A hilarious underestimate of longevity

I have this notion of the ideal Jason Voorhees sequence, developed from snippets of these movies seen on cable back in the day, and just the other ways he's been used in the popular culture. 

In this sequence, Jason is walking through the woods at a determined pace, maybe even a little less determined than it should be. Serial killers don't rush, remember. They are propelled on by supernatural powers that allow them to be where they need to be without hurrying there, remaining all the more ominous for their unflappable calmness. 

Meanwhile, there is a prospective victim running through these same woods. She is crying and looking behind her to where she knows Jason is, having already come face to face with him and bolted in the other direction. She may trip every once in a while, but it's not a permanent stumbling block, and she's back on her feet after just a moment, in theory putting an ever larger gap between her and her assailant with her every second more of her panicked scurrying.

The film cross-cuts between these two about five times -- Jason walking slowly, this girl running and looking back and crying.

And then finally, out of nowhere, he's right behind her -- or even better, she runs right into his chest, as he's somehow gotten on the other side of her.

After four movies, I haven't gotten this sequence even once. 

No, every time Jason appears, it's through some jump scare, smashing through a wall or window to stab or grab someone. The suddenness of his appearance, and often the direction of his appearance, is just as baffling for physicists as in my ideal example, but what it lacks is any sort of build-up to the kill.

And the more of these Friday the 13th movies I've watched this month, the more I've felt that the victims are "wasted." 

One thing that's developed over time with slasher movies is that they've learned to milk the death of each victim. That might mean with a short pursuit of the type I'm describing above, or it might mean the victim takes several smaller cuts, smaller injuries, before the blow that finally removes him or her from the pool of available victims. Each victim is worth a two- to three-minute section of the running time for a modern slasher movie. In the Friday the 13th movies, and in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter in particular, a victim can go from not realizing they're in harm's way to having an axe through the head in less time than it takes for one iteration of the sound design's "J-j-j-j" effect.

I've started with a macro look on these four movies I've watched, but let's return to this, ahem, "final chapter" of the saga.

Now, I don't know for sure and I'm not looking it up right now, but it's absolutely hilarious that they would have been considering closing up shop on the Friday the 13th series in 1984, only four years after starting it and while the box office clearly seemed to support continuing it. It may have always been a gambit to goose the box office just a bit more with a title that suggested the series was ending, or maybe they just thought that four movies was already a lot and they were really pushing their luck. Or maybe they really did think that there were only four movies to reasonably tell about Jason Voorhees. Of course, having seen these movies now, I know there was actually only one movie to tell about Jason Voorhees, they just told it four different times.

But the movie starts with a sense that it's really wrapping everything up. I've talked about how these movies spend as many as five minutes recapping the events of previous movies with actual footage from the endings of those movies. Well The Final Chapter takes that to the next level, rivaling modern reality TV in terms of the thoroughness of its recapping. We get scenes from all three previous movies that basically tell the story of those movies -- such as it is -- to bring us to this point in time. And while I stand by the notion that all four of these movies are just slightly different versions of each other, there is, in theory, some slightly new situation in which Jason finds himself at the end of each movie, a little more "actually" dead than he was at the end of the previous one.

One thing I do want to say is that I was glad to see that the hockey mask still has the machete cut from the end of the previous movie. I was sure they would just give him a pristine mask to start the new movie, because the mask is now an iconic part of his representation, even though it was only just introduced in the second half of the previous movie. Score one minor victory for realism.

There are no other victories for realism in this movie, though of course that's not really what it's going for.

I've described the victims in the previous movies as horny teenagers, but in reality, the teenagers were never as horny as I assumed they would be. Each movie has, I believe, one couple having sex who experience the ultimate form of coitus interruptus. 

Well, this is the movie where they decided to get really horny. There were so many interchangeable couples off having sex that I could swear each new one I came across had already died in the previous scene. All these characters are white and otherwise undifferentiated, perhaps only slight variations in their hair color causing them to stand out from each other -- though nothing in the actual writing or dialogue. At least by now this series was finally realizing the need to maximize its R rating with T&A. 

Actually there are two differentiators in this movie in terms of character. For the first time since Kevin Bacon appeared in the original, we get some actual cast members we recognize. Crispin Glover is one of the teens here -- he gets a knife through the face in one of those previously described abrupt deaths -- and I don't think I've ever seen Glover be more normal than he is. Remember, this was still a year before Back to the Future. 

Then there's Corey Feldman. He has a more central role in the film than the rest of the disposable characters, and he's also far younger than they are. When the movie was released, he wouldn't turn 13 until two months later. They haven't yet figured out Feldman's verbal strengths that would characterize his usage in his future films, but it was nice to see him. 

I realize I'm barely giving any synopsis of the actual plot in any of these movies, but truly, what plot? You can summarize it as follows: Horny teenagers find yet another reason to go to Crystal Lake in defiance of the fact that the area is cursed. They are all together in one space and they get killed off one by one, leaving one character -- or in the case of this movie, two -- alive to tell the tale. Jason apparently dies at the end. Ho hum.

I want to mention that while I had limited respect for some of the actual filmmaking by Steve Miner in the previous two films, that has gone entirely out the window now. Joseph Zito -- who? -- is the director of this film, and the whole thing looks cheap and rushed. 

It's definitely time for something new to happen in these movies, and I think that almost can't help but happen in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, the fifth movie that hilariously came out less than a year after the movie that declared the series was ending. That was proof either that the gambit was always planned, or that the box office was just so overwhelmingly positive that they did an immediate about face and began cranking out another sub par script. 

For the record, there were still six further movies in the series, even after the next one, prior to the 2009 reboot. All of which -- except the reboot -- I will watch as this month of Halloween rolls onward.  

My latest hill to die on

Last week when I wrote a short post about the cute method the Sun Theatre had of ticketing for Digger, I mentioned I would likely be writing another Digger post to talk about my first experience with the Sun's VistaVision projector, one of only five in the world and the only one in the southern hemisphere.

Little did I know that this would soon feel very secondary in the discussions of this movie. 

At the time we bought our Digger tickets, I had an inkling that it was not doing well. An article I read about what Rotten Tomatoes portends for various Oscar contenders listed the 52% fresh rating that you are now familiar with. Which, I suppose, is likely to fluctuate a bit and might not be exactly that at the moment.

What I didn't know until after we saw it was that it was also a certified box office flop, and possibly one of the worst flops of all time, in terms of prospective box office relative to the costs of production and promotion. A break-even point for Digger has been listed as $350 million globally, but this movie will be lucky to make even a quarter of that. 

What I also didn't know was that I would love it.

I wasn't sure at first. There were a few things that, as they happened, I questioned, unsure how they would pay off. But then, they all paid off. All of them. 

In fact, this is one of the rare movies that is best in its final 15 minutes, when it reveals the full scope of its design, none of which was revealed in the trailers and only some of which starts to be revealed at about the 30-minute mark. A friend of mine who didn't like it even said the closing credits are the best part, not because they signify the end of the movie, but because of a creative choice that ties in with the whole structural reveal. I don't need to get into any of this in greater detail, because I want you to experience it like I did, if you do experience it at all. 

Which I hope you do. If you want to read my rave, it's here. 

As soon as I began circulating in my movie groups that I'd seen it and that I loved it, I received incredulous responses. Now mind you, these were all from people who hadn't seen it. I've still only spoken to one person who's actually seen it, which yes, explains the bombing. But those people objected to the possibility of it being good on the grounds of the word of mouth, on the grounds of the box office failure, and on the grounds of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's ego or Tom Cruise's participation in Scientology. (Which, it seems, is not a problem for them when it's a Mission: Impossible movie.)

So now, if I want to continue expressing my true opinions of Digger, I'm planting my flag in a big mound of dogshit. 

That's what one movie friend said he'd heard it was: "dogshit." Now granted, this guy also disagreed with me on The Odyssey. So now he must think I'm really full of it.

Going to bat for a divisive film -- that is a kind way of characterizing the reaction to Digger, but an accurate one, as I will explain in a moment -- is always a painful experience. You have to be true to yourself and to the movie you saw, but you know you are losing credibility everywhere you turn, every time you pipe up in defense of that film. It happened for me with Don't Worry Darling. It happened for me with Emilia Perez, though at least that was a best picture nominee. It happened to some extent last year with my #1, Together, which some people liked fine, some people did not like, and no one liked as much as I did. 

The thing is, you aren't prepared for these things to happen to you. You don't go into these movies expecting to love them, and then loving them is some sort of confirmation bias. You don't know that this movie you innocently see, one of more than 150 you see that year, is going to rise up well beyond the affection level of anyone else you know, and suddenly your own affection for it makes you seem like a pretty suspect person from whom to take movie advice.

But maybe there's hope for Digger yet. 

I mentioned the 52% on Rotten Tomatoes earlier. I mentioned the horrific box office, though not in actual numbers, which I will spare you since they are so paltry as to be shocking. But I didn't mention a couple opposing data points.

The first of these I noticed was on Letterboxd. The cumulative rating for Digger on Letterboxd currently stands at 3.8 out of 5. That's damn good. And that includes more than 31,000 five-star ratings, 13% of the total. In fact, there is no rating under 3 stars that has more than 11,909 ratings, and that's 2.5 stars that has that total. Anything below that is just a pittance relative to the total percentage. 

Then you have IMDB. As you know, I am suspicious of IMDB when it involves trolls taking down the ratings of movies with subject matter they don't like, or propping up subject matter they do like but that progressive-minded people don't like. But I see no reason why Digger is in conversation with any of their ideological bugaboos, either in a positive or a negative sense. In fact, with its environmental message, trolls would be more likely to be against it than for it, I would think.

Well, the collective user rating for Digger is 7.3 out of 10. And holding steady since the first time I checked it. 

What does this all mean?

A future as a cult classic for Digger, very likely. But is there a possibility of redemption within the current year? A positive backlash to the negativity?

It seems unlikely that enough people will even see it to move the needle in that regard. 

But publishing posts like this, as well as publishing my review, will confirm that I am true to my own impressions of this movie, and that I can contribute, in some small way, to other people seeing it. My wife and I talked about the movie for our entire 20-minute drive home, and then continued after we reached home. That simply doesn't happen with most films. I think even a conversation-starter like Obsession might run dry before then -- though that could be because the two people have had a differing take and they don't want to make this schism any worse.

My wife and I, we had the same take. She might have even liked it more than I did. And there will be others out there. They will come, eventually.

I suppose I should comment on the VistaVision projecton, while we're here. I guess this might have been the only thing about Digger that disappointed me.

It started with the fact that the projectionist did not come out to speak to us beforehand, as he had done when we saw The Odyssey in the same auditorium. (That wasn't the VistaVision projector. Apparently this auditorium can do double duty.) We got a program when we came in (it's beautiful) as well as gratis chocolate gold coins, so they had set it up for the same sort of "event" as The Odyssey. (Which also came with a program, but that time the candy was a gummy eyeball for the cyclops.) But then the projectionist never emerged, and the film started ten minutes late -- so maybe there was some last-minute thing that prevented him from coming out, or maybe he had the chicken pox. Who knows. In any case, it could have also been an ominous portent of the way some critics have savaged Digger. Maybe he was just too ashamed of the movie he'd seen to come out and do a positive song and dance about the new projector and this film in particular. 

Then the actual projection? Well, it had a square aspect ratio, but I know that was the case even for people who didn't see it in VistaVision, which is most people throughout the world, and includes my one friend who has seen it, who was able to confirm this. 

And though I certainly liked what I was looking at, it was not possible to identify this as being bolder, more clear, more detailed, or any of the other things you usually expect when you see a movie using a projection system that cost a fortune and that only four other places in the world have. 

What I really needed was some sort of side-by-side comparison, so I could identify fine differences in the picture quality. Obviously, no such thing was available.

I will say this, though:

I loved Digger, and if the projection played any role in that, then I'm glad I saw it the way I did. 

I hope you see it too. To leave you with the line that finished my review: 

"If you are going to see Digger, do yourself a favour and leave your baggage about Cruise and Inarritu at the door, and be open for a wild and woolly journey that ends in just the right spot."

Watching the movie after the podcast, not before

When it comes to movies I know are going to be discussed on a podcast, my conventional wisdom has always been that I should prep for the podcast by watching the movie -- or more to the point, that I should avoid listening to the podcast until I've watched the movie. 

Of course, this is not always possible. They talk about a lot of movies on my movie podcasts and I'm not going to be able to see each one before I listen to the episode. Some would skip the episode in this situation, but I'm too much of a completist to do that. I like to tackle them in order, even if I'm sometimes operating a couple months behind. (My incessant fantasy baseball podcasts throughout the baseball season put me way behind on other sorts of podcasts.)

Just yesterday, for example, I listened to an episode of Filmspotting in which they made mention of Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, David Wain's new movie. Now it isn't usually possible to spoil a comedy, and Filmspotting tries to avoid spoiling any movie it's talking about. But as a result of listening to that episode, I now know which celebrity Gail Daughtry's husband sleeps with, setting in motion her quest to sleep with her one celebrity she gets to sleep with. (Think Ross Geller and Isabella Rosselini if you want to get the gist of the sex pass.) It doesn't spoil the movie but I would have preferred to be surprised by that. Still, I'm not going to hold off listening to the episode because of one five-minute segment of the show devoted to this one movie. 

The thinking is a little different, it turns out, when it comes to a classic movie you've already seen. On this same episode, they were also doing a 30th anniversary Pantheon project review of Fargo. Just quickly, for context: "The Pantheon" is the show's movie hall of fame, where if they assign a film to it, it means they don't discuss that film anymore on the podcast. It means it's too great and it would come up in too many discussions, so it is effectively "retired." Many of these films never got an initial discussion on the show, so now they're going back to do their one discussion and, in some cases, deciding that the movie is not Pantheon-worthy. Let's just say the worthiness of Fargo was wholeheartedly confirmed by hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen. 

As I was listening, and getting a ton out of the discussion, I thought "It's too bad I didn't watch Fargo beforehand in order to maximize the richness of this conversation." I should mention that Fargo is a top ten movie for me (#8 on Flickchart) and it has also been fourteen years since I've seen it, which is longer than possibly any other movie in my top ten. (Nope, not quite. I haven't seen Raiders of the Lost Ark since 2011.) 

Then I realized a couple things:

1) It's streaming on Netflix, which they mentioned at the end of the discussion (I own a DVD copy, but no longer a DVD player); 

2) It's only 98 minutes, which is the kind of thing you know about a movie but don't immediately remember if you haven't seen it in a decade and a half;

3) I could just watch it after their discussion, rather than before.

So I did, that night. 

There are some clear benefits to this. When Adam and Josh go in depth on a movie, they talk about it for maybe 45 minutes -- nine times as long as Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass -- and they get down into the nitty gritty, such as minute details of the facial expressions of the actors in certain scenes. As well as larger thematic elements that I wouldn't have considered, such as the fact that this movie shows three different versions of mildly unhappy domesticity, down even to the parody of a marriage between the two kidnappers played by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare. 

If I were to have watched Fargo prior to this discussion, I might have said "Oh yeah!" during a couple of their observations. But by watching it afterward, I could make sure to sharpen my focus as certain moments in the film arrived, since my memory of their discussion of those moments would be fresh in mind. I could pay attention to facial expressions by William H. Macy and Frances McDormand at the moment they made those expressions.

Another thing their discussion revealed to me? That it takes more than a half hour for McDormand's Marge Gunderson -- the role that won her her first of an eventual three Oscars -- to even appear in the movie. I couldn't believe that was true, just based on my 14-year-old memory of my last viewing. But sure enough, during this screening I paused the movie to check the time stamp during the first pan over to Marge as she's sleeping and gets the phone call about the roadside murders. It's not only after 30 minutes, it's after 33 minutes.

The other thing the podcast did is it gave me a taste for watching Fargo again. It's weird to think that it would take any sort of external stimulus to get me to watch my eighth favorite movie of all time, but there's evidently something about Fargo that prevents me from revisiting it with any regularity. It's a notable contrast with the other Coen brothers movie in my top ten, Raising Arizona, which you would know is my favorite movie of all time, and which I watch at least every four years. My most recent viewing was after only two years. Fargo? This could be as few as my fifth viewing overall. 

So I wouldn't have rushed to watch Fargo just because I knew it was coming up on Filmspotting, if I did even know that. (I can't remember if I knew it or not.) However, the deep podcast discussion made me want to run and watch it, even during my afternoon slot of availability, before my late night one. (And even though I started around 10:20, I was in no danger of falling asleep, as I do during almost every new movie I start at that time. I've written before about how you don't fall asleep during movies you love, no matter what time it is -- and even though there are no stakes to falling asleep because you've already seen it.)

And I think it certainly won't be another 14 years before I watch Fargo again.

I could get into some of Adam and Josh's other shrewd observations about this classic, but that's not the sort of post this is. This is the sort of post that reminds you, if you are in the same position, that you haven't missed the boat if you listen to the podcast but haven't rewatched that classic in preparation. Sometimes, watching afterward is just as good, if not better. 

3D movies lost to time

For my third Friday the 13th movie of this month, Part III from 1982, I got to be reminded of the era when people made 3D movies specifically with an eye for what could jump out from the screen at you -- and little else. 

Yes, 3D movies in the 1980s were not good movies that were specifically fitted out for 3D -- or failing that, retrofitted, the way they were during the form's return to prominence earlier this century. They were movies that existed only to make their audiences recoil from the screen so they were not hit by a spear that appeared to shoot right out at them. 

I remember two very terrible ones in particular that came out very close to each other, only the first of which I saw: The Treasure of the Four Crowns, and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn. Both of those movies came out in 1983, just one year after the 3D Friday the 13th entry. (I definitely saw Treasure of the Four Crowns in the theater, and I remember being shocked by some of the deaths in it. I was only nine when I saw it. Then again, the body count must have been way worse in Raiders of the Lost Ark.) 

The funny thing about such movies is they have basically no life after their initial moment of 3D presentation is gone. As I was watching Friday the 13th Part III, I was wondering: would there be any way to recreate the experience of watching this in 3D nowadays? Just to see if the 3D effects were any good? Would having one of those 3D TVs, which we used to have in Los Angeles, be enough? (The internet is a bit unclear on that. The answer seems to be "maybe.")

The other significant thing about Part III, the second consecutive film in this series directed by Steve Miner, is that it's the other movie in the series that I have always given myself credit for having seen. I knew for sure I'd seen the original, but then this one was sort of "I'm pretty sure I saw another movie in this series. Let's just say it was Part III."

Well, that would have been so long ago -- before I saw the original I'm pretty sure -- that I cannot, now, look at this movie and say with any certainty whether I'd already seen it. But just to be on the safe side, I'm not going to add it to my list of rewatches. It's just now a confirmed one-time watch. 

One of the things that makes judging this so difficult is that this is yet another movie in this series that has essentially the same structure, essentially the same setting, and essentially the same dramatis personae as every other movie in the series. I know this series at least has to diverge by the time of Jason Takes Manhattan, but I'm expecting several more carbon copies of the same movie before we get to that point. 

But at least Jason finally gets his mask. It takes until the 57-minute mark of the movie for this mask to appear, and the actual manner of its first appearance is, I suppose, of some historical interest.

At least the last two of these movies have featured a prankster, a guy who scares all the other teens by pretending to be Jason. I suppose this is a trope across all slasher films where the characters know that such a slasher exists, and the mere act of pranking his friends is surefire proof that this guy is going to die, likely with extreme prejudice. 

This time the guy tries to punk his friends about three times, and the last involves him emerging from the water with a hockey mask. How did he get the idea to use a hockey mask, given that this is not one of the known things about Jason? Who, you may remember, ran around in the previous movie with a burlap sack over his head?

Well I suppose we can just credit this guy -- let's call him Shelly, because that's the character's name -- with a little bit of ingenuity. I don't know where got this hockey mask in a summer camp setting, but that's for wiser minds than mine to ponder. 

When we see Jason wearing the mask a few minutes later, having finally assumed his finished form after nearly three movies, it's our clue that Shelly is no longer with us. Though I do wonder at the choice to have Shelly die off screen. I suppose you benefit somewhat from the "surprise" that one of the characters you thought was alive is actually dead, since one of his cohorts has to stumble across him. I guess it's meant to be a bit of a prank on the audience, because we've seen Shelly crying wolf so many times that we're initially supposed to think the gore on his neck is more makeup. But no, this time he actually got his throat slit. Still, in a slasher movie with a limited number of characters, I wouldn't think you'd want to waste any kills off screen. 

So the origin story of Jason's mask is that he got it from a kid who looks like this:

A bit more disappointing than if Jason had reached down into the depths of hell to pull it up through a pool of molten rock, but what are you going to do. 

I don't have a lot more to say about this movie from a plot perspective. There are more teenagers in basically the same lakeside setting as the first two movies. Some of them get killed while having sex. Others die in other ways. One survives until the end, just as one survived until the end in each of the previous two movies. And yet again, someone jumps out at this Final Girl in the final moments of the film, this time it being the mother, Pamela Voorhees, who somehow has her head attached again in order to fully inhabit the form of a decomposing corpse in a lake. Which was never her final resting place, but whatever.

And I'll be curious to see how the hockey mask makes a comeback, given that it got a machete part of the way through it.

I should mention that once again this movie starts with footage of basically the whole ending of the previous film. For a series that is not very interested in making its mythology more complicated -- at least compared to what was happening at the same time in the Halloween series -- these movies are sure determined for you to be fully caught up on what happened in the most recent one.

Oh yeah, before I go, I do need to tell you a bit about the things that appear in 3D. I should have scribbled them down at the time. There's a pole at one point. There's a crazy drifter who holds a very fake-looking eyeball at the camera. Nothing struck me as particularly clever, nor were they present in the quantity you'd think they should be, given that the 3D was the movie's whole gimmick. (And maybe the reason they thought they could take another movie off before getting more clever with the story?)

One thing I did note is that I am definitely becoming an old softie. Since I had already said I'd seen this movie, that means the movie already had a Letterboxd rating from me, which was 1.5 stars. Without knowing my previous judgment until after the fact, I was prepared to go as high as two this time. 

Then again, considering that I can't prove my first viewing ever actually happened, that 1.5 stars doesn't mean a whole lot. 

Friday the 13th Part 2: Jason Doesn't Get His Mask Yet

So, um, yeah -- that happened.

I watched the entirety (only 87 minutes) of Friday the 13th Part 2, and no hockey mask.

How is it that the thing we know most about Jason Voorhees does not even occur until the third movie in the series? Though at this point I'm wondering if I can even expect it then.

So what does Jason look like in this movie?

Well he runs around with a burlap sack on his head, a little bit like a murderous scarecrow. And yes, that is more than a little bit funny. 

It makes me wonder if they got notes on this movie. It was still popular, still making money. If the sequel took only a year after the release of the original came out, the third followed the second by only 15 months. But something was missing to take this to the next level.

It took an extra three months to think of the hockey mask and to factor it into the script. 

But let's talk about what's actually in this movie rather than what isn't in it. 

As you will recall from my first Friday the 13th post, in which I explained that I am going to watch this series all Halloween month, this was actually the movie I started watching first on Thursday night, for only five minutes before I decided it would be better to just start over and totally refresh myself on what had happened in a movie that I hadn't seen in probably 30 years. Well, I don't know that I really needed to do that. There is so much recap of this movie in the opening minutes of Part 2, it puts the "previously on" segments of modern TV shows to shame. Like, there might be four whole minutes of footage from the first movie, spliced in while the girl who survived that movie tosses and turns in bed as part of a post traumatic nightmare. You really needn't have watched the first movie at all.

Well, spoiler alert, she doesn't survive for long. Jason comes to stick an ice pick in her head. End of the road for previous movie's Final Girl.

Now obviously we haven't built up a huge amount of affection for that character, such that her death is a shock to our system. But I do wonder if this was one of the first times that we saw a character survive the previous movie at great paints to her psyche, only to be offed in the first few minutes of the sequel. I suppose such disposability would become something of a genre staple.

Really, this whole film is disposable. If I said I thought it would be basically a remake of the first movie, that's pretty much correct. The distinction, plotwise, is that the horny teenagers -- who don't seem to be quite as horny this time -- are not actually trying to reopen Camp Crystal Lake. They are attending a school for camp counselors on another shore of the lake. As if a maniac like Jason Voorhees would confine himself only to the actual grounds of the camp. 

I don't want to suggest that this movie is horrible. There were some touches I liked, especially some filmmaking choices by director Steve Miner. His camera setups are generally good, and it doesn't look as cheap as its predecessor in some important ways. I thought there was some clever dialogue too. One moment I remembered is that after two of the prospective counselors are caught by local police breaking into the condemned Camp Crystal Lake on a dare, the guy running their counselor school, who is not as concerned about the legend of Jason, says he will punish them by preventing them from having seconds on dessert that night. Anyway, there are a few things like this that elevate it somewhat. 

Though I do think it is quite disappointing to go through another Friday the 13th movie without the hockey mask. We do get the "J-j-j-j" sound affect, another Jason trademark, but without the menace of the man in the hockey mask, it just feels lacking. Let's just say I'm ready for some classic Jason Voorhees nonsense in the next film.

I also think it's funny that the movie ends in almost exactly the same way as the first, except this time, it's Jason, sans burlap sack, jumping through a window to grab somebody, rather than jump from out of the lake. Let's just say the effect is lessened considerably. 

This Final Girl also awakens, not dead, to survive to the next film. 

But, I'm guessing, not for long. 

Spot the one that isn't a horror movie

Because you are a cinephile, yes, of course you can do it. 

But I thought this screenshot of my most recent five rewatches, taken from a personal Letterboxd list called "Rewatches" (as you can plainly see), was illustrative of the sorts of movies I've been rewatching lately. And it's only just now the month of Halloween. 

Only Greed, as you know, isn't actually a horror movie. It's an epic social drama about life in the early 20th century in which the theme of greed factors in heavily. It was made in 1924, when I think the only horror movie in existence was The Phantom Carriage (1921). Okay I guess also The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).

But it's funny how much it looks like a horror movie poster, isn't it?

What if Halloween fell on Friday the 13th one year?

The subject of this post is a dumb joke I like to make. I don't know if I would quite call it a dad joke. It doesn't rely on puns. It doesn't make you groan. It's more in the category of what I call "dumb guy humor," where you say something earnestly that you pretend you don't know contradicts itself or is disprovable in some obvious way. Though of course you have to be careful because you could slip into what I call "double dumb guy." (I'll explain the distinction some other time.)

In any case, to spell it out laboriously, Halloween can't fall on the 13th of the month because Halloween always falls on the 31st of the month. It's actually fun sometimes to watch people listen to this joke, because for a second you see them thinking "Oh yeah, I wonder if that's ever happened?" before it clicks in for them.

Well, this year, Halloween may not be falling on Friday the 13th, but Friday the 13th is falling on Halloween. The month of Halloween, that is.

That's right, I'm back to consuming an entire series of horror movies, just as I did two years ago, when I watched all the Halloween movies I had not yet seen. Which in that case was 10 movies, though I also rewatched the original just to lay the groundwork. I only skipped one movie in the whole saga, which was Halloween III, because I'd only just seen it for the first time in the year or two before that. As it happened, in that series, Halloween III: Season of the Witch is not part of the larger chronology anyway. Michael Myers isn't even in it. (It's also the best movie in the series after the original.) 

In 2026, I'll be applying the same treatment to the Friday the 13th series, with just about the same number of viewings, again starting with a rewatch of the first and again skipping one movie I'd seen recently (the 2009 remake, which was part of last year's Halloween viewings). 

I was actually going to start with Friday the 13th Part 2 from 1981, and even watched a few minutes of it last night. Enough to note that it starts with a kid singing "Itsy Bitsy Spider," which I thought was funny because I had just listened to Carly Simon's version of that song earlier in the day. 

After that I was going to skip Part III (yes they switched to Roman numerals at this point), because my records say I've seen it. However, I'm highly skeptical of any records when it comes to this series. Even when I originally compiled my list of movies way back in the 1990s, I suspect I had said "I've seen one of the other Friday the 13th movies" and I just decided on Part III, remembering that I'd had a fascination with that one because it was presented in 3D when it was in theaters. (Not that I would have been in the position to see in this in the theater, being only eight years old at the time of its August 1982 release date.)

Incidentally, did you know that not a single of these movies was released in October originally? They go May, May, August, April, March, August, May, July, August, April, August, February. 

But after five minutes of Part 2, when I realised that my memory of the original was decidedly rusty, I decided to start with the original, to also watch/rewatch Part III, and to just go on the whole damn journey from start to finish. Excluding the aforementioned 2009 remake, of course.

Good thing I started on the first of the month.

So my entire journey will consist of this:

Friday the 13th (1980)
Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (as if!) (1984)
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
Jason X (2002)
Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

I'm not sure whether that last should be part of this franchise, part of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, or whether they get to share it.

By the way, how crazy is it that this series cranked out eight movies in one decade? That's gotta be some kind of record, especially since to even qualify for it, a series would pretty much have to start with the first year of the decade, which this one did.

That's 11 movies, the same as with Halloween. It worked out okay then, but I had to be persistent with it, obviously. Also, that year, I didn't get started until October 3rd, plus I had a five-day trip to Singapore, during which I took a break from watching Halloween movies. This year my only weekend away is a camping trip, though I still won't be able to relax at any point. 

So let's get right into discussing this first one, shall we?

It's not really much of a movie, to be honest with you. In fact, it was so different from what I thought the first Friday the 13th was, that I had to keep checking to make sure I wasn't still watching the second one. In any case, it's a bit of a surprise that it even engendered a series with this sort of longevity. 

For starters, you would probably know that Jason Voorhees is not even really in it. You do see him once in the brilliant jump scare ending, in which he jumps out of the water to overturn the canoe carrying The Final Girl. (Who, I should mention, does not die here. I had remembered that this was the last shot of the film, but the next shot is her sitting up in bed, sometime after she's been saved by police officers from a watery grave. Disappointing.) But the hockey mask is not even established as a series trope until the second film. This I did remember.

Who is the killer, then? Well Jason might actually be the killer -- I'm unclear on that -- but the person with equally murderous intentions is his mother, still grieving even though I believe it's been two decades since her son drowned, as one of the things that put a curse over Camp Crystal Lake. (Wikipedia confirms that the unseen killer is meant to be the mother. It could be Jason, in theory, because for the majority of the kills, the killer is not seen at all.)

So that makes a good transition into the next thing I expected from this movie: actual camp life.

I was under the misapprehension that the movie takes place with camp actually in progress, but it's entirely before the potential reopening of the camp, which had closed due to the high number of previous tragedies. (One of which is the murder of two counselors the summer after the drowning, which we see in this film's cold open.) And because the camp isn't even open yet, it does not really feel like a camp at all. It could be any woodsy setting where a murder might take place. No children around, only horny teenagers. 

The thing I found funny is how many of these teenagers -- who include Kevin Bacon by the way -- are actually killed before a single one of them discovers the dead body of a single other of them. It might be 30 minutes of screen time from the actual first death to the point that any corpse is discovered and any horny teenager screams in fear. In other words, a highly improbable amount of time within the world of the film, where these teenagers are all basically together on one night at the camp, some of them prepping for the season, some of them playing strip Monopoly, that sort of thing. The way it's staged, they had to be wilfully dumb and wilfully avoid seeing each other's corpses -- which probably just solidifies this as the template for the whole slasher genre, along with Halloween, which was released two years earlier. 

Because the action, such as it is, is all very samey, with at least three different brunettes who I could have sworn were the same brunette that had already been killed a few minutes earlier, the film has quite a lack of narrative momentum for most of its running time. It just feels like one after another pair of teens having sex or doing solo prep projects, meaning they are isolated enough to be killed by Mrs. Voorhees. And because they take so long to discover that their other friends have been killed, the stakes take a very long time to progress. We don't even meet Mrs. Voorhees until there are only about 30 minutes remaining in the movie, which I think is also the first time we hear the name Jason spoken. At this point I was really relieved to have some sort of plot taking shape and giving a definitive direction to what I was watching.

Of course, we have to note the contrast in quality with a series like Halloween, which is naturally a far superior entertainment product. (Though I suspect some of the later movies in both series will be equally bad.) While that series was launched by horror master John Carpenter, this film's creative voice is a guy named Sean Cunningham. Sean S. Cunningham, to be exact. This was his sixth film directed, but I haven't heard of any of the movies that came before or it, nor any that came after. He didn't direct another Friday the 13th film after this one. 

And yet the slasher movie, even when executed at this basic level, was such a relatively new thing that viewers ate it up, such that it launched an unprecedented production schedule for sequels, enabling them to crank out another seven films before the decade was over. You have to put yourself back in 1980 to really be able to understand the attraction, because none of it holds up particularly well today. Then again, Halloween itself is far more sophisticated and predates it by two years, so it's not like it would have been impossible to make something better. 

Noted special gore effects guru Tom Savini has a credit on this film, so you'd think the gore effects would be a bit better. There were one or two clever effects, but overall it feels quite pedestrian.

I do think the final jump scare, and the appearance of the waterlogged and horribly deformed Jason, was the kind of thing that was propulsive enough, in itself, to keep this series running. However, if even the first one is not very good, well, I'm a bit concerned where we go from here. 

Hey, I've been watching too many movies that I like lately, bringing my overall percentage of movies I've given a thumbs up -- which, yes, I track in my big movie spreadsheet -- all the way up to 68.48%, an all-time high. Maybe this October can throw some cold water on those numbers. 

I don't know if I will be writing about each movie as I see it, nor that I will have a huge amount to say about each movie. I think this might differ from Halloween in the complexity of its mythology. I'm expecting many of these movies essentially to be a remake of the previous movie. 

However, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, because in October of 2024, I got really into the weeds with the Halloween series, analyzing all the internal contradictions and other failings of the series. I wouldn't mind if the Friday the 13th movies were more a case of going in one ear and coming out the other.  

How cute are they?

It's October 1st, and I feel like that is the beginning of Oscar season.

How do I know this? The first film by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu in four years, and the first one with any heat since The Revenant 11 years ago, opens today. This after a very transitional September in which I only got out to the theater four times, two of which were in the same night, due in large part to a dearth of anything worth seeing.

Well, there will be things worth seeing from here on out to the end of the year, starting with Digger. 

Will Digger be any good? I don't know, but it will be worth seeing, if you are considering that to be only a proactive judgment about a film. After the fact, we may think it was not worth seeing, but beforehand, it passes the test. 

I expect to write more about Digger after my wife and I go to watch it on Saturday night, because it will be the first movie I see -- maybe even the first movie they play? -- in which The Sun in Yarraville uses its new projector capable of projecting in VistaVision. 

I'm not even going to pretend I am speaking about that in a technically accurate way. I'm pretty sure the projectionist will give us a little intro to explain it, because that's the kind of theater this is. I do know that this might be the only camera like this in the Southern hemisphere, because that's also the kind of theater this is.

But for now, I just want to talk about the experience of buying tickets. (Due to the special presentation, I didn't think I was capable of using my critics card. And since this is a date night with the wife, you want to take greater precautions than just rocking up and trying to score a free ticket. Plus if a movie theater is going to put in a VistaVision camera, I want to give it some of my money.)

And now you understand my subject, and the screenshot above.

In another example of what kind of theater this is, The Sun has gone to the trouble of showing occupied seats with a little shovel, just for Digger. 

They had to care enough to have someone reprogram the functionality of their core ticket-buying system just for this one movie, and just to bring a smile to the face of someone who was already about to buy a ticket anyway. 

In other words, it isn't something promotional with a calculated intention of increasing sales. It's just fun.

I hope the movie will be too. I'll report back. 

Dropping my irrational opposition to Louis Theroux

I had never seen any content featuring Louis Theroux prior to watching Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere on Wednesday night. That includes things you would define as a TV show and things you would define as a movie, and anything else in between. 

Yet someone I thought I was qualified to roll my eyes at him.

I don't know why this is, but I do have a few theories.

One is that I resent new people. I'm phrasing that in an intentionally broad way to poke fun at myself. But I notice this tendency in myself when a new celebrity of any sort pops on the scene, and then is treated as some sort of stratospheric riser whose fame and popularity we are meant to incorporate into our lives as a serious and justified thing. 

I wrote about this in a post about Ariana Grande back when Wicked came out, which you can read here, as young pop musicians particularly fall into this category. Even without hearing their music, I instantly feel annoyed by them because I reject the human weakness of become infatuated with what seems like a flash in the pan person who will never get more than 15 minutes of fame. When they exceed that 15 minutes, usually I welcome them into the fold. However, a few in the Grande mold who are still in my celebrity jail: Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter.

But you'll be glad to know this is not just some mildly misogynistic tendency that applies only to twentysomething female pop stars. It also applies to 56-year-old men like Louis Theroux.

The thing is, Louis Theroux is not "new." He may be new to me, but he has been around for 25 years, doing his thing. Just because I haven't sampled any of that thing doesn't make that Theroux's fault, though I'm just trying to be honest here and describe my perceptions, however irrational they may be. 

I guess when we explore it a little deeper, I am opposed to people who declare themselves a brand. I feel like branding is what goes on with young pop stars who are fed to us by the publicity machine, but it is no less true for a man who goes around trying to expose injustices in the name of journalism. It's especially strange for me to find fault with that because that's the sort of mission that I, a former journalist, fully support.

But you've got to earn it. Michael Moore earned it. He took a unique approach to documentary filmmaking that showed him as unafraid to hold up a mirror to people at the highest levels of power. Sure, at some point his theatrics wore thin, but by then he was already entrenched. He had passed my personal relevance test that allowed me to welcome him in, kind of like Ariana Grande did.

Louis Theroux? What test had he passed? Who was this johnny-come-lately who had only been around for ... cough cough ... 25 years?

You can see the problem with this line of thinking. Instead of rolling my eyes when I saw the name Louis Theroux attached to something, I should, you know, actually watch it to see what I thought of it.

And so finally I did. And now I'm on board. 

What I liked about the way Theroux exposes the shortcomings of influencers in the manosphere -- "shortcomings" being a pretty hilarious way to categorize their toxicity -- is that it lacks the finger wagging of someone like Moore. While it's clear that Theroux would never have made a movie with the aim of celebrating these men, neither is what he's doing "gotcha journalism." 

His manner of interviewing about a dozen of these truly awful men is to "just ask questions." Now I know that phrase is a bit problematic and is actually used by men like these influencers, and right-wingers in general like Charlie Kirk, to attack the left. To say racist and homophobic things while externalizing it from their own brains.

But Theroux, to me, is asking the sorts of questions that you would ask any person you were interviewing while meaningfully engaging with their core identity. Your original series of questions are mild, encouraging enough of their world view without actually supporting it, and then you logically follow up on things they say to attack the veracity of it or to point out its internal inconsistencies. You don't appear to have an agenda and you continue in a very mild manner the whole time.

The thinking is that in order to "ensnare" a man who talks about his philosophies, when they surround "one-way monogamy" (his partners are monogamous to him but he isn't to them) and other problematic views on the acquisition of wealth and the laying of fault against groups who don't deserve it, is that you have to trick the person into thinking you endorse these things. You have to encourage them to incriminate themselves through your own comments that, at the very least, do not indictment them for those views, and may even suggest your complicity with them.

Theroux does not do that. Any time he has the opportunity to tell one of these men that he believes they're wrong, he does, even if it results in an awkward silence, even if it risks ending the interview then and there. But he also phrases it carefully, not telling them they are wrong, but telling them that he thinks they are wrong, that he thinks the things they are saying are untrue. It's a subtle difference between telling someone they are categorically wrong and telling someone that you differ with their opinion.

Still, this approach should have ended a lot of interviews before they began, or before they got far enough to be worth including in a documentary. And who knows, maybe there were some interviews like that and they just ended up on the cutting room floor. Surely, these men would do the research necessary to figure out the perspective Theroux is likely to have on them, and never even allow themselves to be across from him in the first place.

Or would they?

The other brilliant thing about his approach to this material is that he knows many of these men can't help themselves. They are so addicted to the sounds of their own voices, and the cameras that bring those voices to their followers, that they are willing to go before said cameras, to sound off said voices, under almost any circumstances. 

He also knows how confident they are. He knows that even if these men know Theroux is out to do a hit piece on them, they believe they have the ability to turn that agenda against him. They believe they have the ability to beat him. Or perhaps even more to the point, they believe so much in the things they are saying that they believe it is impervious to hit pieces. If they feared being raked over the coals for their views, they probably wouldn't even spout them in the first place -- and their millions of followers are proof enough that everything they say reflects a viable and profitable truth. Which, sadly, may be true for their core audiences.

But Theroux still "gets them" in Inside the Manosphere, because after having dozens of these mild-mannered interactions with Theroux in which he calmly tells them he does not agree with what they're saying and tries to carefully show them the limitations of their words, each subject ultimately feels triggered, and then ultimately burned, by Theroux. In fact, there's significant footage in this film of the subjects bad-mouthing Theroux to their followers, and even seeming pushed to the point of wanting to punch Theroux in the face if they ever shared the same room together ... which at this point they probably would not.

And yet this is not because Theroux violated their trust. It is not because he did anything differently than the exact thing he said he would do. After watching one Theroux movie, I am of the opinion that Theroux would rather abandon a project than to lie to one of his subjects in order to extract the material from them that he wants to extract.

And proving just how little of a coward he is -- though that's certainly one of the things they accuse him of -- he does return to speak to one of these men, in the presence of his own mother, even after the man has shown such frustration with Theroux that you worry it will spill over into violence. And certainly, this guy is jacked enough that he could put Theroux in the hospital without much effort. 

Perhaps his mother being present ensures this kind of thing won't happen. But that is to a point by Theroux too. If you truly believe these things about women, surely you should be just as happy to say them in front of your own mother, a woman who worked six days a week as a solo parent just to feed you. 

The real reason these men are so triggered by Theroux is that some part of his mild-mannered inquisition has caused them to question their own core beliefs. Or, if not question the beliefs themselves, at least question whether they can hold them and still consider themselves a good person. And isn't that the ultimate goal of any film like this?

If I haven't mention the names of any of these denizens of the manosphere, it isn't because I've forgotten them or am too lazy to look them up. It's because these cretins already have too much of a platform, and I don't need to contribute to their names appearing on the internet even one more time. Louis Theroux is the one I want to give a platform, however belatedly I've reached that point.

A questionable association with the year 2011

Last night I finished a rewatch of The Cabin in the Woods. I should really say this morning, because I finished around 1:30.

I did watch it again from the start, but it was the continuation of an attempted rewatch from a couple months ago. When I got in no more than 25 minutes on that attempt, instead of finishing it the next day, I abandoned the viewing. That's how I'll usually handle an interrupted rewatch, though first-time viewings always get completed the next day.

I thought it might have been my first rewatch, but no. My records tell me I watched it for the second time back in 2014. That makes sense. It's a movie I really liked and continue to really like.

But something bothers me about it just a little bit, and it has nothing to do with the movie itself, which I already discussed in detail in this post if you've read into this post for that sort of analysis of the film.

When you look up The Cabin in the Woods on either IMDB or Letterboxd, it is listed as a 2011 film. Which we all know is wrong. It's easy for me to remember that the film belongs with 2012. I saw it in the theater in April of 2012, just after its release, and one of the reasons I easily remember it's from that year is because of this post, which is still the only post on this blog ever written by a guest writer, in which he talked about the feat of watching and ranking 212 movies in the year 2012. (Which is a laughable thing to be impressed at nowadays, since the same guy has subsequent watched nearly 500 films during the same period.) Anyway, as you can see, The Cabin in the Woods is responsible for the art for this post. 

So why, then, the 2011 year?

Well of course it is the usual suspect in cases like this: a film festival from the year prior to its release. The moment a film debuts in any public venue, it gets slapped with that release year on places like IMDB and Letterboxd, never to relinquish it. And though that annoys us, we can accept the reasoning and we just move on with our lives.

So where did The Cabin in the Woods play in 2011, you ask? Was it TIFF maybe? That's a September festival, and might have given in the necessary thrust for an early 2012 release. The Cabin in the Woods is not the sort of film you necessarily debut during Oscar season. Which isn't to say it's not good -- of course it's quite good -- it's just that you'd correctly assume it could help prop up the otherwise weak start of a release year. October would also be a good time to debut it, for Halloween, but that would be too soon after TIFF to build any sort of marketing campaign.

So I looked it up on IMDB, and there was exactly one festival in which it appeared, in December of 2011. On December 11 of 2011, in fact. It was:

The Butt-Numb-a-Thon Film Festival.

I will allow a moment's pause for you to finish laughing like Beavis and/or Butthead.

Oh my.

What exactly is this festival, you ask?

It's cooler than it sounds, it turns out. It was a secret 24-hour film marathon held at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin from 1999 to 2016. It was the brainchild of Ain't It Cool News founder Harry Knowles. That's a name I haven't heard in a while. In fact, when I just looked him up, I discovered the festival appears to have ended as a result of his expulsion from the Austin Film Critics Association in September of 2017 following credible accusations of sexual assault. So that's why I haven't heard about him lately. 

Ever helpful despite its impending takeover of the world -- not inappropriate for a discussion of this movie -- AI tells me that the festival was in celebration of Knowles' birthday (December 11th) and that it contained "a lineup of films kept completely secret from the audience ahead of time. It featured a mix of rare vintage prints, cult classics, and surprise high-profile studio premieres."

So that last is where The Cabin in the Woods comes in.

But is the fact that an estimated 200 people (according to AI) saw it with three weeks remaining in 2011 enough to associate it in all public documents with the year 2011?

I say it is not. And so when I list the movie in places like my Most Recently Seen area on the right, I will continue to write 2012 as the release year. Because that was the real release year for this movie.

But what happens when I'm old and no longer remember that The Cabin in the Woods came out in 2012 and that a friend of mine wrote a blog post about the 212 films he ranked in 2012? What will I do then?

I guess I will just pop in my dentures and my bionic eyes and enjoy the viewing. And if I've forgotten some of the film's twists and turns, all the better. 

Zombies are actors too

As I was proofreading my writer's review of Resident Evil, which I saw myself on Sunday night, I noticed something interesting that I think speaks to human nature -- or at least, to critic nature.

Namely, an actor playing a zombie is apparently not credited for their performance.

And normally, you wouldn't think they would be. Individual zombies are generally disposable in zombie movies. (Resident Evil may or may not be considered a zombie video game series. I'm sure both suggestions would be considered controversial, depending on the context.)

But some zombies have big roles, and I would say that's true of the zombie credited as "Pedestrian" on IMDB, played by Andrea Miltner.

I know Andrea Miltner is her name because I checked it myself, not because my writer included it in his review. Again, no shade on him. 

The notable contradiction is that he did include the name of the guy who plays the police officer who stops our protagonist while he is trying to ferry Pedestrian to the hospital, having hit her with his car and found her in a gnarled position in the woods, too far away from the car to have been thrown there. (The footsteps leading off into the snowy woods are also a dead giveaway.) 

That actor is Johnno Wilson, by the way. And he definitely has less screen time than Miltner has.

Now you might say that Johnno Wilson is just a better known actor than Andrea Miltner, and when you include a name in parenthesis during a review, you're usually trying to let the reader know they may have seen this person before, in addition to crediting a working professional for their work. But while Wilson does have small roles in films you've heard of, like King Richard and Bride Hard, Miltner was in both The Crow and Nosferatu, two very prominent films from just two years ago.

No, I think it's just that we consider a zombie to be a triumph of makeup or digital effects, but not a triumph of performance. The character is sub-human, but that doesn't mean it's not played by an actual human with a lot of ability to scare and discomfit us.

Which Miltner certainly does here. She has to make a lot of choices in her affect as she goes through various states of confusion, agitation and catatonia. She's in the movie for 15 minutes all told, maybe even 20, and her collaborations with the director, to freak us out as much as possible, are not insignificant. 

Here's just one:

When I noted the absence in his text, I thought of looking up the actress' name and adding it. I did look up the name, obviously, but didn't end up adding it. Apparently I opted to write this post instead as a way of crediting her. 

But I do want it to go on the record that zombie acting can be some of our most demanding and some of our least recognized. Yes, most movies only require an actor to shuffle and look vacant, and murmur "Brains ..." every once in a while. That's the stereotypical, degraded version of zombie acting.

But just think about movies where characters you actually know become zombies. I hope this isn't a spoiler -- well it is, but I hope you don't care -- but just think about the end scenes we get with Robert Carlyle as a zombie in 28 Weeks Later. I've only seen that movie once so I can't remember if Carlyle's craft is brilliant or anything. But I do remember being taken by the zombified Carlyle, and I'm able to remember it because it was actually a known actor behind all that zombie makeup.

You know what? I just went back to the published review and added Miltner's name.

And feel better about that. 

Monty Python and the Holy Grail, live and on stage

Or, "I finally saw: Spamalot."

Spamalot, the musical adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, has existed for 21 years. Now, those 21 years have not been a particularly fruitful time for musical theater in my life, though we have tried to make up for it some in the past decade. In the seven years immediately before its Broadway debut, I lived in New York for three years, where I went to a handful of Broadway shows, and I dated a woman for nearly two years, who was involved in the promotion of musical theater, so I saw a fair bit of that in Los Angeles.

But Spamalot came along at just around the time I started dating my wife, who is not a musical theater buff -- though she does like going to shows. I'm not sure we ever went to a live musical during the eight years we were together in Los Angeles before moving to Australia, where we have tried to make up for it a bit lately.

All this is to say that my first exposure to Spamalot is long overdue. Not only am I huge Monty Python fan, which you might not know because I don't have occasion to touch on it here, but The Holy Grail is my sacred text. In fact, there are two things in particular you should know about the film, which I may have told you before, but if so, that was ages ago:

1) My first time seeing King Arthur's fight against the black knight is the hardest I have ever laughed. Is that definitely true? No, of course not. I might have laughed harder at some random thing somebody said sometime. But I can't remember that random thing, and I can remember The Holy Grail. So if ever asked my memory of my hardest laughter ever, this is the answer I give.

2) From the days when I performed Monty Python skits on stage at the place I used to work in the summers -- and I may have performed a half-dozen of them -- I still, to this day, have the dialogue memorized from the "Constitutional Peasant" sequence of the film. I did this on stage in 1987 as all the three speakers in the scene, back when I was a guest on that island rather than staff. I have no idea if it worked at all, though there was at least polite laughter. Anyway, it became permanently ingrained and I can still dictate it, if anyone were ever interested in that sort of party trick.

My actual interest in tracking down Spamalot, though, has been fairly low.

I'm not sure why this is, really. A sense that it could never be as funny as the film? A slight wariness from having read Eric Idle's memoirs and finding them a tad self-indulgent? (He's a relentless name dropper.) Whatever the reason, I never leapt at the opportunity to see it nor did I feel any FOMO that I hadn't seen it. Nor do I even know if I ever actually had the opportunity to see it. (According to Wikipedia, it probably would have been on North American tours in 2008 and 2009.)

That opportunity finally came this past weekend, when my sister-in-law got us tickets to it for a Saturday matinee for its nascent run in Melbourne. She's been initiating all sorts of cultural activities this year, though many of them are with my older son, who dutifully accompanies her even if he doesn't have any actual interest in these things. (Oh to be a fly on the wall when they watched Anthony LaPaglia in Death of a Salesman.) These were the end of the previews, and the proper Melbourne run is now launched. (The only thing, incidentally, that distinguished this from the proper run is that they addressed the audience after the final curtain, which I'm sure they will no longer do.)

The story, such as it is, pretty closely follows the plot from The Holy Grail, though some of the scenes are out of sequence. But the actual title is a callback to a separate Python sketch from 1970 called "Spam!" And because this was the likely to be the only time Python material would ever be staged, Idle -- the show's co-writer with John Du Prez -- needed to fit in "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," which is actually from the Python film Life of Brian. 

Before I get too deep into the show, I should tell you that someone famous played King Arthur. Or at least locally famous. Australian actor Stephen Curry -- and yes that is the same name as the basketball player -- has 84 credits on IMDB, most of them Australian content, though not obscure Australian content. I took notice of him in a film I really like called Hounds of Love. But he's also been in The Castle and Rogue, and you might know him from what I assume was a very small role in Thor: Love and Thunder. (Anyway, small enough for me not to have remembered he was in it. Though then again, I was not particularly following the career of Stephen Curry with the foreknowledge that I would one day see him in Spamalot.)

I thought the second act worked a lot better than the first. Even though there is a professorial type who occasionally says things in his capacity as a narrator -- which reminded me a little bit of the similar character in The Rocky Horror Picture Show -- I still feel like this story is fairly lacking in context, and its first act density of songs without any plot momentum further complicates the problem. Plot was never the strong suit of Monty Python, as even in a generally coherent story like The Holy Grail, they were fundamentally stringing together unrelated sketches that followed a central theme. That feels like even more of a problem on stage, when you are relying on a narrative spine to carry you through, particularly when the songs are inevitably going to slow down that progression. Here I felt that there were sometimes only about four lines of dialogue before it was time for another song, and because Python has a wicked digressive streak, these songs rarely actually furthered the narrative. (There's one song where a character complains about the fact that her part is too small, although this is actually in the stronger second act.)

This is a good time to pause and acknowledge how Idle has made gestures toward preventing this from just being a sausagefest, like the film. (The Python ensemble themselves usually played the female roles, with one important exception that I will touch on two paragraphs from now.) One way to gender diversify is that there are four women who basically serve in the role of backup dancers, though there are many actors doing multiple duty in order to keep the total ensemble to under 15 people, so they do have other, more consequential showcases. But there's also a female lead, who does sing that song about her small role, and this is The Lady of the Lake, who in the film is responsible for bestowing Excalibur on King Arthur and making him king -- though is not an actual character. Here she keeps showing up and has about five songs, so it's strange that one of those songs is that the story hasn't checked in with her in a while. 

One of the reasons the second act is better is that it has most of the actual skits we enjoy. I thought they might not be able to include the black knight fight due to the impossibility of knocking an actor's arms and legs off on stage, but instead they just make use of the large screen at the back of the stage that plays animations throughout, including Idle playing God. In this instance, they have the black knight on the back screen and Arthur fighting him, coordinating his sword clashes with those of the two-dimensional image. And then at four key junctures, his two arms and legs are lopped off. It works, but of course did not make me laugh like in the mid-1980s. 

I could continue to list the various scenes, but it's probably better to mention what they don't include. And one of those is the scene alluded to earlier that has the lion's share of the film's women, which is that scene where one of the knights spends an interlude in a castle full of sexually aggressive women. This is the only part of Holy Grail that totally turns me off -- it's just not remotely funny -- and I thought it was a wise decision of Idle to consign this to the dust bin of history. The only set piece that I enjoy that they didn't include is the one where the knights must cross the chasm and are asked a serious of questions, where if they get them wrong they fall into the chasm. I think this might have just been cut for time.

Unfortunately, the overall impression of the scenes they do include is that they sort of pale in comparison to my love of the sacred text. I realize this would not be a problem for everybody, but it is for me. For example, during the scene where the French guard taunts the knights, all I could really focus on was how the actor was intentionally changing the inflection on the lines so it was not a direct impersonation of the actor from the film. While I certainly understand that instinct, I guess the thing that I loved about Python was the familiarity, the exact sound of the words and the exact line deliveries, that resonated so much with me that I still have them in my head today. I know a piece of original stagecraft is not just trying to regurgitate the film, but most of these scenes just weren't that funny to me. Maybe I've heard them too many times before.

There were some "cute" executions of famous moments from the film, which were, I believe, intended as a wink at the meager options available in a stage performance. For example, a rather small inflated cow is catapulted on the knights by said French guards, while the catapulting of the Trojan Rabbit is on the video screen on the back. Then I was wondering how they would do the fight against the other rabbit, the one that kills so many of the knights in the film. It's a stuffed rabbit thrown at the neck of one knight, who holds it to his throat and mimics it chomping his neck. Obviously you can't get a rabbit to fly around the stage. 

Spamalot shows its age in a couple spots. I didn't love the bit where it starts to talk about itself as a Broadway musical, which would have tickled us in 2005 but feels a bit old-fashioned now. More problematic is the song where they talk about how you can't have a Broadway show if you don't have any Jews. My wife and I agreed that this became dated very fast. Not only don't we want to teach people like my children that Jews are associated with the entertainment industry, but the last few years have also not been a great climate for making light of anything related to Judaism. I suppose that's in the text, so if you want to mount Spamalot, you have to include it. Then again, these are sketches, so any individual part lifts right out.

Oh and do you want to know how it ends? Famously, the film doesn't have a proper ending. The remaining knights get arrested by London police officers. Here, after they use the holy hand grenade of Antioch (which was a pretty funny scene) to blow up the rabbit, they get a clue to the location of the grail, which is that it's under one of the seats in the audience. Sure enough, that unwitting audience member gets to come up on stage with the cast. We debated afterwards whether it was the same seat for every performance or if they vary it up. I took the former position and my wife took the latter. My thinking: they could improvise the dialogue that's related to the specific seat number, but it would be easier just to use the same one every time. You don't usually have to worry about repeat audiences, and if anyone's coming back for a second time, surely it means they love the show and are not going to fault it for using the same seat over and over again. 

And then, because they've previously acknowledged that a Broadway show has to end with a wedding, Arthur gets married to the Lady of the Lake, revealed to have a name: Guinevere. Which brings thing back in sync with Arthurian legend. 

My overall impression was eventually a positive one. I'm glad to say that the show was salvaged a bit by its second half. But I found the first half to be pretty groan worthy, I'm sorry to say. 

My kids? Well there's not much chance this will push them down a Monty Python rabbit hole, to make yet a third reference to rabbits. The whole thing must seem very odd and dated to them. While we were taking our seats at the start, they used that back screen to play skits from other films and from the TV show, and the kids just looked at them dumbly, without having any context or without being on their wavelength. My older son even asked "Is this the thing we're here to see?" which I thought was funny.

The director came on stage afterwards to thank us, as a preview audience, and to award us by emailing every ticket purchaser with a discount code to come see the show again during its proper run. I was impressed to learn that they had only rehearsed for 13 days. It's not a show heavy on sets or staging logistics, but I still think that's pretty impressive. 

I definitely would not see Spamalot again, so my sister-in-law can use that discount on herself or maybe a friend. But it does feel like by seeing it, I've finally scratched an itch I may never have known I had.