The Article Gladwell Should’ve Written; Non-Football Horrors
Filed Under Cinema, Dale Cooper, Sports
You know a Serious Sports Issue is gaining momentum when ESPN acknowledges it. Like steroids before it, the relationship between football and debilitating brain injury is going to be examined – in detail, and maybe soon.
Malcolm Gladwell’s take on this material was not to my liking, so I’m glad that someone (ESPN Page 2’s Tim Keown) is taking a more direct tack. It may not be the kind of writing that wins awards and prompts lots of furious blogging, but Keown deals simply and straight-forwardly with the obvious:
1. The long-term impact of playing football – at any level – is a more serious problem than we thought, and warrants in-depth examination.
2. We may be approaching a point that football as we know it becomes not viable or sustainable. Maybe the future of football lies in some altered form (like without most special teams play, especially kickoff and punt returns, where many of the worst hits occur); maybe a sport recognizable as football has no future.
3. The NFL has a huge interest in controlling the damage done by this emerging story, and may be poised to become the next Phillip Morris or major league baseball. They are commissioning a big study (results due years from now), the outcome of which we should probably take with a grain or two of salt.
If you have any interest in this subject, read Keown’s article, and keep an eye out for more journalism on the topic in the coming months and years. Football may have to evolve to survive. Or it may not survive. The Colts fan and the alarmist humanist in me are at war.
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This being Halloween month, and in fact Halloween week (October goes so quickly), I thought I’d append a lighter bit of content here at the end. These are a handful of horror movies I recommend that are not exactly classics, but still worth your time. So if you’ve exhausted the likes of “Halloween” and “Night of the Living Dead,” maybe you’d enjoy one of these.
~ Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. This movie was new to me when I popped in the Netflix disc a few nights ago – I’d heard the title for years but never had much interest for whatever reason. It turned out to be an atmospheric, creepy, sort of surreal movie about a woman who may be going out of her mind (shades of “The Haunting” and “The Innocents”) or may be stalked by a female vampire and her town full of loony slaves (maybe “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” by way of every Hammer Horror vampire pic). Slow, not gory, but good.
~ The Deadly Spawn. I am of two minds about this no-budget creature feature. On the one hand, the acting is abysmal, the non-monster scenes feel painfully long and pointless even though the movie is under 90 minutes long, and the visual style is non-existent. On the other hand, the alien monsters (that emerged from a meteor in the opening scene, naturally – see also “Slither” and “The Blob”) are pretty cool, like a much more malevolent take on Audrey II from “Little Shop of Horrors”; the gore effects are surprisingly over the top; and the ending is both bleak and ridiculous. If MS3TK ever did this movie it might have been their most enjoyable episode ever.
~ Teeth. A sort-of satire that got a lot of press on initial release because of its misogynist-or-maybe-uber-feminist premise: a girl who has a literal vagina dentata, and manages to remove the fingers and penises (penii?) of some overly aggressive suitors. I wasn’t totally smitten with it despite a lot of good ideas, but my girlfriend dug it. Worth checking out for anyone who liked “Ginger Snaps” or “May,” both of which I found similar in tone and substance.
~ Burnt Offerings. I am a haunted house movie freak; unfortunately most of them suck hard. Apart from the aforementioned “Haunting” and “Innocents,” and a few other gems (“The Changeling,” “The Others,” and of course “Poltergeist”) this is a sub-genre that suffers more than is reasonable from non-sensical plots and indifferent writing. “Burnt Offerings” is a good second-tier movie – maybe a notch below “The Changeling,” with Oliver Reed (he of “The Brood” fame) standing in for George C. Scott. So basically, the same movie. And might I add, the much-hyped “Paranormal Activity” is a pretty decent little haunting movie as well; I saw it twice and it’s a rung or two above “Blair Witch” for me.
The above are just the ones I’ve watched this month, but you may also like:
~ Carnival of Souls. Creepy and otherworldy B&W movie shot on a shoestring budget with amateur actors. And better than I just made it sound. This is another “is she cracking up or is something supernatural really happening” movie.
~ Slither. I just mentioned it above, but where’s the justice when this movie flops, while the entire “Saw” series and both “Hostel” movies rake in the dough? I could give a crap about torture scenes – give me a horrible half-man, half-latex-tentacles monstrosity, and I am in. “Slither” followed in the footsteps of venerable gore-and-prosthetics classics like “Re-animator,” “From Beyond,” and “Evil Dead II,” AND it has Nathan Fillion in it, dammit.
~ Tombs of the Blind Dead. The Knights Templar are blood-sucking zombies roaming the countryside on their zombie horses in slow motion looking for living prey. In other words it’s a typically insane Euro horror “classic.” I quite enjoyed this although honestly, I think out of all those Spanish and Italian horror movies of that vintage, only “Suspiria” is an undeniable masterpiece.
