The apartment, designed by mad architect Ivo Shandor to function as a conduit for Gozer and its minions and formerly occupied by Dana Barrett, is located at 55 Central Park West — taking up most of the block between 65th and 66th Streets. The portion of the block not taken up by the building is occupied by the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, though you probably know it as the “Nobody steps on a church in my town!” church. 55 Central Park West was actually designed by the architectural firm Schwartz and Gross and completed in 1929 (the movie claims Ivo Shandor was holding rituals on the roof as early as 1920). It’s been home to, among others, Calvin Klein and Donna Karan.

This is what it looked like when the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man visited

This is what the building looked like when we watched Ghostbusters in Brooklyn Bridge Park last year

And this is what it looked like when we were there Friday night

The Fat Boys emerge from the subway

And this is what it looks like now, sans Fat Boys sadly

The Sbarro circa Krush Groove

And still going strong today

Teleport City and Calamity Chang. Yes, I am dressed casual. It was a long day of climbing and fighting Gozer

He’s going to kill you. An alligator pit, perhaps, or some sort of slow moving laser so he can savor your demise. But first, he will do two things: explain his entire nefarious scheme for world domination, and offer you a last drink. That drink will almost certainly be a blended scotch whisky.

Some time ago, we looked at the history and definition of whisky as filtered through the eyes and words of Ian Fleming and his most famous literary creation, James Bond. I’d like to pick up where we left off (more or less), and take a look into the tumbler in the hands of the villain. In particular, the villains of old Eurospy, crime, and Bollywood thrillers where no secret lair or fortified chateau was complete without a hidden panel that would slide open to reveal a silver serving tray, two glasses, and a bottle of whisky (and we’re going whisky without an “e” this time around, since it’s almost always whisky from Scotland, where they don’t use the “e”). They drink it to celebrate, they offer it to the captured hero to gloat, and they drink it again when their nefarious schemes begin to crumble around them. And its near universal. Italy, Germany, India, Turkey, the United States — it doesn’t seem to matter where you are. If you are a megalomaniacal madman bent on world destruction or just a common thug who is sick and tired of Maurizio Merli, chances are your drink of choice is scotch. You’re not going to catch Blofeld toasting the demise of James Bond with a Kahlua Mudslide, just as you’d never catch Bond wooing a sultry woman by ordering an apple-tini. Hell, my tastes in life are suspect enough that I don’t begrudge anyone what they like, and those drinks each have their place. That place just happens not to be the control room of a secret lair inside a hollowed out volcano.

So let’s take a quick journey through some of the favorite brands of some of our favorite movie villains, and along the way, maybe learn a thing or two about the history of the spirit we call blended scotch whisky, the ups and downs of its reputation over the years, and the role drinking it plays in various cultures. This will be a multi-post ongoing series, so this first time out, we’re going to concentrate on history and a single brand. Others will follow.

Medicine of Kings

Trying to pinpoint the “first” whisky is a sometimes fun but largely pointless endeavor, like naming the first “punk” band or the first “slasher film.” So for the sake of verifiable facts, let’s begin in 1494, which is when the the first officially recorded appearance of a distilled whisky in Scotland — which means it had been around for longer, but this is the first time the tax man got to it, and nothing exists in this world until it is taxed. “Eight bolls of malt to Friar John Cor wherewith to make aqua vitae.” With that entry in the Scottish Exchequer Rolls, whisky — known then as aqua vitae, aka “water of life” — verified its existence to future historians, drunks, and guys with handlebar mustaches lifting up trapezoidal weights. According to whisky lore, the distillation process itself came to Scotland by way of Ireland. St. Patrick, it is said, introduced distilling to Ireland in the fifth century, and the Dalriadic Scots took the process with them when they migrated to Scotland. St. Patty himself apparently learned the process from people in France and Spain, where distillation was used to create perfume and later used on wine to create brandy. In areas where there were no grapes, and thus no wine making, distillation of “mashes” made with an assortment of grain was adopted.

The official use for this concoction, of course, was medicinal. Things that make you tipsy have a long history of being medicinal in nature, at least some of which is actually earned. For example, scientists have figured out that the presence of certain types of antibiotics in Egyptians mummies — antibiotics that would not be discovered by medicine for thousands of years — was because they occurred naturally in the beer ancient Egyptians consumed. Makes me wonder if centuries from now, future gadabouts will be reclining in a swinging lounge on Mars, nosing and writing tasting notes for their preferred space spirit Nyquil which the ancients used to consume “for medicinal purposes.”

This medieval version of aqua vitae — usquebaugh in the Gaelic language, sometimes shortened to usky and later…well, I think you can figure it out from there — was raw, potent stuff that had more in common with backwoods moonshine that it would modern scotch. Distillation was still rough, the recipe and process for making the spirit varied from one maker to the next, and the notion of aging it in a barrel was basically non-existent. It was a local drink, made locally, but with a growing popularity across Scotland. A small modicum of organization was introduced in 1505 when King James IV — himself quite a fan of this intoxicating medicine — granted the Guild of Surgeon Barbers in Edinburgh sole rights to make and sell usquebaugh in the capital. Because there’s no trait you want more in your surgeon or your barer than drunkeness. Whisky continued to grow in popularity during the 1500s, and advances in still design and distillation began producing spirits that were considerably less harsh and less “occasionally deadly” than the early whiskies.

Whisky and War

This is when things start to get ugly, and I promise you eventually we will get to blended scotch. But before that, you have to understand why people would ever think to blend whisky in the first place. So we have established the potent birth of whisky in Scotland and established that James IV was quite fond of a wee nip when he got the chance. The quality of spirit being made in Scotland began to improve steadily during the 1500s, and this happened largely because of war.

At the end of the 1400s, Europe and Britain were in a hopeless tangle of treaties that, the same as they would in World War I, seemed designed to eventually drag the entire continent into war. For our purposes here, the first to go at each other were Italy and France in what would become known as The Italian Wars. England allied itself with Italy, because if there’s one thing England loved, it was going to war with France. James IV of Scotland, unfortunately, had a binding treaty with France. Way back in 1295, John Balliol and Philip IV of France agreed that one country would always help the other if attacked by England. This agreement, known as The Auld Alliance, was renewed from time to time with little consequence, until eventually French monarch Louis XII called in the favor. As England came into the war on the side of Italy, Scotland was obliged by The Auld Alliance to invade England in support of France.

Italy — which is to say, The Pope — was most displeased with Scotland attacking the English. Pope Leo X threatened the Scottish monarch with censure from the church, and England’s King Henry VIII decided if the Pope was mad at James IV, Henry (himself not exactly a fan of popes, but whatever) might as well rub salt into the wound by declaring himself overlord of Scotland. He felt justified in doing this since, in 1502, England and Scotland had signed a non-aggression pact. By fulfilling Scotland’s old treaty with France, James IV was violating the newer one with England. James IV defied both king and pope, carrying out the raids into England and sending Scottish sailors to reinforce the French navy. The war between the two neighbors came to a head in 1513, when James IV led a host of some 30,000 Scots into battle against the English. The Battle of Flodden, sometimes known as The Battle of Branxton since that’s actually where it took place, is generally pegged as the last true medieval battle. It went poorly for the Scots. James IV himself led the army and paid the ultimate price, falling in battle and effectively ending Scotland’s involvement on France’s behalf in what was now being called War of the League of Cambrai.

Things settled down a bit, but not for long. Henry VIII’s support of Italy in the wars had less to do with England’s love of the Pope and more to do with their hatred of France. The Protestant Reformation, which among other things sought to address the vast wealth of the church and the terrible poverty of its followers, was gaining steam throughout Europe, and Rome was scrambling to curtail the damage. In distant England, Henry was pushing through a series of reforms to the Church of England that better reflected the mood of the population — and also happen to make it much easier for the crown to confiscate wealth from the church. In 1534, Henry VIII issued the first Act of Supremacy, naming the crown rather than the Pope as the supreme head of the Church of England. Among the things he did as the Church of England continued to extract itself from The Roman Catholic Church was begin the dissolution of monasteries.

And this is where war and politics intersects once again with whisky.

Into the Mix

Monks were the original distillers. What else are a bunch of dudes living together in a frat house going to do with their time? And suddenly, a lot of them were out of a job so to speak. Forced now to make it in the outside world, many former monks fell back on their distilling skills. There was a sudden influx of knowledgable experts into the world of whisky making, resulting in substantial advancement in the art and science of distilling. Whisky making continued to thrive and evolve in a loose and wild style, with the occasional violent conflict over taxation, until 1823 when the Excise Act essentially laid the foundations for the modern whisky industry. At that time, whisky was still a pretty rough spirit. The knowledge of the monks advanced the process substantially, but that’s “advanced” by the standards of the 16th century. It remained largely a provincial indulgence sold locally by grocers — grocers who just happened to have surnames like Walker, Dewar, Ballantine, and Chivas.

In 1831, an inventor by the name of Aeneas Coffey invented the Coffey — or Patent — Still, sometimes also called a continuous or column still because why let something have one name when it can have like half a dozen? Traditionally, whisky was made in a pot still which consists of a rotund “pot” with a neck where condensation takes place. In a pot still, you could only make one batch of whisky at a time. Then you had to drain it, clean it, and pour in the next batch for distillation. By contrast, the Coffey still ran liquid through a long column that enabled distillers to ply their craft in a continuous flow. No batches. The only time you had to stop distilling was when you needed to clean the still or your workers went on holiday. The invention of the column still also led to the production of “grain whisky.”

Wait. Isn’t all whisky “grain” whisky, what with the legal definition of whisky being that it has to be made from grains? Well yes, but the designation of something as “grain” whisky means that it is made with, well, pretty much any grain other than barley. Single malt whiskies are, as you might guess, made with only barley. Anyway, grain whisky off a column still had an altogether different taste than rustic pot still whisky. So someone — that someone being a man named Andrew Usher — wondered what might happen if you took that big, beastly pot still whisky and blended it with the more refined and delicate column still grain whisky. What might happen, it turns out, is you might create the biggest whisky market in the world.

Since then, blended scotch has dominated the market. Up until very recently, it was pretty much all any whisky drinker consumed. Single malts — pot still whiskies made entirely from malted barley and distilled at a single distillery — were an almost statistically non-existant sliver of the market. As far as most people were concerned, single malts were nothing more than the raw ingredients that went into making true scotch — blended scotch. In the past decade or two, many hardcore whisky aficionados have changed their tune, trumpeting single malts as the true expression of a whisky while blends are diluted and dumbed down for the masses. Go to any reputable whisky shop these days and you will almost certainly see the bulk of the shelves taken up with an array of single malt scotches — Glenlivet, Glenfiddich, Balvenie, and so forth — while the blends are relegated to the bottom shelf, where spirits in specialty shops go to collect dust and die.

This arrangement fails reality on a number of levels. First of all, anyone who thinks a single malt is superior to a blend purely by virtue of being a single malt is a person whose opinion should not be trusted in any matter of import. They’re probably the same people who insist that the older or more expensive a scotch is, the better it is. There are fantastic, complex, challenging single malts. There are also dumb, simple, one-note single malts. There’s everything in between as well. And hey, guess what! Exactly the same is true of blends. There are blended scotches that can easily go toe-to-toe with the best the world of single malts has to offer. There are also blends that are terrible. And the whole range in between. Blends are not dumbed down versions of single malts. In fact, the process of making a modern day blended scotch is incredibly complex, with master blenders sometimes combining upwards of forty, fifty, even sixty different single malts to achieve a specific flavor.

The heavy weighting of a specialty shop’s whisky selection toward single malts also doesn’t reflect the simple economics of the industry. Over 90% of the single malt produced is used to make blends. There would be no single malt market if not for the demands of blended scotch. The world over, blends are still overwhelmingly what people drink. Chances are if you were ordering your first whisky without guidance from a whisky-literate friend or bartender, you probably ordered a blend, because those are the brands everyone knows. If your father or grandfather drank scotch, he almost certainly drank a blend.

And recently, that first wave of single malt snobs has come back around to the blends they once dismissed. Boutique whisky makers like Compass Box started making blends glamorous again with releases. The tumultuous economic situation in the United States also meant that people with less money to spend than previously but still possessed of a taste for scotch started eying blends, which are traditionally less costly than their single malt compatriots owing to the fact that the grain whisky that makes up much of a blend is considerably cheaper to produce. And what they discovered was that a lot of these blends are good. Very, very good. And suddenly, though whisky enthusiasts still love single malts, the blends are back in fashion.

And when you talk blends — especially blends favored by movie villains — there is no more obvious a place to start than Johnnie Walker.

The Walking Man

Johnnie Walker as the drink of choice for conniving screen villains — and heroes — boasts an almost incomprehensible pedigree, thanks primarily to its popularity in the prolific film industry of India. I think it’s safe to say that Johnnie Walker has appeared in more Bollywood films than any other actor. So prolific is its career in Indian cinema that one of Bollywood’s most famous comedic actors took his name from the whisky. To count the number of villains who have sipped Johnnie Walker while relaxing in their lair, plotting the overthrow of some government or other, is an impossible task. Everyone from Dev Anand to Amitabh Bachchan has celebrated victory or tried to drown defeat by hitting the Red or Black Label, and pretty much every Bollywood action hero has had it offered to them by a sneering villain or seductive femme fatale. The seductive “dancing while displaying a bottle of whisky” routine that appears in so many Bollywood movies has resulted in a bottle of Johnnie Walker likely being popular dancer Helen’s most frequent on-screen partner.

Johnnie Walker started out as an experiment conducted by Kilmarnock farmer turned grocer John Walker, whose specialty was blending tea leaves. He eventually decided that, although tea leaves are nothing like whisky, the experience could apply to making the harsh spirits commonly thought of as whisky into something more drinkable. And so he began mixing single malts together, then further blended them with cheaper, less abrasive grain whisky to create his store brand. It was a modest success but hardly a global juggernaut — at least until 1857, when Walker’s son took over the business after the passing of his father. Alexander Walker was substantially more ambitious with the whisky brand. He was the man who established the brand’s identity with the slightly askew black and gold label. He was also the one who came up with the square bottle, a design decision that not only reduced breakage but also allowed a retailer to fit more bottles onto a shelf. Alexander Walker’s three sons took over the business from him in 1889, and then the push began in earnest as the era of marketing was upon us.

In 1909, George Walker hired a cartoonist named Tom Browne to create a logo for the brand. Browne used a likeness of John Walker sporting a top hat, waistcoat and high boots — the now iconic Walking Man. Around the same time, Alexander Walker Jr. was greatly expanding and improving the product portfolio. By 1906, the John Walker & Sons whisky company offered three blends: the basic blend with a white label; Extra Special Old Highland with a red label; and Walkers Old Highland Whisky, 12 years old with a black label (in a blended whisky, age statements reflect not the average age of the single malts put into it, but rather must be the age of the youngest whisky in the blend). In 1909, the three brand names were simplified: White Label, Red Label, and Black Label.

Through a combination of canny aggressive advertising and quality product, Johnnie Walker became one fo the most pre-eminent global brands. In 1925, when a lot of consolidation was happening and businesses were reeling from American Prohibition, the company merged with Distillers Co. Ltd, an arrangement that stayed in place until they became part of Guinness in 1986. In 1997, Guinness merged with Grand Metropolitan to form Diageo — the whisky world’s number one Blofeld-esque supervillain. Diageo’s stewardship of Johnnie Walker has been fraught with controversy, as are most things involving Diageo. The global beverage mega-corporation shuttered the facility in Kilmarnock, causing substantial economic strife in a small town who’s number one industry was Johnnie Walker. Accusations of a substantial drop in quality plagued the brand as well, though whether these are true or simply a symptom of the intense dislike engendered in so many people by Diageo and its business practices is a matter that will never be settled. Suffice it to say that there’s a pretty good chance the entire town of Kilmarnock found itself dangling over a crocodile pit while Diageo offered it a tumbler of Johnnie Walker and explained its dastardly plan to close the plant.

Bollywood’s relationship with whisky in general and Johnnie Walker in particular, is contentious and often contradictory. India consumes more Johnnie Walker than anywhere else in the world, and their fondness for it is what makes it the most popular whisky in the world. In fact, Johnnie is so popular in India that there are years when Indian consumers purchase more Johnnie Walker than is actually made. Counterfeiting Johnnie Walker is a booming business that India is only just now beginning to get under control, a fact that has led to a seemingly endless economic and legal battle between India and the Scotch Whisky Authority — the body tasked with enforcing a variety of trade agreements and copyright issues.

In the movies, Johnnie Walker represents the schizophrenia often inherent in judging the perceived vices of others. Out of one side of the mouth, Indian cinema frames alcohol as a demon stalking virtue and traditional Indian goodness — Johnnie Walker, more times than not, is the drink of the evil or a crutch for the weak. Out of the other side of it’s mouth, of course, the whisky and whisky consumption is heralded as a symbol that you (and India) made it, that you have attained a better standard in life. Of course, that message of Johnnie Walker equating to a more sophisticated status is often undercut by the need to pander both to the urbane city dweller and the more suspicious traditionalists who see such advancement as horrifying and immoral. Ultimately, the morality expressed by most Indian cinema is the same as the one espoused by the cinema of most other countries: buy a ticket. So Johnnie Walker remains both hero and villain, success and failure. Whatever the case, you’re going to be seeing a lot of it.

Teleport City’s recommendation: Red is the starter, Black is the standard, and Blue is what douchebaggy businessmen and loudmouths buy to show off their status. If you want to mic things up a bit, go Green. The soon-to-be-retired Johnnie Walker Green is harder to find but remains my personal favorite of the line. Thick, smoky, and sweet with a hint of peat — maybe I like it because it’s the closest Walker to bourbon. When the villain swivels around to offer you a pour from his bottle of Johnnie Black, sneer at him and say, “I’m prefer Green Label. But then, it’s less common so perhaps you’ve never heard of it.” You may still get strapped tot he nose of a nuclear missile targeting Moscow so as to parka world war, but at least you’ll die with the satisfaction of knowing you got a minor whisky-related leg up on the megalomaniacal supervillain who tied you to the rocket in the first place.

Johnnie is hardly the sole domain of the Bollywood action film, though. Turkish cinema’s most prolific and iconic villain, Huseyin Peyda, is seen drinking the stuff constantly, though I’m pretty sure I caught him branching out into Teacher’s Highland Cream a time or two.

Also, here’s a gratuitous shot of Christina Hendricks standing in front of a Johnnie Walker sign.

Simply calling Da Khwar Lasme Spogmay “a Pakistani film” would likely send any serious minded booster of that nation’s cinema into paroxysms of despair. The Pashto language film industry that produced Da Khwar Lasme Spogmay, which serves an overwhelmingly male audience in the country’s northern border region, is considered to be pretty much the absolute gutter of Pakistan’s film making culture. For Americans, you’d have to imagine meeting a person from a foreign country whose only exposure to American cinema was through seeing Manos: The Hands of Fate, and who tried to characterize the whole of the U.S.’s filmic output based on that.

Nonetheless, there are many Western cult film enthusiasts — specifically those jaded lovers of trash cinema desperate for ever more depraved kicks — whose sole experience of Pakistani films will likely be Pashto films like DKLS and Saeed Ali Khan’s notorious Haseena Atom Bomb. And while I might high mindedly assert that viewers should sample the whole of Pakistani cinema before wallowing in its depths, I am also a shameful hypocrite. Because, faced with the choice of watching one of that country’s Urdu language romances or historical dramas, as opposed to a film in which Sultan Rahi shouts a lot while gorily asserting his peasant dignity or a Pashto atrocity like DKLS, I have time and again chosen from among the latter.

Da Khwar Lasme Spogmay is part of a wave of Pashto horror films that followed in the wake of 1991′s successful Adam Khor. DKLS‘s female star, Shehnaz Begum, was also featured in Adam Khor, but in the intervening years had moved from merely acting and dancing in her films to producing and directing them as well — something that I imagine was quite the rarity in such a morbidly macho environment. Still, the uninitiated viewer might have some difficulty identifying the female touch within DKLS, as it is nearly as redolent of sleaze and grotesquery as the previously mentioned Haseena. It has to be said, however, that it is indeed a woman’s story, and that its heroine — despite the presence of a couple mega-masculine, mustache farming male heroes — proves herself throughout as being fully capable of fighting her own battles.

Despite being classified as a horror film, DKLS is in equal parts an ill-conceived superhero tale, a mangy hybrid of Catwoman and The Incredible Hulk. Its heroine, Banno, is a young woman who periodically transforms into a ferocious half cat/half human creature and prowls the night in search of rapists. In the opening scene, she catches one such devil in the act, and, after gruesomely mauling him with her knife-like claws, uses her telekinetic vision to spread his legs apart so that she may more easily ram a huge tree branch up his ass. Yow! In classic Pashto film tradition, this sequence is accompanied by abundant stock footage of thunder and lighting, a blaring and ceaselessly hectoring music track, and teeth rattling sound effects that include a heavily reverbed cat’s yowl.

Banno’s nocturnal adventures have apparently left a trail of finely minced male predators in her wake, and in the light of day we find that her trail has been taken up, not only by the handsome and determined police captain, but also by a local ruffian (Badal Munir) whose jacket has all kinds of knives hanging off of it. Into this scenario DKLS introduces a freakish gang of cackling punk rock inbreds who hide out in a graffiti covered sewer, among whom are a leopard print wearing guy with devil horns and a Freddy Krueger glove and a mohawked fellow with both a beak and a mustache. As absurd as they may sound, there is actually something really nightmarish about this group, as it is in those moments when they appear that Da Khwar Lasme Spogmay most seems like something created by an insane person.

Eventually, a flashback reveals that it is this gang who are responsible for the death of Banno’s mother, who, pregnant and cast out from her home lo those many years ago, wandered out into the night and into their rapey arms. Traumatized and left to die, she went into labor and gave birth to Banno, who was in turn whisked away to safety by a black house cat who just happened to be hanging around. (I think; this flashback isn’t really staged very clearly, nor is it apparent that it’s supposed to be a flashback until after it’s over, with it instead coming across more as random footage from some other movie that suddenly crops up in the middle of DKLS.) Not one to underestimate the intelligence of its audience, DKLS entrust us with making the logical leap of seeing infant Banno in the proximity of a cat to understanding this as the reason for her later being able to physically transform into a monster. In this guise, she then goes about the business of wiping out the men responsible for her mom’s death — although it’s not clear how she knows who they are. (Perhaps the cat told her.)

In describing Da Khwar Lasme Spogmay‘s narrative so compactly, I’m actually doing the film a service, as, in reality, it contains a lot of peripheral business that prevents it from being quite the freewheeling spectacle said description might lead you to think it is. Counted as part of that business, of course, are the movie’s many, many, many song and dance numbers, all of which are of the character, unique to Pashto films, that has outraged and repulsed many a Western blogger with its crassness and crudity. Typically these involve very large women — and by “large”, I mean that even those solicitous souls among you who would scream “sizeist” at the faintest whiff of the pejorative in a discussion of weight would be left no choice but to describe them as “fat” — in vacuformed outfits shaking their junk for the camera like butchers displaying choice cuts at a meat packers’ convention. Among these are Shehnaz, who is no slouch in the girth department, but we also have a few other plus sized performers to take up the slack, as… well, did I mention that there were a whole lot of dance numbers?

As for Shehnaz’s skill as a filmmaker, I have to say that DKLS shows a fair share of visual artistry, especially when considered in comparison to some of the more characteristically ragged examples of Pashto filmmaking. There is evidence of both style and technique, present in an array of weird camera angles and bizarre lighting choices. Her gifts as a story teller, however, are harder to gauge. The abuse that the few prints of these films suffer during their extended life on the Pashtun theater circuit makes it difficult to determine which of a film’s narrative shortcomings are the result of damage and which are the result of sloppy editing and scripting. In this case, though, I suspect it’s a little from column A and a little from column B.

Ultimately, Da Khwar Lasme Spogmay is one of those cult movies that’s much more fun to read about than actually watch. It’s also much more fun to write about than actually watch. And for that reason, as the film becomes more widely available to the denizens of the internet, I suspect that we’ll all be reading about it a lot more. And that is an activity I’d recommend over actually going to the trouble of tracking it down and viewing it. Still, if you’re like me, I know you’re just going to do it anyway. At least I can feel that I’ve honored my conscience by warning you.

The cover, I remember with shocking clarity, depicted a sexy, big-breasted female robot standing against your typical 70s sci-fi world that looks like something that would be airbrushed onto the side of a stoner’s custom van. There were a couple sexy illustrations and classified ads inside, but being a particularly twisted young thing, I was far more enthralled by the illustrations that accompanied one of those “true tales of adventure” type articles about a group of men whose boat sank, forcing them to fight for their lives against a seemingly endless frenzy of flesh-hungry sharks. The lead illustration was of a stubble-faced man shrieking in horror, holding aloft into the sky a handless arm. Where the hand should have been, the artist had piled on an eye-popping atrocity show of amputation by shark teeth. Amazingly, the shark had bitten off the man’s hand and left a perfectly smooth cross-section of arm with a bone protruding from the wound while blood spurted toward the clouds in a great geyser. Bobbing behind him were various severed arms and legs sporting the same smooth cross-sectional amputation and spurting more blood. Half a man bobbed next to him with intestines spilling out from under his half-exposed rib cage.

You know, I never once read the actual story, but every time we went over there, I stole a peek at the illustration. I do believe that eventually I took it upon myself to color the illustration in. It was even better than the encyclopedia that had the entry on human anatomy with transparent pages so you could peel away the layers of man and gawk at his innards and blood vessels. Gasm was one of the two great treasures back in the utility room. The other was boxes and boxes full of green Army men and their accompanying gray Nazi and beige Japanese opponents. This was no meager collection, understand. There were hundreds upon hundreds of pieces. Soldiers, tanks, troop transports, Howitzers, little plastic coils of barbed wire — everything you needed to mount a realistic campaign over the floor and up the washing machine. I spent hours setting up vast and elaborate battlefields so that I could demolish everything in under ten minutes when “crazy Kawolski” from the infantry hopped into a half-track and tore through the entire scene, single-handedly defeating the German army and rescuing all those useless “guy in crawling pose” Army men that had become stuck in the barbed wire. I didn’t care for those guys, but you know how it is. Kawolski wouldn’t leave a man behind, no matter how useless that grunt’s pose may be.

On the shelf above the buckets of Army men was some war memorabilia of a different nature. It was there that my grandfather kept the German helmet he’d brought back with him after the war in Europe, where he’d managed to storm Utah beach on D-Day then storm across the continent as part of Patton’s Third Army. Somewhere along the way, he got separated from the greater portion of the American force and, in a scene that seems straight out of a movie, found himself pursued by German soldiers to a small French farmhouse, where the sympathetic locals hid him in a hay bale that the Germans went through with a pitchfork. He also sustained some shrapnel damage to the lower leg, but I can’t remember exactly when that occurred. Near the end of the war, when it was obvious to the German regulars that they were going to lose, that the Nazis were crazy, and that this was no longer any cause worth dying for, my grandfather and members of his platoon found themselves facing off against a group of their German counterparts in some small Bavarian town. Or maybe it was still in France. The details elude me so many years after first hearing the story. Whatever the location, it was obvious that the Germans no longer had their heart in the fight, and the Americans were not all that interested in killing beaten men. The town had been in the midst of some manner of celebration before the opposing forces had descended upon their narrow country streets and set up camp on either side of the main square, which was, it turned out, occupied by a couple huge kegs of beer mounted on wagons. With the war for Europe winding down, this seemed a far more promising prize. Someone took a couple shots at one of the oversized wooden barrels, poking a hole or two in it and allowing the brew within to spurt out in an arc to the ground. Then an American would run toward the keg and fill his helmet with beer while the Germans took pot shots at his feet. Upon his return to the safety of his comrades, a couple minutes would pass, and then a German would run from the opposite end of the square and fill his helmet with beer while the American GIs shot at his feet. This went on long enough for everyone to get good and drunk, and frankly, given the amount of beer that was doubtless consumed that night, it’s a wonder no one actually got shot.

He came out of that war with a whole host of stories, a German helmet, and his most prized souvenir, the “Little Nazi,” a Luger he’d taken from a dead German officer. Few and far between are the Christmas get-togethers that don’t involve Grandpa Harley trotting out the Little Nazi for show and tell. “Jesus Harley,” my grandmother would exclaim, “What are you doing? That thing’s not loaded, is it?”

“Of course it’s loaded,” he would respond. “A gun ain’t no damn good if it isn’t loaded. It’s not going to go off. The safety’s on. Now,” he would say as he flipped a switched or pressed a button somewhere, “now it could go off!”

He regaled us with stories about how, when they were shorted food and ammunition by that yardbird Harry Truman, they would have to run across a field and catch bugs in their mouths if they wanted to eat. “Yardbird” was the very worst of the insults Gradpa Harley could level at someone, a tag reserved for those he truly hated: Hitler, Harry Truman, and whoever was coaching the University of Louisville’s basketball team. He would also tell us about how the Turks who fought alongside them against the Nazis used to cut off the ears of German soldiers, dead or alive, and string them onto trophy necklaces. Most of his stories rang true, though even as a little one I had my doubts about the bug thing. It did invest in me a healthy disdain for Harry Truman, though. And I never doubted the thing about the ears. For years Turks both excited and terrified me.

Mixed in with the relics of the war and of life in the 50s and 60s was a particularly gruesome curiosity that held my fascination nearly as firmly as the gory sleaze of Gasm magazine. It was just one of those ugly heads made out of a coconut, some useless and tacky souvenir grandpa and grandma had picked up one year on a vacation down south to Florida. But the thing was ugly. It had feathers glued all over the top of its head, hideous eyes, and most chilling of all, actual human teeth glued into the rough-hewn mouth. I wasn’t exactly a well traveled kid at the time, so I didn’t even know what a coconut looked like still inside its shell and not made into a radio or a car by the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. This would prove to be a mortal weakness.

“You don’t want to go messing around with that,” my grandfather once admonished me in an attempt to keep me from scaling the rickety shelves like some devil-may-care Alpinist in an attempt to get a look at that malformed head. “Do you know what it is?” And then he would smile. An evil smile, though I didn’t realize it at the time. “That’s Hitler’s head. I cut it off during the war and brought it home with me.”

“Really? No it isn’t. Really.”

“And if you go messing with it, it’ll come to life and scream at you.”

“In German?”

I still remember asking that bizarre question. Here I was, confronted by the disembodied head of Adolf Hitler, and the only thing that amazed me about the possibility of it coming to life and screaming at me was that it could do so in German.

“It doesn’t looked like Hitler,” I commented, still a tad bit skeptical about this wild yarn.

“That’s because we dried it out on the boat back to America.”

“Where’s his mustache?”

“I tore that off myself and sent it to Harry S. Truman.”

From that day on, I was terrified of Hitler’s head. Up late one night watching one of those “They Saved Hitler’s Brain” type movies with friends, I would explain to them how I knew where Hitler’s head actually was. In school, I once got in trouble for telling classmates that my grandfather had Hitler’s head in his basement, and that it would scream at you in German. My teacher — I would guess this to have been around second grade — told me the story was silly, and that my grandfather had just been pulling my leg, but what did she know? “Who you gonna believe?” my grandpa asked me. “Her or the guy who was actually there?” And he was right. She hadn’t seen the thing, with its foul, cracked yellow teeth and hair of green and red and blue feathers — just like the real Hitler!

It was assumed when the Twilight novels and movies took over the universe, that we would be inundated with similar works of weepy, melodramatic teen supernatural romance. While that may have been the case in literature — assisted no doubt by the fact that self-publishing for e-book readers means anyone with enough determination to finish a book could get it published and sold on Amazon — the same thing didn’t really happen in film. There was a similar unfulfilled expectation when Harry Potter was the king of the hill, and we all assumed there’d be a billion little boy wizard movies. Despite it’s astounding popularity, only a few cinematic cash-ins ever saw the light of day, and they weren’t all that successful (I don’t think many people are demanding the next installment of the Percy Jackson series). I guess now you can throw Hunger Games into the mix as well. Young adult supernatural fantasy may rule the pop literary world these days, but it didn’t really succeed in setting aflame the big screen, or even the small screen. You’d think that, if nothing else, the direct-to-DVD or direct-to-Netflix-streaming world would be stuffed to the gills with dodgy young adult vampire romances and such, but that’s not the case. And yes, I’ve looked. All I found was a bunch of cheap, shot on digital video Fast and Furious rip-offs, which naturally, I immediately added to me queue.

I’m not a fan of either Twilight or Harry Potter, but neither am I a detractor, as I have never read either series and likely never will. I have seen some Harry Potter movies, and they were all right, though it turns out that not everyone counts Troll as part of the series. Good or bad, however, there’s obviously something in both of those series that was perfectly timed to tap into a zeitgeist that propelled them to the upper ranks of popularity that was not obtained by their imitators or even by the books (or movies) they themselves might have been imitating. There was something that happened to make each of those the successful ones, and whether you love, hate, or don’t care about either series, there’s no denying that they did something right. Red Riding Hood was one of the first movies to copy the overwrought YA melodrama of Twilight, and few people seem to remember Red Riding Hood was even made. That’s not really a crime against art or anything. Red Riding Hood is a pretty disposable film in many ways. But there’s nothing in it that would seem to make it obvious why it failed where something like Twilight succeeded. Maybe it’s darker? I can’t say, because I have no idea the tone struck by the Twilight series. I know Twilight came with a fan base basically assured, where as Red Riding Hood was basing itself — very loosely — on an old children’s fairy tale. But Red Riding Hood did have Amanda Seyfried, a veteran of the television show Veronica Mars, which has a huge cult following. And there’s the Gary Oldman factor. I guess maybe fans of Veronica Mars and of Gary Oldman skew a little older than the target market for Red Riding Hood?

But still, the advertising seemed to hit all the right “hey, if you liked Twilight then you’ll probably be OK with this film” notes. I remember from my own experience being an idiotic movie goer that teens and younger are particularly susceptible to such marketing, especially when there’s nothing better to do on a Friday night. Maybe the high price of movie tickets has changed things. I might not have seen all those Conan the Barbarian rip-offs in the 1980s if it cost me upwards of twelve bucks a pop to do so. Or maybe werewolves just aren’t as popular with the tweens as vampires — at least not werewolves that keep their shirts on. Whatever the case, Red Riding Hood died on the vine by comparison. Thing is, it’s not that bad of a movie. Oh don’t get me wrong. It’s certainly got it’s flaws, but there are so many other movies that are so much worse that somehow manage to become hits. Red Riding Hood is mildly more ambitious at times than its status as a Twilight cash-in might lead you to believe — but the fact that the writer and director also seem to abandon those ambitions makes it a more frustrating film.

Seyfried stars as Valerie, she who tends to wear a bright crimson robe in a town that is otherwise pretty monochrome. Her remote village is currently under siege from what appears to be a werewolf. Usually, they could sacrifice some chickens or a goat or a little pile of Snausages to the beast, and it would be assuaged (or sausuaged as the case may be). But nature is about to hit the town with a “blood moon,” which means the relative good behavior of the werewolf is subsumed by an out-of-control bloodlust that has it slaughtering the locals. This leads to assorted hunts, deaths, and eventually the welcome arrival of Gary Oldman as a typically Oldman-insane werewolf hunter/inquisitor type accompanied for some reason by some male models. Oh wait, maybe they’re his henchmen. Hmm. When it comes to impressive henchmen, we’re a long way away from but much better groomed than Ben Davidson’s Rexor in Conan the Barbarian. It’s possible they’re there to help him shop for his fabulous clothing, purchased no doubt from the same Renaissance Faire merchant where all those people from M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village bought their jaunty yellow cloaks. Anyway, he and Valerie are the only people who own clothing with such warm, vibrant color so you know they’re going to have some words with each other.

Valerie is torn by the love of two competing young lads: the clean-cut virtuous bore Henry (Max Irons), and the brooding skulking bore Peter (Shiloh Fernandez, cast apparently for his ability to look a lot like Robert Pattinson, the vampire statutory rapist from from Twilight). Despite being in a remote rural village in a setting that can best be described as “romancy old timey days where I didn’t want to do a whole lot of historical research,” both of these furrowed-browed lads seem to have an endless supply of hair putty for their bad boy fauxhawks. And both of them are pretty dull, though Peter (oh, I get it…and the wolf) is dull and also likes to flirt with being an emotionally abusive prick, so obviously he’s the ultimate romantic prize for young Valerie. Romance has always had a problem with holding up the mentally abusive dick as the prize, and Peter is basically the Ren Faire version of Ethan Hawke’s snotty emo dickweed from Reality Bites (sadly not a werewolf movie, despite the title and Hawke’s mangy hair) — though Peter manages to be slightly more redeemable. Anyway, when they’re not worrying about the werewolf, one or the other of these two guys is usually popping up behind Valerie, probably perched on a branch or in a hay loft or something so they can squat down in a soulful fashion. Valerie is at least not a total sap for either of these guys, and she spends part of the time being as irritated by the wishy-washiness of the one and the assholishness of the other as are we the viewer.

Needless to say, Valerie also has mysterious ties to the werewolf. Is she the wolf? Is Peter the wolf? He does seem overly concerned about his hair, after all. Or could it be her witch woman grandmother (Julie Christie) who lives in a creepy house out in the woods? And yes, you can bet your bottom dollar that this script will do everything in its power to shoehorn in the “what big eyes you have” dialogue from the source material at some point. Anyway, you won’t really care about the mystery of the werewolf’s identity all that much, but I guess it helps pass the time until Gary Oldman shows up to turn in his expected weird performance. He breathes some life into things and looks resplendent in his purple velvet robes. All things considered, our forgettable young heroes are surrounded by a pretty good cast. Oldman’s shtick is so established now that “Oldmaning” should be a verb, but I never get tired of Oldman when he’s Oldmaning. Michael Hogan is best known for playing the cranky, belligerent Colonel Tigh on Battlestar Galactica. Here he plays… well, basically he plays Colonel Tigh. Virginia Madsen stars as Valerie’s mom and another possible werewolf suspect, while Lucas Haas shows up in a pointless role as a quivering, ineffectual priest who should open a parish with the quivering, ineffectual priest from Dracula Has Risen from the Grave. And to make sure there are some direct ties in the cast to Twilight, Billy Burke plays Valerie’s dad. Yes, yes, he’s in Twilight; but more importantly, he was in Drive Angry and got his ass kicked by Jack Bauer’s daughter in that season of 24 where Johnny Drama hunted Kim Bauer on his private game reserve with a pack of trained panthers. Wait, was that the plot? Well, it is now.

So there’s more veteran talent in this movie than Twilight, which helps soothe the more pouty aspects of watching our young love triangle sigh and mumble at each other. Amanda Seyfried properly looks the part of a fairy tale heroine, and I like that her character has a little more backbone than is typical for a female in a fantasy romance. The trend in supernatural romance literature, which definitely skews toward female protagonists, is to make them much stronger — sometimes in clumsy fashion, but whatever — than the women traditionally featured in either romance (there to be ravaged) or supernatural (usually there to be a sacrifice rescued by the male hero) stories. I know one of the complaints about the girl from Twilight is that’s she’s really kind of a chump. I can’t say too much about that, but Valerie is a much better rounded character. She is a chump from time to time, but no more so than anyone is when they’re stupid with love, and she balances out the teen angst by being more than willing to go at someone with a knife, stare down a werewolf, and engage Gary Oldman in a battle of vibrant cloaks. She also spends a lot of time walking through fake snow in slow motion while Peter and Henry furrow their brows and mumble something or other. And hey — at least her two potential boyfriends are her age, and not some two hundred year old creep who still attends high school and woos teen girls. I know they try to give that Edward Cullen guy an emo gothy twist, but let’s be real — that dude is nothing but the vampire version of Matthew McConaughey’s character from Dazed and Confused.

None of the three leads are actually all that bad at their jobs, but the writing does them no favors. Peter is written as a moody prick, but they forget to highlight any redeeming features he may have that would make you understand why Valerie would be torn between him and what’s his name, the one with the lighter hair. Valerie, for her part, is a more active participant in her own story than I gather the main girl in Twilight is. Red Riding Hood isn’t afraid to throw down in a fight, and while she’s caught in this silly romantic triangle, she doesn’t spent the whole movie pining and whining. So there’s that, I guess. Overall though, David Johnson’s script spends too much time on undeserved romantic hand-wringing of a decidedly high school level — and not as in it would appeal to high schoolers, but that it feels like it was written by a teenager. I think Johnson is purposely trying to write down to the film’s intended audience, and he does himself and them no favors as a result. He wrote two of the better episodes of The Walking Dead (a show that is largely disappointing and frustrating but has a tendency to be brilliant on occasion, making it hard to abandon it). There are flashes of a good if simple story, as well as an impressively ominous mood and a willingness to take on complex topics, but then those flashes seem to get second guessed, and we return to a somewhat crass imitation of Twilight — a movie that is, frankly, below the standards of this film in pretty much every regard save box office.

Director Catherine Hardwicke has previously directed…oh. Twilight. Huh, how about that. But hey, she also made Lords of Dogtown, which is actually a pretty decent film dealing with teenagers. She should have leaned more on that, though I don’t know if Red Riding Hood would have benefitted from a scene where Henry (dude totally looks like a SoCal skater anyway) leads Valerie through a magical, snowy fairy wood to show her a secret empty pool only he and the brownies can skate. But there was a grit to Lords of Dogtown, thanks no doubt to a large degree to the script, that shows Hardwicke is a lot more than “the woman who directed Twilight.” In fact, she left that series after the first film, if I recall, because she just didn’t like the resources and short schedule with which she had to work. Whether by design or coincidence, Red Riding Hood ends up as her response to that other series, and it seems to me to be a more mature if still flawed attempt at capturing the same general audience. I think if she and David Johnson had been less hamstrung by the directive to “make Twilight but with werewolves…well, with just werewolves,” they would have actually come up with a pretty good movie. But that wasn’t the case, and as a result, too much of Red Riding Hood feels too often like a Twilight imitation and treads that same middle-of-the-tween-intellect writing water that panders to but never really engages or challenges the audience (and yes, you can both pander to and challenge in the same film).

There are a few places where the film succeeds without as many caveats as I’ve so far placed on it. Hardwicke’s background is in production design, and for someone known mostly as the director of Twilight, she has a surprisingly strong cult film pedigree when it comes to that profession. She cut her teeth on the hilariously wrong-headed but now hilariously harmless skateboard exploitation film Thrashin’ and went on to work as a production designer for such films as Tapeheads, I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, Brain Dead (the Bill Pullman/Bill Paxton one, not the Peter Jackson one), Tank Girl, and Alex Winters’ Freaked. So it’s not surprising that where the plot and dialogue of this movie may falter, the look of the film is pretty interesting. The setting is obviously not from any actual period in history, and for the most part, the movie is unconcerned with convincing you this is anything but a movie set. But it still looks pretty good, thanks largely I would guess to Hardwicke’s background as well as the fact that she has a pretty accomplished production designer working with her here. Thomas Sanders got his start in production design on Francis Ford Coppola’s ridiculously overblown Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Say what you will about the bombast of that movie, but it was certainly memorable looking. Sanders also worked on Braveheart, We Were Soldiers, and Apocalypto, three of crazy ol’ Mel Gibson’s most ambitious films in terms of setting and sense of place.

What Sanders and Hardwicke dream up for the look of Red Riding Hood is pretty sumptuous even if not wholly original, though just like the films by which it was inspired, it’s going to be a very divisive style. A lot of people don’t like the obvious setbound look, but I guess growing up on Hammer and Shaw Brothers movies predisposes me to liking that approach. It obviously hearkens back to Sanders’ experience on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with more than a dash of Ridley Scott’s glittery fairytale atmosphere from Legend. In fact, this movie looks an awful lot like Legend, which was another movie that seemed to actively seek out a very stylized but obviously not “real” setting, the polar opposite of fantasy films like The Lord of the Rings that go to great lengths to make their fantastic events look like they are happening in our real world (more or less). The look of Red Riding Hood lends the film a lush, hypnotic quality that helps the viewer deal with the choppy plot and painful young romance dialogue. If I could change anything about the look of this film, it would be to explain that snow does not look or move the same as white sand, and that if you are CGI’ing in a blizzard, you should probably douse your actors with more than a token few fake snowflakes on their shoulders. But other than that, there’s a lot to appreciate visually in this film, which makes good ose of awkwardly tilting cottages, spooky woods, and of course, Valerie’s bright crimson robe against snowy white backgrounds.

I also really like the soundtrack composed by Brian Reitzell and Alex Heffes. Reitzell is turning into an interesting musical director, and his inclusion in this film’s crew draws further connections to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Reitzell got into the soundtrack business thanks primarily to the fact that he was a record nerd and dating Sofia Copolla’s best friend — Sofia, of course, being Francis Ford’s daughter. Anyway, she hired Reitzell to put together the music for her first film, The Virgin Suicides, and he worked with her on subsequent films not just as a soundtrack advisor, but as a composer. Before too long, he had a fair string of credits under his belt, including Lost in Translation, 30 Days of Night, and Stranger than Fiction. He also joined the band Air at some point and wrote a soundtrack for a fake sequel to Logan’s Run. His music for Red Riding Hood fits the film in that way where it doesn’t really fit the film but somehow works perfectly. On a few tracks, he works with Swedish electronic artist Karin Dreijer Andersson, also known as Fever Ray. It’s a blend of modern sounds, ambient noise, and percussion that sounds like Dead Can Dance, Tarja Turunen, and the soundtrack from Ravenous all got thrown into a blender. It works well with the freaky production design. It’s not exactly anachronistic, since Red Riding Hood doesn’t really take place in a real time, and I like the fact that it’s weirder and more aggressive than the “eh, just get some Enya sounding stuff or some new age asshole” soundtracks for which movies like this might otherwise settle. Fever Ray’s “Keep The Streets Empty For Me” and “The Wolf” alone are worth the price of the watching the movie.

Oh yeah, also, there’s a werewolf in this movie. I guess we should talk about Red Riding Hood‘s great hairy beast and its version of werewolf lore. The original fairy tale lends itself pretty easily to adaptation into a werewolf movie, as is evidenced by all the werewolf versions of it that have been made over the years. None fo them achieve the fairytale atmosphere as effectively as this one. Like a lot of modern movies, it seems to make up whatever crap it wants to about werewolves. They become werewolves during the full moon, though there seem to be a lot of full moons. But that’s pretty common in werewolf movies. The werewolf is an uncontrollable hulking killing machine with no humanity left in it, unless of course the movie needs it to be otherwise, in which case I guess love conquers the savage heart or some dreck like that. Compared to what both Twilight and those Underworld movies did to vampires and werewolves, Red Riding Hood‘s transgressions against traditionally accepted werewolfery are relatively mild. The monster ends up just looking like a big shaggy wolf, which isn’t all that exciting but is better than those silly acrobatic humanoid werewolves from the Underworld movies. I’ll always miss when werewolves were just dog-faced hairy guys, but that’s only because I like monsters who wear trousers. Red Riding Hood‘s werewolf is CGI, but the stylized artificiality of the setting as a whole makes it work better than it might otherwise. Plus, they keep it in the shadows or moving too quickly to pick apart the special effects.

So how about that? Almost a positive review of a tweeny werewolf fairytale? Fact is, I really didn’t hate this movie at all. If I had a kid, I think I would rather take them to see this than Twilight — and I would take them to see either this or that before I took them to, you know, some Bratz: The Movie sort of deal. Having grown up a weird punk rocker, I appreciate that the popularity of supernatural romance, especially among teens, promotes acceptance of a more off-kilter, weirder, nerdier sort of lifestyle. Now if only we could dispense with the male love interest being a sullen prick for most of the movie, we’d really be in business. I also appreciate that Red Riding Hood dips its tow into more controvertial material than “could I eve rlove a werewolf?” Lucas Haas’ cowardly priest and Gary Oldman’s torture-happy inquisitor are juxtaposed against a comparatively benign opinion of paganism and humanism. And Oldman’s scenes in particular push the film out of the realm of misty-eyed fantasy and into the gruesome darkness of something like Dragonslayer — still the most shockingly dark kids’ fantasy film of all time. And ultimately I think Red Riding Hood deserves to be in the company of movies like Dragonslayer and Legend rather than being relegated to the ranks of Twilight cash-ins. When it mimics the latter is when it’s at its weakest and when the writing becomes too hokey, with hammy romance dialogue delivered by young performers without the skill and gravitas to pull it off. Gary Oldman could have done it, but it would have been silly to have him saying everyone’s lines. Maybe they could redub the entire film using Oldman as Peter, Christopher Lee as Henry, and Brian Blessed as Valerie. No matter what shit the writer has those actors say, they’ll make you believe it. And since we can’t have Oldman dubbing Oldman, I guess you could then go and dub Oldman’s character with Christopher Walken. “Gather…round…you star-crossed lovers…one of you…is…a WOLF.”

Ehh, I’ve lost myself in a tangent, haven’t I? OK, so point is, Red Riding Hood is a hammy Twilight imitation that sometimes strives to be more than that but never seems to develop faith in itself, ultimately undermining what could have been a perfectly acceptable fairytale film. Instead of going with the typical “fans of Twilight will like it,” let me give the film a little more credit, if for no other reason than the production design, music, and Gary Oldman’s frockcoats: fans of Legend will like it. Werewolf movie fans? Eh, probably not but I bet you’ll end up watching it anyway because you know, like I know, we werewolf movie fans don’t get many choices. Actually, this entire movie could have been salvaged if they’d just done something different with love interest Peter. But his look is just so utterly absurd — seriously dude, the hair — and his character so inconsistently written that he almost sinks the movie. Amanda Seyfried’s Valerie is perfectly acceptable, and even Max Irons’ boring woodsman or blacksmith or stoned Z-Boy or whatever he was could have been tolerated since that sort of character is always sort of dull (he can go out later for a beer with Orlando Bloom’s dull ol’ character from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies). Those things could all be accepted, especially with Oldman mincing about and Colonel Tigh all grumpin’ on about conditions on New Caprica or whatever. But Peter — ugh! Just terrible. I don’t blame you, Shiloh Fernandez. Someone obviously commanded you to gel up your hair and act as much like the Twilight guy as possible, and you did what they asked. But they asked something bad of you, and when you delivered, it wreathed what could have been a much better in a whiff of bad poetry and hair putty.

So there’s a lot of bet hedging in this, but the final result is that I liked Red Riding Hood a lot more than I expected to — which is to say that I didn’t expect to like it at all. I’m always happy to be surprised, especially by a movie that seems at first glance to be so far afield from the sort of thing I normally like. But then, if you looke dat my reading list right now, you’d find it pretty heavily weighted by supernatural romance and urban fantasy with female leads, so I suppose if you take into account my reading preferences these days, perhaps it’s not so surprising that I thought this movie was OK despite the missteps and the fact that Henry and Peter spent so much time sculpting their hair. Hey, at least they didn’t have swept-forward mop top Justin Beiber cuts, right? Red Riding Hood benefits greatly from a veteran supporting cast and some actual talent and vision behind the camera. Yes, it’s a movie that struggles with being an overly mawkish young adult romance or being a grim fairytale. And in a way, this film’s identity struggle is reflective of the same struggle on the part of the film’s one last big gun. It was produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, an actor who still struggles with being thought of only as “that guy from Titanic” or as a kid actor since he has a young face. The only difference is that DiCaprio has totally distanced himself from romantic Titanic sorts of roles, where as Red Riding Hood can’t quite divorce itself from that sort of tween romance, but I can deal with that. It’s really no different that listening to a Shangri-Las song, and I love the Shangri-Las. Just imagine if the pack the leader of the pack was leading had been a werewolf pack.

Ironically, Red Riding Hood failed as a Twilight cash-in and seems to have missed a sudden flood of fairytale movies and television shows. Red Riding Hood hit screens a year too soon. If it had been made in 2012, it would have been accompanied by TV shows like Grimm and movies like Snow White and the Huntsman. Oh wait. Damn, Snow White and the Huntsman stars Kristen “Twilight” Stewart, doesn’t it? It’s inescapable! Anyway…released as a colleague of those works rather than Twilight (which has just about run its course, I think), Red Riding Hood could have shed some of its absurd teen romance dialogue, featured less of an Edward Cullen wannabe love interest, and concentrated on being the more mature and sinister movie director Hardwicke and writer Johnson are doubtless capable of making. There are flashes of that movie in this one, especially once Oldman loses his shit and starts torturing people in pretty grisly fashion. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and so Red Riding Hood ends up being a footnote, dismissed because of its attempts at mimicking a movie series that gets very little respect. Sometimes, that’s exactly what it is. Other times, though, it’s something more substantial, and for me those moments made it worth wandering through Red Riding Hood‘s twisted winter forest.

Sector 7 is the very worst kind of movie with which to be confronted. OK, maybe not. Maybe What Happens in Vegas is the very worst kind of movie with which to be confronted, but since that’s not the sort of movie I seek out, and Sector 7 is, then the wounds I suffer at the hands of Sector 7 leaves a much deeper scar than any injuries I may have suffered while confined to a seat in a bus where they were playing What Happens in Vegas. Sector 7 is the person who should be your friend, but when you are dangling over the precipice and it is holding on to you, it suddenly flashes an evil grin and lets go, allowing you to fall to your death puzzled by this betrayal. Also, you are falling into lava. Sector 7, you were a flashy, big budget monster movie set on an oil rig and fronted by a wickedly cute actress with decent biceps. How could you do this too me? How could you be so very bad on pretty much every single level?

Let’s re-establish the fact that despite my propensity for lingering in the more obscure reaches of the cinematic landscape, I have nothing again glossy, big budget, even soulless movies so long as they are in a genre I’m prone to liking. It doesn’t matter to me. I’ll give you a fair shake, and I’ve walked away from more than my share of such films with the feeling that I have been satisfied. Unlike a lot of cult film commentators, I don’t have a grudge against $250 million blockbusters. Nor do I have anything against movies that are generic or formulaic provided, as I’ve said before, that the formula is well-executed. In the past decade, few countries have proven to be as adept as South Korea at executing formula. Starting more or less with the espionage/action film Shiri, South Korea became a powerhouse for producing slick, formulaic cinema that didn’t do much that was original but still pulled off its cinema with a polish and eye for detail that made for pretty fun, if somewhat emotionless, entrainment. They also made D-Wars.

So a big-budget Korean movie about a monster running amok on an isolated oil rig? I’m your target market, from top to bottom. Pile it on by making sure the lead is an attractive female bad-ass who has nice biceps and looks good in a tank top, and I’m practically eating out of your hand like a well-trained circus chimp. But like a well-trained circus chimp, if you betray me I will turn on you, bite your finger off, and smoke it like a novelty cigar while I roller skate away, doffing my comedy derby at passersby. And you, Sector 7 — I want to bite your finger off so bad! You didn’t have to do hardly anything. You’re a big budget rip-off of a medium budget rip-off of Alien. Pretty much all you had to do was remake Leviathan with Ha Ji-won in the Peter Weller role, and I was going to walk away happy. Instead, you managed to cock things up at every turn, making a film that is as boring as it is disappointing, with terrible CGI, idiotic writing, and a cast of characters almost as annoying as Daniel Stern’s Sixpack from Leviathan — only more numerous.

The plot of the movie is simple enough and nothing original. A group of workers on a jinxed oil rig finally get a break when they strike oil. Unfortunately, their good fortune corresponds with a strange little deep sea beasty getting lose on the rig and, in no time flat, mutating into a giant murderous creature that forces humans to scream and run down dimly lit metal corridors. And of course, in line with the template that was established with Alien and reinforced by countless movies there after, there is a company man with mysterious knowledge of the beast, a cowardly dude, and a whole bunch of desperately trying to close doors while the camera zooms toward you. This is not a hard kind of movie to make, and like I said, I don’t really demand any originality from such films. Leviathan is so much like Alien (but underwater) that it’s ridiculous — but that doesn’t stop me from loving the hell out of Leviathan. Sector 7 hits all the beats, but none of it ever clicks.

For starters, half the cast overacts to a stunning degree. The amount of screaming, falling down, flailing, and gibbering on display far exceeds my admittedly low tolerance for such histrionics. It’s like a movie comprised entirely of over-the-top odious comic relief characters, except instead of being odious comic relief, they are trying to be dramatic. Nothing good comes of their presence. Ha Ji-won does what she can to soothe the impact of these buffoons, but she can only do so much despite playing the tough, take-no-crap final girl with aplomb. She looks great in action and has plenty of attitude, but when you’re surrounded by so much crap, you can’t be expected to salvage it all. The rest of the cast — a boring doctor, another boring doctor, Ha Ji-won’s uncle, a bland male love interest — is OK if somewhat forgettable. If they were just monster fodder, that would be acceptable, but we are actually forced to spend a substantial amount of time with them all in “character building” dramatic scenes that do not build any character and are not all that dramatic. If this film was trying to make you feel what it’s like to be trapped on an oil rig with a bunch of people who are either tedious or obnoxious, then I guess mission accomplished?

But the film’s real problem isn’t with the acting. Hell, you’d be hard pressed to find a worse character in these types of movies than Daniel Stern in Leviathan, but that movie survives despite his contributions. Sector 7 could have similarly survived its terrible characters if the rest of the film had been fun, but it’s not. It drags on forever, even when the monster starts its rampage. When your monster rampage scenes are boring, then your “monster on a rampage” movie is really in trouble. Sector 7 sends its characters running around in circles with no sort of tension, and we’re forced to watch them do the same things over and over. The amount of punishment the monster endures and survives stretches from absurd to repetitive to just plain irritating. There’s no real in-film reason for it to be indestructible. It just is, which means we have to watch like half an hour of “it’s dead…no it isn’t! OK, for real it is this time…no it’s not!” nonsense. It just never ends. The monster at least looks OK, despite being all CGI, but it’s another one of those all-CGI monster designs that shows no real creativity or menace. It looks like a bunch of other CGI monsters. Why do they all have infinitely long killer tongues?

But still, the monster is mostly OK at least when measured against the standard Syfy channel movie monster — which counts for something because that’s more than can be said for the rest of the movie’s CGI, which ranges from bad to shameful, especially for a film with this large a budget. And the CGi is used, like it was in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, for no reason in scenes where it has no business intruding. Sunsets and “folks staring out at the sea” shots look like cartoons, but the most egregious example of terrible CGi where no CGI at all was needed is in a pointless motorcycle race Ha Ji-won and her co-worker/love interest have. You couldn’t just get a couple motorcycles and ride them around? No. Instead everything is done in terrible computer animation with bad backdrops and unconvincing motion. It’s a classic example of the old adage that a movie can ask us to believe the impossible bot not the improbable. A monster ripping through the corridors of an oil rig? I can accept that. But fakey looking computer animated motorcycle races? That torpedoes any sort of involvement I have felt with the film, and I was already feeling sketchy about it.

The look of the rest of the film is OK. Just as it’s lifting the plot from Leviathan/Alien, so too does it lift the overall production design of those films, with a bit less of the grittiness that both those films so perfectly attained. Even when it is covered in grease and muck, this movie still looks polished and clean. But the crew looks good in their industrial cover-alls, and the sets provide a suitable environment for lurking monster action. I’ve always thought that oil rigs are excellent settings for horror/monster movies, and even though Sector 7 fails at being a good monster movie, it’s not the fault of the setting. One of the things that works well is that the average person has no idea what the inside of an oil rig looks like, which means this movie can throw as many dimly lit labyrinths, murky pools of water, and scary dark storage spaces at me as it wants, and I’ll not have any cause to call foul. It all seems plausible enough to me. Sadly, even though the oil rig provides the movie all the isolation, darkness, and nooks and crannies any stalking monster could ever hope for, the pace and execution of the movie fails to put them to effective scary use.

I’m pretty comfortable lying the blame squarely at the feet of director Kim Ji-hun. The script may be spotty, but that’s never stopped a monster movie from being good if it was properly paced. And there may be some serios overacting, but again, a decent (or even workman) director can reel in an out-of-control actor. Kim doesn’t reel in the screeching, and he has no idea how to pace the movie. Not surprising — before being handed the reigns to Sector 7, he’d hardly done anything. So why did someone think it was wise to give an inexperienced director control over such a big movie full of complicated situations? Most likely because he directed May 18, a political drama about the Gwangju massacre in 1980, during which thousands of students and protesters were killed by soldiers during anti-government demonstration.

It was a big movie and critically acclaimed, so I guess they thought Kim was ready to handle anything. But making a successful monster movie is a very specific skill. Just because you can direct a big movie doesn’t mean you can direct a big monster movie. And that certainly turned out to be the case with Kim Ji-hun. He doesn’t get anything right. Scenes that should end go on forever. Scenes that need more tension are abandoned. And when he shoots for a dramatic death near the film’s end, the result is embarrassingly hilarious — less like the death of Quint in Jaws, more like Will Farrell pole vaulting into a dinosaur’s mouth in Land of the Lost.

Writers are required by law when writing about any Korean monster movie to mention The Host, so let me get that out of the way real quick. I don’t think there’s any reason to mention The Host when reviewing Sector 7, even though everyone does (and I guess I just did as well). Yes, they are both Korean movies, and yes they both feature monsters. But those are superficial similarities. The Host is a subversion of the classic “giant monster attacks a city” movies, while Sector 7 is a “medium size monster stalks a group of isolated individuals” sort of deal and has no aspirations of being subversive or in any way thumbing its nose at the genre in which it has placed itself. Let me also log the fact that I’m one of like five people in the world who didn’t actually like The Host very much. I much preferred Chaw, the Korean horror-comedy take on Jaws type movies with a healthy dose of Razorback remake. But that’s neither here nor there, because despite both being monster movies, Sector 7 and The Host are no more comparable to one another than Alien is to Godzilla.

So anyway, there’s that done. Sector 7 has very little to do with a film like The Host, and as I’ve mentioned it’s basically Leviathan, which was basically Alien. The difference is those two movies are either entertainingly suspenseful (Alien) or exciting (Leviathan), and Sector 7 fails to be either of those. When the final credits rolled, my reaction to those film was nothing more than a disappointed sigh and wonderment at how long it took to get to the end. I did not demand much from it, but it still managed to let me down. About the only positive things I can say is that it made me want to watch Leviathan again (and that gets more entertaining every time) and that Ha Ji-won is a pleasure to watch in action — but she’s not enough to rdeem an otherwise boring movie. I went in armed with moderate expectations, a certain degree of excitement, and a tendency to like even the bad films in this genre. That wasn’t enough to get me through. Even Deepstar Six is a better example of the genre than this flat-footed letdown.

I know poking around cemeteries isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery is one of the most historic and beautiful in the region. You can spend an entire day wandering the grounds, and there’s a pretty high probability that you’ll get good and lost for at least an hour or so.