What It Feels Like for a Girl (Part Two: The Snappening)

As discussed yesterday, Ginger Snaps attained a certain level of cultish success, at least within horror circles, and relative to cost analyses for mid-to-low budget Canadian horror.  As is the way with horror, the idea of sequels became a consideration, however Ginger Snaps ended with a relatively conclusive story closure.  For one thing, how do you make a sequel to "Ginger Snaps" when Ginger is dead?  Well, the producers found two ways (or found writers who found ways) that differed as greatly from the original as they did from each other, and then released them both in the same calendar year.

FILM:


Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed - 2004
Written by Megan Martin
Directed by Brett Sullivan

Following the events of Ginger Snaps, Brigette is now out on her own, laying low, and struggling to keep her own lycanthropic infection at bay.  The Brigette to whom we're re-introduced is still socially reclusive, but clearly stronger and more self-reliant as a matter of maturation through necessity.  Survival is a full-time occupation for Brigette, and she meticulously charts her physical changes, dosing herself on monkshood to fight her slide toward the wild side.  She's on her own, but not totally alone.  She's haunted (and taunted) by visitations (or delusions) of Ginger, particularly when she knows she's slipping.  When she overdoses on the poison to stave off a flare-up, she awakens to find herself in rehab, cut off from the resources she needs to stay in control of herself.

To a large extent, Unleashed plays like a "Women on the Psych Ward" thriller, or alternately, a "Just Say NO to Lycanthropy" after-school special about the horrors of monkshood addiction.  Brigette has to deal with fellow patients while her grasp on self-control is slipping away, an exploitative orderly with access to her medicine, and Ghost, the strange young girl who suspects Brigette's true nature, and just might know a way out of the hospital.  To make matters much worse, she can smell the male werewolf that stalks her, eager for a mate.  This plays into some distinctly sexual connotations about controlling the beast within.

In ways, this is the most horrific of the three Ginger Snaps films.  The humor of the original really didn't make the jump to the sequels.  There are definitely some ironic beats about rehab, but none of the satirical edge that so invigorated the original.  This is Brigette, the sullen one, alone against herself most of all.  If Emily Perkins had to carry the first film, she's bench pressing this one.  Katharine Isabelle's role amounts to little more than a cameo.  That makes Unleashed much darker with a greater sense of foreboding .  It's a high definition, slow motion train wreck as Brigette fights to avoid certain doom.  The ending feels a little undeserved, but it certainly fits the narrative arc of the film and the character.

Ah, there's one more thing that bears mentioning.  I took some issue with the soggy and hairless werewolf in the first film, but the sequels seem to demonstrate that the transformation is by-and-large a much more gradual process than we're accustomed to in other movies.  The werewolves grow more hair over time, the further they move away from being human.  In fact, they turn out to be some of the wolfiest werewolves (that aren't just wolves) in any of werewolf movie I've watched.

Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning - 2004
Written by Christina Ray & Stephen Massicotte
Directed by Grant Harvey

"Together again... for the very first time!"

Rather than curing and/or resurrecting any characters for another go around, this is a sort-of prequel that inserts Ginger and Brigette into the origins of their curse.  Set in 1815, The Beginning tells the story of a time when the Wendigo's curse from native legends reached a transformative turning point on the Canadian frontier.  Traveling alone in the wilderness, the two girls with secrets behind them arrive at a frontier outpost in the dead of winter to find a dwindling troupe of soldiers and trappers with a few secrets of their own.

On one hand, this entry has the least humor of the bunch.  On the other hand, when Ginger responds to a tense and ominous dinner where simmering rage and racial, sexual & religious bigotry are on full display with "These people are fucked," it's clear that they're not taking themselves TOO seriously.

With a forest full of werewolves, an absent supply shipment and an atmosphere thick with paranoia and superstition, the Fitzgerald girls find themselves walking a precarious path between threats.  The only person who doesn't seem to be completely out of his mind is the native hunter, who just might be able to help them find some answers... if they don't all get killed first.

Ginger Snaps Back plays heavily on the threatening group dynamic.  Every interaction tugs threads of fear, tension and mistrust.  Additionally, it features the most outright carnage, closing things out with a bang.  Less is made of the sexual themes, unless you count the suspicions of the puritanical preacher (the type for whom everything is subtextually sexual) toward the girls.

If The Beginning had actually been the first film released, I doubt that Ginger Snaps would have become the kind of modest phenomenon that it did, but it's a sufficient excuse for getting the band back together one last time, and it's a dark little frontier adventure that metes out tension and a growing sense of fear from start to finish.

What It Feels Like for a Girl (Part 1)

 

So far, most of these movies have followed the Wolf Man tradition and dealt with male werewolves.  Today I'm going to look at a pair of radically different films that place women in the the fore.  The werewolf mythos has made much of the theme of male aggression in the past, but these both recontextualize the tales in uniquely feminine perspectives.

FILM:


In The Company of Wolves - 1984
Written by Neil Jordan & Angela Carter
Directed by Neil Jordan

I have to apologize right off the bat for the inadequacy of my ability to discuss In The Company of Wolves in as thoughtful a manner as it deserves.  I'm going to need to see it at least once more before I really get a grasp on just what the hell is going on here.  The film plays on more than one level and is dense with symbolism.  I can't imagine that that's all meant to be clear before one can approach it with the perspective of having seen the complete story arc, given the revelations involved.

Director Neil Jordan is still most often referenced with The Crying Game, but looking at the body of his work reveals a strong and recurring attraction to the supernatural and the imagination, which, of course, are facets of the same gem.  He's made films about vampires, ghosts, selkies (something of a were-seal in Irish legend) and here, werewolves.  Themes of transformation are also recurrent in his work, whether the mystical or the gender related.  Probably the most frequent element of all in his films is the consideration of sexuality, particularly its role in identity.  In this, Jordan's second film, all of those aspects of his directorial tastes are on full display.

This is also the second of at least nine times that Jordan has used Stephen Rea, who has done at least three werewolf movies in his career.  I don't really have a point here.  I just find it interesting in a trivial way.

The majority of the movie takes place in a young adolescent girl's dream, building up to a distinctly original reinterpretation of Little Red Riding Hood.  Now I, for a long time, have been considering the psychological, symbolic and sexual connotations of the LRRH story, but whatever I'd considered, it's clear to me now that Angela Carter had been there, written a thesis about it, then moved on to even larger considerations and implications.

Within the dream, Rosaleen's sister has been devoured by wolves; an inherent risk for "straying off the path."  Following this event, her grandmother shares with her various tales of the dangers of wolves (often while knitting for her the red shawl that she will come to wear proudly in a world of muted tones).  Over the arc of the narrative, Rosaleen goes from meek child to budding young woman, and the appeal of straying off the path grows, and the lure of wolves becomes more seductive.  Obvious parallels to sexuality are only the beginning.  There's almost certainly something about independence and identity in there too.

None of this is to suggest that you need to watch the film as part of a women's studies curriculum, mind you.  I'm sure it's perfectly possible to enjoy the movie at face value and chalk up recurrent symbols to the fingerprints of cinematic auteurism.  Visually, In the Company of Wolves is lush and beautiful, filled with stimulating imagery that needn't have meaning to be enticing.  A bird's nest filled with eggs that reveal baby figurines inside can simply be strange and surreal without symbolizing fertility, which is merely a guess on my part.

As for the werewolves, Jordan approaches them from both ends of the spectrum.  On the one hand, we have a lot of just plain wolves running around in places, although the wolves are being played by Belgian Shepherds here.  On the other hand, we have some pretty disturbing and explicit werewolf transformations, particularly the one involving Stephen's Rea's character.  The effects aren't quite as high-end as American Werewolf's or even The Howling's, although I found it to be better thought out and even more unnerving than the latter.

It's never really a distinctly scary movie, but Jordan creates such a compellingly surreal atmosphere that conveys an appropriate sensation of dreaming.  There are different kind of dreams, and some of them convey a growing sense of undefined danger and dread as they go through their paces, visiting both seductive and unnerving imagery as they lure us in.  That's the kind of dream that Jordan and Carter craft for us here.  While the overarching narrative isn't necessarily the most compelling story when taken at face value, In the Company of Wolves is a completely unique werewolf movie with more than its share of moments and ideas all wrapped in gorgeousness, which more than earns the repeated viewings it's going to take to really digest it.

Ginger Snaps - 2000
Written by Karen Walton & John Fawcett
Directed by John Fawcett

The makers of Ginger Snaps have some female oriented observations about the werewolf mythos as well, although they approach them much differently.  Key to its development is the observation that both adolescent girl and werewolves are subject to a bloody "monthly curse."

Ginger and Brigette Fitzgerald are morbid pair of Canadian sisters.  At 16 and 15 (respectively) neither one of them have yet gotten their monthly friend, a fact which is of considerable concern to their busybody mother who listens more to parenting manuals than she does to her daughters.  Between their over-engaged mother and their disengaged father, they have made a pact with each other than they will either get the hell out of Nowheresville, Ontario ASAP, or come to a drastic end trying.  In a school filled with hollow mundanity, their escape and identity is rooted in their outsider status.  Ginger is the smart-mouthed and aggressive one who balks at attention from boys.  Brigette is the silently plotting brains of the team who not-so-secretly covet Ginger's strength.  Their roles and relationships to their family, school, classmates and each other are summed up neatly with a class photo project in which they depict themselves in a variety of possible suicide scenarios.

At the precise moment when Ginger first gets her period, one night in the park, she is attacked by some sort of feral beast that drags her into the woods.  Brigette helps her to flee, and the beast is hit by a van driven by the local dope dealer.  Previously inseparable, the changes that these events trigger in Ginger will become a growing wedge between them, in a way not dissimilar to the changes that all adolescents experience.  Except this one goes to eleven.

Suddenly Ginger becomes dramatically hormonal, sprouting hair where she never had it before (never mind that it's coarse and grey, growing from the bite marks on her shoulder) and the attention of boys is more than welcome.  Brigette, meanwhile, is desperate to both save her sister from the condition about which she has growing suspicions, and to keep Ginger from leaving her behind.

Getting right to the point; Ginger Snaps is my favorite werewolf movie, period (no pun intended).  Ginger and Brigette are strongly developed characters that would be enjoyable to watch no matter what the story vehicle.  I would watch them in any variation on the high school movie, whether or not there was a monster involved.  This is due not merely to the writing, but to the powerful performances from the film's two lead actresses; Katharine Isabelle (Ginger) and Emily Perkins (Brigette).

The first time I saw Ginger Snaps, I declared (to an empty room, but still out loud), "Oh THAT girl's gonna be a star" in reference to Isabelle.  Nevermind that she's beautiful.  She exudes the same kind of magnetic "cool to hang out with" appeal that has worked so successfully for Jennifer Lawrence.  Months after watching the Ginger Snaps films (more on that later), I was watching a movie called American Mary, and without realizing that I was watching the same actress, I declared to the empty room, "Oh SHE needs to get famous," only to realize once I jumped online that it was Katharine Isabelle again.  Purely in the interest of science, let me be clear, I had not made this declaration at any point in between, and I don't run around making it about every pretty face I see.  Isabelle plays Ginger with enthusiasm, making her antisocial behavior all the more appealing.  The humor and personality with which she fills Ginger overflows in such way that you realize it's bigger than the role.  She's certainly a working actress, but Hollywood hasn't yet given her the vehicle that would really put her into orbit.

Absolutely none of this raving is intended to take anything away from Emily Perkins.  It's certainly Ginger that steals the show, but it's Brigette that carries it.  While Isabelle is tasked with the slow-motion explosion of an adolescent girl coming unhinged as she turns into a werewolf, Perkins is the one that has to hold it all together while Brigette feels her world falling apart.  She really becomes the lone protagonist and draws us close to see how she has to become her own person in the face of this cataclysm.  The role calls for range, and Perkins delivers it.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is Mimi Rogers as the girls' mother.  Several of the most laugh-out-loud hilarious moments come from her highly satirized portrayal of suburban parenting.  When the girls end up with too much blood on their hands (literally), Mom steps up with a plan to rescue them.  She's just a mom that cares, you guys!

The third act is a high tension race against tragedy, and it's here that Perkins is most clearly called upon to carry the film.  Once Ginger fully transforms, it's Brigette that we connect with and root for.  This does, however, bring up one of the less satisfying aspect of the film.  The final werewolf isn't all that we might have hoped for.  I'm not faulting the director for choosing to go the practical effects route, but the final wolf form looks kind of diseased and mutanty with wispy hair and wet, soggy flesh like a drowned and bloated molerat.  I'd be more concerned about it touching me than biting me.  Fortunately, the film isn't reliant on giving the werewolf a lot of screen time.

My only other complaint is a selfish one.  The funny parts are so funny and the sisters so personally appealing that I wanted more.  The blessing there is that Ginger Snaps attained enough cultish success to inspire a duet of sequels.  For more about those, come back tomorrow!

The Year of the Wolf

The anthologies are behind us, and we're on to Werewolf Week.  The truth is, I've been sitting on a bunch of werewolf movies with the intention of writing a Best Werewolf Movies list, but this is probably the closest I'm going to get to doing that.  The truth is, there just don't seem to be enough truly great ones to make it worth a Best Of list.  That being said, I expect to hit a lot of the high points this week.


Speaking of high points for werewolves, 1981 was it.  In one year, three major werewolf movies were released, then they disappeared back into the b-list.  I decided to watch all three of them in a row.  The things I do for you people...

FILM:

Wolfen - 1981
Written by David Eyre & Michael Wadleigh
from the Book by Whitley Strieber
Directed by Michael Wadleigh

Wolfen essentially presents as a mystery, opening with the grisly murders of a couple of big-deal New York socialites and power-brokers.  Evidently the case is so instantly startling to the NYPD that they feel obligated to call in hard-boiled and harder drinking retired cop, Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) to investigate the case.  While the rest of the department is investigating the murders on the premise that they were the act of an anarchist terror cell, Dewey along with not-quite-age-inappropriate lady-cop Diane Venora (Rebecca Neff) and jiving medical examiner Whittington (Gregory Hines) are following a trail that leads from canis lupus hair fibers to Native Americans to shape-shifting werewolves.  Yeah... it makes more sense in the context of the investigation, although Dewey does Goldblum his connections once or twice.

This is one of those movies where the director would be justified in saying things like "The city of New York is really a character in the story" and yet we're not talking about a case where there's some romantic encounter on the Circle Line leading to dinner at Tavern on the Green and a stroll through Central Park.  This isn't the "family-friendly" corporatized post-Giuliani New York.  This is the urban decaying New York of the post-70s which conservatives still imagine when they think of the big scary city.  The Bronx, which feature prominently in the story, look like Dresden.after the bombing, creating a unavoidable example of the themes of class division that enter into the plot.  There was also some fascinating New York "inside baseball" about Native Americans as steelworkers that clicked neatly into the story.

The werewolf aspect seems to serve to illustrate some of these same themes of old ways versus new ways, natural people versus money people, rather than that to be the primary excuse for telling a "werewolf story" with the running and the biting.

I was really very pleasantly surprised by Wolfen.  I'd been given the impression that it was the lesser of the three werewolf movies from '81, but instead what I found was a slightly twisted police procedural with a strong sense of momentum, some enjoyable characters, and a unique take on werewolves that bucked convention in a clear way that wasn't overly hung up on its own mythology.  The special effects were certainly the least complicated, never showing us a true transformation and primarily using real wolves.  I didn't feel that this took anything away from Wolfen, and in fact, served not to distract, but I can see how that might be significant to some people.  Special effects were a big deal to me when I was a kid too.  So if the "least of these" was this good, I was eager to move on to the rest.

The Howling - 1981
Written by John Sayles & Terrence Winkless
from the Book by Gary Brandner
Directed by Joe Dante

If Wolfen is a mystery with a werewolf elements woven in, then The Howling, you could say, is a werewolf movie with a mystery woven in.  It uses elements of a mystery, but they're only mysterious to the characters who, by and large, come off as a bunch of self-absorbed nitwits.

The Howling opens with tough-as-nails TV news reporter Karen White (Dee Wallace) on her way to meet a serial killer/her stalker down in the seedy part of town with the porn stores and the ethnic people.  There are a couple problem right there, just for starters.  One, Dee Wallace is not believably "tough-as-nails."  She presents as a cream-puff, and, despite the roles she's played over the years, never convincingly exhibited strength in a role until she was into her 50s.  Secondly, are you freakin' kidding me with this meeting a serial killer who also happens to be your stalker shit?  The BEST excuse available is career ambition, which isn't actually a virtue taken on its own.  If she's not believably tough and she's demonstrably stupid and self-serving, why on Earth should we care what happens to her?  I certainly didn't, and that presents a problem.

Okay, maybe we got off on the wrong foot.  What follows is actually kind of interesting.  After meeting with the killer and getting rescued by a shoot-first-and-well-at-least-I-shot-first! rookie cop (seriously, the guy fires blindly THROUGH A DOOR in the direction of a scream), what follows is, I have to assume, a satire of modern life as the self-examining 70s turn to the self-without-the-examining-part 80s.  As she returns to the TV station, we're introduced further to a collection of crass, self-obsessed characters and their apparent guru, putting-the-self-in-"self-help" psychiatrist Dr. Waggner (Patrick Macnee).  When Karen folds up on camera when she's supposed to tell her tale of confrontation with a killer, the news director decides she needs to get away for some rest and self-actualization at Waggner's woo-woo Colony in the woods.

So Karen and her husband, the Marlboro Man (henceforth known as Bill) head off to camp where they meet a bunch of people as flaky as they are and Marsha (Elizabeth Brooks) the resident "nymphomaniac" sets her sights on Bill (Christopher put-the-Stone-in-Dee-Wallace-Stone).  Things are a little "off," and Karen is increasingly disturbed by strange sounds from the woods.  Soon enough, Bill has been attacked in the woods by some kind of creature, but he's doing fine. ...except for the part where he's suddenly making the filthy werewolf whoopee with Marsha.

Meanwhile, back home, Karen's co-workers are following up on the killer's story which picks up the stink of a wolf marking territory.  When the killer's body disappears from the morgue, things are definitely showing signs that there's more here than meets the eye.  The mysteries aren't so much solved as revealed, and the third act is a werewolf bonanza, featuring a major transformation scene that was a pretty big deal at the time.

For my money, I felt that The Howling had the weakest story of the three, by a considerable measure.  I didn't engage with the characters or care what happened to them.  I enjoyed the satire, but I'm not sure to what extent it was intentional versus me looking back at the early 80s with sharpened hindsight.  Given the involvement of Joe Dante and John Sayles, I'm prepared to believe that it was intentional.  I like the use of practical effects, but I found the werewolves to have kind of a silly (and inconsistent) design (due largely to ridiculously long ears and hair) and the transformation, while impressive for its time, hasn't aged well, and was never as good as American Werewolf's.  It makes no sense to me that the skin should bubble that way, other than that effects artist Rob Bottin felt obligated to distinguish himself from his mentor, Rick Baker, who was working on American Werewolf at the same time.  At one point during the transformation, Wallace actually looked bored and impatient in a cutaway shot, creating the only moment at which I sympathized with her in the movie.  Of the three movies here, The Howling is the most unabashed about its b-movie heritage, to the extent that it isn't really not one.  Why should it come as a surprise to me that this is the one that spawned a litter of sequels?

An American Werewolf in London - 1981
Written & Directed by John Landis

An American Werewolf in London is, in many ways, the most simple of the three, and that's not a bad thing.  There's very little mystery, and yet there is a consistent ramping-up of tensions.  Like See You Next Wednesday, the porno movie featured in its penultimate scene, it's long on foreplay, then obscenely explicit and orgiastic in its climax.  It also most deeply embraces its relationship with Lon Chaney's original Wolf Man, in all the best ways (except perhaps for a lack of gypsies).

David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne) are American college students doing the whole European backpacking thing.  For reasons unexplained, they have chosen the rainy ass-end of England to start their journey.  In a quaint-but-not-in-a-welcoming-way Welsh village, they're met with instant suspicion when they walk into the pub.  If a record had been playing, the needle would have fallen off.  They manage to cajole the surly bar mistress into a cup of hot tea, but when they inquire about the pentagram scratched into the wall, it becomes evident that it's time for them to leave; tea or no tea.  As they leave, they're granted a foreboding warning to stay on the road, off the moors, and to beware the moon.

Leaving rural hospitality behind them, they're once again on their way, and without so much as a word, soon off the road and trotting across the moors by night.  Rain comes.  Then howls in the distance.  Worry turns to panic as they realize they have no sense of direction.  The howls become nearer, and almost always in front of them, almost as though it were circling them... whatever it is.  They run.

Whatever it is attacks.  Jack is down.  David runs on, then turns back.  He finds Jack, horribly mauled to death, and then whatever it is attacks him too.  The villagers arrive with rifles and cut it down, and David loses consciousness...

He awakens in a London hospital three weeks later, nearly healed, but haunted by nightmares of everyone he loves being killed.  The nightmares seem to be seeping into his waking life, as a mangled vision of Jack appears to tell him that he's going to turn into a werewolf at the next full moon and he needs to kill himself to save others and to free the souls of the restless dead killed by the lineage of werewolves that ends with him.

Like in The Wolf Man, American Werewolf treats David's lycanthropy as a curse, a horrible burden.  For several days, David believes that he's losing his mind and the visions of a decaying Jack are merely the face and voice of his guilt.  That's both reasonable, but also an act of denial in its own right.  Leaving the hospital, he's taken up with a charming English nurse and found happiness that he doesn't want to end.  When, after a prize-winning transformation (literally -- Rick Baker won the first ever Oscar for Best Makeup for this) David wakes up naked in the wolf cage at the zoo to news reports of several murders, he comes to believe the unbelievable truth.

The story here is clean, unconvoluted, leaving plenty of room for humor and character-building.  The threat builds slowly after the initial attack.  In that way, it works more like a haunting, gradually drawing the unseen enemy within nearer to the surface, and conveniently working in the ever-more-disturbing visions of Jack, decomposing much more quickly than a corpse actually would but who cares, you've got Rick freakin' Baker showing his stuff here.  Meanwhile the romance builds and so does our investment in these characters.  Hope and despair tug back and forth, destined to collide.

It should go without saying that I enjoyed this one most of all, but there I've gone and said it anyway.  It simply wins every category by which a film can be judged against another, as far as I am concerned.  I was startled to find that there were people who prefer the effects in The Howling, because this was just masterfully done.  While much wolfier, my only complaint is that, like in The Howling, the wolf's hair is far too long.  Do these people never look at actual wolves?  Rather than the silly bubbling effect, the werewolf stretches into his transformed self.  David howls in pain as his bones change shape, his organs shift and his skin distends.  What clearer depiction of a cursed man could there be?

In the end, I'm glad I saw all three, and that I made a triple feature out of the whole affair.  They were three distinctly different takes on a sub-genre that doesn't always strike one as fertile ground for variety.  That being said, An American Werewolf in London is the only one that I expect to watch again, and that certainly should say something about what it has to offer.

Monster Mashington DC

FILM:

The American President.  He (or she, just hang on) is committed to protecting the nation from all enemies foreign, domestic or supernatural, right?  We are assured that the Pentagon has considered plans for a Zombie Apocalypse, but if the movies are to be believed (and why wouldn't they be?) this is not the first time that the President has had to deal with the Undead Un-American Activities.  Many of our greatest presidents have faced down some of our most classic monsters already, and they did not shirk their responsibilities.

What with the internet being the hotbed for "This + That" nerdistry and wannamemes that it is, there are as many spawns of this idea as a hot bed is wont to bring forth, especially with zombies.  There is zombie every-damn-thing on the internet.  Go on, think of a word, add zombie to it and Google.  Yup, there it is.  Zombie Pool, both billiards and swimming.  Zombie Ice Cream.  Zombie Pope.  As such, I'm not addressing every damn variation on this theme, but simply hitting some of the bigger cinematic moments in American Presidents versus Classic Monsters.  Fanfic (and there's puh-lenty) need not apply.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - 2012

Abraham Lincoln vs Vampires

I was surprised to discover that this was a June release, because it has the key ingredients of a May movie; specifically traditional monsters, a forgettable story, B-list effects and double cheese.  That's not to say that it's bad, mind you.  I often have more fun with May movies than I do with, say, the July ones.  They're frequently more fun, and AL:VH is certainly that.

The film doesn't so much posit an alternate timeline as a secret history.  Lincoln, in his youth, had a run in with some pretty vicious vampires, which led him to a night job as a slayer of the undead while he pursued his legal and political career by day.  He trains with a mentor hunter in the finer points of axe-handling, which you just know is gonna end poorly for the mentor yet motivationally for Honest Abe.  This comes in handy, since there is a much larger vampire threat with endangers the future of American freedom... or something.

The movie makes more than a token effort to fit the vampires in around the events of Lincoln's life.  Sure, whenever you shake a tree like this, four score and seven history nerds fall out to tell why nuh-uh, but for a movie that tell you in its title that it gives not one shit about such fussbudgets, it's more faithful than it needs to be.

The action is slick and cool.  Lincoln is a reluctant badass, much as history holds him to be... plus, you know, the axe.  Lincoln wields it like a kung fu artist and it provides a unique visual profile to what might otherwise have been some pretty rote violence.  The not-terribly-memorable villain is played by an Englishman, because ALL the villains are played by Englishmen nowadays.  The narrative takes itself seriously internally, but it is fully aware that you won't.

Really, the weakest thing about it is that I've seen it twice and I still don't remember the full core story.  I think that's probably because it was pulled along more by the chronology of Lincoln's life (lives being less tightly structured than stories) rather than by A-to-B narrative tropes.

It's good mindless fun that won't fill you up or weigh you down.

FDR: American Badass! - 2012

Franklin Roosevelt vs Werewolves


This movie has every excuse to be terrible, and there's certainly no denying the bargain basement production values, but despite all the obvious shortcomings, it's really rather funny thanks to its script and performers.  I can only assume it was conceived as a low-budget satire on the idea of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, being released straight-to-video within months of the bigger-budgeted film.  Where Lincoln takes itself remarkably seriously, FDR takes absolutely NOTHING seriously, and that is its trump card.

As a younger man, Franklin Roosevelt was good at everything and so beloved by everyone that his massive ego was merely another beloved characteristic.  And then he was attacked by a werewolf, and werewolf bites cause polio, dontcha know?  In a sight gag that will recur throughout the movie, FDR's legs are reduced to wildly quivering children's legs.  That sets the "story" into motion, and establishes the level and premise for much of the movie's humor.  As FDR, Barry "Brad" Bostwick is an over-the-top caricature of the manly man of bygone days.  He drinks hard, he laughs hard at his own jokes, and he's predominantly concerned with how the polio will affect his "cack."  After the werewolf attack, he's more determined than ever to become President.

Little does he know at the time, but the werewolf was a German agent.  It seems that all the Axis powers are werewolves, and werewolves Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini chat with each other on the phone like teenage girls while making their plans for world conquest.  Fortunately, FDR is a take-charge kind of leader, and takes point on the D-day invasion with his armored and machine gun-enabled wheelchair.

In case I've been too subtle, this is not a delicate comedy of manners.  It's crude in as many ways as possible, but there's an ounce of brain under the hood of it all, as opposed to, say, just another Wayans movie.  My personal favorite joke comes from a left-field cribbing of Bon Jovi lyrics in a campaign meeting FDR has with a struggling constituent.  Some people will be put off by some of the humor which comes across as racist or sexist, but there are enough instances that expose enough awareness to suggest that what they are really mocking is not races and sexes, but racists and sexists.

For a movie that didn't need to accomplish much to attain "so bad it's good" low-low-budget and expectations status, it really seemed to me that FDR: American Badass! delivered more than it needed to, and much more cleverly than is likely to be appreciated.

Bubba Ho-Tep - 2002

John F Kennedy vs a Mummy


Bruce Campbell is a sad old man in a nursing home.  He drifts in and out of awareness, and isn't sure he cares.  He also may or may not be Elvis.

Ossie Davis is his best friend in the nursing home.  He also may or may not be JFK.

Together they become aware of an entity that haunts the nursing home by night, sucking the life energy out of the home's defenseless residents.  He definitely IS an Egyptian mummy!

Jack and Elvis have to push themselves to their limits to confront the mummy and free the souls of their friends.  While it takes the obvious guise of a monster movie, much of what makes Bubba Ho-Tep so good is the way it uses these recontextualized horror tropes to consider issues of age, ability and respect.  The majority of monster movies are about impulsive young people who don't think about what they're doing.  Jack and Elvis aren't like that.  They don't run screaming like a bunch of ninnies.  They face their enemy fully accepting that they will likely die.  It's not about survival for them.  They're past that point.  It's about being useful, having value, and dedicating their lives to doing something with meaning.  They continue to EARN respect, even if no one gives it to them anymore.

Must-see if you appreciate the way that Bruce Campbell can turn just about any line into something hilarious and cool.  Easily one of the best mummy movies ever, which isn't really saying that much.

See also: JFK vs zombies in Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Mars Attacks! - 1996

The President vs Martians


Yeah, you could just as easily put Independence Day in this slot, but Mars Attacks! is the better movie by far.  They're essentially the same movie, but ID takes itself completely seriously, which makes it all the more ridiculous.  Mars Attacks! however, is based on a fan favorite trading card series from the 1960s and takes very little seriously.  ID wants you to care about the outcome.  MA! gives you credit for already knowing that the human have to win in the end, so it doesn't really matter if it's a silly victory.  That approach is woven throughout the movie.  ID teases you with its aliens and insists that they're badass and scary even after it's been revealed that they're cheesy and dopey.  MA!'s aliens fully embrace their anachronistic origins and simply play their required role.  This all frees up MA! to be more creative and fun while essentially doing the same things.

It's an ensemble cast, and just happens to include Jack Nicholson in two roles, one of whom is the President.  While one might initially question the judgment of casting Nicholson in two roles when he is always so clearly Nicholson, Mars Attacks! reminds you that it couldn't possibly matter.  The film is full of recognizable faces and at no point does it matter if they embody the role with transcendent gravitas.  It's more like an episode of the Love Boat.  It's just fun to have them there because they're them, and them being them is a convenient shorthand to who they're playing.  There's no extra exposition required, which again, frees up MA! to be the silly fun that it is.

Nicholson's President oozes with transparent people-pleasing charm.  His triteness is summed up with the go-to refrain for late 20th century naivete, "Can't we all just... get along?" shortly before he learned the hard way that the Martians have not come all this way to... get along.

See also: President Colbert vs aliens in Monsters vs. Aliens

Death Race 2000 - 1975

"Frankenstein" vs the President

Death Race 2000 is one of that select class of 70s exploitation films that manages to have it both ways.  It's a brutal satire that gets away with just being brutal if that's the way you watch it.  The premise presages the like of The Running Man, The Hunger Games or CBS's Survivor, where a cross-country race in which hapless victims of automotive homicide are scored for points, all of this in a bread-and-circuses effort to distract from the corruption of the government.  The racers are all over-the-top personalities a la Hanna Barbera's Wacky Races, professional fake wrestling or "Real" "Housewives."

Under the surface of all these goings-on there's the political machinations of the president, and the underground movement to overthrow him.  One of the most successful racers, Frankenstein played by David Carradine, is sympathetic to the cause.  He's seen and been the worst of the best and the best of the worst.

In the interest of full disclosure, Frankenstein is not a Frankenstein's monster.  He's just a man who survived a disfiguring accident and earned the moniker for his appearance.  Nevertheless, it was too golden an opportunity to round out the roster of classic monsters faced by presidents.

Death Race 2000 was a midnight movie classic that has now attained the status of just plain classic.  The satire is still bitingly timely, which says a whole lot of bad things about the ground we've covered in the past 40 years.




Obama vs Zombie image from the internet, no rights or credit claimed