Genre: Indie Comedy
Premise: A lonely journalist finds love and inspiration in a quirky, unlikely manner –covering the misadventures of a young boy’s ‘protest’of an animal rights movement.
About: New Line picked this up. Energy Entertainment and Broken Road Productions will produce. This was Sachs’ first screenplay. The script landed him on the 2008 Black List with 5 votes.
Writer: Adam Sachs (Draft 5/5/08 — 110 pages)

Animal Cruelty is one of those scripts they tell you not to write because it’s not mainstream enough and it’s too weird and quirky and the comedy’s too “intelligent” but you ignore everyone, write it anyway, land yourself on the Blacklist and get enough buzz going that Lionsgate takes interest and then they’re like, “You know what? What do we have to lose?” and the next thing you know your tiny screenplay that never should’ve made it past the first reader is now paying for your new 2000 square foot loft on Venice Beach…. Well, maybe not Venice Beach. But between 11th and 18th street in Santa Monica.

Animal Cruelty is a strange little beast – a munchkin of a satire that pokes fun at both sides of activism. And let’s be honest. Activism is ripe for being poked at. Hell, I’m all for standing up for what you believe in, but there’s definitely a line activists cross. Most of the time, it’s more about the activist than what they’re activing about. Full disclosure: I used to work next to the Federal Building where someone was protesting every single weekend. It made it impossible to find a parking spot! I grew to hate those damn protesters. I even considered protesting their protests. And if I were someone who took initiative, I very well might’ve done that. Which is why I enjoyed Animal Cruelty. It finally allowed me to live a little bit of that dream.

Paul Nemser is 45, balding, and makes his living writing angry articles at the Vanguard Newspaper. Nemser is haunted by his father, a great reporter who won the Pulitzer. When The Vangaurd decides to cover an Animal Testing Laboratory protest, Nesmer sees a chance to write about something meaningful – something that will finally get him recognized. But instead of giving him the story, his boss gives it to the younger better-looking Mark. Nemser seethes but can do nothing.

All the way across town we meet Georgie, a 16 year old kid who’s so smart he dropped out of high school. As he tells his only friend, Rajiv: “I’m an autodidact, Rajiv. Do you know what that means? It means I teach myself. Do you know how I know that word? I taught it to myself.” Georgie drifts around aimlessly, spending most of his time at McDonald’s throwing french fries against the wall for his own amusement.

Lynda, a local reporter who’s abnormally obsessed with Paul McCartney, wants the local Animal Testing Laboratory shut down pronto. Because, like, animals get hurt in there and stuff. So she stages a protest in front of the building that somehow attracts almost everyone within a five mile radius. This hapens to be the same event The Vanguard newspaper was sent over to cover. But as she pounds out phrases like “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy!”, the fry-flinger Georgie is drifting by. Seemingly out of boredom, he yanks off his shirt and writes on his chest, “Pro Animal Testing!” and begins screaming out his own catch phrases, which admit that Lynda is hot but that what she’s saying sucks. For this oh so brief period of time, Georgie becomes the face *for* animal testing. Nemser, who sneaked here against his newspaper’s wishes, sees the potential for a great story.

Nemser follows Georgie home and asks him if he can write a story about him protesting. But since Georgie hates protests, he’s annoyingly appalled by his own protest, and therefore refuses to go along with it. Nemser, glimpsing the end of his career, makes the drastic decision to write the story anyway. It ends up being a huge success that spurns all sorts of controversy. Nemser is catapulted to the top of the reporter totem pole and ordered to do a follow-up. In the meantime, the public reacts by congregating around Georgie’s house and holding up signs that call for his death.

No matter how hard Nemser begs Georgie to continue his protest though, Georgie refuses. He can care less if all those animals are saved. A little later we learn that Georgie’s father was one of those batshit crazy activists, the kind that live for anything that allows you to fight the system. And so instead of raising his son and providing for his wife, his father tied himself to a tree for five years. So no thank you, Georgie says. He won’t be protesting anything…

Or will he?

Animal Cruelty wins points for its original premise alone and most of it is pretty unique. But it’s not without fault. The quirkiness that works so well in the first and most of the second acts, wears thin as we approach the latter parts of the screenplay. I see this a lot with scripts that forgo traditional storytelling in favor of humor or “quirkiness”. Playing everything up for laughs leaves little room to advance the story. And if you don’t have enough story at the beginning of your screenplay, there’s not going to be any at the end either.

Still, it was nice to read something different for once. And Sachs has a unique sense of humor that leaves you laughing most of the time. Lynda’s strange obsession with Paul McCartney was particularly funny. And when Nemser pisses her off by telling her that John was a better songwriter than Paul, the script was running on all cylinders. In this scene, one of the scientists is showing Georgie and Nemser around their testing laboratory:

[scrippet]
INT. HUNTINGDON LAB – LATER
Bergstrom takes Georgie and Nemser on a tour through the lab. Everywhere they go, scientists and ASSISTANTS are packing things into boxes, preparing to leave.

BERGSTROM
(walking and talking)
Here we were developing a drug to treat Alzheimer’s…This was a rat experiment for a novel Parkinson’s treatment…This was a comprehensive monkey trial of a new multiple sclerosis vaccine.

He opens a cage and a MONKEY grabs hold of him.

BERGSTROM (CONT’D)
And this little fellow is named Mr. Gibbs. He’s been with us for nearly a decade, and he’s one of our favorite pals around here. He and I have become very, very close.
(to the monkey)
Say hi, Mr. Gibbs!

An ASSISTANT looks up from his desk a few feet away.

ASSISTANT
Mr. Gibbs died during an experiment yesterday. That’s Boris. Bergstrom doesn’t bat an eye.

BERGSTROM
Say hi, Boris!
[/scrippet]
A great change of pace in a pool of scrips that seem to be written by the same hand. If you’re into stuff that’s a different and are searching for a few laughs, check this one out.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] barely kept my interest
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Never forget the power of showing and not telling, especially when it involves a potentially melodramatic backstory revelation. We discussed this in Due Date already. But the ideal way is always to *show* instead of *tell*. Nemser’s dad used to be a great reporter. But instead of Nemser disclosing this to another character, or another character disclosing it to him, we see Nemser sifting through some old black and white photos. And there’s his dad, marching with Martin Luther King. That tells us everything we need to know about him. And we don’t have to endure some cringe-worthy dialogue in the process.

So I’m doing something different next week. I want to give four writers a chance to get some exposure. The only catch is you have to have agency representation and not yet have sold a script. If you meet those requirements, send me your script, your agency, and a logline. I’ll take the four most interesting loglines and review those scripts Monday-Thursday. If you don’t want your script posted or you won’t be able to take a potentially negative review, then you shouldn’t participate. I know a lot of you unrepresented writers are crying foul here but there’s a reason I’m only allowing represented writers. First, I don’t want to be inundated with 10,000 e-mails. But more importantly, this is an exercise to review scripts from writers who *were* able to land representation, but have not yet been able to sell a script. What’s the difference in quality between a represented and an unrepresented writer? What’s the difference in quality between a represented writer and a represented writer with a sale? Is the difference merely a matter of luck? That’s what I want to explore. Who knows? Maybe we’ll find something great. Send the scripts to this e-mail: Carsonreeves2@gmail.com. There is no guarantee your script will be chosen but you have my word that I will delete all scripts I don’t use. Deal?

Okay, now let’s make one of you guys a millionaire.

Edit: I’ve decided to allow Manager representation as well. Though the choices will be weighted to favor agency representation.

Accepting submissions until: Saturday, August 1st

Early Edition – still editing.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: When Stan is given a one night “pass” from his fiance to have as much sex as he wants, all hell breaks loose.
About: Spec script that just sold Friday. Lionsgate picked it up. Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg (writers of Harold and Kumar 1, directors of Harold and Kumar 2) attached to direct.
Writer: Joshua Friedlander (draft dated July 6, 2009 – 115 pages)

What some of you might not know is that the spec market is disastrous right now. Absolutely nothing is selling. I think a month went by without a single spec sale. The studio coffers were closed. Laptops were shut down. Writers refused to subject their material to the harsh market. But then a script came along. A script by one Joshua Friedlander that gave writers across the globe hope again. And what was it that changed Hollywood’s mind? Why a script about a one-night stand of course. Makes sense when you think about it. The people in this town aren’t exactly relationship friendly. But was One Night Stan that good? Or did Hollywood just get bored and feel like they had to pull the trigger on something? There are only so many comic books you know. At some point you gotta buy original material.

Stan is a nice caring 20-something who’s lived a life full of long relationships. Yeah, he’s the friend in your group you call “Relationship Guy.” Stan loves being the relationship guy. The crazy confusing disease-ridden rock’em sock’em singles scene just doesn’t suit him. Stan is most happy when he’s sharing his life with a woman. And he’s about to marry the woman of his dreams, Julie. Julie is seemingly just like Stan – a responsible committed sweet person. They’re best friends with Russel and Marie, a former couple who still live together and Neal and Karin, a slightly older couple who own the video game company Stan works at. During a night of slightly excessive drinking, the dreaded “number” comes up. As in “the number of people you’ve slept with.” One by one people start revealing their numbers and when they get to Julie, we find out that she’s slept with over 30 guys. This is all sorts of news to Stan, who, no matter how hard he tries, can’t seem to get the number out of his head. Later on he presses her for details, and it only gets worse (or better – depending on your perspective).
[scrippet]
INT. STAN’S BMW – LATER

STAN
Before I answer, can we clear something up? I just wanna make sure that your number includes all your partners. That’s every guy. There’s not like an addendum to that list, of guys you just blew?

JULIE
No. Except with my first boyfriend, I’ve never been one to just fool around. I always go all the way. So that number is all the guys I’ve had intercourse with.

STAN
Okay.

JULIE
That number doesn’t include girls.

Stan looks like he might faint.

STAN
Here we go.

JULIE
Don’t freak out. I’ve only had one same sex experience.

STAN
You slept with one girl?

JULIE
It was one experience, but there were actually five of us that participated.

STAN
Five at once?!

JULIE
Yeah.

STAN
Five?! I’ve only been with four women! You’ve had sex with more women than I have!

JULIE
No. I’m included in the five. There were four others.

STAN
Oh, so you’ve had sex with as many women as I have! That makes me feel much better.

JULIE
It was all one night. A sorority thing. We were drunk, there were five of us that got together on a lark.

STAN
You had a lesbian orgy on a lark?
[/scrippet]

I don’t know why, but “girlfriends who just may be super-sluts” humor always makes me laugh. So I was onboard from the get-go. But “One Night Stan” still had to maneuver through some tricky waters as we have to buy into some iffy motivational logic. As Stan becomes increasingly self-conscious about his lack of sexual partners, Julie gets it in her head that he should sow his wild oats. So she offers him one night to go out and have as much sex as he can. Which technically wouldn’t be a “one night” stand. Because there are potentially multiple people involved in the night. That’s like a fraction-night stand isn’t it? Actually, that’s a good question. If you have sex with multiple people in one night, what “stand” is that? I’m confused. Anyway, Julie tells him to sleep with as many girls as he wants as long as it’s before sunrise tomorrow morning. Of course, as we men know, just because you’ve been given permission to have sex, doesn’t mean you’ll actually get any sex. Believe me, I wish I could use that line. “Hey, I’ve been given a free pass tonight. Will you have sex with me?” Please allow there to be a world where that works. Anyway, it’s in Stan’s desperate attempts to lay some pipe that the script takes off.

At first reluctant, his buddies convince him that this is the best thing that could ever happen to a man and if he doesn’t take advanage of it they’ll kill him. His very first opportunity is with a MILFish client of his video game company. Stan makes a tentative move on Milfy only to find out that this isn’t a MILF at all. It’s a TILF. As in “A transfender I’d like to fuck”. I don’t know how many of you have ever been out with a TILF before but it can be a bit of a shock to the system. Which Stan finds out firsthand as the TILF puts his hand on her penis. Ultimately Stan decides not to have sex with the Tilf. He then rushes back home to target the apartment complex slut. She agrees to have sex with him, but only if it can be a three-way…with another guy. Stan figures sex is sex and agrees, but when a third sword swashbuckles onto the ship, Stan figures enough is enough. Next is a trip to the local club with his buddies where they find the trashiest girl on the dance floor (a self-proclaimed nymphomaniac). She needs to have sex *all the time* so they go back to her trailer. Just as they’re about to have sex, Stan notices her two children staring up at them. He figures children watching mommy have sex isn’t cool and leaves. Next up is my favorite sequence of the script, “Book Club Girl”. His friends convince him that there are tons of sluts at the bookstore so he goes there only to stumble into a weird book club. He immediately begins chatting up a really cute girl. But the girl is acting strange and keeps asking him what his favorite book is. When she’s 100% clear that his favorite book is also her favorite book, she takes him home. It is there that Stan learns that the book was actually code for a particularly…specific sex act. If stuff like this really happens, you won’t catch me at Barnes and Noble anytime soon. When all hope is lost, what’s left to do? Hire a hooker of course. Needless to say, that doesn’t go according to plan either.

In the meantime, Julie starts having doubts about whether she did the right thing. This leads to a total meltdown where she questions whether she’s really over her one true love. So while Stan’s out there desperately trying to get laid, Julie pays a visit to her old boyfriend to get closure. As sunrise nears, both are in danger of cheating on the person they love, and this seemingly smart decision by Julie very well might end their relationship forever (she should’ve consulted me. Letting your boyfriend bang other women tends to have negative effects on a relationship).

Here’s my problem with One Night Stan. It’s really hard to buy into the premise. I talk about this in a review I did for another script called “Permission.” I simply don’t know anybody in my life who would allow someone they loved to have a one night stand with someone else. Do you? I understand this is a movie but there has to be some level of reality here, right? But what compounds the problem is that Stan doesn’t really want to cheat on Julie. So now you have a situation that’s hard to buy with a character that doesn’t want to do it. The motivation for him to cheat is…what? So I had a hard time getting over that setup.

But once you do get past it, One Night Stan is hilarious. Friedlander’s got the funny going on all cylinders here. I can’t tell you how many times I laughed. The whole Book Club sequence has “classic scene” written all over it. And the cool thing about “Stan” is that we haven’t seen any of these situations before. So many writers take a concept like this and basically recreate their favorite movie from top to bottom. All of the humor here felt fresh and original, which is I’m sure why “Stan” stood out from all the other contenders that crashed and burned in their attempts to land a sale this month.

Anyway, if they can somehow fix those two structural problems, I heartily endorse this jumping onto the big screen.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] barely kept my interest
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Break rules. Even the ones I tell you not to! You may have noticed that this script was 116 pages. That goes against a rule I just touted only days ago. That comedy specs should be under 110 pages. Just goes to show that I’m not always right (it’s rare – but it happens) and that every rule can be broken. I actually encourage breaking a couple of rules in each screenplay. Just don’t go breaking all of them. Pick and choose – and make sure there’s a reason behind your disobedient ways. Rule breaking tends to work a lot better when the writer knows why they’re breaking the rules.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: The most feared cop in Scotland comes to L.A. to solve a case and defeat his evil nemesis.
About: From the writers of Pierre Pierre, here comes O’Gunn, a spec that Reliance snatched up during the Cannes Film Festival (Reliance is the Bollywood company that is making a huge investment in Hollywood with the production of 20 new films). It should be noted that this is a first draft and therefore not the draft that sold. Whether there was an attempt to clean it up and make it more focused, or actually push the boundaries of taste and reason even more is anyone’s guess.
Writers: Edwin Cannistraci and Frederick Seton

Edwin and Frederick. I love you guys. I really do. If I could spend a night out getting plastered with any two writers, it would be you two. Pierre Pierre was hilarious. Couldn’t get enough of it. But what just happened here was not good. Finishing O’Gunn was like waking up with a really bad hangover. The kind where you’re in some random person’s dorm room with no memory of how you got there. Oh, and you’ve already graduated college 7 years ago. And the beautiful woman next to you isn’t a woman at all, but a man. The taste of stale beer feels permanently coated to the inside of your trachea. And you swear to yourself. *Swear* to yourself. That you’ll never drink again.

It’s hard to classify O’Gunn. I think I can safely say I’ve never read anything like it. No. No. I’ve *definitely* never read anything like it. Nor do I want to read anything like it ever again. I feel like I’ve lost at least 3 of my senses. Yes, parts of my sensory perception are definitely missing. To try and explain to you what I just went through is like a soldier trying to explain urban warfare to someone who’s never seen a gun before. I feel…violated. Not sure how anyone can physically feel pain from a script. But I felt it. The only thing that I can take away from this is that Cannistraci and Seton are so insane, that they could obviously care less what I think about their script.

Scottish cop Charlie O’Gunn was born without a mother. I know. I know. That doesn’t make a lick of sense. But if you’re going to survive the barrel of O’Gunn pointed in your face for two hours, you better throw sense out the fucking window. O’Gunn is the toughest craziest cop in the existence of mankind. Think Mel Gibson’s character in Lethal Weapon with a Scottish accent times a billion.

O’Gunn’s evil nemesis, a feminine-like British laddie named Lovejoy, has just stolen one of the most elaborate telescopes in the world and nobody knows why. O’Gunn and Lovejoy have an extensive and complicated history and it is believed he is the only one who can stop this Wimbledon-loving dentist-fearing Londonite. So O’Gunn flies to Los Angeles to find and defeat Mr. Strawberries and Cream. Once there, he meets his pansy partner, the Spaniard, “Bullet” (yes – O’Gunn and Bullet). Think of Bullet as a whiny useless version of Mandy Patinkin’s character in The Princess Bride (“You killed my father. Prepare to die”).

After O’Gunn beats the living shit out of the albino Chief of Police because all albinos are soulless devil-spawns who only want to feed off the souls of mankind, he and Bullet check out a mysterious character who works at a pet store. For some reason all the pets in the pet store are dressed up in S&M gear and are on mind-control. So when things go bad, they go really bad. The animals are released and try to obliterate the poor Bullet. Bullet barely escapes with his life. Later , they’re summoned to an elementary school where there’s a bomb threat. Unfortunately, it’s a trap, and all the kids are actually on mind control as well and try to attack O’Gunn.

Mind-control Kids are defeated, which natually means that O’Gunn and Bullet must attend a cock-fight. It gets Kentucky Fried Crazy and the cock fight turns into a human fight. O’Gunn “fists” two roosters by sticking his hands up their asses and uses them as boxing gloves. This leads to a huge car chase where O’Gunn jumps a small river. We then cut to the river where we meet two Navy high-tech dolphins with translator headgear. The dolphins start talking to each other in English. Yes, you heard that right. The dolphins start talking to each other.

After O’Gunn bangs Bullet’s sister, they get a tip that Lovejoy is at the docks. O’Gunn, who by this point has overcome his fear of albinos, asks one for directions. The albino rats him out and Lovejoy captures O’Gunn and Bullet as a result. The two are tied up in a box and thrown into the river to drown. The crafty Bullet somehow escapes but poor O’Gunn isn’t so lucky. He sinks to the bottom of the river and dies. Yes, ladies and gentleman, our main character is dead.

Or is he?

Later, at the funeral, we cut to heaven, where O’Gunn and Death square off in a game of chess. When Death is least expecting it, O’Gunn beats the shit out of him, allowing him to WAKE UP AT HIS OWN FUNERAL. Yes, O’Gunn is alive again.

O’Gunn and Bullet then go to a Lesbian strip club where they’re attacked by lesbians. Oh, by the way, Lovejoy also has a clan of ninjas working for him who are involved in most of the fights. Anyway, they finally infiltrate Lovejoy’s lair and find out what the hell it is this insane man is up to. Oh yeah, and Bullet fucks O’Gunn’s wife to get back at him for fucking his sister.

And that, my friends, was O’Gunn.

Was it funny? Ummmm…hmmm. Okay, I did laugh a few times. I particularly liked that instead of parking, O’Gunn would crash into whatever building he was going to. Outside of that, I mostly wore a puzzled expression on my face. If you like complete absurdity with no reason behind it then I’m thinking you’ll like this quite a bit. But man, it felt like Cannistraci and Seton locked themselves in a room and thought up a million things to make each other laugh…without ever checking to see if anyone else was laughing. They needed that referee in the room to say, “Okay wait a minute here guys. You’ve gone too far with this one.” O’Gunn didn’t just go off the rails. It went under-fucking-ground on a one way trip to the San Andreas Fault. This makes Balls Out look like The English Patient.

In order to be fair – because I do like these guys – I got some feedback from a few of our readers. Here are some of the things they had to say:

“I get it, it’s funny. But I don’t know if my mom would get it. Then again, I’d never let her watch this movie.”

“In the wrong hands this sort of thing turns into a Mike Myers “Austin Powers” style vehicle (my heart broke a little when “Pierre” was cast with Jim Carrey) – but in the right hands it turns into “The Jerk”, mixing scatological humor (poo+pee=tee-hee) and non-sequitor anything-for-a-laugh wordplay.”

“The writers are certainly talented, and I’m sure they believed in what they were doing. And why shouldn’t they? they write with conviction and flair. But like a couple of mad scientists they chose to create a frankenstein. A big ugly freak that can barely stand up straight, let alone walk.”

“Carson, never send me a script like this again.”

In the spirit of the recently completed British Open, I’m going to give these two a mulligan and chalk it up to too much Red Bull and the always exploratory first draft . I’m hoping number 3 in their million dollar spec sale trilogy will make up for this rather…strange experience.

Script link: No link

[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Comedy is subjective, but I’m a strong believer in grounding your comedy – no matter how outrageous it is – in some sort of reality. If there’s no reference point, something for the audience to hold on to, it becomes a lawless state of nonsense. At the point where the dolphins started talking to each other I was like, “Okay, that’s it. I don’t know what the fuck is going on anymore.”

So today we have a review of S. Craig Zahler’s script, “Incident at Sans Asylum.” Zahler is the writer of the number three script on my Top 25 list, the Western, “The Brigands Of Rattleborge.” That script is a town favorite, yet everyone’s terrified to make it. I have no idea why. Show this thing to one A-List actor and they’d die to play the part of Abraham, a character that has the potential to be one of the greatest movie characters of all time. We’re talking Hannibal Lecter territory here. But hey, you guys don’t want an Oscar? That’s cool with me. Anyway , this is one of Zahler’s earliest scripts, written in 1998 while he was still in college. He wrote the script as a directing vehicle and was actually going to shoot the movie for 75,000. I’m leaving the review in the trusted hands of Roger Balfour, a young man whose unique perspective on writing digs all the way to the bone of Zahler’s work. So take it away, Roger.

Genre: Nihilistic Horror
Premise: A group of struggling musicians who work as cooks in an asylum for the criminally insane get locked in with the inmates during a massive thunderstorm. Chaos ensues as the musicians/cooks struggle to escape and stay alive.
About: S. Craig Zahler, writer of the 2006 Black List screenplay, “The Brigands of Rattleborge”, wrote this script which has been developed by Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures in conjunction with Vertigo Entertainment. Helmed by Spanish director, Daniel Calparsoro. To be released, one presumes…
Writer: S. Craig Zahler

Caveat lector: Forgive me. I’m going to season this review with references to other horror movies and writers of the genre in order to properly convey what this script accomplishes to do. We’re going to explore the coin of this sub-genre a little and look at the ideas that are reflected on both sides of the coin.

Confession.

I’m one of those struggling screenwriters outside of LA that worships at the stone altar of “The Brigands of Rattleborge”. I live in the Bible Belt. I don’t just surround myself with books that can be categorized as Southern Gothic, I live in the environment. I’m exposed to the Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy flavor grotesquerie every day. It’s part of the atmosphere here.

It’s the temperature.

And I only read it a few weeks ago. But when I finished, I wanted to hold the screenplay up in the air like the baby Simba and shout its ultraviolent majestic grandeur from the precipice.

“Look, some dude wrote a screenplay and he used the word ‘agglutinated’ in one of the prose passages when describing dried blood and brain matter! Fuck studio readers!”

“Rattleborge” was a bizarre and compelling morality play that explored a cycle of bloodshed and violence and bloodlust. It was about revenge. It was about what revenge does to a man’s soul. It was about the consequences of revenge. It was Shakespearean. It was Greek tragedy. It was Grand Guignol. It was Southern Gothic. It was “Unforgiven” if written by Cormac McCarthy. And I loved every fuckin’ word of it.

So, I was foaming at the mouth to read another Zahler screenplay. Here’s a guy who is obviously both a bibliophile and a cinephile. He knows his literature as well as his movies. And the motherfucker can write. So when I found “Incident” in my inbox, I burned through it immediately like a junkie jonesin’ for the rock.

And if the screenplay wasn’t a PDF file on my computer, I would have hurled it against the wall in frustration and disappointment. But, it was a PDF file on my computer and I need my netbook. It’s not very useful to me if it’s in pieces.

Did you expect to be disappointed?

No. I was supposed to be shaken, thrilled. I was supposed to be aroused viscerally and cerebrally. But instead…I was puzzled. I felt like I was attacked by an angry mob of natives on some alien continent where people don’t possess souls, and they tried to cut my limbs off and fuck me in the eye-sockets. And after the initial shock of that faded…I felt empty. Hollow.

But…

But something had slipped under my skin, kept nagging me throughout the day. I kept turning the story over in my head like a rock in a lapidary, trying to find its meaning. Surely, what I just read had to mean something, right?

Zahler is a writer that seems to be interested in eliciting dread. Which I think is an admirable pursuit in the world of Story. Dread is a useful ingredient, a powerful emotion that burrows past a person’s mental walls and pierces the heart like a stiletto fashioned out of ice. The sensation is like being impregnated with a seed of panic and as it grows and blooms and does war against your conscious and subconscious, the war that fights against this revelation can be best described as a paralyzing sensation, a numbness that tries to protect you from the horror that elicited the dread.

Dread pairs especially well with exhilaration.

Horror movies like “Alien” or “The Descent” are good examples of this. Both stories that are more Lovecraftian in nature than most of the intentional adaptations of his work out there.

They manage to explore the concept of Lovecraftian existentialist and nihilistic horror. The realization that man is an infinitesimally small speck in the order of the universe. Or: man is insignificant in the face of the alien, the other. H.P. Lovecraft, a master at eliciting dread, was an atheist who wasn’t scared by the concept of God and the Devil; Angels or Demons. So he created a pantheon of the other, whose very existence, when exposed to man, was capable of driving the individual mad.

Of course, the stories in “Alien” and “The Descent” have different outcomes…

Sure. Ripley is the light that pierces the darkness of the other. She blows it out of the airlock and wins. In “The Descent”, Sarah’s ordeal and exposure to the other drives her mad with a hallucination of freedom, but her dramatic need to be reborn in order to overcome her family’s death is a still-birth attempt at best. She doesn’t make it out of the cave. She’s left trapped in the caves with the other, wrapped in a bundle of raw nerves and reduced to a gibbering psychological state.

But I would argue that both movies are exhilarating. Cathartic even. We faced the abyss, we ran from the abyss, we fought the abyss. When all was said and done, we walked away from the theater and were entertained. No biggie. Just a fun roller-coaster ride of a story. Go on with our lives, rejuvenated for a while by our escapist encounter with the abyss.

So what’s the moral?

Distribute some darkness and dread with that creator’s wand, and pit it against light and hope, toggle in some thrills, and you have a heady potion of adventure. Adjust the contrast knobs if you want the tone to be dark fare, or lighter fare. If done right, manage to thrill an audience both viscerally and cerebrally.

But what happens when dread is the ultimate victor? What happens when dread is your only ingredient?

“Incident at Sans Asylum” happens.

It is not a ride.

It is not escapism.

It is a cold, serrated knife in the gut.

It’s watching a layer of torn skin be flayed from the bone with a potato peeler, and feeling every moment of it.

These characters are not heroes.

They are victims.

And we suffer with them.

So what’s the story?

George is a musician in his mid-twenties who moonlights as a chef at the local asylum. Seems to be a new job for him. His band-mate Max is his second-in-command and they spend a lot of time together, working in the kitchen preparing cafeteria-style meals for the populace of the institution. When we first meet them they’re pissed at a younger, undisciplined drummer of the band, Ricky. Why? Ricky was a no-show for a studio session that they all saved up hard-earned money for because of his questionable taste in women. Ricky also works with them in the asylum as a cook, and most of the humor in the script (which is kept to a minimum) is derived from George and Max making fun of Ricky and his dubious taste in the female gender. We’re also introduced to William, a likable Hispanic employee who works diligently for George as a kitchen grunt and is a bit ostracized by the other guys, especially Max, because he’s not a member of the band.

There’s a simple, naturalistic feel to the scenes and the dialogue. Spare, with the highlights of these scenes being the detail applied to George’s job as a chef. Zahler captures the weird, limanel state-of-being of the struggling artist: George and his band have a gig at a venue where they have to cover an extra set because a scheduled band dropped out at the last minute. Which means their gig is going to run to 2 am. Good news for the band, but George also has to be back at the asylum at 5 am to oversee a shipment of product that is set to arrive.

The details are right. The lack of sleep. The tedium and mundanity that accompanies chopping vegetables or cleaning up blood because the plastic bag that contains meat product ripped and it made a mess everywhere. Pretty ordinary stuff that chef’s deal with everyday, but the fact that they are mentioned in the script gives the scenes and characters a sense of verisimilitude.

This sense of simply being and living and working is shattered when a thunderstorm blows out the generators and fries up all of the electrical wiring in the building.

This means two things: (1) No more lights, and (2) The electronic security doors leading to the outside world no longer operate, and there is no way to open them.

J.B., the main security dude/orderly, needs the cooks to help him escort the inmates back to their cells from the cafeteria before things start heading south. Already, some of these mentally fragile inmates are starting to panic because the thunderstorm interrupted their mealtime and habitual sense of institutionalized routine, and more importantly, there is no fucking light anymore.

So the cooks argue about what they should do, some opting to barricade themselves in the kitchen, while George and Max decide to help J.B.

And of course, things go horribly wrong.

As violence erupts within the darkened walls of the asylum, we get the sensation that some of the alpha’s of this insane-convicted-felon populace have taken over and they have some plans for these cooks who have been preparing meals for them for the past few days.

What about the structure? Does Zahler do his own thing again?

Kind of. Zahler does eschew the traditional, time-tested 3-Act screenplay structure and does his own thing. But I get the sense that he turned to classic stories of the horror genre found in literature and studied what made them work. How they were put together. Hell, they were good enough in that medium, why try to interface it with the Hollywood way?

This is essentially a tale told in 2 Acts. With Act 1 being a 40-page setup; Act 2 plays out like a brutal and tragic 50 page survival mode.

Most comparable movie in structure, theme and style I can think of is “Wolf Creek”.

Let’s get to it already. Was it scary?

It’s pretty fuckin’ terrifying, dudes. Think about it. You’re a kitchen grunt who works in the cafeteria of an asylum for the criminally insane. A dark storm hits and transforms the asylum into a haunted house with no exits and no lights. Several of these inmates are roaming the haunted house. They raid the kitchen, find sharp objects, and begin attacking all the institution employees they can find.

As the characters look for asylum within the *cough* asylum, there’s even shades of zombie horror. Kind of like a dreadful game of hide and seek. They catch glimpses of the pale, naked flesh of the lunatics as they roam the halls. Some are harmless, some attack on whim, others have some kind of fucked up plans for our characters. Except, you know, these ain’t zombies. These are people. There’s nothing supernatural about them.

And that’s the idea. The only monsters in this story are the ones within ourselves. There’s probably nothing more revolting than the depravity and sickness a broken mind is capable of.

The realism and brutality and chiaroscuro murk gives the story a distinctive 70’s cinema vibe.

It sounds pretty good. Why didn’t you like it?

A few reasons which could be chalked up to a matter of taste. I’m not a fan of the genre. I don’t like Nihilistic Horror when it’s followed to its logical conclusion: I don’t like watching violence as it’s committed against a protagonist for the sole purpose of taking away any and all motivation for the protagonist to merely stay alive.

Here’s the deal. George isn’t a hero. He’s a victim. He exists to be broken down and ground into dust.

There’s a key scene that brought to mind Gregg Araki’s “The Doom Generation”. If you’ve seen it you probably already know what I’m talking about. Except this castration is performed with poultry shears instead of pruning shears.

The most disturbing part of the flick is that this is a horror movie where the final coup de grace is the protagonist offing himself. Sure, there’s a character in “The Exorcist” who kills himself. Father Karras kills himself, but he does so because he’s trying to kill the Devil. Even if he was driven mad by the Devil and opted to kill himself, it would be an act that would be seen as a man who was driven mad by a demon and was looking for respite.

George kills himself because he’s been emasculated, both literally and spiritually, by his fellow man. He’s a victim of the violent volition of sick minds, which any human being is capable of, and he refuses to recover after his ordeal because he feels like he has nothing to live for. Even though he survived, he comes to the conclusion that his life is over. George loses the will to live because his sense of peace has been irrevocably violated. There is no more sanctuary for George. His sense of asylum has been stripped away, stolen.

The only escape from the horror and dread is death.

And I don’t like that.

What did you like?

The details and the foreshadowing: The Shakespearean technique of evoking and harnessing storms and weather to parallel the emotions, moods and future of the characters.

I liked that the exposure to the inmates is limited to mealtimes, where cooks are separated from the rest of the institution by a plexi-glass window. At first, we never see any of the inmates. We only hear them being directed through the line by an officer.

In fact, whenever they hear ghastly screams coming from the bowels of the asylum, the cooks are so accustomed to it’s just white noise.

The symbology. Zahler knows what he’s doing. Some interesting stuff going on with violence and images. Particularly an image involving a calf’s head and a decapitated body.

There’s a brazen climatic scene of suggested violence and horror that involves an oven. If the director is capable, this sequence will become part of cult-cinema history.

I like that someone is writing dark, cerebral genre fare other than the Nolan brothers. Stuff that feels like it’d be as much at home in literature as it would be on screen. I’d like to see Zahler take a stab at “Blood Meridian” for Ridley Scott, or maybe even adapt Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast” trilogy into an HBO miniseries.

[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I Learned: Theme, theme, theme. Your choice of theme can either invigorate an audience, or alienate an audience. Nihilistic themes always seem to come out of a dark place, and when followed to their logical conclusion, descend into an even darker place. As storytellers, we have a responsibility when it comes to deciding what kind of story we want to tell. Again, this is a matter of taste, but I like to think that stories of hope are more palatable than stories of despair.

Also – I was reminded of a quote concerning the distinction between horror and terror. Anne Radcliffe wrote, “I apprehend that neither Shakespeare nor Milton, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreader evil.“

Boris Karloff put it in simpler terms. Terror is anticipating the monster behind the door. Horror is the sense of shock and revulsion upon seeing the monster. Zahler seems to be a master of both, and uses both techniques impressively. This is an apt distinction for anyone who wants to know the secret to creating suspense.