, he knew no one would want to kill a damn child if they had to. And he was right.

His shovel hit something hard. He recognized the sound right away. He fiddled the tip around in the dirt and cleared off a small portion of the surface of the coffin - the sizable chip in the smooth, wooden exterior visible in the light of the climbing sun. Usually he paused when he hit it, but not today. Today he set right back to work. He ignored the odd, numbness in his chest and the slight stab of pain in his heart.

Bill was going to finish the goddamned hole if it killed him.

Norma had made him dig up that grave. She carried on and on about it until he finally snapped and grabbed his shovel. There was no conceivable way that the body in that hole could still be moving. It had been buried for years. Buried before the dead ever started to rise. He dug that hole faster than he had dug any hole before, Norma watching the entire time. When he reached the bottom, the coffin, he tore it open in triumph, tore it open to prove her wrong and what he saw made him lose his breakfast.

The coffin was mostly visible then. Bill’s breathing was wheezy and slow, much slower than before and he was starting to lose feeling in his left shoulder. His fingers tingled like they were asleep, like they used to be when he had his arm around Norma in the movie theaters before…

His mind was wandering back to that moment, more than a year before, staring down at that body. That woman. She was bone in places, body in others. The tissue and skin around her face had sunk in to her skull and her eyes were just gaping holes in the dark black mass of her cranium. Purple and black patches and misshapen growths spread throughout her body that were, after a moment, recognizable as rotted flesh and one of her arms, amazingly, still looked, for the most part as it should’ve. That was the arm that moved. Norma screamed. The woman in the box rattled and her skull shifted, a portion of it caving in completely as a sickening sound emitted from a hole in her neck where a white, mucus like substance was leaking.

Bill threw himself against the side of the narrow hole. He winced and shook his head, fighting to push the memory from his stubborn brain. He could see Norma’s eyes welling with tears. See her staring down at the body in the coffin. See her losing what hope she might’ve had left. He watched Norma give up. Then he watched her die.

He thew open the coffin and faced nothing more than a skeleton. He winced again as he chortled through the pained tears that were leaking from his bloodshot eyes. He felt relief wash over him as he fell backward, hitting his arm against the shovel and twisting his ankle in the confined space. The pain was there, dully in the background and on a different day Bill might’ve been worrying about how he would ever climb out.

Norma’s heart gave out, Bill was sure of it. It was a good heart. A good heart that had seen a lot of bad things. But that day, as she stared down at the poor soul who had been trapped in the coffin, as she more than likely considered the hundreds of thousands of other poor souls trapped in their own coffins for, well, forever Bill supposed, she lost something. If Bill had to put his finger on it, he would say it was her faith. Deep down, Bill thought, just maybe, the sight confirmed not the non-existence of her merciful God but the very real existence of an extremely cruel one.

Bill’s vision was blurry. He sat upright, his wheezing growing more and more faint, his tired grin gazing into the face of the skeleton. He had only spoken aloud to himself once or twice since Norma died, mostly on accident. And, even then, as he spoke, he still did not view the act as being aimed at himself, rather his companion in the hole.

“Must be nice.”

He didn’t know they would be the last he’d ever speak as he said them, but, certainly, once they were out, he knew.

He had buried Norma in the back, to the south. He made sure she wouldn’t be coming back, although Bill had a sneaking suspicion that it was the amount of embalming fluid to blame for some of the resident’s animation in the cemetery. It seemed that based on the level of decomposition at the time of the incident, some came back, while others appeared to have not. Still, Bill suspected Norma would have wanted to be sure, so he started the long and arduous task of unearthing the bodies and taking care of the issue.

He had put down at least sixty of them that year, although had found several hundred more that were nothing more than bones and dark, rotting fabric. Most of them weren’t no more than that, but if there was even a chance, Bill had to dig. One a day, he had decided. He would do it until he had completed the whole cemetery and then, well, he supposed he would’ve moved on to the next and the next after that. He was getting on, but, to Bill, life seemed as though it were going to be endless. And he needed a routine. A purpose.

Norma. He needed-

The air was leaving him then. The skeleton lay across from him, its cranium cocked to the side slightly, as though it were shooting him a one eyed glare. A near playful look as far as Bill could figure. He remembered that look. He remembered that look from his Norma. That look that said Bill was acting a boy, not a man of his age. Just a boy who liked to play in the dirt. And she wasn’t wrong.


Bill had seen enough of them to last him a lifetime, he could be sure of that. It had been so long by then. So very long.

He had put Jerry down last. His friend. Almost like a son to him after more than a year together. But that was so long ago. That terrible night. First Jerry’s son and then Jerry. Norma was screeching. She was never the same after that. The next day she began to read the names off of the gravestones. The names of people she would never know, the names of people that, presently, would never be said aloud again.

The marked ones. As good as unmarked, in Bill’s opinion.

Bill smiled serene. He listened to each slowly diminishing breath. The birds and the insects talked, so loud they were then. The one across from him, the one in the coffin stared forward, eye cocked in his direction. Bill wanted to laugh, maybe he would.

Bill swallowed it then, the last. His eyes rolled back and his brain dimmed low. The terrors he had seen subsided and the last vision that flashed was anything but horrific. Norma was young, so was he, they were to be married that day. Marrying his best friend and the prettiest gal this side of the Mississippi. How lucky was he?



Bill’s last breath faded away, as did his life, slowly blending with the wind as it swirled down into the hole. Bill had dug that hole with his own two hands. A hard day’s work, done, and it wasn’t even noon yet.




By Paul Farrell

Monday, July 3, 2017

Why We All Love Horror Movies, Whether we Know it or Not

An Editorial by Paul Farrell


Dedicated to Tom Holland:
a man who provided this self-proclaimed horror nut
with his very first experience in terror. 



  Full disclosure, before we begin: I love horror movies.

  Whenever someone discovers my love for horror, they typically want to know the same thing: what do I think is scary. The question is more often than not posed with great emphasis, as though a challenge to the credibility of my claim. That is, if I’m such a big fan of horror movies, then I should unequivocally know what is and is not scary.
  This idea touches upon the fundamental difference between someone who is a “fan” of horror and someone who is not (or perhaps only peripherally so):
  The fan understands that the nuances of what frightens a person are in constant flux and are, in large part, contextual to that individual’s life; ultimately that the overall quality of a horror film’s success or failure cannot solely be determined by whether or not it is overtly “scary”.
  The other simply thinks of horror as either being good or bad as tied to its ability to make them jump, squirm, shield their eyes or scream.

  But… why is that?

  Horror is the one genre that almost always leaves a scar.
  Most everyone that watches movies, even if only casually, can remember their very first horror film. Not the first that they decided to go and pay for to see in a theater, but their very first one - that movie they caught late one night at home on cable TV. Maybe the one that their friend snuck over on VHS. Maybe the one they only caught pieces of, the imagery of which never left them.
  The one they weren’t supposed to watch.
  They remember where they were. They remember who they were with that night. They remember the light of the TV flickering against the wallpaper. Why?
  Because they were scared. They were in danger. They were utterly fucking terrified.
  Few things in life leave a mark on your memory, a tangible impression that goes on to inform you as a person, as a consumer of cinema and art in general. And its the reaction to that experience (or perhaps even lack there of) that leads to the aforementioned split in the cinematic ideology of horror.

  Let me tell you a story:
  I was young, in first or second grade. I was staying the night at my cousin’s house. It was late.
  My brother and two cousins had already gone to sleep, but, being the oldest, I wasn’t tired. My Uncle let me stay up with him and we watched MAJOR LEAGUE. In short, he’s a pretty great Uncle.
  At some point, I dozed off.
I woke up some time later alone on the couch. The single lamp in the room had been turned off and the light from the TV cast an eerie glow on the somewhat unfamiliar trappings of the living room. This wasn’t my house, after all, and late at night, in my dream-like state, it seemed particularly foreign.
  Clips from a news broadcast were playing on the TV. I saw an anchor woman saying something as an image of police cars and flashing lights floated beside her. I immediately got the impression that the topic being discussed was a tragic one.
  I was in and out of consciousness then, slipping back into darkness and reemerging in bursts of time, the lengths of which were impossible to discern. That’s when, suddenly, I became inexplicably alert.
  There was a woman on the television now. She was alone in a living room, not unlike the one I found myself in then. She looked frightened. All I could think about was the news anchor, the images of the police cars. In my young, sleepy brain, what I was seeing was attached to that broadcast, was an extension of the news.
  I felt the hair on my arms stand on end. She was looking for something. I prayed she wouldn’t find whatever it was despite not having the slightest clue what it could even be. She bent down and peered under the couch. That’s when she found it.
  A doll. A doll with red hair and a devilish smile. It looked like the MY BUDDY doll I had at home. My heart sank in my chest. Something about the scene told me that the doll was off - wrong, somehow. She picked it up and it talked to her, as some dolls with pull strings are prone to do. That’s when she flipped the thing over.
  Carefully, she unfastened the back of his overalls and removed the battery plate. As she did so, I felt my chest tighten further, felt the breath escaping me in faster spurts. I knew what she was going to find behind that battery plate. I didn’t want to keep watching, but I couldn’t stop myself and then…
  No batteries.
  I screamed. I screamed and I ran. I had no idea what the doll did next. No idea what happened to the woman. No idea why or how that particular news outlet could have nabbed such a well photographed and choreographed version of the events they were reporting on. I didn’t care. That doll was alive. It was real. 

  I didn’t sleep that night (and neither did my Uncle). I had nightmares the moment I closed my eyes. I was convinced that the danger was there, right then, in the room with me. I was too young, perhaps too naive to understand that what I was really feeling was the acceptance of the reality of danger in general. Not necessarily in the room, but in the world.
     Within the next few days I was told that what I had seen was a piece of Tom Holland’s film CHILD’S PLAY and it was over a decade before I could bring myself to finally watch the film in full. I avoided horror for the remainder of my childhood, turned away from it entirely. Over time, I grew to think less of it, but, admittedly, it was because I didn’t understand.
  After all, you cannot gain an understanding or appreciation of any art form through avoidance. But, when I did find my way back, many years later and was finally able to look the genre square in the eye, it occurred to me that my dismissal implied… reverence.

  As I sat at a friend’s house, late one night, a teenager with a greater sense of agency, I felt the same hairs rise on neck. The same sinking feeling in my stomach. Only this time as Karen Barclay turned over Chucky, I didn’t scream and I didn’t run. I smiled.
  CHILD’S PLAY hadn’t changed. It was the exact same movie it had been a decade before. It would always be the same. But, its affect on me would forever be in flux, rooted in the experience it implanted in my mind when I was young enough to not know the difference between imagination and reality. That was a special feeling, one I could sense the echoes of as I revisited the film all of those years later. And those echoes, although faint and not nearly as biting, allowed me to remember the sort of danger and risk that the unknown represented to the my 7 year old self; the rush of adrenaline that becomes more difficult to recapture with each passing year.
  Some children’s lives are understandably constructed of a series of blockades, various defense mechanisms put in place by both society and their own families to maintain a sense of safety. And, in many of those cases, it is cinema that first takes a battering ram to those defenses.
  For some, our experiences with horror then become a sort of fuel, a drive to recreate that moment, the intensity of the feeling. For others, well, it becomes a conceptualization and blanket assessment of what the best of that particular kind of art has to offer: fear. And, perhaps for them, becomes something they altogether turn away from. Disregard. View as lesser because, deep down, they simply don’t like how it makes them feel, finding it easier to avoid understanding rather than facing the discomforting truth.

  I used to get annoyed when people would ask me what I thought was scary. My annoyance was born not out of the query but the general response to my answers. Often, what I find scary is anything but to the non-horror fan.
  However, the more I think about it, the more I’ve come to realize that when you forget about all other cinematic criteria, stripping a film down to its most carnal and visceral elements, what you’re left with is a doll under the couch, talking to a woman with no batteries to make that action possible. Without realizing it, that non-horror fan is asking you, purely and simply:
  “How can I experience a moment of utter, visceral terror?”
  We’re all chasing the same high, whether a die hard horror nut or the most casual of romantic comedy viewer when it comes to horror. There’s something important buried within the question of what’s “really scary”, and it’s not dismissive or condescending. No, if anything, the question offers insight into all of our plights: deep down, we’re curious about what scares us. We’re driven away from the notion, yet, when the opportunity to take even the quickest peek at it arises, safely and in the comfort of our own homes, we devour the opportunity.

  Horror is exciting. When people discover my love of the genre, they jump at the chance to ask me about it. Fans, movie goers or not, they want to know what scares me.
  So, whenever you find yourself in that situation, facing a person who, unlike you, doesn’t watch a horror movie every night, who hasn’t seen every installment of every horror franchise at least twice and who didn’t spend at good year of their life believing CHILD’S PLAY to be a segment on a late night local news broadcast… tell them what scares you. Tell them what your favorite horror movies are.
  But tell them why. Tell them that story. You know the one. And, then, ask them for theirs.

  I love horror movies.


  So… why do you?

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Why Revisiting MATINEE is so Important Right Now

An Editorial by Paul Farrell

Dedicated to the director of MATINEE, Joe Dante:
a man who has given this cinema addict and, indeed, 
the world, more gifts than any of us could ever deserve.
Thank you, sir. 



“It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.”
-Roger Ebert

I don’t think I have to tell you, but it’s a shit-show out there.

The media has become a predominantly negative outlet. Social media, then, an avenue which requires even less credibility than any news aggregate to be a credited source these days, takes on the frighteningly important role of determining which national set-piece is worth bolstering and which is worth forgetting altogether.
  It’s easy to believe, when beholding all that we have set before us, that things have never been so bad. Easier still, when you click a few buttons on your computer and are faced with think-pieces, news articles, pundit videos and even the inane Tweets of the sitting POTUS.
      But that easiness to believe, that tug in your gut that makes the transition from fear to fact so simple, so obvious, is anything but new. Still, the vast social media landscape we have created has called attention to and amplified that deep-rooted, human instinct to turn terror into action.
  And, of course, adding insult to injury, buried within this melancholic societal despair, is the rejection of fear. The human tendency to defend confidence and radicalism as necessary evils, planned activations as opposed to the reactionary, antagonistic manifestations of the anxieties that they truly are. This methodology ends up being applied to all sorts of things, but, for the purposes of this article, we’re going to narrow it down to one, key element of our very complex connected world: entertainment.
      More specifically, the movies.

      “Horror is dead.”

      “The end of horror?”

      “When did horror stop being interesting?”

      “Why __________ isn’t a horror movie.”

      Two things tend to happen when the world takes a turn:
      1) The horror genre sees an influx of smart, edgy work that instigates conversation and, at times, very real social change.
      2) People notice.
Many of those that do the noticing, however, have not paid much attention to the genre for quite sometime. Therefore their reactions tend to be ones of shock, surprise and while often positive, lend themselves toward believing the picture isn’t really the thing that it is. After all, to the unconvinced mind, how could a “horror” picture be any good? How could it make them feel the way that it did? These sorts of feelings tend to spark conversation and lead to the types of articles and think-pieces quoted above.
      And, here we are, in one such time. A time of turmoil. A time of social unrest.
A time of great fucking cinema.
      Still, it can be difficult to appreciate that fact, difficult to separate the art from the minutia of the world around us. And, at times like these, it is important to be reminded that despite how it seems, this all has happened before… which brings me to MATINEE.

      Between October 16, 1962 and October 28, 1962 America entered into a 13 day confrontation with the Soviet Union. During these 13 days people in this country believed the end was near, coming by way of a blinding blast and followed by the destruction of everything they knew and loved.
  MATINEE is a lighthearted comedy regarding those 13 days.

      Well, sort of.
It’s a movie about the movies. A picture so excited about the essence of humanity, about the motivations of mankind that it can barely contain itself. The film features John Goodman as a William Castle-esque film producer, pulling out all the stops to showcase a fresh horror film (MANT! - a movie that is exactly what it sounds like) in a new, engaging theatrical model which he calls ATOMO-VISION. The character could have easily come off as loathsome or disingenuous if not for the fact that John Goodman infused every last spoken line of dialogue he had with childlike glee and reverence for the movies he so clearly loved and dedicated his existence to.
  But, why try to put this character’s passion into words? Here’s John Goodman’s (as Lawrence Woolsey) conversation with his young pseudo-protege to do it for me:

Lawrence Woolsey: A zillion years ago, a guy's living in a cave. He goes out one day, Bam! He gets chased by a mammoth. Now he's scared to death, but he gets away. And when it's all over with, he feels great.
Gene Loomis: Well yeah, 'cause he's still living.
Lawrence Woolsey: Yeah, but he knows he is. And he feels it. So he goes home, back to the cave, the first thing he does,
[Waving his hand on a brick wall to show cave-drawing of Woolly Mammoth]
Lawrence Woolsey: ... he does a drawing of the mammoth. And he thinks, "People are coming to see this. Let's make it good. Let's make the teeth real long, and the eyes real mean."
[Animated sequence of roaring Woolly Mammoth, squashed at end by Woolsey's hand]
Lawrence Woolsey: Boom! The first monster movie. That's probably why I still do it. You make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything's okay, the lights come up…


Horror is special because it taps into our subconscious, eliciting an emotion that is historically reserved for the worst case scenarios. The above story showcases our innate desire to turn our biggest scars into our most engaging stories. Get any group of people around a table late at night, pour a few drinks and what will happen is… stories. Tales infused with emotion, pain and, often times, laughter. After all, catharsis is often made possible through levity.
More than a love letter to genre filmmaking, more than a poignant homage to a bygone era of theatrical culture, MATINEE is an exploration of the dichotomy between life and motion pictures. Truthfully, one often does ape the other, but harmlessly so - maybe, helpfully. Watching an atomic monster wreak havoc on screen, allowing those deep rooted fears and anxieties to manifest in the dark theater and dissipate as the credits roll, can be more than therapeutic. At times, the process can be necessary.
Fear begets damnation, in that it suggests the fearful will not be saved. Art, however, removes the risk of destruction, replacing it with the promise of conclusive narrative denouement. An ending, yes, but one the viewer gets to walk away from. Talk about. Explore.
      The process then invites revisiting, a feeble attempt to recreate the strength and visceral realism of that first, immediate terror.
  It’s the artists, the filmmakers, their crew, those who put on the show, the many individuals that make the whole thing possible that end up responsible and a part of that feeling. There’s an accountability there, a reverence that makes showing even a picture like MANT! important and momentous.
  Again, to quote Mr. Goodman as Lawrence Woolsey in the film:

Lawrence Woolsey: I know some of you have never been in the motion picture business before, and some of you have been at it a long time. But I want all of you to look at the faces out here during this picture. There's gonna be room in their heads for only one thought: "Don't let it get me!" They know we can't hurt 'em, but they're still gonna be scared half to death. And all of you, when you thread the projector, when you tear the tickets, when you sell the jujubes, you're all a part of it. And just when it gets the worst, when they're sitting there and their hearts are going like trapped animals out here in the dark, we save them. And they say, "Hey, it's all right! Thank God! Hey, can I see that again?"

The motion picture is then a communal experience, mirroring that of a real life tragedy or event. A visual art form that can be experienced collectively, amplified by way of that group’s reaction and altogether uniquely impactful from town to town. The movies allow us to discover what lies within and, yet, still hold a sense of wonder about it.
The people in this film are faced with anxieties both fabricated and very real. Our young protagonists grapple with hormones and making friends, but they also deal with a world on the brink and a father in the Navy who may or may not come back from the mission he’s been dispatched to. Yet, at the forefront of the story is MANT!, a low budget creature feature in which an ant bites a man while being X-Rayed, something goes wrong and, well, you get the picture. Seeing this show, being a part of it, matters more to this boy in this narrative than almost anything else, because of what it represents:
A fabricated world which will allow him the very real ability to deal with that which he fears the most. Mortality. Loss. Rejection. Life.

The world is a difficult place right now. There is plenty to be concerned about. Every day there’s news of an atrocity, stories regarding something terrible, something unforgivable, which flood our senses. It is easy to allow the fear that those stories manifest to become something worse, to alter us in some way as to let go of the one thing which can help us all collectively move forward: hope.
My ask is this:
Don’t let that happen, just watch MATINEE instead.

The world may be a shit-show, sure. But as long as there are pictures like Joe Dante’s MATINEE, we’ll be able to reflect and see that, more than likely, that show will end. The reels will change. The genre might shift. A new picture will start. And, at its core, will be the human condition, one we can all relate to and revel in, if we allow it to show us how.
After all, as I quoted Mr. Ebert at the top of the article, sometimes the ‘how’ in life, far outweighs the ‘what’.

Howard, the Theater Manager: The country is on red alert. People are already scared.

Lawrence Woolsey: Exactly! What a perfect time to open a new horror movie. 

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Let’s Talk About ‘Ninja III: The Domination’

Ninja III: The Domination (1984)
Dir. Sam Firstenberg

Written by: Paul Farrell

     Believe it or not, there was a time (let’s call it ‘1984’) when ninjas were just about the coolest fucking things on the planet. They could do anything. Literally, anything (and, before you comment, NO I am not misusing the word ‘literally’). In the mind of most 11 year old kids at this particular point in American history, the ninja was the most formidable, badass force in the universe.
Thus, ‘Ninja III: The Domination’ was born. Now, I know what you’re thinking.

If I read about how awesome Ninja III is, it’ll spoil Ninjas 1 and 2!!
Well, dear reader, it’s your lucky day. The title is a bullshit cash in to tie the movie to 2 previous ninja movies made by the same production company. It was an attempt, however feeble, to link the thing to the modicum of financial success (meaning they didn’t lose money) those other two films had seen. So, in essence, you’re totally safe.
So, what is it about? Well, ninjas. More specifically: A ninja. See, there’s this ninja and he goes to a cave to get a bunch of ninja-like weapons. These weapons are EXACTLY what you’d guess if I asked you what kinds of weapons a ninja probably uses. Seriously. I don’t care how little you know about ninjas.

YOU: “Throwing stars?”
ME: YUP.
YOU: “A long, shiny sword in a sheath?”
ME: UH HUH.
YOU: “Um…. yet MORE pointy, metal throwing star things?”
ME: ABSOLUTELY.

Now, before you ask “Where is this cave?” or “Who is this guy?” or “How do we know he’s a ninja?” Just shut up. Because there is only one answer that matters:
HE COVERS HIS FACE EXCEPT FOR THE EYES IN BADASS BLACK NINJA CLOTH.
So, you know, logically the movie cuts from this to a golf course where a rich asshole-ish looking guy is golfing with his hot, scantily clad GF. He’s surrounded by an entourage of men in suits who are so clearly only there to be killed by a ninja, it almost makes their inevitable deaths less fun - almost. Oh man, do those guys get ninja’d.
Oh shit, I mean, DO they get ninja’d? Only time will tell… well, as time would have it, they get ninja’d almost immediately. See the rich guy hits a golf ball into the thicker grass. Having played ‘Mario Golf’ before, I can fully understand how frustrating that can be, so it’s completely understandable that he has one of his cronies retrieve the ball so he can have a ‘do-over’ or whatever.
 



     Well, apparently the Ninja doesn’t cotton to do-overs. As MAN IN SUIT #1 approaches the golf ball, the ball in question is intercepted by none other then THE NINJA. Shocked and dismayed by such an out of place ninja sighting, MAN IN SUIT #1 stares slack jawed as the Ninja proceeds to CRUSH THE GOLF BALL WITH HIS BARE HANDS.
Yes, that’s right friends, the first real thing we see this ninja do, other than steal weapons from some cave near the golf course, is a straight up GOLF BALL CRUSH. MAN IN SUIT #1 is so pissed that an innocent golf ball has lost its life that he gains the brass ballsiness to fucking PUSH THE NINJA. What a mistake.
The ninja grabs his arms and bitch slaps him to what I presume to be his death. That’s when shit gets real. He kills MAN IN SUIT #2 as he runs up to him with a few JUDO CHOPS.  That’s when the ninja stars come out of the old ninja pocket (ninja’s have so many pockets, RIGHT?!). He dispatches of MAN IN SUIT #3 with relative ease and sets his sights on what seems like the target, I guess: The Rich Douchebag Golfer who is Straight Up Wearing a Yellow Scarf like an Ascot (Honestly guy, it’s like you WANT to be killed by a ninja). 
MAN IN SUIT #4 isn’t having it. He pulls a gun on the ninja. Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiig mistake MAN IN SUIT #4. For the Ninja knows the gun’s only weakness - WOODEN BLOW DARTS. The old ‘Exploding-Gun-with-Dart’ trick does nothing to ward off MAN IN SUIT(S) #s 5 & 6, so the Ninja is forced to kick them super hard in the face. Then he stabs a bunch of people and picks up a moving golf cart. Like while its moving - he picks it up Hulk style. He swords the GF and then puts his Ninja sword into Yellow Scarf-Ascot’s face. Game - Ninja. 
 



     So, yah, that happens like in the first 10 minutes of the movie. In the next 8, he gets chased by cops, kills like a hundred of them, gets shot a ludicrous amount of times, buries himself alive in a matter of seconds, sneaks away to bleed to death, bumps into a female telephone company worker/aerobics instructor and straight up possesses her body upon his death utilizing what can only be described as Ancient Ninja Magics. Got it? What’s that? Why did he kill the Doucher with the scarf? Well, uhh, he’s a scientist or something.. don’t worry about it!
So, yah, logically, the rest of the movie is about the telephone worker chick turned Ninja killing a bunch of cops to get revenge on said cops since they were… you know, doing their job  or whatever. Either way, the good news is we get:
A) An overly long workout/aerobics session - complete with sweaty, leering men who can’t WAIT to get their sex on.
B) A cop boyfriend who is creepier and more obnoxiously misogynistic than the horny crew from the aforementioned aerobics session.
C) The strangest seduction sequence you will ever see -  FYI apparently pouring thick, lukewarm V8 juice down your semi-naked body and having your HAIRY AS FUCK (seriously, I’m talking Harry and the Hendersons level body hair) asshole boyfriend lick it off slowly is super hot in 80s culture.
D) Inexplicable magical arcade games that maybe possess her also (?)
And so much more!
 

Look, I could wax on and on about how the Ninja sword she took from the dead Ninja that possessed her occasionally floats around awkwardly for no reason, or how the climactic one liner realization of the film was: “ONLY A NINJA… CAN KILL ANOTHER NINJA!!” The logic of which boggles the mind, and conjures some very dark philosophical questions regarding the depths of Ninja culture if true. But, at the end of the day, none of that matters. All that matters is one, simple question: Was I entertained?
A: Generally.


“Ninja III: The Domination” is unabashedly what it is - the epitome of 80s schlock. It’s self aware enough to exist, but not so much so that there isn’t at least one golden eye patched Ninja present, albeit silent, like most of the time. In conclusion: it was funnier than ‘Dumb and Dumber To’ and it wasn’t even trying to be! That makes it a success in my book.