Every time bavatuesdays is loaded a random screenshot from one of several of Mario Bava’s films will be assailing the unsuspecting visitor to my site from the header, kinda like my own little haunted house!
Many thanks go to Darcy Norman’s generous explanation of how he swaps out random images in his header using a clean and simple script called the Image Rotator by Automatic (I love the the Automatic site’s header images – the 60s and space – what more could you want?!).
We’ll miss you … but the rockin’ post-punk, space-age, surf music of Man or … Astroman? can express that sentiment far better than I ever could!
I promised an update to the “A Bit Blue with Bluehost” article I posted last week, and I am afraid there is still very little clarification as to why Drupal and Typo3 are not currently Fantastico enabled. According to the tech I spoke with this afternoon, the Drupal and Typo3 development communities need to work with Fantastico so that they can come up with a fix to the recurring problems users have encountered with these install scripts. When asked about the specifics of these problems, unfortunately there were little or no details to be had.
In the search of clarity, I spoke to my specific problems with Typo3: namely that every time I try an upload and insert an image in a content element these days I get a 500 Internal Server error which in turn crashes all my different installs on the server space (see the images below). The tech said this seems to be a Fantastico install issue, but how he knew this was this case was unclear to me. I imagined (with a little help from Zach -thanks!) there might be a problem with how Typo3 was configured for ImageMagick (which indeed there was and I corrected it), but the 500 errors have not gone away. Needless to say, I am stumped and I haven’t been getting any real clarity from Bluehost. While overall I think Bluehost’s service is solid, I don’t know why they failed to notify their costumers of the choice to remove Drupal and Typo3 from Fantastico (to echo Inversarium’s legitimate gripe in a comment to the original Bluehost post), especially given, as the tech duly noted, that Fantastico is any web hosting service’s bread and butter.
I guess one can always work through the manual install of these programs latest versions – now that would be novel! (Something I may be doing as a alternative to test the Fantastico theory of failure with typo3 shortly, and – from what I hear – this process is relatively simple for Drupal.) Nonetheless, the fact remains that part of what we pay for with a web hosting service like Bluehost is a quick and dirty installation of programs like Typo3 and Drupal. And while I know all good Typo3 and Drupal users may find this post irrelevant because the latest version are not supported by fantastico, I still believe such a service needs to at least communicate the reasons of why and how to their subscribers. Do you think Bluehost could afford to remove the Fantastico installation of WordPress without notifying their users? Most definitely not..
Here is the Typo3 internal error I got after uploading an image
Here is this message I get from this blog seconds after the internal error occurrs
The error log suggests that there is a premature script ending in index.php for the typo3 install, after doing a quick search I found a similar set of problems with certain WordPress installs here. One response from trek7k suggested that these errors had occurred when his web hosting service upgraded from PHP 4.3.11 to 4.4.2, see his message below:
Seems my host had just upgraded to PHP 4.4.2 from 4.3.11 leading to the 500 ISE. They bumped PHP back down to 4.3.11 and everything started working again.
All this is purely conjecture at this point and Fantastico may in fact be working out the bugs with Drupal and Typo3, yet I am pretty sure that Fantastico still supports Typo3 because I was referred to a forum wherein they are discussing the future release of a Fantastico install for Typo3 4.0 (link). So if anyone can offer anything in terms of answers they received from bluehost on these issues, or how they resolved 500 internal server errors they have come across (and whether or not these two things may be related in their experience) – it would be greatly appreciated.
About two years ago I read a novella by Richard Matheson titled I Am Legend which was written in 1954. This work continues to haunt my soul quite regularly, and a quick look at the basic plot of the narrative, as quoted from wikipedia below, would make you think, “oh, wow, another post-apocalyptic vampire story …”
The book takes place in the then-future of 1976-1979, and opens with the monotony and horror of the daily life of the protagonist, Robert Neville. Neville is apparently the only survivor of an apocalypse caused by a pandemic of a bacterium the symptoms of which are very similar to vampirism. He lives in a house fortified against nocturnal attacks by the roaming infected, and sallies forth by daylight to kill the sleeping vampires. Every day he also makes repairs to his house, boarding up windows, stringing and hanging garlic, and disposing of vampires’ corpses on his lawn.
What is remarkable about this particular riff on vampires is Matheson’s ability to immerse the reader in the quotidian labors of Robert Neville’s extraordinarily horrific circumstances. From the first pages you accompany the last man on earth through his daily struggle to find meaning in a universe literally emptied of humanity. In fact, Neville’s status as human frames him as the marginalized other in a world populated by the undead. The loneliness and horror of his situation is only matched by the austere manner with these realities are narrated, which makes for a strikingly original and modern re-imagining of the vampire legend. So, if you like horror or SciFi or some combination of the two set in a post-apocalyptic future – then I Am Legend is a sure thing for you! I would argue that if even you don’t like the above genres but are fascinated by narratives that explore the gossamer psychological fabric that enmeshes a vision of humanity, then, once again, this is the story for you!
However, selling you on reading I Am Legend is not the intention of this post but, rather, a potentially “beneficial” side-effect. After having read this work I continually found myself saying, “This would be an unbelievable movie! I can’t believe no one has thought of producing it yet!” Nonetheless, I was certain that films like Night of the Living Dead, The Blade Trilogy, & 28 Days Later were progeny of this story. What I didn’t realize was that two adaptations of this story have already been made, and one of them was written by Matheson himself (although he had his name removed from the titles because the filmmaker had hacked up his script so badly), but more on this shortly.
How did I come to realize this two years after reading the novella? A healthy combination of serendipity and the internet! The most exciting thing about the internet is that when you go on a protracted search for something you can be sure to explore a host of different things that you always wanted to know but, given the restraints of time and life, never pursued with any rigor. Serendipitous discovery is at the heart of the power and magic of the internet, and it is made possible by the unbelievable resources that millions of people continue to proffer, on a daily basis, to the rest of the world. A virtual community that has quite recently found ways to circumvent the commercialized maelstrom that typified the internet of the late 90s and re-imagine itself as a space for sharing, nurturing, and augmenting our imaginations. All of which is made possible through the creation of tools that allow people to quickly and easily share their ideas with the rest of the world, an empowering reality that makes the vision of utter isolation of at the heart of I Am Legend that much more dreadful as I think about that work while writing this.
Well, godspeed the point! While searching the internet archive (a paragon for this vision of sharing – their tagline is as modest as “Universal access to human knowledge!”) for their collection of public domain feature films, I came across The Last Man on Earth, a 1964 film adaptation of I Am Legend starring the iconic Vincent Price, directed by Ubaldo Ragona (a no name director who was responsible for butchering Matheson’s script), and produced in Italy (at the time a mecca for b horror movies as my post on Mario Bava attempts to illustrate).
After I found the The Last Man on Earth, I was then pointed to yet another film adaptation of this novel, which was none other then The Omega Man starring Chalton Heston – the greatest over-actor in film history! This in turn led me to a series of conversations about yet another adaptation of this work, which will keep the original title I Am Legend, currently in pre-production tentatively starring Will Smith and Johnny Depp (which is extra scarey!). You know, it is really amazing the things you can find out on this box. Hey, who knows, maybe I’ll discover that they did, indeed, make a film adaptation of Afred Bester’s The Stars, My Destination sometime soon!
Check out the first two minutes of The Last Man on Earth below. For those 1980s film fans, Night of the Comet seems to take its vision of an abandoned LA directly from this movie, which in turns seems to take its cue from 1961 The Twilight Zone episode “The Midnight Sun:”
[MEDIA=16]
Update: this project has since been kiboshed, but the meat and potatoes of the Flash tutorial is still valuable.
I have talked briefly about a project I have been working on in my post “A Bit Blue with Bluehost”. And while my content management issues with Bluehost have not entirely been resolved as of yet (I’ll keep you posted on that front), it may prove useful to work through some of the technical details of this project.
As a general overview, I am working with the Linguistics faculty here at UMW to create a series of exercises with various sounds from a number of the world’s languages. The goal is to create a predetermined number of exercises (that will be augmented over time) that can be easily accessed by students online. The goal is to have images of a series of related linguistic characters (or symbols) that the user can click on and hear the corresponding sound without being redirected to ever, that I am a relative newbie to Flash and that the following tutorial will be most useful for folks that, like me, have a working knowledge of Flash but never understood all the mysteries of ActionScript.
ActionScript 2.0 is a scripting language that is compatible with versions Flash MX 2004 Professional and Flash 8 that gives you increased control over the wide range of effects you can build into a Flash movie (extension SWF). I do not pretend to have extensive knowledge of all the ActionScript 2.0 capabilities as of yet, but I now know how to embed sound files into a flash movie, so the least I can do is share this information with you.
Click on the following link to read the rest of this tutorial.
Continue reading
I watched His Girl Friday for the first time this evening and it was quite impressive -I am still recovering from the barrage of piercing dialogue shot at me, as if with a machine gun, for over an hour. Much to my surprise, the film is much darker and political than most screwball comedies I have seen. But I am not posting a review of this movie, but rather to direct you to the unbelievable film resource that is the Internet Archive.
After finishing this film I wanted to find out what the idiomatic expression “His Girl Friday” means, or meant. I had heard a few people use it in my childhood, and when my wife asked me if I could explain its meaning – I froze. Such a moment is not easy for one who takes great pride in being well-versed in all things slang. So, in a state of resignation, I turned to the internet but alas with no luck (so another alternative is Gardner, for some reason I think he’ll know this). However, all is not lost for I did serendipitously stumble upon a far greater prize that the signification of an idiomatic expressions from the 40s: the public domain film collection of the Internet Archive.
Recently I published some thoughts on horror movies, wherein I noted that The Night of the Living Dead is in the public domain and freely available through the Internet Archive to anyone with an internet connection. During my stunted search for slang this evening, I realized that there are many, many more great films made available by the Internet Archive -it is truly the site that just keeps on giving!
The site provides smaller versions of these films that are a quick download (and readily compatible with a video iPod as mp4s which I am well aware is sacrilege for many purists) as well as larger, higher-resolution versions (around 3-4 gigs). And while the transfer quality on the larger versions may not match that of a digitally mastered DVD, there are some useful tools that would allow you to quickly and easily edit and compile clips from these movies for entertainment, intellectual, instructional, and/or creative (i.e.mash-ups) purposes. And all this joy is made available to us (the John & Jane Q. Publics of the world) gratis.
I have listed some highlights from the collection below (interesting that one could take a trip through the cinema of German Expressionism without ever using Netflix!):
This afternoon I have been a bit blue with bluehost. I have been ramping up for a project I will be working on over the next month, and I finally got motivated to install the Content Management Systems Drupal and Typo3 (I am going to try working through both to see which one is best for the project). When I opened the script installer Fantastico, to my great surprise, neither were available. I knew they had been previously available because I had installed both programs using Fantastico on Bluehost to play with these different systems a few months ago. So I called Bluehost and found out, with a bit of uncertainty on the tech’s part, that Drupal v.4.7.2 and Typo3 v.3.8 are for the moment -this is where the uncertainty manifested itself- unavailable through Fantastico because they have recently had problems with both applications. Hmmmm … problems? How do you call these problems?! (Excuse the Strong Badian moment.) I asked if they planned to resolve the issues and have these applications back up and running through Fantastico anytime soon? To that question I was told that the person who found the bugs with Typo3 was on break and that as of right now they could not support Drupal 4.7.2. Not very reassuring for those of us interersted in using CMSs through Bluehost.
After this I decided to use a Typo3 installation I had installed (using bluehost, mind you) for an entirely different set of sites I worked on previously as a temporary development space. And at this moment my surprise became something closer to concern. I was uploading some images when I began getting a 500 Internal Server Error message (see image below) that basically disabled all of the installs, i.e. blogs, wikis, lyceum, etc., on my web-hosting space. However, the various sites on my account were back up and running in a matter of a couple of minutes.
Click on image to see a larger copy of the error message
I had gotten the Internal Server Error message previously when working with Typo3 on Bluehost back in April. At that time I was told that I probably had bad javascript in my templates that was causing the crashes. The tech was right. I did, indeed, have an errant javascript in the template so I removed it promptly and had fewer errors, but they were not entirely fixed. But today the problem seemed worse, anytime I try and upload an image file from my desktop to Typo3 I get an Internal Server Error -to avoid this I have been uploading my images via FTP, but this only circumvents the problem. Additionally, during the last half hour I have been getting these errors when trying to add an image as a content element which I uploaded via FTP. At this point I am not entirely certain if these issues will be resolved, but I would think that two pretty popular php driven applications like Drupal and Typo3 would be a pretty high priority for Bluehost to get working correctly, don’t you?
Over the last couple of months I have been putting together some resources for ripping DVDs, editing the extracting files, and converting/compressing them into more globally readable formats. Negotiating the minefield of video codecs and file extensions is a complex process, and I certainly do not claim to be an expert. Yet, I think such a resource could be extremely useful for enriching the ways we integrate multimedia into the teaching and learning process in higher education. I hope to come up with a series of relatively straightforward guides for accomplishing this on the MAC, at least at first. Having recently been the benefactor of a new MacBook Pro :), I plan on working through a similar list of resources for Windows once I get more and more familiar with the possibilities for XP.
Some of the topics that might prove helpful are as follows (feel free to add suggestions or requests to this list):
Below is an annotated list of some applications that I have found useful when working with digital video on MAC OS X. I will be working on a more detailed, step-by-step set of guides using these applications to accomplish the above listed tasks in the not too distant future.
ffmpegX is a Mac OS X graphic user interface designed to easily operate more than 20 powerful Unix open-source video and audio processing tools including ffmpeg the “hyper fast video and audio encoder.
In other words, ffmpegX cannot edit digital video files, like MPEG Streamclip can, but it can compress and convert these files into a variety of video formats such as Mov, AVI, DV, MP4, etc. And, unlike MPEG Streamclip, you do not need to purchase the Mpeg 2 Encoder from Apple for this program to convert VOB files. Once again, this software is only compatible with MAC OS X.
In a recent article on ZDNetUK, Sun’s Simon Phipps argued that the open source movement is premised on the capitalist ethic of self-interest. Below is an excerpt from the article quoting Phipps’ discussion of open source within a capitalist framework:
Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference, Sun Microsystems’ chief open-source officer, Simon Phipps, said that open source had been focused for too long on sharing code instead of what he called “the enrichment of the commons” …
… Phipps said that the message of open source was that “creating and maintaining a completely independent code base was ultimately self-defeating”.
Instead, the future was in co-operation and in organisations preserving what was ultimately of value to them. “This is not volunteerism,” said Phipps. “It is directed self-interest, synchronised self-interest and there is nothing wrong with self-interest.”
And Phipps took time out to take a swipe at some of the exhibitors at the conference who were selling professional advice on negotiating the open source “legal minefield”.
“I disagree with those who say who say open source is a legal minefield,” he said as he threw from the stage a brochure from one firm of lawyers. “If you think open source is a minefield you’re doing it wrong.”
In fact, this intellectual property minefield is the legal mechanism for preserving capitalist self-interest to turn a profit. I think many would agree these days that the litigious spirit of US capitalism has gotten just a wee bit out of control as this idea of sharing and cooperation has been construed as being at odds with self-interest and profit. Given this, I think Phipps call for a re-evaluation of how we understand the open source movement as a necessary and beneficial element of the innovative engine that drives capital is both strategic and astute.
And while I agree with what much of Phipps is arguing here, I think channeling the possibilities of the open-source movement through the human nature argument of capitalism is an attempt to sell this idea to a group of people who can profit from it, using the appropriate buzzwords like “self-interest” and “connected capitalism.”
Such loaded and vague economic terms, such as ‘self-interest,’ seem inadequate to define the potential power of the open source movement. This movement is not premised on the individual as much as it is upon his/her space within a larger collaborative network of groups and communities that by working together are redefining the idea of the economic self, as well as the social self, creative self, etc. -bearing in mind that the term self here becomes increasingly more meaningless for it quickly becomes impossible to rein in or determine.
Open source is premised on using technology as a tool to share intellectual labor in new and potentially profound ways. The driving logic behind the open source movement is at odds with the mythical biopic of the self-interested individual entrepreneur, a bootstrapping capitalist who labors alone in the sole pursuit of his/her benefit, often translated as financial wealth. Edison’s biography can be understood as an example of the paucity of such myths. His patenting of Tesla’s inventions is a fine example of the problematic history of the legal minefield of capitalist self-interest. How different would our ideas of energy be if these two had collaborated rather than competed?
That some are desperately trying to monetize this wellspring of creativity and innovation is not unimaginable or even undesirable, but it does need to be put in perspective. The late 1990s showed that investors (corporate and otherwise) were willing to throw money at just about anything related to Internet technology. This speculative value is, in fact, the predominant method through which we have come to create value in our society. Yet, might we not be able to generate value through collaborative efforts that are premised on more than a speculative faith system that pays homage to the idol of unbounded profit?
An idea that would be interesting to persue in more depth would be how open source may differ from the over-determined figure of capitalist self-interest. How might the open source movement refigure some of our assumptions about capitalism? -many of which are still premised upon industrialized labor? The possibilities and challenges posed by an organized and robust open source community may provide an moment to start re-examining some of our pre-conceptions about concepts like self-interest, speculation and value rather than a moment to routinely reinforce them.
This post started out as a comment on my favorite blog these days, The Tattered Coat. Matt, the proprietor of said blog, has one of the most intelligent, entertaining, and interactive blogs going. After a long hiatus to finish his dissertation, Tattered Matt is back at it and as good as ever. Lately he has been posting some movie thoughts on his blog that have had me commenting, and now blogging, with a new found energy. His most recent post on movies calls for suggestions of horror films for those who do not like the genre. The post below is both a response to his question as well as a perambulation through my own ideas of the genre and its uses and generative abuses.
A few years back IFC did an excellent documentary, The American Nightmare, with the masters of recent horror (i.e. Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, & George Romero) in which they talked about their films in relationship to the violence of the Civil Rights and Vietnam War era. These directors (and special effects guru Tom Savini) represent a particular group of film folk that can actually talk intelligently about their work -for 99% of the actors, filmmakers, and producers who talk about their films are completely inane. In particular, Romero, Craven, and Cronenberg articulate how they understood their films as allegories of a particular moment in America when violence, terror, and horror were undermining the dreams and ideals of a generation.
Possibly the greatest horror movie of this moment is Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead (1968). This film was made on a shoestring budget, but quite effectivly turns the entire nation into a battle zone against zombies (a rich figure that he gets a lot of mileage from, especially in Dawn of the Dead (1978)) by simply integrating the TV and Radio as narrators of the cataclysmic event. The lead character, Duane Jones, is a resourceful no-nonsense black man who slaps up an hysterical white woman -most definitely a radical moment in film. His ultimate demise after surviving an intense evening of fighting off the flesh-eating humanoids comes not at the hands of the undead, but by a posse of rednecks who mistake him for a lifeless savage. Click on the video below to view these two clips from the film.
[MEDIA=15]
Romero mentions in the documentary that when he was bringing the recently finished film up to NYC for distribution, the news that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated was announced on his car radio; a powerful fact once you watch this in terms of the conflicts and social unrest of the 1960s. As an added bonus you can watch this film for free given that it is part of the public domain, just click on the following link to be redirected to archive.org.
Horror might be understood as the ideal vehicle for social commentary because its message can often be embedded within such malleable and generative figures as vampires, zombies, werewolves, aliens, freaks and maniacs. And unlike drama, comedy, and the documentary, most viewers are not expecting sophisticated critiques from what at first appear to be relatively straight-forward genre scare tactics. Some other movies from the IFC documentary that are a must see are Shivers by Cronenberg, Last House on the Left by Craven, and Maniac by William Lustig.
Most of these films, however, are pretty painful to watch, and if you are already unlikely to watch horror films these may not help the cause. So I have another suggestion (well, more like a crusade): Mario Bava!!!
“Who the hell is Mario Bava?” you ask. Bava is an early pioneer of my favorite type of horror movie: the 1980s b horror movie. There is no substitute for camp. I just got finished watching an early film by Bava, Hercules in the Haunted World (1961), which is probably one of the few horror movies with Hercules as the hero- which quite bizarrely, and hysterically, plays the whole Greek Mythology thing pretty straight -how can you go wrong? But more seriously, Bava’s brilliance, and I don’t mean to use this word lightly for I am not about to argue that he is a genius or master, for unlike the documentary on Bava that attempts to argue this very fact, I find it both irresponsible and antithetical to the value of the films Bava made. Bava’s aesthetic is uneven throughout his work but at moments transcendent in films such as Black Sunday (1960), Black Sabbath (1963), The Girl Who Knew Too Much, (1963) and (my personal favorite) Planet of the Vampires (1965). Bava’s ability to work through more genres than even Kubrick with overtly campy themes (see Roy Colt and Winchester Jack (1970) for an over-the-top Western—the other spaghetti Western) marks his uncanny ability to make a compelling variety of worlds with little or no budget, a trademark that would jump-start the power of the b-movie which comes to a kind of oxymoronic golden age with the advent of VHS during the 1980s.
In fact, many critics, fans, and Bava devotees link his films to some of the most important horror films of the 80s. And while Alien is anything but a b-movie, many link Ridley Scott’s marriage of horror and SciFi and the mist-filled atmospheric aesthetic with Planet of the Vampires. But one of the most persistent and interesting legacies of Bava comes with his film Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971) (a.k.a The Bay of Blood). This film is set on a wooded bay and methodically works through 13 brutal murders by an unknown maniac. An earlier prototype for horror/slasher/gore franchise films such as Friday the 13th (1980), Halloween (1978), and Slumber Party Massacre (1982). Twitch of the Death Nerve has it all: p.o.v slasher perspective, over-sexed camping teenagers, and an ending that will leave you wondering what the hell you just watched.
If you are not overly impressed by the moralistic slasher movies of the 80s then Black Sunday may be a perfect Bava alternative for the weak-stomached horror film hater. Starring the queen of 60s horror, Barbara Steele, this film is often cited as the pinnacle of Bava’s aesthetic, and after seeing a couple of his shots in glorious black and white it may be difficult to argue otherwise. What strikes me about Black Sunday is that its film aesthetic comes right out of the stage-sets of the classic period of horror films during the 1930s. It is really a pleasure to watch Bava’s ability to conflate the camp world of Barbara Steele with the aesthetic brilliance of James Whale.
Barbara Steele fresh out of the Iron Maiden in Black SundayTwo more Bava films of note before I try and wrap-up this seemingly endless comment cum post cum book prospectus. As I mentioned earlier, Bava was constantly working though genres and in the case of Twitch of the Death Nerve fashioning new ones. Perhaps the best example of an acknowledgment of his place as an Italian b-movie filmmaker is found in The Girl Who Knew Too Much-a gorgeous attempt to put the Giallo on film. Professor Hieronymos-Grost from Ireland does a nice job of summarizing this film in a comment on IMDb:
Nora Davis (Letícia Román) is an American tourist in Rome who witnesses the brutal murder of a woman on her first night in the city, however circumstances prevail that no body is found and the police and pretty much every one else believe she is a little crazy, except that is for a young Dr. Marcello Bassi (John Saxon) that she has befriended who plays along and helps her investigate. Nora’s investigations brings up three earlier killings in the same place on the Spanish Steps in Rome, that at the time were called the Alphabet Murders, due to the killer’s preponderance for killing women that had the respective letter in their surname, but the killer was caught and imprisoned for life, so who is it doing the killings? Soon Nora realizes that the letter “D” is next on the killers list and that she is to be his next victim.
Well, I’ve searched high and low for this granddaddy of the Gialli Genre for over two years now and finally got myself a copy, and was it worth it? It’s Mario Bava of course it was! Filmed in stunning black & white the film boasts some fine performances from the leads, it is also regarded as the film that started the ball rolling for the Giallo on film. The Girl Who Knew Too Much also gives a very firm nod to the work of Hitchcock whose Man Who Knew Too Much the title is borrowed from. The film is full of suspense with some very nice scenes and keeps you guessing until the end, as all fine Gialli should — it is quite low on the bloodletting though, a trait the Giallo would ignore more and more as it entered the 1970’s, but this is still an excellent film and well worth checking out.
Well said, Hieronymos! Bava fashions yet another sub-set of the thriller with this film version of the Giallo. And as the comments above suggest, the film Giallo’s increasing dependence on bloodletting may begin to suggest a transition from this pulp genre to the more overtly gore driven films of Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci – admittedly a fast and loose genealogy of the 80s slasher viz-a-viz Bava.
Letìcia Romàin in The Girl Who Knew Too Much.
Finally, Rapid Dogs (1974) adds yet another layer to the influence of the films of Mario Bava on the B-movie horror films of the 1980s and beyond. The plot, as told on IMDb, is as follows:
A gang of thieves hijack a man’s car after botching their getaway from a robbery. They take a woman prisoner and command the man to drive them to safety. The man must try to cope with the bad situation he is in as well as trying to get help for a sick child that he is caring for.
What is striking about this film is how radically it departs from any of Bava’s previous films. It is shot in a hyper-realistic style, especially by Bava’s standards, and smacks of a documentary-like examination of the horror of everyday violence. The film is gritty and at times very hard to watch and as one commenter suggest on IMDb quite similar to Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left -given its relentless and realistic portrayal of people’s potential for horrific acts of brutality towards one another. This film seems inspired by Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, and may be understood as a model for films like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Man Bites Dog.
Kidnap victim (Lea Lander) being molested by her abducters in Rabid Dogs.
Anyway, this post is becoming unruly and I will have to save my thoughts about the relationship between Bava and the b-movies of the 1980s for another post on the subject. I imagine it will pick-up where I left off in order to explore (or rather indulge in) some of my favorite bad films of the 1980s such as Stepfather (1987), Terrovision (1986), Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) and The Toxic-Avenger (1985), Saturday the 14th (1981) and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978) -the first movie I ever saw on HBO which was technically made in the 70s, but made available to kids like me in the 80s.
Finally, below is a collection of taglines for the films I listed above, absolutely genius:
This post was made possible by a film retrospective titled “Mario Bava: the Baron of Blood” that was scheduled at the BAM a few years ago. Thank you BAM programmers, you’re doing fine work.
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