Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)

Oh hey, blog.

So it's been awhile.  We've done okay.  But perhaps it is time to discuss.  To plan.  To shout into this endless void once again, glory be.

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Velvet Buzzsaw was a movie tapdancing on my periphery for some time.  Hey, I said, I liked Nightcrawlers, but now it's got all these big cool actors, and what's that an apparent mid-90s horror aesthetic?  How can this go wrong, I thought, letting my netflix subscription roll over for another month, feeding the Great Beast.

The answer, obviously, was Netflix.  Look, more writer-er people than I have discussed the nature of modern day Netflix's filming strategy, that bizarre amalgamation of artistic and commercial goals powered by a degree of data analytics that induces the fetal position if you think too much about it.  It's probably a slightly better system than the nightmare world of modern hollywood, a sort of modern day renaissance patronage system where artists are given reign to create their own ideas, provided those ideas are sufficiently within the parameters of Netflix's machine mind in an attempt to create the new hit.

The obsession Netflix has with these chimercial audience spanning pictures  honestly fascinates me more than the stready drip feed of content that it provides.  Has there even been such an attempt to create entertainment via the careful study of what people are watching, an endless refinement until we get to some kind of 90-minute 1080p singularity that we will binge watch, over and over, until our species dies from inactivity?  It's the most banal Philip K. Dick story ever written, but that's still better than most of what occupies our life these days.

This constant sloughing towards the movie plot summary equivalent of the Anti-Life Equation is what drives every piece of Netflix content, including Velvet Buzzsaw.  The basic plotline tries to hit three or four different concepts like an extremely serious/unsexy twister game: Gory Horror! Wry Sendup of Art Culture!  Ensemble injokery!  There's the obvious parade of stars that get easy money and possibly a little teeny tiny boost to their social media (chant the birdbox with me, Oh Sandra Bullock, but we were always behind you).

When I watched the trailer, I was excited, because here's the other thing about Netflix: in terms of horror, it fucking sucks.  Unless you're really into slow moving ghost dramas or complete and utter garbage like THE OPEN HOUSE there is really nothing to justify a randy old horror hound like me to keep paying for a sub.  This is understandable, since (warning incoming shill) Shudder's brilliant curation of horror and cult completely trounces any other service in this field, so it's a waste of time to compete seriously.  But Velvet Buzzsaw seemed to maybe be a sign of turning a corner, of horror with a more fun bent.

Boy, was I wrong!

For those that haven't been strapped into the internet social media ludovico machine and been forcefed buzzworthy trailer after trailer, Velvet Buzzsaw's nominal plot is about a disturbed deceased artist's works being appropriated by the art world, and the art world's subsequent supernatural punishment for this transgression, but the real plot is "ho ho the art world sure is shitty."  The closest thing to a central character is Jake Gyllenhaal as the powerful art critic MORF VANDEVALT, that name being the only actually funny joke in the entire film.¹  

Jake's performance is one of the two things I can unreservedly appreciate about the movie, though it's helped by the fact that MORF VANDEVALT is the only character in the film with any actual degree of depth.  Despite the field of talent present here, everyone else is pretty well reduced to the dreaded "This character trait, BUT ALSO this somewhat opposing trait" type characters, such as:  

Rene Russo's gallery owner is ice cold, BUT ALSO regrets her own days as an artist!  
Toni Collete's art curator is super helpful, BUT ALSO in it for her own selfish gains.  
John Malkovich's artist is completely extraneous, BUT ALSO clearly a way for John to make a easy monthly payment on his Real Doll harem!

i was going to populate this review with bad velvet buzzsaw fanart
but I actually like this piece oops.  credit to clara martinez murcia

As an aside, I'd like to give a quick tip of the hat to the screenwriters for their ability to make MORF VANDEVALT (okay I'll stop) pleasing to both critics and people that hate the critics.  Obviously a lot of people are going to get a kick out of how the self-assured critic is confounded by the disintegrating unreality of the situation he finds himself, but while he's an object of ridicule, the blow is softened by the fact that almost everyone in Velvet Buzzsaw is equally reprehensible.²   It's also worth noting the subtle ego stroking given to the critics (perhaps in the hopes of a better rotten tomato aggregate, who even knows) in the fact that, at least in this universe, art critics have some semblence of power, with Morf's judgements making or breaking the relative value of any object d'art that he trains his words upon.  This notion that traditional critics have any sort of power besides enraging idiots into sending death threats to them is the most fanciful moment in a movie that also has a scene where a guy is attacked by gorilla arms coming out of a painting.  But in a world where I have about a millionth of the taste making power of a 20-year-old guy who hates washing his hair almost as much as he hates female characters without boob windows, sometimes fantasies are nice.

Back to the actual object at hand, the reason for having this many disposable characters is to cheerfully butcher them in various art-related ways. This is what we were all here for, right?  And here is where the film really goes off the rails.

Firstly, any time not spent in a kill sequence, and especially any time where MORF VA...Morf is not in the frame means you're going to be mired in a big vat of nothing.  It feels kind of unfair to complain about this since it's not like most horror films don't suffer from inability to be interesting when people aren't getting machete'd, but the scenes in Velvet Chainsaw just feel...ephemeral.  I had to stop watching about a third of the way through and on restarting the next day I could barely remember what the fuck was happening, aside from "everyone is very cross" and "schemes within schemes."  If the film was less committed to the horror element and more to the black comedy, I may have felt the need to pay more attention, but the knowledge that most of these people were going to be canvASSed essentially nullified that compulsion. As is such, I treated most of the scenes in this movie like waiting for a friend to show up in a party I didn't really want to go to in the first place.  Of course, then the friend shows up and he's reeking of cheap booze, rotisserie chicken, and the foreknowledge that your waiting has only led to a quiet tragedy. 

Here's the thing. This movie has really really nice set pieces.  One of the few perspectives I can really offer to watch this film is if you're the kind of person that gets off on spending an entire day in an art museum.  I'm sure someone will slob their knob onto the comments here an explain that ACTUALLY the art in this film is very DERIVATIVE but whatever I liked it.  How does the movie utilize these touchstones of imagery, though?  The answer is really fucking badly.

(spoilers here i guess)

For example, there is a BIG METAL BALL that people put their arms into.  I wonder what will happen when one of the characters does this!  I bet there will be some interesting fakeouts like oh it just cuts the arm off and they die.  Here's a creepy robot mannequin how are they going to play around this old horror convention oh it just comes to life and does a neck snap.   Oh there's an art gallery full of weird colors, i wonder what might happen here oh the colors flow into the person and they become a graffiti.  OK, I guess that one is a little less obvious to see coming, although it still smacks of the classic Kane Hodder scene from Wishmaster, so whatever.

I'm not saying that every scene o' death in a horror movie needs to be some kind of rube goldberg/final destination keep 'em guessing every second kind of thing.  Directness is a virtue, but here it feels like they showed the screenwriter each central scare object, gave them ten seconds to think of a way it would kill a person, and just went with that.  It's a little mortifying to have a movie with the vaguely high concept of the power art wields in our life, and then execute that concept like it's a third-rate 80s slasher, the ones where the only surprises are that the film pulls the "it was only the cat jumping on the chair psych here's the killer" card twice.

So fifteen hundred words into this, here's why this movie broke my mental writing impasse.  Shortly after watching the film, I dipped into a couple reviews of the film to see if my own mind perspectives comported with those who actually get paid for saying shit about media, as is my wont.  But there was another reason: something about the film was triggering memories of horror past, but I couldn't put my desiccated finger on it.  Then I ran into the review that ended with a snarky comparison of the movie to a full length Tales From the Crypt episode.

OKAY SO LET'S JUST BE CLEAR, I am not saying that this movie feels like something from Tales From the Crypt.  That is something only an idiot desperately trying to flaunt some illusionary nerd cred would say.  Except at it's absolute worst, whatever faults any given Tales From the Crypt episode had, they would not have long periods of nothing happening or kills that denied the insane, wonderful nature of horror.  But it did make me realize that the resemblance I was remembering was from a horror anthology.  This drove me a little mad, since if I have one inherent weakness, it is the short-form television horror.  I ran down the list of suspects: Tales from the Darkside, Monsters Masters of Horror?  But all were incorrect, the slipper wouldn't fit baby, so what was a hip cat like me to do?  I thought harder, scratching the bottom of memory.  Freddy's Nightmares, The Hitchhiker, fucking Are You Afraid of the Dark?  

Things were looking dire, then it hit me.

So a little background for probably anyone reading this, because despite being on NBC, Fear Itself is about as obscure as it gets for this subgenre.  Fear Itself is technically season 3 of Showtime's Masters of Horror, whose gimmick was that each episode was directed by a different established horror director.  While this was largely not false advertising while the show was Masters of Horror, by the time the concept rolled into NBC, we got episodes directed by the guy who helmed Bride of Chucky and Freddy vs Jason.  Needless to say, the show flopped and about half of the episodes were never even broadcast, though they appeared later on..heh heh, Shudder.

So you might be wondering, what was Fear Itself like?  The answer is "exactly how you'd expect an hour-long primetime network horror anthology in the late 2000s to be." That is to say, wildly divergent on quality but generally exhibiting the same qualities of being stuffed with filler, curiously unscary, and gotcha spooks that one always sees coming.  And that's...just what Velvet Buzzsaw was.  It's honestly fascinating to me that this is ultimately what Netflix's original horror offerings (and really almost all of their non-horror offerings) come down to: intensely forgettable scraps, except with an absurd budget fueled by my inability to cancel the goddamned service. 

And baby, that's some real horror.


^1. Unfortunately, the humor in Velvet Buzzsaw is probably only going to be funny to you've never seen a Christopher Guest movie in your life. We're talking "clueless gallery owner praises an artist's pile of trash as a daring new concept" levels of on the nose type jokez. ↩
^{2. Also it's kind of sad to say but it was nice to have a bisexual male character who isn't portrayed as having the libido that operates in the same manner as the tasmanian devil?} ↩