Armageddon man: a review of The Loom of Ruin, by Sam McPheeters.

I first realized that Sam McPheeters was a great writer when I read his incredible profile of former Crucifucks frontman Doc Dart, an acutely observed and devastating piece of writing that reads like "Frank Sinatra has a Cold" for the punks. At one point not long ago, I remember wondering aloud to a friend when he was going to publish a book.

It's tough to talk about McPheeters without talking about his musical career (much to his chagrin, no doubt). Full disclosure: I am something of a diehard fan. When I was in college, I actually attempted to write a profile of McPheeters for a journalism class when I discovered that he lived in nearby Claremont. While very polite in responding to my inquiries, Sam clearly had no interest whatsoever in being profiled--although I did manage to badger him into answering a handful of questions. (I felt a thrill of vindication when he responded with some enthusiasm to a query about which Presidential Libraries he had visited, as I had long detected a certain fascination with the presidency in his output, which also recurs in The Loom of Ruin.) McPheeters is probably best known as the singer for Born Against, the quintessential political punk band of the '90s--but his greatest work is with Men's Recovery Project, who I rank alongside Devo as premier satirists of the boundless stupidity of modern man. When I heard McPheeters had written a novel about a furious gas station owner who threatens to destroy civilization, I was frankly ecstatic.

I see The Loom of Ruin as a continuation of the aesthetic evinced by Men's Recovery Project, who chronicled the absurdity of the commonplace. MRP scrutinized the barren landscape of modern life, unmasking the surreal, nightmarish qualities of quotidian activities like working in an office and sending email. The emblematic Men's Recovery Project song is "Normal Man", where the banal title proclamation--"that's right, I'm a normal man"--is delivered with the slobbery desperation of someone who recognizes that "normal" is nothing of the sort. It's one of MRP's many thumbnail sketches of the grotesques haunting our dystopian present, figures that include the Sexual Pervert ("The world is his napkin / Sitting quietly on the bus / No one knows it's him"), the Egyptian Assassin ("It's a gross, lonely life"), and the Rude Scientist ("his theories have been rebuked and his articles refused").

Trang Yang, the central figure of The Loom of Ruin, is the most striking grotesque in the McPheeters oeuvre: a violent, pathologically furious Hmong gas station owner, whose limitless rage suggests a combination of Mel Gibson, Virginia Tech gunman Seung Hui-Cho, and Michael Douglas' "D-Fens" character from the film Falling Down. But The Loom of Ruin is a novel about the cosmic cruelty of coincidence, and Yang's rage is explained to be the result of brain damage suffered after being struck with a stray round from an LAPD firefight. Before the shooting, we are told, Yang had plans to build an enormous Hmong community center. Afterwards, he plots the murder of the LA Lakers with a machete.

One of the best qualities of The Loom of Ruin is how expertly McPheeters evokes the setting of Los Angeles, a natural playground for his brand of surrealism if ever there was one. At the same time, McPheeters' depiction of the city evokes the interchangeability of the metropolis, in a world where all interactions are mediated by a vast corporate matrix composed of entities like Chevron, Safeway, Apple, and Time Warner. Through his total rejection of society, Yang represents that most classic of American archetypes: the rogue, operating beyond the bounds of legality and even common sense, inscrutable and indigestible to all observers, serving no master.

But true escape from the web of global capitalism is impossible, both in The Loom of Ruin and in real life; Yang is still, after all, a Chevron franchise owner. Appropriately, nearly every character in the book is depicted as a bundle of private anxieties buffeted by vast, impersonal forces they can't begin to understand. One of the most impressive writerly feats of The Loom of Ruin is how McPheeters juggles the novel's large cast, which features dozens of characters ranging from a pair of dimwitted ironic racists to Barack Obama to Satan, with each one progressing the ominous plot and remaining (mostly) distinctive. That said, one also can't help but wonder if the real reason McPheeters added Satan to the roster is simply in order to work in a Black Sabbath quotation in the novel's final stretch. But the method by which the devil is summoned is an inspired and appropriately prosaic piece of urban mythography: a character accidentally runs an empty microwave for two minutes.

But all of the characters are essentially reduced to props the second Trang Yang enters the scene; he is a figure of such raw, hateful energy that he crashes through the book's brief chapters like a wrecking ball. Yang is more a force of nature than anything else; he is more akin to a mythological demon or a cruel demigod than a human being. He's nothing less than the glowering unconscious of late capitalism, a seething, embodied death wish that wants nothing more than to burn it all down.

In the end, that's what The Loom of Ruin is: it's a jet black comedy about man's ruin. We love our apocalypses, but our favorites tend to be those where we can imagine ourselves surviving and even flourishing; dramatic reversals of fortune that give meaning to the meaningless and deliver us from the grueling monotony of an existence defined by mindless consumption. (The reigning example, is of course, a world overrun by zombies--where we can literally rise above the drudgery of our everyday lives.) But the annihilation wrought in The Loom of Ruin is of a very different kind: haphazard, undignified, inscrutable. It's a kind of kitchen sink apocalypse, where rather than being transformed into rugged survivalists, we watch humanity blown to pieces at the absolute nadir of its dignity, fighting over an Applebee's gift card. In The Loom of Ruin's ultimate flourish, man is laid low not by his Promethean hubris but by his sheer laziness, auto-corrected into oblivion.

My DNA's For Sale: A Beginner's Guide to Turbonegro, Pt. 2

"Most rock 'n' roll bands start as a riot but end up as a parody. We started up as a parody, but ended up as a revolution."
- Happy-Tom

Scandinavian Leather (2003, Burning Heart)

Circa 2003:

Circa now:


I hated this album when it came out in 2003, as a Turbo-obsessed college student. Me and my roommate/best bud/fellow Turbojugend spent hours ranting and raving about how much it licked ass (and not intentionally). Today, I'm more forgiving (seeing these songs in the live context helped), but the wretched opener "Wipe it 'Til it Bleeds" still serves as a microcosm of the album for me: a slicked-back, heavily polished, watered-down version of Apocalypse Dudes. It's got a lot of variety and more than a few great melodies, but it lacks A.D.'s chesthair and virility; it's like a giant penis made out of rare gems, flaccid in spite of its own majesty. It's not all bad though. The second song, "Gimme Some", should've been the opener, delivering the kind of dark, razor-edged bubblegum that Turbonegro has always excelled at. ("Locked Down" also recaptures some of the black magic of Apocalypse Dudes.) But the biggest problem with Scandinavian Leather--and the guy had, admittedly, been through a lot--is Hank's vocals. The man from hell just sounds tired as hell here, and the results feel phoned-in. At the end of the day, I think Scandinavian Leather would've worked better as an EP or a mini-album. It seems stretched too thin, like they should've held back longer before dropping another album; too much, too soon.




Party Animals (2005, Burning Heart)

"All My Friends are Dead" is one of the 10 best Turbonegro tunes of all time, a piledriving Red Army hulk of a song, catchy as hell, full of snake-charming Euroboy money shots--and best of all, Hank sounds like his old self again! I worried it was a fluke, but "Blow Me (Like the Wind)" is even wilder, sounding very much like Happy-Tom's description of the album: "It's like the best bits of the Rolling Stones mixed with the best bits of Black Flag, but composed by Shostakovich, Stalin's in-house composer." Unfortunately, the album never recaptures the heights of the first two songs, but it's a step closer to the Turbonegro return to form I had hoped for in 2002. It's still very much part of the top-heavy "Apocalypse trilogy" that began with Apocalypse Dudes and continued with Scandinavian Leather, but Hank sounds so much more inspired here than he did on the last album that he breathes life into even the half-baked songs. That's the problem with this album: there just aren't as many great pop melodies on this one as Scandinavian Leather; it's a very straight-forward hard rock album, especially towards the midsection. (The flip side of that is that there are no songs on here as turdly as "Train of Flesh" or "I Want Everything.") If you mixed and matched the best bits from this and Scandinavian Leather, you'd probably five-Tom effort on your hands--but this is another step towards the true rebirth of darkness.





Retox (2007, Scandinavian Leather)



(Maybe even 4.5 Toms)"People say we've been making the same record for 10 years, that's not right. We've been making the same record for 4 or 5 years." So true. But the "Apocalypse trilogy" is over, and Retox is the best and most consistent album TRBNGR have made since getting back together. With its air-raid-siren guitars, pinch harmonics, and a chorus that would sound appropriate blaring from a Panzer steamrolling over Poland, "We're Gonna Drop the Atomb Bomb" is an awesome, surprisingly heavy opener that comes on like At The Gates covering The Weirdos. It's also definitely a subtly more metal record overall, but think Judas Priest rather than Entombed. Post-reunion Turbonegro has never lacked for polish, but the songs on Retox sound as if a lot more thought went into them, rather than being dashed off in between orgies with well-muscled sailors. There are a surprising number of hits here, stretched over the whole album. Two of the best moments come deep in side B: "Hot and Filthy" is positively Dudes-ian, and the wicked, minor-key "Boys From Nowhere" is like "Armed and Fairly Well-Equipped" part III. Since it dropped, Retox has grown on me with every listen--it really is the Turbo comeback album, and in all honesty I might actually like it more than Apocalypse Dudes. It was also fated to be the last Turbo album with Hank on vocals, and even though he was the band's third singer, it's tough to imagine what they'll sound like without him.

Small Feces (2005, Bitzcore)



Like any odds-and-sods collection, Small Feces is for the completist, with plenty of stuff you've heard before--but it also features a few Turbo classics that are scarcely available anywhere else. Of the 42 songs here, a whopping 16 are covers. Most of them are well-executed but unambitious ("War on the Terraces", "Suffragette City", "I Don't Care About You", Ebba Gron's anti-capitalist barnburner "Staten Och Kapitalet"--the latter is a truly inspired choice though), but a standout is Turbo's rendition of "Gimme Shelter", which they turn into a Brainbombs-style mongoloid stomper that really plays up the eerie darkness of the original. And then there is "(I Fucked) Betty Page", one of Turbonegro's greatest and noisiest songs, with tongue-in-cheek lyrics made legitimately creepy by how vicious Hank and the boys sound; it really sounds like it was written at the same time as "Librium Love" or "Kiss the Knife." And the unreleased songs on Small Feces are all surprisingly excellent, from the infectious, almost pop-punk "Kick It Out" to the raging D-beat thrash of "Let it Burn". But best of all is the absolutely astonishing "My Hometown", a tender and wistful minute-and-a-half gem that I've used to instantly transform people's opinions on Turbonegro. Again, it's probably best not to bother unless you're already a jugend, but if you are, Small Feces is extremely fun and (mostly) essential listening.

What does the future hold for the denim recruits, especially now that they've parted ways with Hank Von Helvete? It's hard to say, but it's possible that the change could be just the shot in the arm Turbo's been looking for these past few years--and going from this and other videos, I have to say I like the cut of new frontman Tony Sylvester's jib. (On the same uploader's video of "Denim Demon", he sounds like Damien from Fucked Up!) The future looks bright, if you dig darkness!

Armed and Fairly Well Equipped: A Beginner's Guide to Turbonegro

Hey jügend! Did you know that Turbonegro is one of, like, the greatest rock and roll grüppes of all of times? It's true, buddy. We here at SCB have compiled this handy-dandy buyer's guide to help you out in the heady task of selecting the best Turbonegro record album for your hard-earned dollars. Each record is assigned a rating out of five possible Happy-Toms. (I also listed the first label to release the album in order to give credit where credit is due, although most of these have been reissued through multiple, international generations and a tangled web of reissuing labels. For cover art, I just picked the best version, since the reissue of Never is Forever has a way better cover than the original and I couldn't decide which variation of Hot Cars I liked more.)




Turboloid (1990, Straitjacket Records)


Well here it is, the humble beginnings of the Turbonegro legend. They are pretty humble: this record doesn't sound too far off from the muck being cranked out by contemporary Sub Pop or Amphetamine Reptile bands. If you're into nowadays noise-rock like Pissed Jeans you might find yourself grooving along to the hit single "Cockwork." And "Let's Go To Mars (Richard Burton's Penis)" trundles along on some pretty damn tasty Happy-Tom bass plonk. But in the final analysis, this is a pit stop on the roadway to darkness, and unlike some of the other early Turbo records you won't be losing out too much by skipping this one until later in your Turboducation.




Hot Cars and Spent Contraceptives (1992, Big Ball Records)


"Venom meets Radio Birdman in an institution for sexually abused retards." If that legend-making quote from Swedish DJ Lars Aldman doesn't tell you everything you need to know, maybe you should just stick to listening to Godspeed You Black Emperor or whatever. Turbo's lineup changed pretty significantly in between Turboloid and this one, so a change is to be expected--but what you get here is a full-on transformation from tender boys into rich and flavorful men. Hot Cars is one of those annoying albums that opens with an extended sample--but "Librium Love", the song that follows, sounds much like the scenario Aldman described above, except if all persons involved were equipped with flamethrowers. This is a dark, noisy, demented, brilliant album that more than lives up to the moniker of "death punk"; contemporary listeners may be surprised to find that the band documented here has more in common with Brainbombs or Rusted Shut than they do with later incarnations of themselves. This is the most undiluted of Turbo material; definitive vocalist Hank Von Helvete had not yet joined the band, but Harald Fossberg actually sounds quite similar and the songs here are cobbled together from C4 and cut-up gay porn magazines. "I'm in Love with Destructive Girls" manages to out-Stooge the Stooges with its relentless, brain-nullifying chant of "YEAH-YEAH. YEAH-YEAH. YEAH-YEAH. YEAH-YEAH." Which, subliminally, is informing you that you MUST OWN. The German edition added a cover with a painting of Sirhan Sirhan and bonus track "A Career in Indie Rock", which seems to be a 20+ minute recording of a really nasty gay porn movie. Which is also on the current repress. Rejoice!




Never is Forever (1994, Dog Job Records)

After dumping Hot Cars onto an unsuspecting world punk marketplace, Turbonegro changed their name to Stierkampf ("Bullfight", durr) and released a 10", which I skipped over since almost all of it is re-recorded better here. Turbo here deliver another flawless record which sounds COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from its predecessor. The band billed this album as their tribute to Blue Oyster Cult, and it's definitely a riposte to the "raw, primitive" garage scene then exemplified by labels like Crypt Records and Sympathy for the Record Industry (Long Gone John would ironically release the next Turbo album in the US). Never is Forever is exactly what it sounds like: a "suburban deathpunk opera" of epic scope and vision, like an episode of Law & Order rendered by a Romantic painter and soundtracked by Poison Idea. The songs are also catchier and more digestible than the Claymore blasts on Hot Cars, with jams like the Evel Knievel tribute "I Will Never Die" revealing a melodic tenderness not hinted at on the previous album. But the band that exhorted you to "go with Satan" and "kiss the knife" has not retired: "Time Bomb" is among the darkest and most seething of all Turbo songs, and "Nihil Sleighride" is the unofficial sequel to "Armed and Fairly Well-Equipped." It's an epic journey well worth undertaking--like reading Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, only with more dicks.




Ass Cobra (1996, Amphetamine Reptile)


Picking a favorite Turbo album is impossible, but Ass Cobra is the definitive one. Ass Cobra is the dialectical synthesis of the ass-ripping death-punk of Hot Cars and the lush, hard rock melodrama of Never is Forever; it's ass-ripping melodrama. Christian A. Calmyer, who also recorded N.I.F., here captures the most perfect buzzsaw guitar tone ever laid to tape, and generally this is the best Turbonegro recording of them all: raw and nasty, but also crystal clear. This stands side-by-side with the Dwarves' Blood, Guts, and Pussy and the New Bomb Turks' Destroy-oh-Boy! as one of the best punk albums of the '90s. The songs here are among their best: "Denim Demon" and "I Got Erection" deserve their classic status, but every song is a gem--and my favorite is actually the bonus for the SFTRI American release, "Screwed and Tattooed", the greatest satanic biker ballad ever written. This album also marks the birth of the denim aesthetic; in Tom's immortal words, "Leather is for empty, little people. Denim is for us big guys! And the kids LOVE it." While the Dicks reveled in being a "commie faggot" band, Turbonegro's denim transformation truly made them into a classic MC5-style rock-and-roll gang, like the Red Army Faction if they were sexy sailors out for vengeance. Whether you're an American punk rock boy or a new wave telephone hooker, you will love Ass Cobra. (Also note that the Denim Demon single features as its B-side "(I Fucked) Betty Page", one of the very best of all Turbo songs and one which should've been on Ass Cobra.)




Apocalypse Dudes (1998, Boomba Records/Virgin in Norway)



Apocalypse Dudes is the consensus favorite, the album that made them stars, and the Turbo record that even non-Turbo fans can love. I still consider it a tiny step down from the previous three albums, but that's basically like saying the Gospel of John is a step down from the other three; they're all essential. And A. Dudes is a diamond-hard, ass-blasting Eurotrash smash that expands on the band's long-running fixation with Feel the Darkness era Poison Idea, The Dictators, and Alice Cooper, adding a heavy dose of sexy glitter magic to create a rich cocktail that tastes like a White Russian with extra semen. The opener "The Age of Pamparius" serves notice: now with Chris Summers (Prince of Drummers) in the mix, this is easily Turbo's most musically varied and dynamic record since Never is Forever. But the biggest change here is the addition of Euroboy, a 25-year-old wunderkind who spends most of the album's run time ejaculating crazed guitar leads in every possible direction. In true punk cliche fashion, I hate guitar solos, and it's testament to Euroboy's abilities that I love his addition to the TRBNGR sound. It might sound like a strange comparison, but he reminds me a lot of Randy Uchida from G.I.S.M. in his ability to deliver wild wank that still somehow fits perfectly into the song. (I think my favorite moment is when he affects a pedal steel in the otherwise blistering "Prince of the Rodeo", with tasteful[!], slow-bent single notes.) And the songs are as poppy and well-crafted as they've ever been, sounding much closer to the grand pomp of Never is Forever than the firebreathing punk of Ass Cobra. Where Ass Cobra depicted a gang of denim-clad urban guerillas on a bloody rampage, Apocalypse Dudes is the "too much too soon" sequel, a portrait of the same gang of deathpunks as jet-setting, world-class superstars: zillion dollar sadists zonked out on hashish, riding a Concorde to a rendezvous with anus. Jello Biafra, uncharacteristically, said it best: "possibly the most important European album ever." Eat shit, Wagner. ("So you think you had an opera? Well, not like this!")


Unfortunately, the sense of excess and wild-ass/ass-wild madness on display in Apocalypse Dudes had some basis in reality, and Turbo broke up soon after, "in the waiting room of a psychiatric emergency ward in Milan, Italy." The last song they played onstage, in their hometown of Oslo, was the immortal Hot Cars classic, "I'm in Love with Destructive Girls." Broken on the wheel of a decadent and cruel music industry, Hank von Helvete returned to his hometown, where he worked as a guide at a whaling museum. But the world would not let our heroes rest, and in 2002 the denim recruits would rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of this golden age of confusion...

The Gun Speaks: The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008)

This is a longform review of the film The Baader-Meinhof Complex that I wrote shortly after it was released on DVD. I ran across it recently and was surprised to discover that, unlike how it sometimes goes with writings of your own that you return to later, I still stand by it completely and feel like I sort of hit the nail on the head here. Thus, reposted!

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I spent an entire summer when I was in college researching left-wing terrorism in the ’60s and ’70s. This meant five or six hours a day in my school’s library, poring over every resource I could find that had even the most tenuous connection to the RAF, the Red Brigades, the Japanese Red Army, etc. I tried to put myself into the mindset of students who moved from staging protests and chanting slogans to planting bombs and taking hostages; I tried to understand the warped logic that led to grisly massacres such as the attack on Tel Aviv Airport in 1972. (If you played the last Call of Duty game, that attack is the closest real world corollary to—and the probable inspiration for—“No Russian.”)

My work had a particular emphasis on the Red Army Faction, who to me were always the most interesting group of the era. In some ways the RAF were unexceptional: they weren’t as politically potent as the Red Brigades or ETA, as bloodthirsty as the Japanese Red Army, or as psychedelically deranged as the Symbionese Liberation Army (of Patti Hearst kidnapping and brainwashing infamy). But the RAF personified the self-absorbed romanticism of the western “urban guerilla”, stretching an intellectually paper-thin justification over what was in reality a brutal crime spree. And the group’s charismatic, loudmouthed ringleader Andreas Baader (alongside Carlos the Jackal, who he resembled in a great many ways) is the closest the western New Left ever came to having its own homegrown Che Guevara.

As such, my interest was instantly piqued watching the 2009 Oscars, when I heard that a German film called The Baader-Meinhof Complex had been nominated for best foreign language film. I'd somehow missed this movie entirely, but the title alone announced the film’s historical credibility to me: it’s the name of the definitive book on the RAF, and the key source for my research paper. Written by a former Der Spiegel editor named Stefan Aust, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex is an exhaustively detailed page turner chronicling the RAF phenomenon from the inside out, written by someone who was there. (Aust actually rescued Ulrike Meinhof’s orphaned daughters from a camp in Palestine, winning him death threats from the RAF in the process.)

Having finally seen the movie, I’m happy to say that it’s easily one of the most historically accurate films I’ve ever seen, while also managing to present a captivating yarn equal to the best thrillers. What impressed me most about the film was how perfectly the actors captured the outsized personalities of the figures in question. Martina Gedeck’s Ulrike Meinhof is the kind of engaged intellectual whose critical faculties fail her completely as she is swept in a wave of violent nihilism that she increasingly struggles to justify, both to herself and the world. As Gudrun Ensslin, Johanna Wokalek embodies the shrill, hectoring intransigence that veiled brutality in a cloak of dialectical rhetoric and self-righteousness.

But best of all is Moritz Bleibtreu, as the incomparable Andreas Baader. A surprisingly intelligent, sulky, and privileged mama’s boy, Baader was defined by his macho, anti-intellectual ferocity, dominating the group through sheer volume and bullying any dissenters into complying. While Meinhof and Ensslin both seemed to possess keener intellects than Baader, he commanded the RAF with bullying charisma and force of will, and Bleibtreu brings him to roaring, scenery-chewing life.

The film also captures the heightened atmosphere of the period perfectly, with the protest over the Shah of Iran’s visit to Berlin setting the stage for what is to come. The raw political theater of the street melee is removed from the dry accounts of newspaper archives and comes to bloody life before us; it’s as real as any battle in Lord of the Rings, and no goblin has ever seemed as menacing as the small group of smartly-dressed Iranian counter-demonstrators striding towards the barricades, snapping the handles off of their placards to use as clubs.

Inevitably, a film such as this will omit certain things, and as I mentally checked off each turning point in the RAF’s lifespan as it played out before me on screen, one major event was missing: Jean-Paul Sartre’s visit to Baader in prison. The decision here is understandable: attempting to present such a major historical personality so late in the film would risk derailing the story. But the event always stood out to me as a singular expression of the intellectual irresponsibility of Sartre and other European Communists who went to any length to apologize for atrocities committed on the road to socialism. Best of all was Baader’s estimation of the philosopher, who he said above all else gave “the overwhelming impression of age.”

In a welcome break from most films about the era, The Baader-Meinhof Complex uses period music only sparingly. When Baader and fresh recruit Peter-Jürgen Boock race down the highway to the strains of “My Generation”, the song suddenly seems fresh again—and it seems to say more about Baader’s ideological stance than any number of Frankfurt School theorists ever could.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex is an extremely graphic film, but it refuses to stylize any of its bloodshed. The violence is instead awkward and amateurish; none of the principals have been trained or conditioned to kill, but instead have chosen to, and the clumsy murders we see effectively convey the severity of the decision to “take up the gun.” At the same time, the film shows restraint, depicting the effects of the group’s actions mostly through montage and brief snatches of footage—effectively putting us into the RAF’s shoes, as they watched the fruits of their vicious labors on the evening news.

As viewers, we are left us with no easy answers. The film does not moralize, but largely because it does not need to; the RAF’s guns and bombs speak for themselves, defensible only to the most critically numb of fellow travelers. While it takes no more of an explicit stand on the issue of the first generation’s deaths at Stammheim prison than Aust’s book does, the implicit message is another story. We witness the despair over the “Dead Section” where the group is detained (in conditions that contemporary viewers raised on crime movies will likely find shockingly accommodating; the cells look more like studio apartments), and it’s hard not to see a group suicide as a fitting, final act of irrational aggression, striking out at the only target left to them.

The film ends with a sense of interruption, rather than closure. This is fitting, since the Stammheim suicides offered no closure for the families of the RAF’s victims, who didn’t even get the luxury of a verdict. And even as Baader and company are discovered dead in their cells, the next generation of the RAF—to say nothing of their contemporaries in groupls like the Red Brigades or the Weather Underground—still roamed free, plotting the next robbery, bombing, kidnapping, or hijacking. We are left with the familiar fact that terrorism didn’t die with the end of the ’70s and the ascent of neoliberalism, or even with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the purported “end of history”—it remains all too apparently with us today.

Revenge of the '00s: The Final Chapter (5-1)

5. Triangle (2009)Remember how at the beginning of this list I talked about how High Tension's twist ending totally undermines the movie and makes repeat viewings endlessly frustrating? This is the opposite of that. Triangle is a sharp, harrowing Mobius strip of a movie, with a mind-bending, quantum storyline that withstands the closest of scrutiny. Watching director Christopher Smith's previous feature, the satirical slasher Severance, you could be forgiven for going into this with modest expectations. But Smith delivers something exceptional here, in a chiller that's as clever and polished as it is haunting. It's hard to really talk about the plot, since it's best to go into Triangle with no prior knowledge--but suffice it to say that this is almost like a horrorshow take on the non-Batman Christopher Nolan films (most obviously Memento, but there are definite shades of The Prestige as well), and a flick with a seemingly endless number of rabbits that it pulls out of its hat. Surprising, smart, and very unsettling, Triangle is a cruelly overlooked movie that deserves a wider audience.

Note: if you liked Triangle's mind-bending style, try and track down a copy of a 2004 movie called Primer. The DVD seems to be out of print, or at least going for an obscene amount on Amazon--but if you thought Triangle was a mindfudger, Primer will well and truly do your head in, with a subtle sci-fi plotline of boundless, chart-requiring complexity. (Or, you could just watch it on YouTube.)




4. Ju-on/The Grudge (2000; 2003; 2004)

If The Ring is the father and Pulse the son, then Ju-on is the very unholy spirit. What defined J-horror as a style was imagery: while a lot of horror derives its mileage from the unseen, J-horror, like The Exorcist, was about showing you images you'd never forget--and Ju-on is very much the apotheosis of the style. Director Takashi Shimizu took Hideo Nakata's grim vision of Sadako and ran screaming with it, abandoning the strange mythos of The Ring for one of the purest, most nightmarish takes on the haunted house ever filmed. This series is infamous for its number of incarnations, and although many connoisseurs cite the first, straight-to-video feature as the best, they're all total screamers. And actually, Ju-on: The Grudge, Shimizu's first theatrical version (pictured above) is the definitive version: it dispenses with the gore and unnervingly glacial pacing of the original TV movie, but features the most coherent story and the most haunting visuals. Even the American remake is quite good, which is no surprise considering it's directed by Shimizu himself and is basically a "greatest hits" reshuffling of scenes from the two original movies.

But in any incarnation, Ju-on is nothing short of a master class in cinematic tension: the folktale themes and minimal plot are a skeleton that Shimizu fleshes out with sheer, oppressive dread. The scares are numerous and legendary; by the end of the sequence in Hitomi's condo you may need a clean pair of pants. And again, what really pushes Ju-on over the top is the imagery, as what is seen here cannot be unseen: a flash of Toshio reflected in a glass door, a bedroom suddenly filled with keening black cats, Kayako descending the staircase. A truly essential modern masterpiece.

3. Inside (2007)

As I neared the end of the list, I agonized a bit more over the ordering: should Inside really beat Ju-on, a movie I'd call a five-star classic? In the end, I decided yes, but the truth is that they're not that far apart, in more ways than one: both are movies about an average house where things go very, very wrong, and where cruelly wronged mothers seek their grisly revenge. Part Halloween, part Tenebre, and part Die Hard, Inside is a gruesome nerve-jangler that also functions quite well as pure, popcorn entertainment. In terms of "the new French extremity", Inside is very watchable: this is an altogether enjoyable thriller that will leave you feeling guilty about having so much fun watching so many people get butchered so horribly. I've seen a lot of violent movies, but Inside can quite honestly stake a claim to being the bloodiest there is (at least outside of played-for-laughs bloodbaths like Piranha and Dead Alive): it isn't especially shocking or transgressive for the seasoned viewer of extreme cinema, but this is a movie where the arterial spray is almost a character in its own right, dousing the scenery and actively transforming the look and mood of the film. In classic Sadean fashion, every time you think it can't go any further, the film throws some new, pioneering innovation in bloodletting at you. (The "zombie" scene towards the end is unparalleled in this regard.) Truly a scorcher, and as good as horror films get these days. Also: the DVD features one of the best "making of" featurettes I've ever seen, offering great insight into how hard it really is to make a movie like this.

2. Audition (1999)My original concept for the list was strictly movies in the last ten years--but I had to include Audition, and for a while I actually thought of giving it the number one spot. The overused horror superlatives used to describe Audition, a movie that became almost instantly legendary for its audience walkouts, are all completely warranted; Audition really is one of those movies that no one forgets. It's an outlier as well, almost to the point of being a satire (yet another level the film works on): the long-haired spirit of vengeance in this one is very much alive, and spends most of the movie smiling cheerfully (regardless of what's going on onscreen). The best compliment I've heard paid to the film came when I subjected a friend to it: during the film's climax, it offers a brief, illusory moment of respite before plunging you back into its unique brand of sadism, and at that point she turned to me and simply said, "Help me." If you've seen any of the promotional materials for Audition, you know something is coming--but it doesn't matter. You really can't prepare yourself for what happens in the last half hour, in an agonizing sequence that earns the oft-used comparison to the shower scene in Psycho.

To be honest, I find a lot of director Takashi Miike's work overhyped and insubstantial--but Audition is such a left-field masterpiece that it will nonetheless forever cement him as a great director in my mind. And truthfully, my favorite moment in Audition isn't actually the final scenes. I don't want to say too much in case you haven't seen it, but it comes midway through what, up to that point, has been a slow-moving, Japanese family drama. Along the way, Miike has been feeding you brief, eerie glimpses of Asami at home, waiting by the phone. But all of a sudden, we're hit with a scene that, visually, is so unsettling that it forces you to rethink everything you've seen up to that point--and then it really makes you jump. This is what makes Audition so great: it is a virtuoso performance in the art of audience manipulation, and its sheer cruelty to the audience would make Artaud blush. If you haven't seen it, watch it--you won't forget it.

1. Let the Right One In (2008)Let the Right One In is not just a horror movie, but a downright beautiful coming-of-age tale, a delicate love story, even a period piece. But it is also, unashamedly, a horror movie, and one that performs a miracle by finding new territory within that most moribund of horror tropes: the sympathetic vampire. Modern horror has had an ongoing love-hate relationship with the idea at least since the advent of Anne Rice's tortured vampire aesthete, and it's back on the rise again with fare like Twilight and True Blood. But Let the Right One In makes the idea of a humanized vampire seem wholly fresh again, thanks to the incredible character of Eli: a 12-going-on-300-years-old vampire who is simultaneously sweet, endearing and viciously murderous. Lina Leandersson's performance is uncanny, but it's also truly a composite: much like with the fully demonized Linda Blair in The Exorcist (whose blasphemous dialogue was actually delivered by veteran radio actress Mercedes McCambridge, who tragically had to sue for a credit in the movie!), all of Leandersson's lines were overdubbed by Elif Ceylan, giving the waifish vampire her appropriately world-weary voice.

But it's not just Eli that makes the movie great. Kare Hedebrant is every bit her equal as Oskar, a pale, fragile-as-porcelain boy struggling to assert himself and to figure out how to be a man. The film also looks absolutely gorgeous, with Swedish suburban scenery so icy and beautiful your breath will practically turn to steam in front of you. It's also filled with indelible, shivery images: Eli scampering up the wall of a hospital, or wreaking a bloody retribution on Oskar's tormentors. And as for the tenuous, innocent relationship between the two principals, I would paraphrase a famous accolade extended to Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: it is one of the only truly believable love stories of our time.

Postscript: what, then, of the American remake, needlessly retitled Let Me In? The change of name says it all: while it's an extremely faithful remake, and it'll do in a pinch if you can't get your mitts on the original or just suffer from morbid curiosity, it loses a lot of poetry in the translation. In the US version, Eli is just a girl, with more special effects to make her scary, and all the gorgeously grey ambiguities of the original are smoothed over. Most notably, Eli's gender is never brought into question, and Oskar explicitly agonizes over his budding romance with a killer in a way that seems more like a Hollywood artifact than a real piece of characterization. On the up side, there are some interesting changes: the disfigurement of Eli's guardian is re-imagined in a pretty tense and suspenseful fashion, but it's not enough to justify a movie that simply did not need to be made. The original, as it stands, is perfect.


That's it, it's over...or is it? (Musical sting)

Revenge of the '00s, Part V: A New Beginning (11-6)

11. Suicide Club (2001)

Battle Royale has become a real cult classic with American viewers, but Suicide Club attacks many of the same themes and anxieties and is a much creepier, more shocking and effective movie. Like Battle Royale, it's a J-horror outlier: no pale, black-haired onryō, but the same sense of social comment and the same earnest desire to shock audiences. And shock it did: Suicide Club became immediately infamous for its opening scene, depicting a mass teenage suicide in that most psychologically fraught of Japanese settings: the subway. In terms of sheer excess, this is as over-the-top as millennial Japanese "extreme" cinema ever got--but the real surprise is that, from there, Suicide Club just gets better and better. This movie is like what might have happened if Kiyoshi Kurosawa had decided to trade in his abandoned, derelict buildings and direct day-glo J-pop music videos (literally). This is a bright, kinetic, and visionary film--and at the same time, an utterly bleak and nihilistic one. Suicide Club truly has everything: there are real scares, real gross-outs, and a gnawing, pit-of-the-stomach sense of dread to complete the J-horror checklist--but this is no formal exercise. It's one of the most original and powerful Japanese films of the last decade, in any genre.




10. Eden Lake (2008)
Donkey Punch had more than a faint whiff of chavviness to it, but Eden Lake is where the nascent chavsploitation genre reaches full bloom. There's nary a Burberry tartan in sight, but this is as classic a "cruel story of youth" as you'll find in modern movies. It's all very rote at first: weekenders-on-holiday-run-afoul-of, and all that. But what puts this one over the top is an incendiary performance by the 18-year-old Jack O'Connell (above, with knife), as one of the most eerily pure film sociopaths of all time. O'Connell doesn't chew any scenery or throw any bombs, but he evinces such a cool, unfeeling malice that he's every bit as scary as 2008's other great psychopath: Heath Ledger's Joker. By the end of the movie, O'Connell only needs to turn his eyes directly into the camera to create a deeper chill than an army of ghouls. (Along with cast member Thomas Turgoose, O'Connell also starred in the critically acclaimed 2006 pic This is England, creating a subtle metacomment: where the hooligans of Thatcher's England had a streetwise soulfulness, the youth of today have nothing but bloodthirst.)




9. Martyrs (2008)
Man, you know a movie is going to be good when the DVD starts with an apology from the director. And unless it's all a huge put-on, it's hard to believe somebody as sheepish and bashful as Pascal Laugier could've directed such a savage, unapologetic film. Martyrs got a lot of hype very quickly as a new high-water mark in "extreme" cinema, for those always on the lookout for the next big shocking, bloody thing. But it's a movie with much, much more thought packed into its (literally) torturous run-time than the average post-Saw bloodbath; this is a movie that has a lot to say about trauma, victimization, and the justification for violence, with a bone-deep existential message as stark and intimidating as Being and Time. And Laugier is right: this is not a movie you enjoy, but one that you endure. Martyrs has to be the signal film on the horror end of what one Artforum critic has ridiculously (but understandably) termed "the new French extremity"; it is also a much better film than overheated shock treatments like Baise-moi or even Irreversible. And Laugier, in his wisdom, has downplayed the kind of hype which would give his movie a place at the Cahiers du Cinema table: in France, much like in America, horror is still a ghetto.

Postscript: of course there's going to be an American remake! And it sounds predictably dubious. Daniel Stamm, the skilled director of The Last Exorcism, is attached, but he says: "[The original film] is very nihilistic. The American approach [that I'm looking at] would go through all that darkness but then give a glimmer of hope. You don't have to shoot yourself when it's over." Very American, Mr. Stamm; we never did really take to existentialism.

8. The Descent (2005)

From the man who brought you Night of the Living Dead: Werewolves comes Aliens: Underground: Vampires. If my writeups of Neil Marshall's films seem flippant, it is only because they lend themselves to it. Don't mistake my irreverence for contempt, because as a moviegoer The Descent thrilled me like nothing in years. (Note that the first two Alien films are essentially my cinematic bible; they contain within them all great wisdom.) Marshall takes the unmapped caverns of the American backwoods, fills them with creeping, de-evolved Nosferatus, and drops a whole pack of spunky Ripleys into the mix (plus at least one Vasquez). The results, quite simply, are dynamite, and go deeper than the entirely respectable thrills and chills on offer: there is a subtlety and a human complexity at work here that dwarfs many similar films. But Marshall still expertly exploits our instinctual fear of the dark, and the movie's real triumph are its drooling albino CHUDs: taking a key page from the Aliens playbook, those are real people! (Who took an underfreak crash course, naturally.) A truly inspired directorial flourish: Marshall didn't allow his heroines to see the creatures in full makeup until they appeared in-scene. Also, bonus points for perhaps the gnarliest final girl transformation scene of all time (above).

Postscript: I discovered after seeing this movie that it shares the title with a surprisingly good 1999 thriller in the Michael Crichton mold, by a guy named Jeff Long. Book and movie share more than just a title: imagine the movie blown up into an epic, near-future saga about the colonization of an enormous world below, populated by the dread underbiters. It's really good, and if you liked the movie you'd do well to check it out.

7. Rogue (2007)
With Wolf Creek, director Greg McLean tapped into the blind spot behind our smug sense of mastery over the world around us, transforming a beautiful (if dangerously isolated) tourist destination into an alien planet, inhabited by a stalking menace wearing a human face. Rogue actually continues in a surprisingly similar vein, and it's also a better, tighter movie overall. More than that: Rogue is the best Jaws movie since Jaws. It's another movie about a big, man-eating bastard of a beast, but a couple things put it over. One, as in Wolf Creek, is naturalism: they may not have the same dimension as Brody, Quint, and Hooper, but these characters are believable, and they behave suspiciously like real people. The other is the simple fact that the titular croc is the best creature effect since The Host: this is, again, CGI done right, at its most subtle, restrained, and effective. The big lizard doesn't tear through the mise-en-scène, wagging its complex modeling in your face, but instead acts like a real crocodile, drifting slowly and inevitably your way before exploding into brutal, even clumsy motion. You will really forget you're watching a special effect, and mistake it for a real crocodile of extremely generous size. And the film's climactic moment is a concerto of suspense, and in its key moment even offers an inspired variation on the perfectly simple, stabbing heartbeat of the Jaws theme.


Next time on Revenge of the '00s: a time paradox, black cats (gone awry), an unexpected zombie, little monsters, and--you guessed it!--a last act surprise.

Revenge of the '00s, Part IV: The Dream Master

16. Dawn of the Dead (2004)
It's better than the original. Yeah, I went there. Dawn of the Dead is not actually a remake of the Romero zombie classic; it's the 5,679th remake of Aliens (which you could argue was itself reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead), but it's also one of the best ones ever made. Compared to 28 Days Later's revisionist, almost apologetic take on the genre, Dawn is stubbornly traditional (although it keeps the hated "fast zombies"). It's actually more classicist than Romero himself, who has proven eager to "evolve" the genre with each entry, for better (Day) or worse (possibly barring Land, everything since). As such, I'd argue that this is the key movie in the modern zombie renaissance, for that one simple reason: it isn't afraid to take itself and its chosen genre seriously, and it points directly towards fare like World War Z and The Walking Dead (which, to be fair, began in its comic incarnation one year earlier). This isn't to say that the pic is without humor: watch for Modern Family's Ty Burrell in a great turn as a rich, self-involved asshole. This is also Zack Snyder before he became buried under the weight of his own schtick, degenerating into video game farce. I'd contend that if this movie had been titled anything else, it would've been much more readily accepted by genre connoisseurs--even with the fast zombies. A better straight-up, no-bullshit zombie flick is tough to find.




15. Paranormal Activity (2007)
Necessity is the mother of invention. In the world J-horror made, we saw vindictive spirits visiting an apocalyptic vengeance on a lonely, high-tech civilization. Paranormal Activity is a $15,000, back-to-basics riposte: an intimate, quietly devastating story about our fear of what goes bump in the night. It returns to an antiquated view of technology as tool rather than transformative. Even if you bracket the low budget hype, Paranormal Activity works because it's a lean, muscular film, focused like a laser beam. This is a ghost story as pure as Ju-on, but it abandons the J-ghost template to once again draw tension and chills from what you don't see. While the film actually shows us plenty of the title phenomenon (especially compared to a found-footage predecessor like The Blair Witch Project, which relied totally on suggestion and implication), we still never get to face the monster itself. As a result, I personally find it much less frightening than the Japanese greats--but the film is driven by an amazing grasp of our psychology, basing its pull on our own desperate desire to see documented evidence of the spirit world. Just like the film's victims, we are roped in, incapable of turning away even as we see things getting worse and worse.

14. Sheitan (2006)

In America, Vincent Cassel is typecast as a snooty French dickhead, in movies ranging from Steven Soderbergh's Ocean series to Black Swan. But in his native land he's a superstar, and in case you doubted his acting chops, Sheitan is proof positive that he's the real deal. Here Cassel plays Joseph, one of the most unforgettable horror characters ever: a grinning bumpkin oozing with sweaty menace, a cheerful malevolence always just below the surface. It's a totally committed, incredible performance; Joseph not only lives on when he's offscreen, he casts a ghoulish shadow over the entire film. As a major star totally committing himself to such a weird, off-putting role, stateside comparisons are hard to come by: Brad Pitt in Kalifornia, maybe? The film is less about chills and shocks than a queasy, mounting sense of revulsion--and the final frame is almost in the same league as Sleepaway Camp.

13. The Ring (1998; 2002)
It's hard to appreciate in the same way after all the hype and the inevitable backlash, but The Ring is a stone-cold horror classic, with a pioneering mix of medieval spookiness and millennial tension that still resonates. Part Japanese folktale and part Candyman-style urban legend, this is a clever, original, and pioneering movie that was way ahead of its time: The Ring is a ghost story for the age of viral video and social networks, avant la lettre. In Sadako J-horror found the perfect icon: the vengeful female ghost is a longstanding trope in Japanese folklore that pushed some deep cultural buttons, a la The Exorcist; for western viewers, this spectre exuded an even more profound, alien hostility. And again, it's hard to view it the same way today, but The Ring is also a great example of how to do a twist ending right. There is simply nothing else in cinema like the sledgehammer blow delivered by that scene, where the smoldering tension of the entire film explodes like a hydrogen bomb. The American remake is really not that bad: it's very faithful to the original visually, and for the small amount it loses in translation (mostly just the ESP/psychic angle) it atones by upping the hair-raising intensity of the jump scares by about, oh, 10,000 times.




12. Kairo ("Pulse", 2001)

Takashi Miike gets all the press among horror and cult cinema fans, but a bulletproof case can be made that Kiyoshi Kurosawa is Japan's greatest outre/genre filmmaker. Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) has developed a brand of horror that is very distinctly his own, defined by a crushing sense of isolation and the most perfectly unsettling locations ever filmed. Kairo (which I'm told might be better translated as "Circuit") could be his masterpiece, and it is without a doubt the bleakest and most apocalyptic of all J-horror films. The classic themes are present and accounted for--chief among them, technology as the vehicle for spiritual annihilation--but they are given the ultra-bleak Kurosawa edge, and never has the sense of desolation so key to J-horror been more acute than it is here. The fright does not come in sudden stabs or sharp chills, but in a devastating sense of hopelessness. Note: of all the terrible remakes of horror classics we've seen in recent years, the American Pulse is, by far, the worst--avoid at all costs.


Next time on Revenge of the '00s: death cults, more chavsploitation, bloody misdirection, a final girl fake-out, and a three-hour tour...gone awry.