Share

Funny how phenomena follow me around, my own personal paparazzi. Are they always there and I usually fail to notice them? Or do they travel in swarms and every once in a while I walk through one, like a mist of perfume in a department store sales floor demo?

I don't like horror films. I'm squeamish, a violence prude. Too much of that from male family members in my childhood, no doubt, to last a lifetime. And yet I don't mind sadism: controlled cruelty's more my cuppa tea. Civilized, attentive, subtle, nuanced, incremental thrills. Acutely verbal, if you please, none of this thuggish dese, dems, dose. Precision brutality, I prefer.

You know, Hitchcock. Dorothy Parker. My ex-truelove.

Sam "Evil Dead" Raimi's horror film Drag Me to Hell premiered at Cannes.

So what the hell was I doing at the Another Hole in the Head film fest press conference at the fabled funky Roxie Theater , 16th Street, the Mission, San Francisco? Eating salmon'n'chive-pocked cream cheese on sesame-seed bagel halves and guzzling Stash Earl Grey tea, courtesy of Larsen Associates, my favorite PR firm in the known world.

After sitting through Coming Soon (2009), a tasty but undercooked Thai reflection on the immorality of making and watching horror flicks, I took home six dvds, which, with one exception, are the most godawful movies I've ever made myself sit through. Graphically unimaginative heterosex, bad dialogue, shit jokes, reflex misogyny based in reflex gynephobia provoking reflex feminicide, racial stereotype parody that seemed to reinforce the stereotype.

In a word: vulgar. Not the content, per se, but the approach. And most of these approaches are just plain stupid. Whence, perhaps, the fest's toldja-so title.

Fifties sci-fi movie clips are best thing in the documentary Monsters From the Id .

Okay, two exceptions. The first is Monsters of the Id (2008), which appears to want to analyze the allure of cheap, cheesy 50s sci-fi debacles like It Came From Beneath The Sea (1953), one of my all-time faves, featuring a femme fatale marine biologist and her alter-ego giant octopus that suctions the phallic Ferry Building to death, but Monsters morphs into a deranged plea for more such cinematic inspiration for U.S. adolescents not yet yearning