Cult-Movie Review: Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

Well, this is my “versus” or “vs.” week on the blog, I guess you could say. In the past few days I’ve reviewed both Alien vs. Predator films, and today I turn my attention to another slug-fest, 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason. 

Globally speaking, the overriding creative impulse behind such cinematic monster meet-ups seems to be the pent-up fan-desire or built-in coolness factor associated with such clashes.

These films answer, first and foremost, the question…wouldn’t it be cool to see (fill in the blank) fight (fill in the blank)?

As I noted in terms of AVP (2004), those aren’t the most artistic or dramatic motives underlining a work of art, or even a popular entertainment. 

And because “versus” movies tend to feature two separate continuities, the screenplay writers involved also have to pack in a lot of supporting material, and make certain that each monster or participant is given a moment of glory.

One thing I observed, having watched AVP and Freddy vs. Jason this week is that these match-ups or contests do tend, at the very least, to reveal a new shade of the characters. 

In both versus films, one “villain” unexpectedly becomes the hero or champion, while the other is dismissed as irredeemable or evil.  

For example, in AVP, the Predator, Scar, joins up with Alexa (Sanaa Lathan), working with a human to defeat the real bad guys: aliens. And Jason adopts a similar role in Freddy vs. Jason, proving to be the slasher/monster that humans can -- if not work with -- then at least manipulate towards their own end. 

Indeed, Freddy vs. Jason is the first film in the Friday the 13^th continuity to attempt to drive the audience’s empathy towards the hockey-masked slasher and not away from him. Here, we get a dream sequence revealing Jason to be a bullied, neglected, ostracized child.

Freddy, by contrast (and like the aliens) is sinister and unrepentant. He’s the “real” monster, the true evil that must be defeated.

As you may recall, I was pretty ambivalent about AVP.  

I feel that it shines in comparison to AVPR, and that it possesses some qualities that make it worthwhile, notably the imagination of the flashback sequences, and Lance Henriksen’s very human performance.

By contrast, Freddy vs. Jason doesn’t even have that much going for it.

The human characters here are paper-thin, even though it is always nice to see the remarkable Katharine Isabelle (and I’ve been enjoying her performances as Margo in Hannibal).  

Also, Jason Mewes should probably sue the makers of the film for appropriating without permission his silver screen persona in a few key scenes.

Beyond the fact that the human characters are either dull or derivative, Freddy vs. Jason genuinely lacks scares too. The final battle at Crystal Lake is shot well, and it's really bloody, but it isn’t scary.  

An unexpected side-effect of these monster-on-monster smack-downs, then, seems to be that terror dissipates, and two franchises are actually compromised rather than improved.

When a studio green-lights a project like Freddy vs. Jason, it no doubt expects to revitalize two franchises for the price of one.  

Funny how that is almost never the real-world result...

Even the attempt to be faithful to Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13^th lore is only partially successful in Freddy vs. Jason.  There’s quite a bit of rewriting (or ret-conning) going on here to get the two monsters into the same world (either dreams or reality), and the ret-cons don’t always fit with the established canon.

Most disturbingly, Freddy vs. Jason doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of fun about this clash of the titans. A lot of the Elm Street sequels got by on a wing and a prayer, action set-pieces and a wicked sense of humor.  

But Freddy vs. Jason doesn’t express any sort of joy in Freddy’s return. We get lame one liners and all, but there's a sense that the filmmakers don't really love or fully understand the appeal of the material.

Freddy vs. Jason ends, finally, with no real winners.

“Welcome to my nightmare.”

In Hell, mass murderer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) laments his inability to impact the children of the real world.  The people of Springwood have forgotten his reign of terror, so he needs someone  to revive his fearsome legend.

He finds that someone in mad-dog killer Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger), the slasher of Crystal Lake. Imitating Jason’s Mother, Freddy convinces Jason to travel to Springwood and begin a killing spree; one designed to revive the memory of Freddy.

On Elm Street in Springwood, teenage Lori (Monica Keena) and her friend Kia (Kelly Rowland) soon realize that the town is being stalked by not one boogeyman, but two.  

Lori’s old boyfriend, Will (Jason Ritter) joins them, after escaping Westin Hills Sanitarium, to help bury Freddy and Jason permanently.

“It’s time to put this bad dog to sleep for good.”

Freddy vs. Jason opens and closes strong, I’ll give it that.  

The film commences with the words of the most unreliable of all narrators, Freddy Krueger, and in broad but effective strokes, re-tells the origin stories of Freddy and Jason.  The film squeezes a lot of information into this colorful montage, and it works surprisingly well.  It’s an interesting device to have Freddy talking to us directly, telling us his (warped) side of his own story, and it opens the film on a high note.  It feels like a fresh take.

But after that ingenious opener, we meet our lead (teen) characters, and they are all as milquetoast as humanly possible. Lori is our standard feisty final girl^Tm and Will is the “outsider” (but always loyal...) boyfriend.  There’s also your obligatory co-culture “best friend,” in this case African-American Kia.  These characters are so dull and so uninteresting, in part, because they don’t honor the tradition of either supporting franchise.

Actresses such as Heather Langenkamp, Amy Steel, Patricia Arquette, and Lisa Wilcox …all demonstrated how a solid, thoughtful performer could take a lead character in a slasher film and imbue that character with life, energy and individuality.  That lesson has been forgotten here.  Lori's most memorable trait is, alas, physical: her porn star (collagen?) lips. 

The filmmakers also seem bound and determined to feature elements or call-backs to previous franchise entries including 1428 Elm Street, Westin Hills Sanitarium, Hypnocil, the Freddy Worm, Jason’s mother, and Camp Blood, but they would have been wiser to focus on creating human characters that we can care about, or can invest our energy in. 

I will readily admit that the Elm Street sequels are of variable quality, but they are -- oddly -- enlivened by pro-social portrayals of insightful and courageous young women.  Alice, the Dream Master, fights Freddy, it's true, but also goes through the process of self-actualization. Nancy Thompson, similarly, gets cast as horror's Prince of Denmark (or Princess), Hamlet, tasked with going through the lies of her morally questionable parents. 

These characters had weight and individuality, and made the films more than mere "dead teenager" movies.

I would be hard-pressed to find teens less interesting than those featured in Freddy vs. Jason.

For example, let's go back to the horrid Jason Mewes knock-off. That’s what he is, and there's no way to deny it. He’s a lookalike/sound-alike doing the Mewes’ shtick. Since that’s all he is, why didn’t the filmmakers actually just hire Jason Mewes himself? 

Because we know that persona from the New Jersey Cycle (six films and counting), we would at least register him as an authentic human being and not a cipher. Instead, I can't ever see Freddy vs. Jason's stoner as a human being or person, just as a rip-off, a derivative clone.  I'm taken out of the movie's narrative every time I look at him in his stolen clothes.

And, let's face it, love or hate the Mewes persona, the actor would have added a clear sense of fun to the proceedings. Imagine watching Mewes go up against Jason. It's impossible not to smile at the thought.

In another creative area all together, the movie's screenplay hems and haws. The movie wants to studiously avoid giving us a clear winner in the fight.  Freddy gets his moment in the sun, turning Jason into a human pinball in the dream world.  Then Jason gets his glorious moment, decapitating Freddy and emerging from the water in (a beautifully-shot, beautifully-visualized) epilogue.  

But Freddy winks at the camera, just so we don’t draw too strong a conclusion about the victor. 

Did Freddy and Jason have it in their contracts that neither one could win? What's the fun of setting up a fight like this if no one can be crowned the winner?

Again, what I found most intriguing about Freddy vs. Jason -- and it may not have even been intentional -- is that when these characters are thrown together, we, as viewers, make judgment calls about the true villainy of our two starring monsters.  

Jason seems compelled to maim and murder, but it feels instinctual…like it is part of his wiring.  

Freddy, by contrast, relishes in his badness. He intellectualizes it, seeks out ways to increase his range, and manipulates others.  

So Jason is the shark in Jaws, and Freddy is Hannibal Lecter.  Fact to face, I judge Freddy the more evil of these two monsters, and almost (at least in this film...) can’t blame Jason for what he does. The sympathetic flashbacks make it clear that his vengeance is righteous, or at least justified.

So if you get in Jason’s way, yes, he will kill you (as Kia learns).  But Freddy will seek you out, and find ways to get you, regardless of where you are, what you are doing, or why you are there. He's a puppet master and a schemer.

Again, this comparison would not exist if we didn’t have the monsters sharing the same story.

Still, some of the ret-conning doesn’t work.  

I know the filmmakers want each monster to have “Kryptonite,” the thing/element that stops him.  Freddy’s kryptonite is fire, and I get that.  He died in fire.  But now, suddenly, Jason is afraid of water?  I know he drowned in Crystal Lake in 1980, but many previous films have revealed him emerging from the lake, or attacking skinny dippers in the water (Part VII is one example of the latter).  But now he can’t even approach water without paralyzing terror?   

That just doesn’t pass the smell test.

I enjoyed the battles in AVP and similarly I enjoy the fight between Freddy vs. Jason here.  At least in this case, gore is not shorted.  The wide-ranging final fight -- from cabin to construction site to the lake -- lives up to expectations in terms of violence and bloody depiction of violence.

My problem is -- again like AVP -- that the whole movie is constructed around a fifteen minute fight. The rest of the movie is just filler.  Dumb filler at that.  There should be a TV series called “Versus” where all great movie monsters can fight one another with glorious special effects and extreme destruction, sparing us the necessity of seeing whole movies built for a single serving purpose.

Bottom line: Freddy vs. Jason isn’t fun enough or scary enough to honor its parent franchises.

But it is bloody enough.

Some days, that will do, I suppose.  

And I should note, I’ve watched Freddy vs. Jason probably five times over the years, always thinking that on the next re-visit I’ll see something new or change my mind about its overall quality.

And I always come out feeling disappointed.  

Yep, it’s time to put this bad dog to sleep for good.

Ask JKM a Question: Torture Porn?

My friend and regular reader, Trent, sent me this question in July, and I have been holding onto it for the week of Halloween.  Thank you for your patience, Trent!

Trent writes:

“Torture-porn seemed to all but disappear as a hugely successful sub-genre from the movie landscape. Some say that it was found-footage that killed the sub-genre. Some say it was inferior productions. Some squarely place blame on the "Saw" franchise. 

However, like every sub-genre, there are standouts and complete fails. If you were to construct a Best 3 and a Worst 3 list of torture-porn themed films, what would it be?”

Trent, I love this question, and have been a defender of the torture porn genre for some time now, though it took me a little time to be "sold" on it.

For one thing, torture porn (or gorno, as it was briefly known) was given its name by those who don’t like it or approve of it, mainly cultural and movie critics. Anything with the word “porn” in it is instantly going to be controversial, and derided by the Establishment. Slasher films were controversial once upon a time too, but imagine if they had been tagged with the moniker “knife porn” or “mask porn” in the 1980s. 

Torture porn’s very name means that it has a steep hole to climb out of in a wide cultural context. The name drives people away, and holds the movies up to scorn.  

And in terms of horror fans, there always seems to be a generational divide, and that factors in with torture porn too. The folks who grew up with the Universal Monsters didn’t have much nice to say about the slashers of the 1980s.  And many of those who grew up with the slasher films have been especially hard on torture porn.  I readily admit it: I find this hypocritical and inexcusable. Those fans are old enough to remember when the previous generation hated “our” horror. I will not be that cranky old man, who judges newer horror more negatively while forgetting the battles my generation faced with its brand of genre entertainment.

Why did torture porn drop-off?

It wasn’t inferior films, and it wasn’t the Saw franchise, any more than the Friday the 13^th films scuttled the slasher genre.

It was simply, changing times that killed the trend, and that’s a normal function of life. The slasher franchise lasted, perhaps, give years (1979 to 1984), before rubber-reality took over (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Candyman, etc.).  Torture Porn arose, in earnest a few years after 9/11 and as the Japanese horror remake phase was still playing out. So, say that torture porn lasted from 2004 (Saw) to roughly 2008 - 2009 and the dawn of found footage as a mainstream sub-genre (with Cloverfield, REC, Paranormal Activity being the initiators, or re-initiators if one factors in The Blair Witch Project [1999]).  So historically speaking, torture porn didn’t last any shorter a duration than did the slashers of the 1980s.

I reserve the right to alter this list in future books, or posts, but right now, looking back, these are my selections for the best torture porn films.

3. Hostel (2005)

This Eli Roth masterpiece expresses one key aspect of the torture porn paradigm: you reap what you sow.

In particular, America in the immediate post-9/11 can be said to have not lived up to its historical values. This isn’t a pleasant realization, especially if you consider (as I consider myself…) a patriotic American. 

But Hostel reminds us that we are not above the rest of the world; we are connected to it. And it suggests that when we don’t live up to our values, other countries and individuals take heed.  For example, after the shock and terror of 9/11, our government dismissed the Geneva Conventions as “quaint” and those who had established them as “Old Europe.”  We tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib and set up a prison, Guantanamo Bay, where combatants who had been taken off the battle field would have no access to any legal apparatus for years, even decades.  And then we wouldn’t take “yes” for an answer when Saddam Hussein allowed inspectors into Iraq to look for WMD. We wanted a war in Iraq (although it had nothing to do with 9/11), so we engineered one.

At least in terms of sub-text, Hostel concerns the blow-back that occurs when innocent Americans travel overseas and run afoul of a torture business crafted in our own capitalist image, one that has become the driver of the local economy in “New” (Eastern) Europe.  Americans are worth more to torture, and so unlucky travelers from the U.S. become nothing more than a resource to be used up by the torturers.  The film is visceral and disgusting, but never immoral. We never adopt the point of view of the torturer, only the tortured, and that is a key quality of the film. It puts us in the torture chair, and asks us how it feels.  We believe that these kind of things can’t happen to us, that as Americans we have a privileged standing in the world. Hostel says, not so fast, and that blow-back is a bitch.

2. The Strangers (2008)

In some key ways, The Strangers is the absolute inverse or opposite of Hostel. Here, a lovely young couple, played by Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman are ruthlessly attacked as his house comes under siege from masked, lunatic spree-killers. Ultimately, we find out that the couple is ambushed so relentlessly for no other reason than it happened to be home. The doorbell was answered, and the game is afoot.

Again, one has to go back to the galvanizing event that spawned the torture porn genre: 9/11. On that day, 3,000 innocent American men and women died needlessly, and through no fault of their own.  They went to work, and work, that day, turned out to be the absolute worst place to be.  The terrorists chose a symbol – the World Trade Center – to attack, but not specific people (outside the rubric of being American citizens).  If Hostel was about the way our actions will be mirrored back to us by a watching, developing world, The Strangers is about how terror can strike out of the blue, for no discernible reason or cause.  It feels personal to us, but to the terrorist (or spree-killer) we are incidental to their plans, just someone to be destroyed.

1. Martyrs (2008)

The human lot, perhaps, is to suffer. And what, finally, comes from suffering? 

Is there a point where suffering is so complete and total that it gives way to something else, to something transcendental, something beyond the human capacity to see or understand?  These are the key questions in Martyrs (2008), a brilliant horror film that uses its extreme violence to consider the human equation, and the human tolerance to pain and suffering. 

One driving and fascinating question about suffering, raised in the film, asks if suffering brings us closer to God, or at least seeing God.  For a horror movie to be truly classic, truly great, there must be a point about the violence featured, there must be a reason for it.  Martyrs takes its lead character through the ringer, but the violence suffered by that character ultimately means something for the audience beyond mere rubber-necking or gawking.  We are asked to consider the idea that only when we face pain, death, and suffering, are we truly in touch with “life.”  One can reject or accept that notion, but one can’t argue that the violence in Martyrs is gratuitous or unnecessary.

Other torture-porn films that I feel are legitimately great include Irreversible (2002), which may be more rape-and-revenge than torture porn, Saw (2004) -- which suggests that there are no “safe” options in a post-9/11 world, and every move we make is going to cost us an arm, or an eye, or a leg -- Hard Candy (2005), and the Last House on the Left (2009) remake.  A recent torture porn movie of pure, unadulterated beauty -- which moves past the 9/11 era -- is Would You Rather (2014).

Now, in terms of the worst torture porn movies, I need to do a further study, honestly.  I have watched many films in the genre, but not all of them, and so I should probably save this consideration for Horror Films of the 2000s, when I am seeing every single torture porn movie again.  I’m tempted to knee-jerk say The Human Centipede (2010), because I have not been able to discern the film’s deeper meaning, or the purpose for its violence. And yet, I think The Human Centipede is well-made, and it is deeply scary and unsettling without actually being overtly gory. I don’t actually think it’s a bad film, just one without purpose.

Don’t forget to ask me questions at Muirbusiness@yahoo.com

Terminator Week: Terminator: Salvation (2009) movie trailer

Cult-Movie Review: Code 46 (2003)

"If we had enough information, we could predict the consequences of our actions. Would you want to know? If you kissed that girl, if you talked to that man, if you take that job, or marry that woman, or steal that papelle? If we knew what would happen in the end, would we ever be able to take the first step, to make the first move?"

- Code 46 (2003)

If you subtract the  futuristic and dystopian details from Michael Winterbottom's spell-binding Code 46 (2003), what emerges is a relatively simple and straight-forward tale of doomed, irrational love. 

In other words, this sci-fi movie concerns an adage from an old Woody Allen film: the heart wants what the heart wants.  Even if what the heart desires isn't really wise, legal, or necessarily right.

Once you layer on the film's impressive futuristic details however, Code 46  emerges as something of tremendous import and note.  It's a frightening and deeply saddening glimpse of technology run amok and genetic control ruthlessly imposed by a seemingly-invisible but all-powerful State. There are echoes and resonances of Gattaca (1997) here, but Code 46's focus is not on personal achievement and widespread genetic "racism," but rather on a single star-crossed couple who -- inexorably and unintentionally -- flout the prevailing laws. They feel they have no choice. They are in the grip of a force not of their conscious choosing.

Coupled with a mesmerizing, trance-like score and an informal cinema verite shooting-style, Code 46 masterfully conveys a real sense of place and time; even though the film's futuristic venue doesn't exist in the real world.  It's a staggering achievement on Winterbottom's part, and Code 46 thrives not as an action film or even as a thriller, but as an unforgettable mood piece. Even if precise details of the plot are occasionally opaque or baffling, images and feelings from the film nonetheless linger and echo long after a viewing. 

After experiencing Code 46, you will authentically feel as if you've spent ninety-five minutes in another world. Or, as film critic Paul Byrnes insightfully reported in his review of the film: "It's a bleak future, but not a bleak film. Winterbottom has an uncanny ability to create beautiful, hypnotic sequences, using contemporary music. His films have a seductive modernism, but without losing focus on character and idea. Other directors raised on MTV use music to paper the cracks; Winterbottom uses it to get inside the cracks."

Does an empathy virus work long distance?

In the intriguing world of Code 46, genetics are rigorously policed, perhaps as a result of widespread infertility or sterility in the recent past. 

As the film's opening card relates: "due to IV, DI embryo splitting and cloning techniques, it is necessary to prevent any accidental or deliberate genetically incestuous reproduction." 

If genetically incestuous reproduction does occur, it is termed a Code 46 violation. If genetically incestuous reproduction occurs intentionally, it is a criminal violation of Code 46, and duly punished.

The future imagined by Code 46 is also one of huge class differences. Cities are over-populated (except in the "unhealthy" heat of broad daylight), highly affluent, and termed "Inside."  Beyond the borders of the colossal cities -- "Outside" --  denizens live in abject poverty, environmental desolation and technological primitivism. Because of the draconian genetic regulations, freedom of travel is a luxury of the past. 

To make passage from one from city to another, from Inside to Outside and vice-versa, travelers must carry genetic passports termed "cover," or "papelles." These electronic "papers" -- genetic driver's licenses, essentially -- must be presented before any egress. "Cover" is also severely time-limited.  If your cover i.d. expires while you are still in a foreign land, you have no way to get home.

As Code 46 commences, a fraud investigator, William Geld (Tim Robbins) is sent to Shanghai to investigate a problem inside the massive Sphinx Insurance Company. 

Someone inside the company is falsifying cover papelles for undesirable genetic elements, thus permitting them to travel freely in restricted zones. In order to help him ferret out the saboteur, Geld has been injected by his employers with an "empathy virus" that allows him to intuit the traits of those people he interviews, provided they freely share with him one detail of their lives.

After a series of one-on-one interviews, Geld determines that Maria (Samantha Morton) is the source of the falsified or forged papers. However, instead of arresting her, the married Geld makes a leap.  He pursues a romantic and sexual relationship with Maria. The next day, while still "covered," he leaves Shanghai.  

Back home in Seattle with his wife and young son, Geld still seems obsessed with Maria. When he is summoned back to Shanghai on a new development in his investigation (the death of a man with falsified papers...), he attempts to find Maria again. William discovers that she has been taken to a state clinic for a Code 46 violation. Specifically, she was pregnant with Geld's child. Now, the pregnancy has been "terminated" by the State. Also, Maria's memories of the sex act and her lover have been surgically-removed.

Although he knows he is courting danger, Geld remains in Shanghai as his cover papelle expires, and shares with Maria memories of their lost relationship. Geld also goes to a DNA expert and learns that he and Maria indeed share genetic history. Specifically, Maria is fifty-percent genetically related to him, a "biological clone" of his own mother, who was one of a "set of 24 in-vitro fertilized clones." 

Legally, they cannot "liaise"

Despite his knowledge of this fact, Geld still pursues a romantic relationship.  On forged cover, Maria and Geld flee to the "Outside" and to Jebel Ali, in Dubai. There, Geld learns that Maria has been implanted with a virus that reacts negatively to his...sexual presence. Still in love with him, Maria demands William strap her to the bed and make love to her.  He complies. 

But afterwards, still possessed of the virus, Maria reports to local authorities a Code 46 violation. 

The couple attempts to outrun the State in a hastily-purchased car...

You know what they say, "the Sphinx knows best."

In some ways -- and as has been duly noted in other reviews -- Code 46 plays like a high-tech variation and meditation on Sophocles' play, Oedipus Rex (429 BC).  

In both tales a man unknowingly falls in love with his own mother (or a genetic duplicate of his own mother, at least), and personal disaster and destruction ensue The Oedipus Complex is known in psychological circles as a male child's unconscious desire for the (sexual) love of his mother, of course, and Sophocles' famous work also gazes explicitly at the conundrum of fate versus free will. In pursuing his free will, Oedipus meets his unpleasant destiny.

This idea is resurrected, updated and tweaked in Code 46. William Geld is involved in an unacceptable form of love by legal, societal standards (as was the case with the King of Thebes), but in his case, the laws of the state actually seem to compel this behavior, at least to a certain extent. 

Society as depicted in the film creates the very technological conditions under which William can encounter a genetic duplicate, essentially, of his mother. And then society punishes him for his "illegal" response to Maria. Yet, importantly, Geld is in no position to deny his Oedipal feelings, his destiny, either. The "empathy virus" he has been injected with only augments his feelings for others, thereby assuring that he will step outside of bounds of legality with Maria.

As for Maria, she describes early in the film a dream she experiences every year on her birthday. In that dream, she gets closer and closer to finding her "destiny." She first meets William Geld on her birthday, and when she experiences the prophetic dream again, she sees him waiting for her. He is her destiny. Since she believes this, and William is "empathetic" (thanks to the virus), he cannot help but believe it as well.  He is a sense, under her romantic influence.

And Maria? She is a biological clone of William's mother. Does this mean that her subconscious vision of William as her destiny actually symbolizes her genetic desire for an offspring, a child?  The movie never suggests that explicitly, but it certainly seems a possibility. Maria receives one signal, but misinterprets her destiny. William is not supposed to be her lover, perhaps, but her child. A biological clone of another being, her circuits seem crossed.

Even the so-called "riddle of the Sphinx" is adapted in Code 46. In Oedipus the King, Oedipus must solve the riddle of the Sphinx, a query which has perpetually vexed travelers outside Thebes. In Code 46, the mysterious Sphinx -- the monolithic insurance company -- permits and denies travelers egress for reasons all its own. The corporation's decision-making process remains completely hidden from the actual travelers.  As viewers, we don't discern the Sphinx's higher purpose, except control.

In both Oedipus and Code 46, the man who has broken the law -- William or the King -- must pay for their crimes. Oedipus gouges out his own eyes and becomes a wandering wretch. In Code 46, William Geld has his memories of Maria expunged from his mind and lives up to his name, "Geld."  To Geld is to castrate, and here William Geld is emotionally castrated; denied the knowledge of what he once felt (rightly or wrongly) was his destiny.

In substituting a company (Sphinx) for an instrument of the divine (the Sphinx of Greek mythology), Code 46 suggests that in a high-tech future both fate and free will shall be supplanted by the iron will of the State. 

And again, there's a kind of hypocrisy embedded in the State's will. The very world that it creates ultimately is responsible for encouraging and discouraging William and Maria's love. The State is a fickle deity. The couple would never have met without the genetic laws, never have fallen for each other without the "empathy virus" and then never have been torn asunder without the widespread prosecution of Code 46 violations. Maria and William are thus screwed six ways to Sunday, if you'll pardon my French.  Their love and loss is unimportant to the Order of Things as legislated.

William survives the affair well enough, after a fashion. But for Maria, it's quite a different story.  The end of the film features a canny montage of cross-cuts to suggest this. 

In one set of images, we see William returning home to his well-dressed, perfectly-coiffed wife in Seattle. He is greeted by his gorgeous spouse and young son, and then returned to his affluent home.

These images are inter-cut with visions of Maria alone, in Dubai, wandering in solitude and poverty. Her final words, uttered in voice-over -- "I miss you" -- are ones that William will never hear. In fact, he has no awareness or memory of Maria at all.Their love affair is erased, deleted except in her solitary memory.

And lastly, there's one final connection to Oedipus here. In Sophocles' work, Oedipus realized what he had done, and took steps to punish himself.  He rendered himself blind, and then made himself an outcast. In Code 46 -- after a second instance of illegal sexual intercourse with Maria -- William knowingly permits his lover to notify the authorities. He watches her make the telephone call, and does nothing to prevent her or stop her. 

This is by far a more passive response than Oedipus's, but it is William's tacit acknowledgment that he has committed a wrong, and that it must be corrected.  Yet -- in some cowardly way -- the burden of pain falls not on William (as it did on Oedipus) but on Maria instead. William blithely returns to his happy life, never knowing what he has lost while Maria forever bears the scars of their brief but passionate relationship. 

In this fashion, I submit, Code 46 also concerns a globalized society in which the rich make the rules and benefit from those rules, while the poor get shafted. 

William had an illicit dalliance, but was welcomed back into the loving embrace of his wife (and we see them make love after his return). He carries not even the burden of a guilty conscience for his illegal behavior. In this world, love apparently means you don't have to remember to say you're sorry.

Instead, Maria takes it on the chin, alone. Outside, and grief-stricken. She wonders, mournfully about the man she has lost, harking back to her own memory loss.

"Can you miss someone you don't remember? Can one moment or experience ever disappear completely, or does it always exist somewhere, waiting to be discovered?"

We all have problems, William. How we deal with them is a measure of our worth.

As I wrote at the beginning of this review, Code 46 is an eminently powerful mood piece, and all the details add up to a believable future world as backdrop to the haunting, conflicted love story. 

In this case, one of those backdrop details involves the "globalized" society I just noted. Although the world-spanning State (a one world government?) regulates genetics, it has apparently also paved the way for the assimilation of all known languages and cultures, and therefore also the destruction of small, local, individual worlds (at least on the "Inside.") 

Specifically, all the characters in the film speak a hodgepodge of English, French, Spanish, Mandarin and Farsi. There are no borders anymore, as the State (apparently a Corporate State) has smashed all of them. 

To support the idea of this rampant "globalization" and wanton intermingling of cultures, Winterbottom even intermingles our very sense of geography in the film. Outside metropolitan Shanghai, for instance, is a vast, empty desert. And Seattle looks roughly the same as Hong Kong does, or any other over-populated urban center. 

And in every city, gigantic interior structures seem to wind around on themselves, technological behemoths with no end and no beginning.The idea here is that technology and business "globalization" have dwarfed individuality the world around. By shooting in real-life locations all over the world and mixing and matching locales freely, Winterbottom presents a vision of global sameness on an inhuman (and inhumane) scale.

What's so beautiful about Code 46's presentation, however, is that Winterbottom does not approach this inhuman world with sterility or even, actually, cinematic formality. On the contrary, through informal editing and shooting techniques (jump cuts, blurred focus, point-of-view perspective shots, and more), he enhances the sense of a real place, of bustling Shanghai at nightfall, for example. 

Desson Thomson, writing in The Washington Post rightly observed: "The movie's atmospherics -- the grainy-hazy images, a blighted world, the zoned-out luminosity of Morton's face -- give "Code 46" an impact that transcends the actual story. You may soon forget the specifics of the plot, but you'll always remember the world it came from.

The spontaneous-seeming, cinema verite camera-work in Code 46 also successfully contrasts the controlling aesthetic of the Sphinx and the State. It's a top down world of rigorous control in which citizens are constantly under surveillance.  But down on the street level -- and between two lovers like Maria and William -- life can still feel spontaneous, surprising, unpredictable. This couple wander into a pre-ordained genetic meeting with eyes closed; not understanding the pull of destiny, or rather, genetic pre-determination. 

The fact of their genetic incompatibility is revealed in visual clues  by Winterbottom, right down to the casting of Robbins and Morton. Robbins towers a full meter over the diminutive Morton, a virtual giant beside her, and there's something unsettling and wrong about them "together," down to their very physicality. 

Kurt Loder noted this idea in his review of the film: "But in extrapolating from our contemporary unease about human cloning, and of course the ever-ominous powers of government, "Code 46" presents a future society that's hauntingly plausible. Robbins and Morton don't seem to have much in the way of romantic chemistry at first — or do they? In fact, they probably have all the chemistry possible in a world that's been so drained of cheer and trust and human possibility, and so fundamentally disfigured by scientific technology. They have too much chemistry, it turns out, and it dooms them both in different, dreadful ways."

That last point is a critical one. In very deep, thoughtful fashion, Code 46 concerns the way that our feelings seem to dictate our reality; how our emotions become intertwined, irrevocably, with our world view. Maria and William may be courting destiny in their tragic love affair or they may be responding to something deeper: a genetic, Jungian unconscious that must pull them together, regardless of the consequences. 

In small, meaningful ways and in occasional grace notes, Code 46 artfully explores the nuances of the human condition, and the way that the human condition forever remains constant, even in the looming shadow of scientific, technological and business "advances."

The heart wants what the heart wants...

Movie Trailer: Code 46 (2003)

Movie Trailer: Dark Water (2005)

Cult-Movie Review: The Ring (2002)

The Ring (2002) -- an American remake of Ringu (1998) from director Gore Verbinski -- commenced the Japanese horror remake trend of over a decade ago.

Some may view this fact as a negative legacy, since the trend resulted in some truly bad horror films, like The Eye (2008) and One Missed Call (2008). 

On the other hand, The Ring is universally-acclaimed as the best of the J-Horror remake breed, and more than that, I’d name it as one of the ten best horror films from the span 2000 – 2009. 

In short, the film succeeds not only because it is scary as hell (especially considering it is rated PG-13), but because -- like all the great horror movies in history -- it expresses something important about the age in which it was created.

In this case, The Ring obsesses on the notion that modern technology is not connecting or informing the population of the 21^st century, but rather negatively influencing and otherwise harming them. As you no doubt recall, the movie concerns a VHS tape that will kill you if you watch it, but will permit you to live in peace if you pass it on to other viewers. 

In the social media-heavy Web 2.0 Age of “shares” and “retweets” this cycle of copying and re-broadcasting takes on an even greater significance than it did during the movie’s post-9/11 milieu. 

What happens when disturbing imagery goes out to millions of people -- young and old alike – instantaneously?  

What are the repercussions for people and communities when this footage is seen, seen again, and then manipulated and disseminated?

Importantly, The Ring conveys this idea of instantaneous information transmission in unforgettable visual terms. The entirety of the story is presented in a kind of de-saturated, silver coloring, an intentional reflection of the twilight, static-laden world of reflected computer monitors or TV light. 

And the film’s bogeyman -- a monstrous child who literally climbs out of a TV set -- is depicted with blurs, hiccups and periodic visual interference. She is a digitized image come to life.  

But this boogeyman is something else too. She is also the ghost of a forgotten emotion (rage) or story, one bouncing around the airwaves, never truly dead, always ready to return.

“It’s about the tape. The one that kills you when you watch it.”

When a teenager girl, Katie, dies exactly seven days after viewing a mysterious VHS tape, her aunt, Rachel Keller, investigates her death.  Rachel finds and watches the tape herself at a mountain cabin, and then realizes, after a phone call, that she has just one week to live.

With help from her estranged boyfriend, Noah (Martin Henderson), Rachel attempts to find the maker of the tape.  

The trail leads back to the Morgan family, who lived and kept horses on Moesko Island. While Rachel attempts to talk to Mr. Morgan, she learns of his daughter, a little girl named Samara (Daveigh Chase) and her incarceration at a local psychiatric facility. Apparently, the girl had frightening psychic powers, including the capacity to burn imagery on X-ray film...or videotape.

Noah visits that facility, but finds that Samara is long gone.

Meanwhile, Rachel must accelerate her efforts to find Samara and end her curse because her sensitive son, Aidan, has also watched the dangerous videotape, and will die in seven days.

“You play it, and it’s like somebody’s nightmare”

As I noted in the introduction above, The Ring is a treatise on modern technology, particularly television. 

The film opens with two teenage girls discussing TV signals and phone signals killing brain cells. “I hate television,” Katie (Amber Tamblyn) says. “It gives me headaches. You know, I heard there are so many magnetic waves traveling through the air, because of TV and telephones, that we're losing ten times as many brain cells as we're supposed to. Like, all the molecules in our heads are all unstable. All the companies know about it, but they're not doing anything about it. It's, like, a big conspiracy.”

This chunk of dialogue reveals a few important points.  

First, it reveals that the girls live in a pervasive culture of distrust. Katie, at least, is fearful that she doesn’t know the truth about how her everyday technology works, and furthermore doesn’t trust the establishment -- government, business, science, or the media -- to explain it truthfully. 

Secondly, Katie's dialogue suggests that modern technology plainly and simply kills, murdering brain cells a little at a time. This urban legend conveys, in a nutshell, the film’s critique of modern technology.  Under the guise of connecting you to those you love, these high-tech instruments actually kill you.

The Ring proves very concerned, indeed, with the idea of signals of an inappropriate or unsafe nature entering your house and your psyche, unbidden.  

Why should the movie obsess on this notion?  Well, in real life, it was a topic of some controversy. America had just been through Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings, wherein blow jobs were discussed around-the- clock on 24 cable news-stations. I still remember parents complaining about having to explain some of the sexual terminology to their young children.  

And then, soon after that, the 24-hour news stations broadcast hour upon hour of horrific imagery from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and even the bullet-ridden corpses of Saddam Hussein’s sons.  

Again, how can one explain these events and images to the very young, or the unprepared? Although horror movies when they air on TV must contextualize their visualizations with ratings explaining suitability for the young, newscasts come with no such warnings.

At one point in The Ring, Rachel steps out of her apartment, onto a ledge, and peers down into an adjacent apartment building.  She is the only person standing outside in the vast complex.

The film then cuts to a long, impersonal shot of the building, where it looks as though inhabitants are warehoused.  As the camera focuses on various apartment units, we see that the TV set is prominently placed in each dwelling, and that it is on in every unit as well, depicting some image. 

We see these people and their TV sets, and feel they are blissfully unaware of the world outside their windows. And yet they believe themselves connected to that world because an appliance -- a TV set -- is activated.  The long pan across these living units raises a few questions

What images or terrors are coming into the world over there?  In that apartment? 

Or the next one over?  The impression is that Samara's tape may not be alone in its transmission of pain and suffering.

Later, Rachel’s sensitive son Aidan (David Dorfman) watches Samara’s tape and Rachel is furious at this transgression. 

The pictures on the television have exposed him to images that she was not prepared him to see, and that are dangerous to his psyche and could, literally, do him grave harm.  This scene explicitly trades on a parent’s fears that the air-waves may not be safe for children’s eyes.  

In the post-9/11 world, you can’t leave a kid alone in the front of the TV, because you just don’t know what he or she will see.  Far from being the "babysitter" of a previous generation; a safe generation, the TV now is a portal through which children might see any number of horrors.

On top of such visual flourishes, the film’s main character, Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) is a journalist, a person responsible for what type of “news” reaches the rest of the world.  

When, during the film's finale, she pushes the copy button and then passes the horror onto someone else, without comment or explanation, Rachel is committed a technological crime of sorts. We expect her to be responsible and moral, given the public trust she holds, but The Ring, again suggests that those in the media are ultimately untrustworthy gate-keepers.  

A child, like Aidan, by contrast, is trustworthy, and at film’s end he asks the question that Rachel willfully ignores: “What about the person we show it to?  What happens to them?”

Mr. Morgan (Brian Cox), Samara’s father, also reserves a high degree of hatred for journalists, as he says to Rachel.  “What is it with you reporters?” He queries. “You take one person's tragedy and force the world to experience it...spread it like sickness.”  

Again, we are left to ponder the nature of contemporary news, and the phenomenon of 24-hour news stations on cable TV. Fox, CNN, and MSNBC jump on a popular story and ride out, regardless of the human or personal toll their reporting exacts.

Much in the way that, a generation earlier, Poltergeist (1982) critiqued television as a portal of evil, The Ring thus positions the new shape of television and media, circa 1999 – 2002 as a technological and inhuman monstrosity.  

This idea is expressed in several scenes which show important action either transmitted on or reflected by the television set.  

Again and again we get compositions of characters watching screens, a fact which indicates the importance of that "act" in our modern culture. At one point, we even get a Goldilocks-type shot with a big-screen/little screen dynamic for Rachel and Aidan.  They are joined in the act of watching something...inappropriate.

Importantly, Samara, it is reported in the film “never sleeps.”  Do you know what else never sleeps? 

A 24-hour cable news channel on TV.

Even the near-ritualistic repeating of Samara’s tape in the film seems to reflect the nature of modern mass media.  

You can check in on CNN every two or three hours and find it replaying the same footage, the same imagery, the same “breaking news” reel.  This was true, as well, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, shortly before The Ring premiered in theaters. A nation’s trauma was recorded, broadcast and rerun day after bloody day, over and over again, and those who saw it felt authentic fear and real trauma even though they were safe, and lived thousands of miles away from Manhattan, or Washington D.C.  

The suffering of the few was spread “like a sickness” and a virus of fear was released into the world at large.  

That virus, eventually, became the Iraq War, a war that would never have occurred had the media not been complicit in drumming up a culture of absolute, pervasive fear.

Steely and silver in color palette, The Ring thus reveals a world in which people -- despite all the connection provided by telephones and television -- feel isolated from one another.  

Noah and Rachel barely talk, and Noah is unwilling to step up as Aidan’s father.  “I don't think I'd make a good father. Maybe it was because my own was... such a... disappointment. Thing is, I don't want anyone else to do it, either, be your father.”  

In other words, Noah doesn’t seem to truly be living, but rather existing in a kind of half-paralyzed, half-awake state.  He wants to be a Dad and he doesn’t want to be a Dad. He has a job, after all...looking at screens all day.

Similarly, Rachel doesn’t listen to Aidan’s teacher, or to Aidan’s worries about death, and Samara’s mother committed suicide.  

Taken all together, this world is a dark place where love seems subdued, but personal traumas spread like wildfire, chain-mail style, via “the tape" and TV monitors.

Samara’s brand of evil also fits the film’s organizing principle, of suffering transmitted to many, like a disease, by modern technology.  

The last thing she sees is a “ring” around the well where she is trapped, and yet a “ring” is also the description of the sound a telephone makes.  The phone rings when Samra reaches out to warn viewers of the tape of their impending demise.  

A “ring” is also a synonym for a circle or loop, and news footage of tragedies are often discussed in terms of being “looped.”  Samara may be physically dead, but her suffering keeps transmitting via phone ring, and via the ring or loop of the tape itself.  

And this is how she wants it.  “Everyone will suffer,” she insists.  In modern culture, and thanks to technology, everyone can experience one person's suffering.  And as often as they would like.

The Ring establishes a new paradigm in the American horror movie involving culpability, and that too is part of it successful artistic gestalt. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, “vice preceded slice and dice.”  That turn of phrase means, simply, that the victim pool in horror movies often brought on their own deaths by breaking moral taboos. They smoked weed, had premarital sex, or snorted coke.  

This paradigm was seen in the slasher formula of the 1980s, but also the Interloper formula of the 1990s, wherein quasi-respectable white men (think: Timothy Hutton in The Temp [1993]) broke “the rules” to get ahead in his profession, only to see the blow-back destroy his family and reputation.

But films like The Ring, The Grudge (2004) and Pulse (2006), suggest something different. 

They suggest that the very act of being present, of watching or seeing is enough to warrant the wrath of angry spirits or individuals.  

In a hyper-connected, globalized world, the act of watching is enough to doom you.  Knowledge of a crime itself becomes the crime. Once you see the "the crime," you are culpable for it, a fact which is reflected in the photographs of the impacted in The Ring.  

Everyone becomes a hideous monster on film because they have "seen" Samara's tape.  They are now carriers of the disease, of the sickness that is spreading, according to Mr. Morgan.

Horror movies are often accused of coarsening the culture, or showcasing imagery that is somehow damaging to a society. Ironically, The Ring makes the reverse case. Consider: horror movies are rated appropriately, and reflect aspects of the society that created them. They are fictional works of art that are about violence in the culture, and how that violence affects people.  

TV news, by contrast, is not safely bounded within an artistic frame-work, or a regulatory one, for that matter. So while the horror film can comment meaningfully on the culture, the media, in its "fair and balanced" reporting, can actually damage it.  It just puts the images out there and leave it to "you" [to] "decide." 

The Japanese original, Ringu (1998) is a remarkable film too, with some big differences from the American version. There, the mystery of the island involves a volcano, not horses.  And the Noah figure, Ryuji, boasts psychic abilities, which helps when contending with Sadako, the film’s version of Samara. But perhaps because it was designed for American audiences, I find The Ring much scarier and on-point about technology than its Japanese predecessor. Both are great horror films, for certain.

In particular, the structure of The Ring, originated in the Japanese film, is clever because it doesn’t reveal the true horror of Samara’s behavior until after Rachel has solved the mystery.  

Until Noah becomes Samara’s victim in the film's last moments, we have seen only snippets of her activity, mainly the gruesome corpses she leaves behind.  

Thus, for the duration of the movie, we can only imagine how, precisely, Samara’s tape is murderous.  But then, all that coiled-up, sustained energy is released in the climactic scene with Noah, and we get to watch Samara’s emergence from the TV -- as a ghost and as a ghost signal -- virtually uninterrupted.  

There are few moments more genuinely disturbing in the American horror cinema of the early 2000s than Samara's escape from the television. Perhaps Samara’s water-logged form, long-hair and herky-jerky “digitized” movements have been aped so often now as to render them ineffective. 

But at the time, Samara’s ascent from the well -- and the TV set -- was a valedictory moment in the horror genre; the moment when the next generation of terror techniques and principles arrived and a new paradigm was born.

The Ring also develops well the notion of inevitability, of a “ring” of repeating events. 

You see the tape, and then you see the images of the tape in real life, until, finally, you meet Samara and she kills you. Accordingly, imagery from the tape including a ladder, water running blood-red, a fly, and an oval mirror, all recur progressively during Rachel’s investigation. The question becomes: were they already there, or are they a side-effect of Rachel’s vision; of her life re-shaping to the imagery that Samara has forged from her mind?

The Ring is an unnerving and disturbing film, made more so by the fact that it very much considers how we live in the 21st century, and wonders about all images that we have transmitted and committed to the ether.  

Could they come back to haunt us?