Genuine August Underground question

Does anyone over the age of 17 really want to shell out cash on a two disc version of this sophomoric, juvenile and ultimately rather boring exercise in self-promotion ? (Let's not kid ourselves, not matter how many credits the not untalented Vogel and crew have on low budget productions, this is a glorified showreel with a few non-ticket holders to the local metal club night helping out). I know there are some ultra-rabid cover-all horror fans, with bulging collections who'll take a philanthropic view to this picture and it's attempted dark undercurrents, those who'll essentially get it for completions sake. Or those who want a career in FX (though I'd tell them to just by Tom Savini's Grand Illusions book). Great. I love horror from cheap and old to gloriously over the top and forward thinking. But this ?

The whole AU clique puzzles the hell out of me. On one hand it's not like In A Glass Cage or 120 Days Of Sodom or something with a genuine subtext to its catalogue of "horrors". On the other, it's not even some depraved work of madness that should be pulled from public consumption.

It wishes.

Because it's relentlessly dull.

It's like a kid running into church and screaming a passage from De Sade at the priest and calling him a cunt. On some surface level it's shocking and you might be enlightened by his tonal enunciation, but has all the meaningfulness of involuntary defecation in your shorts, and about the same artistic merits too.

As a special effects extravaganza (and it is one - this isn't meant to be a serious drama enlivened by some seamless effects work - it's a gore flick) is it really any better than Peter Jackon's Braindead ? No, they're not. Neither pictures is particularly realistic, but one realises the futility of realism so is much more effective and inventive because of it. The other just has supposedly a more morbid agenda which, sorry to say, doesn't substitute for depth, well sculpted though it maybe.

Is the picture really an any more serious, intelligent dissection on the bland, everyday terror of serial killers than Henry? This is surely the most rhetorical question ever. Not a hope in hell.

Is the lo-fi camerawork really any more effective and real because of its intentional shoddiness ? Or is it an easy get-out for people that actually aren't particularly good photographers.

It's taboo busting and little else. But no more so than the real animal slaughter in 70's Italian pictures and sure to become as innocuously annoying in years to come. It's not disturbing, just faintly tasteless. It's not probing, just fairly ordinary in its depiction of vicious acts. It's not relentless, just far too long at barely over an feature running time.

There's a Nine Inch Nails video that achieves everything AU and its sequel hoped to achieve. It's a terrible and disturbing short about a guy tortured with a blow torch. It not only achieves a quite devastating effect with chilling ease and nonchalance, it does it in around 4 minutes.

In terms of something longer, Nacho Cerda's Aftermath is 100 times more engrossing, moving, terrifying and enlightening about the human condition. With better gore effects too, if you want to shallow about it.

I understand Murder Set Pieces (also featuring Vogel's work) is of similar gross aesthetic, judging by Fangoria's review.

2000 Maniacs is better made than August Underground.

Unless you meant Tim Sullivan's remake, which I won't see until next week, but probably is too.

H G Lewis may have had a questionable aesthetic, but at least it was eccentrically artful.

Again, Bloodsucking Freaks, while terribly made, like 2000 Maniacs, is still aesthetically a better film than AU because, if nothing else, it's goofy charm. It's a ghoulish confection, that aims to delight in grand guignol, a theatrical tradition dating back to the 1800s.

Which isn't to say there isn't a place for horrific, modern and disturbing art that doesn't have to "entertain" to be worthy: the NIN video, the Bob Flanagan documentary Sick, some GG Allen performance art, those guys that make the plastic holocaust sculptures, Mapplethorpe....

AU is nothing like this. It's literally - in a non-judgmental way - pornographic: something that is of no artistic merit but causes, in this case, certain base reactions. None of them particularly thoughtful it has to be said.

But Dan hits the nail on the head. It doesn't seem to realise why the great works of horror from The Cat & The Canary to Suspiria work. Because there's something going on under the images. This is adolescent snickers for the desensitized, without point, without insight, pretty much without context. And for fans to defend saying "that's the frikkin' point, true evil has no context, dude!" is to: a) ignore the very purpose of this genre of horror cinema, namely to elucidate on just such banality, as, say, Henry did so marvelously; and b) to be grossly untrue as to the nature of a picture who's almost sole aim to make you marvel at how depraved it aims to be. It's a grim and pointless perpetuation of virtual-prank calling.

Which wouldn't bother me any more than Charles Band's misguided, still going, erotic vampire series does if it weren't for the false, overblown cachet put out there by people who probably haven't had to sit through the witless catalogue of basic, competently delivered gore effects and filmmakers worryingly certain that there are no other merits upon which to claim a film's quality.

I read that the day after I posted this, yeah, bizarre coicidence. I linked it up over at DC (where as regular readers may remember, there's a whole wing devoted to "best rape", "best sex horror" and the like which appears to be not much more than taste-challenge creative-void hell).

The three examples I brought up at DC were Henry and Aftermath and a Nine Inch Nails video I can't recall the name of (the one with the fellow kidnapped and tortured) - exactly the kind of nihilistic yet valid concept involving depictions of pure, unmotivated evil I assume these new filmmakers are attmepting, but also three creative endeavours that are intelligent, creative, involving, disturbing and eminently more "worthy" of accolades and attention than a a guy fucking some sausages taped to the inside of a girl's t-shirt.

As Dan says, a lack of motive in subject shouldn't mean a lack of effort in creativity or artistry.