Red Box Double Feature #1: BLOOD CREEK (2009) and ASSASINATION OF A HIGH SCHOOL PRESIDENT (2008)

Like it or leave present reality: The Red Box is the 21st Century Deuce, our modern day equivalent of a row of rundown, lit-up theater marquees advertising the latest and most lurid low-budget exploitation offerings.

And, very much in the spirit of  the storied haunts of 42nd Street and Chicago’s Loop and Downtown L.A. and The Block in Baltimore and hundreds of drive-in screens across the landscape in the glory days of grindhouse cinema, The Red Box is open all night and charges only a buck to get in on the action.

And, thus, as I did in days of yore while hopping from the Selwyn across the street to the Harris and then downtown to the Variety and then back up to Cine 42 (and so on), I’m running through my Red Box options two at a time, devising double features of the freshest fodder from our various trash film factories.

And, as is always the case, most of these movies will be overwhelmingly lame and largely worthless. But you’ve got to learn to love the sleaze-movie spelunk, not just the maniacs, bloodsucking freaks, holocausting cannibals, and medical deviates you luck into once every 10,000 trips downward.

The first-one two punch is a pretty much a blow right where it stings, but does not swell. But onward we go.

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BLOOD CREEK (2009)
DIRECTOR: Joel Schumacher
CAST: Dominic Purcell, Henry Cavill, Michael Fassbender, Emma Booth, Rainer Winkelvoss

My cousin is an esteemed boxing trainer who once believed—correctly—that the height of hilarity was getting you into the ring, turning his back to you, touching his shoulder with one hand, and asking: “Did I ever show you wear the horse bit me?”

When you inevitably leaned in to see, he’d swat you in the schnuts with his free fist.

And now Blood Creek (2009) arrives after a microscopic theatrical run somewhere, and it could be titled: Did I Ever Show You Wear the Horse Bit Me: The Movie.

At least as far as I’m concerned.

After an engaging opening that’s set in 1936 in which a Nazi sorcerer conjures up some black SS magic on a rural American farm, Blood Creek leaps to modern times.

We go back to that same farm, see that the same occupants that lived there 75 years ago have not aged and the movie cooks up a decent mystery as to what kind of brutality has been going on and then … and then these un-fucking-believably shitty CGI horses show up.

They gallop around, all loco-possessed by The Evil Magic Gestapo-Thing in the Celler and one of these see-through Seabiscuits bites a buy on the shoulder and pulls him out a window, and all I could think about was my cousin prankishly popping an endless succession of suckers smack in the package.

The other moment that comes to mind is The Attack of the Killer Forest Deer in The Ring 2 (2005). To be surrounded by a battalion of berserk Bambis that continually head-butt your car on an isolated road would be, in real life, entirely terrifying.

In fact, it would be seats-soakingly scary if one deer did it even. But in a movie, it looks ridiculous. There’s no way to make deer look scary on-screen, short of busting out the rubber suit from the end of Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo: A Film by Larry Fessenden.

The same proves true of horses. While out here in actuality, horses are enormously imposing beasts whose strength and hugeness stands behind their power as crowd-control tools (plus it would really suck to get trampled under even just one hoof, let along a pack of them).

But in Blood Creek, the horses are all amateurishly CGI’d up and they’re transparent and they get huge, cartoony holes blasted through them, so that these obviously computer-animated animals, so hellbent on inspiring horror, come off momentarily hilarious, then irritating, and then insulting.

And that’s pretty much the course of the movie: it kicks off pretty well, staggers, then sucks.

Curiously, Blood Creek was directed—between the Jim Carrey thriller The Number 23 (2008) and the upcoming Emma Roberts Sundance hit Twelve (2010)—by Joel Schumacher, an A-list name who you have been told to hate and despise and tar and feather and soil your pull-ups over at the mere mention of because he upset grown-men with his treatment of their favorite dress-up super-heroes.

And he did it twice, even!

(The only job I’ve ever had of which I am ashamed was a six-week stint at a “New York arts and fashion quarterly” shit-sheet called Black Book, which once befouled existence with it “101 Suggestions on How to Save Hollywood”, one of which was “Never let Joel Schumacher direct another Batman movie again. Ever!” That came from the Future Screenwriter of the Fucking Will Smith Rom-Com Hitch … and his writing partner. Because quality like that? It takes two, baby).

There are any number of Schumacher transgressions with which to be genuinely outraged and, in fact, he inspired the first truly stand-out use of “brutally” as an overkill adjective that Youngman McBeardo ever came across.

In 1985, New York magazine film critic David Denby ended his review of St. Elmo’s Fire with the line: “Directed by the brutally untalented Joel Schumacher.”

In the all-calling-for-beheadings, all-the-time world of Internet language, that line is coddling gurgle. But at the time, and in such a normally demure context, it was, indeed, brutal. And inspiring. Brutally.

Still, I’ll properly applaud Schumacher for D.C. Cab (1983) and The Lost Boys (1987) and the opening of Falling Down (1993) and that picture with the Muppets, above, and nothing else. Least of all Blood Creek.

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ASSASSINATION OF A HIGH SCHOOL PRESIDENT (2008)
DIRECTOR: Brett Simon
CAST: Mischa Barton, Reece Daniel Thompson, Bruce Willis, Patrick Taylor, Melonie Diaz

Writer-director Rian Johnson’s debut feature Brick (2005) is a subtly brilliant bending, intersecting, and dissection of two genres that results in a one-of-a-kind experience: stark film noir via high school romance.

And I must say that Brick WAS one-of-a-kind—note the past tense—because now we have Assassination of a High School President and what that means is what we have now is, specifically, Brick for Dummies.

Severe dummies. Severe, loathsome dummies. If I were in charge: dead dummies.

For whereas Brick is quiet and disquieting, understated and all-enveloping, never flinching from the seriousness with which its characters take their situations nor needing to acknowledge the bizarre language they use to communicate with one another, Assasination is all winks, japes, raspberries, text message shorthand brayed out loud (loud! LOUD!!!), and stomach-turning post-Diablo-Cody tongue-twister/panty-buncher-uppers bombarding faster than the speed of every unwelcome Twitter you ever couldn’t figure out how to delete quickly enough.

Neither film consists of dialogue that could ever possibly occur in real life. Brick’s words call to mind Daschiel Hammet and James M. Cain as filtered through Shakespearean rhythms. Assassination’s lead dick describes a situation as being “as crooked as a case of scoliosis” and adds that he’s “on it like pink rubber bands on your little sister’s braces.”

By the time we get to Principal Bruce Willis as the “Psycho Gulf War Vet” (at last, a stereotype I am not eager to embrace) with a “Mission Accomplished” sign and a picture of Eisenhower (fuckin’ Ike?) above his desk, I was waiting for someone to produce a Chinese phone book and mention something about someone having more Chins than could be found inside.

Willis, in fact, delivers not only the worst line in the movie, but the worst line of the … maybe ever. As he gets guff from a bad attitude Hot Topic chick in his office he blurts out:

“I don’t go to the strip club where you work and knock the dicks out of your mouth!”

The correct version of this ancient hack stand-up comic’s heckler comeback line is, of course, “I don’t go where you work and knock the dicks out of your mouth!”

The joke is in NOT stating where the target works. The humor comes from the IMPLICATION – e.g., strip-club, whorehouse, glory-hole, Bruce Willis’s backyard pool cabana, etc.

To have included this mummified turd of a gag as it properly exists would be lethal, but to kill what is already beyond dead by including “THE STRIP CLUB” is … well, that’s Assassination of a High School President in one handy bifurcation.

Except it’s not. Not completely. Because goddamned if halfway through I didn’t find myself getting caught up in the central mystery. And the art direction, costumes, clever set design, and sharp cinematography pulled me in even further.

But it did not pull me far (or hard) enough. Because I had seen Brick and, as Assassination grated along, sometimes successfully (even Willis turns funny by the end), there was just no un-seeing the original, superior-in-every-meaningful-scintilla version of this material.

Alas, there is one area where Assassination swamps Brick, and it’s the one that genuinely qualifies it for the bottom half of an exploitation double feature: gratuitous nudity.

Mischa Barton, whatever your opinion of her, is one of Hollywood’s most famous contemporary starlets and so it’s especially noteworthy that we see her buoyant British B-bags multiple times as she eases back in a bathtub.

First, those dark-tipped nerps bobble into sight as the hero spies on her and provides us with a long, lustful leer, and then we see the same footage twice more in flashback—even longer and more lustfully leering.

Assassination’s closing line is the ultimate groaner that anyone who is not the intended audience for this film had been dreading all along (yes, Chinatown), but the repeated presence of Mischa’s bon-bons make for an interesting paraphrase:

“Remember, you out there watching this … it’s a teen exploitation movie.”

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