It's beginning to look a lot like halloween... part 10: True Blood

My selection of movies over here is rather limited. Basically, with no video rental place anywhere near me, I'm confined to what I can rent from the school library, whatever is playing at the little cinema (very reminscent of the good old Eaton Centre theatre) nearby, or what I can find online. Well, you can imagine how great the selection at my school library is, and I've already seen the movies that are playing at the theatre here. This has made the task of finding decent horror movies to watch this month and include in the countdown somewhat more difficult.

But thankfully, Alan Ball has temporarily solved this dilemna for me by creating True Blood. After not being able to find anything good at the library yesterday I recalled hearing about this show premiering not long before I left, but never recalled hearing anything about whether it was decent or not. Although I've only watched two episodes of the new project from the creator of Six Feet Under, I'm well addicted already.

Set in Louisiana, True Blood follows waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), who can (for yet unexplained reasons) read peoples' minds, and how her life changes one night after she meets a vampire, her first since they 'came out of the coffin' two years ago. Now that a Japanese company has perfected synthetic blood, vampires claim that they have no need to kill anymore and just want to be like the rest of us. However, as one character points out in the first episode - would you give up all your favorite foods and drink just SlimFast for the rest of your life?

This show, similarly to Six Feet Under, is not a joke show, though their premises might make them seem like they could go that way. The show is sexy and violent, sometimes more disturbingly it is both at the same time, though Ball would not be the first person to cash in on this portrayal of the vampire world. Despite the fact that this show is much more fantastical than Six Feet Under, Ball seems to have counteracted this element of unrealism by cutting back a great deal on even the dark, twinge of humor that his former HBO hit had, although there are still some traces of it.

So far I like this one, but I may have to update after a few more episodes.

It's beginning to look a lot like Hallowe'en...part 9: City of the Dead (1960) aka Horror Hotel; or, Who Let the Fogs Out?

I'm talkin' 'bout John Llewelyn Moxey's foray into the witchtastic realm of devil worship and the occult. Without a doubt the foggiest film I have ever seen.

See, when the end of October nears and Samhain grows closer with the hour, for some reason I feel drawn toward books/art/music/film that deals with ghosts, monsters, and most of all...witches. Re: the latter - City of the Dead delivers in spades.

We begin with a flashback to the 17th century where one Elizabeth Selwyn is being tried (read: tied) for witchcraft by the townsfolk of a small Massachusetts burg (Whitewood). After her burning at the stake, we jarringly jump cut forward to modern times (well, modern for when the film was made, 1960) with Chris Lee's Prof. Driscoll lecturing a bunch of college kids in what looks to be the bird course to end all bird courses, Historical Witchcraft 101. While most of the jocks in the class snicker at Driscoll's intensity on the subject, one particularly keen student, Nan Barlow, takes things a bit more seriously, and, against the will of her brother, Prof. Richard Barlow, and her beau Bill Maitland (Tom Naylor doing his best Jimmy Dean impersonation), decides to visit Whitewood for a bit more of a hands on approach to researching her paper on witchcraft.

So she goes, checks into the Raven Inn, whose proprietress, Mrs. Newless, looks uncannily like Elizabeth Selwyn. Things begin to seem a bit off, and the further Nan gets into her studies, the more she begins to suspect she may be rooming among the very witches she came to research. Anyway, Feb. 1st rolls around, Candlemas eve, and Nan, the pretty young virgin, discovers a bird with a skewer through it (a starling, I noticed) in her dresser drawer - a sign that she's pretty much a goner. Soon afterward, she is spirited away post haste by the witches and sacrificed to some pagan god - no, it's probably Satan himself; these witches don't play. One of the witches in attendance at the sacrificial altar is none other than Prof. Driscoll! So he was a witch all along! I'm thinking that with post-secondary education enrollment rates dropping, more and more professors may be turning to black magic to secure tenure. Ba-dum-bing! (I'm sorry, that was horrible...)
Two weeks later, her brother and her beau begin to get suspicious that Nan hasn't returned, so they venture to Whitewood to find out what happened. Long and short of it is this: they discover that their arrival marks the second night of the year when the witches must make a sacrifice (the first was Candlemas eve) - and the witches have their eye on the only other good person in town, the preacher's granddaughter, Patricia, who has taken a bit of a shine to the recently arrived Prof. Barlow. Well, a bird with a skewer through it (I noticed it was a cedar waxwing - what does it all mean!?!) and a sprig of woodbine on the door means that Pat has been targeted to be the next sacrificial lamb. Many thrilling close calls ensue, but it ends with Pat and Barlow escaping, Bill dying (when Mrs. Newless whips a friggin' dagger across the graveyard and it lodges in his back - wicked scene - but not before he can carry a cross that literally shoots tongues of flame at the witches - it's dope), and Mrs. Newless being outed, finally, (as if it wasn't painfully obvious for the entire film), as Elizabeth Selwyn. Actually, if the heroes had simply phonetically reversed "Selwyn", they would have realized that "Newless" isn't far off....dummies.
I absolutely love this film, the amount of fog pumped in is immense. It really has a creepy, mysterious vibe, but retains a sense of fun throughout. Beautiful black and white photography, and a loopy, oboe-heavy jazzy score complete the picture. This is director Moxey's high watermark - he mostly cranked out workmanlike fare in television for the rest of his career (everything from Coronation Street to Magnum P.I., and everything in between) - though a close second would have to be the Darren McGavin vehicle The Night Stalker, the first of two TV-movies that were followed by the incredible series Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

And although Lee is highly touted on the DVD box and in the credits, he really only plays a small (admittedly important) part in the film. Some false advertising of the "star" that reminded me of the top-billing of Brooke Shields in Alice, Sweet Alice (aka Communion), although she lasts all of five minutes before being killed. A metaphor for her career?

City of the Dead (aka Horror Hotel in North America) is quite easy to find for a couple of bucks as a public domain print on countless "Horror Classics" collections - I have one of these and the print actually isn't bad - but I'm such a fan of the film that I recently upgraded to the more expensive but beautifully presented and extras laden VCI edition. I hear the Roan Archival Group edition is also very worthy. Check it out if you get a chance. Highly recommended for a spooky good time.

It's beginning to look a lot like Hallowe'en...part 8: Halloween, Pumpkinhead, Return of the Living Dead, Demons...

...and A Nightmare on Elm Street (sort of).

So, last Saturday, I over-ambitiously hosted a "Dusk 'til Dawn" (supposed to be 7 pm-7 am) horror film fest, which was supposed to feature about 10-12 guests and somewhere around 10 films, over the course of the 12 hours, give or take...

Somewhere along the line, though, things went wrong.

Two (and a half) guests throughout the night (Jen G, Kris, and my sis Katie, who counts as the half because she's a sibling), mixed with overzealous drinking and incredibly salty snacks ended up with me in bed by 2 am, with a few stragglers around until about (I'm told) 3. Oh well...

The films I did manage to see were John Carpenter's Halloween (a perennial fave), Pumpkinhead (Stan Winston's ode to the creature feature of yore), Return of the Living Dead (zombie-gore-punk classic), and Demons (an Italian take on the living dead genre, and one I watch EVERY October). Things began to get real shaky around the beginning of Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (the terrifying original, not to be confused with the self-parodying sequels), soon after the onset of which I retired for the evening. Kudos to the diehards (Kris, Katie, Robyn) who saw the film out to its conclusion.

A few lessons learned for next year's installment: pace yourself, get lots of sleep the night before, and invite people more than a few days beforehand (and people that actually might show up).

Regardless of the hiccups, I'm looking forward to 2009s edition...

It's beginning to look a lot like Hallowe'en...part 7: The Old Dark House (1932)

SEE the original dysfunctional family! WITNESS the deranged brute and half-wit butler Morgan, crazed with lust and violence and filled with smouldering menace! FAINT with terror at the beautiful damsels in distress! HEAR the creaking vocal cords of the man-child Sir Roderick, confined to his bed and wrinkled beyond recognition, uttering cryptic, terrifying warnings! LEAP with ICY FEAR at Saul, the most dangerous son, waiting in his room, twice-locked from the OUTSIDE, plotting, plotting....!

Yes folks, The Old Dark House is one of my favourite films (I especially love to watch it near Hallowe'en), and presenting it as some kind of late October carnival sideshow attraction is not altogether inappropriate. Weirdness abounds, there's madness, mystery, murder, and romance. When they came up with the old adage "they don't make 'em like they used to", they could very well have been referring to The Old Dark House, which has many surprisingly risque (and since much-copied) components for the era in which it was made.
We begin with three travellers (Raymond Massey's Philip Waverton, Melvyn Douglas' Roger Penderel, and Gloria Stuart's Margaret Waverton) on a dark and tres stormy night (natch) who eventually become completely stranded by the storm, conveniently, at the steps of a decrepit mansion. They expect to be welcomed into the home and perhaps be granted a night's shelter there, but we know, as soon as the door opens a crack and Karloff's heavily made-up, slashed and sneering brutish visage peers out menacingly, that the travelling trio is in for the night of their lives. Things get increasingly weirder as each Femm family member is introduced - from Ernest Thesiger's wonderfully eccentric and nervous Horace Femm, Eva Moore's selectively deaf, pickled onion-loving, bible-thumping Rebecca Femm, to Elspeth Dudgeon's horribly eerie androgynous invalid patriarch Sir Roderick Femm, and finally, to Brember Wills' Saul; clever, insane, and needing to kill.

There are some virtuoso camera tricks used as well - particularly in the scene with Moore and Stuart in the bedchamber with the distorted features in the mirror, coming across as a twisted version of Alice in Acidland played though the most warped of funhouse mirrors. Not to mention many motifs carried over from Whale's previous film, that one about the mad scientist and the monster.

I can't even really put into words how much I love this delightfully insane film. The template for SO many films to follow, and certainly not those limited to the horror genre.

The one, the only, The Old Dark House, is James Whale's masterpiece. Frankenstein gets all the glory, but what we have here is a bona-fide CLASSIC, and a film that I can safely say makes my top 20 films of all time. There are a few clips from the film on YouTube, but I chose not to include any here, as the film is really better served if viewed in its entirety.

Go. Watch. Then have some exceptional gin, and don't forget - have a potato.

Today's the day...

Regardless of your political stance, get out and vote today. There's still time...

It's beginning to look a lot like Hallowe'en...part 6: Gumby on the Moon

Horror ....

Everyone is afraid of something; rats, spiders, the complete graphic evisceration of a nubile young virgin, confined spaces, vampires, 3 bean salad, Germans, ...the list goes on. Fear, and our emotional response to it, seems almost universal in it's appeal. Something in us likes to be scared, likes the rush that comes from being afraid, nervous and uncertain. For whatever reason, I avoid horror in cinema, but judging from the blog lately, I'm obviously in the minority around here.

I thought I'd try and trace the genesis of this current disinterest in the macabre by thinking back over the media I've watched since childhood to attempt to find the moment when I witnessed something so terrifying, so deeply disturbing, so visceral that I would turn away from horror forever. It stands to reason that something must have galvanized my decision to avoid the horror genre all these years, but what was it?

I recalled seeing “Happy Birthday to Me” at the Hanover Drive-In in 1981, a scary-as-shit birthday party from Hell B-movie that really got under my skin. I realized that, while instrumental in my detour around the genre in subsequent years, this wasn't the source of my disinterest in horror cinema. I'd have to go back further. Orca and Jaws freaked me out, but it turns out, I'm not all that afraid of sharks and killer whales. Well, a little bit maybe. No, it was earlier still.

I liked the old Universal horrors of the 30's, although they were hardly terrifying by today's sick standards. I'd watched most of them by the time I was 10 and slept like a baby on the nights they played on TV. I sneaked into a theatre with my childhood pal Greg Yeoman and watched about 20 minutes of the Exorcist before we got caught and were led out of the North Bay Odeon Theatre by an usher barely older than we were. They actually stopped the movie, turned up the house lights and led us out of the theatre. Yes, it was completely humiliating, but not the thing that turned me off horror forever. It was earlier still.

What was it then?.... I pushed back further – through that acid trip Wizard of Oz stop motion TV show that forever fucked my generation in ways that we're only now beginning to understand, past the episodes of the Twilight Zone with that giant-headed Rod Serling blathering on about strange events and earwigs, further back still to the sickly backgrounds of the earliest Spider Man and Rocket Robin Hood cartoons that still make me queasy 40 years on, and then I found it. The source. 6 minutes and 16 seconds of sheer, unadulterated, gut-wrenching terror. It's a 1956 episode of Gumby and Pokey, called Gumby on the Moon and it forever changed me. I was probably about 3 or 4 when I saw this sick little number and rewatching it all these years later took me back to a place I'd rather not talk about.

He said he was my Uncle, but that's another story.

This evil claymation short seems innocent enough – the triangle-headed Gumby, for reasons never quite explained, ends up on the moon being chased around by little orange moon-pylons bent on his destruction. Pokey, like all childhood friends (including Greg) is nowhere to be found right when Gumby needs him most (just like Gumby's magically disappearing/reappearing black utility belt). Mind-fuck synthesiser moon-music amplifies the tension, ratcheting it up until all you can hear are the screams of a little boy named Scotty. Gumby's dad, in a segment that still really bugs me, takes a ladder truck and shoots up to the moon, safely protected in a hampster suit, to save Gumby and bring him home. Somehow, the ladder both reaches (ridiculous, even to a four year old) AND ends up right-side-up on the moon too. Years of engineering experience tells me that somewhere along Dad's stupid ladder journey to the moon he would have had to turn around to go down the steps on the moon. This really annoyed me in 1966 and it hasn't gone away. A giant plot hole, to say the least but that notwithstanding, it doesn't get any creepier than this baby.

So...You can keep your French torture-porns, your Dario Argento, your Zomedies, Cabin Fever's and endless variations on Saw and Hostel. None of them matches up to the godless black horror of a little green piece of plasticine, his useless orange horse-friend (who obviously had better things to do that day than help his pal out in his time of need), and his physics-challenged Dad being chased around by vicious moon triangles for no good reason. THAT is terror. I challenge all of you horror-mongers to scope this 6 minutes and 16 seconds out and tell me I'm wrong. I'm not.

Tell me the little baby head trapped in the frozen emptiness of space right at the end doesn't leave you gasping.

You've been warned.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT2eHX5h8Pk

...if you dare.

It's beginning to look a lot like halloween... part 2: The Strangers

Last night, as I ignored the pile of work on my desk for the second day in a row, I decided to watch The Strangers, the fantastically frightening debut movie from director Brian Bertino. This film seriously gave me the willies, people. The entire movie takes place over the course of just a few hours at the conveniently-out-of-the-way summer home of leading man James (Scott Speedman).

His girlfriend, Kristen (Liv Tyler), and he have arrived at the summer home late in the night after attending a wedding. During the first fifteen minutes of the film we become privy, through various flashbacks to the night’s events and conversations between the leads, to the fact that this relationship of theirs is not exactly in a good place at the moment. Just as the pair are about to partake in what looks to be some kind of very hot hate and/or break-up-sex, a knock comes from the door. A young, somewhat dazed girl, stands in the shadows of the doorway, giving only minor glimpses of her face as she asks if “Tamara” is home. James informs her she has the wrong house and sends her politely away.

Now that their totally hot fun has been interrupted, and because James got Kirsten so worked up in those few short seconds they were at it, she really needs a cigarette. Unfortunately for both of them, she’s all out. James being the stand up guy that he is offers to drive and go get her some. As Joanna Newsom plays on the old record player (Joanna Newsom on vinyl?) and Kirsten knocks back a beer, a knock comes yet again from the door – this time much slower, and much louder. Through the security of the wooden door, Kirsten asks who is there, to which the young voice from the shadows again asks for Tamara. After informing the voice that she has already been here before, we can hear retreating footsteps.

Now somewhat afraid, Kristen calls James’ cell phone and tells him to come home quickly, just before the phone is cut off. Kirsten goes to get her own cell and finds that it is out of batteries and needs to be plugged in. As she wanders around the house, checking the windows to see if the young girl is outside anywhere, our lead villain finally makes his first quiet appearance – watching Kristen from the edge of the next room, already inside of the hom, a hood-like mask drawn over his face. This quiet introduction lasts an uncomfortably long time (in an awesome, horror kind of uncomfortable way), yet without it seeming unbelievable that Kristen does not spot him. When she eventually turns around the masked-man is gone, but seconds later she hears a door being shut. Grabbing a knife she goes to investigate and finds some things amiss in the house that obviously lead to someone having been inside with her. She returns to the spot where she had plugged in her phone only to find it missing. And then the knocking returns.

Hearing another noise at the window Kristen moves to investigate, and, drawing back the curtains, she is now confronted by the hooded man who had watched her earlier. Terrified, Kristen hides in a back room of the house until James returns and finds her in hysterics. Skeptical of Kirsten’s story, James says that he has left his cell phone in his car and will go and get it, only to find that his car has been smashed up and his cell phone has also been taken. The couple returns to the car together and this is when the torture-through-terrifying begins as James at last sees what Kristen already has. Over the next hours until early day-light finally comes, the couple is chased and menaced by a voiceless “family “ of three mask-wearing psychopaths who over-and-over again taunt them torturously until eventually, as day finally breaks, the two of them end up bound beside each other and come face-to-face with the menacing-Mansons.

Finally being confronted by them, Kristen asks them ‘why?’ to which the young girl replies ‘because you were home’.

Perhaps I enjoyed this movie more because I am somewhat mourning the lack of Halloween on this side of the pond, but, the very minimal presence of blood and gore in this movie, along with absolute creepiness of the villains and the manner in which they induce fear for no obvious reason, really made this one great. My only qualm about this movie would have to be the publicity-stunt-like addition of a disclaimer at the beginning of the film which states that the movie is ‘based on true events’, which upon further investigation one quickly finds out is not exactly true. Speedman and Tyler are both superbly understated in their roles, there is no obscene over-dramafication by either one. And, although at first I thought the movie might have done well without the back story of their relationship in turmoil, I found that, in fact, it added a necessary element of distance and mistrust between the two characters.

All in all a good one.

It's beginning to look a lot like halloween... part 1: Mother of Tears

Mother of Tears is the long-awaited finale to Dario Argento’s series of The Three Mothers, preceded by Suspiria, and Inferno. It was premiered last year at TIFF midnight madness which I, very unhappily, was unable to attend. I feared that it might be ages before it was released on DVD and was even warned by Joe of a rumor that the DVD release would be a much duller, less gory version than what was screened at the festival. This is why I was supremely excited to finally get to watch this the other night, in full. Although after finally watching it? Well...

True to Argento style the gore certainly does not disappoint; within the first ten minutes the blood is spilling and the guts are flying (as well as being used to strangle people). Sarah (Asia Argento, Dario’s daughter) is a student at the Museum of Ancient Art in Rome where she and her colleague open an ancient urn, sent by a priest, intended for their boss (and Sarah’s extracurricular love affair). As Sarah runs off to collect some books to decode the ancient script on the urn, her colleague opens the urn, unleashing the Mother of Tears, the third and most beautiful of the three sisters who appear in Argento’s series. The contents of the urn include a red tunic, apparently the witch’s most powerful relic, which the Mother dons to regain her powers, summoning demons who kill Sarah’s colleague in a superbly-grotesque fashion.

Sarah returns with the books only to see her friend being viciously murdered. She runs from the building, encouraged by a loud, unseen female voice. The police think that Sarah’s story is quite insane and have her followed. They do not beleive her story despite the fact that the city of Rome is suddenly now boiling over with evil and tearing itself apart; thiefs, murderers and rapists fill the city streets day and night along with gaggles of half-goth, half-harajuku girl-type witches. Seriously, these witches look like some kind of glam-rock meets pirate-hooker leftover from the era of 1980’s Inferno. And still the police think that Sarah is insane and in need of their unrelenting surveillance?

("You Harajuku Girls you got the wicked style. I like the way that you are, I am your biggest fan." - Gwen Stefani)

After her torrid love affair/boss/boyfriend’s son is kidnapped by the Mother’s cult, and he is then captured while attempting to find his son, Sarah is eventually forced to go on the run from the stupid cops and gothy witches chasing after her. Sarah escapes to find the last surviving exorcist recognized by the church. In his home she meets a woman who knew her mother and finally gives an explanation for the encouraging yet mysterious voice that has been pushing Sarah onwards to fight against the evil that is consuming Rome. Now prepared with her white-witch powers gifted to her by her dead-but-alive-via-apparitions mother (the voice), Sarah can finally kick some pirate-goth-hooker ass. Well, that is if Argento hadn't insisted on maintaining the stereotypical Italian-horror traditional roles which require Sarah to run about in heels and dresses without any clue what to do. Luckily for her, and basically through random chance, the chicken with its head cut off apparoch leads her to the Palazzo under which the Mother is living. At this point, without the use of any of her magical powers which took nearly most of the movie to be discovered and honed I might add, manages to shed the Mother of her tunic, burning it and causing the Palazzo to crumble, unleashing a tower which impales the Mother in an uncharacteristically lame death by Argento. Even at this point, after killing an entire coven including one massively powerful with who managed to effectively tear Rome apart in mere days, Sarah still requires the help of a man, the one cop who believed in her all along, to make her way out of the cave, because apparently it's just too... icky.

Immediately after finishing this movie I was quite excited by it. As mentioned before, gore is one thing that Argento does brilliantly and which, hopefully, will never change. But, as I thought about the movie more over the last couple of days I realized how blinded I was by my sheer wanting for the film to live up to its potential. Truthfully though: not such a good plot, terrible acting and an uncalled for amount of gore. This, as my friend pointed out, might be said of many of these ‘classic’-type horrors but Mother of Tears (save for the gore which, although uncalled for was certainly a pleasure) really took it to a level that I simply couldn’t appreciate in the long-run.

aesthetics 3

Ok, with apologies to the Kris(t) child for putting the blocks to him a month or two ago when he “loved all over Joe” about the updated blog font/colouring, .... this new one is really good. It's a shame that the people running IE or Chrome will never see it. Nice one Joe.

A first kick at my top 13 newish releases this year. Feel free to rip them apart and add your own

AMERICAN GANGSTER
ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES
BAND'S VISIT
BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD
CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR
GONE BABY GONE
IN BRUGES
IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH
KURT COBAIN - ABOUT A SON
LIONS FOR LAMBS
MICHAEL CLAYTON
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
RAMBO

Pee-Wees Big Adventure - love and coping man-child style

Recently I had this need to watch a batch of “break up” movies. I’m talking about films about break ups and how to cope on the most basic human levels with said break ups. I needed a guide map of sorts because I was at a loss.

Since I couldn’t think of any good ones, I ended up just grabbing a batch of films at random that I’ve been meaning to watch for awhile. I threw them all in a bag and picked one out at random. I had no idea what I was in for. What fate had in store for me was probably one of the best break up films I have ever seen.
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure is seemingly a film about man child Pee Wee Herman and his quest to find his stolen bike but you would be oh so wrong.

Pee Wee is lost in his own world of contentment. This world is bizarre to you or me but it shapes who he is. His Bike is his most coveted possession and its existence in Pee Wee’s life is what keeps him living the way he does without feeling embarrassment of the outside world. He can’t go anywhere without his bike, and it becomes a part of who he is or at least who he thinks he is. The only other person who can see what value the bike has is another man child, the neighbourhood bully Francis Buxton. Francis is a fat rich snobby guy who, with the help of his father’s bank account, gets whatever he wants and he wants what Pee Wee has. See Francis doesn’t want the bike per say, what he really wants is the happiness Pee Wee receives from it which is impossible. You can’t change who you are, and you can’t feel the same way for something as someone else does.In stealing Pee Wee’s bike he sees how hurt Pee Wee is and how at a loss he is to deal with it. Francis ends up throwing it away and never taking fault for it but fully understanding that he could never feel that way for the bike. In his loss Pee Wee abuses his friends, walks madly down rainy streets howling like mad, and sits still for hours. No one can comprehend his loss but him. Sure there’s other women vying for his attention but Pee Wee wants only one thing, and that’s more than just a new bike, or someone else’s company. He wants what he had and he can’t function at all without it. In his despair he turns to a fortune teller who leads him astray and tells him that his bike can be found in the basement of the Alamo.

This is what starts an epic quest across the country to reclaim what’s his. Which forces him outside his bizarre world and into the real one we all live in.

He meets a convict wrongfully charged and on the run. Pee Wee decides to help the man, but the friendship they share is short lived. The convict, like Pee Wee, is looking for something and he needs to be alone so he ditches Pee Wee in “the middle of nowhere”. In this dark and sad place Pee Wee meets Large Marge who, like Pee Wee, is lost. She tells a story of a terrible accident that she witnessed ten years prior on the very same road they are driving down. Pee Wee realises later on that large Marge died in the accident she spoke about ten years ago. Large Marge rides down the same strip of road in the middle of nowhere trying to understand the why of her accident but the years have made her bitter and angry and now she has nothing left in her heart for anyone else.

Pee wee next meets Simone, a friendly but sad waitress who watches the sunrise with Pee Wee. They talk about life and what their dreams are. Pee Wee wants what he had and she wants something new. Simone is in love with Pee Wee but Pee Wee’s heart is already given to another.

He runs into a biker gang who take Pee-Wee under their wing. This represents how bad his pain has really become, it has pushed Pee-Wee to running with bad groups of people and partying and drugs and emotionally unsatisfying sex. When Pee-Wee takes this route as far as he can he wakes up in a hospital. His fever dreams have only taunted him of his bike. He says goodbye to the party life and continues to search for the love of his life.

Sure, he does find the fucking thing. However, i feel that the ending where we see Pee-Wee watching a big budget version of his own story with all his friends proves to us that Pee-Wee has changed. The only story continuing on about the love of his red bike is this big budget movie with better looking people and new scenarios and even a new bike. This represents how people move on and change. Sure you loved that red bike and that love is yours to keep and it makes you crazy sometimes and act like a child. And maybe the only role you have in the next story of that bike is a badly acted cameo but you loved and you moved on and are happy and ready to share new things with new people.