Into the Velvet Darkness: Vincent Price & The Masque of the Red Death.

During the mid-1960s aspiring director Roger Corman was wrangled by producers into making a series of films loosely based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, most starring Vincent Price. Unforeseen by anyone, it would be this unlikely congruence of resourceful auteur, gothic progenitor, and incomparable leading man which resulted in the dark miracle that is "The Masque of the Red Death".



Set in early renaissance Europe, a plague known as The Red Death makes everyone it touches bleed from every pore of their body -- an excruciating end to the lives of millions. Yet safely within the sealed keep of tyrannical nobleman Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) an endless party of sinful delight and decadence goes on. Three peasants are also trapped with them whom Prospero plans to use as both fodder for his court's entertainment and object lessons to spread his satanic gospel.



As inhuman as Price's Prospero seems, he's also potently charismatic, and slowly convinces and compromises peasant girl Francesca (Jane Asher), whose life and faith (and the lives of her fiancee and father in the dungeon below) hangs in the balance, towards her first tentative steps to a darker illumination. At the same time his courtship of the naive Francesca destabilizes his relationship with fetching princess and disciple Juliana (Hazel Court), making for poisonously royal intrigue.

[It almost looks like they've been caught doing something ... .]

While much of this plot is not in the original 30-page short story, Corman integrates Poe's "Hop-Toad" too, and adds fitting elements to flesh out a top-notch hour and a half. And a viewer would never know Corman worked on a less than shoestring budget, with only five weeks to deliver it. Early Universal monster films aside, there are few other horror offerings more classic than this parade of costumed revelers, garishly gorgeous path color splash, and soul-stirring dialogue.



So put on your best Venetian mask and listen as Prince Prospero mellifluously intones, "The way is not easy, I know, but I will take you by the hand and lead you through the cruel light into the velvet darkness." Thank you for the soirée, sweet prince.

[Francesca listens to Prospero!]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

Your Future Looks Like a Danish Luxury Hotel: Aeon Flux's Sexy Dystopia.

The future will look like a very large Danish luxury hotel. At least if "Aeon Flux" has anything to say about it.



Set 400 years from now, a disease has decimated the world's population to a mere five million, all enclosed in the walled city-state of Bregna run by an iron-handed committee, opposed by righteous alt-looking Monican rebels who feel not all is right with the way things are. Disappearances and strange dreams for starters.



The attraction of the 1995 cartoon, aside from the obvious machine pistol toting lanky domina in catsuits with ram's horn tendrils, is the dichotomy of order versus change set within a mysterious Moebius-esque world. Totalitarian Chairman Trevor Goodchild and anarchist-assassin Aeon Flux are more than just characters -- they're concepts that give the other context. They need each other. And in that need there's a palpable lust that electrifies the story of their working at crosspurposes. They recognize they require each other to mean something, and that internal conflict of individual desire against a greater duty (whether it's to the state or the revolution) always made the outcome uncertain. Translating all these qualities to live-action movie, however, only works in some ways and not others, but the basic spirit is captured.



The severe design of the sets, some shot in Berlin with its Bauhaus concreteness, is gorgeous. By contrast, bad props, such as very plastic explosive charges, stick out like sore thumbs, along with fake computer generated elements. Costumes are all wonderful. Charlize Theron's black numbers are all winning. It's a shame that her performance doesn't hold up under equal scrutiny. Oh, it's mostly good like Marton Csokas' Goodchild, or Jonny Lee Miller ("Plunkett & Macleane"), but for all the principals there's moments where the emotional integrity just isn't being delivered, and those moments fail to skate by on looks alone.

Direction's from an MTV school -- understandable since it's an MTV property. But like many action films using tight shots and quick cuts, we lose a sense of space and fight choreography, and the far too trebley foleys do not help matters. Only when director Karyn Kusama selects long shots in some sequences, which is about half the time, a graceful ballet of violence is revealed.



And the movie explains much about the enigmatic cartoon -- why Aeon actually wears such a high-maintenance hairstyle, the rebels' rational for trying to destroy their perfect society, some practical uses behind Aeon's BSDM couture, and why the law of eternal return occurs. This last one was the most confusing for fans, but as the cartoon progressed it became accepted. The film underestimates general audiences by not using that device. If it had, it could have made one of its big revelations with so much more impact. (Yes, I'm being oblique here, but I'm trying very hard not to spoil things for you.)



Cinema can add "Aeon Flux"'s Bregna to its depiction of far future dystopias, like those of "Metropolis", "Dark City", "Logan's Run", and in extremis "1984" & "THX-1138". It's not the best of these predecessors, but it places as the sexiest.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.