Lindsay Utz Staff Writer

Utz: Yeah, so for this fun, orange little Halloween section, our editor Adam made us rent old horror films to talk about.

Betancourt: So we go to Casa Video and ask the kid in the green vest what are some good ones, and he keeps pulling tapes out of this sea of illustrated plastic covers depicting bloody, half-naked women with shadowy figures standing over them and saying, "This one's decent," which is, as we keep reminding him, not what we asked for.

Mark Betancourt Staff Writer

Utz: So we ask him for slasher and gore and maybe some bestiality ÷ just anything really sick; we don't care at this point, Halloween deadline laughing devilishly through our minds. There we were, scratching our heads watching our Casa helper in the green vest bounce around the horror section, picking up this and that, our eyes blurry with chainsaws and killer bears and that sort of thing. We finally decide on three films.

Betancourt: "Suspiria," "Deranged" and "Nadja." We thought by picking films we hadn't heard of we'd push some mysterious envelope of movie criticism, we'd plunder the underbelly of cinematic horror for gems of either revolting or insightful intensity. Somewhere in the first ten minutes of "Suspiria's" blaring soundtrack by some group calling themselves The Goblins, which consists mostly of frenetic flutters of xylophone and loud, ad-libbed moaning intended to be either scary or disorienting, I realized we had made a terrible mistake.

Utz: Wait, wait. Wait a second there, cowboy. The music in "Suspiria" was creepy! The haunting xylophone was totally eerie along with the colorfully stylized shots of dead people. Yes, I will admit that this film had some weak plot that I don't remember, but the art direction was brilliant. Some scenes looked to me like some strange, Dali-esque, paintings, where nothing makes sense but somewhere within all that senselessness there is beauty. I love surrealist cinema and was able to forget the plot that I didn't remember in the first place, just kick back and dig on all the weird images.

Betancourt: The art direction? The girl's bedroom looked like a roller-skating rink. It's as if the cinematographer, if there even was one, had all these green and blue and red gels lying around and, like a kid piling marshmallows on his irreparably slumping model of the solar system, said, "Hey what the hell, it couldn't get any worse," and started turning whole scenes magenta. Supposedly, the director, Dario Argento (what is that, Italian?) is an auteur, if only because he has his own section upstairs in Casa. But his movie sucked.

Utz: You have no imagination. Not all movies are great; we've established that. It's easy to blow off this movie because the plot sucked. It's easy to rip apart movies you don't like. However, you can't deny that the shots weren't imaginatively constructed. So the art isn't your taste; but that doesn't mean the movie sucked.

Betancourt: So how about "Deranged?" Now there's a cinematic masterpiece.

Utz: Yeah, "Deranged" is a fictionalized story based upon the true story of the serial killer Ed Gein from Wisconsin. In the late Î50s this psycho killer murdered a bunch of women, collected their vaginas and stuffed their breasts to hang on his wall. Yeah, sick.

Beatancourt: Actually, the documentary at the end of the tape was way more interesting than the film itself, even if it did look like something grade-schoolers put together with graphics they made on brand-new Commodores. At least the documentary put things in perspective; real photos of the victims and the killer, who might be the creepiest looking man I've ever seen. But the film is just a boring and really poorly made play-by-play of the sicko's career. The man loves his mother too much, mother dies, man introduces live girl to dead mother at a tea party. Sure it's sick, but bad filmmaking can make anything boring.

Utz: Bad filmmaking, yes, agreed. But, hey, it had its good moments. Like when he's rebuilding his mother with other women's body parts. He actually looks at an instruction manual for directions on how to scoop brains out of a skull. There is an instruction manual for everything these days.

Betancourt: And then, (sigh), there was "Nadja."

Utz: A film that probably wasn't that bad had we watched the whole thing. At this point, though, it was best we turned it off, for Mark and I were on the verge of brutally murdering one another.

Betancourt: Oh, it would have been bad. Did we turn it off at the lesbian sex beneath the Christmas tree or the vampire giving his sister a bath? All I know is David Lynch was involved somehow, and he's hard enough to control when all America is watching, much less as executive producer on some straight-to-video erotic-vampire-art film with Peter Fonda in it. I'm confident we made the right choice.

Utz: You're funny. Now I'm going to kill you. As we sit here week after week and I am forced to listen to you complain about everything, I smile, yes, but underneath it all I really want to slice open your stomach, scoop out your insides, put them into a shiny silver buffet-style pan and feed it to the people of Luby's Cafeteria, where old people go to eat.

Betancourt: But that won't stop me, and everyone in the audience knows it. My guts will begin to boil unwholesomely as some withered old biddy wearing a plastic cover on her hair dips a stainless-steel ladle into them, and after brutally spoiling her enjoyment of "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," I'll escape from Luby's and show up in the middle of "Full Frontal" while you're watching it for the 10th time and whisper outrageous criticisms at you from some ambiguous corner of the theater. Eventually, you'll kill yourself from the madness.

Utz: I was just kidding, Mark.

Betancourt: So was I.

Utz: Or were we?