Unraveling Sono's 'Suicide'

Sion Sono wrestles with the soul of the Japanese in 2002's "Suicide Circle."

As much a meditation on the Eastern version of free will versus self-determination as it is a shocking thrilled, "Suicide Circle" confronts its audience with images of detached youth finding meaning in the final moment.

And then it asks, "Are we complicit in such self-destructive cycles?"

Packed with wince-inducing images of self-annihilation, the film somehow suggests a tranquil center, and resolves into a dreamlike beauty.

Sono's film is dense, dark, and disturbing, but in this reviewer's analysis, stands up with great moment of gory societal critique. "Suicide Club" should be placed on the shelf next to "A Clockwork Orange" and "Natural Born Killers," perhaps.

Read about "Suicide Circle" at Cinescare.com.

The Real Torture ...

It is not clear which Saw movies critics and horror fans watch, when they come up with this all-too-common quote: "I can't go and see the Saw movies because they are just so agonizing and torturous, and everything is always so down."

In this case, the quote is from Mr. Disgusting's Bloody-Disgusting.com interview with actress Danielle Panabaker, starring in the 2009 reboot of "Friday the 13th." 

What is she speaking of?

The number one accusation hurled at Leigh Whannell and James Wan's franchise is that it falls within the realm of, say, Eli Roth's torture-porn series Hostel. This is pretty far from the truth. 

Let's look for a moment at content and underlying meaning of the Saw pictures. Jigsaw is a man decimated by cancer and a history of personal loss. Yes, he constructs elaborate traps that force his victims to make brutal choices between physical well-being and absolute survival. 

Jigsaw does not torture people. His victims are selected from the corrupt, the addicted; the torturers, rapists, and morally vacuous of the world. In the moments of crisis into which he immerses them, Jigsaw demands they come alive for the first time — to explore the meaning of their biography and choose a better life or die  by their own impatient adherence to the easiest path. 

If we find Saw "torturous, and everything is always so down," it is because the franchise's creators take their material seriously. The films set a tone, and adhere to it. The narrative is complex and interwoven. We are not meant to walk away from Saw lightly, or without a head full of thoughts on what has happened before us. 

And then there's the version of horror cinema people like Panabaker understand. Speaking in that same interview about the upcoming "Friday the 13th," she assures us: "The movie, for starters, is hilarious." 

Therein, perhaps, lays real torture. 

Brain Dead?

Zombie films are a favorite at Cinescare. No other iteration of the modern horror film makes its mark on sociopolitical cinema as the dead walking. That is, the shuffling hordes are all too familiar. The mindless masses are every conscious adult's nightmare. Isn't Romero and company's listless, hungry apocalypse the feared eventual product of every drone worker's experience, of too many bleak florescent-lit days between beige cubicle walls? 

But in anything,  repetition breeds a kind of inoculation. Romero's last installment, "Diary of the Dead" in 2007, was horribly earnest, and it showed seams. Rumors of a direct followup from Romero, and coupled with new plans for funny corpses, the zombie film faces a threat worse than bullets to the head: brainless activity.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ruben Fleischer is set to lens "Zombieland," a comedic horror starring Woody Harrelson. This follows, of course, in the shambling footsteps of Edgar Wright's 2004 "Shaun of the Dead" (not a sequel, think of it as The Office effect — the reinvention of the successful British property through safer, blander American methods).

The issue here is twofold: Approach and dilution. 

First, comedy has never needed to be explicit in the zombie film. Romero's Dead franchise has always exploited the ridiculous, presenting the lumbering decomposed as dark imitations of the vacant lives too many humans already lead in urban and suburban America. 

While "Shaun of the Dead" was fine piece of postmodernism, it also wasn't a terribly valuable contribution to the zombie canon. One reviewer, upon its release, noted that main character Shaun (Simon Pegg) fails to notice any difference between the walking dead and the living, at the start of the movie. A brilliant execution, in "Shaun of the Dead," but the same is true of the unwitting Barbara and her brother at the beginning of "Night of the Living Dead." 

The point is, the newest iterations of the undead are not necessarily any fresher. And loading the leads with one-liners is not an approach that brings anything necessarily new or salient to the context. The dead, walking, have been the objects of nervous laughter for at least 40 years. Forking them onto the bonfire of belly laughs leads us to the second component of comedic horror zombie films — dilution.

The reduction of the source to a parodic form, at best, recasts the original as important. But Hollywood loves to repeat itself. "Zombieland" is "Shaun of the Dead," in concept, only the continent has changed. Does anyone really need this picture? Or any others like it?

Fangs for Nothing, Folks!

[NOTE: OUTDOOR SCREENING: Please check out Cinescare's outdoor screening of Werner Herzog's 1979 masterpiece, "Nosferatu," tonight at The Video Underground in Jamaica Plain. The screening starts at 7.30pm with Attila Szasz's expertly photographed short, "Now You See Me, Now You Don't." And then it's a mini-lecture on German nationalist cinema and Herzog's vampire, followed by the feature. The event is sponsored by UFO beer. See you tonight!]

Okay, on to our look at recent horror media. 

Plenty of room for interpretation when it comes to just what HBO's renewal of True Blood for a second season — two episodes into season one — means. 

But first, all the usual suspects are frothing over Hollywood Reporter's news that Carrie Fisher is negotiating with Summit Entertainment for a role in the company's remake of "The House on Sorority Row," a 1983 slasher about the titular sisters succumbing to a serial killer after they accidentally off one of their own during a prank. 

Perhaps the sheer proximity of the Star Wars star to a genre project simply proved too much for ShockTillYouDrop and Mania, as they both run accurate stories but completely false headlines. 

The former tells us: "Carrie Fisher is the House Mother on Sorority Row," while its lead is "Carrie Fisher is in negotiations ..." Mania gets in the mix with its equally exuberant inaccuracy: "Carrie Fisher Joining Modern Sorority Row" (the distinction in time, presumably in case readers imagined Fisher might be stepping into the cast of the 1983 film). As The House of the Devil has asked before, so it asks again: Does anyone edit these things?

And now, the dirty business. True Blood's second season means somebody at HBO is taking the vampires-meets-Alien-Nation storyline seriously, but THOD has to question the voraciousness with which your favorite online horror sources slurped up channel programming president Micahel Lombardo's press release gushings. 

Here are the facts, fanged as they are: The top 10 cable programs from the week of Sept. 8, according to Nielsen, ranged from 12.5 million viewers at the top (Vikings vs. Packers game) to 5.02 million viewers in the 10th place spot (Monk). With that kind of data, let's look at the vampire show. 

Bloody-Digusting had the sense to include actual True Blood viewer numbers from Sept. 7 and Sept. 14 (1.4 million and 1.8 million). Compared to 10th-place Monk, True Blood is still in its coffin ... barely out of the ground. 

But Lombardo's release is all about the positive. As well it should be, HBO supports the program. By his measure, the show saw a 24 percent jump from 1.4 million to 1.8 million. Even that math is weird. Isn't the difference between 1.4 and 1.8 actually 28 percent? (Nobody has accused THOD of being a math wizard, however. Ever.)

No matter, the long and short of it is that the percent change has to be presented within the context of the actual numbers. For example, a 24 percent increase in Monk's viewership in one week would mean more than 1.2 million new viewers jumped on board. But in True Blood's corner, 24 percent more equals 400,000 new viewers. 

That's quite a difference of proportion. 

No one tells you this, however, out there in horror-media land. And then there's the way the percent change is characterized, or not characterized. 

Bloody-Disgusting is the most mild-tempered: "The show's aud grew significantly." Fangoria doesn't try to characterize the increase (good for them, actually) but completely fails to tell readers what size audience to which the 24 percent rise applies. Could be anything, really. ShockTillYouDrop pulls the same punch: here's the percent change, but no viewership numbers. 

And then there's Mania. Oh, Mania. 

Jarrod Sarafin apparently drank the Kool-Aid with a little too much gusto. He provides Lombardo's percent data in a rush of celebration, and conflates viewership over time with viewership at air time. 

Sarafin writes: "The Sept. 7 debut episode is proving to be a hit with HBO audiences, attracting more than four million viewers to date, while the debut of the second episode on Sept. 14 posted an unprecedented 24% gain in viewers over the first week's debut."

With that kind of smooshing together of the facts, one could draw the false conclusion that 960,000 new people started watching True Blood (that is, that the 24 percent increase is what got the viewership to 4 million, not to 1.8 million). 

And how Sarafin concocts that a 24 percent increase is "unprecedented" is a mystery. Television programs over the past several months logged increases such as 76 percent (Mad Men's season two premiere), 22 percent (2008 DNC coverage, opening night to night two), even the magical 24 percent (2008 RNC coverage debut). 

All this boils down to some basic reporting skills. When grappling with numbers and percent change, one can't just trust the press release and fork the numbers onto the reader without some kind of context. I don't suppose that genre reporting is coming from J-school grads, mind you, but does it ever seem like maybe our genre news sources tend to play four-square on the basketball court?

We'll let Lombardo have the last word, quoted from the same press release in the Hollywood Reporter (via Reuters, here): "The show deserves a second year whatever the ratings." 

Exactly. Thanks, Michael. That puts it in perspective. 

Where, Out There, the Truth is Not

Mania uncorks a bottle of "do-you-like-it?" on Fox's Fringe. They'd have you believe Fox execs are jumping for joy over the series debut.

JJ Abrams' The X-Files redux featured a pilot with actual pilots — a passenger jet full of skeletons and a familiar FBI-partners-chase-the-supernatural structure. 

What's confounding about writer Stephen Lackey's article on the show is that it is (a) headlined "Everybody's on the FRINGE," with a sub-headline maintaining "All Eyes Were on Fox for the FRINGE Premiere," and (b) his lead reads "Did you watch the series premiere of Fringe? Apparently everyone else did according to Nielsen. Preliminary numbers for the 90 minute premiere averaged 9 million viewers and a 3.2 rating/share in the adults 18 to 49 demographic."

Well, Stephen, nice try. Here's what the numbers really mean: Fringe had a modest opening, leaving Fox in fourth place overall behind NBC, CBS, and ABC, according to tvbythenumbers.com

The TV Decoder blog at the The New York Times tells us Fringe did indeed lead 18-49 year-old viewers for the the night, but that its 9 million watchers put it just in front of ABC reality competition Wipeout. 

For a $10 million episode, that's not going to win Abrams a seat of honor at the next Fox board meeting. And while Lackey notes that Fringe is the biggest premiere on Fox "in a couple of years," (he presumably means Standoff in 2006) he fails to not that Standoff — at 13.7 million viewers on its opening night — was subsequently canceled for low numbers. 

So what's going on here? Sloppily constructed opinion? A little booster action from Mania for advertising favor? 

Hard to say. But what's not hard is to predict that Fringe has a tough haul ahead of it, and all eyes were certainly not there, last Tuesday. 

Who Speaks for Chucky?

In a quiet news week, what are horror entertainment journalists to do? 

Dig something up, of course, and they've done that since Sunday, with varying results. 

ShockTillYouDrop published a smart and exclusive interview with "Child's Play" producer David Kirschner and writer Don Mancini. 

The two are at work on a remake of the 1988 original. As with most reboots, in the 2000s, this take will be darker and more realistic than its initial camp/consumer-culture infused iteration. 

Mania's Jarrod Sarafin thought well of Ryan Rotten's interview. He repackaged STYD's coup with a consumer-note lead that the original "Child's Play" is available in its 20th-anniversary edition this week. Sarafin apparently assumes buyers know new DVDs tend to drop on Tuesdays, so he doesn't include the date of the release. It's today, Sept. 9. 

And that's not all he leaves out. Sarafin moseys through the rest of this unfortunately typical Mania half-assery by dropping a quote from the STYD interview into his news item, but he forgoes any kind of attribution. We don't know who is talking, or how they might be related to "Child's Play." It's writer Mancini in Sarafin's piece, talking about the movie.

Bloody-Disgusting.com skips the "Child's Play" item entirely, but rounds up some minor casting news from in-production projects ("Killing Jar," an untitled Twisted Pictures project, and "Butterfly Effect: Revelation" [although what that film is doing on a horror cinema Web site is an open question]). 

Mr. Digusting could have skipped the clunker from 2007, however. Shoreline Entertainment (producers of "The Signal") has listed on its Web site for some time that something called "From Beyond," a reworking of H.P. Lovecraft's short story of the same name, is in preproduction. But it's certainly not news. No cast. No director. The company has not listed "From Beyond" with IMDB.com. 

I Ain't Afraid of No Facts

So, the good news, if you're a fan of interdisciplinary genre film, is that Sony has attached two writers to a possible new Ghostbusters movie. 

The bad news, if you follow such things online, is that the piss-poor horror-film media can't get the story right to save its, um ... soul.

Hollywood Reporter, as usual, is the apparent ground zero for the accurate news. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, and director Ivan Reitman, are "aware of" the project. The upshot of the production: Writer-producers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, of the U.S. incarnation of The Office, are attached to the film. It is meant to be a reboot, not necessarily a direct sequel, and it will focus on a new cast. 

Fangoria eschews some detail, but jives with Hollywood Reporter. This is a new cast. Not the familiar quartet. At least, nothing is promised in that regard.

Variety, in a show of journalistic hubris, decides that having some familiar names in the Sony news is cause for a little leap of logic. Scribe Michael Fleming's second graf just plops the change in facts down: "a film designed to bring back together the original cast." Fine,  just put it out there, no attribution other than his. And then he goes on. Why stop at a sip, when one can chug at the table? "The close proximity between the writers and original Ghostbuster Ramis is evidence that the ghost chasers have sparked to the idea of returning," he writes. Oh, really? 

And then Mania and Bloody-Disgusting run ape-shit all over the news. Why do any reporting yourselves? Just copy things in there, kids. 

MANIA: Writer Jarrod Sarafin whiffs from the start, telling readers that "the studio hopes of [sic] bringing back Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Ernie Hudson for their title roles." No attribution is given for this claim (although we know now it's from Variety). His article also ends in media res, thanks to the apparently editor-less Mania setup, but perhaps that's best. Sarafin also calls this a Columbia Pictures project, while his headline declares it a Sony project. The fact is that Columbia is owned by Sony and Sony announced the development. Sarafin should choose one, or make some distinction in the body of the text. 

BLOODY-DISGUSTING: I like how they title their news brief, "Get the eff out ... 'Ghostbusters 3' Officially Announced." I actually do. That's funny and energetic. Granted, nobody at Sony "announced" the movie is greenlighted and in production; merely that some writers have been hired to work on a script. But the headline is plausibly deniable, and it's fun. But then they drop Fleming's opinion piece into the space provided. It's literally just a copy and paste. Why there's a yellow header that reiterates what's in the article is beyond me, but there it is, getting it wrong again. At least they tell us the source of the hooey at the bottom of the article. Mania just blasts Sarafin's primitive English as if he did a little reporting or something.