Culture Shock 03.29.12: Returning to a deliriously bad 'Frankenstein Island' movie

The "Frankenstein Island" wrap party didn't go as planned.

It's surprising that a movie set on a scenic island populated almost entirely by attractive young women wearing only leopard-print bikinis could be this bad. It has so much going for it.

But in this case, the movie is "Frankenstein Island," which while made in 1981, would have seemed cheap, tacky and hopelessly outdated in 1951.

Just imagine how it seems 30 years later.

Actually, you don't have to imagine. "Frankenstein Island" is back, this time as the latest video-on-demand offering from Rifftrax, the post-"Mystery Science Theater 3000" movie-riffing project of MST3K alums Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, who were the show's movie-mocking leads during its Sci-Fi Channel years.

Originally conceived to riff on recent Hollywood films, Rifftrax has devoted a bit more attention in the past year to vintage B-movies that would have been perfect targets for MST3K. Recent Rifftrax titles include 1978's "Buffalo Rider" (think "Grizzly Adams" without a plot) and "Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe" (1990), starring former pro wrestler and future conspiracy theorist Jesse "The Body" Ventura as a bounty hunter from outer space.

The most unintentionally hilarious of the bunch is "Frankenstein Island," but that just means Mike, Kevin and Bill have even more material to work with.

The writer/director responsible for "Frankenstein Island" is Jerry Warren, whose 1966 movie "The Wild World of Batwoman" is one of the strangest films ever to get the MST3K treatment. In fact, "Frankenstein Island" is full of past MST3K offenders.

Katherine Victor ("The Wild World of Batwoman") plays Sheila Frankenstein, who is carrying on her grandfather's work, whatever that was, because in this movie it's something way less straightforward than reanimating corpses. She's joined by veteran character actor Cameron Mitchell ("Space Mutiny"), who seems to have been paid for one day of work and spent all of it in a cage.

Also on hand is Steve Brodie, who appeared in "The Wild World of Batwoman" and "The Giant Spider Invasion."

Tain Bodkin, who had a small part as an apocalyptic preacher in "The Giant Spider Invasion," shows up, too. In his first scene, he does an impression of a fire-and-brimstone preacher for no apparent reason other than to remind us of his earlier role.

What viewers in 1981 made of that is a mystery.

Finally there's horror icon John Carradine, who at this point in his career was crippled with arthritis and taking small roles in terrible movies. He portrays the disembodied spirit of Dr. Frankenstein, a part that probably took half a day to shoot and didn't require him to be on set with the other actors.

The plot goes something like this.

A hot-air balloon crashes on a remote island, stranding four men and their dog. But they're not alone. There's a tribe of women in leopard-print bikinis who spend all of their free time dancing and carrying logs. The rest of their time they spend trying to avoid capture by a few slovenly thugs who kidnap them for Sheila Frankenstein's experiments, which have something to do with reviving her 200-year-old husband Dr. Van Helsing. (Try not to think about that.)

Or maybe Sheila is trying to turn people into werewolves. I'm really not sure.

Anyway, the props literally look like dollar-store Halloween accessories, which they literally are, and Carradine seems confused whenever he appears, which is exactly how this movie left me.

It's a deliriously bad film, and Mike and the guys are in top form making fun of it.

You can download "Frankenstein Island" for $9.99 at Rifftrax.com.

Culture Shock 03.22.12: Before 'Hunger Games,' there was 'Battle Royale'

Stop me if you've heard this before.

An authoritarian government takes children from their homes, drops them in an isolated setting and forces them to fight to the death until only one survives.

That's the plot of "The Hunger Games" — based on Suzanne Collins' best-selling young-adult novel of the same name — which opens Friday in theaters nationwide.

It's also the plot of "Battle Royale," a controversial film that became a blockbuster in Japan more than a decade ago but is only now reaching our shores — officially, anyway.

Until now, Americans — even Netflix — had to rely on imported DVDs from Asia and the United Kingdom.

Nevertheless, "Battle Royale" has a small, but loyal, following in the U.S., despite not getting an official release here until this week, when Anchor Bay Entertainment issued "Battle Royale" on Blu-ray and DVD in order to capitalize on the "Hunger Games" hype.

Like "The Hunger Games," "Battle Royale" began as a novel, in this case by Koushun Takami. "Battle Royale" then inspired a manga adaptation, published in America in 15 volumes.

This English- language translation by American comic-book writer/illustrator Keith Giffen, upset some fans because it added a "reality television" element — absent in the Japanese version — that ended up prefiguring the reality-show element in "The Hunger Games."

But the similarities between "The Hunger Games" and "Battle Royale" really end there.

"The Hunger Games" is ultimately a PG-13 movie aimed at kids and starring a likable heroine with a silly name — actually, everyone in "The Hunger Games" has a silly name — who serves as a role model for girls everywhere.

"Battle Royale" is nihilistic, brutal, bloody, darkly satirical at times and, without giving too much away, the kind of movie in which any character you think of as a likable role model is going to end up dead, probably done in as much by their own naivete as anything else.

In the movie, which differs somewhat from the book, the Battle Royale program starts in response to a student strike.

It's an effort by the government to assert control over an increasingly rebellious youth population.

To that end, each year a class is sent to a remote island where its members must kill or be killed.

Apparently, Battle Royale is what happens when governments don't have wars to send their youths off to die in.

While some of the students break off into groups and try to cooperate with each other, they have to fend off attacks from above in the form of psychotic teacher Kitano and from within in the form of equally psycho classmates. Some of them, however, have a plan to fight back, provided they can hold off disaster long enough to carry it out.

Here's the twist: Unfettered death and mayhem perpetrated by teens on teens has never been so much fun. "Battle Royale" is sick and twisted entertainment for people who realize the whole idea of making children kill each other is sick and twisted.

So, you might as well roll with that.

"Battle Royale" is the master work of the late director Kinji Fukasaku, otherwise best known for the loopy, over-the-top sci-fi epics "Message from Space" and "The Green Slime," as well as the Japanese sequences of "Tora! Tora! Tora!"

And it stars the great comedian and actor "Beat" Takeshi Kitano in the deadly serious role of a former teacher who methodically ensures the 21 boys and 21 girls of class 3-B get down to the business of killing one another.

It all reaches absurdist heights.

But in the absurd is usually where you find the deepest truths.

Culture Shock 03.15.12: 'Dangerous' book sees everything in 'Shades of Grey'

"Fifty Shades of Grey" is also available in
a convenient paperback.

For all of the publishing industry's ups and downs as it adapts to an environment of e-books and the Internet, it's still rare for any single book to shake up the status quo on as many levels as has the new best-seller "Fifty Shades of Grey."

First, you see, "Fifty Shades of Grey" is not your typical best-seller.

Not that most best-sellers have especially impressive literary pedigrees, but "Fifty Shades of Grey" comes from a very lowly estate indeed. It began as fan fiction — and not just ordinary fan fiction, but "Twilight" fan fiction.

Fan fiction is itself a "gray" area — a shadowy world where mostly anonymous authors write mostly atrocious stories of legally suspect status featuring other writers' characters. The Internet is full of these stories, where sex scenes are plentiful, inventive and almost invariably bad. But no one makes money off fan fiction, and most professional authors are sensible enough to leave these besotted typists alone.

Then, sometimes, a fanfic writer or a particular work of fan fiction will gain a following.

That's what happened to British writer E.L. James, a former TV executive turned fanfic phenom. Her racy "Twilight"-based fan fiction became so popular she changed the characters and expanded the story into a novel — the first novel of a trilogy, actually.

It then took off, alighting atop the New York Times and Amazon e-book best-seller lists, which brings us to the second way "Fifty Shades of Grey" is helping change everything.

After becoming a very successful e-book — and having a small print run published by something called The Writer's Coffee Shop — "Fifty Shades of Grey" has been picked up by a major imprint, Vintage. It's scheduled for publication (again) on April 3 and, as I write, ranks No. 5 on Amazon's chart. This is the new way of things: publishers turning the self-published into the really published.

And, thirdly, this is all the more interesting given the book's content, which happens to involve bondage, sadomasochism and power exchange. The book is heir to "The Story of O" and that "Sleeping Beauty" trilogy Anne Rice wrote under the pen name A.N. Roquelaure — except, judging from the free sample I downloaded, nowhere near as well written. (But what does one expect of a novel that started as fan fiction based on another, badly written best-seller?) Maybe "Fifty Shades of Grey" is actually closest to the last several Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter novels that all of Laurell K. Hamilton's earliest fans love to complain about?

Maggie Gyllenhaal learns the "proper"
way to take a letter in the cult film
"Secretary," also starring James Spader.

Even the title, "Fifty Shades of Grey," evokes the name of James Spader's character, Mr. Grey, in the kinky S&M romance "Secretary."

So, this is where things get really fun, because now "Fifty Shades of Grey" is dangerous. (The word "disturbing" gets thrown around quite a lot.) And that leads to absurdist spectacles in which professional worriers fret on chat shows about the horrible, horrible things perfectly reasonable, adult women are reading of their own free will.

Does Dr. Drew Pinsky realize that he comes off like a sexist jerk when he goes on the "Today" show and worries about the erotic fantasies of women who read "Fifty Shades of Grey"? Probably not.

This one book, "Fifty Shades of Grey," demonstrates how a novel can, via new technology and publishing models, rise from a literary ghetto, elevate an obscure author to transatlantic fame and generate controversy with sensational — but actually quite common — subject matter.

Maybe I should have kept working on that trashy "X-Men" fanfic I started 10 years ago? I could be famous by now.

Probably not.

Culture Shock 03.08.12: McQuarrie brought Lucas' 'Star Wars' vision to life

Without Ralph McQuarrie there probably would be no "Star Wars." And if there were a "Star Wars" without him, it wouldn't look like the "Star Wars" we know.

McQuarrie, an illustrator and conceptual artist, painted the first visual depictions of George Lucas' galaxy of long, long ago and far, far away. When Lucas sought studio backing for "Star Wars," he used McQuarrie's paintings to sell skeptical movie executives on the film.

And when Lucas couldn't describe to his production designers and special effects technicians what he wanted, he let McQuarrie's illustrations do the talking.

"When words could not convey my ideas," Lucas said, "I could always point to one of Ralph's fabulous illustrations and say, 'Do it like this.' "

McQuarrie died Saturday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 82.

Soon after news of his death broke, the first tributes appeared on YouTube — sideshows of his paintings synchronized to selections from John Williams' "Star Wars" score, each one as good a reason to skirt copyright as any.

It was McQuarrie who designed the iconic look of Darth Vader, modeling Vader's helmet on those worn by samurai. And before any footage was shot, he had visualized the climactic attack on the Death Star.

Looking back at McQuarrie's earliest illustrations for "Star Wars," it's striking how similar they are to the finished film — and yet how different. There's a strangeness to some of those paintings. Maybe it's how C-3PO looks a lot like the robot from "Metropolis." And in the very earliest sketches, you get hints of a "Star Wars" that never was, a "Star Wars" Lucas still called "The Adventures of Luke Starkiller."

Others are reminiscent of the NASA concept art you used to find in books published in the 1960s and '70s, when it seemed like a future with daily space flights to huge spinning wheels in the sky was just around the corner. The similarity isn't accidental. Before he helped Lucas envision "Star Wars," McQuarrie was an aerospace illustrator for Boeing and an animator for CBS News' Apollo coverage.

McQuarrie's paintings gave "Star Wars" fans their first peek behind the scenes of the space saga. The illustrations appeared in some of the first official "Star Wars" magazines and were mixed in as inserts in packs of the first "Star Wars" trading cards.

To young fans back in 1977, it was a strange, new side of "Star Wars" we hadn't seen in theaters.

There is real power in McQuarrie's art. A painting for "The Empire Strikes Back" depicting Luke Skywalker running from his crashed snow speeder with an Imperial walker closing in the background manages to be just as menacing as anything in the movie itself.

McQuarrie worked on the original "Star Wars" trilogy as well as related projects like "Shadows of the Empire." But by the time Lucas was ready to make the prequel trilogy, McQuarrie was ready to bow out.

And maybe that's just as well, considering how the prequels turned out. Even he couldn't have saved them.

Besides "Star Wars," McQuarrie contributed to the original "Battlestar Galactica" and films like "E.T.," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." He designed a new USS Enterprise for the proposed "Star Trek: Phase II" TV series. And he won an Oscar for the special effects in "Cocoon."

We may never be sure what the future will look like, but we know what it's supposed to look like. It's supposed to look a lot like a Ralph McQuarrie painting.

'We're not a team. We're a time bomb'

Your inner fanboy will hulk out.

Avengers assemble.

5.4.12

Culture Shock 02.23.12: 'Artist' makes Oscar case loud and clear

"The Artist" is nominated for 10 Academy Awards and is favored to win at least a couple of the top prizes, including Best Picture and Best Director for Michel Hazanavicius.

That's good because "The Artist" is easily the best of this year's nine Oscar-nominated films.

Still, it's a shame that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' antiquated, arbitrary and sometimes just plain bizarre rules — the same rules that allow the Academy to continue ignoring Andy Serkis' brilliant motion-capture performances year after year — don't allow Jack Russell terriers to compete for Best Supporting Actor.

Otherwise, Uggie, who steals "The Artist" as easily as he might steal a sausage, would end the streak of supporting actor wins Christopher Plummer has racked up this awards season.

The Oscars always say more about Academy voters than they do about the year's best films, so it's best not to take them too seriously — or seriously at all most years.

(Nine Best Picture nominees, and the Academy still manages to snub 2011's two best films not titled "The Artist" — "Young Adult" and "Drive"? It's insane.)

When the Academy recognizes the year's best film as such, it's usually a happy coincidence. I think the last time that happened was "Silence of the Lambs" in 1991.

We're due for another happy coincidence, and "The Artist" — backed by the Weinstein Company's hype machine — just might provide it. Never mind all that Weinstein hoopla, "The Artist" is a magnificent, magical piece of work.

"The Artist" is set during Hollywood's transition from silent films to talkies, an era Hazanavicius and cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman capture beautifully in sparkling black and white, taking full advantage of the narrow, old-style 1.37:1 aspect ratio to give us gorgeous vertical scenes such as one taking place on a staircase.

George Valentin (Best Actor nominee Jean Dujardin) is one of the silent era's biggest stars, with a trusty canine sidekick (Uggie) and admiring fans such as Peppy Miller (Best Supporting Actress nominee Bérénice Bejo), herself an aspiring actress working her way up from bit parts in chorus lines.

Peppy's timing is perfect. She has a voice for sound, and the studios are looking for new talent to usher in the dawn of talking pictures.

Meanwhile, George's star is fading, and when his studio drops him, he sinks his own money into making a silent movie — just as the Great Depression looms. Not the best of timing for long-shot bets.

"The Artist" features a solid supporting cast, including John Goodman as a cigar-chomping mogul, Penelope Ann Miller as George's disillusioned wife and, especially, James Cromwell as George's faithful chauffeur. But this is Dujardin and Bejo's movie to carry. And because "The Artist," like the movies it honors, is a "silent" film, they do so without saying a word.

Yet the artist isn't really a silent movie. It uses music, sound and silence to create an alternate universe where everyone "speaks" in title cards and spoken conversations are some scary, science-fiction monster from the future, ruthlessly invading the present.

In that silence, too much is left unsaid. George's wife keeps her unhappiness and disappointments mostly to herself. George and Peppy remain quiet about their mutual attraction. And the secrets they keep from each other could lead to disaster for them both.

Hazanavicius may have a nostalgic fondness for the silent era, but in the end he and "The Artist" side with the talkies — and with talking.

If Uggie could talk, he'd say he deserves that supporting actor award.

Culture Shock 02.16.12: 'Chronicle' chronicles why teens shouldn't have super powers

Super powers are wasted on the young.

Andrew Detmer's life is miserable. He's an outcast at school. His mother is bedridden with pulmonary disease. And his father — stepfather? I was never sure — is an alcoholic who does little but collect dust and disability payments, except for when he takes time out of his busy schedule to slap Andrew around.

That's the poverty-row setup for "Chronicle," the first feature film for both director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max Landis (son of director John Landis).

As if looking to make himself even more of a social pariah, Andrew starts "recording everything" with his new video camera. Why? He never says. Certainly not to have evidence against his abusive dad, even though Andrew captures plenty.

Is Andrew just a narcissist in spite of his crippling shyness? That would explain some of what follows.

One day Andrew (Dane DeHaan), his cousin Matt (Alex Russell) and Matt's friend, the super-popular Steve (Michael B. Jordan), stumble across a pulsating, crystalline object of presumably extraterrestrial origin and — presto! — all discover they've developed super powers.

From there, our newborn superheroes use their superhuman abilities to make life better for everyone, especially for poor, miserable Andrew and his family.

Stop. That must be a different movie, because that's the opposite of what happens. Even the obvious thought of going to Las Vegas and using their telekinetic powers to strike it rich at the roulette tables, so Andrew can afford the medicine that keeps his mom alive, is beyond our three geniuses.

Instead they practice their abilities by playing practical jokes and, after they get the hang of flying, tossing a football around at (at least) 6,000 feet.

Even Spider-Man tried to profit from his powers before Uncle Ben guilt got the better of him.

We see all of this through Andrew's camera and the cameras of others.

Yes, this is another "found footage" movie, and this time the gimmick doesn't appear to serve any purpose except to provide an in-story excuse for the movie's lo-fi look. "Chronicle" has a modest $12 million budget, and most of it seems to have gone into the grand finale — an old-fashioned superhero smack down at the site of Seattle's Space Needle.

It's not giving away much to say that one of our three super-powered protagonists eventually starts to go bad and must be stopped. Hint: It's probably the one who behaves like a sociopath long before he reaches his Columbine moment.

Before that, though, we watch as Steve helps Andrew use his powers to become popular while Matt goes off on an unnecessary subplot to win the affection of Casey (Ashley Hinshaw), a classmate who, coincidentally, is also recording everything on video — "for her blog," she says.

There might be an interesting movie here somewhere about people who feel compelled to constantly film and take pictures of themselves, but as an undercurrent to a movie about kids who have never heard that "with great power comes great responsibility," it gets lost.

On the flip side, the story of how having super powers changes — or doesn't — the lives of Andrew, Matt and Steve gets equally lost by having to compete with the found-footage approach to the material.

There is no reason "Chronicle" couldn't have been shot as a conventional movie. That "Chronicle" wants to be the latest heir to the checkered legacy of "Blair Witch" and "Cloverfield" only makes the exercise almost as frustrating as Andrew's home life.

Culture Shock 02.09.12: 'Woman in Black' is showcase for post-Potter Radcliffe

The boy who lived is now the man who survived.

He has graduated from Hogwarts, but Daniel Radcliffe is still facing supernatural threats in his first post-Potter film, "The Woman in Black."

In this Edwardian period piece, Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a young widower left alone — if you don't count the nanny — to care for his now 4-year-old son following his wife's death in childbirth.

Arthur survived his late wife, but you sense part of him wishes he hadn't.

In the years since his wife's death, Kipps' position at the law firm where he is employed as a lawyer has declined, along with the quality of his work, and he now has one last chance to redeem himself, keep his job and maintain a household for his son.

That means journeying to the countryside to put into order the estate of a recently deceased client, Alice Drablow. But when he arrives in the village near Drablow's crumbling, overgrown house — located deep in a saltwater marsh and cut off from civilization during the high tide — he finds uncooperative villagers and a local attorney who is trying his best to send Arthur packing back to London on the very next train.

You'd think Arthur was in town to visit Castle Dracula.

What the villagers know and Arthur is about to find out, is Drablow's old house is haunted, and the ghostly Woman in Black who haunts it has cursed the village.

Alas, there are no magic spells that can help our hero this time.

From its period setting to its gothic atmosphere to its suspicious villagers, "The Woman in Black" is a quaintly old-fashioned ghost story, hitting all the familiar notes but doing so with such skill it's hard to complain.

This is the movie we've been waiting for the revived Hammer Films to make.

After an unnecessary remake ("Let Me In") and missteps like the Hilary Swank-starring thriller "The Resident," Hammer is back in its element — even if "The Woman in Black" is sorely missing the crimson "Kensington Gore" blood spatter that so enlivened Hammer horrors of old, such as Christopher Lee's Dracula films.

This is almost the kind of movie Hammer made in the 1950s and '60s, but not quite. There are no busty Hammer scream queens with plunging necklines here (a shame, really), and there's no climatic action scene of the sort Dracula and Professor Van Helsing used to provide.

Director James Watkins, in only his second feature, opts for a more sedate approach with his adaption of Susan Hill's chilling novel — perhaps too sedate, as the slow burn is sometimes more slow than burn.

But it pays off in the movie's pervasive sense of dread — which follows Kipps through the dim, dusty corridors and out to the misty woods. Mood trumps gore every time.

The deliberate pacing also gives Radcliffe a chance to show us what he's got, and he delivers an understated performance that would make his Hammer predecessor Peter Cushing proud. Radcliffe's Arthur Kipps is a haunted man long before he sets foot on the marsh and glimpses the spectral woman who haunts the place.

Outside the estate's dreary ruins, the former Harry Potter is again aided by able British supporting actors, like Roger Allam as Kipps' boss and Ciarán Hinds as the village's one helpful and skeptical resident, Mr. Daily.

Naturally, however, Mr. Daily reeks of someone hiding a dark, terrible secret. It's that kind of movie — the kind of horror movie they don't make enough of anymore.

But with Hammer back, maybe this is just the beginning.

Culture Shock 02.02.12: 'Shazam!' isn't just a magic word anymore

You can call him the World's Mightiest Mortal. You can call him the Big Red Cheese — his arch-nemesis does. But don't call him Captain Marvel.

The superhero some mistakenly called Shazam is getting a new name.

Now, the Superhero Formerly Known As Captain Marvel is, officially, Shazam. That means the arguments I've had about how his name is Captain Marvel and Shazam is just the magic word he uses to become Captain Marvel have all been in vain.

But how did we get to the point where a character who was once the world's most popular superhero can't go by his original name? It starts at the beginning.

Captain Marvel first appeared in 1940 in the pages of Whiz Comics No. 2. For most of the decade, Captain Marvel's comic-book adventures were so popular they outsold Superman's and inspired a 12-part Republic movie serial, "The Adventures of Captain Marvel."

This annoyed Superman's publishers at what would eventually become DC Comics. So, they sued Captain Marvel's publisher, Fawcett, for copyright infringement, claiming Captain Marvel was too similar to Superman. Fawcett dragged out the suit until the 1950s, when comic-book sales declined and Fawcett left the business.

Afterward, Captain Marvel's main writer, Otto Binder, moved to DC to write Superman, and when he did, Superman's stories became almost as bizarre and surreal — and entertaining — as Captain Marvel's had been.

So, who was copying whom?

In the 1970s, DC took the next step by licensing Captain Marvel outright and publishing new Captain Marvel stories. But by this time, Marvel Comics has come along and created its own Captain Marvel, the trademark to the original having expired while no one was paying attention.

Over the years, Marvel Comics had published several characters named Captain Marvel. Most of them are currently dead. But a new one always shows up or a dead one becomes temporarily undead just long enough to ensure Marvel Comics keeps the Captain Marvel trademark.

It's never-ending payback for DC's having filed that stupid lawsuit way back when.

DC can publish the original Captain Marvel, and it can call him Captain Marvel. But it can't use Captain Marvel as a title or on merchandise. So, since his revival, the original Captain Marvel has appeared in comics titled "Shazam!"

A '70s Saturday-morning TV show featuring Cap was called "Shazam!" too, and eventually people began to think the character's name was Shazam because that's what the title said.

It's like how some people think the name of the creature in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" is Frankenstein, even through the book's title clearly refers to the creature's creator. We call these people "illiterates."

Also, for the record: Steely Dan is a band, not one guy.

So, DC Comics is finally giving in to the popular misconception. Now DC's Captain Marvel is Shazam. But I'm not sure this is an improvement. Apart from surrendering to people who can't bother to remember the character's real name — which is rather like letting the terrorists win — Shazam is problematic, too.

Anyone who grew up in the 1960s probably thinks of "Shazam!" as Gomer Pyle's catchphrase. (He was referring to Cap's magic word, but how many people know that?) And kids nowadays think of Shazam as a smartphone app that identifies music.

Shakespeare said a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But is the same true for a Big Red Cheese?

Culture Shock 01.26.12: You're better off not running with 'The Devil Inside'

As a movie, "The Devil Inside" is a failure. As a horror movie, it's a scare-free bore. But as a test of the audience's willingness to put up with being jerked around for an hour and a half, "The Devil Inside" is a resounding success.

Never before have I attended a movie after which every single audience member made his displeasure known with some sort of verbal outburst, some of which I cannot repeat here. (Must think of the children.) I'd heard stories of audiences being so angry with "The Devil Inside" they threw popcorn at the screen — which means they were really mad, 'cause theater popcorn ain't cheap. That didn't happen at the screening I attended, which is a shame. That would have been entertaining.

As I recall, my own response at the time was something like, "That wasn't very good, now was it?"

That's an understatement. "The Devil Inside" will make you angry. Any hope I'd had that it would be "so bad it's good" faded in the first 20 minutes. This is a film that combines two overused horror tropes — exorcism and "found footage" — and makes something less than the sum of the parts. There's even a dash of "Da Vinci Code"-style Vatican conspiracy paranoia thrown in for bad measure. I almost feel bad for reviewing this movie. It's like drowning a puppy because it's too dumb not to poop on the rug.

The movie starts in the 1980s, with 911 recordings and police video taken from the scene of a triple homicide. The slaughter, it turns out, was committed by a woman (played by the aptly named Suzan Crowley, in the film's only credible role) who may or may not be possessed by the devil. (Go ahead. Guess.) Flash forward to the present day, and the woman is, for reasons that vaguely make sense only if you assume a vast Vatican conspiracy rules the world, incarcerated in an asylum next door to the Vatican in Rome.

Her now adult daughter Isabella (Fernanda Andrade) is making a documentary about Mom and exorcisms. Assisting her is a filmmaker (Ionut Grama) whose purpose is to hold the camera and be a jerk. (In these movies, the guy holding the camera is always a jerk.) During her quest, Isabella sits in on — and films! — an exorcism class. Turns out, Vatican-authorized exorcisms are really boring, and, as it happens, two rogue priests whom Isabella meets agree. The priests (Simon Quarterman and Evan Helmuth) have been performing unauthorized exorcisms on the side because the church is too busy covering up demonic possession to be of any help. Naturally, the priests decide to tag along for a fateful meeting with Isabella's mom.

After tricking the world's dumbest hospital staff into leaving them alone in an examination room with Isabella's mom, our four heroes confirm their worst suspicion: Mom is possessed not by one demon but by five. If you can add, you can figure out the rest.

That's the problem. There is nothing the least bit surprising about "The Devil Inside." Even the attempted scares are telegraphed well in advance. And the ending manages to be even less satisfying than anything in the "Paranormal Activity" franchise. It's no wonder people want to throw things afterward.

Writer/director William Brent Bell and co-writer Matthew Peterman have reached the rock bottom of the found footage genre. The whole contrived exercise seems like an excuse to take a trip to Rome — and then it rained the entire time.

Maybe they were just taking their disappointment out on the audience.

Culture Shock 01.19.12: Tucker and Dale vs. stereotypes

"Tucker and Dale vs. Evil" is a romantic comedy masquerading as a horror spoof in which various college-student stereotypes meet grizzly ends.

If you like horror movies but are tired of horror clichés, it's a nice way to spend an evening.

But if you feel empty the next morning, it may be because of a nagging sense that "Tucker and Dale" could have been so much more.

"Hillbilly horror" is one of the most used and abused sub-genres of horror. City slickers go to the woods or the mountains or the middle of nowhere and run afoul of the natives — inbred, possibly cannibalistic rednecks wielding meat hooks, axes and chain saws. From "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" to "The Hills Have Eyes" to "House of 1,000 Corpses," it's a family tree without a lot of branches.

But "Tucker and Dale" diverges from the norm. This time, the rednecks are the heroes.

Dale (Tyler Labine) and his best and probably only friend Tucker (cult favorite Alan Tudyk of "Firefly") are just two good ol' boys minding their own business. They're on their way to Tucker's new fixer-upper cabin in the woods, a not-so-palatial spread Tucker insists on calling a "vacation home."

On the way, they pick up supplies at one of those absurdly well-stocked country stores that exist only in movie depictions of country stores. (This is part of the genre, so roll with it.) While there, they encounter an SUV full of college students, who happen to be on the way to party it up at another nearby cabin. This is somewhat breaking with tradition, because cabins in these movies normally don't have close neighbors.

Anyway, the students — probably having seen all of the horror movies I named, plus "Deliverance" — are immediately suspicious of Tucker and Dale.

After they get to their cabin, and after a few ghost stories and beers — ghost stories being something college students tell only in movies — the college kids decide it's a good time for skinny-dipping. Except they keep their underwear on, because skinny-dipping no longer means what it did when I was in college.

At this point, a student named Allison (Katrina Bowden of "30 Rock") falls, hits her head and is rescued by Tucker and Dale, who are fishing nearby. When Allison's friends assume she has been kidnapped by those two scary rednecks, a hilariously tragic series of misunderstandings follows. Each of the kids' attempts to "rescue" Allison ends with one or more of them painfully dead, and Tucker and Dale become convinced the college kids are part of a suicide cult.

If this sounds like a cool idea with a heartwarming message about not judging people by appearances, it is — as far as it goes. I hope everyone learns a valuable lesson about not looking down on hillbillies. But while "Tucker and Dale" fights the evil of stereotyping rednecks, it embraces just about every other movie cliché.

Writer/directer Eli Craig and co-writer Morgan Jurgenson saddle Allison with two-dimensional friends, which at least has the advantage of letting us not care when they die. And the movie saddles us with a standard-issue romance between a hopelessly mismatched pair: namely Dale and Allison.

If there is any genre more deserving of being subverted than hillbilly horror, it's the romantic comedy about a couple of opposites who overcome their differences — and plot contrivances — to find love.

We've all seen "Lady and the Tramp." Enough already.

For what it is, "Tucker and Dale" is a fun movie, even if it does underuse its greatest asset, leaving Tudyk to sit out most of the final reel. Yet, "Tucker and Dale" is a missed opportunity.

Maybe it's too much to expect two hillbillies to deal with more than one evil at a time.

Culture Shock 01.05.12: 'Young Adult' subverts the traditional rom-com

Mavis Gary is no serial killer, but she's undoubtedly Charlize Theron's most despicable character since she won an Oscar for "Monster."

Mavis is narcissistic, selfish and — ultimately — delusional. That's bad for her but great for us. Fortunately, Mavis is the kind of despicable that is fun to watch. Most of the time, anyway.

Directed by Jason Reitman from a script by his "Juno" collaborator Diablo Cody, "Young Adult" is a romantic comedy waiting to happen. All the pieces are there: a woman returning to her rural hometown from the Big City, an old high-school flame, a former classmate/confidant.

We've seen it a thousand times — usually with Reese Witherspoon in the starring role — and Mavis knows the fairy tale cliché only too well.

But "Young Adult" is not a rom-com. Instead, it's a slightly dark and refreshingly pointed reversal of the lazy, insulting rom-com formula.

After graduating high school, Mavis left her "hick" town for a bustling metropolis — in this case, Minneapolis, where she found modest success as a writer of young adult novels. But with her deadline to turn in the series' final volume looming, Mavis has a sort of premature mid-life crisis, set off by an email announcing the birth of her high-school boyfriend's new baby.

By all accounts, Buddy (Patrick Wilson) is happily married to his wife, Beth (Elizabeth Reaser), but that fact and the couple's new bundle of joy are just minor complications for Mavis, who returns to her hometown with her laser sight on winning Buddy back.

All she has to do is look her best — not a problem for someone who looks like Charlize Theron — inflate her resumé and convince Buddy they are meant to be together. It's just like in the movies.

The only person fully aware of Mavis' insane scheme is Matt (Patton Oswalt), a classmate Mavis virtually ignored in school, although it's subtly implied Mavis might be indirectly (and unknowingly) responsible for the brutal hate crime that left him crippled in more ways than one.

Matt is a geek who shares a house with his dorky sister, makes custom action figures and — in an unorthodox twist — distills bourbon in his garage. He tolerates Mavis only because he's had a crush on her since high school.

As he says during a scene where both are indulging their neediness, guys like him always fall for girls like her.

For the rest of us, Mavis is a hard character to like, and yet Theron still manages to make her sympathetic during fleeting moments, conveying hints of fear behind tired, hungover eyes. There's a real person behind Mavis' self-created, cartoon-character exterior, which evokes at times Paris Hilton, complete with a little dog tucked away in a shoulder bag.

"Young Adult" subverts the typical romantic comedy's clichés by always doing the opposite, but it subverts other Hollywood clichés, too. It says: "Most people are pretty happy. Family life can be fulfilling. Life in small-town America isn't all bad." Maybe those things aren't for everyone, but they're valid choices. The quiet suburban desperation of "American Beauty" says more about screenwriters than it does about the suburbs.

Despite centering on a miserable protagonist, "Young Adult" is a strangely optimistic film. In Reitman and Cody's neighborhood, most people are doing OK. When Mavis drives her trendy Mini Cooper through her old stomping grounds, wrinkling her nose at the chain stores and the combination KFC/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut — a Frankenstein restaurant that reeks of tackiness — she's not actually showing off her good taste. She's just being a snob.

Everyone's happy except Mavis and the people like Matt who are unlucky enough to fall for her.

Culture Shock 12.29.11: Not everything was annoying in 2011

Once again, it's time to say goodbye and good riddance to another year.

As far as years go, 2011 isn't winning any awards, but at least it isn't the end of the world. For that, we have to wait until next December, or so I'm told by people who don't really understand how calendars work.

On Dec. 21, 2012, the Mayan calendar "runs out." This uneventful event is apparently regarded as cosmically significant by people who don't realize that our own Gregorian calendar runs out every Dec. 31 — at which point it cycles back to the beginning, as it has since it was introduced in 1582, replacing the Julian calendar, which ran out with virtually identical frequency, give or take a few doomsdays.

At this point, however, if the world did end, I'd be hard pressed to say we didn't have it coming.

When I look back at 2011 and see that one of the cultural high points was the return of "Beavis and Butt-Head" to MTV, I know the pickings are pretty slim.

Still, in keeping with the spirit of the season, here are a few things that did not annoy me in 2011:

The sixth season of "Doctor Who" was the best since the show's revival in 2005, and Matt Smith firmly established himself as my favorite Doctor since Tom Baker's tenure in the 1970s.

"House" is never going to be as good as the first three seasons were, but at least the current Cuddy-free season is an improvement over last year's. Nothing against departed co-star Lisa Edelstein, but after the writers decided to have House and Cuddy get together — and then break up — her leaving was the only thing that could save the show. It has been more than 20 years since Dave and Maddie's kiss of death on "Moonlighting," yet TV writers still tempt fate.

C'est la vie.

At the movies, the best of the best was Werner Herzog's 3-D documentary "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," which I reviewed a few weeks ago.

For superhero movies, it was a down year, with "X-Men: First Class" the best of the bunch, despite glaring flaws like January Jones' non-performance. I have higher hopes in 2012 for "The Avengers," but I'm worried about "The Dark Knight Rises," which seems dangerously close to taking the whole "taking Batman seriously" thing way too seriously.

Apart from "The Avengers," the two films I'm most anticipating are both prequels: Ridley Scott's "Alien" prequel "Prometheus," and Peter Jackson's return to Middle Earth with "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey," featuring Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins. (If you're honest, you'll admit "The Hobbit" is a much better story than the bloated "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.) Speaking of Martin Freeman, he and Benedict Cumberbatch return next year for a second season of "Sherlock," the BBC's modern-day version of Sherlock Holmes, from the creative team of Mark Gatiss ("League of Gentlemen") and Steven Moffat ("Doctor Who").

The best books I read in 2011 were mostly nonfiction: "The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human" by V.S. Ramachandran and "Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark," Brian Kellow's biography of the still-influential New Yorker movie critic whose style the rest of us all lamely try to imitate.

I'll have to take an incomplete on Haruki Murakami's newly translated novel "1Q84," which I've just started and is approximately the length of the Tokyo phone directory.

And lastly, on the music front, a word of advice: If you have a chance to see thepau Alabama Shakes perform live, take it. This little band, originally from Athens — as am I, so I confess a slight bias — is probably about to hit it big, and deservedly so.

For the Shakes, 2011 wasn't a bad year at all. But 2012 will be even better.

Culture Shock 12.22.11: When you wish upon a Wish Book

There it is was, on page 442. Seven and a half feet long, and the Holy Grail of G.I. Joe toys — the G.I. Joe aircraft carrier.

At a retail price of $109.99 — in 1985 dollars — you had to be a very good boy indeed for Santa to leave that under your Christmas tree.

I was never that good, but that's why they called it the "Wish Book," wasn't it?

Before the Internet killed the catalog business, you knew the Christmas shopping season had begun when the Sears Wish Book arrived in your mailbox. There were other catalogs — the J.C. Penny catalog wasn't bad — but none had the allure of the Wish Book. Whether you were a boy or a girl, it had just what you were looking for, whether or not you knew you were looking for it.

That's my idea of an "old-fashioned Christmas."

From remote-controlled airplanes and Teddy Ruxpin storytelling bears to Cabbage Patch Kids and the Atari 2600, the Wish Book was an illustrated guidebook to Christmas bliss.

You leafed through its slick, glossy pages — past the clothes and furniture, bedroom linens and other boring, adult things — and you stared in wonder, not just at the fancy, high-end toys that you suspected might be outside of Santa's price range, but at the elaborate displays of toys in action.

A two-page layout of "Star Wars" action figures might feature dozens of Stormtrooper action figures. Now that was more like it! Not just the one or two Stormtrooper figures you had, but an entire legion!

That was what you needed if you were serious about recreating scenes from the movies.

Just think: It was someone's job to put together those Wish Book photo shoots. Now that must have been a dream job.

The Internet has changed all that. Sears closed its catalog business in the early 1990s.

Nevermore a Wish Book. But while the Internet is great for ordering things, no website has yet come up with a browsing experience that equals sitting down with a fat, heavy catalog in your lap.

But when you had your wish list, what to do next?

Why, time to take it to the man himself, of course. Santa.

Today, you send a letter or email, or maybe you visit Santa's helper in the red suit at the nearest shopping mall. But there used to be a more ostentatious way of going about it.

Believe it or not, there was a time when TV stations aired shows that were nothing but young children sitting on Santa's lap and telling him what they wanted for Christmas. One of these was "The Santa Show," which aired Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in December on WAAY-31, taking half of the half-hour time slot usually devoted to cartoons.

A similar show aired for a time on what was then the Shoals area's NBC affiliate, WOWL-15.

Unfortunately, little video evidence of "The Santa Show" remains. You can find almost anything on the Internet, but the only video footage I could locate was a partial episode from 1982 (see vimeo.com/24661874).

I can only assume that most children whose parents videotaped their appearance on "The Santa Show" either destroyed the evidence or are too embarrassed by it to upload it to YouTube.

As I explain to my younger friends who don't remember much of the 1980s, to say nothing of the '70s, it was a different time back then.

Local TV stations were desperate for programming and would air almost anything.

It was a strange time in American history: getting big books in the mail, writing lists on paper and sitting on Santa's lap on local television.

Our children will never believe it.

Kim Jong Il Is Dead: A 'Tribute'

North Korea's "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il, the world's greatest filmmaker and star of Team America: World Police, has died. With the help of Kim Jong Il Looking at Things, I give you this tribute:

Steal This Comic

Via Geeks Are Sexy.

Culture Shock 12.15.11: Superheroes are real, and they look like us

Phoenix Jones is a superhero, or a reasonable facsimile.

For the past year, he has patrolled the neighborhoods of Seattle, stopping fights, changing tires and staring down drug dealers.

Despite incidents that have landed him in the emergency room, he has, amazingly, avoided a trip to the morgue.

Even more amazing, Phoenix Jones isn't alone.

According to journalist Jon Ronson, Phoenix Jones is one of about 200 self-styled, costumed superheroes operating from the Pacific Northwest to Florida.

None, however, embraces the calling as thoroughly as Phoenix Jones.

Ronson explores their comic-book-come-to-life world in his new e-book, "The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones: And the Less Amazing Adventures of Some Other Real-Life Superheroes."

Phoenix Jones doesn't have any super powers. He hasn't been bitten by a radioactive spider or survived a gamma-bomb explosion.

He isn't a billionaire with a cave full of high-tech equipment, which makes you wonder why billionaire do-gooders such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are such slackers. He isn't even a strange visitor from another planet, although that seems almost plausible compared to the truth.

Phoenix Jones does, however, have an origin story of sorts.

After someone broke into his car and his stepson cut his knee on the shattered glass, the man who would become Phoenix Jones took the mask the robber left behind and made it part of a costume.

"They use the mask to conceal their identity," Phoenix Jones tells Ronson. "I use the mask to become an identity."

That's how superheroes talk.

Ronson is no stranger to true stories that are nearly impossible to believe. He also is the author of "The Men Who Stare at Goats," the true story of the U.S. military's forays into spending your tax dollars on paranormal research. (That book was turned into a disappointing movie starring George Clooney and Ewan McGregor.)

As advertised, Phoenix Jones' adventures are amazing — and baffling.

In his spare time, he is a mixed martial arts fighter, and until recently his civilian alter ego worked at a home for autistic children. But he lost that job after he was arrested for using pepper spray to break up a fight.

He was never charged, but now the world knows his secret identity: Benjamin Fodor.

Most of the time, Fodor seems to be acting purely to help others. Then he does something that makes you wonder, such as stopping to have his photograph taken with a fan while letting a suspect get away.

You wonder if maybe being a masked "superhero" isn't a kind of narcissism for the terminally shy.

"When I wear this I don't have to react to you in any way," says another costumed vigilante, Urban Avenger. "Nobody knows what I'm thinking for feeling. ... Sometimes I wish I never had to take the mask off."

In New York, Ronson encounters a group of "heroes" who seem anything but.

"These men just seemed menacing," he writes, "with no fun to them. I don't want my superheroes to be bullies."

Whatever his faults, Phoenix Jones is no bully, but he is imposing.

After watching Phoenix Jones intimidate — by sheer willpower — armed drug dealers into leaving a neighborhood, Ronson becomes a fan.

Whether he is really a superhero or just an arrested adolescent who has let his love of comic books go too far, it's hard not to be a fan of Phoenix Jones.

'A Krampus Carol' by Anthony Bourdain

Culture Shock 12.08.11: These 'Dreams' old but not forgotten

The one thing that strikes me as off about Werner Herzog's documentary "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" is the title.

As we see, these dreams have not been forgotten. They've lived on, surfacing at other times and in other places, long after the cave vanished beneath a rock slide some 20,000 years ago, to be rediscovered only in 1994.

Maybe "Dreams of the Forgotten Cave" is the more accurate title, even if it sounds a bit too much like an Indiana Jones movie crossed with an H.P. Lovecraft story.

The cave is Chauvet Cave, located in southern France and site of the earliest known cave paintings, some of which are between 30,000 and 33,000 years old. As Herzog tells us, that makes them twice as old as any other known prehistoric paintings.

The cave of Altamira in northern Spain — subject of an admiring Steely Dan song, "The Caves of Altamira" — contains paintings generally thought to be about 15,000 years old, although some researchers argue for some of them being as old as the oldest Chauvet paintings.

That, however, is an archaeological dispute for another day, and one that probably doesn't interest Herzog in the slightest.

Given special permission to film in Chauvet — under severe restrictions — Herzog descended with a small crew and advanced 3-D cameras. Confined to a narrow walkway and limited to just four hours a day during six shooting days, Herzog and company nevertheless emerged with remarkable footage that Herzog has fashioned into an equally remarkable film, enhanced by Ernst Reijseger's melancholy score.

The paintings are astonishing for their age. These prehistoric artists capture horses, bison, lions, bears, mammoths and woolly rhinos in unmistakable detail. They simulate the movement of fleeing beasts by giving them extra legs.

More remarkable still, they use the irregularities and contours of the cave walls as part of their paintings. In the torchlight, Herzog notes, these creatures must have seemed to come to life.

For once, the 3-D is worth it. Viewing "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" in the standard two dimensions, you miss the three-dimensional tricks that play out over Chauvet's walls, and which Herzog recreates. Leave it to a 3-D skeptic such as Herzog to finally put the technology to good use. I wouldn't suggest purchasing a 3-D TV and Blu-ray player just for this film, but if you have them already, this is a film you must own, if for no other reason than to show off your home theater.

Perhaps the cavemen who left these paintings were showing off, too.

There is no evidence anyone ever inhabited Chauvet, so its purpose was likely ceremonial. Maybe it was the world's first art gallery, or maybe it was just the world's first graffiti.

In evolutionary psychology, there's a hypothesis that art, like the peacock's tail, is something used to attract a mate. Maybe we're looking at the works of prehistoric Don Juans trying to impress a girl.

The normally fatalistic Herzog (see his "Encounters at the End of the World") seems drawn to these artists as kindred spirits. They, too, document the world around them and seek meaning in symbols. The closest thing we find to a depiction of a human among the horses and rhinos is symbolic — part-woman/part-bison. It's the earliest blending of human and beast, starting a tradition that goes through Egyptian hieroglyphs and continues today in the pages of Batman and Spider-Man comic books.

Who were these Ice Age people who left behind only their art and their hand prints? What were their hopes and fears? In the end, they seem very much like us, and their dreams are our dreams.

In his career-long search for what he calls "ecstatic truth," a truth deeper than mere facts, Herzog has never come closer.

Thankfully, he takes us along for the ride.

Culture Shock 12.01.11: Ken Russell was uncompromising in pursuit of excess

Challenged to make a movie so offensive even he would say it should be banned, British director Ken Russell came up with an eight-minute film called "A Kitten for Hitler."

The title is just the beginning. It's downhill from there. And did I mention it's a Christmas movie?

Best known for his adaptations of D.H. Lawrence novels and "Altered States," his psychedelic foray into science fiction, Russell died Sunday at age 84 after a series of strokes.

Many filmmakers are described as "uncompromising," but few have earned that descriptive so thoroughly as Russell, who was uncompromising in his pursuit of cinematic excess.

Baffled audiences? An occupational hazard. Outraged critics? Serves the bums right.

Often, to watch a Ken Russell film is to be assaulted by sight and sound. If film is a visual medium more than a narrative one, Russell carried that to its logical — or is it illogical? — conclusion. In his hands, even so straightforward a genre as the biopic becomes a mad experiment in imagery and symbolism. The facts of the matter, when they matter at all, are in service to what you see.

Russell described "The Music Lovers," his 1970 film about Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, as a movie about a homosexual who marries a nymphomaniac.

That's a cute way of putting it. It's also a story of repression, obsession and madness. One thing it's not is a literal biography of Tchaikovsky. But it shouldn't be taken literally in any case. It's a backdrop on which Russell can project the fantasies, fears, nightmares and delusions of his characters, all set to the compositions of the Russian composer at the center of the proceedings.

By the time the "1812 Overture" inevitably comes along, we're not surprised to see actual canons going off and beheading Tchaikovsky's tormentors.

Even when working with a more traditional narrative, as in "Altered States" or his adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Lair of the White Worm," Russell used dreams and hallucinations to stunning visual and thematic effect.

His frequent collaborator — you might even say "muse" — Glenda Jackson, who won an Oscar for her role in Russell's "Women in Love," called him an "incredible visual genius." But he also was a director who got brave performances from his actors, whether from Jackson, as Tchaikovsky's doomed wife in "The Music Lovers," or the temperamental Oliver Reed, who shared an infamous nude wrestling scene with Alan Bates in "Women in Love."

For all his visual flair, it might still be possible to dismiss Russell if all there were to his films was the extravagance. In some of his movies, such as 1972's "Savage Messiah," it seems the only direction he gave the cast might have been, "Act louder!"

Not all of his experiments are successful. "Gothic," his 1986 retelling of how Mary Shelley came up with "Frankenstein," is absurd fun, but I'm not at all convinced it's actually a good movie.

Russell also tested the boundaries of subjects such as sex and religion, both of which tend to get artists into trouble. "The Devils," Russell's 1971's film set in a nunnery, deals with both, and it has yet to get a proper U.S. release in its uncut form.

When he didn't break a boundary, he at least showed the rest of us where it is.

In his later years, Russell returned to making television documentaries, which is where he started, and the cinema lost one of its most daring, original voices.

Ultimately, I'm not sure the world really knew what hit it when Russell burst upon the scene in the late 1960s.

And I'm not sure it knows now, either.