PBS recently has been airing some old reruns of Siskel & Ebert shows, and they’re pretty fun to watch. The shows start like they’re a new movie review show, with these young movie critics, and they say hello and introduce themselves, but then they admit they’ve tricked us into watching an old rerun. But that’s okay, because these are a great cultural time capsule! A lot of these shows come from before I was even going to see movies without my parents coming along, so many of these movies I’ve either never seen, or else I saw them much later on video. But the best thing about these old shows is how these guys rail against movie trends they don’t approve of: especially slasher movies!
Man, these guys are hilarious in their scornful disapproval of slasher movies! Not that slasher movies are great or anything, but they were a pretty small part of the market, and ignoring them altogether would have been a better way to keep people from seeing them. I saw a documentary about the Friday the 13th series, and they showed what has to be my favorite movie review of all time: Roger Ebert saying: “…Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, an immoral and reprehensible piece of trash… (etc.)” (I’ll include a link to this review below.) So then the producers of that movie say about the review that it was so great for business, that it was “a badge of honor”, and that: “you can’t buy great publicity like that!” (Or some such thing.) I wondered if Siskel & Ebert had any idea how much free advertising they were giving the slasher genre by railing against it? Maybe that was their plan all along, and they got a cut of the box office? (That’s a joke! I’m sure they hated those movies; but like I said: ignoring them would have been the best policy to discourage attendance. Having a couple of old nerdy squares say something is naughty and awful is like catnip for teenagers! They should have said they were “a great artistic achievement” to repel young moviegoers in droves! You’ve got to use reverse psychology with kids.)
But those with a bully pulpit and a rant rarely demur from using it, whatever the effect may be. Perhaps they simply loved the sound of their own voices too much to resist. I like Siskel & Ebert both very much, but I think they were way off base bitching about slasher movies back then, and they only sound more ridiculous when I hear the old shows now. Many of you reading may not know about the ministers who railed against Rock ‘N’ Roll music in the 1950s and 60s, but it’s much the same in feel. In fact, these rants against slasher movies sound to me now very much like frustrated parents in the 1970s and 80s yelling at their kids to: “Turn down that damn music! It just sounds like noise to me!” (Same as today, I’ll bet!) Or worse yet, they sound like an old man yelling at kids, inviting them to: “Get off my lawn, you damn kids!” It just makes kids enjoy things more when authority figures hate them. Didn’t they know that? (They were professional critics, and as such, they should have known. In fact, I think I remember seeing one {old one} last month where Roger Ebert says that he knows he just ought not to mention it, but… {And then he rails against slasher movies for 10 minutes, drumming up tons of business for them.} Funny, that.)
When railing against slasher movies in general, Siskel & Ebert used the usual feminist reading of them: that they punished free-thinking women, were sexist, misogynist, etc. They may have been sexist, but I’d say it was purely incidental. You see, young men were the primary audience for such movie fare, and this demographic wanted to see sex and female nudity in movies, as well as violence and gore. Well, these filmmakers were working on a tight budget: can you think of a way to give the audience all those things at once very cheaply? Hey, I know: let’s have young couples getting it on, we’ll show the girl naked, and then the killer strikes! That’s all it ever was, and all the scholarly academic papers can make as much logical sense as they want to, but it’s still just mental masturbation. Slasher films do what they do for a specific reason, and it all has to do with making money with a specific target demographic. And guess what: they all made money! That’s how I know I’m right about this. Well, that, and all the filmmakers say that’s why they did it, too.
But as much fun as these movie reviews are, what it shows more than anything else is that these guys didn’t get (as in understand) these movies any more than those preachers got that “devil’s music” in the 1950s. And that just proves they were squares. There’s nothing wrong with squares, unless you’re a teenage kid; and then, whatever they say, the opposite must be true! And if you enjoy watching fuddy-duddies complain about what those crazy kids are into, you should seek out these old Siskel & Ebert reruns on PBS! (Hey, maybe they’re showing these to prove to Republicans they shouldn’t defund them!)
Here’s a link to the Siskel & Ebert review I mentioned (watch the whole thing: it’s great!):
