matrix feed

It's Chinese New Year's Eve, and fine time to turn over a new leaf! I've fallen behind on this impossible (for me) task of writing on every movie we see, so instead of trying to battle the rising flood, I'm instead resorting to lists, with occasional commentary. So here is a list of all the movies we've watched since last October, rated completely unobjectively from one to ten.

The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal - 7
The Weather Underground - 8
The Notorious Bettie Page - 7 (Gretchen Mol is great as Bettie Page, even if the film seemed a bit underdeveloped)
Under Fire - 5
Kaspar Hauser - 10 (one of Herzog's best works)
My Best Fiend - 10 (just for the gossip on Kinski)
Wheel of Time - 9
Possible Films: Short Works by Hal Hartley 1994-2004 - 7
Best of Youth - 9
The Machinist - 4 (I was too disturbed by Christian Bale's extreme weightloss for this role, and too concerned for his health to suspend disbelief. Couldn't he have just tried acting?)
The 40 Year Old Virgin - FF (Fast Forward)
White Diamond - 10
Cobra Verde - 9
Spiderman 3 - 4 (It would have been alright until Spidey started in on a dance number)
Chuck and Buck - 8
Atlantic City - 5
A Bizarre Love Triangle - 6
Little Dieter Needs to Fly - 9
Wes Craven's New Nightmare - 4
The Host (Gwoemul) - 9
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster - FF
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (about my 99th viewing) - 10

Happy Year of the Earth Rat!

Here is my Movie Mythos column from Matrix #79:

Joe and I aren't up on many current films. That is to say, we know what new films are coming up and we read the reviews; we have high or low expectations of them. We don't, however, see very many of them (ah, the sacrifices of parenthood). So it gives us a lot to look forward to when the films come out on DVD. Because this is our dominant mode of movie-watching, and because of our internet movie-rental service, we might end up watching Wernor Herzog one night and Wes Craven the next, as we just did. We are not movie snobs; we like Wernor and Wes both, though you can't compare apples to oranges, as the saying goes. Now, aside from Wernor Herzog, who always astounds in one way or another, when was it that I last thought, wow, that's really good? Sure, there's lots of better-than-mediocre stuff, but I think that Hollywood mainstream is pretty much kaput. As for "independant cinema," well, now it's just Hollywood-lite. It's been clear for quite a while that, for example, the Sundance Festival has become a Hollywood genre unto itself, showing a certain type of small, quiet, well-observed drama, or a quirky kind of darkish comedy that in fact is completely status quo.

Checking back over our rental list for the past couple of years – seeing that in writing, I think, am I obsessive-compulsive that I keep lists like this? But no, I decide finally that it's in the interest of a scientific survey. Plus, Joe sometimes forgets if he's seen a movie or not. Ahem… back to it. Checking back over our rental list for the past couple of years, I realize that the freshest, most surprising, sink-into kinds of films that I've seen were practically all from Asia, especially South Korea and Thailand. I wonder, is it simply because I'm not used to seeing Asians in North American movies so much, and so I like the reflection of seeing people who look like me, somewhat? I enjoy not having to read subtitles of Cantonese films, but do so anyways for fun. But no, I think it's just because so many of them are darned good. A couple of years ago, one of our national newspapers ran a front page headline that started with a few words of Chinese, then “if you can't read this, you're in trouble.” I was shocked at the overtones: “the Yellow Peril” is coming, folks! But now I realize, it's true. Asian films are superior and they will take over the world.

Here, my list of top ten Asian film rentals (I've tried to stay “underground” and not include the perhaps more well-known directors such as Wong Kar-Wai or Ang Lee, or anything too genre, which warrants a whole other list!):

The Quiet Family; A Tale of Two Sisters by Ji-woon Kim – Perhaps these might be classified as Asian horror, though The Quiet Family is more comedic than horrific.
The Host by Joon-ho Bong (2006) – Okay, as a monster movie and as South Korea's biggest box-office hit of all time, this one is not exactly “underground,” but let's face it, most of the time, “foreign” is “underground.”
Oldboy; J.S.A. (Joint Security Area) by Park Chan-wook – The hyperviolence of Park Chan-wook's films is often way over the top and at times, just too much, but in Oldboy, it works with the intensity of the plot to become a poetic crescendo of psychological gore and mayhem. J.S.A. is an earlier film that explored political tensions on the border of North and South Korea with the same kind of unabashed and soap-operatic style.
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring; 3-Iron by Kim Ki-Duk – I can't say I like Kim Ki-Duk's earlier works such as Bad Guy quite as much. They seem to be obsessed with violence and misogyny, albeit in an interesting way, but nevertheless, difficult to watch. But Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… is a pure revelation about a Buddhist Monk and his disciple, and 3-Iron was likewise a lyrical, near-silent Zen-like story about a young man breaking into people's houses and doing their laundry. Extraordinary films.
Saving My Hubby (Be Strong, Geum-sun) by Nam-seob Hyeon – I'm cheating a bit with this one, since it isn't available as a rental yet. I saw it at a film festival a few years ago and have been keeping an eye out for it ever since. Billed as a Korean Run, Lola, Run but way cuter and funnier.
The Eye by Danny and Oxide Pang – Alright, another genre film, but this Thai ghost story about a blind woman receiving a cornea transplant is also Buddhist in nature!
Last Life in the Universe by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang – Another near-silent film about a Japanese man who meets a Thai girl, neither of who speak the other's language. Breath-takingly beautiful (shot by Chris Doyle), meditative yet darkly funny and with a yakuza subplot and a bodycount.

Guy Maddin has to be one of the most original and just plain strange directors around. I find his work hilarious, surreal and compelling to watch. He's been called the David Lynch of Canada but I think that does Maddin a disservice. Eraserhead has similarities to Maddin's work but that's where the comparison ends. We watched Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, which is an adaptation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's stage production, and I think it's perhaps the best Dracula I've seen to date (not counting Bela Lugosi's, a class by itself). And speaking of Maddin, the newest issue of Matrix is back from the printers, featuring an excerpt from his "autobiographical" film, Brand Upon the Brain!. It's the Narrative "I" issue, film and autobiography all mixed together by yours truly, plus it includes a DVD of short vids and animations by such artists as Elisabeth Belliveau, Victoria Stanton, Yvette Poorter... Tell me what you think of it!

A pair of movies about killers, neither of them great, but Fun (1994) was downright awful. Neither Joe nor I remember (or would admit to) putting this film on the list, and so we're both baffled at why either of us would have done such a thing. I started with extremely low expectations, and so, I was actually pleasantly surprised, at first. It's nicely shot, in what looks like 16 mm black and white for the scenes set in the present, colour for the past. The first third of the film roped me in with what started as some fairly interesting characters, two teenaged girls who murder an old woman. The dialogue was stagey, as often are films adapted from stageplays (of which this is one), but sometimes it didn't matter. A couple of monologues felt like it was trying to ape David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago (which became About Last Night, a 1980s film starring Demi Moore). But Fun never breaks out of its theatricality, which becomes a burden that eventually sinks the whole film. The acting became stale and overdramatic without any insight, so I stopped believing, and after that, it was just a chore to sit through, especially when the horrible techno music came on and wouldn't stop. It became a fast-forward.

Zodiac, on the other hand, was a film that Joe had been looking forward eagerly, Fight Club and Seven being among his favourites. But Fincher, he said, you let me down! We weren't as enthralled by his newest work as we wanted to be, though that is a tall order. A detective film about the Zodiac killer who was never caught, it wasn't great, but it was, on the whole, quite watchable - except for the few scenes of murder and killing during which I simply left the room, not willing to endure explicit violence these days. Being a mother has made me super-sensitive, which I personally think is a good thing. I don't know why I don't mind Seven so much, maybe because the actual killings don't take place before your eyes, and the bodies are treated as incredible pieces of set decoration.

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) belongs to the spate of Oscar-winning emotional family dramas of the late 70s/early 80s, such as Ordinary People (1980), On Golden Pond (1981), and Terms of Endearment (1983). I'd never seen any of these in their entirety, so I was interested when this film about a divorce and child custody battle showed up in the mail. And sure, it was really well-acted and well-written, a little overdone in the way of Oscar-winning Hollywood films, all orchestral music soundtrack and traumatic events. I always feel a little manipulated, even as I'm enjoying it. And I did enjoy it, though I sympathized for Meryl Streep's character, who is portrayed as a real selfish witch. I guess that's a testament to her acting, since the film's POV seems to side with the father. I wonder if the feminist overtones to the mother's story (which only comes out in the end courtroom scene) are actually there, or something I'm reading into it? And the ending, I found pretty unbelievable, like something tacked on because they wanted (SPOILER! MOVE TO NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON"T WANT TO KNOW) a "Happy Ending." What? A Happy Ending? Quelle surprise.

Joe has always said that Kramer vs. Kramer had one of his favourite scenes, where Dustin Hoffman is sprinting down the street to music on the soundtrack, when suddenly he runs past a band playing that music, effectively turning it from non-diagetic to diagetic. When Joe saw the actual scene again after so many years, he said the details of the scene were completely different than how he had remembered and described it. "Maybe the scene I remember comes later on," he said. But it didn't.

And then, from the same time period (1980) and also graced with an Oscar for Sissy Spacek's performance, was Coal Miner's Daughter. Surprisingly, I enjoyed this film pretty much without reservation! Most of the credit goes to lovely Miss Sissy as Loretta Lynn, whose performance truly is amazing (she sings her own songs live for the camera, no lipsyncing here), though Tommy Lee Jones as her husband is also pretty darned good. Loretta Lynn's life makes quite a story, and I was in the mood for a good old-fashioned story. What fun, when done right! Right on!

Highball is another Noah Baumbach film, except that it is credited to Ernie Fusco. I found this out only after we watched it and were searching the credits for Baumbach's name. Who the heck is Ernie Fusco? I said. Joe looked it up on the internet, which is substituting for his and everyone else's memory these days, and it confirmed that Ernie Fusco was Baumbach. He had shot Highball on a shoestring with his famous friends improvising, in only six days. And in spite of the fact that the film looks and feels like it was shot in six days, it was a lot funnier than Mr. Jealousy. Baumbach's usual stylistic tics are here, like the use of quick jumpcuts that look like stutters, which seem like a mistake everytime it happens, except that it happens so often. It's dialogue heavy and seems like a stageplay, especially since the camera often frames two-shots from the knees up, for whole scenes, without any close-ups, shot/reverse shots, or any other edits. But there are some genuinely laugh-out-loud scenes which occur when the cast lets loose into serious wackiness, like a great gag with two giant lizard suits, or a falsetto karaoke rendition of Beautiful Dreamer.

We rented Jennifer Eight (1992) because it was written and directed by Bruce Robinson, writer and director of the very very excellent "How to Get Ahead in Advertising" and "Withnail and I." It's said that this movie was his attempt to do a mainstream, formula film so he could get leverage to make other projects, but it was box office failure. And frankly, it feels like his heart wasn't really into it. Beautifully gloomy photography can't cover up the gigantic plot holes that destroy this film. I mean, a blind woman (or anybody, really) wouldn't notice that someone is in your bathroom with you, taking pictures of you in the tub? Come on! In fact, the sound design really sucked throughout. People are always walking noisily around Uma Thurman, the blind woman who can't hear the most obvious sounds. Halfway through the movie, Joe, who had put it on the to-rent list in the first place, suddenly said "I thought this was another movie! I remembered John Goodman being in it!" And he's not. The last comment on this really not good film is that it was brought to you by Diet Coke, which is drunk very conspicuously at least twice.

Next, we watched Spike Lee's 25th Hour, which we were both looking forward to. Frankly, I'm not a Spike Lee fan, since I've only ever liked Do the Right Thing and She's Gotta Have It. The rest of his oeuvre I've found either "meh..." or just not very good, though I admit I haven't seen Malcolm X, which Joe likes a lot. But 25th Hour had gotten excellent reviews, and we were psyched! But expectation has a lot of influence in how one receives a film, and if we hadn't been so psyched, maybe we would have liked it better. I thought it had a few good scenes, but I didn't like the spoken word pieces that popped up. Maybe as short films in themselves or in another film, but not as part of this one. It felt too completely disparate with the rest of the movie. The soundtrack was the most obtrusive thing I'd ever heard, trying to give drama to everything, even banal things like walking the dog (which, I know, is perhaps the point, but I found it simply distracting). It's one thing to build drama with music, but when it's on all the time, it becomes flat, like it's not even there because you learn to ignore it. Joe was less forgiving of the film. He said: "It's a muddled pile of poop!" This film seemed sponsored by Guinness, as it was drunk conspicuously a few times.

The DVD interface amazed Joe and I immediately, consisting of a stop-motion animation clip from the movie that was one of the most original ideas I'd seen in quite some time. It looked like plastic toy figurines moving around a toy farm set. But then, their eyes moved, making us realize with a shock that they were humans in costume and make-up. Wow!

If you're not familiar with the work of Robert Morin, all I can say is, you should be! His classic film Yes Sir! Madame... is a classic of faux-mockumentary fiction, exploring the bi-personality of growing up Franglais in Montreal. He often uses video to heighten the soap-operatic dramas that build to violence, and fractured storylines and POVs. Le Neg' is an intense, Rashomon-like story of one night of violence, reconstructed through the POVs of each of the participants, whose stories, of course, contradict each other while giving more and more details as to the climactic scene of horror. The story follows a police investigation into the assault on and torture of a young black kid after he defaces a lawnboy, which ultimately leads to the shooting of the elderly woman who owned it. One of these POVs is from that of an autistic boy who has his walkman on all the time, listening to a beautiful song "Donnez-moi des roses" by Fernand Gignac. The racism is intense, at times verging on too much, and hard to take, but at the same time, not too explicit. The characters are, to their credit, full of surprises, becoming less and less stereotypical and flat as the film progresses, though more and more cruel. A harrowing, but powerful Quebecois film.

Joe and I rented Mr. Jealousy (1997) because it was written and directed by Noah Baumbach, who also wrote and directed the very funny Kicking and Screaming, the squirmingly well-observed the Squid and the Whale, and penned the charming The Life Aquatic by Wes Anderson. Mr. Jealousy seemed like it was his first film, and I was surprised to find that it actually came after Kicking and Screaming. It had all the trademarks of his other films, with some excellent dialogue at times, interesting characters in strange situations. But it felt like a first film because it seemed way too in love with itself, trying to be showy and clever with fancy camerawork that is always panning and zooming, iris in and out, jumpcuts and freeze frames galore. The narration felt overwritten and completely unnecessary, and the main characters were prone to literary monologuing, as though they were in a stageplay. Eric Stoltz and Annabella Sciorra are pretty good as a new couple whose relationship is threatened by the guy's excessive jealousy, but the supporting cast overact as though they are projecting to the back of the theatre, probably because the script is so theatrical. And, wow, a lot of sensitive rock guitar. Baumbach is certainly talented and it comes through despite all the excess, but he is so much better when he doesn't try so darned hard.

Then we watched Dirty Rotten Scoundrels with Steve Martin and Michael Caine who play two conmen out to gold-dig. What a delightful confection! What a comic treat! Great acting, great script that twists and kicks all the way to the ending. What a pleasure!

I would never have rented The 4th Man (1983) by Paul Verhoeven, director of such Hollywood schlock as Showgirls, Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers, though I admit, Robocop was a fun treat. But Joe said our friend Johannes in Rotterdam had recommended it, and we're glad he did! Filmed in his native Holland before Verhoeven hit Hollywood, The 4th Man is a taut psycho-thriller with shades of the surreal (the main man has crazy visions) and lots of male full-frontal. Great editing and special effects that teeter on the line between incredible and cheesy. Thanks Johannes!

Speaking of surreal, incredible, and cheesy, we finally got the 2nd season of Twin Peaks (disc 1) on DVD! It hasn't been available until just recently, and believe or not, I hadn't seen any of it back in the day when it was on TV. I didn't have cable back then, and I was making an effort not to buy into the hype (and frankly, I hadn't liked any Lynch film since Eraserhead). Silly me! Years later, when Joe and I watched Season One on DVD, well, we couldn't get enough. Season Two starts out weirder than ever, in fact, seemingly weird for the sake of weird, but by the third episode, we were once again sucked in. More, more!

Finally, we just finished Fritz Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), the sequel to his earlier Testament of Dr. Mabuse, and his last film. Fritzy, old boy, you've done it again! A brilliantly orchestrated, twisty thriller. And interestingly, a lot of silence in this film, something you rarely find nowadays. So much of film music soundtracks are manipulative and unnecessary, so it was pleasing to hear the action unfolding without benefit of the orchestra. Thanks, Fritz.

It's not the 1993 thriller called The Crush with Alicia Silverstone, or the 2001 comedy called Crush, which you've probably never heard of, with Andie MacDowell. It's the 1993 Crush, which you've also probably never heard of, with Marcia Gay Harden. We rented it because it was directed by Alison Maclean, who later did Jesus' Son, which is, btw, pretty good. The other thing that links these three films with similar names is that they all are overly-contrived in both plot and characterization, manipulative, and boring. Joe and I fast-forwarded through much of this movie, and we noticed that we still more or less knew what was going on anyways. The surprise ending was no surprise.

Then we watched Cure, not the Robert Smith band of the 80s, but the Japanese psych-horror-thriller made in 1997, just before Ringu (1998) pretty much blew open the popularity of that genre, worldwide. For one thing, it was a relief not to have to brace myself though scenes of torturously extreme violence. Some creepy imagery, sparingly used, is plenty. It’s a police thiller about murder, hynosis, memory and identity, where seemingly well-adjusted people commit bizarre murders using the same technique of slashing the throat with a giant X. The main characters are, for the most part, really well-drawn, rounded, intriguing, and though the pace is slow, it’s tense enough to have kept me interested. I like a story that takes its time to build into a deep, menacing drone. Joe, however, thought the film was “just okay” since he kept falling asleep through it.

Sometimes movies show up in the mail and we're not sure why. Sometimes Joe gets carried away with his browsing and sometimes I read about some film that seemed interesting at the time. Maybe the director did something else that we liked. Now, The Matador (2005) was one of those films that might have sounded good on paper: an oddball comedy thriller that turns into a buddy pic, with Pierce Brosnan as a hitman who befriends Greg Kinnear as a suburban businessman. Only, as Joe says, the screenplay seemed as though it was written from a book about how to write screenplays. The camerawork and editing felt as though the director came straight from doing music vids and commercials, all showy tracking and zooming and panning. "Is it really homoerotic, or is it just me?" asked Joe. Indeed, Brosnan smokes a lot of fat cigars around Kinnear and seems intent on seducing him, though under the aegis of friendship. In the end, The Matador wants to be a slick, quirky British comedy/gangster thriller like Guy Ritchie's Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels but ends up feeling empty and soulless, just trying too darned hard. "No," said Joe, "it was just a stupid stupid film!"

Someone to Watch Over Me (1987) was next, another Ridley Scott film, coming just after Alien, Bladerunner and Legend. Right off the bat, we had Sting warbing the theme song, and later, that 80s saxophone music. The 80s weren't a great time for film, it seems. A working class cop falls in love with the socialite he has been assigned to guard after she witnesses a murder. "Competently done is all you can say about it," said Joe. By the book and bland. Next!

Every time I see Keith Carradine in a movie, I always, without fail, ask Joe, "who's that actor? He looks familiar." Each and every single time, Joe replies, “It’s Keith Carradine.” I asked this question through all the Alan Rudolph films we watched, as well as Nashville. Why can’t I remember who he is? So, again, when we were watching Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (his first feature). The film follows Carradine and Keitel throughout the years as they challenge each other to duel after duel. “Who is that guy?” I said to Joe. This time, he just laughed. In any case, the film is beautifully, stunningly shot, and even though at first I made fun of Carradine and Harvey Keitel’s costumes (the sidebraids and foppish hats made them hard to take seriously at first), I eventually ended up enjoying it. The ending made revenge a very dignified, gentlemanly affair.

For Park Chanwook, however, revenge is a dish served best to your nemesis-turned-victim while he is still conscious, so that you can both fully savour the torture. Lady Vengeance is the third in his revenge trilogy, of which Oldboy is probably his best work. We loved Oldboy, but none of his other films have come close, save J.S.A.:Joint Security Area (not part of the revenge trilogy, but a tense political thriller set on the border of North and South Korea). Lady Vengeance has been at the top of our to-rent list for a long time, and it finally arrived to much anticipation. Hooray! The same kind of lush stylistics, over-the-top camera work and intense violence. I was into it, savouring the twists of plot, the crazy digital edits, the cartoon-like action scenes.

But then, in the flow of the gorgeous credit graphics, remarkably inventive camerawork and editing, and twisty, harrowing plot turns, came one scene that just made Joe and I turn the movie off. It was too much! The scene shows children in what are practically snuff films (a child murderer films his victims crying to their parents for help), which is worse than gratuitous, it’s seriously cretinous. Even if it’s not real. Granted, Joe and I might be particularly sensitive because we’re parents, but come on! One kid was in a noose, crying that he couldn’t breathe. “Think about those child actors!” Joe said. “Imagine having to be in a scene like that? They’re not old enough to not be affected! How could any cretin let their kid do that? WHAT’S WRONG WITH PEOPLE TODAY?!”

The next evening, we fast-forwarded through the objectionable parts, as well as much of the rest of the film. We watched the ending, just to see what would happen. Lots of blood and some slapstick, none of the choreographed grace that marked Old Boy’s hammer scene. In the end, it might have been not a bad film, but it was just ruined by intolerable excess. I don’t like kids in my violence, nor do I like too realistic violence, and that brings me to a whole other can of worms: what is the point of realistic violence? Why do people get off or otherwise feel they should endure depictions of other people’s pain? Is it cathartic, or masochistic, or an attempt to look at the world’s horrors in the face? Why does it need to be so unrelenting? But that’s a tangent that is too off-course to get into here. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, but I’ll pursue it elsewhere else.

It’s well into July and I haven’t yet posted! I have much to catch up on. Briefly, then, let me enumerate our recent films. Most recently, Joe and I watched Boris Karloff in The Black Castle (1952) with our friend Day, but I remember only that Lon Chaney Jr. stole the show as the monstrous, gigantic and massively scarred henchman. “His name is Gargon!” Day exclaimed. Of course, what else could it be? And before that, we watched Permanent Midnight, a dark comedy/schlockfest starring a very sinewy Ben Stiller as Jerry Stahl (based on Stahl's autobiographical book about being a television writer hooked on junk). The first half was the dark comedy, which was actually not bad, featuring the memorably shocking line uttered by Ben Stiller’s blond mistress when they first screw: “Ohmygawd, I’m f**king a Jew!” The second half descended into schlockfest with every cliché in the book, so to speak, and it might have been funny had it been done ironically. Alas! It didn’t seem ironic in the least. It felt instead like a studio ending cooked up by executives welding focus group tests. “They really messed that one up,” Joe said.

And before that… The Poseidon Adventure! The 1972 version,and don’t even talk to me about the remake. Along with The Towering inferno (which I saw as a kid and it scared the shit out of me), this is Seventies Disaster Movie at its best! It’s got religion in the form of Gene Hackman as an arrogant and buff preacherman battling to lead his flock of survivors up to the hull of a cruise ship after it gets hit by a tidal wave and turns over. Lots and lots of bodies. Big cheesy fun acting. Big cheesy but pretty good effects. The new version only had lots and lots of bodies and cheesy but too CGI-ey effects, no character whatsoever. However! We do have an odd story associated with the remake. While in New York last year, when Poseidon was in theatres, Joe and I saw a giant billboard advertising the movie, just across from the cruise ship that we were about to board. Was it a joke, we wondered?

Soldiers Pay is a hodgepodge documentary short, directed by David O. Russell among others, consisting mostly of interviews with dozens of soldiers about the 2004 Iraq war. There's enough enraging and fascinating material here to choke a Halliburton horse, but not really enough to make it a full-blown documentary. It's more like DVD extras material for Russell's excellent film Three Kings, which it was actually supposed to be. Russell was hoping to use this as ammunition against Bush during the elections, but the studios found out and nixed it; however, Russell managed to release it to the public at a later date, well after the elections. Damn! I still can't believe that $#%&*#@ was re-elected, or that we're in the mess we're in. What to do? Throw up our hands in despair and disgust, and watch another movie.

And the next movie? Black Christmas (1974) by Bob Clark, who is perhaps most famous for directing Porky's. Laugh if you want! Black Christmas practically invented the slasher genre, inspiring such films as When a Stranger Calls. With no outright blood or gore, it's pretty low-key in comparison to modern slasher flicks, but even today, some of the shocks are truly horrific, the obscene phone calls truly obscene.