Of Wendigos and Waterways...

Almost done cleaning off the DVR - granted there were a handful of things that I just said "Fuck it, I'm never going to watch this," and deleted. For example, Eaten Alive (crocodiles? blah.) and The Crazies (Sorry George, but outside the first three "Dead" films, your track record isn't so good).

Ravenous - I had been meaning to see this movie since it came out in 1999, but 1999 - 2005 was when I was in college and didn't really watch many new movies (nor listened to many new CDs). It takes place right after the Mexican-American War, and the protagonist is an American soldier who chose to lie down and play dead rather than fight. As luck would have it, the Mexican soldiers put him on the bottom of a pile of dead Americans at just the right angle that a whole bunch of blood poured directly into his mouth and down his throat. The premise of this movie is that cannibalism makes one supernaturally strong, albeit constantly hungry. The lead character crawls out from under the bodies and singlehandedly captures a Mexican fort. He is honored as a hero at first, but then when he tells his superiors that he captured the fort by playing dead, they decide he's a worthless coward and send him to a remote outpost in Northern California.

The idea that cannibalism = super strength is apparently based off the Native American legend of the Wendigo. In Ravenous, when someone eats another person, they become a Wendigo. They get supernatural strength and are nearly impossible to kill, but always crave human flesh and are never satiated. As luck would have it, the small Californian outpost ends up entangled with another Wendigo, and whereas the protagonist quit eating all meat after his ordeal in the war, this new Wendigo revels in the power derived from eating human flesh. Sure enough, there's only one way to stop the bad guy, and that's to eat more people!

Overall, this movie was pretty good, though for some reason I expected it to be gorier than it actually was. I should also note that the bouncy main theme music was actually used in some Seat Belt PSA they used to play all the time on the Milwaukee buses between 2003 and 2005. Let's see, a PSA about the importance of buckling your child's seat belt properly, what music should we use? I know, how about the theme music from that movie about Pre-Civil War soldiers eating each other!

Wendigo - Larry Fessenden is awesome. He directed this movie and a vampire movie called Habit. Both are low budget indie flicks I caught on IFC. In Habit, a New Yorker goes through a midlife crises, breaks up with his longtime live-in girlfriend to "see other people," and soon finds himself involved with an alluring, enigmatic woman who knows how to get fucking freaky. However, the more time the protagonist spends around her, the sicker and weaker he seems to get. Could she be draining the life out of him? Habit is awesome because the majority of the movie is shot in the areas of New York City that one doesn't usually see in film and on TV. The plot is a little slow, but the interaction between the characters is very engaging.

Wendigo came out after Habit, and is about a family of New Yorkers getting away in the country for a weekend. The main character is their son, who is played by the youngest Malcolm in the Middle urchin before the sitcom hit big. The mother is a psychiatrist and the father is a photographer, so the impetus behind the plot is urban professionals versus the local with a chip on his shoulder. Now this ain't Deliverance or Calvaire, all but one of the locals in this movie are just nice, normal people. It's this one guy, Otis, whom the family butts heads with. The movie starts out with the family hitting a deer in the road. Otis and his two friends were hunting that deer, and when it turns out the deer's antlers got busted in the collision, Otis holds it against the father, who was driving the car. Otis's two friends just laugh it off like normal people, but the dad starts seeing Otis hanging around everywhere they go. Speaking of the dad, the dad in this movie is the single best dad in any movie - ever. He's not abusive in anyway, he's not mean to his son, yet he doesn't come off as sappy and fake. He ends up being the most sympathetic character in the movie.

Oh, did I mention there's a Wendigo in this movie too? In this movie, the Wendigo is simply a spirit that eats and never stops eating. It's also the major flaw in this movie. Really, this movie doesn't need a Wendigo for anything to happen, and the Wendigo itself reminds me of the "Jackolope" sketches from when America's Funniest Home Videos first came out (why do I know this?!!). On the other hand, I guess if this movie didn't have a Wendigo, it wouldn't have been tagged as "horror" and I probably would've never watched it.

Tideland - I loves me some Terry Gilliam. Every movie up until The Brothers Grimm is just pure gold. I grew up on Time Bandits and the Adventures of Baron Munchausen. In High School, I saw 12 Monkeys, connected it with TB and AotBM and made it a point to see Brazil and The Fisher King. When Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas came out, I convinced my mother to take me and my younger sister to see it. Every one of those movies - PURE GOLD. Then he tried to make a Don Quixote movie, ran out of money, did the Brothers Grimm and then Tideland.

When it first came out, people hated Tideland. HATED IT. It's based off a novel, which is apparently one of those novels that is quirky just for the sake of being quirky. The protagonist is a little girl whose heroin addict parents both die, leaving her to fend for herself in a dilapidated house in the middle of rural nowhere. The only people she has contact with are the creepy neighbors, a witch-like sister and a retarded, epileptic brother. The title comes from the fact that the brother likes to pretend he's a captain on a submarine, that the grassy fields are the ocean, and a nearby train is a shark.

Bad things about the movie: 1) Remember the annoying child actress from Silent Hill? Yeah, now you get to see her do a Southern Accent for two hours. 2) I think the reason why people HATED this movie is because a type of "romance" develops between the main character and the (grown up) retarded brother. The last half hour you're just filled with dread that any minute he's going to molest her or something. I mean, it wouldn't be that out of place in a movie that BEGINS with the little girl cooking heroin and shooting it into her father. I've met people who didn't like The Professional because they felt there were undertones of a romantic relationship between Leon and the girl. In Tideland, there are no undertones, they declare their love for one another and imagine themselves married. It's really fucking disturbing.

There were many points during this film that I wanted to just stop it and turn it off. It's long, there's a sense of despair, you expect the absolute worst to happen - Requiem for a Dream was great, but I don't really want to see that happen to an eleven-year-old girl.

But the most fucked up thing?

When it was over, I was glad I watched it. It's stomach churning while you watch it, but afterward, I thought to myself, it's another dark fantasy by Terry Gilliam - just as Time Bandits was a dark fantasy, just as Brazil was a dark fantasy, etc. Some of his movies have happy endings, others don't. Maybe the source material wasn't exactly the best thing to adapt, and maybe this would be Gilliam's worst movie had he never done The Brothers Grimm, but even a bad Gilliam movie is better than a lot of other movies out there.

So there, I'm the only Tideland defender I've ever read.