The Attic - Is it bad enough to be good?
This morning, I watched a DVD of the movie The Attic, in an attempt to determine whether or not it was bad enough to send to Glen. In case you don't know, Glen and I share a love for horror movies that are so bad that they become glorious in their own unmitigated awfulness. We discovered we had this common interest when we worked together in Northwood Hills and we used to trade DVDs somewhat regularly.
I introduced Glen to The Stuff, and Glen introduced me to the Psycho Cop series. I cannot help but feel that I got the better end of the deal--I really don't think anything filmed prior to the Psycho Cop series, or subsequently, has ever matched them for pure gleeful atrocity. Somehow they manage this in spite of the fact that, much like one of the creatures in the horror genre itself, they have become self-aware and seem to know how dreadful they are even as they are being made.
But I digress.
Now that Glen and I live further apart, our movie trading has become almost nonexistent, mostly because it generally takes an act of God to get me to the post office. However, I have recently become in possession (no pun intended) of a movie called Special Dead, which seems very promising, and if I'm going to make all of the effort to mail that off, I may as well fill up the package. But I can't just send him any old rubbish. This has to be GOOD rubbish--the kind of rubbish that warms the cockles of one's heart.
After becoming a connoisseur of the truly terrible horror film, one gets a little rush of joy every time one sees some beautiful moment of discontinuity. I think this is akin to the feeling an amateur lover of antiques feels the first time he or she is watching Roadshow and says something like, "Ah, yes, what a lovely Sheraton veneer," before the expert even opens his/her mouth.
My heart felt this little leap of happiness when watching Glen's last contribution: Witchery, a delightful example of the art form starring David Hasselhoff and Linda Blair. There was this wonderful moment in which the little boy walks into the bathroom and suddenly, inexplicably, the string hanging from the lightbulb has become 6 feet longer so that he can reach it to turn on the light. The memory warms my heart even now.
Unfortunately, though, there are a vast number of horror movies that aren't good enough to be good movies but also aren't quite bad enough to be delightfully bad, instead falling into the vast quagmire of tedious unwatchability in between. Frankly, Glen deserves better.
For the novice lover of antiques, there are many sources of information on how to recognise and appreciate periods, styles, and artists. Buying guidelines, if you will. So, before passing a verdict on The Attic or any other horror film, it is helpful to know what constitute the judging criteria.
Badness is subjective. However, in addition to terrible acting (the worse the better), most particularly fine bad movies contain a healthy helping of one or more of the following:
1. Blatant Exposition. Finding a way to tell the story or relate important background information without being too obvious about it is an art form. That sounds an awful lot like hard work! Why not just interrupt the film for a moment with a power-point presentation?
One of the best ways to accomplish blatant exposition is to have a character suddenly deliver a lecture in a stilted and unnatural fashion in the middle of an otherwise ordinary conversation. For example:
SCENE: Our hero and heroine, Tom and Louise, are standing in the kitchen, making breakfast.
Louise: Good morning, Tom. How did you sleep?
Tom: Fairly well, thank you. And yourself?
Louise: Not very well, I'm afraid. I kept having dreams about this guy who looked like Abraham Lincoln.
Tom: Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States. He successfully led the country through its greatest internal crisis, the American Civil War, preserving the Union and ending slavery. As the war was drawing to a close, Lincoln became the first American president to be assassinated. Before his election in 1860 as the first Republican president, Lincoln had been a country lawyer, an Illinois state legislator, a member of the United States House of Representatives, and twice an unsuccessful candidate for election to the U.S. Senate.
END SCENE
[thank you, Wikipedia]
There are, of course, many other beautiful examples. Stating the obvious is always good, as is assuming that the audience is full of complete idiots who have also lost all of their short-term memory. A character can say something like, "Ack, a werewolf is eating your arm!" or "Why, that medallion looks exactly like the one in the painting we showed at the beginning of the movie and did a close-up of for fifteen seconds while playing Significant Music in the background!"
2. Complete Lack of Exposition/Development. Of course, instead of over-explaining things, or explaining them in a stilted fashion, a really fine bad scriptwriter can opt to explain nothing at all, by means of dialogue OR plot. As an artist, he is above that sort of thing! For example, the last scene in our fictitious example could read something like this:
SCENE: Tom, Louise, Kitchen, Breakfast
Louise: Good morning, Tom. How did you sleep?
[Louise's toast now sprouts wings and flies out of the window. Neither Tom nor Louise seem to notice this phenomenon, and it is never alluded to again throughout the course of the movie.]
END SCENE
3. Outrageous Coincidence/Convenience. By this time in your life, you should know that if a gypsy woman wants to repay your act of kindness by giving you an elixir that renders you inedible to zombies, you should just take it. You're guaranteed to need it within the next week. But why bother to set up that kind of plot element in advance?
SCENE: See above
Louise: Good morning, Tom. How did you sleep?
Tom: I don't sleep any more since I became A VAMPIRE!
Louise: [screams and backs away, tripping over a bottle of holy water which is sitting in the middle of the floor for no apparent reason.]
END SCENE
You get the idea. Although a certain amount of suspended disbelief is necessary for all movie watching, the thing that makes these moments truly special is the extent to which they make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER. If, while describing the scene later, you use the words "for no apparent reason," odds are high you're onto a winner. Sure, normal people don't have ghosts rattling furniture in their attics--but somehow our minds accept this when watching a movie, while they rebel against the idea of an pickaxe randomly nailed to a bedroom wall. I don't know why it is, it just is.
So, back to The Attic.
The dust jacket blurb is promising, indicating that this movie could end up on either end of the spectrum. A girl in a house sees her own doppelganger, and hilarity ensues. Excellent! Definitely worth sampling. Off to the DVD player we go.
The movie (this is not nearly arty enough to merit being called a 'film') starts out by showing a girl in a bathtub who sees herself walking by. No background or build-up for us! We were lucky to get credits. Already, I am starting to suspect that this screenplay is not going to be Oscar nomination material. Within three minutes, the girl is collapsed on the ground having some kind of epileptic fit, and we find ourselves cutting to a new scene at the front of the house with a completely new group of people.
Excellent!
Who was this girl? Who knows, that's who. The purpose of this scene, as far as I can tell, was to shield us from any suspense we might feel later on. When the girl in this new family starts to see her own doppelganger, we needn't trouble ourselves with any kind of deep thinking. Is she seeing things? Is she going crazy? Thank goodness we don't have to worry our pretty little heads about such matters!
The rest of the movie appears to be made up of scenes filmed and pasted together pretty much at random. At one point about halfway through, we see a black cat walk down the stairs of the house and out the front door. This is the cat's only appearance in the movie, and at no point does anyone mention a cat. Was it a family pet? A harbinger of doom? Again, no idea. My theory is that it won some kind of contest and this film debut was the prize.
I don't want to ruin this movie for those of you who might want to see it by talking about specific examples, so I'll stop here. Suffice it to say that I spent most of the movie trying to figure out if it was merely bad, or if it was bad enough to share. But all things must come to an end, and eventually this did, too, and oh, such an ending it was!
Random scenes! Bad dialogue! Terrible acting! A veritable cornucopia of badness!
You know that bit in The Ring where the creepy girl with all of the hair starts coming out of the television set? Imagine what it would have been like if the screen writer had thought, oh, hey, that would make a great creepy visual, and filmed it--but instead of figuring out how to fit it into the rest of the film or even a single scene, he just pasted it randomly between two other scenes for no apparent reason. Open with a scene in which someone's in a restaurant having lunch, cut to this visual of a creepy girl coming out of a television, and then cut again to a woman walking through a park with a friend. Was that supposed to be a vision? A premonition? A flashback? A commercial break? This is what The Ring would have been like if it had been filmed by the team who filmed The Attic.
So, the verdict is this: If you're a novice to the bad movie as an artform, skip this for now, and go out and get Psycho Cop. But if you're a seasoned professional, stick with it to the end, and The Attic doesn't disappoint.
This morning, I watched a DVD of the movie The Attic, in an attempt to determine whether or not it was bad enough to send to Glen. In case you don't know, Glen and I share a love for horror movies that are so bad that they become glorious in their own unmitigated awfulness. We discovered we had this common interest when we worked together in Northwood Hills and we used to trade DVDs somewhat regularly.
I introduced Glen to The Stuff, and Glen introduced me to the Psycho Cop series. I cannot help but feel that I got the better end of the deal--I really don't think anything filmed prior to the Psycho Cop series, or subsequently, has ever matched them for pure gleeful atrocity. Somehow they manage this in spite of the fact that, much like one of the creatures in the horror genre itself, they have become self-aware and seem to know how dreadful they are even as they are being made.
But I digress.
Now that Glen and I live further apart, our movie trading has become almost nonexistent, mostly because it generally takes an act of God to get me to the post office. However, I have recently become in possession (no pun intended) of a movie called Special Dead, which seems very promising, and if I'm going to make all of the effort to mail that off, I may as well fill up the package. But I can't just send him any old rubbish. This has to be GOOD rubbish--the kind of rubbish that warms the cockles of one's heart.
After becoming a connoisseur of the truly terrible horror film, one gets a little rush of joy every time one sees some beautiful moment of discontinuity. I think this is akin to the feeling an amateur lover of antiques feels the first time he or she is watching Roadshow and says something like, "Ah, yes, what a lovely Sheraton veneer," before the expert even opens his/her mouth.
My heart felt this little leap of happiness when watching Glen's last contribution: Witchery, a delightful example of the art form starring David Hasselhoff and Linda Blair. There was this wonderful moment in which the little boy walks into the bathroom and suddenly, inexplicably, the string hanging from the lightbulb has become 6 feet longer so that he can reach it to turn on the light. The memory warms my heart even now.
Unfortunately, though, there are a vast number of horror movies that aren't good enough to be good movies but also aren't quite bad enough to be delightfully bad, instead falling into the vast quagmire of tedious unwatchability in between. Frankly, Glen deserves better.
For the novice lover of antiques, there are many sources of information on how to recognise and appreciate periods, styles, and artists. Buying guidelines, if you will. So, before passing a verdict on The Attic or any other horror film, it is helpful to know what constitute the judging criteria.
Badness is subjective. However, in addition to terrible acting (the worse the better), most particularly fine bad movies contain a healthy helping of one or more of the following:
1. Blatant Exposition. Finding a way to tell the story or relate important background information without being too obvious about it is an art form. That sounds an awful lot like hard work! Why not just interrupt the film for a moment with a power-point presentation?
One of the best ways to accomplish blatant exposition is to have a character suddenly deliver a lecture in a stilted and unnatural fashion in the middle of an otherwise ordinary conversation. For example:
SCENE: Our hero and heroine, Tom and Louise, are standing in the kitchen, making breakfast.
Louise: Good morning, Tom. How did you sleep?
Tom: Fairly well, thank you. And yourself?
Louise: Not very well, I'm afraid. I kept having dreams about this guy who looked like Abraham Lincoln.
Tom: Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States. He successfully led the country through its greatest internal crisis, the American Civil War, preserving the Union and ending slavery. As the war was drawing to a close, Lincoln became the first American president to be assassinated. Before his election in 1860 as the first Republican president, Lincoln had been a country lawyer, an Illinois state legislator, a member of the United States House of Representatives, and twice an unsuccessful candidate for election to the U.S. Senate.
END SCENE
[thank you, Wikipedia]
There are, of course, many other beautiful examples. Stating the obvious is always good, as is assuming that the audience is full of complete idiots who have also lost all of their short-term memory. A character can say something like, "Ack, a werewolf is eating your arm!" or "Why, that medallion looks exactly like the one in the painting we showed at the beginning of the movie and did a close-up of for fifteen seconds while playing Significant Music in the background!"
2. Complete Lack of Exposition/Development. Of course, instead of over-explaining things, or explaining them in a stilted fashion, a really fine bad scriptwriter can opt to explain nothing at all, by means of dialogue OR plot. As an artist, he is above that sort of thing! For example, the last scene in our fictitious example could read something like this:
SCENE: Tom, Louise, Kitchen, Breakfast
Louise: Good morning, Tom. How did you sleep?
[Louise's toast now sprouts wings and flies out of the window. Neither Tom nor Louise seem to notice this phenomenon, and it is never alluded to again throughout the course of the movie.]
END SCENE
3. Outrageous Coincidence/Convenience. By this time in your life, you should know that if a gypsy woman wants to repay your act of kindness by giving you an elixir that renders you inedible to zombies, you should just take it. You're guaranteed to need it within the next week. But why bother to set up that kind of plot element in advance?
SCENE: See above
Louise: Good morning, Tom. How did you sleep?
Tom: I don't sleep any more since I became A VAMPIRE!
Louise: [screams and backs away, tripping over a bottle of holy water which is sitting in the middle of the floor for no apparent reason.]
END SCENE
You get the idea. Although a certain amount of suspended disbelief is necessary for all movie watching, the thing that makes these moments truly special is the extent to which they make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER. If, while describing the scene later, you use the words "for no apparent reason," odds are high you're onto a winner. Sure, normal people don't have ghosts rattling furniture in their attics--but somehow our minds accept this when watching a movie, while they rebel against the idea of an pickaxe randomly nailed to a bedroom wall. I don't know why it is, it just is.
So, back to The Attic.
The dust jacket blurb is promising, indicating that this movie could end up on either end of the spectrum. A girl in a house sees her own doppelganger, and hilarity ensues. Excellent! Definitely worth sampling. Off to the DVD player we go.
The movie (this is not nearly arty enough to merit being called a 'film') starts out by showing a girl in a bathtub who sees herself walking by. No background or build-up for us! We were lucky to get credits. Already, I am starting to suspect that this screenplay is not going to be Oscar nomination material. Within three minutes, the girl is collapsed on the ground having some kind of epileptic fit, and we find ourselves cutting to a new scene at the front of the house with a completely new group of people.
Excellent!
Who was this girl? Who knows, that's who. The purpose of this scene, as far as I can tell, was to shield us from any suspense we might feel later on. When the girl in this new family starts to see her own doppelganger, we needn't trouble ourselves with any kind of deep thinking. Is she seeing things? Is she going crazy? Thank goodness we don't have to worry our pretty little heads about such matters!
The rest of the movie appears to be made up of scenes filmed and pasted together pretty much at random. At one point about halfway through, we see a black cat walk down the stairs of the house and out the front door. This is the cat's only appearance in the movie, and at no point does anyone mention a cat. Was it a family pet? A harbinger of doom? Again, no idea. My theory is that it won some kind of contest and this film debut was the prize.
I don't want to ruin this movie for those of you who might want to see it by talking about specific examples, so I'll stop here. Suffice it to say that I spent most of the movie trying to figure out if it was merely bad, or if it was bad enough to share. But all things must come to an end, and eventually this did, too, and oh, such an ending it was!
Random scenes! Bad dialogue! Terrible acting! A veritable cornucopia of badness!
You know that bit in The Ring where the creepy girl with all of the hair starts coming out of the television set? Imagine what it would have been like if the screen writer had thought, oh, hey, that would make a great creepy visual, and filmed it--but instead of figuring out how to fit it into the rest of the film or even a single scene, he just pasted it randomly between two other scenes for no apparent reason. Open with a scene in which someone's in a restaurant having lunch, cut to this visual of a creepy girl coming out of a television, and then cut again to a woman walking through a park with a friend. Was that supposed to be a vision? A premonition? A flashback? A commercial break? This is what The Ring would have been like if it had been filmed by the team who filmed The Attic.
So, the verdict is this: If you're a novice to the bad movie as an artform, skip this for now, and go out and get Psycho Cop. But if you're a seasoned professional, stick with it to the end, and The Attic doesn't disappoint.
posted by Simone @ 4:46 PM
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