Swipe File

The infamous 'Nowhere to Run to' DJ from the classic street gang on the run action movie 'The Warriors'

Misty Knight, coordinating superheroes on assignment in 'Heroes for Hire #1' from Marvel Written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning art by Brad Walker and Andrew Hennessy

Not so much a swipe as a tribute, and a nifty one.

The First Horror Movie

It's short, not quite thirteen minutes.  It's stagy and melodramatic.  The effects are crude, though surprisingly effective and the film stock is very degraded.

But put yourself in the mind of somebody in 1910.  Maybe you've seen a couple of the new short silent film reels, maybe you've never seen moving pictures at all.

You're ushered into a dark room and watch in horror as a grotesque monster is born out of a steaming cauldron.  A backwards immolation as the figure forms out of burned meat.  And then a shaggy monstrous creature, not even remotely human stalks its appalled creator.

It must have seemed apocalyptic.

Edison Frankenstein - 1910:





Some history.

Top 100 Horror Movies

Top 100 Horror Movies
IDW/Fantastic Press
Written by Gary Gerani
Introduction by Roger Corman

I approached this one with caution and skepticism.  Invariably these kind of 'best of' books are so subjective as to be one step up from vanity projects, overly weighted to recent movies and suffering from unforgivable exclusions.

But Gerani has created a list that had me nodding my head at almost every page.  Almost every pick and its ranking made sense.  These aren't necessarily the 100 best horror films, but Gerani makes a good argument for them being the most important ones.

OK, no true genre fan could pick up a book like this without at least a couple fierce nit-picks.   The author justifies the absence of John Carpenter's The Thing because it will be in his planned follow up Top 100 Science Fiction Movies.  I would quibble that while yes, Romero's original Night of the Living Dead certainly belongs on the list, the original Dawn of the Dead does too.  It's the platonic ideal and all time classic of the zombie genre and any list of great horror movies has to include it.

Plus if you're going with a Tim Burton film, I would pick the Hammer Horror worshiping Sleepy Hollow, a more artistically successful and quintessential horror film than the entertainingly gory but overly stylized musical Sweeney Todd.

The production is excellent and while the art selected will be familiar to any fan of Famous Monsters of Film Land or indeed any genre productions its an atmospheric graphic collection nonetheless.

Rhymin' and Crimin'

Hip Hop and crime movies have been a match made in hell since the earliest days of old school rap but Masterpieces like Boyz in the Hood and New Jack City  have slowly been supplanted by limited vanity projects and barely watchable straight to video dreck.

There have been a few authentic masterpieces that advanced both the crime film genre and the artistic boundaries of Hip Hop as well.  Today we'll look at two gems, lesser known except among the cognoscenti.

"I think you know that there's no such thing as an American anymore. No Hispanics, no Japanese, no blacks, no whites, no nothing. It's just rich people and poor people. The three of us are all rich, so we're on the same side"

Deep Cover released in 1992 is an overlooked oddity that never really got the audience it deserved.  With a theme of tortured moral ambiguity and the existential terror of ethical compromise it also features a brilliantly appropo old school Dr Dre soundtrack and the introduction of a rapper known then as Snoop Doggy Dogg on the title track

Laurence Fishburne is the hero and poetic narrator, a fiercely straight edge cop compensating for the childhood pain of watching his drug addicted father gunned down on Christmas day with an iron self control.  A sleazy DEA agent tells him his 'criminal personality type' makes him perfect for undercover work and reluctantly at first he sets himself up as a drug dealer to bring down a cocaine network that traces back to a South American politician.

The neo-blaxploitation stylized film-making of Bill Duke (A Rage in Harlem) builds and maintains a dark atmosphere of moral dread as Fishburne's character hooks up with a corrupt lawyer played with edgy intensity by Jeff Goldblum, a successful family man with a yearning need for a gangsta lifestyle, who want's his cake and eat it too.

Lines blur, loyalty is tested and Fishburne's narration gets more and more lyrical and intense.  Some amazing dramatic set pieces, tight wire over the top performances and thoughtful political and philosophical speculation make this a film you can watch multiple times and find something new every time.

"It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream. When you have something like a nightmare, you will wake up and tell yourself that it was only a dream. It is said that the world we live in is not a bit different from this."

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai from 2001 is a masterpiece of slow burn suspense and dramatic artifice.  Director Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, Down by Law) never makes the same movie twice, artistically and musically he always stretches boundaries with his films.

Ghost Dog takes the martial arts movie fantasy world of Wu Tang Clan alum RZA who does the soundtrack and tells a darkly lyrical story about the power to choose the world we inhabit.

The hero played with sleepy eyed intensity by Forest Whitaker is either a crazy assassin who lives on a roof top with pigeons and kills people for the Mafia, or he is a dedicated warrior, committed body and soul to the melancholy death worshiping code of the ancient samurai as laid out in the classic 17th century Japanese text Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai. Quotes by Whitaker from the book are interspersed throughout the film and are offered as a mournful poetic counterpoint to the ambiguity of the main character.  He serves an unworthy gangster master who once saved his life, a moment of essential defining purity for Ghost Dog, but a casual throwaway whim on the part of the gangster.

There's a lot of sly humor, Ghost Dog's best friends are a Haitian Ice Cream salesman, and most of their translated conversations consist of  good natured misunderstanding; "I'm sorry, I don't speak English" in response to "I'm sorry I don't speak French" and a little girl waiting for the book that will change her life. The elderly fading mobsters offer the most laughs, ancient Italian Mafiosi obsessed with old school rap and cowboys and Indians.

The theme is simple.  Your identity, your code, your very reality is what you choose it to be, and just because you live in modern day New York doesn't mean you can't choose to be a Samurai living by an ancient code of honor.

Sleeping Through the End

The Walking Dead hasn't even officially aired yet and already some commentators are sniffing that the opening seems awfully similar to the opening of 28 Days Later.

This is, of course, true.

In 28 Days Later bike courier Jim, in hospital with a head injury from a car meets bike courier accident wakes up out of a coma to find the hospital and seemingly all of London are completely abandoned. Death and destruction are everywhere, and ultimately it turns out that ravening hordes of horribly transformed normal people are slavering for his blood.


In The Walking Dead (Both comic book and TV series) Rick, a police officer in hospital after being critically injured in a shoot out wakes up out of a coma to find the hospital and seemingly all of his home town are completely abandoned. Death and destruction are everywhere, and ultimately it turns out that ravening hordes of horribly transformed normal people are slavering for his blood.

So yeah, kind of similar.

But what the nitpickers don't realize is that 'sleeping through the apocalypse' is actually a recurring trope that has appeared many times.  In fact 28 Days Later was specifically referencing the classic John Wyndham novel turned multiple movie and TV adaptions The Day of the Triffids. 

The hero Bill Mason, is in hospital getting treatment for an eye injury that has temporarily blinded him.  So his eyes are covered with bandages when almost everyone else raptly watches a bizarre meteor shower that lights up the skies all over the world.  The next morning everyone who did is permanently blind while Mason can see as soon as he takes off his bandages.  His awakening in hospital surrounded by the terrified newly blind and stalked by horrific monsters is strongly reflected in the first quarter of 28 Days Later.

Ultimately the sleeping through the apocalypse trope is useful to writers because it allows them to plunge directly into the post apocalyptic action without having to explicate the apocalypse itself.  Plus the audience is introduced to the new reality at the same time as the hero is, encouraging identification with his baffled terror.

Other examples range from the Twilight Zone classic episode 'Time Enough at Last', the short lived Gene Roddenberry series Genesis II, the zombie move Night of the Comet and too many other examples to count.

Worry about the similarities between 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead if you want - or you could just enjoy a great thrilling zombie series on the small screen every week.

I know which option I'm picking.

UPDATE: Heh.  AMC aren't too worried about the comparison.  They ran 28 Days Later right after the repeat performance of the premiere episode on Friday Nov 5.

No gum shall escape my sight

Is it just me or does the upcoming Green Lantern movie have an easy advertising tie-in pick up right out of the gate?