A Vintage Interview with The Godfather of Gore

Before the Internet, those of us who wanted to self-publish our musings on film (or whatever) had to do it the old-fashioned way, by creating a zine. My own compulsion to write about horror movies resulted in a publication entitled Raw Meat, which lasted for three whole issues in the early 1990s. I wrote all of the content on a typewriter, pasted it up, photocopied it and mailed it out, all by my lonesome. Content ranged from the usual movie reviews to articles on Hong Kong horror films, the gory antics of Monty Python and the various film adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft. The pinnacle of my efforts came in the third issue, when I presented my first-ever interview, with director Herschell Gordon Lewis, the legendary "Godfather of Gore." I tracked him down via a book he'd published on plate collecting, of all things, and he graciously agreed to a phone interview.

Not everything I wrote back then is worth a second look, but having recently reread the interview, it occurred to me that I'm still pretty proud of it, and I figured I ought to resurrect it and publish it here for your enjoyment (although, for all I know, all of this information has been regurgitated in the intervening time in other interviews, DVD audio commentaries and the like). I considered merely scanning the old zine pages and posting the images, which would have been kind of cool, but there were a few mistakes I wanted to correct, and I also did some additional editing 23 years after the fact to remove a few sections that, in retrospect, perhaps weren't all that interesting (back then, it didn't occur to me that I didn't have to print every single word he said). Additionally, I've added a few editorial comments in brackets to clarify a few things. So, without further ado, here is my 1991 interview with H.G. Lewis.

In 1963, an enterprising filmmaker named Herschell Gordon Lewis made a film called Blood Feast. This tale of an insane caterer attempting to revive the ancient Egyptian goddess Ishtar was made on a microscopic budget, featured shoddy production values and execrable acting and had its world premiere in Peoria, Illinois. But despite everything it had going against it, Blood Feast was an enormous success, and it went on to become a minor classic? Why? One word tells it all: gore. Blood Feast contained lots and lots of gore. Tired of the nudie film genre that he had been toiling in for several years, Lewis looked for something new, something that had never been done before. He found it. Among Blood Feast's many gory scenes were a hacked-off leg, a cut-out heart and a ripped-out tongue, all presented in living color (or, according to the advertising, "blood color"). Graphic gore had been seen in films prior to Blood Feast; Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958) shocked audiences with their graphic surgery and staking scenes, and Mario Bava's La Maschera del Demonio (aka Black Sunday, 1960) had some pretty potent violence for its time, but while those films used their violence sparingly, in only a few scenes, Blood Feast wallowed in it. The presentation of graphic gore was Blood Feast's raison d'être.

Lewis had found his niche, and his next gore film, Two Thousand Maniacs, was released in 1964. Miles ahead of Blood Feast in terms of acting and production values, Two Thousand Maniacs still delivered the gory goods with its story of a town of Southerners who take revenge for the Civil War on a carload of Yankees who stumble into their hamlet. The Yanks are cut up, barbecued, crushed by a giant rock, and rolled down a hill in a spiked barrel. In an eerie twist, the sole survivors discover that the town was completely wiped out by Northern soldiers a hundred years earlier.

Lewis went on to make Color Me Blood Red (1965), about an artist who finds an unusual source for that perfect shade of red; A Taste of Blood (1967), about a man who inherits his family's ancient curse of vampirism; Something Weird (1967), about a man who gains psychic powers after an electrical accident; The Gruesome Twosome (1967), about a sweet little old lady who gets the raw materials for her wig shop the easy way, with the help of her demented son; The Wizard of Gore (1970), about a magician whose bloody stage illusions happen for real after his performances; and The Gore-Gore Girls (1972), about a psychopath who murders and mutilates strippers.

The Gore-Gore Girls was Lewis' last film [at the time of this interview - MG], and for several years, he and his films faded into temporary obscurity. Then, in the late 1970's, his films experienced a renaissance, and Lewis was hailed and recognized as "The Godfather of Gore." Since then, he's been seen in countless genre publications, he's been the subject of several film festivals around the country, and he's even been interviewed for The Incredibly Strange Film Show in the U.K., where, ironically, all of his films are banned. Lewis' films are certainly an acquired taste, but like 'em or not, there's no denying the influence they've had on the modern horror film. Seen today, they're amusing, often still quite shocking, and, in the case of Two Thousand Maniacs and A Taste of Blood, they're genuinely well made films.

I was lucky enough to speak with Mr. Lewis in May, 1991, and it was a very pleasant experience. He is a funny, intelligent, and articulate man, and unlike a lot of other people who got their start in exploitation films, he is more than willing to talk about his colorful past. Mr. Lewis has been interviewed many times in the last several years, and being aware of this, I tried to ask him some questions that he hasn't been asked a hundred times. (The set-up that I used to tape our conversation was far from the world's greatest, so I apologize to Mr. Lewis if I've screwed up a word here or there.)

MICHAEL GROVER: When did you first realize that your films were attaining a cult status?
HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS: About seven or eight years ago, I guess [At the time of this interview, that would have been the early 1980s. - MG]. I had completely forgotten - I shouldn't say forgotten - I had begun to think that I would pass unnoticed into the limbo of motion picture would-be's, and I had paid no attention at all to any of the many comments that I had seen on occasion. People might send me something that appeared in Fangoria, or some little reference here and there. But seven or eight years ago, I don't even know what year it was, I had a phone call from New York which really startled me. It was a fellow named Rick Sullivan [Editor of the legendary Gore Gazette zine. - MG], who was an accountant at Exxon at the time, and who was sponsoring "gore film night" at a little theater in Greenwich Village, and he invited me and my wife up there. I figured the whole thing would be like a Harvard lampoon, where people would throw tomatoes but miss, but it wasn't that at all, and I began to wonder "How long has this been going on?"
MG: Had you seen many horror films before you made Blood Feast?
HGL: No. Well, of course I had seen things like the original Dracula, and some of the mystery films, but the horror films were always people like Bela Lugosi posturing around, looking fierce. Blood flowing, no. There wasn't anything of that sort.
MG: Except maybe Hammer films.
HGL: Hammer came after me.
MG: Actually, their first horror film was The Curse of Frankenstein, which came out in 1957.
HGL: Then that's before me, but was that a gore film?
MG: When you look at it nowadays, it wouldn't really be considered one, but back then, I guess it had people fainting in the aisles. But then again, so did the original Dracula.
HGL: Yeah, well put.

MG: Did the shower scene in Psycho at all inspire you to have Blood Feast's first murder take place in a bathtub?
HGL: Interesting point. I think that's neater than having it in the shower, it was more contained. But bear in mind that in Psycho, two things were true that weren't true of Blood Feast. Number one, the picture was in black and white. Number two, it was a series of quick cuts in which suggestion took the place of specificity. I would never call Psycho explicit gore. Certainly, it set a tone, and there's no question that that picture did have a tremendous effect on the future of horror films, just as Blood Feast did.
MG: Was John Waters the first filmmaker to acknowledge you as an influence, or were there any others before him?
HGL: Oh, I think Frank Henenlotter. I don't know, I shouldn't say that. It may have been John. A very decent fellow, he has a mixed reputation, I'm sure as I do, but yes, that may have been. In fact, I was a little surprised. About a dozen years ago, we had just moved to Florida, and John Waters called and asked it he could interview me or talk with me about some book or another he as writing, and I figured "Why did he want to talk to me?" But yes, I think he may have been the catalyst. Good thinking.
MG: Do you recall who painted the paintings that were used in Color Me Blood Red?
HGL: Yes I do, it was a member of the Hall family out of Venice, Florida. There were some brothers named Hall - Scott Hall is the fellow who played the police captain in "Blood Feast" - and they were all old Ringling Brothers carny type people. In fact, Venice, Florida is where the winter home of the circus is, the Ringling Brothers, and there's a huge community of sideshow people there. But we had these things literally painted to order, and I hung on to 'em for years and years until finally, there was just no more room in the attic, and out they went.
MG: Those would be great collectibles today.
HGL: Do you really think so? Maybe I still have 'em! (laughs)
 

MG: How did you approach Henny Youngman to appear in The Gore-Gore Girls? Was he aware of what kind of a film it was?
HGL: I don't think he was. Henny Youngman was a friend of a man named Bob Dachman, whose son, Alan Dachman, wrote the screenplay for The Gore-Gore Girls. I wasn't ready to make a movie then, and Dachman and I were both members; in fact, we were both on the board of the Variety Club in Chicago, and he said that he'd make me an offer I can't refuse. He said "Look, if I put the money together, would you shoot the movie?" Well, who could say no to that? So he put the deal together, and one of the things he put together - he was quite a contact person; he was actually a professional fundraiser, and I will say he was as professional a fundraiser as I've ever met in my life. One of his cronies from Lord knows when was Henny Youngman, so he approached me one day and said "Can we fit Henny Youngman into this movie? I can get him for one solid Sunday. The only rule is we've got to shoot every one of his scenes that day." I said "sure." It cost next to nothing. Why Henny considered doing this for next to nothing I don't know.
MG: Maybe his career was in a slump at that time.
HGL: At that time? (laughs) Anyway, he was very cooperative, but he read his lines with a lightning-like speed, where I had the feeling that we had poured those lines in at 33 r.p.m., and he was regurgitating them out at 78 r.p.m. In fact, at one point, I said "Henny, what we're going to have to do is put English subtitles under your lines!" But once we slowed him down a little, he was certainly a pleasure to work with. I had no quarrel with him; he did not play big shot, nor did he show any sign of temperament at all.
 

MG: Have any of the cast or crew of any of your films ever objected to the gore?
HGL: You mean when we were shooting them?
MG: Yeah.
HGL: Not that I can remember. Everybody knew what we were doing. On occasion, somebody would object afterwards, saying "I can't get it out of my hair." We had an actress in The Gore-Gore Girls named Hedda Lubin, and her role called for her to be the murderer, and to justify the plot line, she was supposed to have lost all her hair and be wearing a wig. Of course, she hadn't lost all her hair, and we weren't about to shave her head. So, we put this stuff on her with mortician's wax or whatever, and she was appearing in some stage play in Chicago, and she wasn't pleased with us, 'cause she couldn't get the stuff out of her hair for that night's performance, and she had to wear a wig. But in general, even people like Nancy Lee Noble, who was a very nice little actress, we smeared her up pretty thoroughly in She-Devils on Wheels, and never a peep. And originally, that stage blood was very hard to scrape off. Bear in mind we were shooting features here. Actors will give their left arm for a screen credit, and to be in a movie, in whatever kind of role, overrides anybody's initial revulsion at having a fake eyeball squeezed out.
MG: Of all the effects in your films, which one are you proudest of?
HGL: Well, I've got to give you a double answer here, Mike. The effect that changed the course of motion picture history was the tongue scene in Blood Feast. So, purely from a viewpoint of notoriety, that one has to rank first. But to me, my favorite scene is one that's little known, because that picture hasn't been released on video. That's in The Gore-Gore Girls where the lunatic shoves a girl's face into a bowl of French fries that are heating up on the stove. [The film had actually been released on VHS at the time, and has been re-released several times since. - MG]
 

MG: Why, after coming off of a string of nudie films, did you refrain from using [extensive] nudity in all but your last horror film?
HGL: Well, I didn't think it was pertinent. I also felt that we might be splitting the difference. In fact, sometimes when you try to be all things to all men, nothing happens at all, and I didn't want to be self-cancelling. As you are aware, Dave Friedman felt another way.
MG: If Blood Feast had been a tremendous bomb, which of course it wasn't, do you think you would have made another gore film?
HGL: Who knows? I thought we had made a specialty picture, not a bomb. But you see, it's impossible to be a tremendous bomb with the kind of budgets we had. But I suspect yes, I probably would have tried it again, because even as we were cutting Blood Feast, I had the notion for Two Thousand Maniacs.
MG: Do you see many horror films today?
HGL: Not many. We have total cable here; in four of the five bedrooms of this house we have about sixty channels, and if somebody doesn't want to watch what's on, every bedroom has it's own VCR. I prefer to be entertained; I like action, science fiction, and comedy more than I do horror. I think one reason is there's a sameness to the Friday the 13ths and the Amityville Horrors and the various kinds of Halloweens. It seems to me I'm watching the same picture over and over again. They've begun to become parodies of themselves. [Nothing has really changed in the intervening time. - MG]
MG: What does your family think of your films?
HGL: My son Bob was the sound man on half a dozen of these things. In fact, he's the only one who would squeeze the eyeballs; most of the actors would cringe at squeezing eyeballs. We had all forgotten this stuff long ago, but certainly nobody is going to disclaim it. I think I speak for the whole family in saying that we think it's funny. It's funny that people still remember us, it's funny that they still exist. Here are pictures which cost 100 to 200 times as much money, and they are in and out and forgotten, and these little old things still kind of chug along like the African Queen.

Bob Hoskins, 1942 - 2014

I've reached the point in my life where many of the familiar faces who've inhabited my personal pop cultural landscape since my childhood, whether they're actors, authors, artists or musicians, are beginning to die in earnest. I suppose it was inevitable, but it's still depressing to hear about these (often quite untimely) passings week after week. I've found that these people tend to occupy one of three categories: someone whose work is very well-known to me, someone whose work I was quite familiar with at one time but haven't paid as much attention to lately, or someone whose work I should be better versed in but haven't really explored to the fullest. Veteran actor Bob Hoskins, who passed away a few weeks ago, was in the latter category.

 

Don't get me wrong; Hoskins was unquestionably known to me, and over the years I've enjoyed watching him in a number of different films, but there were certain key roles of his that I had yet to experience, and to be honest, I was woefully ignorant of his range as an actor. As is so often the case, his death inspired to seek out some of those films, and I've embarked upon a sort of ongoing Bob Hoskins retrospective at my home, which is easier said than done in this day and age in which video rental stores effectively no longer exist. The selection of Hoskins' films that are streaming on Netflix is fairly sparse, so I've been reliant upon my local library, but evidently, others had the same idea in the wake of his death, and I've had to wait to acquire some of them.

With his diminutive stature, stocky build and thinning hair, Hoskins seemed unlikely material for a movie star, but his formidable acting chops proved otherwise. Perhaps best known in the United States for his role in Robert Zemeckis' 1988 live action/animation hybrid, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Hoskins initially came to prominence as a film actor in his native Britain via his role in John Mackenzie's 1980 gangster opus The Long Good Friday, which is a film I'd known about for years but never seen. Among those I had seen prior to his death, my favorite of Hoskins' films was probably Terry Gilliam's 1985 dystopian satire Brazil. Hoskins plays Spoor, a psychotic maintenance man who harasses Jonathan Pryce's character throughout the film, until he receives what is perhaps the most hilariously disgusting comeuppance in the history of the cinema, courtesy of Robert De Niro and a rerouted sewage hose. Hoskins' role is relatively brief, but it's impossible to imagine anyone else in it. His signature Cockney accent gives Spoor a necessarily rough edge, and his mischevious grin that can morph at any time without warning into a menacing grimace allows the character to be both goofy and scary within the same scene. This prodigious talent at expressing a character's duality would become even more apparent when I was at last able to see Hoskins in The Long Good Friday, which finally became available at the library last week, allowing me to take a long overdue look at the film.

In the film, Hoskins portrays Harold Shand, a London mob boss who operates more like a businessman, at least at the beginning. Shand, along with his elegant and sophisticated significant other, Victoria (Helen Mirren), has plans to redevelop a disused section of the London waterfront as a venue for the forthcoming Summer Olympics. His aspirations toward legitimacy begin to crumble, however, as his criminal empire is left reeling following an escalating series of attacks from an unidentified group. In a brilliant scene early on, Shand gives a stirring speech about his vision for London to a yacht full of potential investors as they chug down the river Thames. With the instantly recognizable Tower Bridge framing him as he waxes eloquently about the future of the British capital (an inspired visual choice), the viewer can be forgiven for forgetting that Shand is actually a gangster who is capable of brutal violence, as we will witness later in the film. Thanks to Hoskins' brilliant delivery of the monologue, I found myself rooting for Shand despite my knowledge of his true background. Hoskins keeps the character on a mostly even keel for the first part of the film, until things begin to heat up and Shand plunges off the deep end.

Two later scenes in particular are showcases for Hoskins' virtuosic talent. In the first, he discovers that a close associate was inadvertently responsible for triggering the offensive against his organization, and in an explosive rage, Shand violently attacks and mortally wounds the man. As he cradles his dying friend, Shand slowly comes to realize what he's done before breaking down in remorse. Hoskins handles this powerful scene with aplomb. I was aghast at his actions, but a moment later, I felt his pain and sadness as his friend died in his arms. The very end of the film, however, displays perhaps his finest work of all. Without giving too much away, Shand realizes too late that he's been snared by his adversaries and is whisked away to an uncertain fate. As the film's jazzy, uptempo yet somehow melancholy theme is reprised, the camera lingers on Hoskins for a good long while, with only a few, brief cutaways, as a gamut of emotions cross his face, from surprise, to disbelief, to rage, to sadness, to resignation and even a little dark humor for good measure. Hoskins is absolutely phenomenal in this scene; it's an impressive end to a great film, and it really opened my eyes to how much we've lost with his passing (Hoskins had actually retired from acting in 2012 after being diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease). Although I'm a bit late to the game, I look forward to seeing as many more of his films as possible in the weeks and months to come.

The Ultimate Practical Effect: ALIENS

(My return to blogging after nearly a year comes a few days after the untimely death of legendary Swiss artist H.R. Giger, the mastermind who designed the titular beast in the original Alien, among many other fantastic and terrifying creations. Giger is not mentioned in this piece only because he did not actually work on Aliens, but it goes without saying that his artistic DNA is indelibly imprinted on the film. WARNING: If, for some inexplicable reason, you've never seen Aliens, there are a few mild spoilers below.)

Released in July 1986, James Cameron's Aliens will celebrate its 30th anniversary a mere two years and change from now. (The fact that I was old enough to accompany my underage nephew to see the R-rated film at the long-defunct Southgate theater in Milwaukie, Oregon means that I am gaining in years myself.) At the time of its release, Cameron's action-oriented sequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi/horror classic, Alien, boasted state-of-the-art special effects by some of the top teams working in the field. Having watched the film for the umpteenth time the other night, I can offer my opinion that the vast majority of these effects hold up to this day, but one scene in particular still stands head and shoulders above the rest: the climactic battle between Ellen Ripley and the alien queen in the cargo hold of the Sulaco.

Aliens was made just prior to the dawn of a new era in filmmaking, one that was ushered in in large part by James Cameron himself. A mere three years later, in 1989, Cameron's film The Abyss became the first major live-action feature to incorporate computer generated imagery (CGI), using it to create a watery alien pseudopod in a relatively brief but highly memorable scene. Two years after that, Cameron pushed the CGI envelope again with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a film that made extensive use of the technique. For better or worse, T2 unleashed a deluge of CGI-laden films that continues to this day, and while the quality of what we see on screen has certainly improved over the years, the use (some would say overuse) of CGI remains a touchy subject for many film fans. Personally, I'm not necessarily opposed to CGI; some of my favorite films, including Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy and Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim, probably couldn't have been made as effectively without it. Nevertheless, I remain a fan of the use of practical (on-set) effects whenever possible, and Ripley's knock-down, drag-out fight with the 14-foot-tall alien queen represents what, in my mind, may very well be the pinnacle of achievement in this arena.

In order to create what would become, at the time, the largest animatronic puppet ever designed for a film, Cameron turned to the late, great special effects genius Stan Winston, with whom he had previously collaborated on The Terminator. Winston was not initially convinced that Cameron's idea of positioning two stunt performers inside a hydraulically-controlled puppet that could either be suspended from a crane or propped up from underneath was feasible, but after testing was done with a primitive mock-up, it was discovered that Cameron's idea worked brilliantly. From the queen's first reveal in the egg chamber through the subsequent scenes in which she pursues Ripley and her surrogate daughter, Newt, through the quickly disintegrating atmosphere processor, the puppet is amazingly lifelike, but it's the final, desperate battle in the Sulaco's cargo hold that really demonstrates what this astounding creation was capable of.

The finished sequence, in which Ripley dons a robot-like loader suit and goes head-to-head with the queen in an attempt to protect Newt, remains jaw-droppingly effective to this day. The stunt performers and puppeteers (up to eight of them) working in unison to operate the queen achieve perfect harmony, imbuing her with a palpable sense of malevolent life. There is not a single moment in the entire sequence in which the queen is anything less than completely believable. The use of the puppet brings a tactile quality to the scene that would be utterly lacking if it had been rendered via another method. Even stop motion animation, which I have a nostalgic fondness for, wouldn't have had the same immediacy or impact. Sigourney Weaver gives a remarkably fierce performance throughout the film as Ripley, culminating in this scene, and her acting was no doubt enhanced by having this enormous, frighteningly lifelike creature bouncing around with her on set. Even the finest actors undoubtedly have trouble relating to a green screen, but Weaver was face to face with this bad bitch. Thank goodness Aliens was made when it was. If the film had been produced only a few years later, audiences might have been deprived of this unprecedented marvel of practical special effects technology and subjected to a lackluster CGI version instead.

BATTLESHIP: One year later

At the risk of alienating the 50% of my regular readership that consists of serious film connoisseurs (the other half being my wife and mother - hi ladies!), I feel compelled to say a few more words about Battleship, last summer's resounding box office dud from director Peter Berg. In this piece, published last July, I speculated on why it might have been such a failure, while somewhat apologetically admitting that, for what it was worth, I enjoyed the film. At the end of my piece, I remarked that I'd likely end up buying a copy on Blu-ray if I could find it for ten bucks or less. (This price point has nothing to do with my opinion of the film; I'm pretty militant about holding out for good deals on movies, and I've acquired most of the Blu-rays in my collection for $8 to $15.) After nearly a year, this magic threshold was finally passed, and I am now the proud owner of a Battleship Blu-ray, DVD and Digital Copy combo pack.

Having watched the film again last night, I must say that my opinion of it has changed somewhat over the past year, or rather, my concern about what others might think about my opinion of it has changed. I'm tired of pretending. Let me state for the record that I unashamedly, unreservedly and without irony, love Battleship, and I don't care who knows it. After seeing it for the second time, it has become clear to me that, in its own way, it's a masterpiece. It's a given that American summer movies have come to mean one thing and one thing only: blowing shit up, and Battleship blows its shit up with the best of them while still managing to work on a human scale. I'm not generally a huge fan of CGI, as I think it's overused, and it usually makes movies look more like video games, but while a few of the sequences might have lost a bit of their lustre on the small screen, in general, Battleship's VFX work is stunning.

More than that, though, it's simply a likeable dog of a movie. I went back and reread some of the favorable reviews of the film from other critics (we're in the minority, believe me), and the consensus is that Battleship succeeds (at least in our eyes) by approaching its subject with an earnestness that's often absent from this type of film, and it presents us with characters we can feel great about rooting for in the midst of its apocalyptic fury. Folks, this is a film so big that it requires not one but two AC/DC songs on the soundtrack. It's an enormously loud and bombastic film that wears its heart on its sleeve. It approaches you, hat in hand, smiling its $209 million smile, and kindly asks you to check your logic and, let's face it, your common sense at the door while promising you a hell of a good time if you acquiesce. It's a film that extracts a naturalistic and even appealing performance from Rihanna, a person whose public persona irritates me to no end. It's a film that manages to celebrate the military in an entirely apolitical way, by pitting them against an extraterrestrial threat, which is a stroke of genius in my book, and it makes Battleship perfect for viewing this Memorial Day weekend, especially given the fact that it features real-life veterans, past and present, among its cast. It's a film that, I think, deserves a second chance.

Light 'em up.

Triumph of the Will?

As Hollywood grows increasingly bereft of original ideas, more and more classic films are being desecrated by unnecessary, unwanted and ultimately inferior remakes. Don't get me wrong - I think remakes are fine in certain cases. If the original film was technically flawed in some way, or if it missed an opportunity to make a salient point, or if the story can be updated in some way to make it more relevant for our time, then by all means have at it, but some films are so perfect, so timeless, that they should be off the table as far as remakes go. Sam Peckinpah's monumental 1969 Western, The Wild Bunch, is just such a film, but of course, nothing is off the table in today's Hollywood, and a remake has been in the works for some time. If that wasn't bad enough in and of itself, it was recently announced that Will Smith is on tap to star in the film. I have nothing against Will Smith; I've enjoyed him in many films, such as Independence Day and the Men In Black series, but the announcement of his (mis)casting in what is certain to be a cinematic travesty is the straw (dog) that broke the camel's back. I now present for you seven reasons why remaking The Wild Bunch, especially with Will Smith, is a bad, bad idea.

1. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, The Wild Bunch does not need to be remade. Peckinpah's original still retains its visceral power nearly 45 years after its release. It's arguably the finest film by one of the greatest directors in the history of American cinema, and there's really nothing about it that could have been done better.

2. Smith is a fine actor in the right role, but I'm not convinced that he's capable of fully conveying the self-loathing that is a crucial aspect of the main character in The Wild Bunch. William Holden did a magnificent job in the original film of demonstrating Pike Bishop's inner disgust at the man he had become. Smith just doesn't have the world-weariness or the gravitas necessary for the role.

3. The remake will not be a Western, but will be a contemporary thriller featuring Smith as a disgraced DEA agent. The whole raison d'être of the original was to tell the story of a group of outlaws left behind by changing times not long after the turn of the twentieth century. A remake set in modern times won't be capable of rendering that milieu with any sort of authenticity, which begs the question: what's the point?

4. The original was extremely violent and bloody, but the violence was presented in a realistic fashion meant to show the audience that death is an ugly business. The remake will undoubtedly try to top the original, but will showcase the violence in a flashier manner, with less moral weight - as modern action film audiences are accustomed to - and it will probably be rendered with fake-looking CGI blood, totally ruining the effect.
 
5. Smith rejected the title role in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (which eventually went to Jamie Foxx), reportedly because he felt it wasn't prominent enough (anyone who actually saw Foxx's rousing performance in the finished film should find such a sentiment laughable). If he's truly conceited enough to feel that he's not suited for any role other than the lead, then he has no business acting in The Wild Bunch. It's an ensemble piece, not a star vehicle.

6. The practical effects that were accomplished on the set of the original, such as the bridge that was blown up with actual stuntmen and horses on it, gave it a sense of realism that will likely be completely absent from the remake due to the overuse of CGI effects.

7. It's highly unlikely that the characters will be as morally ambiguous as they were in the original, which is what made them so interesting. I have a difficult time imagining that the remake's screenplay and performances will have the courage to walk the fine line between showing the audience that the characters are very bad people yet still allowing us to care deeply for them. That sort of nuance is hard to come by these days, at least in big budget, star-driven films that have to appeal to the widest audience possible if they're to have any hope of earning their production costs back.

Roger Ebert: 1942 - 2013

I think it's safe to say that the average moviegoer doesn't put much stock in the opinions of movie critics. If they did, the weekly box office reports would look a lot different than they do now. Although I'm far from the average moviegoer, I don't pay much attention to what most critics say, either. I read their reviews, sure, and I can usually take something of value away from what they say, but in the end, their endorsements or their condemnations mean very little to me. (For the record, I don't consider myself a movie critic, just someone who likes to write about movies.) The one, major exception to this rule has always been Roger Ebert, who tragically passed away a few days ago, leaving a gaping hole in the world of film criticism that will likely never be filled.

Roger Ebert has been a part of virtually my entire life as a movie fan. At some point in my young life, it became apparent to me that movies were more than just a way to kill a few hours; they were a form of art, and they could mean something. It was at this point that I began to watch the movie review show Sneak Previews, featuring Ebert and co-host Gene Siskel, on public television. Although I was frequently dumbfounded as to why they panned many of the movies I loved (often, their "Dog of the Week" was the movie I was looking forward to the most), it became apparent to me that their opinions stemmed from a genuine love of cinema. I also became aware that certain types of movies I might have dismissed out of hand could actually be worth watching. I continued to watch the various incarnations of their show for many years, with various co-hosts filling in following Siskel's death in 1999.

In more recent years, Ebert's online column was often my first stop when researching a new film, and his blog and Twitter feed found him branching out and writing about other subjects just as eloquently as he did about film. While he may have lost his ability to speak following cancer surgery several years ago, his robust online presence demonstrated that he had not lost his voice. So many critics seem only to care about demonstrating their intellectual superiority by ripping films apart, but if Ebert was hard on a film, it was usually because he was disappointed by its failure to take full advantage of what the medium is capable of. With that being said, Ebert was often able to find something worthwhile in films that other critics didn't have the time of day for. He was often remarkably prescient in appreciating the true value of certain films well ahead of others, such as Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch; he was able to look past the film's graphic violence and recognize it for the masterpiece it is now (almost universally) considered to be.

The increasing prevalence of online journalism means that practically anyone can be a critic these days, given enough time and exposure. A glance at some of the aggregated reviews on a site like Rotten Tomatoes presents one with a list of a few familiar names and many more unfamiliar ones. While this approach may provide a much greater quantity of opinions, it's unlikely that we will soon see another critic whose opinion will mean as much to me, and to many of us, as Roger Ebert's did. He was truly one of the greats.

What goes around comes around

Jeff Bridges, in King Kong (1976, top) and Heaven's Gate (1980)

There's been an odd sort of symmetry to my movie watching as of late, and I'm not referring to the intentional kind. Like most film geeks, I periodically embark upon my own, private "film festivals," during which I'll view multiple films by the same director or featuring the same actor, but this isn't that. I'm finding that many of the films I'm watching have a completely unexpected connection to another one recently viewed, whether it's an actor who appears in both, a thematic consistency or even a similar scene. It's actually a bit weird. I first noticed it about a month or two ago, but it hasn't been until the last week or so that I've started to make note of the phenomenon. It's almost like some weird version of the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game that I'm playing without realizing it.

For instance, the weekend before last, I rented Steven Spielberg's Jaws, John Guillermin's 1976 version of King Kong and Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. It occurred to me after I had returned home with the discs that I had almost rented the original version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three as well, which meant I would have had two 1970s films starring Robert Shaw, but that didn't even occur to me while I was at the video store. King Kong, of course, stars Jessica Lange, and we'd just finished watching season one of American Horror Story on NetFlix a few weeks before. Without really thinking about it, I'd watched Lange's first filmed performance shortly after seeing one of her most current. There had been other recent instances such as these, but I didn't pay much attention to them beyond an initial moment of surprise, chalking things up to pure coincidence.

The unexpected connections deepened this past weekend, when we watched, among other things, Michael Winner's The Sentinel, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. The first two films were streamed on NetFlix, the last two were viewed on rented Blu-rays. The Sentinel, of course, highlights devilish goings-on in a New York City apartment building, as seen in Rosemary's Baby the weekend before, but strangely enough, both films also feature actresses who were once married to Frank Sinatra (Mia Farrow in Rosemary, Ava Gardner in Sentinel). The Sentinel also features a barely-there performance by a young Christopher Walken, who has a starring role in the very next film I watched, Heaven's Gate. I had been wanting to revisit the Cimino film ever since Criterion announced their restored director's cut Blu-ray release, so it was on my mind long before seeing Walken in The Sentinel. Another featured performer in Heaven's Gate is a young, bearded Jeff Bridges, who I'd just seen in King Kong. Heaven's Gate also showcases stunning views of Glacier National Park in Montana, as do the opening helicopter shots in The Shining, a fact I was completely unaware of until I looked it up on Wikipedia while watching the film. 

The oddest connection of all was between the Indiana Jones film and The Shining, both of which have brief scenes in which one character expresses a desire to talk meaningfully with another, prompting the second character to ask facetiously what the first character would like to talk about, leading to an uncomfortable moment between the two. It's not necessarily an unusual type of scene to have in a film, but I'm not convinced that I would have noticed this juxtaposition had I not watched the two films back-to-back, and the strangeness of witnessing these oddly similar scenes in two disparate films, one right after the other, resonated with me. Just to bring things full circle and to make sure I was paying attention, a few of the documentaries that were featured on the Blu-ray of The Shining had interviews with - wait for it - Steven Spielberg.

I'm not sure if I simply didn't pick up on these connections before, or if I'm actually gravitating toward films that have something in common. I do think having films available to watch instantly plays a big part in it. While I may not have had a conscious desire to see two Christopher Walken films in a row, having both of them at my fingertips via NetFlix perhaps allowed me to indulge a subconscious desire without fully realizing it. Maybe after seeing the older (but still stunning) Jessica Lange in American Horror Story, part of me felt like traveling back through time via the magic of cinema to gaze upon her younger counterpart. Whatever's behind this, it'll be interesting to see if this trend continues, especially now that I'm fully aware of it.