Haute Tension (2005) Christmas Eve. Crazy Pete’s Saloon, North 8th Street, Philadelphia. Stephanie the bartender shakes her new titties at the freak show on-stage, managing to knock a liter of vermouth with her left breast off a low shelf in front of her. Currently tonight’s stage act had hammered a ten-penny nail up his nose and to assure the realism of the trick, audience members are allowed to come up stage for a mere five bucks and each is allowed to try to sink the nail a little deeper into the geek’s sinus cavity. A few have even opted to rip a hole in their five-spot and hang it off the head of the nail. However, there are mostly groans from the crowd (including the distinctive grumble of Graveyard Frank Trautman, who is here ducking out from the holidays), and Stephanie is the geek’s only cheerleader. But this, unfortunately out of loyalty to her boyfriend who is part owner of the club; in someway that she doesn’t completely understand, although she does know that his parents are full owners of Wasabi, the sushi bar two blocks away which he (predictably named, Brad) manages and lives above in a spacious warehouse. Brad also has some investment in Tickles, the semi-nude strip club on South Street, where Stephanie danced until about two weeks ago. Decidedly inconsistent yet territorially, Brad had demanded she stop dancing after they hooked up, but he had also been insistent she allow him “invest” in her boob-job as a Christmas present. This is all neither here nor there. What catches Frank’s attention is not how a bemused Stephanie tries to fold her arms over her chest and re-finds her new appendages. What Frank spots is her uncanny resemblance to French actress Cécile De France (Around the World in 80 Days; Coraci 2004/L'Auberge Espagnole; Klapisch 2002). Her breakout performance in Haute Tension (Aja 2003) is now out on DVD (Lion’s Gate, 10/11/05). The film centers around De France’s and friend, Alexia’s college roadtrip to Alexia’s family’s isolated country farmhouse. No sooner are they snug in their beds when a brutal killer breaks in, slaughters the family (including the pet dog) and kidnaps Alexia. Alexia, BTW, is played by Maïwenn, Luc Besson’s gawky former girlfriend, who we all know as that weird blue opera singer in Besson’s 1997 The Fifth Element. The killer is Philippe Nahon, a veteran of the psycho role (Seul Contre Tous ; Noé 1998). Some people have claimed Aja’s “High Tension” is a benchmark in French filmmaking–-the French’s mastery of yet another American genre, the teen slasher film. The people who say that, however, are idiots. The film does not deliver. If the film has mastered anything, it has somehow mastered the 21st c American horror film’s ability to be both immediately predictable and flawed in continuity at the same time (consider Hide and Seek [Polson 2005] or Saw [Wan 2004] or The Village [Shyamalan 2004], to name a few.). Bleh. Forgive the spoiler, but the film opens with De France’s flash-forward to the plot twist at the end of the film and a series of very non-subtle hints that she is totally cuckoo and has a gay obsession with Alexia. So knowing that De France is the killer, why then is her ulterior personality the killer, Nahon, tooling around in his van and terrorizing the countryside? Why then is Nahon/De France slaughtering anybody? And how is she/he getting two vehicles around? Now, granted, Aja is adept at creating dramtic tension as De France is alternately pursued by/ and purses Nahon/ herself. The gore is on the silly side, too. But, even if one misses the twist-ending set-up on the first viewing, the twist makes the whole movie silly and pointless in retrospect. As a rule, a film that relies on a twist ending which doesn’t stand up to a second viewing is not a good film. It is a gimmick film. The film-making equivalent of a rubber chicken. Besides, a movie about pointless killing is,---well, pointless, after all. It’s no wonder that Aja’s next project is a remake of Wes Craven’s 1977 The Hills Have Eyes. Stephanie smiles at Frank and gives him a Gray Goose and soda that he didn’t order; but it’s hard to take her seriously, having already met Brad. Oh well. If you like Nahon, check out his other films, especially those of Gaspar Noé. Check out Luc Besson’s films, if you like Maïwenn (or Besson’s other love-interest, Milla Jovovich). But, If you like the sexy sexy Cécile De France, Frank recommends you check out her identical twin Stephanie (and her two new co-stars) down in So. Philly.

Merry Christmas.

The Innocents (1961)

Frank knew he often sounded like a broken record, but sitting on the old pier in Esperanza, looking out over Puerto Real and to Cayo de Afuera and out to the vast blue Caribbean (and beyond to what? Port-of-Spain? Caracas? Maracaibo?), it didn’t seem to matter much. “Convengo, Capitán,” he agrees with Jose Ortiz Príncipe, the old hombre surveying the beach with him, “Verdad, el mundo sería perfecto, si la amabilidad era persuasiva.” “Sí. El amor es como una elección,” he claps Frank on the back, “Cada hombre deseó ser contado. Pero, deciden a los ganadores ya.” “¡Perros y perras!” At this, Jose Ortiz chuckles, then goes back to his stories of the “pequeños hombres obscuros” that he and his sons had seen while emptying their land crab traps in the mangrove fringes around Red Beach. Stories about spacemen and UFO both in the skies and coming out of the sea, are not uncommon on Vieques.

To be fair, though, UFO sightings are common in a five-mile radius of just about every US military base, and in the past, the US military controlled about 2/3 of the 20-mile long island. And here too, spaceships are most often spotted flying towards the neighborhood of Fajardo and Ceiba (where the navy’s mainland operations were held in NS Roosevelt Roads). However, on Vieques, UFO stories hold a special reverence. They go hand and hand with the hatred of the Navy presence. Spacemen, like accidental death and cancer, are just another negative consequence of the military bombing and firing ranges. But Frank was more interested his stories about island visitors from an even farther flung galaxy: Hollywood. In the past the island was the principal location for movies such Lord of the Flies (Brook 1963), Heartbreak Ridge (Eastwood 1986) (as a stand-in for Grenada), and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (Huston 1957) (as a stand-in for the WWII Pacific theater). In fact, it was in that Huston movie that, as a young Marine, Jose Ortiz stood in as an extra with Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr. Jose Ortiz was absolutely in love with Kerr after his scene, despite the clash between the nun’s habit she wore for the part, and Jose Ortiz’ Catholic upbringing.

At this, Jose Ortiz pulls out from under his linen shirt, the scapular medal he’d worn since the Korean War. Frank frowns at it briefly; he always found the Jesus of the Scared Heart iconography a tad disturbing. Instead, he asks if he had ever seen Kerr in The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s 1961 telling of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. He hadn't. Frank recomends it. It was new on DVD (6 September 2005, 20th c. Fox) and Frank had picked it up in San Juan the last time he had flown in for supplies. As Frank had been recently thinking a lot about the Gothic films (or ‘no horror’ horror as Frank put it) of the past few decades, The Innocents is certainly one for the list. Now, the acting can be a tad “theatrical,” an artifact of 1950s Hollywood or of Truman Capote’s assist in the screenwriting, but it is also appropriate for the Victorian setting. Moreover, Kerr’s prim governess is a great foil for the creepiness of the kids Miles (Martin Stephens) and Flora (Pamela Franklin) whom she is taking care of following the mysterious deaths of their previous caretakers Peter Quint and Miss Jessell. Quint and Jessell have a vague sort of beyond the grave power over the children (for those of you who haven’t had to read Henry James in some High school lit class), and it the vaguery of their ghostly influence that makes the kids creepy. Miles has been expelled from school under mysterious circumstances. Kerr catches glimpses of the spirits when one else can see, supplied by snippets of gossip about Quint and Jessell’s tempestuous relations. With Kerr’s repressed Victorian manner it’s as if Quint is a distinct threat to her own virtue, no the kids. But the spirits are abstracted and remote, a figure on a tower, a face in a windowpane, a candle blown out at an opportune moment. The finale, Kerr’s exorcism of Quint, while again may be more theatrical than natural, is however, beautifully shot, and makes the whole movie. The audience gets an almost ghost’s eye-view of Quint rocketing up to heaven, his hand lifted over the scene. Visually a climatic, sudden treat, after a vastly visually calm movie. It is, for example, the same effect as the finals shots of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). The not-subtle visual impact of suddenly being transported out of Jimmy Stewart’s apartment, which has enclosed and framed every other shot in the movie until that point. In The Innocents, we become accustomed to a slower paced phantasm, suddenly bolting form the scene. For his part, Frank wants to make it back to the Crow’s Nest for happy hour, so he’s about to bolt from this scene and leave Jose Ortiz once again alone on the pier, mulling over crabs, Korea, Kerr and the little spacemen in his mind. Hopefully making more sense out of it all than Frank has. “Adiós, Capitán,” Frank salutes. “Buena suerte, Frank” He smiles again tapping Frank on the bill of his cap and his chest, “Utilice sus herramientas: Cabeza y corazón.” “Si, Capitán.”