More movie time

That Darth Bastard movie made me laugh so hard. Yeah, the ending was hilarious.

As fer movies, eh, I don't know all that much really. I troll imdb and the Criterion Collection. I just know a couple people who know a lot, and I live right next to the world's best video store. Have a lot of late nights to kill, so I just wander in and browse. I've seen a ton of movies in the last year.

This all got started due to several things coinciding. First, my girlfriend's a big horror movie fan, and two movies that she wanted to see kicked this all off... Last House on the Left and Cannibal Holocaust (check 'em out on imdb.com). I was pretty shocked, actually, and started to wonder just how far you could legally go in making a movie. The guy who made Cannibal Holocaust was put on trial, and rightly so- it's fucked up, and definitely has its illegal moments. It's the movie that inspired Blair Witch, by the way. Great movie though, for what it is.

Soon I discovered that video store. Doing the work I do, I was getting home right as the video store was about to close, so I could pop in and grab something to watch while falling asleep. Then I met a couple people who gave me a lot of good suggestions.

Mainly though, my girl and I had a few late night phone conversations, both of us on the internet, finding and reading about horrible movies to each other. I forget the websites, things like badmoviereviews.com or cultfilms.com or something like that. I think one of the better is I couldn't believe the depth and breadth of crap on film. So I guess I had to see for myself.

Criterion Collection is really good- lots of great and weird stuff. The movie I mentioned earlier, Salo (the homage to de Sade) is Criterion also, and probably wins the award for most horrible movie. Guinea Pig and Men Behind the Sun are also contenders.

In My Skin (Dans Ma Peau) is also creepy and weird, and I actually fainted when I saw it. In the theatre. Didn't have much to eat that day, so I chalk it up to low blood sugar. I watched it again on video, no problem that time. It's so fucking graphic and personal. About a woman who's life is rather unsatisfying, until she accidentally gashes her leg open. She becomes fascinated with the wound and begins, uh, opening it up. Expanding it. Checks into a hotel room to start photographing herself cutting off her own skin. It's a quiet movie, not a horror movie in the usual sense.

Irreversible is another fucked up French movie. One of the characters is an awful NPC after my own heart- a pimp who hangs out in a sleazy gay S&M club. His name is 'La Tenia'. "The Tapeworm". It's shot kind of like Memento, in that it's backwards- each scene comes chronologically before the following scene. What the movie's famous for is this unbelievably realistic, long single-take single-shot rape scene. Not to spoil anything, but it comes in the middle, not the end of the movie, and afterwards, you just sort of watch the other characters getting ready to go to this party and living their lives (because it's shot in reverse time order). For a long time, I couldn't figure out why the climax of the narrative was pretty much in the exact middle of the movie. But I think it works- I've rambled on too long though, so I won't get into it.

Needless to say, Steve, these aren't films you want kids to watch. Usually I shrug and laugh at parental advisory stickers on video games and music. These aren't like that, at least not to me. Definitely check out Pan's Labyrinth though. All those 80s kids' fantasy movies, that even though they basically sucked I was worried weren't made anymore- it's a great homage and work of art.