Mixed tape movies - (Murder) mysteries

In the eighties it was the-thing-to-do to make a mixed tape (like a mp3 but touchable, always in need of a pencil and most definitely cooler). On it you would make a little playlist of all the cool songs. Now the trick was to make each song correspond with the rest of the tape. In this post I will try to do the same with movies.
Every once in a while I will select a general topic and select movies to accompany it. As you can see the more child-friendly movies are at the start of the day, but  when night falls: ‘here be monsters’. Please feel free to give suggestions of other unknown movies.

One rule though: Auteur themes like ‘Shakespeare’ or ‘James Bond’ are not allowed. ‘Spy-movies’, naturally, are.

Theme: (Murder) Mysterie

Everybody in the world has committed a crime at least once in their lives. Stealing cookies from the jar, using some kind of drug, not flicking your turn-signal. We’re all criminals. This time ‘round I wish to talk about crime and especially (as the day moves on) murder. It’s a big theme and yes there are a lot of movies I won’t mention. So I’ll limit myself to the mystery element of it. One person tries to uncover the truth. That has to be part of the story.

 

08:00-10:00

No deposit, no return: This is one of those movies that, when you re-see it after several years, you suddenly get some things you missed the first time. The story is quite simple: kidnappers and kidnapped bond while some real villains come into play. Plus it got an adventurous skunk.

10:00-12:00

Candleshoe: The great David Niven is in this one too. A young Jodie Foster is a street kid who’s brought into a scam to pretend to be an elderly lady’s long-lost granddaughter. Why? Because there is a hidden treasure somewhere in the old lady’s mansion and the bad guys wish to find it. Naturally Jodie bonds with the lady and the other kids around the house (and yes they do find the treasure in the end and defeat the villains).

12:00-14:00

Young Sherlock Holmes: “The game is on”, is the phrase commonly used by Sherlock Holmes. Yet, in this movie, they use “The game is at foot.” And I always preferred it.  To cinefiles this movie is known for being one of the first (or maybe the first) movie to use a full CGI character – namely the stained-glass-knight.  But apart from that gimmick it is also one hell of a story that sets Holmes (Nicolas Rowe) and Watson (Brian Cox’s son Alan Cox) on an adventure involving Egyptian cults, human sacrifices and murder most horrid. This mystery is brimming with excitement and we get the ultimate portrayal of Moriarty to boot.

14:00-16:00

Just ask for Diamond: A fun (but slightly forgetable film) about a private investigator investigating a case with the help of his little brother.

16:00-18:00

Clue: Sometimes a movie just strikes a chord with a person. Clue did that to me. Twenty times after I first saw it and it never gets old. Based on the board game Clue the movie introduces all the characters and the crime to solve with such humorous slapstick glee that it’s infectious. It is also so quotable: 

“Why did you kill you husband?”

“Well it was a matter of life and death.”

“Life and death?”

”Yes, now that he’s dead I’ve got a life.”

And my personal (morbid) favorite:

“I. AM. Your singing telegram!” *BANG*.

18:00-20:00

The radio land murders: I’m a big fan of screwball comedies, farces (preferably with at least three doors on stage) and the little movie niche of lighthearted murder comedies. The radioland murders is the perfect combination for me. It deals with a series of murders at a radio station and the main writer trying to solve it. Of course he is quickly suspected of the crimes…

20:00-22:00

Guilty conscience: A wonderful little thriller starring Anthony Hopkins. His character wants to murder his wife and he discusses his hypothesizes with an imaginary barrister as if he were in court. Through this mind-game he quickly finds the faults in his planning and is, as such, forced back to the drawing board. So you get several ideas presented (e.g. a robbery gone awry). The plot thickens because the wife/would be murder victim finds out and then a cat-and-mouse game begins. Who’s the cat, and who’s the mouse.

22:00-00:00

Ten little Indians: I assume we all know the story by now. Ten strangers are invited to a mansion on a deserted island where a mysterious voice on a record accuses them of murder. Then, one by one, they die. Who is the killer? The last one standing?

Anybody who’s seen this movie knows why it is on the list. It has this great Ellery Queen break near the end where you, the audience, are invited to sit back and pinpoint the killer. Sixty seconds to be precise. It’s one of the few movies who actually dares to break the fourth wall and ask the viewers to figure things out (it’s much more common on television).

00:00-02:00

M: What I liked about the movie M isn’t necessarily the brilliance of the movie or Fritz Lang and Peter Lorre respectively. But that I was told about this movie by my mother when I was quite young. She told me about a villain who was so evil that the mafia/underworld itself decides to hunt him.

Imagine it, being so evil that even the evildoers want you caught. Food for thought when you are a kid.

It plays out a little bit different in the movie but still this basic cat-and-mouse game prevails.

02:00-04:00

Silent Fall: Again a movie is saw way before my time. There’s a whole abuse sub story going on that – when I first saw it -  went right over my head. But what I did get was the basic idea of ‘telling the audience just enough to get away with it’. Which is -I think should be- the basis of a good story.

The villain, in this movie, feeds Richard Dreyfuss’s character (a psychiatrist) just enough information for him to form certain conclusions. Thus forcing him off the true scent of the crime committed.

Whilst other professionals (a wonderful evil John Lithgow) in this movie draw their logical conclusions that appear right; to Richard (and the viewer) it doesn’t. The fact that –in the end- he’s smarter than the villain just makes you root for your hero more, regardless of the realization that he’s been quite the fool.

Honorable mentions: I hated to leave Gosford Park out of this one (spot the famous actors). But I did! Because, to be honest, this movie isn’t the least about the murder or the mystery; it’s about the characters. That is why you can see it and re-see it. Every single time these characters become more and more alive to you once you understand their motivations.

Compliance - A review

Every once in a while a movie pops up that has everybody talking for a day or two. And...then it's totally forgotten. Compliance is such a movie. It had great reviews a few years back and nowadays you really have to search to find it. None of my movie-buff friends have seen it. And that's strange because it is a really great movie. True, I'm a big fan of movies that take place in a singular location (like a play) so that's already a plus for me. But the fascinating story and the great acting to support it also caused me to become emotionally involved in the movie.

The story in short: 

The manager of a fast-food establishment gets a call from a so-called police officer who tells her that one of her workers has stolen from a client. If she would be so kind to investigate.

That's basically all you need to know about the story. And I hope common sense has kicked in while you read the above because it isn't common practice for the police to ask other people to do their work for them.

So there's something not-quite-right from the get go and that's where the title: Compliance gets dark. Because the characters either follow the phone-officer's demands (almost) to the letter without hesitation or step back to let somebody else do the dirty work. And each new task gets darker and darker.

Now, me sitting on the sofa (you sitting on the sofa) might wonder during this movie why somebody would do such a thing without second guessing? This simple blind reliance to a voice on a phone.

And, I must admit, near the end the movie does take the leap so far out there that it is hard to suspend disbelief that anyone would actually go on with the requests (though, according to the credits, there have been several cases in the US).

There are several psychological games interwoven in the script like peer pressure and authority figures to make this happen. And we all know that ol' test of the guy in the white coat asking to: "press the button again".

The experiment was as such. An actor was placed in a chair and each time a button was pushed he would howler out in pain as if he was electrocuted (fake of course -he was a good actor). So random people -oblivious to the fact that this was an actor- came in and their guide asked them to push the button. The actor would subsequently cry out in 'pain'. Then those people would be asked to press the button again. Now, if the man asking was wearing a lab coat (= authority figure) chances of people pressing the button again were much higher than if the man asking was wearing a normal suit. This tells you something about the influence simple clothing can have.

There's an old joke based on this story - so here it goes.

Three candidates for the CIA (two men and a woman) are up for the final test of their training. The first man enters the room and his teacher tells him: "Inside the next room is you fiance. Here's a gun, you've got five minutes to kill her!".

The man goes inside and after three minutes he comes out crying that he simply cannot do it.

"Too bad for you." The teacher tells him "You're going home. Wait here and keep you mouth shut!"

Then the second man enters and the teacher gives him a gun and tells him: "Inside the next room is your wife. You've got five minutes to kill her!".

Again, after four minutes the man comes out and confesses that he cannot kill his beloved.

"Too bad for you." The teacher repeats "You're going home. Wait here and keep you mouth shut!"

Then the woman enters. She's handed a gun with the mission to kill her husband. While she's inside the teacher tells the men: "Oh, don't you worry lads, the gun I handed you only fires blanks. Do you really think we would ask something like that from you?"

A minute later the woman comes out, completely out of breath: "Tha-that..." She began. "That gun you gave me only fires blanks, I had to strangle Harvey with my brazier!".

But top that off with three dimensional characters and you've one heck of a psychological thriller going. Not only because you can somehow understand why this character would go this far. But also because you look at yourself and wonder: 'would I do this?'. Which brings me to the sucker punch of the finale. In the end all the characters are still three dimensional -with which I mean to say that- it isn't your standard Hollywood fare wherein the 'villain' recognizes or learn from his or her mistakes. No, they were following orders and apparently that makes you just as much a victim. Just to be clear: No it does not clear you from what you did!

But that's basically the cherry on top of a movie that delves deep into humans (psychological) need to follow orders. Even if it is just a voice on the phone.

Mixed tape movies - School (sucks)

In the eighties it was the-thing-to-do to make a mixed tape (like a mp3 but touchable, always in need of a pencil and most definitely cooler). On it you would make a little playlist of all the cool songs. Now the trick was to make each song correspond with the rest of the tape. In this post I will try to do the same with movies.

Every once in a while I will select a general topic and select movies to accompany it. As you can see the more child-friendly movies are at the start of the day, but  when night falls: ‘here be monsters’. Please feel free to give suggestions of other unknown movies.

One rule though: Auteur themes like ‘Shakespeare’ or ‘James Bond’ are not allowed. ‘Spy-movies’, naturally, are.

Theme: School (sucks) 

School, both a period of pure hell and pure exhilaration. If there’s one period in a human’s life that sits comfortably in the top three of most important forming times this is it. And, as the amount of movies shows, I’m not the only one who thinks back now and again. 

08:00-10:00

De Boskampi's: A sweet little Dutch movie about a bullied boy who changes schools. Now, this time ‘round, he decides he isn’t going to get bullied. So he makes up a story that his father is a mob-boss. Hilarity ensues. It is a charming movie that doesn’t overstay its welcome. It tells the story it wants to tell and in the end everybody learned an important lesson.

 

10:00-12:00

Now you see him, now you don’t: Kurt Russell before he battled Aliens on the North-Pole (or was it the South?). As a university student he discovers a spray that turns you invisible. With this newfound power he decides to help the university and capture some villains along the way. A brilliant Disney movie. Absolutely hilarious when the whole golf-sequence starts. 

12:00-14:00

Diary of a wimpy kid: Somehow this movie made me remember all kinds of feelings that I had when I went to middle school for the first time. Top it off with some hilariously recognizable scenarios and you are left wondering whether your first steps into high school were actually a comedy.

 

14:00-16:00

Spud: Becoming a teenager sucks. All those hormones going around doing stuff to your body and whatnot. This movie takes that on a bit. But the main stage is reserved for the great John Cleese (Mr. Paycheck as I often call him. But when he is dedicated he is perfect.) who teaches the boy nicknamed Spud some valuable life-lessons.

  

16:00-18:00

10 Things I hate about you: Shakespeare at school. This was a short rage back then (we also had Othello for instance) but this adaptation of the Bard’s taming of the screw is one of the better ones- It even has a singing Heath Ledger. The script is funny and edgy. The actors are perfectly likeable or (when they play the villain) disgusting. And there are even tears to be shed during the final poem.

18:00-20:00

Teaching Mrs. Tingle: Three high school students decide to kidnap their teacher for better grades. No this isn’t the best movie on the list. This movie is filled with boring plot twists and characters that are incapable of drawing the tiniest bit of sympathy from the audience (especially Katie Holmes is particularly annoying –and she’s the main protagonist). But the highlight of this movie is Dame Helen Mirren with a crossbow.  Yes, that’s right The Queen goes medieval on the kids.

20:00-22:00

Disturbing Behavior: What Teaching Mrs. Tingle screwed up Disturbing Behavior did right (and a good role for Katie Holmes this time round). Teenagers –again with all those hormones raging around- are weird. But adults –to them- are even weirder. So this movie takes this schism between old and young as its basis and creates a nice thriller plot from it. In short: Stepford Wives-light.

It’s got everything the teen audience wants cute actors and actresses, a reasonable amount of mayhem and a cool soundtrack.

22:00-00:00

Plain Clothes: A young cop reenrolls into high school to investigate the murder of which his brother is falsely accused.

I loved this one as a kid mainly because it's a genuine who-dun-it. With a killer –once revealed- who is awesome in the ”Oh cool it’s him/her!”-spectrum.  

Also, the sex-poem (when you see the movie it’ll make sense) was and is without a doubt the most erotic thing my young ears ever heard.

00:00-02:00

Prom Night: The scream queen herself: Jamie Lee Curtis stars in this one. Not the best slasher ever made but definitely one of the more intriguing ones. The faults are obvious once you watch is. The kills only happen in the last act of the movie (the pacing is wrong) and there is far too much disco. But it is also a slasher film with a genuine heart. You understand the killer in the end.

 

02:00-04:00

Scream: What can I say? The perfect high school horror has to be included on the list. It has everything: a who-dun-it, a who’s-next, nail biting tension, humor and lots of gore. This movie is also a fun little cheat on my part. Because Scream references so many teen slashers from the past, I won’t have to mention them all.

Honorable mention: Summer school. A fun movie but it relies heavily on that one cool scene. Not enough for me to put it on the list.

Final Destination. Yes this horror movie deals with a bunch of high school kids but it hardly takes place at the school. I’ll use this one for a theme about disasters or death or something.

American Pie. Yes, this is an important high school movie but since I’m planning on writing a sex comedy topic later on I decided to leave it out.

Movie trivia that I like.

Just a short post about little nuggets of movie trivia that I always liked. Noting fancy, just fun to know.

The Rocketeer.

Lila Finn was a stuntwoman. Who, at the wonderful young age of 82, took on a small part in the (best comic book movie of the 90s, nee, ever) The Rocketeer. She basically falls down when the Rocketeer passes her without breaking a hip. But what I love about her is something she said at the time in an interview about falling down some stairs:

"Well, you're only falling a few inches at a time, so it's not all that bad."

I can't refind the interview I watched way back then (and the quote is probably inaccurate) but nevertheless, I love her completely.

A clockwork orange

Malcolm McDowell was making A Clockwork orange under Stanley Kubrick. Now we all know that Kubrick was a perfectionist. So in one scene poor Malcolm is to be spit upon. So take after take he is in his hospital bed and the other actor spits in his face. After about twenty takes of this Malcolm goes up to Stanley and asks him: 

“Am I doing anything wrong, is there something I need to improve?”

“No, dear boy you are great. I just want the spit to travel down your nose and dangle on the end.”

“Ow...eh...alright.”

After forty takes they finally got it. 

Mr. Holmes

Mr. Holmes is a non-canon story about Sherlock Holmes. So it wasn't written by Arthur Conan Doyle. A bit of fun movie trivia about this movie is that it deals with a ageing Holmes at the end of his life trying to solve one last case. One day he goes into a cinema to watch a movie adaptation of one of his adventures/ Watson's stories. In this movie-within-the-movie he/Holmes is played by Nicolas Rowe. The same actor who portrayed Holmes in another non-canon film about Holmes's first adventure: Young Sherlock Holmes.

So as a nice bit of trivia we have the actors playing in both the last and the first non-canon Sherlock Holmes movies in one movie. Nice touch.

Godsend 
I noticed that the classroom in Godsend (around the 35:00 mark). Is the same as in the game Shiver. Computer games do this all the time. The school in Silent Hill –for instance- is based on the school in Kindergarten Cop. However, this was the first time I actually noticed something.

Jaws

To end this little article with two well known bits of trivia from the movie Jaws.

For starters it is well known by now that the shark hardly ever worked. Which turned out to be a great ‘happy accident’ because Spielberg was now forced to keep the shark from appearing until the final act. A trick he later used again with the evil dinosaurs of Jurassic Park.

So, as Richard Dreyfuss has told in various interviews, the usual message coming from the speakers around the island where the movie was shot was: 

“The shark isn’t working. Repeat. The shark isn’t working.”

Which was great for him because that allowed him to continue his nap.

But one day the speaker said something differently:

“The shark is working. Repeat. The shark is working…but the boat is sinking.”

I can just imagine it.

The second bit of trivia from the movie Jaws is that Dreyfuss’s character was originally supposed to die in the scene wherein he’s swimming around in the shark cage. To shoot this scene Spielberg needed a small human inside a small cage. That way the real-life shark used in this scene would appear bigger.

So they lowered a small person in a small cage, in a small wetsuit, with small flippers, into the water. But they forgot the little fact that a small person uses the same amount of oxygen as an average sized person. So this poor fellow saw this gigantic white shark approaching and –panicking- immediately drained all the oxygen from his downsized/scaled oxygen tank.

Gasping for breath he was pulled back to the surface while the shark had a field day with the miniature cage (which –because it was smaller- couldn’t handle the shark’s attack and got destroyed). Once the shark was done they pulled the, what remained of the, cage out of the water and joyfully inquired whether the man wanted to do another take. He refused and that’s the sole reason why Dreyfuss’s character survived the movie.*

*This bit of trivia has kind of gotten a life of its own. Like an urban legend it has grown more spectacular over time. But I still like this version.

The joy of radioplays (and the power of voice acting)

I like to go running. And, like any sport, you have to do it a lot to get any benefit from it. So, after a while, my MP3-player started to replay the same old songs I heard numerous times before. But then I discovered audio books and I was merrily on my way again. Getting my health up and 'reading' some literature. Best of both sides.

But recently I fell in love with radio plays.

I was born way after the nineteen fifties. So I never experienced the 'power' of radio plays in an Orson Welles kind of sense. But 'people' still do them to this day. Especially the British Broadcasting Company, or, the BBC.

Good omens

In short the story about Good Omes is pretty much a parody of the movie the Omen. The son of Satan (the anti-Christ) is born. But due to a mislaid baby the boy grows up outside of any nether realm influence. He grows up a normal boy. That is, until his powers start to manifest himself.

I fell in love with radio plays the minute I listened to (one of my favorite books) Good Omens. Apart from hearing the voice of the late Terry Pratchett for the last time it also gave me actors performing individual parts with heart and feeling.

In an (good) audio book (e.g. Lenny Hendry's Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman) the reader performs all the parts with his/her own set of acting skills. But when a male reader is voicing a young girl it still feels off. You want a girl to play the part of the girl. You don't want the same narrator performing all the voices (even though Steven Fry did quite well on the Harry Potter books). And that's where radio plays come into play. Here we actually got actors performing the parts. In Good Omens a (probably lovely) girl played Pepper with the feistiness that her character demanded.

When you look at the behind the scenes pictures, 

BTW,you can easily spot which child is who. 

They are mirror-images of their book selves.

One example of the things I liked most about the radio play of Good Omens was how this young actor chewed all kinds of radio-scenery when he spoke the line "When my friends get here!".

Imagine the scene about a young boy, a normal boy, who suddenly grows into immense power of knowing everything and being able to change everything. There are four horsemen of the apocalypse on their way and he knows it. He knows, deep down inside, that he is about the end the world as we know it.

But he is still a normal boy, sitting with his friends in a quarry, playing around until he grows dark and speaks in childish -yet medieval wicked- manner "When my friends get here!".

His pals (greatly acted as well) are scared sh*tless and me -running along- am too.

It carries a far greater punch when you hear somebody who sounds like the character act a line than when a narrator acts it. This boy nailed it perfectly and all I could do was download another BBC radio play.

Something wicked this way comes and Koudelka

The next was Something Wicked this Way comes and -again- it is far better than the audio book I listened to previously. The opening alone (the first ten minutes) are brilliant in acting and writing. But this also brought back a remembrance about voice acting.

When I was sixteen I played the game Koudelka. This game is set almost a century ago when a group of people break into an old abandoned monastery to find the horrors within.

Now, this isn't the best game in the world (the fighting system pretty much destroyed it), but it did contain -for the first time I ever heard- some of the best voice-acting dealing with serious themes instead of “shoot this!” or “aargh I’m hit!”. Take this scene for instance. The group is resting and...drunk. And the main character Koudelka tells her friend the horrors of her youth (around 9:30).

Truth be told it sounded better (acted) in my memory but still for a game industry than only just started to incorporate human voices in computer games this was a leap. This scene isn't some general shouting to shoot somebody. This scene contains emotions of loss and grief. Those emotions have to be acted.

Now that computer games have better graphics they are more like a cartoon or movie. The voice becomes less important. the (e)motions of the face take the upper hand. So, I argue, in 'ye old days' computer games were more like radio plays than nowadays. But I digress.Anyway, now I downloaded Neil Gaiman's 'Neverwhere' (a great play, just look at the cast!).

The downside of radio plays

Radioplays do have one tremendous downside though. Namely: Action driven sequences. There's a whole phone line chase that takes place in Good Omens that just doesn't work (don't bother me about the details. Listen to the book.). It hardly even works in written form. It would look great on the movie screen, but we're not there yet*. So action - be it the Moby Dick hunt, that messed up freefall jump from Angels and Demons. Action sequences don't work well in radio plays. They work better in written form, audio book form (because the narrator can simply read the lines) or -per above example- videogames. But then we're too close to movie adaptations.

So, to end my rambling I pretty much want to make two points (apart from: When you go out running don't listen to coaches or music; pick a book). First, a book becomes so much better when it is acted out**. When a girl is played by a girl and an old man by and old man. Second, a performance by sound can give quite a punch if it is acted correctly. Sometimes when I'm running and listening to a play I stop and stare into the distance because what I just heard moved me. Made me stop running.

* They\ve been working on a Good Omens adaptation for years now.

** I wanted to mention this point in the article but I decided not to. Yes a radio play is different from a book because it is an adaptation. So you don't hear the exact lines the author has written. In an (unabridged) audio book you will hear each and every line. But I argue that, if you really want to read a book and make it your own by interpreting each and every line and using your own imagination*** , you'd better 'read' the paper. This because a narrator will always (in adversely) steer your interpretation (with, for example, tone of voice or pause).

*** Whenever I read a book my mind is filled with all kinds of creatures to fill the slots of the characters. I remember reading the first Harry Potter novels pre-movies. Harry was portrayed by a boy I knew at school (who was black by the way). Ron was me with red hair (truly blood red). And Hermione was a cartoon girl I once saw on the telly. This changed when the actors where cast.

Mixed tape movies - Carnival

In the eighties it was the-thing-to-do to make a mixed tape (like a mp3 but touchable, always in need of a pencil and most definitely cooler). On it you would make a little playlist of all the cool songs. Now the trick was to make each song correspond with the rest of the tape. In this post I will try to do the same with movies.

Every once in a while I will select a general topic and select movies to accompany it. As you can see the more child-friendly movies are at the start of the day, but  when night falls: ‘here be monsters’. Please feel free to give suggestions of other unknown movies.

One rule though: Auteur themes like ‘Shakespeare’ or ‘James Bond’ are not allowed. ‘Spy-movies’, naturally, are.

Theme: Carnival

The first theme I’m going to tackle is Carnivals. Why? Simply because I came up with this ‘mixed-tapes’-topic when I noticed that a lot of movies I watched at the time were about carnivals. Now, I don’t know why. Maybe it is about the mystery of it all, maybe it is about ‘being on the road and free’. Anyways, here’s my mixed tape of carnival movies. 

08:00-10:00

Pete’s Dragon:  A wonderful song and dance movie from Disney to start the day with. True, the story is far too sweet for my taste, but the villains and their songs are so deliciously naughty. A child will love the animation of the dragon. The adults will snigger at the villains and their attempts to capture Elliot the dragon.

10:00-12:00

The thief lord: A sweet children’s movie that actually plays with the age-old notion of kids wanting to become adults and adults wanting to be children again. A magical carrousel can make this happen. And it is all set in beautiful Venice with an Oliver Twist vibe to it.

12:00-14:00 

Something wicked this way comes: The darkest children’s movie on the list. Again the question of growing up, growing down and, again, a magical carrousel to make this happen. But this time the villain has control of the device. Making people’s wishes come true, for a price. Children will probably hide behind the pillow, but adults will be in awe of Jonathan Price’s superb turn as a complete demon of a man.

14:00-16:00

The seven faces of Dr. Lao: Slowly turning to the older children, this is a fun little tale of a one-man carnival coming to an ol’ western town. Dr. Lao plays seven characters to teach various townsfolk a valuable lesson. In the end all is well and that is just as it should be.

16:00-18:00 

Goosebumps and the nightmare room: (My Name is Evil) Let’s end the children’s part of our program with some genuine children horror. Carnival, all kinds of creepy things and children in peril. Wonderful stuff to keep them up at night. 

18:00-20:00
Cirque du freak: A carnival consisting of real vampires and other mythological freaks. Too bad the movie did so poorly at the box-office that the sequel was never made. Nonetheless it is a very good start of a franchise that keeps the tweens in awe. And hey, maybe they’ll start to read the rest of the books afterwards...

20:00-22:00 

Viva Maria!: A bit of a gamble this one. Is it a carnival movie, or is it a circus movie? Anyway it is a great fun movie that, though bloody at times, has some fascinating things going for it like a shoot-around-the-corner rifle and the main villain (somewhat) happily walking around without a head.

22:00-00:00

TV-series Carnival : Of course this one has to be on the list. I suggest everybody watches the two seasons.*

Carnival is a great TV-show that mixes mythology with the dustbowl and life in the depression era. True –since it’s HBO- the sex stuff can be a bit distracting (and sometimes it feels it’s simply there to make the quota). But past that there’s a nice, slow burn, story of right and wrong, heaven and hell going on.

00:00-02:00 

Dead silence: Nobody likes this movie but me. So, since I’m writing this, here it is. A wonderful little (classical) horror story of a demon-like ventriloquist trying to kill everyone the main protagonist ever loved. And the main protagonist trying to find out the truth. James Wann and Leigh Whannell did one last twist ending in this movie and never did it again since. Which is the way to go if you want to prevent being pigeonholed.

I guess people were expecting more Saw like mayhem (even though the first two Saw movies aren’t bloody at all) and were disappointed when the blood didn’t spout to the ceiling. Their loss, I’ve got a wonderful supernatural thriller to watch over and over.

02:00-04:00

The funhouse: Now we are in the realm of true horror. It is a classical B-movie with bad acting and fake blood all round. But who can turn away from a ride in the funhouse with a demented killer on the loose. 

Honorable mentions: I didn’t include Das cabinet des dr. Caligari because –even though it is a great movie- it is more known for its usage of expressionism nowadays than the carnival angle. I also didn’t include circus movies like Dumbo, The greatest show on earth, Trapeze or Freaks because I really wanted to stick to small time carnivals. So how about my first post, are there any movies I should have mentioned?

*This show actually marked the end of my losing streak. For years I’ve been watching TV-shows that got cancelled right when they got interesting (e.g. Nowhere man). After this I caught Breaking Bad and –wonder oh wonder- they made it to the end.

5 ways computer games play with my emotions.

Computer games differ from movies and literature in the way that a lot of the events happen to you the player. Not John McClane, not Harry Potter. No; silly old you behind the keyboard or joypad. So that’s a great way for game-designers to play with a person’s emotions. Here’s my little top five of computer games that managed to make me do and feel things I normally wouldn’t have (done).

5. Forcing me to be a villain.

This is the easiest one on the list. Simply create a level in which you, the player, have to do a truly heinous act to be able to continue the game. There are several examples nowadays. Like –as a terrorist-  shooting civilians in Call of Duty. Or torturing a person in the latest Grand Theft Auto.

This is the easiest of them all. And I don’t really like it. But the game forces me to do it if I want to continue and (eventually) finish the game.

A more ‘open’ choice was given in the first Fable game. The whole premise is that the player can just as easily become a villain as a hero, depending on the choices the player makes throughout the game. In the end, however, these choices were rather black-and-white. Kill the good guy/kill the bad guy. A more nuanced or deceitful choice would have made the games far more interesting. Which is the main critique the game got at the time.

Interestingly enough, in the game Saboteur, I can drive my car over -God knows how many- civilians,  shoot them even, and at the end of the game I’m still the good guy. So, strangely enough, this ‘forcing me to be a villain’ only works when the game emphasizes the fact that I am playing a villain.

As a final thought: In Silent Hill 3 you go around the gameworld killing monsters. Then, late in the game, a character named Vincent mentions that those weren’t monsters at all. That you were in fact killing innocent people. He’s only joking. But that would have been an interesting twist. Going in the game thinking you are the hero, end up becoming the villain.

4. Forcing me to love.

“Aeris lives”. Anybody who knows what this means can read on. The rest, continue to the next paragraph.

In Final Fantasy 7 Aeris dies. Murdered by Sepiroth (that bastard). At the time I didn’t understand why it hurt me so much as it did until I understood what had happened. Real life happened.

Imagine your first true girlfriend or boyfriend. You invest time in the relationship. You are still trying to figure out if the two of you are going to be together forever. You hang out, cuddle, kiss until BAM a drunk driver kills her/him. That’s what happened in Final Fantasy 7. I had spent hours leveling her character to get a strong member for my party (plus I always preferred the more feminine girl over the more tomboy Tifa-character. So I often picked her for my party.) and without warning she got stabbed.

So part of me was struck because I lost the girl I really liked. But another part of me was shocked because I just spent hours invested in her that – in the end- were unneeded.

Naturally the second time you play this game you don’t spent a lot of time levelling Aeris, she’s going to die anyway. As it turns out Tifa is a lovely girl also.

3. Forcing me to be a pervert.

Silent Hill: the room. Like any other Silent Hill game is a horror-story which –partly- involves you killing monsters but with one fun twist: For large chunks of the game you are stuck in your apartment unable to get out. After five minutes in that apartment the walls really start closing in on you. You can’t turn on the telly, you can’t read a book, in short; you are bored stiff. So you start looking out the window, spying on your neighbors.

Then you find a whole in the wall to your (attractive) next door neighbors’ bedroom and you start spying on her. Anything for some human contact.

What happens later on in the game is even more fun. Like Hitchcock’s Rear Window, your next-door neighbor is in danger. And you are incapable of helping because you are still locked in your room. This creates tension because –through your voyeurism- you’ve become attached to your neighbor and now there’s a danger that you might lose her; lose the human contact.

I thought I bought a horror-videogame but as it turned out the game explored my peeping-tom side which I didn’t know I had.

2. Forcing me to flee.

I like to take thing head on. If there’s a problem I want to deal with it right away. Now, I’ve been perilous situations several times in my life  and each time I noticed about myself that I was reviewing the situation. “Can I do this? Can I do that?”

The point is, even in extreme situations there is a choice: you can either fight or flee.

Now; take the game Clock Tower. In this particular game they take away this choice. There is only one choice: flee.

The game is simplicity itself. You are a girl named Jennifer. Locked in a mansion (without a front door apparently) trying to get out. There is demonic child chasing you holding a large pair of gardening scissors. Each time you hear him coming your need to run and hide. And that’s the only thing you can do –run and hide.

Knowing that heightens the tension. You are constantly afraid the scissorman is coming for you. Forcing you to find another hiding spot. Forcing you off your quest to find the exit of the mansion.

The same happens in the last act of the aforementioned Silent Hill: the room. Suddenly evil spirits start to come out of the walls of your apartment. This boring room you were locked in suddenly becomes a dangerous place to be with a fun fact: you can neither (truly) fight, or flee. Panic!

1. Forcing me to be God.

S.O.S. by Vic Tokai. A capsized ship. 2100 souls on board. You’ve got one hour to escape a bring as many survivors with you as humanly possible (seven in total) or the ship will sink. Play it alone, you can get to the boiler-room/ exit within ten minutes – five even if you try really hard. But then the ending will tell you that you died.

Now, if you want the best ending you’d better get some survivors with you. And herein –as the Bard would tell us- lies the rub. Because each survivor has his or her own problem. So sometimes a survivor doesn’t want to go with you just as readily as you’d want. It takes time to convince him/her.

Example: two girls. One is deaf and in shock, the other one won’t go with you if the first one doesn’t go. How to get them? By spending several minutes writing and trying to convince the deaf-and-shocked girl to come with you. Several minutes you don’t have.

So the next time you play the game you decide not to take these two girls along because they take too much time. Instead you only take the ‘easy’ ones. So you find yourself walking past these girls while they (or at least the talking one) scream at you to help them. It’s like playing God. You get to decide who is to live and who is to die.