I have spoken many times about the messed-up movies that helped define my childhood. The Red Shoes might be the primary offender in this case, but The Last Unicorn, The Linguini Incident, and The Flight of Dragons also feature heavily.

However, there are several formative movie experiences that I missed the first time, when you’re in that golden age of understanding that makes you the primary target for that particular piece of cinema entertainment. Labyrinth, for example, I didn’t see until high school, too late for me to wholeheartedly embrace the Henson-ness, and WAY too late for me to not snicker at the relentless sexual-initiation subtext of pitting Jennifer Connelly against the Thin Tights Duke, a dynamic that jump-started puberty for so many others.

Another one of these gems I seem to have missed is Rigoletto, a jewel in the crown of the Feature Films for the Family series.

(Actual tag line on that video box cover: “A musical fantasy ringing of truth and filled with mystery and love.” Just…keep that in mind.)

It has nothing to do with the opera Rigoletto. In theory this is good, since Rigoletto is kind of odd. (There’s a Duke who wants to bang everyone, and his jester Rigoletto, who gets cursed by some gent and who keeps his daughter locked up in the house except to go to church, and of course the Duke saw a hot virgin at church and wishes to sex her, and sends nobles to find her, but they follow Rigoletto and when they see his daughter they think he has a mistress, so they blindfold Rigoletto and make him participate in the kidnapping of his own daughter, and she gets to the Duke’s and is like, “Oh, you’re that guy staring creepily at me all through church!” and he’s like “Nice shoes, shall we bang?” and Rigoletto shows up and is like, “I am going to kill that Duke, I am so mad, okay, you dress as a boy and get out of town and I’ll hire an assassin,” and she dresses as a boy but comes back to warn the Duke as the Duke is pleading for his life with his new girlfriend in the room (awkward), but the daughter is still like, “I’ll sacrifice myself for the Duke I love!” and then the assassin drags a corpse in a bag over to Rigoletto and Rigoletto is like “YESSS ALL RIGHT let me look inside OH MY GOD IT’S MY KID OH GAH THE CURSE” the end.)

However, this movie’s plot is even weirder.

And frankly, could have used an assassin.
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A week or so ago, I talked about my latest Intertitles column, which makes passing mention of The Scarlet Letter as all that is frightening and uproarious about literary adaptations.

In some ways, knowing that the film is “Freely Adapted from the Novel” should tell you what sort of movie you’re in for, but at the same time, it sort of sounds like an adaptation in which Hester Prynne has enough of this Puritan nonsense and peaces out on a dragon to go live in the mountains and do just whatever the hell she wants. Honestly, that would be a lot more fun than the adaptation we get, which is a total blowhard movie that feels like a community theatre rewriting of The Crucible, and some bonus racism.

Oddly, this Scarlet Letter is also in dialogue with its source material, in that it wants to put an overtly feminist spin on the text, enhancing the idea of Hester’s suffering as an extension of Puritanical misogyny and changing some of the text’s original elements to politicize the supernatural (here Mistress Hibbins is no witch, just an Earth Mother madam who gets on the wrong side of a pissed-off governing body). In theory, that could all have worked out just fine, except that then someone started writing it, and it turned into the kind of movie that has this poster, and it just all goes downhill from there.

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So, just like I promised/threatened in my post about Adaptation and other Conversations, I rewatched The Scarlet Letter this week to add it to the We Need to Talk Collection of Quality Cinema.

WOW, does that movie suck.

The last time I saw it I was in high school, and I remember being appalled at the writing, at Demi Moore, at the Kool-Aid Finch, at the wasted supporting cast, and that Eric Schweig’s next big Hollywood option after Last of the Mohicans was some racist nonsense in this pile of crap. (Spoiler: This movie is a pile of crap.)

It took me two sessions to actually complete the film, because it’s that particular brand of bad movie that’s such a slog that when you finally finish, you look around exhausted and slightly dazed, as if someone hit you with a wheel of Gouda and then vanished, and your whole face hurts but also now you wonder if you have enough bread left to make some grilled cheese. (It’s a very specific brand of bad movie, but remarkably densely populated.)

For those who have already suffered through it once and don’t wish to subject themselves again, this screencap pretty much takes care of it.

Lisa Joliffe-Andoh, you speak for all of us.

Full review coming this weekend, though honestly I might skip all the rest of the screencapping and just use this photo repeatedly, because seriously.

In a world (which I hope you read in Trailer Voice as, IN A WORLD…) where so many things about movies disappoint, mystify, or betray us, it’s sort of delightful to see something movie-related do exactly what it’s supposed to do. For instance, yesterday, Hammer released its trailer for The Woman in Black.

(Spoiler: It’s probably nighttime.)

In its two-decade-plus history, Hammer put out several amazing movies, for several different values of “amazing.” I actually think that to audiences overstuffed with gory torture porn, the return of Hammer “Mostly it’s just shadows and creaks and people turning around looking terrified” Studios is a welcome change.

The Woman in Black, a ghost story about a young lawyer (Daniel Radcliffe) who comes to put some affairs in order in a desolate marsh town only to discover shenanigans, is a great story to restart this line with, and thanks to its aesthetic and cast, it’s positioned well in both the Nerds Who Like Things market and the Horror Movie market.

I am firmly in the Nerds Who Like Things demographic. I am absolutely not in the Horror Movie market, due to being a huge coward who is terrified by everything ever.

And though there’s a lot of debate about to what degree horror is a genre vs. a mood, I will say only that Hammer should be pleased that this trailer manages to succeed both as genre (a ghost story about doomed people in a spooky house who turn around a lot) and as a mood (waaaaaah).

Are there more clown dolls in this one trailer than should exist in the entire universe? Yes. (There are never enough creepy dolls in your atmospheric horror, ever.) More creaky doors than the mind can stand? Of course. Enough turning-to-look-over-your-shoulder to make Peter Cushing jealous? Check.

But here’s the thing: Compositionally, that last shot is obvious. When you have a ghost story with a three-pane window and someone’s occupying one-third, something creepy is going to appear at the two-third marker. Even before they cut to the empty marsh, we know there’s not going to be a damn thing out there but the fog, because it’s right behind him. Got it, good to go. Maybe there will be a startle response when we cut back and the ghost appears suddenly from behind him, but we’re prepared, because we know how movies go, so there’s nothing to worry about.

And when the death’s-head appears, it’s still scary as hell.

(Well, if you are me. Maybe this is not at all scary to you, because you are not a huge baby, and that’s cool, but I will admit I spent that whole shot going, “She’s right behind him, I know it, it’s cool, the composition is a dead giveaway, so there’s nothing GAAAAAAAAAAH.” Then I watched it again because I thought it as so well put together, which I guess is my endorsement, because I don’t watch horror trailers even once, much less repeatedly, and yet.)

I honestly think this has the makings of a good one. I will probably not be testing my theory by seeing it myself, because I made enough embarrassing noises at the end of the trailer, thank you very much, but I genuinely hope it does well. Go forth, little movie! May you scare the bejeepers out of many!

It’s really handy that things tend to go up early in the week, when my body is still hung over from a weekend of binging on writing and movies. (As usual, I regret nothing, except that I watch movies all weekend and then somehow can’t bring myself to blog them the next day, though to be fair, I was watching “The Avengers” with Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman, again, and that tends to take the wind out of one’s sails about blogging or anything else because the secondhand embarrassment is so vioetn and overwhelming. Also, I can’t believe I watched that movie twice. Scratch the above, I do regret something.)

So, today’s news will be brief and Uma-Thurman free: my short story “Souvenir” is up today at Strange Horizons! It’s a touch-telepath joint.