Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Cat People!

Believe it or not, movies were once made by people who could read.

If there's one thing on which I can't agree with Ezra Pound, it's in his negative review of Cat People. Famous for popularising jumpscares (which was rightly seen as artful at the time), this 40s RKO gem should be famouser all round. Simone Simon (which is French for Simon Simo) stars as Irena Dubrovna, a Slavic art ho qt3.14 who spends her time sketching panthers at the local zoo. Some Fucking Guy plays Oliver, who strikes up a romance with her in scenes that, much like Hitchcock's The Birds, threaten a feature-length romantic comedy before the horror creeps in to spare us that fate.

The panther, in the background, turns and moves with her as she exits the frame, as though it were her shadow. Happy accident or kinographic genius? No, I couldn't be bothered to find out either.

The idyllic romance is dogged (or should that be catted AMIRITE LOL) by ominous omens, but the pair persist unto the point of matrimony, only to find Irena rendered frigid by her paralysing fear that she will turn into a panther herself due to legends from her Serbian heritage. To be fair, it beats "I have a headache". But Irena wants to smash, so she pursues the cureall prescribed by modernity and twitter thots: therapy.

Wahmen will literally go to be hypnotised by a witch doctor who believes you want to fuck your parents before they'll try calming the fuck down.

When that inevitably solves nothing and makes things worse (hint: if they fixed the problem you wouldn't have to keep going), Irena's mood turns possessive and paranoid, and she ambiguously stalks Oliver's maybe-too-close coworker, Alice (Jane Randolph). As a panther? Only vague shadows hint. Monster movies often struggle to equivocate between plodding literalism and ham-fisted symbolism. By keeping you guessing to the end, Cat People doesn't just maintain a sense of mystery but in so doing keeps either unsatisfactory extreme at bay. Irena's pop-psychologised neurosis is a modern monster, her apparent animistic alter ego an ancient one. By casting a question mark over the symbolic clues, the nature of the horror remains in a quantum state between the two. You know, like Schrödinger's etc. etc.

A high-backed chair positioned just behind her head gives the appearance of cat-like ears...

Here she hides in the foliage like a jungle cat...

Cat People was redundantly remade in the 80s and couldn't be revisited today because of furfags.

You said it Johnny.

Fortunately the original is much less dated than most old school horror fare and can be viewed without condescension. Watch Cat People this Halloween.

Christian blôgg approved.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Event Horizon!

You remember that, right?

I recall being baffled at the late Roger Ebert's dismissive review of this cult classic in which he bemoaned its mining of the unknown in the form of the final frontier as expressing an unwarranted fear of science and discovery. You could make the same critique of Frankenstein or Jurassic Park, but Ebert didn't, which suggests to me his real beef with the movie was that it unnerved him, which apparently it did for quite a number of contemporary viewers (Ebert was always like this, was a good writer but a terrible critic, and was skewered like the fat pig he was by Vincent Gallo, who memorably said he had the "physique of a slave trader". Don't feel bad for the porcine columnist; he was a piece of shit who doxed the lead actress from Friday the 13th to his sycophantic dogs because he didn't like the movie. Rot in hell, piggy).

Roger Ebert learning why we don't do that, forever (colourised).

Anyway, I bring this up because I always just found this flick cool and not particularly disturbing, but you may react differently. The good ship Event Horizon (1997) disappeared some years ago and has now reappeared minus the crew. Lovecraftesquely disturbed scientist Dr Weir (Sam Neil) is despatched with a crew of military toughs to investigate what happened, only to find himself aboard a haunted house in space.

Neil personally requested his arm patch display the aboriginal grievance politics flag in place of the Union Jack. Naturally, the symbolism of a meddling libcuck being the one to unleash horrors beyond his comprehension flew way over his head.

Naturally, everyone starts to go craaazy out in space, reminding many reviewers of The Shining but, given the timing, reminding me more of Sphere, which came out the following year and was basically this movie underwater. Sphere is worth a spin, but never picked up the cult following that this one did, perhaps because the Event Horizon itself boasts the coolest set design in movies. Everything in it is so Gothicmaxxed that redditors to this day insist it's in the boopin snootin Warhammer 40k uuuniveeerse, but you can hardly blame a production for seizing on an aesthetic that has never once gone out of style.

"Do you think we have enough spikes and crosses?"
"No"
- set designer Joseph Bennett to director Paul W.S. Anderson (or vice versa)

From the casting of porn stars and amputees for the blood orgy scene to the reams of bonus gore footage found decaying in a Romanian salt mine, everything about this production has been recited more times online than a videogame creepypasta. When was the last time anyone talked about astroturfed hipster horror like The Babadook? Anyone you know ever say "dude, bro, you've got to see it for that scene, bruh"? For a critically derided flop, Event Horizon proved to be the little kino that could.

How'd they get this footage from my crawlspace, is what I want to know.

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: DaDa!

The album cover being a modified detail from Dalí's Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire is a return tribute to Dalí, who was a major Coop fan and declared his act "musical surrealism". Dalí made a First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper's Brain, the story of which is the best thing you'll read all year.

Everyone knows Alice Cooper for his pioneering theatrical stage show and his slew of classic anthems from "Eighteen" to "Elected" to "Poison", but the thing that really stabs you in the neck as you delve into the Cooper catalogue is how eclectic it all is, like a Ween album strung out over half a dozen decades. The first two albums are as uncommercial as it gets, weird psychedelia with odd melodic gems jutting out randomly like teeth out of a Briton's gums. Then there's the era of unimpeachable classics from Love it to Death through Billion Dollar Babies or even Welcome to my Nightmare (depending on how charitably you view Muscle of Love), but even this hit-making hard rock era has its oddities like the dark jazzy atmospherics of "Blue Turk" or the James-Bond-meets-King-Crimson pastiche of "Halo of Flies". Then you've got disco parodies and showtunes on Goes to Hell, sci-fi new wave on Flush the Fashion, hair metal, industrial and more. For every wild left-turn that crashes in flames, there's one that pays off in spades, but by far the oddest and greatest Alice album is one he doesn't even remember writing or recording at all. Just as Bowie's cocaine album (Station to Station) was his best and bleakest, so too was the Coop's. Now I'm not saying you should dabble in white powder for the sake of a tune. I mean, fuck it, Minor Threat coined straight edge and their Complete Discography is one of the few punk discs that holds up after half a spin. But just as LSD seems to inevitably lead to inane surrealism and heroin to insomniac self-pity, cocaine seems to have a distinctly dark and empty energy you wouldn't guess from something that has adults bouncing off the walls like kids on Halloween candy.

Not that DaDa doesn't have laughs - "I Love America" is almost tryhard in its comic aspirations, though redeemed by the fact Cooper actually meant it - but there's a sort of desperation in the laughter, like a guy trying to distract himself from gnawing despair with a good time. The synthy opener is weirdly beautiful and almost goth, but Cooper sounds like a for-real mental patient on it, far from the theatrical madness of "The Ballad of Dwight Frye". "Enough's Enough" sounds like it was inspired by Midnight Cowboy, a tale of an abusive monster of a father taunting his boy now that his dear old mother is no longer there to protect him, set to a dissonently bouncy bit of new wave that reflects the awful glee in the bad dad's jibes. "Former Lee Warmer" is a tale of a mute, mentally retarded brother kept locked up in a family home that makes those Phantom of the Opera organ tones you'd hear in haunted house parodies actually creepy again. "No Man's Land" is actually hilarious but the casual mention of "my other personalities" brings chills back to a superficially comic scenario. "Scarlet and Sheba" is like some kind of twisted BDSM tango that evokes a dungeon with the scent of candles heavy in the air. "Fresh Blood" takes a startling detour into funk and seems to describe the unhappy lot of a Renfield stewarding a vampire from kill to kill amid the festivity of an uncaring city. "Pass the Gun Around" is a raw sketch of the end of the road against the grandest, most ostentatious arrangements on the album, with a Dick Wagner solo that sounds like David Gilmour having the worst nightmare of his life. Maybe Alice just doesn't want to remember.