Saturday, December 7, 2013

Jason goes to Holehead--Day 5

Two more movies last Tuesday. I'm trying to catch up so let's just jump right in.

First up was THE CEMETERY. A cynical team of "Ghost Seekers" spends the night in an allegedly haunted cemetery in the middle of the Pennsylvania woods. The legend is that in 1671 this was the site of a plague of demonic possession. Or...it was a site where a bunch of sadistic, bloodthirsty priests tortured the natives to death while trying to "convert" them, and then with no more victims and a taste for blood, they turned on themselves. Anyway, the jaded, cynical, and very horny ghost seekers set out to find demons...or prove they don't exist...or just fuck around in the woods. You can guess how this will turn out. With lots of blood, nudity, and comedy. Nice.

Next up was THE DIRTIES, a very clever movie about cinephilia and school shootings. Matt and Owen are best friends and movie geeks (Gotta love a movie that opens with kids making a Gaspar Noe reference.) They're also teased by bullies. Not as bad as the kids in AN AMERICAN TERROR, but enough to be kinda miserable in school. For their school film project, they have and idea for a film called THE DIRTIES. The titular Dirties are a gang of bullies at school, and Matt and Owen will play the heroes who take them down in an orgy of violence. And it's pretty funny how they steal footage at school for use in their movie. But when their teacher nixes a rough cut of their film...reality and fantasy blur, as it looks like Matt might just take it to the next level. I can't help but make a comparison to AN AMERICAN TERROR, because I loved both movies, they're both about (planned) school shootings, but beyond that they're very different movies. AN AMERICAN TERROR presents a situation so horrible that shooting the school bullies is almost a rational act, and it's about finding the inner strength to not do it. THE DIRTIES presents a world where kids are just kind of dicks but a mass shooting would be decidedly crazy, and it's about finding the inner sickness to go through with it. And it's about using movies to find that inner sickness. Which for a film nut like me is kinda scarier.

Total Running Time: 161 minutes
My Total Minutes; 344,216

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