CRANK 2 AND ITS PLACE IN THE COSMOS OF SCUM

CRANK : HIGH VOLTAGE
(and its place in the cosmos of scum)

By Gene Gregorits

Crank: High Voltage is a dirty little backseat hate-fuck of a movie. […] You will walk out of the theater seven times dumber than when you walked in.
Paijiba.com
Nearly all of the women in the movie, including Smart, are shot in hard light that highlights every skin flaw - they’re made to look as cheap and ugly as possible.
-Salon.com
Crank 2: High Voltage practically begs to be passionately loathed by absolutely everyone, with the notable exception of antisocial teenage boys. It evokes an air of lavatorial sleaziness.
-IMDB.com

It was a combination of things that caused me to lose what little interest I had left in the fringe horror / exploitation genre several years ago. There were the Kill Bill films (which confirmed if not the end of Tarantino’s slothful and overextended prank/joyride of a career, then at least the end of the idiotic critical assertion that one could view QT as a young Scorsese. These films betrayed Quentin, like nothing before, finally, as a masturbating half-wit), and there was also the emergence of a new strain of splatter films, those being made by quasi-frat boys like Eli Roth and James Wan, a trend popularly (and justifiably) termed “gore-porn.” Exhausted by this, and perhaps feeling a little jilted, I missed out onCrank, a mainstream aberration and cult hit starring British action thug Jason Stathem and a lusciously white trash ex-model named Amy Smart. Now, keep in mind, several million intellectually lazy and cinematically ignorant young people turned Boondock Saints into a cash cow for the studio who took Miramax’s sloppy seconds after the Weinsteins wisely dumped the project. Saints was an unfortunate film by a scourged Boston monkey-boy known as Troy Duffy, a man who makes Eli Roth look like Orson Welles. Thusly, the significance of the term “cult hit” has been brutally lowered, and were it not for another circumstantial crash landing in dirty old Motown, where I had access to my beloved Cinemark 16 megaplex (the greatest second run theater in the world), I might otherwise remain ignorant to the Neveldine/Taylor films, the 2nd of which, in terms of sheer audacity, far surpasses any other trash film phenomenon since Pulp Fiction. Crank (2006) was an inventively ill-willed, eagerly reprehensible perversion of the action film genre worth well more than a cursory sweep. In hindsight, after absorbing the unspeakable sensory rape of its sequel, and a curiously over-ripe meld of Re-Animator and Fight Club written by Nev/Taylor called Pathology, the intentions of these men became clearer. Crank: High Voltage, in particular, serves as a wake-up call to the few who held out for both pure cinema and pure trash, amid all the ersatz fan tributes and assorted juvenilia that has been allowed to pass for a cult film renaissance every year since innumerable young film critics, perhaps woefully over-eager for their generation’s own Cassavettes, proclaimed Tarantino a genius beyond reproach. CHV, much more the 2009 equivalent of Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S. or Doctor Butcher, M.D. than either half of 2007’sGrindhouse, is a supremely debasing experience, a propulsive, id-sourced mortaring of sleazoid sex, third world machete violence, and high energy retro-grunge which allows for no illusions regarding the identity and agenda of its apparently porn-craven creators. Based on my admittedly trog-like field of vision, the resultant buzz hasn’t been as profuse as that which the aformentioned geek-convention howdy-boys have enjoyed, but this only makes sense. The main game now is irony, hipster melancholy, indie rock self-attention (Dave Eggers, Wes Anderson, Zack Braff et. al.) But while some critics have observed the Crank films as insults, many others see Neveldine and Taylor as messiahs, superior to other punk/ post-modern genre directors in both ambition and intelligence. While it’s easy to mistake the final shot in Crank: High Voltage (the anti-hero, burning alive, extending a middle finger to the audience) as evidence of Nev/Taylor’s seething contempt, I believe they do care, very much in fact, about the same history mined by their predecessors. Rather, it is Tarantino, Roth and Rob Zombie, who are truly communicating a hard “fuck you”. This is probably unintentional, since the whole lot of them lack the sophistication or the wit required to truly, deliberately, attack anyone or anything (Zombie in particular exhibits a blustering stupidity such as to evoke genuine sympathy). And even if these filmmakers had an interesting philosophy, or were the type to communicate any sort of serious politics in their work, it remains almost impossible to imagine them demonstrating the same passion Michael Haneke did in Funny Games. While that film stands as the most galling, contemptible example of Eurotrash piousness on record, having seen it, you do not doubt Haneke’s passion. Still, in the end, Funny Games was more offensive than not only its target, American slasher films, but also the work of Heneke’s contemporaries, such as Lars Von Trier’s insufferably arrogant “EVIL AMERICA” trilogy, begun with Dogville. So which do you prefer? The cold condescension of bourgeois art-holes, or the fetid indulgence of glorified action figure collectors? Somewhere, at a clear, safe distance from all this cynicism (both intentional and unintentional), is a couple of guys who probably drink a lot of beer, snort coke, and watch seedy 70s exploitation movies under the influence, but who also take time aside from that to truly care about the energy which made the best of those movies resonate in the popular consciousness; a couple of guys who sneeringly insist on shooting their films with cheap video cameras, the type you can purchase for a grand or so at Best Buy, because this allows them to be as unrestrained and as intimately involved with the execution of their lunacy on-set as they are with the conception of it at the drawing table. (It also allows them to fuck up a lot of cameras.) They’re as wonderfully hyperactive as their films, nurturing at all times a lust for experimentation that is utterly infectious, and as much fun to observe as the moviegoing experience allows. Best of all, they are not being hailed by illiterate Internet swine and established arts and culture hacks alike as the next big thing, however plain it is to see that in all probability they are. Of course, the big problem you doubtlessly have with my take on all of this only amounts to a lot of “why ya gotta be so tough on Quentin?”-type sentiment. Oh, dear. What ruinous heresy hath I wrought? To staunch the anger of you apologists, and if only for nostalgia’s sake, perhaps you wouldn’t mind harkening back to the halcyon days of “the NEW independent American film”, or the new American punk film in Tarantino’s case, after Alex Cox had run himself out of town, out of the country in fact…it was the birth of Miramax and in those days, the film obsessive was particularly watchful of not only that foulmouth upstart Q.T., but a handful of other young directors like Alison Anders, Alexander Rockwell, Boaz Yakin, James Gray, Lodge Kerrigan, and a long list of others. New faces sprung from every new issue of Film Threat, and many-even most-of them went on to have careers and win various degrees of acclaim. I paid close attention to those films, and those filmmakers. Generally, it was an exciting time to be a movie geek, as I’m sure it was to be a director. It was Tarantino, of course, who spearheaded this boom of “new” American cinema, and it is my contention (inevitably, it seems) that his overbearing sloth, combined with the outrageously poor quality of his work post-Jackie Brown, demands a hard re-assessment of this charismatic uber-geek and what is to be made of him all these years later as a creator of altogether shapeless, joyless, and, most of all, heartless films, films that function first and foremost astributes. These are not the American films his legions of adulatory critics foresaw, but mere tribute films; what a fan, any fan, would naturally produce, compensating with passion where skill is lacking, if given several million dollars and a crew. The will to power of fans, the blurring of those lines between fandom and artistry, the muddying of sacred waters in a culture and society that seems to thrive on the most vacuous celebrity sickness on one end, and the celebration of the amateur over the career-hardened craftsman on the other, leaves me with an overpowering queasiness, and I’ve seen it addressed only rarely (such as in Jamie Kennedy’s excruciating Heckler documentary, which is not so much a study of club hecklers, but of fandom in general). Personal vision has taken a strict backseat to the erroneous assumption that maniacal pop-trash obsession and all-consuming, nearly super-human affection for film was somehow central to a new film psychology, and a new film language, a “meta” or post-modern film. Well, there have always been post-modern films. Genres die out and get re-born again every decade or two, and any filmmaker who acknowledges this in his film has made, if not a post-modern film, then a film with a post-modern element. George Romero’s films are very much post-modern horror films, just as Alex Cox’s were post-modern punk films. Romero and Cox too, even at his most impudent understood the central conceits of his most popular works, the underlying insinuations, the menacing sarcasm, and yes, Romero and Cox are both fans, as any film director who matters is also a fan. But these two directors function as storytellers, who could, if necessary, exist outside of their own self-created universes long enough to surprise an audience that has perhaps grown too familiar with the adolescent anarchism of Cox or the sub-textual social commentaries of Romero. Tarantino, in recent films, has managed to shock us only with bombast, or, as in his Grindhouse film, unendurable banality. In Tarantino’s formative years, those that begat Reservoir Dogs and his screenplays for True Romance and Natural Born Killers, specifically, his work’s considerable camp element seemed held in check by an affection for his themes, and his characters, however borrowed either may have been. In Kill Bill and Death-Proof, we have only ciphers, and a rather depressing kind of fawning by way of spectacle and set-piece. The film world expected miracles from the man, and throughout his decline as an auteur, a backlash has been conspicuously absent. This I would accredit to an unwillingness on the part of those critics who built his reputation to admit the misguidance of their own splenetic prophecies, as well as a lazy, overweening loyalty on the part of his fans who rejoice in that kind of bonehead “one of us” group-projection epitomized by the Ramones tune “Pinhead” . This is the cult of the 70s trash film as swaggering hipster spectacle, not as art-form; of low-budget rock and roll trash as party insignia, as gang-graffiti, not as gutter-level American history. Tarantino and his ilk practice the gross mishandling of that history in their work, in which it is pawed over with trembling fingers as would be an old promotional card at a Fangoria convention. These are myopic and pedestrian fetishists, not even credible as film zealots. Everything vaunted in this world is without depth or wit, and they have the vision of tunnel rats. If Tarantino had stopped making films after Pulp Fiction, he would have found himself the cinematic equal of those one- or two-hit-wonder pop singles he champions in the soundtracks of his films, but a rather unique example of this. On the impact and vibrance of those films, years later, with the tacky imitators only beginning to die off, we would have been left to wonder about this spastic man-child and what he would have eventually done with all that pop trash he’d scarfed down in lieu of film school, which had gestated in him and emerged as 2 or 3 or 4 films that exploded over the landscape as bona fide pop sensations. Pulp Fiction’s arresting irreverence would have aged better than it has without the looming specter of that increasingly regressive, post-Jackie Brown, middle aged Tarantino. The poor aging of Pulp Fiction is not simply due to the man’s imitators (and Jesus, they were everywhere….still are), but the way that all pop fads age. Pulp Fiction was always destined to become one of those very fads, but it needn’t have spoiled so quickly. If films and filmmakers do start evolving a bit faster in the coming years (which is to say, if directors begin making real films again, as opposed to hipster films or tribute films), Tarantino will be Hollywood’s Spuds Mackenzie by the quarter-century, whereas other outdated iconoclasts commonly acknowledged as innovators of film language, such as Cassavettes, or Godard, or Kenneth Anger, or, more to the point, Sam Peckinpah (all “pop” names in their day), survive the passage of time as more than funky relics, despite the more glaring evidence of their work’s antiquity, because, if for no other reason, they were organic. The central conceit of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, wherein the soil of a magic Indian burial ground that returned the dead to life, having gone sour, produces only malefic zombies, offers an interesting parallel to the story of Quentin Tarantino and his small cadre of modern cult film auteurs. Of course, Crank High Voltage will not result in the seismic aftershocks of Pulp Fiction, and it will not be taken seriously as a landmark of neo-exploitation cinema. But at least it’s not a tribute film. An attempt to sum up this ungainly reject of a movie is as beguiling as Pere Ubu records must have been for music critics back in the late 70s. While both of the Crankfilms are not ashamed or at all reticent to reveal their sources, the energy of the films, and the simplicity of them, however aberrant, establish them as classic entertainments in their own respective rights. Not explicitly beholden to cult sources, and as far as possible from the formula action flick, these films strive for sovereignty. They are indigenously “midnight”, as “midnight” as Eraserhead or Vanishing Point. It’s almost as if, on the charge of adrenaline which defines the Crank franchise, there just wasn’t time to get too cozy with any one film, or record, any one trash strewn ghetto, or any affection for such childish things…the order of the day, in Neveldine / Taylor’s world, is chaos. “We are the devil,” you can almost hear them announce, once a gangbanger has been anally raped with a shotgun in CHV’s opening moments. “And we are here to do the devil’s business.” The Crank films, in just a few years, may not even be remembered outside of a fiercely outspoken cult following. So why am I compelled to cite a racist, sexist, video game-influenced and ragingly brain-damaged atrocity exhibition as the strongest evidence of new blood in the pop wasteland since I pre-maturely blew a gasket over Donnie Darko 7 years ago? Oh, let me count the ways.

1. Crank: High Voltage has not one iota of pretension. It does not marinate endlessly in the egos of its creators. Every excess the film indulges in is somehow in the service of enhancing its own vileness, but Neveldine/Taylor’s is an exuberant and joyful vileness. It brings to mind the 2003 raunch-fest Spun, which, of course, is damn near a masterpiece, as well as the anti-social big-dick death-spasms of Sam Peckinpah and James Ellroy, 70s punk at its most mercurial, and the wailing tragedy at the heart of other punk films like Chopper, Trainspotting, and Wonderland.
2. Crank: High Voltage seems poised on the brink of an aneurysm in every possible way, and its attitude is simply, “if you aren’t ready for attack, GET OUT NOW”. For its heinously infantile efforts to create the most wretchedly overbaked and non-stop perversions and mutations of already perverse English slang, the film deserves an award of some kind. With stand-out beauties like “I kiss and hug all the pussy, you go kill cocksucka’,” “Fag whore…I bitch-fuck your ass!,” and “massive homo cunt!”, whatever import you felt your own trademark epithets and profanity carried will be diminished on impact. After CHV, “fuck you” just won’t have any zing or zap left to it. This, you see, is only one such way in which the film asserts its hideous power.
3. There are only 2 moments in CHV which begin to approach romantic sentimentality, and both moments achieve the directors’ aims with outright bravado. You momentarily forget that you are entirely surrounded by grunting rapist misogyny, neck-deep in a cesspool of Mexican gang violence, venereal sores, drug psychosis…abject human derangement and suffering as far as the eye can see. CHV’s kissing scenes are both breathtaking accomplishments, euphoria-inducing bursts of dumb sincerity that work, stupendously. Never mind the cheeky bits of porno, the propulsive collisions of sex and death, and that ever-smoldering fudge-pot of triple-backflip profanity – none of this anti-social ignorance is any match for TRUE LOVE!

Crank: High Voltage is to its predecessor what Escape From LA was to Escape From New York, and more readily, whatEvil Dead 2 was to The Evil Dead, which is to say, more. More of every conceivable low-rent gimmick, outburst, and conceit. Like those sequels, High Voltage’s tone is comparatively alien to that of the first film. Where there was once a winking but restrained irony, there is now outright belligerence. Where there was once a seeming genre adherence at work, no matter how renegade in feeling, now there is a bloodthirsty parody. Neveldine and Taylor were undeniably weaned on these films, and they pay tribute not with masturbatory flailing or in a repellant spectacle of teenage lust. This duo juices themselves and their work on the thing which had always been central to their sources: unbridled heathen dementia; outright amoral thrust. This is not a celebration which belongs confined to a Chiller Theater geek congregation. It is a modern-day continuation of that lowlife impulse to get up as close as possible to the car wreck, the sex and violence and psychosis and especially pathos of killers and thieves and perverts, just close enough to avoid getting one’s own hands dirty or putting one’s physical self at risk. The Crank films encourage this in the viewer with their own unique integrity, and with the kind of socially and morally irresponsible mirth, the mirth of the criminally insane, which is meant to invigorate as much as alienate: precisely what all increasingly bland and brainless sub-culture, be it musical, literary, or cinematic, forbids itself enjoyment of every year.
Sure, like Ash in The Evil Dead, Jason Statham’s Chev Chelios, a hitman, is subjected to endless torture, usually for laughs. And like John Carpenter’s Snake Plissken, he is an irredeemable sociopath. Neveldine / Taylor acknowledge the bigger picture of the trash they suckled from. They do it with class and fire and a big shit-eating grin. They are not about the memory of old movies, and they are not wallowing in old fandom. They are devoted simply to the realization of X-rated velocity, in the same rough and diseased manner that the 70s films were. Neveldine / Taylor are devoted to raising pure fucking Hell.
Isn’t that a lot more honest? Isn’t that a damn sight more respectful? Every executed ploy in Crank to establish a sense of personal violation is acrobatic in its willful wrongness, but so are the love scenes, which welcome you to share in the same knowing passion. The dumbest and most violent wide-release film in years is also among the most honest. What ultimately shocks one about Crank: High Voltage is in realizing that it is every bit as pure an outburst of human negativity as Taxi Driver or The Wild Bunch. Films don’t come anywhere near as assaultive as this, nor as fiendishly pure.
Seeing it on the big screen this week was a high water mark for me, as a viewer and as a critic. In years to come, I can only hope that it is resurrected for the midnight screenings it was so obviously meant for. Whatever these guys come up with next, it’s bound to merit serious consideration, and more importantly, hope.

I don’t know where I should agree, shouldn’t agree, or be a little disturbed (please say you did a copy-and-pasted this article).

Nah, man….the product of my own warped and fevered brain matter, is this.

You will walk out of the theater seven times dumber than when you walked in….

7 just aint enough.

I’m a big admirer of Neveldine/Taylor, though I think Gamer is their best so far.

But this is quite a crazy piece of writing. Not meant as an insult or praise. It’s feverish.

Thanks guys.

Yeah. HIGH VOLTAGE pales in comparison to CRANK and GAMER.

I’d say Crank pales in comparison to High Voltage and Gamer :)

What I cant wait to see, is just how different their Ghost Rider 2 will be from the first film. It’ll absolutely be better.

I disagree. And I more or less had to jump ship on Nev/Taylor after GAMER, which i felt to be a very weak effort, an intellectually bankrupt conflation of Hardware (90) and The Running Man (87). I’ve only seen it once, very drunk, and at a shitty drive-in with bad projection, but I studied the film closely, as best I was able at the time, and it just did NOT get me off. I disliked Keira Sedgewick, and outright loathed the dick from Dexter as the central villain…it was hackwork, pure and simple.

And GHOST RIDER 2 does not exactly get my dick hard. I probably won’t even bother to see it. I suspect that their Jonah Hex would have been as bad or worse than the train wreck that got made last year. My only hope is that they are doing these shit projects just to raise money for CRANK 3D.

But if CRANK 3D isn’t intentioned to plumb the depths of the psycho-sexual abyss to an even greater extent than the first 2 films, well, they may as well not even produce it.