To See, or Not to See; That is the Question:
Captivity (Part Three & Final)

What you see, what you don't see: Daniel Gillies, Elisha Cuthbert, Captivity (2007)

So, what about the movie?

Having now enjoyed the unrated DVD release of Captivity, and its extras, I can offer the following review without spoilers, for those of you who haven't yet seen the film:

As implied in yesterday's post, the plot is simplicity itself: successful but isolated, lonely model Jennifer Tree (Elisha Cuthbert) is drugged in a nightclub and abducted. She wakes up in a cell, captive of a cowled, enigmatic, cruel male 'warden' silently demanding submission. Any attempt to resist or lash out is met with Jennifer rendered unconscious and waking up in a different cell, strapped to a chair and subjected to videos of the death of previous victims and the threat of a similar fate. In an adjoining cell, a young man named Gary (Daniel Gillies) is also held prisoner. Establishing contact, they keep their sanity and plot their escape.

Elisha Cuthbert as Jennifer Tree, Captivity

That's it, really -- to say more would give away critical story details of Larry Cohen and Joseph Tura's script. In its current unrated edit, it's a 21st Century spin on The Collector, The Defilers and early pinku eiga: nothing more, nothing less.
It's typical of the ongoing serial killer genre, too, in literature, cinema and television. In mainstream terms, it's essentially Kiss the Girls sans the police procedural (the only two cops who appear aren't onscreen long) and predominantly told from Jennifer's point of view, save for the privileged omniscient narrative information the viewer is given from time to time to tell the whole story -- but everything keeps us in Jennifer's experience, stem to stern.

One can see where new material was grafted onto the film director Roland Joffe originally shot (at Mosfilm Studios in Moscow, Russia) and completed, which was definitely a psychological suspense film rather than a horror movie.

Deleted scenes include the original script's elaboration of the perverse specificity of Jennifer's captor's emotional assault: broadcast footage of a televised interview with Jennifer provides the necessary sound bytes, as Jennifer is subjected to darkness, a vulture (!), etc. based on the phobias mentioned in her TV interview. It would appear that physical torture was not part of the original film.

That might have been sufficient in the draft of Cohen's script prior to 9/11, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib (the new American reality) and The Passion (of the Christ), Saw, Hostel, et al, but at some point, Jennifer's ordeal was judged not grueling enough.

Welcome to 2007.

Given the eleventh-hour context of the additional material -- as seen in the "On the Set" DVD bonus material, the new material was shot in February 2007, mere weeks before the originally promoted April 2007 opening! That's pretty fucking eleventh hour, and Roland Joffe was still firmly at the helm -- I would surmise (all a guess, mind you) that After Dark Films and/or Lionsgate decided the film needed a stronger edge, a higher gore quotient, pushing Captivity into clear horror turf while capitalizing on the 2005-2006 success of Hostel and the Saw franchise.

This would make sense of the original Los Angeles campaign, in which the third of the four panels -- "torture" -- is the only horror image, really. Indeed, it's easy to see how the overtly horrific elements (the videos of the fate of previous victims, the force-feeding of blendered 'soup,' everything that takes place in the wire-mesh cell) were added, along with the new framing material.

Shorn of this footage, Captivity works fine, and it's all there.

In terms of both the story told in the new context of America 2007 and the marketplace After Dark Films and Lionsgate work within (and have cultivated with previous films), I can see why the decision was made to make Jennifer's ordeal harsher, her plight more terrible.

Like I said, welcome to 2007. Even outside of the context of genre, the original version of Captivity must have seemed to tame to preview audiences -- after all, the agonies of the imprisoned heroine of V for Vendetta was much more harrowing, the incidental details of a certain "abduction/imprisonment/torture/termination" narrative point in Sin City far more gruesome.

Mind you, this kind of 'juicing' of what would otherwise be a soft 'R' or hard 'PG-13' feature film, pushing a psychological thriller into graphic horror territory, is hardly new. John Carpenter's original successor to Halloween, The Fog (1980), was originally shot and edited as a non-graphic 'PG' ghost story ('PG-13' didn't exist as yet, that came after the Steven Spielberg triple-whammy of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Poltergeist and Gremlins pissed off parents). At the insistence of the producers, Carpenter shot additional gore shots staged with makeup expert Rob Bottin to land The Fog the commercially desirable 'R,' which was considered essential for any horror movie to compete in the early '80s marketplace. Carpenter at least did his cinematic surgery with care; tripe like Urban Legend II and the like also sport additional gore footage added after completion, staged and stitched into place so clumsily that it stands out like a sore thumb.

Captivity's new footage: Strap 'em to the chair!

Captivity's new footage wasn't haphazardly conceived and executed: Joffe is too solid a craftsman, and I wouldn't be surprised if Cohen was involved with the rewrites and scripting of the additional sequences. It wasn't too far a push, either; after all, Daniel Pearl -- the cinematographer who, as a Texan film student, shot Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel's seminal 1974 shocker The Texas Chainsaw Massacre -- worked with Joffe on this venture from beginning to end, and escalating Jennifer's plight by adding just one more cell to the subterranean prison of the original edit isn't too great a leap.

The new footage places Captivity firmly in what my son Dan calls "strap 'em to the chair" movies, what Head Trauma director Lance Weiler calls "confined horror" (to describe the type of film low-budget producers began clamoring for three years ago). Yes, it's gratuitous -- Captivity's story works fine without it. The sense of vulnerability and danger is increased, though, and that's central to the effectiveness of any suspense thriller.

But we are at a new cultural crossroads, folks, when the psychological abuse meted out against fictional characters like Jennifer and Gary has to be amplified to at least measure up to our new reality. It's easy to dismiss this as cynical, crass commercial exploitation, but I think something more primal is going on here -- and the producers and creators of horror and exploitation films didn't cultivate this crossroads and harsher environment, either. Not alone, in any case. Far greater cultural forces, realities and powerful individuals put us here -- films like Captivity just make handy scapegoats.

After all, we are still amid a reality and media soup where real-life abduction, interminable imprisonment (read: "detainment"), slow suffocation -- the 'controlled drowning' of waterboarding -- and worse is not only considered tolerable by our President, Vice President, his Administration and a sizable portion of our fellow citizens, but essential and desirable, necessary to our safety and national security.

We are confronted by a national zeitgeist and appetite for inflicting harm unprecedented in our lifetimes.

Daniel Gillies as Gary Dexter, Captivity

No surprise, then, that the taboo-pushing imperative of horror films has had to escalate the depiction of what constitutes psychological and physical agony to new extremes. No surprise, then, that the producers and creators of a modest little thriller like Captivity were moved to escalate the ordeal of their heroine to measure up to the new national zeitgest, the new threshold.

The cruelty of the new footage is harrowing; for most, the force-feeding will push the limit, though dog lovers have a choice moment to push their buttons.

Is this what is necessary in 2007 to place a film's heroine in sufficient danger to engage us? We're a long, long way from the sawmills and train tracks of The Perils of Pauline and Exploits of Elaine, but Captivity has a lot of other things on its mind: the Stockholm Syndrome, the bonding between prisoners, gender roles, survival, betrayal, and so on. It's not just the horror movies of the past six years or our new sociopolitical reality that forces a storyteller's hand in amplifying horrors to make a character's plight appalling enough for us to empathize -- there's also Reality TV, forensic crime programs, round-the-clock access to news, and more I could mention. As innocuous a program as Survivor played a part in Captivity's need to tighten the narrative thumbscrews on Jennifer tighter than Larry Cohen probably felt necessary when he completed his first story draft. The metaphoric tightening of those thumbscrews was a process that continued into February of this year.

Captivity would have faded from view and memory quickly had the controversy not erupted over the advertising campaign and the film's rating. In the wake of The Passion (of the Christ), even with its new footage, Captivity is weak tea; in the context of the Saw and Hostel franchises, it barely passes muster as a horror movie. In the context of our current reality, one can only wonder why anyone wastes their time mounting campaigns against as ephemeral a fictional work as Captivity.

It is, however, an effective suspenser. Though I can't prove it at the time of this writing, I also think the version we now have on DVD was altered further by the gender wars skirmish over the March advertising campaign: a new framing device tips its gender war element into harsher territory (I won't say more, as I'm hoping to get through this without spoilers) and the film as a whole into yet another subgenre.

Note that the atrocities of Tarsem Singh's stylish The Cell (2000) 'outgross' anything in Captivity -- except for maybe that bloody smoothy. Grossest blender drink since The Giant Spider Invasion!

A few parting shots:

* Producer Mark Damon brings his own horror movie career context to Captivity. As an actor back in the '60s, Damon starred in Roger Corman's The House of Usher, Mario Bava's I Tre volti della paura/Black Sabbath, Edward L. Cahn's cheapjack remake of Beauty and the Beast, Antonio Margheriti's giallo Nude... Si Muore/The Young, the Evil & the Savage, and more, including teen/JD pix, pepla, war movies, spaghetti westerns, spy films, etc. As a producer, Damon has been active since 1974, and produced, executive produced and/or co-produced films like (ready?) Das Boot, The NeverEnding Story, Nine 1/2 Weeks, Flight of the Navigator, The Lost Boys, Red Shoe Diaries, Wild Orchid, The Jungle Book, Orgazmo, Eye of the Beholder, FeardotCom, and best of them all Monster (2003).

All in all, Damon has produced almost 50 films, in every genre, good and bad, high and low.

* The professionalism and credentials of its creators, prominent among them Damon, Joffe, Cohen, Pearl and all who collaborated with the, should also lend a context to Captivity beyond the sensationalistic shitstorm over the March ad campaign. The direction and performances in Captivity, particularly from Manitoba actor Daniel Gillies, are solid throughout. This isn't a shoddy film by any definition, and it's obvious Joffe shaped the film with the same intelligence, care and attention to detail he brought to his more prestigious films.

* The tenor of Captivity was definitely changed by the addition of the new footage. That said, a key sequence in the bonding of Jennifer and Gary is quite believable due in part to the harsher ordeal they suffer.

* There is, however, one unforgivably stupid fuckup in the film, and one typical of the 'video footage within the film' conceit Captivity depends upon. Without giving away a story point, suffice to say a bit of what is presented as, and has to be (within the context of the story), 'found' home video footage immediately fumbles the ball by editing its action. The action in the footage is inexplicably presented from more than one vantage point, including fleeting closeups, and edited for impact -- thus betraying the illusory 'reality' of it being a 'home video.' Even the most passive viewer is suddenly prompted to wonder, "Wait a minute, who filmed this?" This further unravels the illusion, as the intimacy of the footage is disrupted. Stupid mistake in an otherwise well-crafted film -- but one I have seen over and over again over the past 30 years, particularly in films like this that have narratives utterly dependent upon the 'found footage' being accepted as 'real.' Dumb, dumb, dumb!


In the end, 'Anonymous' -- the author of the Myrant comment that kicked off this three-part essay -- is absolutely right. Captivity's ad campaign seems pretty innocuous in context of the MPAA-approved advertising that's been plastered all over this land and on newspapers pages for the last six years of horror movies, the Saw, Hostel and Hills Have Eyes franchises primary among them. Captivity's ad campaign is downright toothless in light of the whole of exploitation movie ballyhoo since 1960, most of that MPAA-approved, too.

Nor does the film itself merit the outrage and bile it has fomented, sight unseen: once seen, Captivity deserves neither scorn nor much undue attention. It works well enough for what it is, but the much ado about nothing over the original ballyhoo ensures that Captivity will be screened, discussed and reverberate more than it otherwise would have been.

It all comes down to "To See, or Not to See" -- an individual decision. You decide. The ads and promo art is not deceptive. The ads accurately reflect what the film is, prompting one to fear the worse: a very traditional showman ploy in the genre. "Who Will Survive and What Will Be Left of Those Who Do?" was the MPAA-approved ballyhoo for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). You don't like the ads? Don't see the movie.

Captivity's campaign is hardly worth the controversy, but there ya go. Is it an ugly billboard? Hell, yes. All billboards are ugly. Los Angeles is ugly, to my eye; I loathe driving around there. It's a horrorshow.

We don't have billboards in Vermont, but, look, we have roadkill all over Vermont's roads. Chalk it up to roadkill, if you must. Seeing roadkill neither makes me complicit in the deaths, react by running over other animals (are we Pavlovian stooges?), nor desensitizes me to life. A sense of proportion and perspective is essential.

Now -- what I want to know, is what does Joss Whedon think of the movie?

Who needs Grindhouse? Another tasteful 2007 ad campaign flashback to the '70s: race, sex, bondage, slavery, southern Gothic -- and boxoffice poison. I reckon The Legend of Nigger Charley and Mandingo just wouldn't fly today!

Cinematic Atrocities: Songs That Have Outworn Their Welcome (for the timid), and Captivity Culture
(Captivity, Part Two)

For those of you who don't give a flying fig about the following, here's an amusing Tuesday afternoon link for you on the most over-used songs in contemporary movies. Enjoy.

For the rest of you, it's time to get wrapped up in Captivity...

First off, it was a given I had to see Captivity -- not because it's a horror movie, not because of the notorious ad campaign, though those both helped.

I had to see Captivity because Larry Cohen wrote the screenplay, and I never miss a Larry Cohen effort.

Larry Cohen has been one of the most inventive, aggressive independent filmmakers in America for most of my life. He's been an iconclastic touchstone since he created two of the 1960s TV shows I loved -- The Invaders and Branded -- and a gravitational force since his run of films as writer/director turned the 1970s on its head again and again.

Silent serial heroines suffered abduction, imprisonment, bondage and torture week after week -- including the ol' lash her to the sawmill sequence -- in the first decades of American cinema: The Perils of Pauline

Where do I start? It was a drive-in double bill of Black Caeser and Hell Up In Harlem (both 1973) that woke me up to his rough-and-ready directorial efforts, and turned me on to star Fred Williamson. With the buzz that surrounded It's Alive (1974) in the horror zine scene, when I was booking the student film program at Johnson State College (1974-76) I made sure JSC showcased the area premiere of It's Alive -- the 16mm booker told me we were the first New England booking! It had been dumped onto 16mm before enjoying first-run theatrical play, an oversight Warner Bros. attended to after the film gained momentum, resurrected for mainstream theatrical venues months after we showed it at Johnson.

Until the 1980s, it was almost impossible to see any Cohen film in a theater: I later caught up with his directorial debut, Bone aka Dial R.A.T. aka Housewife (1972) on 42nd Street, where I also saw Cohen's classic, genuinely subversive sf Second Coming epic God Told Me To (1976) under the title Demon (the ballyhoo was stenciled and painted onto sidewalks leading to the Deuce theater, catching the eyes of those pour souls who looked down to avoid the ad cacophony of Manhattan). In the spring and fall of 1982, I caught two of Cohen's films at first-run bargain-price matinees at the Rockaway Mall multiplex -- I, The Jury, which Cohen scripted, and Q, which he wrote and directed (reportedly to spite the producers of I, The Jury for taking that film away from Cohen) -- with my cronies Rick Veitch, John Totleben and Tom Yeates, and we loved 'em both. I rushed to see Q again two more times in the theater before its run was over, primarily for Michael Moriarty's astoundingly entertaining star turn as the down-and-out opportunist hero, and my first wife Marlene (then Nancy) O'Connor and I saw the insane The Stuff (1985) its opening weekend while visiting her parents in Lynn, MA -- big fun!

Elisha Cuthbert as Jennifer Tree in the latest feature from a Larry Cohen story/screenplay (co-scripted by Joseph Tura), Captivity (2007).

But it wasn't until the videocassette revolution and infiltration of backwoods Vermont in the mid-'80s that I could see one of my all-time favorite Cohen works, the take-no-prisoners agitprop biopic The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977). Video was the harvesting ground for Cohen's buried treasures: It Lives Again aka It's Alive II (1978), the oddball werewolf comedy Full Moon High (1981), the filmed back-to-back gems Special Effects and Perfect Strangers (both 1984).

After that, almost all Cohen's films were direct-to-video gems you had to ferret for, but any port in a storm would do: It's Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987), the made-in-Vermont curio A Return to Salem's Lot (1987), Deadly Illusion (1987), the rather grueling final film for a skeletal Bette Davis, Wicked Stepmother (1989), and what became the launch of Cohen's urban kidnap/captivity series (with Eric Roberts as a Marvel Comics freelance cartoonist as its hero!) The Ambulance (1990). The last Cohen-directed feature that played theaters was Original Gangstas (1996), neatly echoing my first drive-in intro to Cohen's work via its reunion of the greats of the '70s blaxploitation cycle -- Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Paul Winfield, Richard Roundtree and Ron O'Neal -- in a typically erratic, raw Cohen confection. Beyond that, it's been TV -- See China and Die (1981), As Good as Dead (1995), and the recent Masters of Horror episode Pick Me Up (2006) -- that has provided Cohen a precious few venues to direct, along with a documentary I haven't seen, Air Force One: The Final Mission (2004).

A Man and His Monsters: Larry Cohen and some of his critters

The consolidation of the major studios, the MPAA and theatrical distribution that squeezed true independents like Cohen and George Romero completely out of the system by the end of the '80s effectively relegated Cohen to where he started: scripting. As I mentioned, TV was his entry into the industry, via The Invaders, Branded and tons of freelancing for many TV series since his first sale to Kraft Mystery Theater in 1958. Before his directorial debut Bone he had scripted features like The Magnificent Seven sequel Return of the Seven (1966), El Condor (1970) and -- relevant to Captivity -- the 'steal the baby' suspenser Daddy's Gone A-Hunting (1969), from his own story, a taut thriller concept undermined by studio dilution of the unnerving premise and the polished, slack direction of Mark Robson.

Also relevant to Captivity, and by far the most impoverished feature ever made from a Cohen script, was Cohen's first true exploitation screenplay, filmed (by director Joseph Adler) as the cheapjack shot-in-Florida atrocity Scream, Baby, Scream (aka Nightmare House, 1969), an entry in the '60s psycho artist sweepstakes (e.g., Bucket of Blood, Diary of a Madman, Color Me Blood Red, etc.) in which said whackjob kidnaps models and hacks up their faces to create deformed models for his twisted 'modern art' paintings (the crude makeup was by Doug Hobert, Florida actor, magician, filmmaker and makeup FX creator who also concocted the low-budget horrors for Sting of Death, Death Curse of Tartu, Flesh Feast and Blood Stalkers). To paraphrase the Captivity billboard that pissed everyone off: "abduction/confinement/torture/portrait painting."

I decided not to get into the whole women-in-prison genre for this essay, but it's relevant -- and the ads were always sexist, violent and lurid, from the flashpoint -- Caged (1950) -- to the mid-'60s (Jess Franco's 99 Women) to the Roger Corman/New Worldmade-in-the-Phillippines opuses of the '70s like The Big Bird Cage. 'Nuff said!

With the closing of the window for the production and theatrical release of Cohen's directorial efforts, Cohen returned to scripting as his bread and butter, scribing the terrific James Woods sleeper Best Seller (1987) among many others. Horror and exploitation fans savored his onoing writing efforts -- the Maniac Cop series (1988-93), Uncle Sam (1997), the excellent Misbegotten (1998, reworking key elements of Daddy's Gone A-Hunting), etc. -- but it was Cohen's script for Phone Booth (2002, its release delayed by the Washington D.C. sniper shootings of 2001-2 and thus inherently controversial) that rebooted Cohen's rep anew as an inventive high-concept writer, spawning the sale of his similar Cellular (2004) and, in the same urban menace mode, Captivity and Tremble (now in production).

So that's the context of Captivity that mattered to me -- not the whole 'torture porn' controversy. Captivity is shot from a Cohen script, so I want to see it. Period.

But what was the film everyone else thought they were going to see -- or, more to the point, were so eager to avoid, revile and pillory? Why would Joss Whedon sandblast a Larry Cohen script directed by Roland Joffe, film unseen?

The weird thing is, the promo campaign for Captivity prompted an outcry that led everyone to assume Captivity was a sordid sex-and-torture exploitation movie -- 'gorenography,' as my buddy Chas Balun coined the term (for another unrelated movie, Aftermath, which I won't go into here).

So, OK, let's get into that a bit -- the movie everyone thought was Captivity, film unseen.

The Captivity everyone seemed to assume existed -- their projection of what the film might be, based on the March billboards -- was arguably pretty old hat, too.

First, let's trace the American chronology. These phenomenon start somewhere and have a context beyond their immediate contemporaries, and I won't go aaaalll the way back to the Marquis de Sade. Let's back up, just a bit, and let's see where this goes.

When the adult film industry of the early 1960s found that 'nudie-cuties' -- films relying entirely on nudity, sans sex or narrative, to draw audiences -- were running out of steam, the 'roughies' and 'ghoulies' arrived. 'Ghoulies' were launched with the first color gore film, Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast (1963), which I think it's fair to assume most Myrant readers know about. Along with the Hammer and European horror films of the late '50s and oddities like The Brain That Wouldn't Die, the so-called 'splatter' strain of horror begins with Blood Feast, emerging from the adult film industry (specifically, producer David Friedman) in need of something new to address the collapse of 'nudie-cutie' profits.

Bondage, abduction and torture scenarios defined the 'roughies' (aka 'nudie-roughies' or 'nudie-kinkies') like The Defilers (1965). These were the other side of the tough adult exploitation film coin: in The Defilers, two horny young men hungry for kicks kidnap a sexy blonde (Mai Jansson), imprison her in a their basement and use her as a sex toy. Director R. Lee Frost, who escalated the 'roughie' into the realm of the Nazi concentration camp with Love Camp 7 (1967), helmed the film with blunt ferocity for its era, and it's here that the template for Captivity arguably lies. The success of The Defilers and similar fare tapped the grisly appetites previously fueled by the underground bondage & sex market (Bettie Page photos, Eric Stanton comics, etc.) and mainstream newsstand men's adventure and detective magazines, not to forget the ugliest of the tabloid newspapers -- including the original National Enquirer, which was genuinely horrific, graphic stuff in the early '60s.

But before similar abduction 'roughies' like The Animal (1967; "He made her an animal... now all he needed was a leash!") were common "one week only" fodder for adults-only nabes, drive-ins and grindhouses, filmmaker Joseph P. Mawra (All Men Are Apes, Shanty Tramp) hit real boxoffice success with White Slaves of Chinatown (1964), which introduced the sadistic dominatrix Olga Saglo (Audrey Campbell). Working for an unnamed urban crime syndicate, Olga reveled in white slavery, selling narcotics (including peddling to school kids) and cruel torture in her makeshift basement dungeon, shattering the spirits of kidnapped young women to make them into prostitutes and drug pushers. This grotty shithouse of a movie -- shot in black-and-white and essentially improvised sans script or synchronized sound dialogue, its soundtrack dominated by purple-prose narration and public-domain classical music, lending the whole an uncanny surreality -- was a huge international hit in the adult film circuits. Mawra instantly concocted two sequels the very same year, Olga’s Girls and Olga’s House of Shame, just as crudely made as White Slaves of Chinatown but with a higher torture and atrocity quotient.

Snip-a-dee-do-da, snip-a-dee-day: Castration in the opening minutes of the equal-opportunity offender, Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS (1975)

These, too, were hits, well outside of any mainstream movie theatrical market; nevertheless, they played for years, and Campbell's cruel dominatrix became an underground icon. The Village Voice named her "the most talented performer to come up through exploitation film" in 1972; three years later, Campbell's successor, Dyanne Thorne, was making her mark on the set of Hogan's Heroes playing Olga's spawn Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS (1975) for producer David Friedman.

So outrageous was Ilsa's wedding of sex, gore, bondage, torture and Third Reich/Holocaust trappings that Friedman removed his name from the credits ("Herman Traeger" supplanted his credit) -- which is saying a lot. I mean, Friedman, the man who produced Blood Feast, 2000 Maniacs, Thar She Blows, The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried and co-founded the first association of adult film producers and distributors, didn't want his name on Ilsa. The high point and nadir of the 'roughies' had arrived, in one movie. That said, this wasn't hardcore XXX turf: it was 1970s Grand Guignol, theatrical in the extreme, its offenses staged illusions.


Meanwhile, back in the '60s, two additional genre paths have to be traced in this tormented tapestry.

In Japan, desperate low-budget producers and a new generation of hungry young filmmakers founded pinku eiga (literally, 'pink film') in the early 1960s, a black-and-white fusion of post-WW2/early '60s angst, soft-core sex and sometimes extreme abduction/bondage/rape/torture scenarios. These were the Japanese equivalent of the 'roughies' with their own distinctive cultural spin and sharp edges, more sadoerotic and sociopolitical in nature than the American genre; pinku eiga were rarely seen, spoken of or written of in Western culture until the late 1990s. I wrote an article on the pinku eiga for my column for the short-lived Fangoria companion newsstand zine Gorezone back in 1990, and editor Tony Timpone rejected the piece, saying "no one has heard of these, no one has seen them, and nobody cares" (I'll be publishing this article for the first time ever in the upcoming Gooseflesh book for Black Coat Press.) C'est la vie, a missed opportunity.

Koji Wakamatsu's Taiji Ga Mitsuryosuru Toki (The Embryo Hunts in Secret, 1966)

For more on the pinku eiga, visit this Bright Lights article, which does a pretty solid job of providing an overview, incorporating the sources I've cited above.

I'd first read about pinku eiga in accounts of one of the first international experimental film festivals in the late 1960s. Koji Wakamatsu's Taiji Ga Mitsuryosuru Toki (The Embryo Hunts in Secret, 1966) was screened and the audience went berserk, attacking the screen and forcing the showing to be stopped. The story was simple: typical of the earliest pinku eiga, an emotionally troubled societal outcast abducts and abuses a young woman, to a tragic end. The misogyny of the film outraged Western viewers, even underground film viewers, and Wakamatsu's comments that many such films were being made in Japan failed to change anyone's mind. Wakamatsu himself had made a number of them, starting in 1963 (with Amai Wana/Sweet Trap and Hageshi Onnatachi/Savage Women), and continued to do so into the 1970s (his 1969 Yuke Yuke Nidome No Shojo/Go, Go Second Time Virgin and 1972 Tenshi No Kokotsu/Ecstasy of the Angels are the titles most readily available to North American viewers, thanks to Image's domestic 2000 DVD release).

Ah, well, see, then things got rough: Yuke Yuke Nidome No Shojo/Go, Go Second Time Virgin

In articles and reviews, Japanese film scholar (and experimental filmmaker) Donald Richie began to mention these films, writing in his introduction for Audie Bock’s Japanese Film Directors (New York, Kodansha, 1990, p. 9), the "West knows nothing of these pictures, nor should it." By then, the pinku eiga had expanded from the insular heterosexual kidnap/rape/suicide and/or murder scenarios of the early '60s to embrace straight, gay, bi and all sexual orientations and practices.

David Desser’s Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) offered the first book in English to explore this shunned, rarely exported genre. About Wakamatsu's notorious The Embryo Hunts in Secret, Desser wrote, "...the film is still disturbing to a Western viewer, the alienation effects insufficient to overcome our emotional distaste for the action. Rape and sadomasochism predominate in the pink film and roman [romantic] porno as compared to American, and especially European "soft-core" films which feature lushly photographed… lovemaking. …It is difficult to believe any audience can truly enjoy this film..." (pp. 100-1) Obviously, Richie and Desser were unaware of the escalating nature of the 1960s roughies and the Olga films that were immediate contemporaries of the early pinku eiga, and in fact pre-dated Wakamatsu's Embryo Hunts in Secret. Now, there are many articles and books on the genre (see Jack Hunter's Eros in Hell: Sex, Blood and Madness in Japanese Cinema).

There was no need to look to far, nor would they have had to visit 42nd Street or grindhouses to find similar American fare. The same year The Embryo Hunts in Secret had provoked an adventurous underground film festival audience to savage the screen, William Wyler's adaptation of John Fowles's bestselling novel The Collector (1966) was playing in mainstream theaters everywhere. The plot: an emotionally troubled societal outcast (Terence Stamp) abducts and abuses a young woman (Samantha Eggar), to a tragic end. In fact, it's arguable that the Fowles novel was the springboard for The Defilers.

A year earlier (but after the release of Fowles novel), the same studio -- Columbia Pictures -- had released the Hammer Films shocker Fanatic in the US as Die! Die! My Darling! (1965), cross-pollinating the imprisonment/bondage/torture scenario of Fowles's novel (the film was based on another novel by Anne Blaisdell) with the geriatric Gothic subgenre launched by Robert Aldrich's popular Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962): an emotionally troubled fundamentalist widow (Tallulah Bankhead) imprisons and abuses a young woman (Stefanie Powers), to a tragic end.

Though nasty, violent and disturbing for their time, neither film was as explicit as the roughies or pinku eiga of the same decade, which, in turn, predate the hardcore sexual revolution of the early '70s, and hence are 'softcore' by nature.

The point is, though, the "abduction/confinement/torture/termination" scenario spelled out on that Los Angeles billboard that prompted such outrage was unreeling on American screens, to mainstream and adult theater audiences, forty years ago.

Captivity's acid-bath is horrific, but take a gander at Joe Blasco's makeup for Ilsa's venereal disease experiments, 32 years ago! Blaaaaaagh!

Since then, we can skip like a stone over the successors, permutations and imitations, from made-for-TV movies that were broadcast in the '70s to hardcore XXX features to mainstream failures (Tattoo, 1981: an emotionally troubled tattoo artist -- Bruce Dern -- abducts and abuses a young woman -- Maud Adams -- to a tragic end) to sleepers (Demon Seed, 1977: a frustrated computer abducts and abuses a young woman -- Julie Christie -- to procreate) and The Cell (2000, an obvious precursor to Captivity and more graphic in its horrors, with a psychic component and imaginative staging of the serial killer's delusions) to hits like Kiss the Girls (1997, from James Patterson's bestseller, a scenario awfully close to Captivity, except it's presented as a police procedural suspenser).

So -- what's the big deal? Yes, these are nasty films, big and small, ongoing battlefields in the gender and culture wars. Why was Captivity such a detonation point?

(Continued tomorrow -- finally, Captivity! The Movie!)

Recaps, Recoveries, Christmas Mail to the Troops, Tourist Traps and How to Get A Head in Advertising
(Captivity, Part One)

The price for regular gas just broke $3.00+ a gallon hereabouts, like, in the past 20 hours. No consumer rebellion yet. Guess that'll take breaking $4.00+ per gallon. Thanks for the WWIII comments, President Bush, which helped boost and rock cost-per-barrel and stock markets; nice to know those eagerly awaiting the Apocalypse and the Rapture still have something to look forward to in the remaining 14+ months of your Presidency.

Secondly, this news brief:

Here's good news to bullied kids everywhere: "Twins invent wedgie-proof underwear"! 8-year-old twins, mind you!

_________________

In an unusual (to say the least) conjunction of post-Garry Trudeau's visit to The Center for Cartoon Studies happenstance and pre-Christmas Bissette family emails, this arrived in my email:

When you are making out your Christmas card list this year, please include the following:
A Recovering American soldier
c/o Walter Reed Army Medical Center
6900 Georgia Avenue,NW
Washington , D.C. 20307-5001
If you approve of the idea, please pass it on to your e-mail list.

Since this recent email circulating among the Bissette clan -- remember, I do come from a military family -- may also be passing among others of you out there, the followup below is timely. I mention Trudeau, too, because his CCS visit involved discussion of Garry's ongoing work with our military (which I'll get into later this week) and support of various veterans support groups, hospices, systems and charities.

See, there's a hitch (pun intended): the American Legion Auxiliary sent cards last Christmas to vets at Walter Reed, and the cards were returned as "undeliverable."

The following information from Walter Reed Army Medical Center should clarify matters, and offer those of you who care a few viable alternatives:

Mail to Wounded and Recovering Soldiers

Walter Reed Army Medical Center officials want to remind those individuals who want to show their appreciation through mail to include packages and letters, addressed to "Any Wounded Soldier" that Walter Reed will not be accepting these packages in support of the decision by then Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Transportation Policy in 2001. This decision was made to ensure the safety and well being of patients and staff at medical centers throughout the Department of Defense.

In addition, the U.S. Postal Service is no longer accepting "Any Service Member" or "Any Wounded Service Member" letters or packages. Mail to "Any Service Member" that is deposited into a collection box will not be delivered.

Instead of sending an "Any Wounded Soldier" letter or package to Walter Reed, please consider making a donation to one of the more than 300 nonprofit organizations dedicated to helping our troops and their families listed on

the "America Supports You" website.

Other organizations that offer means of showing your support for our troops or assist wounded service members and their families include:

USO Cares,

To Our Soldiers,

and the Red Cross.

For individuals without computer access, your local military installation, the local National Guard or military reserve unit in your area may offer the best alternative to show your support to our returning troops and their families. Walter Reed Army Medical Center will continue to receive process and deliver all mail that is addressed to a specific individual.

As Walter Reed continues to enhance the medical care and processes for our returning service members, it must also keep our patients and staff members safe while following Department of Defense policy. The outpouring of encouragement from the general public, corporate America and civic groups throughout the past year has been incredible. Our Warriors in Transition are amazed at the thanks and support they receive from their countrymen.

There ya go, act accordingly, and hope this helps.
_________________

In an email followup to my Halloween Horrors posts, Ashley (hey, Ashley, and congrats!) writes:

"Been loving the blog lately.. nice that I'm not the only one who utterly adores The Haunting. I'll have to look for a copy of Eyes Without A Face on your review alone, though it does remind me of a film I saw on TV in the late '80s where this crazy guy turns a bunch of teenagers into mannequins, and one scene in particular stands out, where the villain has the girl strapped down onto the table, and he's slowly applying plaster of paris to her face, telling her in a soothing voice as he applied the last bit of plaster over her nostrils "don't worry, before you can suffocate, your heart will burst from fright.", and then the soundtrack suddenly follows her heartbeat as it speeds up and suddenly stops. *shudder*"

Ashley, that was David Schmoeller's Tourist Trap (1979) that creeped you out -- and an odd little gem it is, too. I first saw it with John Totleben in our Dover, NJ daze, at the Rockaway Mall multiplex, which we got to by crossing through the woods and coming out on the highway just below the mall. Being impoverished, struggling young cartoonists, we frequented the budget bargain shows before 5 PM, catching almost every movie that caught our eye for just a couple of bucks each week.

Tourist Trap is among the horror movies I plan to post about down the road -- so suffice to say it's a genuinely bizarre entry in the "don't pull into that roadside attraction!" horror sweepstakes none other than Rob Zombie honored with House of 1000 Corpses, copping a few licks from Schmoeller's wacky hashhouse. And I do mean hash, as Tourist Trap's post-Psycho post-Carrie pre-Friday the 13th scenario mashed tried-and-true genre cliches with telekinesis, a bevy of Bavaesque mannequins and some imaginative out-of-left-field elements guaranteed to raise hackles.

"Davey" and Mr. Slausen (Chuck Connors) in Tourist Trap

The whole movie works thanks to Chuck Connors's performance in one of his wildest eccentric roles (which included, at this phase of his career, The Mad Bomber for legendary low-budget producer/director Bert I. Gordon and the lead lycanthrope on Fox TV's debut series Werewolf).

Tourist Trap culminates in some genuinely nightmarish "no exit" imprisonment and torture sequences, primary among them the one burned into Ashley's memory.

Which leads me to:
_________________

Cultural Captivity

Waaaay back at the end of March,

on an anonymous post to this Myrant blog mini-rant about now-ex-Attorney General Alberto (Sow Salt Where He Trod) Gonzales,

I was asked to comment about the Captivity controversy, which I simply couldn't do because I didn't know anything, really, and hadn't seen the film. Nor was it available to we New Englanders following the debacle over its advertising -- until this past Tuesday, when it arrived at last on DVD.

I hope Anonymous is still around, as I'm at last able to comment. Anonymous posted:

"A totally off-topic post (but one for which I hope ya'll will deem appropriate).

I consider you one of the foremost minds and voices speaking intellegently about horror in all it's forms. Now there is a movement afoot to try and remove a billboard for the film Captivity, deeming it torture porn. Even Joss Whedon, who I greatly respect, is against the billboard and is calling it torture porn. They are apparently calling for the film to be denied a rating to keep it from being shown, at least that what I gather from their website, Remove The Rating [links below].

As I recall, you wrote passionately in favor of modern horror torture film, and how it was both making people uncomfortable and confronting America with it's shameful history of political torture, and about the importance of the genre. I'd love to know if you too agree that the board should be removed, or if you think that censorship is again wrong in this case.

Personally, I think that the billboard is not even as bad as many I've seen for things like Saw or The Hills Have Eyes 2, so it seems that this billboard is being reacted to strongly without looking at the fact that it's in keeping with many contemporary horror posters. And I wonder if the advocates of removing this film poster would have a problem with something like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre original poster... it seems like the posters are doing their job, getting people aware of a new horror film, so isn't this just as bad as banning a book for content, or a film or comic?

Thanks for considering this..."

The offending Los Angeles billboard art, March 2007

My pleasure, now that I've seen the film and know what I'm talking about (I've no patience whatsoever for idiots with opinions on things they've not seen/read/heard/experienced, and less still for those who decide not to see/read/hear/experience something, then express an opinion on anything but their decision to not see/read/hear/experience something -- all they know, in short).

One factor that threw many for a loop was the high reputation of the film's director, Roland Joffe -- the British director of upscale fare like The Mission (1986), Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), City of Joy (1992), and the only mainstream American film to chronicle the Pol Pot regime's atrocities, The Killing Fields (1984). What's a prestige director like Joffe doing making what appears to be a grubby 'torture/snuff' movie like Captivity?

To recap:

Here's the still-active "Remove the Rating" blog, with more recent posts since Anonymous's March 28th comment and link, and worth a read to understand my own comments, below.

Of interest to me is the fact that the controversy, and whatever diddling After Dark and Lionsgate did between the March promo that kicked up the initial fuss and the wide July release (see "Remove the Rating" blog June 18 comment from 'anonymous'), which in fact extended the film's promotional and theatrical release window and drummed up more publicity for the film than Lionsgate could have.

The tasteful MPAA-approved Captivity July 2007 one-sheet promo art

I posted the following comment to the "Remove the Rating" board (with corrections noted):

"Having finally seen Captivity on DVD this week, this is all much ado about nothing. It's Kiss the Girls (a film no one protested) from the POV of the victim, who survives -- and lashes out against men as a result of her experience, a'la Ms 45 and its imitators, right up to Jodie Foster/Neil Jordan's The Brave One.

Lurid advertising predates the MPAA, and the MPAA-approved ads of the late '60s and throughout the '70s put anything seen in ads in the past 20 years to shame.

More often then not, the films subvert their ballyhoo -- as does Captivity, clearly siding against its male antagonists and quite thoroughly demonizing them. That, oddly, is in perfect accord with some of the screeds on this comment board.

The last time I crossed a feminist protest line to see a film, it was for Jennifer Lynch's Boxing Helena. When I asked the young women protesting the film if they'd seen it, NONE of them had. When I pointed out it was a film BY a woman ABOUT the topic that so offended them, they didn't care: their outrage was all that mattered, film unseen. Thus, they were effectively neutering the voice of a female artist (indeed, Jennifer Lynch's career was deep-sixed by the protests). How is that appropriate?

[And despite the "A Film by Roland Joffe" byline, it's arguable whether] Captivity [represents] Roland Joffe's work, either, as the extreme gore scenes were reportedly added later, and the end[ing] was changed three times. It's not a good film, nor a bad film: it's just more studio product. Your protests made it of more interest to see than it would have earned otherwise: again, score.

Finally, thank the film that ushered in the 21st Century torture genre and the greater freedom to depict torture on the big screen under the more-tolerant 'R' rating: Mel Gibson's The Passion (of the Christ), the most grueling, graphic 'R' film I've seen since the early '70s. Thank the current President and Administration's foreign policies for ushering in the past six years of what you label 'torture porn' -- the only true 'torture porn' going on, aside from individual criminal actions, are our current gov't's appetite, which inevitably shapes the horror films of the day. Prior to Rendition, these were the ONLY mainstream films (the few documentaries on the subject are relegated to non-mainstream venues) to deal in any way with the new reality. That some of these films should 'offend' is, of course, the point. Horror movies by definition confront and attack cultural taboos; that's what they do, what they are, how they function."

For the sake of clarification,

here's the Hollywood Reporter article on the whole debacle.

But to get back to the links 'Anonymous' provided in his Myrant comment:

Here's the link to the Jill Soloway blog which offers the text of Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon's letter to the MPAA, calling for censorship and a suggestion to penalize Lionsgate by removing the MPAA rating altogether.

Josh should know better, but -- sigh -- here we go again. With the usual "As a believer not only in the First Amendment but of the necessity of horror stories, I've always been against acts of censorship" caveat, Josh joins the procession of creators-who-should-know-better like Walt Kelly, John Grisham and others (who should know better) to "kill the messenger." If only he could direct similar ire against targets that matter.

Josh and the "Remove the Ratings" folks weren't alone: Ain't It Cool lost their cool, too, ire expressed by "Drew McWeeny."

What's the stink?

Here's the billboard that kicked off the controversy -- as if it were more an offense to the senses than the whole of Los Angeles's sullied environs -- and the initial news item.

Now, let's cut to the chase. As for the "Remove the Rating" activists, as I've pointed out countless times and noted above, it was The Passion (of the Christ) that pushed the R-rating further than it had been pushed since 1969, and I'll dance that debate any time with anyone who cares to. I'd argue it in fact ushered in the whole contemporary mainstream torture movie cycle, and was eerily contemporary to the actual Abu Ghraib tortures reported after the fact: the Christian nation bares its underbelly, anticipates & mirrors its hidden reality.

As for offensive advertising, I'm offended by much of the advertising in this culture. In terms of mainstream cinema thaters, I'm most offended by the military recruitment ads in front of almost every movie I've seen in a mainstream theater since 2001, but I tolerate them -- I'm even more offended by the Pepsi and car ads, but there you go.

I could argue, rationally and with statistics to back up my argument, that the recruitment ads have directly resulted in measurable physical, psychological and emotional harm to more teenagers and young persons who responded to them by signing up than any fictional horror movie ever can, will or has.

But no one wants to have that long-overdue argument, despite the blatant lies in those ads and the current Administration's blatant abuse of the standing volunteer military, and Captivity's ads were -- and horror movies are -- such easy targets. Better to engage with the cultural/gender wars than the real wars we're waging, eh?

That said, the ballyhoo and advertising of the 1960s and '70s put Captivity's tame little promo in the dirt. You want movie ads to offend? Check out almost any daily newspaper from the heyday of '60s and '70s movie ads, and suck it up. Sick puppy that I am, I loved and love those ads (and many of those movies) -- and so do many of you, or you wouldn't be reading Myrant, would you? I miss those days, and that ballyhoo, and the shameless, forthright nature of that kind of showmanship. The 21st Century movie advertising is so much tease, Photoshop tinkering and stilted fashion photography by comparison.

Tasteful MPAA-approved art for the UK campaign, adapted from the terminated May 2007 US release ad art

I'm offended, too, by the MPAA's presence, practices, secrecy, and complicity and marketplace corruption in cahoots with the major studios. I felt that way as a parent, and I feel that way as an adult.

(I can't fail to mention the fact that the MPAA refused the initial promotional materials and ad designs for the docudrama The Road to Guantanamo -- ever-vigilant, the MPAA, approving the disturbing fusion of modern fashion photography, medievalism and torture implements Hostel was promoted with. No sweat with the grimy cannibal's hand grinding a woman's face into the dirt for The Hills Have Eyes, or the laundered but quite tactile bargain-basement forensics and body-parts promoting the Saw quartet -- but whoa, let's protect America from Guantanamo prison imagery!)

Let's also dispose of the handy dismissive tags "horror porn" and "torture porn." These are horror movies, doing what horror movies have always done: at their worst, exploit cultural, individual and collective fears; at their best, explore cultural, individual and collective fears.

In the madness that has consumed the US since 9/11, from the top down, and in an unprecedented six years in American history during which our President, Vice President, two consecutive Secretaries of Defense, the current Secretary of State and the now-ex-Attorney General have condoned and executed torture, kidnapping ("extraordinary rendition"), indefinite imprisonment without prosecution or legal representation, and suspended Habeas Corpus, it should come as no surprise to anyone paying any attention that horror movies were the only mainstream genre to explore/exploit this new reality.

In fact, it's the very marketplace the MPAA regulates and controls that suppresses any but the most trivialized exploration/exploitation of such volatile issues coming to market. Documentaries have actively engaged with the issues since 2002, but those cannot come to mainstream market sans studio support, with the sole and significant exception of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. All documentaries on the subject (e.g., Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, Gitmo: The New Rules of War, etc.) and fictionalized docudramas (e.g., Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross's The Road to Guantanamo, the closest to a mainstream non-genre effort prior to Rendition) have been relegated to HBO, alternative theatrical and/or the video/DVD marketplace, sans studio backing.

This can't be blamed on the MPAA -- in short, there's no popular market for any documentary on what America professes it doesn't do, and doesn't want to discuss -- but it is a function of the open market so dear to GOP ideology.

Thus, one of the most pressing issues in America today is instead confronted -- as most cultural taboos are -- via the only mainstream (non-pornographic) marketplace of ideas that tolerates flirtation with taboos: the horror genre.

And, ladies and gentlemen, that free and open market wants horror movies since 9/11.

But what about the movie Captivity? That, after all, is the catalyst for this clusterfuck -- so, now having seen Captivity, let's get into that -- tomorrow.

Have a grand and glorious first Sunday in November, one and all...