The Screengrab : wes craven

"Last House on the Left"'s Garret Dillahunt: The Thinking Man's Ted Bundy?

Phil Nugent — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Garret Dillahunt plays weirdos and monstrous sons of bitches, with the occasional son of God thrown in. He's best known for his work on TV: on the HBO series Deadwood, he killed Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine) and then, after he had been brought to justice for that terrible act, the show's creator, David Milch, ordered that he be shaved, have his wardrobe upgraded, and be brought back as a new character, one "Mr. W", who used his time off from his job fronting for a cutthroat capitalist villain to carve up the staff of a whorehouse. Dillahunt also played Jesus on the short-lived The Book of Daniel and currently plays a killer robot on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. In movies, he was in No Country for Old Men (as Tommy Lee Jones's deputy) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, where his character paid the price for Robert Ford's taking so goddamn long to get the assassination carried out. Now he's the chief sadistic rapist-murderer in the remake of Wes Craven's gutbucket classic The Last House on the Left. Under the citcumstances, it seems reasonable that interviewer Choire Sicha would want some reassurances that he isn't the kind of guy who takes his work home with him. "You know," Dillahunt says, "I don't think I am! There wouldn't be much craft in it if you actually become those people. I like feeling like I have some skill."

Then again..."I'm real proud of it," Dillahunt says of Last House, "which is an odd thing to be proud of. I'm proud of this rape-and-pillage movie. There are reasons that I consciously did the thing -- but there's something about that basic story that is speaking to people, and I think did to me when I read the script. And I think it's because the job situation is getting weird, people feel so powerless right now. People feel like they've been raped by -- fill in the blank, the economy, 9/11. Wes Craven last night called 9/11 the ultimate home invasion. Not meaning to be glib -- but that feeling of violation we all had. People are really responding to the film in a visceral way -- and I think it gives them some release. I kind of feel like it will defend itself. Wow, I got so deep there."

As for his TV work, Dillahunt says that he "get[s] recognized more" since he started doing Terminator, because the killer robot is -- "one of the first characters I played that looks like me," adding that "there's a lot of Terminator fans out there, which belies the ratings!" He credits David Milch and Deadwood for "changing the way I view material. . . . What made Deadwood special killed it, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. For anything! And I owe a lot to that experience. Spiritually. Praise the Lord! I do that too. I get embarrassed about waxing on and I cut myself off at the knees. That's a nice little trait there, FYI." Getting cut off at the knees would be the nicest thing he does to his Last House co-star Sari Paxton, but "I've worked with her before. I was happy about that at first. Then I thought maybe it's a bad thing -- you don't do this to friends! But she was so game and tired of playing mermaids..."

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

GLEN OR GLENDA? (1953)

By high school, I’d seen plenty of artsy foreign films and indies (not to mention a decade's worth of Saturday morning creature double features on UHF), but I’m pretty sure Glen or Glenda? was the first real exploitation flick I ever saw (at least on the big screen), followed by a half dozen more during a day-long marathon at the late-lamented Off The Wall Cinema in Central Square, Cambridge. Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s impassioned fauxcumentary -- about a man (Wood himself) who can work better, think better, even play better, and be more of a credit to his community and his government, in satin undies, a dress and a sweater of finest angora -- was unlike anything I’d ever seen, less a work of art than a Rorschach snapshot of a fringe perspective far beyond mainstream standards of taste, commerciality and talent (in...uh...the traditional sense). Before long, I knew everything about Ed Wood, Jr. and his merry band of misfits, but few cinematic experiences in my life, before or since, have been so bizarrely disorienting as my baffled first encounter with the spectacle of stampeding buffalo superimposed over Bela Lugosi’s impassioned command to “PULL THE STRING!” Wood may have only been exploiting himself (and, I suppose, Lugosi), but respectable Hollywood movies are rarely this fascinating, sincere or unique.

THE TRIP (1967)

Roger Corman was never slow to jump on a trend, so it’s no surprise that he was first out of the gate when the LSD craze hit in the 1960s. Ever the consummate professional, Corman sampled the drug while camping at Big Sur and by his own account, had a mighty fine time doing so. Nevertheless, in the course of his diligent research he had come across some mentions of what the hippies termed “bad trips,” and felt compelled to present a more balanced picture of the hallucinogen’s effects than his own experience had provided. Peter Fonda stars as TV commercial director Paul Groves, a straight-arrow type who decides to take an acid trip as a means of dealing with his pending divorce. Even for a novice like Groves, certain ground rules should be self-evident, the primary one being: when tripping for the first time, you do not want Bruce Dern to be your guide. The man is not possessed of a soothing bedside manner, to say the least. All seems to be going well for Groves at first; he stares at his hands and entertains deep thoughts about the significance of the phrase “living room,” and experiences vivid hallucinations in which he runs around the sets from Corman’s old Poe movies. (Even while experimenting, it seems, Corman never took his eye off the bottom line.) Groves’ trip takes a turn for the worse when he convinces himself he’s killed his creepy guide and, panicked, races out into the Hollywood night. He proves to be an even worse judge of character than we’d previously suspected when, at the height of his freaked-out paranoia, he turns to Dennis Hopper for solace. He also has a proto-Robert Downey Jr. moment when he wanders into a Hollywood Hills mansion and watches TV with a little girl until he is chased away. None of this strikes me as a ringing endorsement of the drug, but apparently it was still too ambiguous for distributor AIP, which added a “shattered mirror” effect to the film’s final shot of Fonda, against Corman’s wishes.

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)

Wes Craven’s later successes made him a genre icon, but it’s the director’s early, bare-bones efforts that delivered his canon’s most inspired chills. That’s certainly true of his skuzzy, deranged calling card The Last House on the Left, which commingled camp, dirt-under-fingernails brutality and one stunner of a twist. Spitting in the face of the peace-and-love generation’s idealism about humanity’s goodness (and rife with hoary urban panic), Craven’s debut mimics Bergman’s The Virgin Spring save for that film’s happy ending, its initially goofy amateurishness – full of ham-fisted cross-cutting, silly songs, and a group of fiends who seem better fit for a sitcom – soon giving way to stark, vicious brutality. After two girls are slaughtered for trying to procure some pot, their murderers coincidentally show up at the house of one of the victims’ parents, who quickly deduce who the strangers are and what they’ve done, and decide to do something very, very violent about it. Cheap, graceless and often shocking, Craven’s film is in many ways quite inept, but it’s the memorable carnage that’s truly, intentionally awful.

IT'S ALIVE (1974)

Ever want to have a baby? If so, make sure to avoid Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive, which trumps Rosemary’s Baby as the ‘70s horror gem most likely to turn couples permanently sour on the notion of procreation. Though the director’s first mainstream success, few scary movies have been as underrated as Cohen’s masterpiece, an undeserved fate one can only assume has something to do with the corniness of its creature’s rubbery appearance and two sequels that did little to enhance its reputation. With a no-frills, slightly surrealistic approach that heightens his tale’s emotional immediacy, Cohen blisteringly exploits the myriad anxieties that accompany the impending birth of a child, which in this case proves to be a mutant monster begat by a middle class couple. A physical expression of its parents' neuroses (as well as ecological ruin), the creature’s rampage is stoked for typical genre scares, but Cohen doggedly keeps the focus first and foremost on the inner conflict of the creature’s father (John P. Ryan), torn between an instinct to care for, and a burning desire to kill, his unholy progeny.

MS. 45 (1981)

Few exploitation cinema auteurs are as skilled as Abel Ferrara, and few exploitation films are as grimly proficient as Ms. 45, the director’s nasty, nimble tale of a female avenger taking her fury out on NYC’s chauvinistic male population. Ferrara’s down-and-dirty aesthetic lends some high-voltage seediness to his story about a mute seamstress (Zoë Lund) who’s raped by two different men in one afternoon and responds by going Charles Bronson on any guy unfortunate enough to cross her path. Her feminist fury unleashed, Thana becomes a simultaneously sexy and scary angel of death, singlehandedly embarking on a campaign of terror that ultimately leads to a mesmerizing finale in which she carries out her bloody work in a nun’s costume. Far from merely an exploitation hack, Ferrara arranges his frame with a master’s eye, conveying his story’s central gender conflict in a raft of expertly orchestrated compositions, all while addressing his own Catholic hang-ups and – as implied by his cameo as her maiden, masked attacker – taking a decidedly ambiguous stance towards his anti-heroine’s rampage.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five & Six...insurance policies are available in the lobby!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

We’ve spent a lot of time discussing quality, award-winning cinema during the past few weeks of Award Season mania, but now that Hugh Jackman has doffed his top hat and tails and the Slumdog kids have shuffled back to Bollywood, we thought it would be as good a time as any to get back to all the SEX-CRAZED!!!! BLOOD-THIRSTY!!!! ULTRA-PSYCHOTIC!!!! movies we really like, from the gin-soaked swamps and drive-ins of hixploitation to the blaxploitation grindhouse and...BEYOND!!!!

And sure, if you think about it, pretty much everything Hollywood pumps out is some form of exploitation, from the straight-up blood and guts of the zillionth Friday the 13th remake to the pity party relationship-porn of He’s Just Not That Into You. Even this year’s Oscar nominees were baited with pulp: after all, Mickey Rourke’s face in The Wrestler was at least as freaky as anything in Freaks, and where would The Reader be without all the hot Nazi sex and Kate Winslet’s big pepperoni nipples?

But the movies on this week’s list go even faster, pussycat...not to mention further, deeper, weirder and wilder. They did it first or they did it best or maybe they really shouldn’t have done it at all. Can your heart stand the shocking facts as Screengrab salutes THE ULTIMATE EXPLOITATION FILMS-A-GO-GO?!!!!??!?!!!

MARIHUANA (1936)

1930s films such as Marihuana (whose poster bore the subtitle "Weed with Roots in Hell"), Cocaine Fiends, Assassin of Youth and Reefer Madness tended to come with introductions explaining that their lurid tales of young people driven to crime, madness, and death by indulgence in vile narcotics were being presented to the public for "educational purposes only." These things were later revived in the 1970s and turned into midnight movies for hip audiences who enjoyed laughing at the dim old things who didn't know that a little weed could just be harmless fun. In fact, the '70s audiences may have been more naive than those in the '30s, most of whom probably understood perfectly well that putting up with some fake moralizing was the price they had to pay for the wild-child melodramatics, which were so extreme that they could only be justified dramatically with the pretext that these characters were carried away by the kind of bad chemicals that had Hunter S. Thompson seeing drunken lizards in the lounge of his Las Vegas hotel. Truth be told, you have to be a little desperate for cheap thrills to really watch most of these things; despite all the wild and crazy goings-on, the slow, stagy filmmaking isn't exactly psychedelic. Reefer Madness is probably the most famous of them, but the 57-minute Marihuana makes that 67-minute epic seem downright poky by comparison. Its answer to Reefer Madness' famous piano-playing scene is a party scene where a girl takes a toke on one of "the funniest-looking cigarettes I've ever seen" and is soon laughing into the camera with an expression that would alarm the Joker. Soon she and her gal pals, one of whom looks like an unchaperoned young Margaret Dumont, are stripping off their clothes and running into the ocean, with the result that one of them drowns and another gets pregnant. (Ask your mother.) After that, it's a short path to dealings with smiling men in dubious mustaches, chases through alleyways against trigger-happy cops with very poor aim, and the once-innocent heroine's steady transformation into Lady Scarface.

DOLEMITE (1975)

Excuse me: that’s DOLEMITE, motherfucker! The world lost a singular talent last year when Rudy Ray Moore, the incredibly foul-mouthed stand-up comic and “King of the Party Records”, left Earth for the big Player’s Ball in the sky. In the blaxploitative 1970s, he made a handful of movies based on his bad-ass pimp persona, but none of them were as enjoyable or as crazily over-the-top as Dolemite. Made for half a buck and some chicken wings in 1975 and starring Moore and a cast of top-shelf nobodies, Dolemite’s plot was so thin it barely existed at all, but who cares? Nobody was going to see this movie for its clever plot twists. They were going to see it so that they could hear Moore call some two-bit cocksucking honky a rat-soup-eating, born-insecure, no-business-having motherfucker. Moore couldn’t act, his director couldn’t direct, and it’s pretty likely that his key grip couldn’t grip, but that doesn’t keep Dolemite from being as straight-up entertaining as anything produced during the blaxploitation era. Whether he was telling his bitch not to buy him no cotton draws or suggesting that a guard use his recently shed prison uniform to wipe his ass with, Dolemite was hilarious to watch, and helped define an insanely politically incorrect archetype that would inform aspects of American culture for decades to come. Even now, Dolemite probably ranks behind only Scarface as the movie that most influenced hip-hop. And even if you’re not a rap fan, if you can watch Moore do his thing without smiling, you might want to have your fun gland looked at.

THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977)

The key to a successful exploitation movie often boils down to having just enough intriguing elements and shocking visuals to fill a two-minute trailer. In the case of The Hills Have Eyes, those two minutes are just about all the movie has going for it. You’ve got the family driving their Winnebago off the beaten path, despite the warnings of the old coot at the gas station. You’ve got the tires blowing out, leaving the family stranded in the middle of the Nevada desert. And you’ve got the most exploitable element of all: the head of Michael Berryman. Berryman – who plays Pluto, the muscle of the clan of cannibalistic mutants that terrorizes the family – was never known for his romantic leading roles. His lumpy, oblong head, recessed eyes, lopsided nose and complete absence of hair pretty much ensured him steady work as one of nature’s mistakes, and he’s true to form here. Other than Berryman, The Hills Have Eyes is thin gruel indeed, one of Wes Craven’s most overrated works, way too reliant on the dog-jumping-out-of-the-shadows school of shock effects. And yet it spawned not only a sequel and a remake, but even a remake of the sequel – or is it a sequel to the remake? Either way – that’s exploitation!

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978)

Those looking for either a passionate condemnation or defense of Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (aka Day of the Woman) will have to look elsewhere, since aside from its unforgettably titillating VHS cover artwork – which made my teenage heart yearn to rent the film – and its infamous reputation, this piece of exploitation hackwork mostly elicits a shrug. Still, it’s nearly impossible to deny the status of Zarchi’s shocker as an exploitation cinema touchstone, what with its Z-grade craftsmanship, empty-headed commingling of sex and violence, and pitiful strategy of reveling in abhorrent brutality and misogyny and then attempting to condemn such behavior with more gruesomeness. Over the course of 30 minutes, a New Yorker vacationing in the country is raped by sadistic hicks (including a mentally challenged virgin Neanderthal) who don’t like city folk. After suffering this assault, the woman seeks lethal vengeance on her attackers, a twist which may upend the film’s early gender-power dynamics, but nonetheless mainly just affords Zarchi further opportunity to stage bloodthirsty mayhem.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five & Six...if you dare!!!!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak & Nick Schager

Vintage Trailer Review: Incredible Two-Headed Marathon Special

Paul Clark — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

It’s the middle of October, and many of you are no doubt getting ready for your Halloween festivities. But for all you movie lovers who are planning to be in Central Ohio this weekend, check out the area’s premier horror-movie event, The Incredible Two-Headed Marathon. Currently in their fifth year as co-hosts, Bruce Bartoo and Joe Neff have once again lined up a diverse and crowd-pleasing lineup, with something to delight horror lovers of practically every stripe. This year, to commemorate the Marathon, I’ve decided to post some trailers for the classics that are being shown, to go along with the Trailer Reviews I've already posted this week for the area premiere films playing at the Marathon, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane and Let the Right One In.

We begin with the trailer for Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby… Kill!, one of Bava’s early classics and a favorite of giallo fans. I’m woefully underversed in my Bava, but there’s no mistaking that style, even in trailer form. Dig those zooms!

Next, we move on to the original Wes Craven version of The Hills Have Eyes, back before he got all mixed up with Kevin Williamson and violins and the like.

Another genre master being represented this year is John Carpenter, whose 1980 film The Fog will be playing here. Not exactly one of my favorite Carpenter films, but it’s a lot of fun nonetheless.

Finally, Bruce and Joe always seem to include a movie that doesn’t necessarily fit with the “horror” theme but is a crowd-pleaser nonetheless. This year, they’ve chosen Peter Jackson’s cult favorite Meet the Feebles, which should be a blast to see with a Marathon crowd.

If you’re planning to attend a horror marathon where you live, feel free to tell us about it in the comments section. And for anyone who’s interested in finding out more about the Incredible Two-Headed Marathon, check out the official Web site.

In Other Blogs: Festivus!

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:30:00 GMT

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir previews the New York Film Festival. “Like any institution closely identified with New York City -- the Yankees, the Times, the Metropolitan Museum, the scum-sucking financial establishment that has ruined all of our lives and our children's as well -- the New York Film Festival makes a pretty easy target for crusading anti-elitists of all stripes…What's far more interesting about the NYFF after all this time is that it remains remarkably successful at its self-assigned mission, anachronistic and undemocratic as that may appear. In programming relatively few features (28 this year) -- most of them drawn from the major European festivals in Berlin, Cannes and Venice -- and in insisting on a pre-pop-culture vision of cinema as an art form, festival director Richard Peña and his staff have, perversely enough, proven to be shrewd table-setters for the fall film marketplace.”

Erstwhile Screengrabber Mike D’Angelo already has a page of NYFF reviews up, and it sounds like you can scratch Tony Manero off your list. “For those not temperamentally inclined to celebrate uncompromising cine-machismo for its own sake, however, this is pretty thin gruel, deeply unpleasant without ever coming within spitting distance of enlightening. Once you've been startled by Raúl assisting an old woman home and then unexpectedly pummeling her to death for her TV set, and then seen him pawn the TV in order to fund a replica of the multicolored Saturday Night Fever dance floor, you're good to go, literally -- everything that follows is more of the same. American Psycho didn't really work as a movie, but at least Bret Easton Ellis had a coherent idea, in that you can readily see the connection between '80s materialism, Bateman's sadistic violence and the transformation of Genesis into a Phil Collins solo act. How exactly does living under Pinochet translate to disco fever? Why are we watching Tony Manero and not, say, Roy Neary or Luke Skywalker?”

Also weighing in on NYFF is Vadim Rizov at The House Next Door, who finds Gomorrah comes up wanting when compared to our favorite TV show. “The problem with Gomorrah is that it could start and end anywhere. The Wire runs full arcs, tying social problems to well-developed characters; the war never ends, but the characters move on. Gomorrah is representative types running through a loop: today's Scarface-emulating young sociopaths are tomorrow's dead meat, but there'll always be someone to replace them. All five stories in Gomorrah's hydra-headed monster have rough conclusions, but anyone expecting a movie about mob life to end in any kind of upbeat fashion a) needs to watch more movies b) needs, indeed, to read up a bit more. Gomorrah is exactly what I thought it would be, which means there's no surprises.”

Dazed and Confused and Waking Life star Wiley Wiggins was a regular fixture around Fantastic Fest, and as this entry at his blog It’s Not For Everyone shows, he’s down with the Ozsploitation. “Brian Trenchard-Smith, fresh from his appearance in Not Quite Hollywood, introduced and answered questions about one of his very early films, The Man From Hong Kong. As one might expect from an Australian Kung Fu movie, the driving sequences are better than the fight sequences, and the main car chase in the. Movie is actually one of the most impressive filmed, mainly for the demolition-derby ferocity with which the cars slam into one another and a sureness in the photography and editing during the chase. The acting and plotting are the most memorable when they flirt with self parody. The movie was a lot of fun, but pales in comparison to some of Trenchard-Smith's crazier films.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Filmbrain features Lost in the Sixties and Seventies: A Dozen I'd Kill to See. At number four is the 1971 obscurity You've Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You'll Lose That Beat. “Easily the holiest of grails on the list, this is a film I originally heard about back in the early 80s, but only recently confirmed that it does indeed truly exist. Dig this: an anarchic anti-establishment comedy that skewers then-contemporary mores that stars Zalman King (yes, that one) as a young man trying to find his way in New York City. Add to that a cast that includes Allen Garfield, Richard Pryor, and Roz Kelly (Happy Days' Pinky Tuscadero), and features music by Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Oh yes, Wes Craven worked on the film as well. I have never met a single soul who can honestly claim to have seen this film, so if you have, please do speak up!”

Take Five: Sweet Revenge

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Responding to criticism that a review of his had unfairly given information about the ending of a thriller, the late film critic Gene Siskel is said to have replied: "Here is the ending of every thriller ever made -- the bad guy dies." So when, in this week's Take Five, we talk about revenge thrillers, we're not talking about movies where some power-tool-wielding misogynist more or less accidentally gets it in the neck after two hours of tormenting co-eds and/or mapless vacationers. We're talking about movies like Xavier Gens' Frontiers, opening in limited and highly disgusting release this Friday; movies where evildoers show up at the doorstep of innocents only to have the tables turned upon them fairly early on; movies where, for at least a third of their running time, the bad guys aren't in control, and the thrills come from wondering how far those who have been wronged will go to get even. While the revenge flick has a pretty shoddy history, and while Frontiers doesn't look like it's going to bring much more than grosser-than-usual levels of violence and some hamhanded political commentary to the mix, not every movie in the tables-get-turned genre is an exploitative dud. The concept may have reached its nadir with flicks like I Spit On Your Grave, but that doesn't mean you can't savor a pretty tasty dish served cold from time to time.

KEY LARGO (1948)

One of Hollywood's first, and finest, attempts at subverting the conventions of the innocent-people-beseiged-by-evil chestnut was this powerful, terrifically acted quasi-noir. When exiled gangster Johnny Rocco holes up in a Florida resort to wait out a storm, after which he looks to make a triumphant comeback, he doesn't count on two things: the presence of embittered but hard-as-iron vet Frank McCloud (played with icily ironic contempt by Humphrey Bogart) and his own terror at a coming hurricane. As the movie progresses, Edward G. Robinson turns from utterly unflappable master manipulator (as in his famously cruel scene with alcoholic gun moll Claire Trevor) to cowering paranoiac, and the desperate sense of terror is ratcheted up to unbearable levels by director John Huston, at the peak of his powers.

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)

Wes Craven announced his arrival as a forced to be reckoned with in the world of horror with this, his feature film debut. Too cheap, too raw and too frankly disturbing to entirely escape the exploitation-flick label, this direly unnerving story about a gang of hoodlums who opportunistically murder a pair of teenage girls only to find themselves, a short time later, staying at the home of the father of one of their victims, has far more going on emotionally, dramatically and philosophically than you might expect. But even if it were just cheap horror, it would be one of the most effective cheap horror films of its era. Powerful, creepy, and almost unbearably tense. Bizarrely, Last House on the Left is based on Ingmar Bergman's masterful medieval drama of 1960, The Virgin Spring!

THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960)

Tellingly, this would be the last of a fertile period in the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's career where he explored his characters' relationship with God. He'd never make another movie like it, and though it netted him an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, its shockingly open depiction of rape and revenge caused waves of controversy at the time of his release. Bergman's favorite actor, Max Von Sydow, gives one of the best performances of his career as the father of a young girl who is attacked and killed by bandits who, through empty fate or inexplicable divine intervention, arrive in his home looking for charity. They find only a bloody end. Bizarrely, The Virgin Spring is based on Wes Craven's groundbreaking revenge-horror film of 1972, The Last House on the Left, through reverse time warp technology!

STRAW DOGS (1971)

Perhaps no revenge thriller in the history of cinema has been more controversial than Sam Peckinpah's brutal meditation on masculinity and cowardice. Easily as vicious and manipulative as the worst grindhouse exploitation flick, it dresses up its blackly beating heart in such undeniable artistry that it leaves even people who have seen it and assessed it time and time again not knowing exactly how to react to it. The film features Dustin Hoffman, in an emotionally exhausting performance, as a mild-mannered professor whose good nature is taken for granted once too often by local bullies; it caused incredibly extreme reactions on its release (with Pauline Kael writing one of the most memorable reviews of her long career in startled reaction to it) and continues to do so even now, nearly forty years down the road.

CAPE FEAR (1962/1991)

This effective psychological thriller, based on a terse little novel by John D. MacDonald, has been made twice -- once in a taut quasi-noir version in the early '60s by J. Lee Thompson, and once in a much darker and more provocative way by Martin Scorsese. The particular twist of both versions of Cape Fear is who, exactly, thinks revenge needs to be taken: the protagonist, Sam Bowden, thinks he needs to take revenge against Max Cady, a vicious criminal who's gunning for his family. Cady, on the other hand, thinks he's the hero of the movie -- he's the one looking for revenge against Bowden, who failed to properly defend him in court years before and doomed him to years of harsh imprisonment. The first is too little seen by modern eyes, and the second is wrongly reviled; both are worth a good look for their tense ambiguity.

The Rep Report (October 24 - November 1)

Peter Smith — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

SEATTLE: As part of the annual Earshot Jazz Festival, the Northwest Film Forum is hosting a trio of documentaries that offer chilled sights and sounds for music and movie lovers, from October 23 to November 1. The mini-fest opens with the new Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer and Ron Mann's 1981 Imagine the Sound, featuring Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, Archie Shepp, and Bill Dixon. Then, starting on the 26th, comes Bruce Weber's newly restored Chet Baker profile Let's Get Lost, a movie that we are always happy to tout.

NEW YORK: New French Films (October 24 - 28) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music provides audiences with the chance to buck the increasingly spotty international distribution system and see the New York premieres of some recent work from France. One film, Je t’aime...moi non plus: Critics and artists is a documentary, on the role of the film critic, directed by the actress Maria De Medeiros, that will be followed by a panel discussion including such critics as Kent Jones, Dave Kehr, and Dennis Lim.

Beyond Boundaries: The Emergence of Croatian Cinema (October 26 - November 14) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center is designed to provide an entry point for audiences unfamiliar with Yugoslavia's cult reputation as a hotbed of experimental and provocative film making. The schedule crams in thirteen classics from the "golden age" of Yugoslav filmmaking in the 1950s and 1960s, eleven more recent works, and a selection of eleven shorts, curated by Croatian film scholar Mato Kukuljica, showcasing the achievements of "the Zagreb school of animation." Krsto Papic, Dejan Sorak, and Ognjen Svilicic, three directors whose combined careers span some fifty years of moviemaking, will be in attendance.

LOS ANGELES: It's that time of year again, and the American Cinematheque at the Aero Theater just wants to say, from the bottom of its heart: Boo! Starting Wednesday, October 25 (with the classic ghost stories The Haunting and The Uninvited) and continuing on Thursday (with the funkier '70s sci-fi of Demon Seed and the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers), it throws on a couple of double features as a simmering build-up to its Dusk-to-Dawn Halloween Horror-Thon on Friday the 27th. With two films by Italian gorehound Lucio Fulci and movies by Tod Browning (Freaks), Stuart Gordon (From Beyond), and Wes Craven (Last House on the Left) that probably aren't the first thing even those guys would tell their mother's friends about, this is not the horror marathon of guys who believe in doing things half-way.

— Phil Nugent