Tag Archives: LGBT

The Dark Hours (2005). The best Canadian horror film?

19 Saturday Apr 2014

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darkhours

Directed by Paul Fox, The Dark Hours is a haunting tour de force.  It’s the type of film you watch while curled up all alone on the couch with a thick cup of hot chocolate on a cold Canadian night.  It’s a film you just get lost in, hypnotized by the slow pace, atmospheric score, and eerie, original, non-linear storytelling.  The film oozes with atmosphere and is superbly well cast and acted.

The story revolves around forensic psychiatrist Samantha Goodman (Kate Greenhouse) and her troubled relationships with her low income husband, parasitic sister, very stupid party crasher (Dov Tiefenbach) and her terrifying patient, Harlan Payne (Aidan Devine), a tall bearded epileptic charismatic gay ax murderer.  Greenhouse is uncannily believable in the part, reminding me of every hyper-educated woman I have ever known.  There’s a familiarity about all of the characters.  We learn just enough about each of them to know the type and recognize them as people we’ve fleetingly known.  Dov Tiefenbach (who Friday the 13th fans will remember from Jason X) gives one of the most fascinating performances I have ever witnessed.

Slasher fans may be disappointed by the film’s slow pace and artsy ambiguous narrative structure and some viewers feel confused or even cheated by the time it ends.  Aside from one gratuitously disgusting scene involving a finger, and a stylishly bloody scene involving a nail, the film is much more a psychological thriller than a splatter film, and unfolds like a group therapy session.

But there is evil in this movie.  Not of the demonic otherworldly variety, but the darkness of human nature. 

Rosie O’Donnell makes dark comments about Lindsay Lohan’s dark docuseries on OWN

16 Wednesday Apr 2014

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See also: respectable ratings for Lindsay Lohan’s dark docuseries on OWN

Rosie O’Donnell went on twitter yesterday to say “The Lindsay Lohan show is a tragedy – on every level.  I hope one day she gets sober for real and watches these episodes – n sees what we all do.”  Lindsay’s docuseries is television and its best and especially enjoyable for someone with my dark sensibilities, but Rosie O’Donnel is an extremely sensitive depression prone person who likely struggles to handle a show so raw.  Back in 1999 she was so traumatized by the Columbine school shooting that she transformed her wildly popular syndicated talk show into a polarizing anti-gun platform, alienating many conservative Americans and getting into a brutal televised confrontation with pro-gun actor Tom Sellek.

It’s interesting that Rosie did not attack Oprah in her comments about Lindsay’s docuseries.  As many will recall, Rosie O’Donnell also had a show on Oprah’s OWN network from 2011-2012.  The show was actually very good, especially once Rosie abandoned the comedy and engaged in deep conversations but it did poorly in the ratings.  This was mostly because back in early 2012, very few people were watching OWN (ratings are much higher today) and Rosie had a mediocre time slot (weeknights at 7 pm), but it was also because Rosie’s obsession with gay topics was uncomfortable, even for gay viewers, and especially for the older middle class women who so loved her syndicated show and were tuning in to the OWN show for the same wholesome family entertainment.  It seemed Rosie was trying to overcompensate for not being visibly gay in her syndicated talk show by being hyper-gay in the OWN talk show.  I also don’t think there’s a huge audience for the type of in-depth intelligent conversation that Rosie was so good at which is why you don’t see much of it on commercial television.

Sadly Rosie’s talk show on OWN had to be cancelled because the ratings were nowhere near high enough to justify the eight figure salary Rosie was receiving, especially for a new network that was struggling at the time.  In fact had Rosie’s talk show not been cancelled, the network would have likely collapsed.  After the cancellation, many were expecting Rosie to badmouth Oprah as she had badmouthed Barbara Walters (Rosie had a brief gig co-hosting the View back in 2006-2007) in Rosie’s dark memoir Celebrity Detox and other shows.  But so far that hasn’t happened, probably because Rosie’s show on OWN was cancelled for business reasons (low ratings) while Rosie quit The View for personal reasons, despite delivering the show record ratings and really putting it on the map as a cultural force. 

Was Rob Zombie’s Michael Myers based on Henry Lee Lucas?

13 Sunday Apr 2014

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In an interview with Vanity Fair, Rob Zombie was asked who his favorite non-fictional serial killer was.  He replied:

I love ’em all. Not, you know, as people or anything, but they all make for great stories. I think Henry Lee Lucas is probably one of my favorites.

He added:

He and his buddy Ottis Toole were just a couple of deranged rednecks. But given his upbringing, y’know, it’s just not that surprising. Some of these guys, you think, “What would make a person do something like this?” And then you read about their upbringing and you’re like, “Oh, okay, well I guess that might do it.”

He also said:

 I’ve read so many books about these guys, I start confusing their backstories. But with Henry and Ottis, I remember it was pretty horrible. Stripper moms, alcoholic dads, I think they were both forced to dress up like girls at some point.  Henry killed his mom and raped her corpse, and Ottis had a thing for arson and cannibalism. They were into some really perverted stuff, like having sex with dead animals and that kinda thing.

So we can see several similarities between Zombie’s Michael Myers and Henry Lee Lucas.  In addition to both being serial killers, both were deranged rednecks with stripper moms and alcoholic father (figures) and both were emasculated by a parent figure.  Henry was made to dress like a girl by his mother and Michael’s mother’s boyfriend mocked Michael for seeming gay, predicting Michael would cut off his penis and change his name to “Michelle”.  It’s unclear if Michael ever had sex with a dead animal, but his sister joked about him having sexual relations with the pet rat he killed.

It is tempting to conclude that a terrible parenting causes one to become a serial killer, but it could be that the children of terrible parents become serial killers for genetic reasons.  If psychosis and psychopathy are genetic, then the parents of the criminally insane would be expected to manifest these same traits though to a much lesser degree, but the bad genes, and not the bad parenting, may be to blame for their kids becoming serial killers.

Although Zombie focuses a lot on Michael’s bad upbringing, he ultimately explains in the clip below that bad upbringing was not responsible for Michael’s cold, robotic, merciless nature.  Michael was just born that way as Lady Gaga would say. His brain was wired differently.