Two Montages That Blow Me Away.

I'll try to begin to describe them.

One, from An American Werewolf in London:

The Muppet Show is on, the family is gathered around the television and the kitchen table. The doorbell rings. The father answers the door. Outside there is slight fog, and men with mutated/alien faces hold machine guns. They fire the guns at the father. He flies backward. People begin screaming from inside. A monstrous alien/mutant holds a knife to the throat of the screaming protagonist. The e.t.s/agents enter the house to the sound of screaming children. The mother, in the kitchen, is killed in front of the children (she flies backward), amid the screams and gunfire and shattering of personal affects. The television continues to broadcast The Muppet Show. A monster/solider kicks the television screen, shattering it. There is a fire in the fire place, and by the fireplace are torches. The invaders pick up the torches and light fire to the house, the helpless protagonist forced by knife-point to watch this play out. More of the house goes up in flames. The protagonist's throat is cut open; blood gushes from the wound.

Two, from Dead or Alive:

Two men kneel on driftwood, counting up to four. They reach four and a rock riff starts. The rock song will play through the entire montage. The title Dead or Alive comes on the screen and a woman, thrown off a building, screams. She falls to the ground and a plastic bag full of cocaine bursts open. The blood splatters onto the coke. A man picks up the cocaine bag and walks away with it. He passes someone and turns to look at the person. A man has a crazy french-kissing make-out session with a woman. He licks her face; it's kind of bizarre. The man with the cocaine bag puts on goggle-like glasses. A woman is on stage in a strip-club, dancing seductively. The man/woman kiss more and the woman dances more. There's scenes of Tokyo life: a traffic jam and a cop hitting someone. The stripper dances as a man enters the club. She licks her lips and unzips her leather top. A man cruises down the street on a motorcycle. The kissing man dances to music, the goggle/cocaine bag man walks. People clap in a restaurant as a man of esteem enters a restaurant. A gunman takes a hidden machine gun from beneath some food in a grocery store. A business man exits a luxury vehicle in a warehouse. The gunman throws a shotgun to another gunman. A stripper plays with her leather-covered-pussy as a business man watches, prodding the vagina with a cane. A huge line of coke is laid out on like a skateboard ramp, a credit card cutting the drug and straightening the line. The man in the restaurant eats noodles. The kissing man is now the dancing-alone-in-a-room-man. The stripper takes off her leather top. The noodle man eats, the stripper dances, and the business man prepares to take his line of coke. He snorts the coke while the noodle man eats. When the line of coke is finished he pushes over a bookcase and kneels, raising his hands above him. The stripper dances the dancing man dances. The motorcycle man drives on. A man is in a separate noodle restaurant; noodles are being made; the man is rubbing his forehead. The stripper dances. A business man sucks on a nipple and glares into the camera. The coked out business man is dragged away. A man (who passed the now-goggled-man on the street earlier) anally fucks another man in a dirty bathroom. Sighs and moans. The noodle man eats. The coked out business man is coked out in the back of the luxury vehicle. The vehicle pulls away. The gay sex continues in the bathroom (rape?). The noodle man eats. The motorcycle man pulls up to a curb. The goggle-wearing-man enters the bathroom in sticks a knife into the throat of the man-fucker. The being-fucked winces, the man-fucker faces the camera. Blood squirts out over the bathroom walls and the being-fucked. The noodle man eats. The being-fucked opens his mouth so the blood of the man-fucker sprays in his mouth. The dancing man dances. The stripper dances. The gunmen enter the restaurant of noodle-eater 1. There is a moment of tension. The gunmen pull out their guns and throw a grenade. A table is overturned; the guns fire. Glass shatters and smoke drifts away from guns. Things explode and are destroyed and people fall to the floor. The noodle-eater is shot and noodles fly out of his stomach onto the screen.

Slasher.

Just leave him alone in the hotel room, Michael Bennett, the slasher, in the grip of all his nerves and fears, and let him work out before the camera his marital hardships, a self-evaluation of professional competence, and an implicit litany of peripheral anxieties (How much is the bottle affecting him? How much do his friends understand and appreciate him?), and you have a movie I'd watch 85 minutes of.

What exactly goes on at the car dealership - the price gorging, the business politics, the orchestration of the slasher event - is interesting as a backdrop, but the substance of Slasher is in the tiny moments. I get really involved in a movie when I think I'm seeing something absolutely genuine and unmotivated and sort of unexplainable. I feel like a vital, intimate aspect of humanity is being communicated through the screen directly to me and I open up to the screen, allow it access to me as it gives of itself. Documentaries are almost always successful at delivering this feeling. Simply the lack of stages sets scripts and actors will accomplish the feeling. What I want though is for the film's role to take shape as the subject develops. You can tell when a documentary is trying to shape its footage and material based on the filmmaker's agenda, and you can tell when the subject doesn't fit into that conceptualized idea. It's horribly boring and painful to watch.

Landis's documentary is about the slasher, Michael Bennett, more than it is about the slashing event. You actually see very little of the pitching and dealing, and what you do see only fortifies the development of Bennett's personality the auxiliary scenes are building. There is also a strong sense of Memphis, and the people of Memphis. As strong as what you would get from a DGG film, and even achieved by similar means: the small activities and decisions of the people are framed just right as to suggest the larger meaning and social structure. It's kind of gloomy, it's kind of destitute, but it's really soulful, organic, and endearing. It's funny too, and a documentary that is funny and sincere can make the humor warm and cheerful.

This was a movie I had heard of back in Ohio. The manager of the theater I was working at had heard of the movie, was a fan of Landis, and had recommended the movie to me. Five years later I finally rented the movie. The next day Stephanie and I went to the theater to see Drag Me to Hell, and before that movie began a trailer played for Neal Brennan's The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard. I would almost think Hollywood wasn't small enough for these two movies to coexist without direct influence (The Goods is apparently not based on Slasher, or at least no credit is given, even though a few similarities even in the trailer are startling, including the dj character, although maybe this is common in slashing events I don't really know), if not for time apparently being small enough so that this irony of sequence could occur.