Sick, sadistic shit

I have a confession to make:

I love movies with sick, sadistic shit in them.

Does this make me a sick, sadistic person? Not at all. It just means that I am generally bored by the mainstream attempts to unsettle me that are offered up by Hollywood. Yeah, that little kid looks creepy and is saying creepy things. But I've seen it all before.

First and foremost when I go to the movies, I want to see something new. I'd rather see a movie that dares to be different and fails nobly, than something that's more solidly crafted but is overly familiar.

Which is why, when I hear about a movie in which a mad scientist surgically fuses three human beings together in a chain, to make one continuous digestive track connecting three people, I try to figure out a way to see it as soon as humanly possible.

The Human Centipede -- or, The Human Centipede (First Sequence), as it is sometimes known -- made it easier for me, by debuting OnDemand at the same time it was appearing for the first time in U.S. theaters. (It was made in the Netherlands and set in Germany.)

Suddenly, I knew what I was doing last Friday night.

One thing for sure is, you've got to watch a movie like this at night. Sick and sadistic -- twisted and gross, warped and nightmarish, skewed and freakish -- doesn't fly during the day.

And I'm pleased to report that The Human Centipede did not disappoint. The subject matter being as gruesome as it is, director Tom Six didn't even need to get all graphic to make us squirm. Once you've got a scientist kidnapping unwitting tourists and subjecting them to procedures that would make Dr. Frankenstein vomit, you don't need to show every little detail. The power of suggestion is strong in a film like this.

And The Human Centipede contains one of the great villain performances I've seen in the past couple years, that of Dieter Laser as the surgeon gone mad. The man was presumably once respected and not insane -- he had a high-profile career separating conjoined twins. But that gave him the intimate anatomical knowledge that would allow him to do the reverse kind of procedure, and he does it with glee. In fact, one of my favorite scenes in the film is when the abomination is first revealed. Everyone is crying, but the three members of the centipede are crying out of fear and despair, while he's weeping in joy. Great moment.

And Laser -- what a weird dude. Just look at him here. My colleague who wrote the review for my site described him as the love child of Udo Kier and Christopher Walken. Here are all three, with Kier on the left, Walken in the center and Laser on the right, so you get some idea what I'm talking about:



I won't talk too much more about The Human Centipede, because it contains some great surprises. I will say this, though: If you go into it for the same reasons I did, you'll be plenty satisfied.

Instead, I'll finish by talking about some other films I saw recently with the hopes of getting some sick, sadistic shit, and whether I left satisfied.

The Collector (2009, Marcus Dunstan). I guess torture porn has become pretty mainstream -- they've made six Saw movies, after all -- but I thought this one might be a little grislier. It involves a serial killer dressed up like The Gimp from Pulp Fiction, who sets up his victims' home as a series of Home Alone-style booby traps, only lethal ones instead of paint cans swinging on ropes. He also sadistically tortures them, if they aren't killed by the traps. The movie was decent, and there were some squirmy moments, but the premise was ultimately a bit too silly, like Saw movies often are -- so much (unbelievable) setup for so little payoff.

Downloading Nancy (2009, Johan Renck). I didn't specifically know what Downloading Nancy was about, only that it was dark and, well, sadistic. Also that some people found it abhorrent, which made it slightly more attractive. If I'd known it was about a woman who cuts herself (as I wrote about here), I probably wouldn't have been as interested, or at least not for the same reasons I was interested in The Human Centipede and The Collector.

I Spit on Your Grave (1977, Meir Zarchi). Another film I've blogged about before (here), I Spit on Your Grave was something I wanted to see because it was supposed to be one of the most notorious exploitation films ever made. I finally got my opportunity last fall. I guess this had the intended effect for me in the sense that I found the gang rape scenes repellent, but the movie satisfying in some way overall. As I discussed at the time, and as you probably already know, the victim systematically kills all the people who raped her, some of them in extremely nasty ways, so it fit the "sick, sadistic" category plenty well. I know I'm supposed to think I Spit on Your Grave is depraved and morally repugnant, but it worked for me.

Battle Royale (2001, Kinji Fukasaku). Forty-four children on an island, with weapons, killing each other until there's only one left. Disturbing, eh? Yes, it was, but it also managed to be reasonably funny in spots as well. I really enjoyed it.

Hard Candy (2005, David Slade). Before she was Juno, Ellen Page was a sexual predator's target who turns the tables on the would-be child molester, ties him up, and ... well, to tell you anything else would be to spoil it. Plenty squirmy, even if some sensationalist moments keep it from being all that it could have been.

Captivity (2007, Roland Joffe). It was the infamously graphic advertising campaign, only a small, chaste percentage of which I even knew about at the time I saw it, that inspired me toward a viewing of Captivity -- in the theater, no less. There were a couple gruesome moments, but not in a good way. This is torture porn at its worst, and it's also poorly made and laughable in spots. I ranked this as the worst movie I saw in 2007.

Funny Games (2007, Michael Haneke). I knew it would be dark, I knew it would be brutal, and I knew it would be nihilistic. What I didn't know is how angry it would make me. This is a depressing, hopeless movie, and Funny Games makes you feel like the target of Haneke's own cinematic game-playing, for his own amusement. Two eccentric youths capture a family in their summer home, torture them and kill them. Funny indeed.

Teeth (2007, Mitchell Lichtenstein). This is the prototype for a sick and sadistic movie -- but like Battle Royale, it's also very funny in spots. The one-sentence plot synopsis says it all: "A shy teenage girl who's an active participant in the local abstinence club discovers she has teeth in her vagina, and those who seek to take advantage of her find out as well -- the hard way." Awesome, gruesome, and as I said before, hilarious. I loved it. Also, afterward, I was singing "Vagina Dentata" to the tune of "Hakuna Matata" from The Lion King.

Zoo (2007, Robinson Devor). A documentary about a man who died while having sex with a horse. 'Nuff said. Sadly, the film was too vague, talking around its subject more than about it, to be as disturbing as one would hope. What was it about 2007, anyway, that there were so many sick, sadistic movies from that year? That makes four in a row on this list.

Antichrist (2009, Lars von Trier). And here's a third 2009 movie. I wrote about this movie also (here). Antichrist is famous for a couple scenes of sexual mutilation that occur in a cabin in the woods where Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg have sequestered themselves in order to rapidly lose their marbles following the death of their young son. I wasn't as shocked as I expected to be, plus, I thought the filmmaker's motivations were artistically suspect -- von Trier is one of the most maddening, egomaniacal directors out there, and Antichrist was a movie he made the way he made it just to be controversial.

I'd love to hear any good examples you have of movies that fall into this category. My comments section is open and accepting contributions.

Anti-theater

There are countless reasons a person could/would write a post about Lars von Trier's highly controversial Antichrist.

The one I'm choosing is pretty low on that list.

Antichrist, which I watched on Friday night, was another Vancetastic milestone, the kind that only an obsessive like me would even know had passed: It was the 2,000th film I've seen on video.

I suppose I should define my terminology here. A movie seen on "video" is any movie that I saw for the first time somewhere other than a movie theater. VHS and DVD are the two most obvious subcategories, but "video" also includes the similar subcategories of On Demand, pay-per-view, cable movie stations (such as HBO and Showtime) and even commercial TV -- though that's rare because I try to avoid seeing edited versions of movies. Of course, I will see edited versions of movies on an airplane (the whole "captive audience" thing), which is another subcategory of video, as is movies seen on a bus, of which I saw maybe a dozen on the Boston-New York route I regularly rode while visiting a girlfriend in 1999 and 2000. I've never actually watched a movie on an ipod, but if I had, that would count too. The last, hardest to define category of "video" are those movies presented on a large screen, but not in a conventional theatrical setting -- such as the movies they showed for free (or a very minimal charge) in lecture halls on campus back in college, or movies we've seen broadcast on the side of a building at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. (You sit in the grass on a blanket and bring a picnic dinner. It's a lot of fun.)

It might seem simplest to say that "video" means any film not seen in its initial theatrical run, but that's a bit too restricting, because it doesn't include films you saw in the theater on a re-release. When I went to see Buster Keaton's The General in college, in a theater that specialized in pairing silent films with a live organist, I could hardly call that "video," could I? The real difficult one was when my wife and I went to see Lawrence of Arabia a couple years ago at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and yes, it was my first time seeing this classic. The "theater" where they screened it was not exclusively used to screen movies, but because it was set up like a conventional theater and had quite a large capacity, I labeled that experience a theatrical viewing. They charged us around $10 for the tickets, so that made the designation a little easier.

So "video" is defined more by what it isn't than what it is. In that way, video is the "anti-theater," making Antichrist an appropriate film for this milestone.

I started keeping track of this theater-video distinction as a "what the hell?" once I had my movie list loaded into Excel, and could easily keep track of additional stats about each movie (such as whether I liked or didn't like them, as I described here). I figured it would be easy enough to remember whether I'd seen a movie for the first time in the theater or on "video," so I went back through the list and marked each film with one designation or the other, and have been doing so ever sense. At the bottom of that column I've kept a running total of how many are in each category, and have been ticking that number upward by one with each new film I see.

When I hit 2,000 videos on Friday night, my theatrical total stood at 913.

Let's consider that for a moment. I've seen more than twice as many movies on video than I have in the theater -- for some time now, in fact. And the number gets even larger when you consider the total number of distinct video viewings -- movies seen for the second, third and sixteenth times on video, regardless of where they were originally seen. (I've also seen some movies more than once in the theater, but that list is less than 20).

This shouldn't be surprising, when you think about it. It's obviously far easier and less expensive to watch movies on video than in the theater. But only 25-30 years ago, it wasn't even possible. Can you believe there was a time in our lifetime -- depending on how old you are -- when the only way to see a movie was to wait for it to get re-released in the theater? I distinctly remember waiting for Star Wars to come back to the theater so I could see it again. And for some reason, I also distinctly remember that Ghostbusters, released in 1985, was one of the last films that made a second theatrical run before video stores, VHS and (back then) laser disc made that practice null and void. The cable movie channels, of course, also played a significant role in limiting the need for theatrical re-releases.

Before video and cable, you did have the one video subcategory of commercial TV available, but you had to be prepared to watch it exactly when it aired (there weren't yet VCRs), and only a limited selection of classics that usually didn't have to be edited for content were widely available that way. As for the movies of lesser quality and sketchier content, once they were gone from the theater, it's like they entirely ceased to exist in any practical way.

Then again, I'm definitely a kid of the video generation, as I probably saw 50 movies at most in the theater before I saw one on video. Strangely, I think I remember what that first one was. My friend Jed's family had the first Betamax player I'd ever seen, and I still remember watching a mostly animated, partially live action children's movie called Water Babies at his house. Water Babies was in theaters in 1979, so this might have been 1980 or 1981 -- but certainly not much later, because Jed and his family moved to Colorado soon after that. We might have seen The Black Hole before Water Babies, but I saw The Black Hole in the theater, so it wasn't my first movie seen for the first time on video. Congratulations, Water Babies, that honor goes to you. Since I was born in 1973, and I'm pretty sure the first movie I saw in the theater was Star Wars in 1977, it might have been far fewer than 50 before Water Babies -- it might have been fewer than 25. It might have been fewer than ten.

Now, 30 years after Water Babies, I've seen my 2,000th. Which brings us back to Antichrist. Which, for the record, was a movie I splurged on, paying $5.99 through On Demand (I guess On Demand and pay-per-view are the same thing these days) in order to get it on my 2009 list.

You know the director of Antichrist, Lars von Trier, for his films Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, if you know him at all. (You may know him from other films. I'm just listing the ones I've seen.) The famous thing about Lars von Trier is that his female characters get used, abused and spat out, which have led to charges that he may actually hate women. It's an interesting line he walks -- as his main characters are most often women, you could actually say the opposite, that he sympathizes them, or that if he does subject them to constant dehumanization and degradation, it's to demonstrate how they get treated in a misogynistic world. But there's nearly a sickness to the way these women get treated in his films, which is why you have to wonder. You also have to wonder if he's just trying to push buttons, which is distinctly possible. The man is known for having an inflated sense of his own greatness, and accusations that he tries to discomfit people just for kicks are easily understood once you've watched a couple of his films.

Antichrist is no different. Following in the footsteps of actresses like Emily Watson, Bjork and Nicole Kidman, Charlotte Gainsbourg takes her turn acting out von Trier's awful fantasies of female destruction. Which is why I could have written a post about how violent is too violent, or how pornographic is too pornographic, to show in a mainstream movie. There are really two moments of mutilation/grotesqueness in the movie that have caused it to gain the notoriety it has gained, and I probably could have spent a whole post just talking about whether it is artistically justifiable to show them. Though, for the record, knowing they were supposed to shock me ended up making them a little less shocking when I finally did see them. That's the opposite of the Suspiria effect, where I spent the first ten minutes watching that movie in white-knuckle terror because I knew something f**ked up was going to happen. And so I could have also written a post called "The anticipation," about how anticipating something you know is going to be horrible is an exquisite experience in itself -- for people who aren't squeamish, that is. (And since I didn't know I wouldn't be as shocked as I thought I might be, the film did have that impact on me.) Lastly I could have written a post about the discrepancy between the beautiful and ugly in a film, as there are many shots and sequences in Antichrist that are delicate and gorgeous.

I like the fact that I spent the majority of this post not talking about those things. Just a little FU to von Trier, the self-stylized enfant terrible, a director who likes having people talk about him for deathly serious reasons rather than utterly trivial ones.