Halloween in Vegas

You know that feeling you used to get as a kid when the circus or the traveling carnival left town? All of the excitement and energy that had briefly transformed the normal into the surreal was suddenly gone, and all that remained was an empty field of memories. That’s how I felt leaving Vegas last night, after Fangoria’s 1st TRINITY OF TERRORS. I don’t mean to suggest that Vegas is suddenly an empty field… In Vegas, after all, every night is Halloween. But there was something magical about seeing a group of guys dressed up as Alex and his droogies, wandering through a casino where Malcolm McDowell was signing autographs upstairs… and seeing zombies playing the slot machines, blissfully unaware of George Romero’s presence a few feet behind them.

This event, masterminded by Renaissance man Scott Licina, featured the longest list of horror genre icons at any convention I’m aware of. While it lacked the celebrity/fan intimacy of a smaller convention, it was undeniably thrilling to spend Halloween among friends and freaks at the lavish Palms Resort & Casino, where horror stars competed for attention with Paul Oakenfold, the Playboy Club, and of course the gambling tables. For me, the highlights were a lively Q&A session with Tom Atkins and Adrienne Barbeau, a stand-up routine by the hilariously demented John Waters, a tribute to Roger Corman (inventor of the high-concept genre film), Ashley Laurence (always), and a pre-release screening of George Romero’s new film SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD! There was also a screening of a little documentary called NIGHTMARES IN RED WHITE AND BLUE, which appeared to be well received. (Next stop: Mar del Plata)

SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD got off to a very rocky start. The Halloween midnight screening, which would have played to a packed theater, was canceled shortly before 1am. Romero himself introduced the movie, and then the folks at Brenden Theaters spent the next hour trying to replace a light bulb in the projector. At 12:45AM, they announced to a very angry audience that they wouldn’t be able to show the film until the following afternoon. A much smaller audience gathered in a much smaller theater on Sunday. Despite this disappointing setup, I was pleasantly surprised by the film – which seems to me like a heartfelt tribute to directors John Ford and Howard Hawks.

SURVIVAL is to last year’s DIARY OF THE DEAD what DAWN was to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. The second in a rebooted franchise, it picks up three weeks after the crisis and follows a minor character from the previous film into the new world. I got a little bit worried when the film began with voiceover narration, because I feel that the preachy narration was the weakest part of DIARY, often at odds (tonally) with the film’s gleefully anarchic violence. Thankfully, the VO in SURVIVAL doesn’t last. Romero quickly drops us into a world gone mad, and turns over the reigns to a group of quirky, ruthless, and ultimately very likable characters. The type of characters we met in DIARY OF THE DEAD – bratty college students with no survival instincts – have presumably been killed off by now, leaving the post-apocalyptic world to modern-day cowboys.

“Lousy times make lousy people,” one character says, but the fact that everyone in this film (even the youngest character, who exists mainly to lament the death of advanced technology) is a survivor makes them much easier to empathize with. Excellent performances by a cast of relative unknowns don’t hurt either. In a Q&A session, the director said that he thought this was the best cast he’d worked with in years, and I have to agree. There are the usual moments of comic book violence, but I was surprised by just how naturalistic much of the film was. It’s also worth noting that, for all of the in-fighting between the characters, everyone seems to have their own personal code of conduct and honor, which makes the film seem more sentimental than satirical, more genuinely insightful than preachy… and makes SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, in my opinion, Romero’s best movie since 1985. Here’s to hoping that it gets good distribution… and that the employees of Brenden Theaters learn how to change a light bulb. If not, they certainly won't last long against the undead.

This guy freaked me out...

"Uncle George" & Malcolm McDowell -- manager Chris Roe (far right) says he'd like to put these two guys together in a film. I don't think anyone would argue with that.

Meg Foster (who could forget those eyes from THEY LIVE?), Caroline Williams (lovable lady of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2), and scream queen Dee Wallace (THE HILLS HAVE EYES, THE HOWLING, CUJO). Meg and Caroline starred together in STEPFATHER II, recently released on DVD.

Me with Adrienne Barbeau & Tom Atkins, who both starred in THE FOG, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, CREEPSHOW and TWO EVIL EYES... but have never had a scene together. (Nor slept together, Atkins divulged in their Q&A.)

The inimitable John Waters performs his one-man show, "This Filthy World," and poses the questions that matter: "Wouldn't you rather have your child be a drug dealer than a drug addict?"

Roger Corman receives Fangoria's Lifetime Achievement Award from Fango editor Tony Timpone - a precursor to the Lifetime Achievement Oscar that Corman is due to receive later this year!

Trinity organizer Scott Licina & artist/actress Ashley Laurence, star of HELLRAISER, LIGHTNING BUG, and Robert Kurtzman's upcoming film BUMP (based on the Fangoria comic edited by Licina)

Dreams Beneath a Desert Sky

Muslims pilgrimage to Mecca. Jews to Jerusalem. Catholics to Rome. Entertainers go to Vegas. So said Bono at Friday night’s U2 concert in Sin City.

This sums up U2’s musical journey better than I ever could. I remember in the mid-90s reading a biography of the band called Until the End of the World. It proposed that Achtung Baby, their 1991 release, was a concept album – charting a spiritual progression through the dark night of the soul, from sensory overload to spiritual salvation. Most of U2’s recent albums since have ended on a quasi-religious note (three of the four band members are avowed Christians), but it seems to me that the entire decade of the 1990s was their dark night of the soul… and that darkness is still visible in their 360 Tour light show.


The band’s history breaks down into roughly four phases:

1976 – 1983: Larry Mullen pulled the band members together while they were all still in prep school in Dublin. They took on manager Paul McGuinness in 1978 and released their first EP in 1979. A year later, Steve Lilywhite produced their first full-length album, a hard-driving guitar rock album called Boy, which gained the band some recognition in the U.S. Their second album, October, found the group almost completely overwhelmed by politics and religion. War, their breakthrough album, successfully combined the band’s early sound with more sophisticated songwriting that expressed their political and religious agenda. They never looked back.

1984 – 1989: Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois took over as producers on the next two albums, The Unforgettable Fire (1984) and The Joshua Tree (1986), and helped to enhance the band’s distinctive sound – making it looser, more textured, ethereal and poetic. Today, The Unforgettable Fire is generally regarded as a rehearsal for The Joshua Tree, their acknowledged masterpiece. Both albums explored the roots of American music and paid homage to the likes of Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan, gospel and the blues. The subsequent stadium tours of the U.S. and Europe established them as “rock’s hottest ticket.” A documentary, RATTLE AND HUM (1988), charted their success… and prompted the first major critical backlash against them. Responding to those who said that they were taking themselves too seriously, U2 disappeared at the end of the decade, to “dream it all up again.”


1990 – 1999: Eno and Lanois pushed a darker, more industrial sound on the next album, Achtung Baby (1991), and the band members reinvented themselves onstage in a multi-media extravaganza called ZooTV. The goal was sensory overload – the band responded to accusations of pretentiousness with evasive sarcasm and blatant over-indulgence. In the eye of the hurricane, they produced a more experimental short album, Zooropa (1993). Their next effort, Pop (1997), was another calculated attempt at reinvention, with producers Howie B. and Flood pushing the band’s sound closer to techno and dance music. The subsequent PopMart Tour was U2’s biggest production yet – so top heavy that practically no one (including the band members) could distinguish any longer between self-indulgence and irony.

2000 – Present: Eno and Lanois returned to the fold to produce a very conscious “return to form” with the 2000 album All That You Can’t Leave Behind. The subsequent Elevation Tour was equally pared-down and earnest, and fans and critics cited it as a renaissance for the band. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004) and the following Vertigo Tour were designed to combine the “classic” U2 sound with the more experimental work of the 1990s. The result was a little bit schizophrenic, and the band underwent a long gestation period for their follow-up, No Line on the Horizon (2009). Eager for a more unified sound, they relied again on Eno and Lanois – who, at this point, might as well be acknowledged as additional band members. The sound was consistent, if overly familiar.


“Familiar” doesn’t seem to be a problem for the legions of U2 fans around the world, and new albums continue to accumulate new fans. At the beginning of the current 360 Tour, one reviewer commented on how amazing it is that most concert-goers appear to know the worlds to ALL of the songs – old and new. The set list emphasizes the Eno/Lanois efforts. Aside from “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” all of the songs are drawn from The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree, and Achtung Baby (the 1984 – 1991 phase) or All That You Can’t Leave Behind, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and No Line on the Horizon (the 2000s). There is no acknowledgment of Pop… but mid-1990s U2 is unquestionably present in the spirit of the production and the performances.

The peak of my U2 fandom came in the spring of 1997, when I bought tickets for an early stop on the PopMart Tour. In a few short months, I collected every U2 song I could get my hands on – including the live albums, the Passengers experiment, and all of the available B-sides (even one that I could only get on vinyl). My favorite was a short track from “The Fly” single called “Alex Descends into Hell for a Bottle of Milk Korova 1” – it was dark and gritty and restless in a way that U2 songs rarely are. The “classic” U2 sound – heard most obviously on The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree and All That You Can’t Leave Behind – is about transcendence. This “other” U2 sound – which underlies Achtung Baby, Zooropa, and Pop – is more primal. You can hear it particularly on “The Fly,” “Dirty Day,” and “Last Night on Earth.”

On the band’s best songs, these two sounds and the ideas they convey go hand-in-hand. U2 sings about divisive earthly politics as well as transcendent “oneness.” At the concert in Vegas, it was hard not to feel like we were all part of one big, crazy family. The girl sitting next to us exclaimed loudly that we were “neighbors forever because we were U2 neighbors.” Of course, she was falling-down drunk. Bono was much more convincing, leading a rousing karaoke crowd through “Magnificent”: “Only love can leave such a mark.” If we don’t remember the people sitting next to us in ten or twenty years, we will certainly remember the night and the sound of the music under the desert sky. It’s no exaggeration to say that concerts like this can be a borderline religious experience – the production values (on par with PopMart) as well as the music are awe-inspiring.


I suspect that most of the audience members had very strong emotional reactions when the band played the three hit singles from The Joshua Tree: “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and “With or Without You.” I remembered having listened to those songs as I drove through breathtaking Joshua Tree National Park for the first time. I was equally moved by the performances of “The Unforgettable Fire” and “MLK,” which I had never heard live. “Ultra Violet,” one of the later songs from Achtung Baby, was another great surprise. For me, however, the highlights were a supercharged rendition of “Until the End of the World” and a show-stopping, primal remix of “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight.” That latter was one of the nine songs that U2 performed from their current album.



While I hadn’t spent very much time with the album before going to Vegas, I must admit that most of the new songs sounded just as familiar and just as exciting as the ones I’ve been listening to for the past twenty years. The words, too, are right on the money. This transcendence is hard-won:

We are people born of sound.
The songs are in our eyes.
Gonna wear them like a crown.
Walk out into a sunburst street.
Sing your heart out, sing my heart out.
I found grace inside a sound.
I found grace – it's all that I found.
And I can breathe,
Breathe now…

Halloween Spirit

Halloween is not just one night for me, it’s a season. As a kid, I associated Halloween with the dying fall, changing leaves, cool crisp air, the smell of chimney smoke and apple cider and pumpkin pie. It was a season of anticipation that began on October 1st and built until Halloween, a day of symbolic transformation that made every other day seem dull by comparison.

Halloween marks the end of summer on the Celtic calendar – the end of the “light half” of the year and the beginning of the “dark half.” According to legend, it was a day when the membrane between the physical world and the spirit world was at its weakest, allowing spirits (good and bad) to cross over into the land of the living. That’s where the tradition of wearing Halloween costumes comes from: We’re trying to blend in with the dead, or maybe to spook the spooks. I don’t remember ever having things explained to me that way when I was a kid, but that doesn’t mean that I was oblivious to the ideas. I understood Halloween as an acknowledgment of death and the supernatural… but it was a celebratory acknowledgment that was always fun, never truly unsettling. (I find myself suddenly thinking of John Carpenter’s comment that his movie HALLOWEEN is “a harmless little movie.”) Some of my best childhood memories are of pumpkin carving, carnival-going, and trick-or-treating on a day when death isn't scary and life is filled with wonder.



When I moved to Los Angeles in October 2006, I was disappointed about leaving the autumn weather behind. I couldn’t imagine feeling the same “Halloween spirit” in a city where it’s sunny and 70 every day, and where the trees stay green all year round. Honestly, while I don’t miss the cold weather, I miss the natural progression of the seasons. But I was thrilled to learn that L.A. celebrates Halloween to the hilt… which probably shouldn’t come as any surprise in a city where so many people make-believe for a living.

This year, it’s taken a little longer for the signs of the season to appear (maybe because of the recession?), but I’m happy to report that my neighborhood is finally beginning to look festive. First thing this morning, I took a walk around the block and snapped a few pictures of decorated lawns. Then I came home and noticed an article in today’s L.A. Times about a slew of upcoming holiday events - carnivals & haunted houses, parties & pub crawls, screenings and celebrity appearances. Suddenly I’m as giddy as a (normal) kid at Christmas. For those who need a little Halloween spirit but can’t escape the computer screen at the moment, may I recommend the following…