by Sean McTiernan

Hardware is a movie about a cyborg that hunts a woman relentlessly, murdering everyone who gets in its way. It had the misfortune to be released as the hype was building for the return of the robotic Austrian weightlifter who redefined emptiness of expression and creativity in parking. This inadvertently invited inevitable, illogical comparisons and doomed it to obscurity along with the rest of the rubbish killer robot knockoffs released off the back of the Terminator hype. This is a shame, because Hardware is probably the best sci-fi slasher movie ever made. And sure, its competition is basically the psychedelic Jason X and probably some “Doctor Who” episodes, but that’s still an achievement worth honoring, right?

Hardware is set in a future where, among other things, pollution and overpopulation have divided the world into two wastelands: the tense labyrinth of the corroding city, where most of the action takes place, and the radiated desert of The Zone. The movie follows the progress of a robot head, discovered by a scavenger and sold to Moses (a character, not the Bible dude). Moses then gives this head to his girlfriend (steady!) so she can incorporate it into a twisted metal art installation. Sadly yes, the future will have hipsters. Unfortunately for all humans involved, the head is part of a robot designed for population control. A robot that can reassemble itself. As you can probably expect: death and mayhem ensues.

Inevitably, the film suffers from the Johnny Mnemonic Syndrome that infects all cyberpunk movies. Thankfully, it falls on the practical, “Max Headroom”/Road Warrior side of scavenging/repurposing, as opposed to the hey-we-put-gears-on-our-glasses-for-no-reason style pointless bullshit of something like Tank Girl. Your tolerance for these cyberpunk affectations will depend on your tolerance for 80s goth. If you think Gwar miming along to a Ministry song (this is not a flowery exaggeration, this actually happens) is okay then you’ll probably be fine with the rest of the movie.

The film also features several cameos from musicians who run the gamut of 80s alternative credibility. They range from the sublime (Lemmy blasting “Ace Of Spades” from his water taxi) through the awkward (Iggy Pop as mean-spirited shock jock Angry Bob) to the no-longer-so-impressive (Carl Mc Coy from Fields of Nephilim plays the scavenger who finds the M.A.R.K 13 head). Like many sci-fi movies, its idea of what the future involves actually makes it a compelling capsule of what was going on at the time.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is very much a horror movie. The best thing about horror, of which a lot of horror movies are seemingly unaware, is that you can set it anywhere and it’ll still be a horror movie. That’s what The Thing and Alien get so right, and while Hardware isn’t quite on that level (The Thing being a perfect movie, so hard to equal) it is still a success. It gets all the slasher elements spot on. It has a plucky heroine who steps up when all the Man Plans made by the men fall through. It has the unstoppable monster. It has the intense disgust and fear of sex. It has the characters who turn up to get murdered. It has the useless friend with a ridiculous name (Shades) who is as ineffectual as possible. It even has the classic slasher padding of a fat odious man who slobs around the movie filling time and may as well have a sign that says “murder bait” around his neck. It’s actually a fantastic horror movie that clips along at a ferocious pace.

Aside from the obvious Blade Runner touchstones, the movie is heavily influenced by horror cinema. The garish red hue that infects The Zone is a very Giallo-style touch, as is the scene where Moses stops to hallucinate and self-harm while the camera goes Drunken Master. The relentless, kill-anything-it-doesn’t-matter-who-dies approach of the second half is pretty reminiscent of Lucio Fulci’s House by The Cemetery. There’s even a bizarre nod to Psycho near the end (in the only scene with vaguely natural lighting which, if it’s intentional, deserves much nodding, knowing laughs and golf claps).

Hardware’s great triumph is the reason it got sued. It is the only movie so far to really capture the same mood as the grimy futuristic worlds in which many of the stories in anthology comic 2000AD were set. The most famous ongoing 2000AD character is Judge Dredd, whose own movie adaptation is so damaging to his legacy he may has well have produced a Dredd-it card and attempted to use it to buy a date with Judge Anderson. Having wasted a large part of my youth reading 2000AD (ABC Warriors, Rogue Trooper and Strontium Dog were my favorites) I have a great appreciation for how well the makers of Hardware caught its dirty, curiously English idea of what the future would hold. Sadly, they copied a bit too closely. Although director Richard Stanley has protested for years that it was just a case of “shared influences”, the plot of the film is indeed identical to a short story published first in 2000AD. They were sued, and forced to add the comic creators’ names to the credits.

Stanley, who was 23 at the time, is an intriguing figure. In order to direct the movie he had to be extracted from the guerrilla Muslim faction he had been fighting with in Afghanistan. He was in his early twenties. He freely admits to underpaying the extremely young people he had working on the special effects, something of a clue to how this movie was made for well under a million pounds at the time. To be fair to him, this doesn’t seem to be a deliberately exploitative movie, merely an indicator of gung ho bravado. Not everyone would trust kids to do their special effects on “school computers.” Still, the experience doesn’t seem to have hurt. In an interview, Stanley mentioned that Chris Cunnigham, revered creator of terrifying music videos for Aphex Twin and Bjork among others, celebrated his 16th birthday on set. That’s a pretty impressive pedigree.

Stanley’s career was roadblocked by his involvement with the disastrous Island of Dr Moreau. Hardware is one of the two classics (look for other here next week) that he has been able to make. His odd, claustrophobic (and occasionally eerily accurate) portrayal of a future in decay is a perfect place to set the story of an unrelenting robotic killler. Sure, it’s not quite as horrific as the last ten minutes of Short Circuit 2 but really… what is? Hardware is a classly piece of work that you should watch before it actually comes true.

Sean Mc Tiernan has a blog and a twitter. So does everyone, though. He also has a podcast on which he has a nervous breakdown once an episode, minimum. You should totally email him with your questions / insults/ offers of tax-free monetary gifts.

Oh, it’s been a while since we last checked in on America’s Zero Tolerance For Violence and Bullying Public Schools. I would say they are pretty much still hotbeds of people beating each other up and other people filming them on their phones.

Do you think school administrators, like, ever search for their high school’s names on YouTube? Because students actually prefer to name their schools in the videos.

It gets… better?

“There is negative energy in the air here….” So begins the story about how sweat lodges are killing the New Age tourists in Sedona.

“My daughter had no idea what they were, she just knew it was a toy she liked. They’re fuzzy, supersoft, and have that squishy Beanie Baby feel, so they’re fun to play with.”
-Toymaker Emil Vicale discusses his newest product, “a pink, plushy pair of ‘cojones’ topped with coarse black hair,” that Vicale was inspired to create after hearing Sarah Palin questioning President Obama’s “cojones.” This article is a festival of testicle-related punnery, but I’ll pull out two more for ya: “I almost died when I heard Palin say that. After that, I knew I had to give Palin the cojones she wanted.” AND. “I can just see it now, [Palin] unwrapping the package and her husband going crazy.” Yep.

Travelers to Australia need to declare the porn they’re bringing into the country to customs agents. The Prison Island government is actually asking you to declare illegal porn, but as you can imagine, there has been some confusion: “According to the Australian Sex Party spokesman Robbie Swan, one case involved a couple on their honeymoon, who thought they had to declare naked iPhone pictures of themselves after reading the incoming passenger card. They were made to display a nude photo of themselves in a line with all these other people; they were so embarrassed.” Nobody tell Brett Favre!

by Abe Sauer

Two weeks ago, we joked about a campaign ad using a voice talent that sounded surprisingly alike a certain celebrated actor. Soon after, Jill Bader, communications director for Scott Walker’s campaign, emailed asking us to “please update your post, I would appreciate it.” We agreed.

Now, having spoken with the agency that created the ad and the campaign that commissioned it, it’s beginning to look a lot more likely that GOP candidate for governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, is knowingly misleading voters by pretending to have the endorsement of one Oscar-winning Morgan Porterfield Freeman Jr.

We finally have attained the ad in question in higher quality than the original post.

;

Acquiring the ad itself was a challenge because, curiously, it is the one ad that the Walker campaign doesn’t offer in its “video media” collection. When we asked Bader why it wasn’t featured on the Walker site, she explained that the campaign had “separate timelines for our online ad roll outs.” Yet, in the time since we asked that question, the Walker campaign has rolled out all of its other broadcast ads to its website, including the just-released spectacular doublethink spot featuring Walker’s lieutenant governor running mate Rebecca Kleefisch in which she recounts her cancer survival story while lambasting “government run healthcare.” (Kleefisch, the wife of a legislator, has healthcare paid for by the state of Wisconsin.)

To date, the “sewage” ad above remains the only Walker ad the campaign doesn’t want to feature at its site.

Nonbox, the agency in Milwaukee responsible for the ad, spoke with us and insisted that “there was no conscious decision to use the talent because he sounded like Morgan Freeman, we chose him because he always does a great job of delivering a message because he is a very talented announcer.” Yet, the Nonbox spokesman refused to reveal the name of the talent and despite insisting it uses him all the time, would not direct us to one of the many ads they claim he has voiced.

Even off record, purely to confirm the claims, the agency and the campaign refused to provide this information. When I pointed out to both that it was in the interest of the Walker campaign to confirm their claims for our update they stopped emailing us back.

Now we’ve heard that this ad, the one that in no way intentionally featured a voice identical to Morgan Freeman’s, has attracted the attention of the real Morgan Freeman, with his people reaching out to the Walker campaign last week.

Completely coincidentally of course, the ad has ceased running.

Abe Sauer hears things.

Say it with me, everyone: What a world. “Detectives questioned a circus owner today about allegations that a wallaby died after being plied with ecstasy and drink at a birthday disco. The marsupial was let loose among more than 150 revellers dancing at the Clarion Hotel in Liffey Valley, west Dublin, to the theme tune of Australian television show Skippy The Bush Kangaroo.”

by Matthew Abrams

When the first announcements surfaced on the Internet in the late summer of 2009, it sounded like a low-budget, energetic, insane Japanese special-effects flick, a la Yoshihiro Nishimura, of Mutant Girls Squad and Tokyo Gore Police semi-fame. A couple festivals in midnight or horror series and it could head to DVD, where it’d get passed around by Takashi Miike fans and brought up on forum threads by gorehounds playing that game where they try to out-cite each other as to who’s seen the most outré flick.

It’s on DVD now, but the path wasn’t what anyone expected a year ago. Some months down the road from those first blips, April and May of 2010, a significantly larger chunk of the Internet than originally expected was abuzz about The Human Centipede: First Sequence. Cracking the rusty shackles of the horror and underground sites, it hit the MSN front page, right there by Betty White talking ‘SNL’ with Jay. Not even under the ‘WHAT THE…?’ section, but right there in ‘CELEBS & GOSSIP.’ It’s not hard to see why The Human Centipede is such an unmistakable brand: because it’s an unmistakable concept.

Some will be amused, some nauseated, but few will deny its audacity. I’d warn about mild spoilers, but I’m not going to give away the ending, and other than that, it’d be like warning that I was going to reveal, in a discussion of Spider-Man, that the human protagonist takes on arachnoid qualities at some point in the story.

You already know that in the film, a mad doctor attaches three people together surgically in a centipedish, dodecapedal arrangement. Here’s the spoiler: The Human Centipede does in fact contain a sort of human centipede. This is revealed in the trailer, to remove any question that the humipede is hypothetical, or unaccomplishable, or metaphorical. But why show it in the trailer? The title is your sell, the hint, a verbal equivalent of that shadowy glimpse of partially draped bodies on an operating table. People (okay, a fairly few people) are going to want to see the thing realized, and these are the ones that would shell out ten bucks or place a furtive order OnDemand.

Common wisdom, both dramatic and marketing, says: keep the thing out of the trailer. For a low-budget indie horror film, that title is plenty to reel in your target audience (though they’d also have turned out for alternative titles: Dr. Heiter’s House of Horrors, or Three Corpses: White, or maybe Eat Shit and Die!) but the uninterested demographic of non-horror viewers and people who involuntarily shake their heads when using the phrase “torture porn” will let it slide without note. Without context, The Human Centipede is an eccentric title, but it’s not more inherently pause-giving than The Wasp Woman, or The Kiss of the Spider Woman, or Mansquito. But a strange thing happens when the trailer reveals it, like a two-and-a-half-minute short film following the hint-glimpse-revelation structure standard for nonstandard-monster movies.

When the trailer buildup culminates not in “Only in theaters,” but in the clear display of the thing, the film is reduced to a kind of tautology, an exact one-to-one correlation (title: Human Centipede, content: Human Centipede), and the combined entity becomes some type of self-contained memetic jokery, like SNAKES ON A PLANE. Hey guys, did you hear about THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE, are you gonna see THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE? It’s about THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE. Seeing the trailer is seeing the movie, and people rightfully feel entitled to comment, since they’ve pretty much seen the whole thing.

And on from there to the next person in the word-of-mouth chain. The admittedly brain-grabbing title/concept obliges repetition: you can’t hear it without the urge to tell someone else about it, whether in giddy, can-you-believe-it glee; offended, can-you-believe-it indignation; or baffled, can-you-believe-it incredulity. Even the most bothered are compelled to pass it on, if only to get it off their chests and out of their heads.

It’s a distinct, unambiguous marketing identity, but it also removes the actual film (and thus the need to see it) from the equation. The premise is the title is the trailer is the film. The fact that the unfailing word-of-mouth is largely Internet-transmitted qualifies The Human Centipede as viral-but as with biological viruses, not all filmic viruses are equal. (Some biological viruses pass through the air, some through casual contact. Some, fittingly, are transmitted through the fecal-oral route.) An opposing example: Cloverfield’s press pointedly avoided showing the monster: viral, but left people wanting to see it. The Human Centipede showed the monster at trailer’s climax: viral, no need to bother with the movie, unless you need that extra badge of honor, like a Three Wolf Moon t-shirt, to show your dedication to the bit.

A projectionist in

hit the internet in June to show off a tattoo of the centipede diagram used in the film, stretched across the tops of both feet. When was the last time you saw a Jia Zhangke tattoo? But you can find Keyboard Cat ink in seconds flat. I’m not judging anyone’s taste, but it’s less plausible that the guy found any real merit in it, and more plausible that he found it comical or provocative to do so. The projectionist told Austinist that The Human Centipede was “my favorite horror movie within the last few years.” But he also describes the movie in terms that betray a deeper motivation: “It’s something that, when he shows these images and people are disgusted, that’s how I wanna do in my life.”

He’s succeeding, judging from angry and nauseated comments on most of the sites publishing the “Man Gets Unlikely Tattoo” story. That reaction is chiefly split between two types: those being first exposed to the germ, disgusted by the concept and beginning the process of repetition by immediately expressing their distaste in a public forum; and those already familiar, perhaps equally unsettled by the inscribing into permanence of something as fleeting as The Human Centipede’s sway on culture.

The upshot is that all representations of The Human Centipede carry equal weight. Embedded in that tattoo is the memetic nature of the title (for the graphic and title are interchangeable), the sheer stupidity and creativity, and the drive to propagate the virus-here, co-opting its power to perturb the squeamish with a simple permanent line drawing.

Permanence aside, the descriptive ability of the design holds true of any graphical representation, and others have latched onto the communicative efficiency for (hopefully) comic juxtaposition. Head over to crafter community Etsy.com and you’ll find the exact same diagram as a necklace, a bracelet, a rubber stamp, a magnet, a t-shirt, a sticker, an “art print,” a cat toy. A cat toy? No explanation is given, none needed: it’s simply the compulsion to pass on the virus taking any form at hand for the afflicted individual. For a needleworker, felt and thread. For Richard Dreyfuss, mashed potatoes.

With that compulsion in place, an effective combination of displeasure and easy replication, The Human Centipede became a success as a viral campaign and a cultural meme, if not as a box office product or a film. Besides its presence on MSNBC and nearly every web site with a film critic, it’s made other inroads into popular culture: Flash site Newgrounds hosts the videogame version (a reskinning of arcade classic Centipede, naturally). And what higher tribute than becoming The Human Sexipede, “the most controversial porn parody of all time”?

This is why the title was on everyone’s lips, but the film made a pretty paltry $180 grand in its nine-week run. Its per-screen average in its first multiple-theater week was $2500 a screen, on 17 screens. That’s not bad, but still less than other limited-release options-such non-catchy, non-viral titles as Mid-August Lunch, Valley of the Heart’s Delight, and fifteen others all had better per-screen numbers on fewer than fifty screens. So some people were interested in seeing it, but most were just interested in mentioning it.

If you’re the right combination of clever and lucky, you call your movie The Human Centipede, you get the right internet/festival buzz, you might get a theatrical release and enough press to guarantee you a sequel, or even two. (The first sequel, entitled The Human Centipede: Full Sequence and quadrupling the victim/segment count, is shooting now, the teaser trailer already on the web. Director Tom Six plays it coy when asked about a third part, saying only that he has ideas, but there’s no way he’ll be able to resist the title The Human Millipede.) If that’s your ambition, you can probably always do okay with a movie like this. If your ambition is loftier, you’ll need something more.

In the end, The Human Centipede is a creative concept, but it’s a one-trick pony, with the sort of truth-in-advertising titular transparency that supplies movies like Hot Tub Time Machine with an ironically-earnest elbow-jab. Does Snakes on a Plane have snakes, on a plane? Yeah, it sure does. But does it have anything else?

Matthew Abrams is sorry you had to read about The Human Centipede again.

Actor Tom Bosley, best known as Fonzie’s landlord on “Happy Days,” has died at the age of 83. What with the recent passing of June Cleaver are we about to see a wave of television’s parental figures finally face cancellation? Somebody check in on Florence Henderson, see if she’s okay.

First I hated the Prada camouflage line, which, to be fair, grew on me! A little. It was still obviously ugly and the worst thing is, you know, you’re wearing those clothes and everyone’s like, “oh there’s those Prada camouflage clothes.” It’s too much on you. And now? And now? BUT AND IF AND? Here. THE “CREEPER WINGTIPS PLATFORM” SHOES.