24FPS @ Frightfest 2013: Part 2

Haunter
Dir: Vicenzo Natali

I can't tell you how tired I am of a certain kind of horror film that I call the 'noises off' movie.  You know the one - or rather the several thousand - where all the 'scares' come from things going bump just offscreen and, usually, something popping up suddenly in the background of a shot.  As Haunter opened it looked like it was simply going to be that; one more ghost story full of offscreen noises, but then the film began to evolve, and became something rather more interesting.

Vincenzo Natali's latest starts out with a simple concept, it's the day before Lisa's (Abigail Breslin) 16th birthday, and everything seems normal except that she's not allowed go about because of a thick fog outside.  It soon becomes clear that it has been the day before Lisa's 16th birthday for some time, but that only she is aware that time is looping.  As Lisa begins to investigate what is happening the events of the day begin to change, in small ways to begin with, but then in more disturbing ways.

It's not easy to talk about Haunter.  It draws on a lot of familiar reference points, but even to mention many of them would be to spoil the film, and the strength of the screenplay, in particular, lies in the fact that while it trades in tropes that you'll have seen in haunted house films, serial killer films and other types of horror, one of the thrills of the film is that it combines and twists them in surprising ways.

What can be mentioned is the fact that Abigail Breslin, who I'm not sure I've seen in anything since Little Miss Sunshine, has a really strong role here; an inquisitive, proactive, brave and reasonably complex character, and she does a great deal with it.  A large part of why Haunter works so well is that Breslin makes Lisa relatable despite her situation and is generally an appealing presence.

Credit must also go to Vincenzo Natali, who takes what could be a patchwork of influences and links them all together in a way that creates a look and mood that, while not entirely original, is consistent and gives the entire film a creepy undertone that serves it extremely well as it moves from twist to twist.  Even when Haunter trades in cliche - as in the early things going bump in the might scenes - Natali's craft and Breslin's sympathetic performance wring effective scares from what could just be another genre workout.

For me, Haunter is one of the best mainstream horror films I've seen for some time.  I wish I could get more in depth with this review but trust me, after you see it you'll thank me for keeping things vague.

★★★★

V/H/S/2
Dir: Simon Barrett / Adam Wingard / Eduardo Sanchez  Gregg Hale /
Gareth Huw Evans & Timo Tjahjanto / Jason Eisener

Portmanteau films are, I think, damned by their very nature to be hit and miss, and V/H/S/2 is no exception.  Composed of a wraparound story that shows the discovery of some mysterious videotapes in an empty (or is it?) apartment and four POV horror short films contained on those tapes, the film dips into many horror subgenres and does so with mixed success.

Everyone is likely to find their own standouts, but outside of the wraparound (which is middling) I found two shorts that I really liked and two that I was much less keen on.  Interestingly both of the films I enjoyed were collaboratively directed.  The first was Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale's fast moving zombie comedy A Ride in the Park, which is a gleefully gory tale of a cyclist bitten by zombie, going on to bite a couple and attacking a birthday party.  It's simple, but full of fun details and big laughs and shows that Sanchez can do tongue in cheek horror as well as the straight up scares he supplied in Lovely Molly.

More substantial in theme and running time is Gareth Huw Evans and Timo Tjahjanto's extravagantly bloody Safe Haven; a story of filmmakers whose documentary about a cult leader doesn't end the way they expected.  Evans and Tjahjanto take more time to set up characters, which means that when they spring a mid-segment surprise it has a bit of resonance, and they also have the time and restraint to set up a creepily disconnected atmosphere in the cult headquarters.  Evans bends his action credentials brilliantly to the mayhem of the film's last third, which is jam packed with twisted ideas and moments, leading up to a very funny last line.  The change of tone is nicely handled, going from restrained and tense to exuberantly over the top in minutes and with total assurance.

Unfortunately, these films account for less than half of V/H/S/2's running time, and the rest is filled by Adam Wingard's obvious jump scare packed Phase 1 Clinical Trials and Jason Eisener's cheap looking and as lazy as its title suggests Slumber Party Alien Abduction.  I get that this is the nature of these films, and V/H/S/2 is better than most and has two really great segments, but I can't help feeling they would ultimately make better DVD extras on the respective director's features.  On the whole, there is fun to be had here, but it's hard to recommend V/H/S/2 as a whole.

★★★

Rewind This
Dir: Josh Johnson

Being in my early thirties, I am very much of the VHS generation.  DVD only came on the scene when I was about seventeen, and it was a few years before I got a player.  I very much grew up and educated myself as a movie fan with the help of VHS, and while I don't miss some of the technical aspects of the format I do still have a nostalgic soft spot for it.  All of which makes me the perfect audience for Rewind This; a documentary that takes a scattershot but extremely entertaining look at the format and the revival it has recently seen with collectors.

If you are a fan of VHS exclusive cheese, this is the movie for you.  Sprinkled throughout are clips from some fantastically entertaining and offbeat looking titles (one that sticks in the mind is Bubba Smith's hilarious workout video, which begins with him telling you he loves you), I'd seriously recommend taking a notebook into any screening so you can remember all the films you'll want to track down.

Outside of this, the film moves quickly through various topics related to videotapes, providing an overview of the format wars before focusing on VHS and the nostalgia that collectors have for the format.  The film is especially good at covering the sheer extent of the VHS library, and how the astonishing popularity of video and the slowness of the studios in catching on to it created a whole new market in which independent filmmaker like Lloyd Kaufman, Charles Band and Frank Henenlotter (all interviewed) could thrive.

There is a real joy - and envy - as a film lover who has over 4000 titles, but only about 400 on VHS, in seeing the many different collections displayed and the different ways they are organised (I especially liked an obsessive horror fan's 'Pre-Sellout Craven' section).

Rewind This spends a lot of time talking to fans and collectors, but it also looks at how video affected filmmakers and distributors.  The interviews are all very informative, and the informality of them makes this an easily engaging watch as well as an endlessly informative one.

There are only two downsides to the film.  First is that it does sometimes ping pong between topics very quickly, and it can feel like some sections (on adult video, for instance) could either be longer or left out so something else could be longer.  Also the US-centric approach of much of the film means that it barely addresses the moral panics that surrounded video here in the UK in the 80's and 90's, which are such a large part of the story of the format.

Rewind This is a film by, about and for film fanatics, and if you grew up with the format as I did it will likely prompt all sorts of nostalgic feelings and a desire to pull a big box ex-rental tape down off the shelf.
★★★★

A Night of VHS at the Prince Charles Cinema

I grew up in the era of VHS and of independent video stores (Upfront Video was especially important as a kid, I went there a lot and discovered a lot of movies through their shelves.  They also used to give away all their promo posters.  I wish I still had those.)

I haven't an instinctive nostalgia for VHS (I'll take the jump in quality and diminished perishability of disc based media over any rose tinted memories of the 90s), but I do still have about 400 tapes and a couple of VCRs because it's an easy and cheap way to check out movies I might not otherwise want to blind buy and because there are still tapes in my collection that aren't available on DVD or Blu Ray.

This was they key reason that, on Saturday night, I - along with my friend and podcast co-host Mike - went to my favourite cinema, the Prince Charles Cinema in London for an all night screening of six VHS exclusive films, all shown from the original tapes.  Three of the films were chosen by Viva VHS, a collector I've known for a while on Twitter, the other three by The Good Bad Movie Club, which holds monthly screenings at the Prince Charles.

We trooped through the rain to the Prince Charles only to find a massive queue (which turned out to be for the other allnighter, a Studio Ghibli marathon), and tweeted Dale (VivaVHS) to let him know we were hanging around and would like to say hello before the screening started.  We had a good chat with Dale and his wife about the movies that were showing that night, exploitation films and video tapes, before heading in to take our seats.

NOTE:  Film titles in Bold are clickable for a trailer.

First up was Enemy Territory, which, like most of the other films on the programme, I'd never heard of, let alone seen.  It turned out to be a 1987 actioner which drew on John Carpenter (Assault on Precinct 13 came to mind) and anticipated the likes of Die Hard and The Raid, while, to be fair, not being as good as any of those films.

Enemy Territory made a great start for the night.  The setup is simple: a white insurance agent is sent into a dangerous building in the ghetto and has to escape when the gang that controls it decides to kill him for a minor insult.  Gary Frank makes for a pathetically weedy lead, but Ray Paker Jr (yes, the Ghostbusters guy) is fun and much more proactive as the phone company worker and (of course) 'Nam vet who tries to help him escape.  In supporting parts we also see a very young Stacey Dash, eight years pre-Clueless and the ever charismatic Tony Todd, menacing as the leader of ridiculous gang The Vampires.

The action is solid, the tension consistent, and everything is drawn together by a fantastic synth laden score that Carpenter himself would be proud of.  It was a great lead off for the night, and a film I'd love to see polished up for DVD or Blu Ray.

Next up was The Taking of Beverly Hills.  I know this is something of a personal favourite of Dale's, and he promised we were going to really enjoy it.  I wish I could have agreed with him.  This action movie has a nice central idea (ex-cops fake a disaster as a cover for a massive heist) but bemulleted lead Ken Wahl simply doesn't have the presence or the appeal of, say, The Rock and the fact that the grating Matt Frewer is second lead really didn't help.

The action is competent, but never really stands out, especially given that this film post dates (and nods to) Die Hard.  Overall I found it very middling and not even particularly interesting as a cheesefest.

After two action films, Dale's final choice was quite a change of pace.  The film was Naked Vengeance, screened from an American tape because the BBFC approved 18 rated cut was 'trimmed' by a mere 24 minutes.

Naked Vengeance is essentially a digest of scenes ripped off from other rape/revenge films (and a few other things for good measure).  The most notable influence (I say notable influence, I mean blatant beat by beat rip off target) is I Spit On Your Grave.  In this film a housewife (Dallas cast member Denorah Tranelli, who in all fairness isn't bad here) goes to stay in her parents house for the first time in years, in an attempt to get away from the fact that her husband has been murdered and the Police can't catch the criminal because witnesses are unwilling to testify.  When she gets back home almost every man in the town responds to her like a rabid, leg humping dog.  Begin rape/revenge movie.

The degree to which I Spit On Your Gave is ripped off is staggering.  An early gas station scene may just be a rewrite of the original, and a later scene in a lake manages to rip off the lake scene, bathroom scene and boat scene from I Spit in barely 3 minutes, admittedly, this is almost impressive.

Naked Vengeance is unpleasant; the massive gang rape scene (which basically combines elements of Straw Dogs with the I Spit homage) is long and brutal, but the idea that 24 minutes had to be cut is ludicrous.  What did the BBFC cut consist of,  a badly acted film about a woman who goes on holiday?

As a fan of exploitation films, and as someone who thinks the rape/revenge genre is extremely interesting, Naked Vengeance is both good and bad.  As a film, it's bad, really quite bad.  The script is ludicrous, with every man in it a slavering dog who immediately sexually harasses Tranelli (and this is a whole town, not the four people we see in I Spit), and the acting (Tranelli, who does what she can, aside) is pretty awful all round.  On the other hand if you know your exploitation and don't treat it seriously then it's pretty good fun playing rip off bingo (Taxi Driver... BINGO!).  I enjoyed it in that respect, but wouldn't recommend it outside that context.

By this time it was about 3am, and I confess I nodded off for much of the running time of The Good Bad Movie Club's first choice, Cellar Dweller.  This is a terrible shame because the premise of a comic book artist drawing a monster that comes to life was extremely cool, as were the bookending scenes that I did see.  I suspect this might have been my favourite film of the night, and I will be finding and watching it ASAP.

Refreshed (somewhat) by a snooze and doses of sugar and caffeine, I stayed awake for the next film, Double Trouble, and was very pleased I did.

Double Trouble is the flat out stupidest film I've seen in ages.  It stars bodybuilding twins David and Peter Paul, one's a cop, the other's a criminal and they have to work together to bring down the criminal's boss.  It's incredibly formulaic, mind-alteringly idiotic, and incredibly entertaining.  The Pauls, better known as the Barbarian Brothers, can not act.  At all.  The ineptitude, the lack of connection to human emotion or the way people talk, is so profound that it almost seems like a studied technique.  The line readings are so terrible, the comic timing so inept and so consistently a beat (or three) off that they enter into a sort of parallel universe of sublime badness, becoming hilarious once again.

The chief problem/asset of the film is the Barbarian Brothers, who are both ludicrously unbelieveable in their roles.  From the moment that one of them (I forget which plays which part, but it really doesn't matter much) appears in a tight, cropped, Raiders T-Shirt with an extravagant mullet and announces that he's a cop it's clear this film doesn't exist in the real world.  The other ridiculously bulky bodybuilder plays a cat burglar, which is perhaps even less credible, given that the chance of him sneaking anywhere is the single funniest joke in the film.  However, this frees you to see Double Trouble as an alternate world filled with hilariously overblown villains, and forget any notion of sense.

A stupid, stupid movie, Double Trouble was perfect for a night of VHS exclusive cheese, and if you're a connoisseur of crap you must seek it out.

The last film of the 'night' (it was 6:30 am by now) was He's My Girl.  A lighthearted ending to the marathon seemed like a good idea, but this choice - a 1987 farce in which a young musician wins a trip to California  from an MTV style TV show, but can only take a girl with him so, 'hilariously', his manager drags up to go with him - really didn't work for me.

The drag comedy was a tired and laboured genre long before this but, despite an energetic turn from T. K. Carter, He's My Girl brings nothing new to the table.  The jokes are older than time, and not executed especially well, and the music plot is both obvious and terrible, thanks to the combination of a wet performance from David Hallyday and the (flaccid) cock rock they have his character play.  The closing number is called Rock Revival, it  made me want to bury the entire genre in a very deep hole, rather than risk its revival (click above to hear for yourselves).

The only really interesting part of He's My Girl was seeing a young Jennifer Tilly, who plays Hallyday's love interest and whose voice is so high here the film makes a joke about it in the end credits.  Overall, even for what it is, He's My Girl was pretty bloody awful.

One extremely crappy movie aside, the night was great fun.  I found a new cheesy favourite, an underrated actioner I'll be sure to show people, and a cool looking horror movie I need to track down.  I also noted some titles from the various trailer reels that I need to see (Wild Thing is top of the list).  It was great to meet and chat with Mr and Mrs Viva VHS (who sat with us for the screenings).  I really hope that, despite the relatively sparse attendance Dale, The Good Bad Movie Club and The Prince Charles will do this again some time soon.

VHS Memories: Natural Born Killers

Dir: Oliver Stone

The Memories 

Like every movie lover who was in his teens in the mid 1990's, I wanted to see ALL OF Quentin Tarantino's films. One small problem... I'm British, and Jamie Bulger had recently been murdered, precipitating a second moral panic about violent films being available on video. This led to BBFC bowing to pressure and delaying certification decisions on True Romance and Reservoir Dogs (among others) for well over a year and to Warner Brothers canceling the video release of Natural Born Killers - though it is still falsely reported as having been a banned title the uncut 18 certificate was always in place and it was purely a decision of Warner to leave the film unreleased in the UK market until 2001.

Obviously, whatever the reasons, when you tell a film fan he can't see something, that immediately means he wants to see it. So, I managed to obtain a second generation VHS, copied, I believe, from an American release. There was one small issue... It had been recorded on long play, and I, at this time - probably somewhere around '96 or '97 - didn't own a long play VCR. I watched it anyway.

My abiding memory of my first viewing of NBK is trying desperately to get the tracking to come in watchably, and trying to discern some of the dialogue through the double speed, suddenly helium voiced, performances. It's a strangely appropriate way, I think, to have first experienced it, firstly because, even at normal speed, NBK is a weird movie and also because that amount of effort feels appropriate for what was, for me at the time, one of the great forbidden holy grails of home viewing. So, how does it hold up? Let's find out...

The Movie 

It is easy to see why, in 1994, Natural Born Killers caused a storm of controversy, and why some people still hate the film, because it's still shocking, still feels dangerous, seventeen years on. It is satire, but it is also very easy to see where the people who decried this film as no more than an orgy of violence that makes heroes of two serial killers were coming from, because Oliver Stone manipulates every shot of the film in order to manipulate us into seeing these psychopaths the way that the mainstream media (personified by Robert Downey, Jr as TV tabloid journalist Wayne Gale) are portraying them. The film, however, does much that subverts and comments on that surface reading.

Early in Quentin Tarantino's career we got to see how his ideas looked filtered through a selection of other filmmakers, Jackie Brown notwithstanding, these films; True Romance, From Dusk Till Dawn and NBK are my favourites of his now 20 year career. NBK, despite its basic story having a very Tarantinoesque feel, is an Oliver Stone film through and through. Stone can be an infuriating filmmaker, he often slaps his audience in the face with his films messages, and his tendency to make digressions and indulge in his own obsessions can become wearing - and NBK is not immune on that score - but when Stone is visibly engaged in a project there are few filmmakers more interesting or more exciting. Though it seems to be anomaly in his filmography, NBK is actually the perfect film for Oliver Stone to have made, he runs wild here, his every crazy idea rampaging through the film like a bull in a china shop, as if he's trying to see just how much he can fuck with the medium. It doesn't always work, but it's never, ever, boring.

The film starts as it means to go on, with a scene that is brutally violent, inventively shot and cut, seductively stylish and unexpectedly funny. This diner set prologue, in which the films protagonists; serial killer couple Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) Knox gleefully murder a selection of truckers and a waitress over breakfast is the film's most Tarantinoesque, but shot through with the blitzkrieg style filmmaking that Stone is about to immerse us in for the next two hours. The use - at seemingly random intervals - of colour and black and white, 35 and 16mm stock, and the incredible pace of the cutting is difficult to adjust to to begin with, but it is impossible not to become caught up in the violent action that erupts when Mallory attacks the trucker who has been flirting with her, and L7's Shitlist begins blaring away on the soundtrack. Like Michael Haneke did with Funny Games a few years later, Stone asks us to revel in this violence, and later he'll (more subtly than Haneke) ask why we do.

Beyond the sheer verve of the filmmaking, the reason that NBK really grabs you is in the performances. They are all of a type; overblown, but the film is so over the top, so relentless, that if the acting was smaller or more subtle it would get swamped. Harrelson and Lewis are particularly good, he as a detached, sometimes thoughtful, psychopath, her as a more gleeful and impulsive one. Their Mickey and Mallory may be despicable murderers, but they are incredibly charismatic; Lewis in particular is so unpredictable, such a coiled spring of dangerous energy, that she is fascinating to watch here (it's a crying shame that she doesn't work much, and certainly not in roles this good, anymore). Also helpful in drawing us in is that, however overblown the film, and despite the fact that it is founded in seconds through a bizarre sitcom parody that provides Mallory's backstory, Mickey and Mallory's relationship does convince. Harrelson and Lewis reportedly didn't get along, but their chemistry works brilliantly, powering the film's epic prison escape sequence, and allowing us, perhaps, the tiniest morsel of identification.

Around those central performances are a set of grotesques, caricatures of a tabloid journalist (Downey's aforementioned Wayne Gale, who he plays with an exaggerated Australian accent, for no readily apparent reason), a tough as nails prison warden (Tommy Lee Jones, having a ball in his third film for Stone) and a seriously disturbed cop who is hunting Mickey and Mallory, but is a rapist and killer himself (Tom Sizemore as Jack Scagnetti, about whom it would have been fascinating to see a whole - more serious - film). You have to be on board with the tone by the time these even more outlandish characters become a large presence in the film about an hour in, or they are just going to annoy you, but in the context of the film they're all brilliantly engaging, and often hilariously funny.

Natural Born Killers has some incredibly striking sequences. From the diner to the sitcom sequence which ends in the murder of Mallory's parents (played by Rodney Dangerfield and Ferris Bueller's Edie McClurg), to the sickly green tinted Drug Zone confrontation which leads to Mickey and Mallory's capture, right through to the monumental, roughly 30 minute, prison riot / breakout which forms the film's third act and, in keeping with the lunatic tone, was filmed in a real maximum security prison, with real lifers as extras. That riot is an incredibly visceral sequence, there's a palpable feeling of chaos and danger in it both in the situation and sometimes in the performances themselves.

The satire of the film, which so many people seemed to miss at the time, lies in its extreme content, and in the way it sees Mickey and Mallory as both products of and commodities to be exploited by pop culture. It implicitly asks (without shouting at us for watching the movie the way Haneke did) whether this is healthy. It's an interesting question too, because we can see echoes of things like the vox pops of Mickey and Mallory fans in day to day life now - consider the Facebook group that declared Raoul Moat a 'legend' or the way that one British newspaper ran a story from a satirical site suggesting that there was to be a Grand Theft Auto game based on the crimes of mass murderer Derrick Bird as fact. It can't obviously, have been the intention, but NBK has only become more relevant as time has gone on.

It's not a perfect film. It's really less a story than a series of connected scenes and, as I said before, Stone's obsessions crop up, giving us the movie's one major misstep; a desert set sequence in which Mickey and Mallory encounter a wise old Indian and are attacked by snakes. Yes, it leads into the great Drug Zone sequence, but the ten minutes we spend in the desert seem to have been teleported in from some other movie; one that's not as good as Natural Born Killers.

For the most part though, this is a relentlessly engaging, intriguing and entertaining film. Few movies have such a freewheeling feeling about them, and few filmmakers could combine that with social commentary as effectively as Oliver Stone does here. I was surprised how well it still played long after my last viewing, but this remains truly exciting cinema.

VHS Memories: Pump Up the Volume

Maybe it's the fact that I'm coming up to my 30th birthday, maybe it's just that there seems to be a 90's nostalgia coming around, but I've been thinking back, recently, on my teenage years, and on my formative years as a movie fan. 1989 was the year I discovered cinema, but it was in the 90's that I became an obsessive, helped along by the tedium of a prolonged hospitalisation in 1992, when I had two liver transplants.

This being the 90's, and me being young and with little disposable income, the way I ended up seeing movies for the first time was often on VHS (most of them rented from an independent store called Upfront Video). So, in this new series I'll be looking back on, and then re-reviewing, some of the titles that made an impression on me through my VCR in those formative years. I'd welcome any of your VHS memories in the comments, whether they're about the film up for review or not, or you could drop me a line at sam@24fps.org.uk.

First up...

Pump Up The Volume

Dir: Allan Moyle

The Memories 

I was an impressionable 11 years old in 1992 when I first saw this movie (I think it was my first 15 certificate). I was a fan of Christian Slater's on the back of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and so I wanted to see this when it came out, despite its forbidden status. It was rented for me when I was in hospital after my transplants, at a time when I was decimating the local video shop at a rate of about 3 titles a day because I was in isolation and had nothing else to do besides talk to doctors and have blood tests.

I remember being rather embarrassed by the film's frequent droppings of the F Bomb but thinking that it (largely thanks to Slater's character; rebellious pirate radio DJ 'Hard Harry' / wallflower high school student Mark) was incredibly cool. There were a lot of sexual references that I didn't get, but one thing... well, two things, did make an impression. BOOBS! I do believe that Samantha Mathis' nude scene marked the first time I had ever seen breasts. I remain a fan. I also remember liking Mathis' performance, and the film's eclectic soundtrack. A few years later I took it to show to my friend Guy, and it became a big favourite of ours . I haven't seen Pump Up the Volume for about five years. How will it hold up? Let's find out...

The Movie 

I imagine that the reason I was allowed to finish watching Pump Up the Volume the first time I saw it was that a lot of it was going over my eleven year old head. Harry's references in his radio monologues to cock rings, the 'eat me beat me' lady, and homosexuality (in a call with a listener) and his simulated masturbation on air, these were all things that I just didn't understand at the time.

One of the great, and sometimes infuriating, things about cinema is that your relationship with every film you see is always in flux. Movies are never the same twice, they change as you do, and I have to say that's especially true of Pump Up the Volume and, sadly, not in a good way. When I was fifteen Hard Harry was cool, because he was rebelling against his clearly evil school and its principal (who is basically depicted as Satan) and because he was on the radio, and that seemed like a cool thing to do (still does, hence The Screening Room). Fifteen years on though, Allan Moyle's screenplay often feels facile; dealing in cheap declamatory statements and shallow characterisations, especially of the film's authority figures. I don't believe in much of what goes on at the film's Hubert Humphrey High (especially the laughable twist which has them setting up a 24 hour helpline in response to Harry's show, how the hell is that funded or staffed?) and its staff are a collection of high school movie clichés from the milquetoast guidance counselor to the evil principal to the cool young English teacher.

The students scarcely fare better. Most of the film's teenagers (including Seth Green, at the start of his roughly fifteen year career playing a high schooler) get very short shrift; a couple of scenes each, and little personality. Outside of Mark (Harry) and Samantha Mathis – amateurish in her first film - as his love interest Nora the only character with a real arc is Paige; the school's star pupil who, listening to Harry, decides to blow up all her nice things in the microwave. It's a transformation we don't believe, because we don't see it from her point of view, there's no sense of the journey between Daddy's princess and BOOM! (Cheryl Pollak's performance does little to help, to be fair).

However, there are still things I like about this film, things that do work. Chief among them is Christian Slater's performance. Slater has always been a better actor than he's credited as, much more than the mini Jack Nicholson he's often dismissed as, and this is actually one of his best roles. During his extended monologues as Harry (though less so during the film opening horseplay which has him pretending to wank. Twice.) you can see why his audience listens to him, he's a voice much like theirs; a bit lost, a bit confused, often very immature, but eloquent in how he sums up what he sees around him, and passionate about denouncing it (even if he doesn't really know what else to do). Slater is forceful and charismatic in these scenes, and all the more impressive given that he's really got nothing to act against for most of the time, and it is in the film's two main radio shows (after the suicide of a listener and after a school meeting discussing Harry and his influence respectively) that Moyle's dialogue is at its best and feels the least like it is smacking you around the face with its message. As with Avatar's 'trees good, war bad' message it's not so much that I'm not on board with Moyle's 'free speech is awesome' moral as it is that he sometimes spoonfeeds us that message with such force that we choke on it.

The other great thing here is the film's soundtrack. From Pixies' awesome UK Surf mix of Wave of Mutilation to the repeated use of Everybody Knows (which introduced both me and Guy to Leonard Cohen) and from an ultra rare Beastie Boys track to Cowboy Junkies, the film is packed with an original and eclectic mix of music which feels much less dated than the rest of the fashions on display here (okay, Ice T's Girls LGBNAF notwithstanding). Moyle uses the music well, never letting it speak for the film or instruct us how to feel, rather its part of the fabric of the society his teenage characters create for themselves; perhaps the film's most realistic touch.

Overall, Pump Up the Volume is probably a film best watched when you're fifteen and angry with your school, your dad and the girl who just refused to go out with you, but it still has more ideas than you're likely to find in any three recent American teen movies, even if it sometimes articulates them with a 2x4. It's deeply flawed, and would work better if it were more clearly satirical, but it remains interesting if only for Slater's charismatic performance.