Hitler & Halloween...It's a Winning Combination!

Goose(bump)step into the season!

First off, this week’s column: how idiot Boomer and Gen X conservatives created a plague of Zoomer Hitler fanboys.

Just boys enjoying the company of boys. The tall one grew up to be Milo Yiannopoulos

If’n you like it, please consider buying me a beer!

The column: Fatigue Heil

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Now to the REALLY spooky stuff! As my reg’lar readers know, horror movies are my passion…way more than politics. But they don’t pay me to write about horror movies, so politics it is…except on Halloween when I indulge my passion publicly.

If you don’t care for the topic, don’t unsub like Don Knotts wetting the bed. It’s only for Halloween, okay? You can just not read on. How easy is that?

For the rest of you…

I rarely watch new horror films all the way through.

Because I’ve seen it all before.

I mean, I’ve seen it all before. Every cliché, every “surprise twist,” every trope. I lose interest in new horror flicks within the first ten minutes, because I either know where the film’s going, or I become aware that the auteur’s some artsy-fartsy asshole who’s purposely taking me nowhere (one of those “it’s not the destination but the journey” lazily-written no-explanation no-resolution films that have been popping up with great frequency these days).

I can’t recall the last new horror film I recommended to you guys, but I think it was The Sadness, the 2021 Taiwanese zombie/infection film. I can say with 100% assuredness that The Sadness is the last new horror film I saw twice, several months apart.

But recently I saw one that I liked so much, I viewed it twice in the same night. I can’t remember the last time I’ve done that.

MADS (sometimes written as MadS) is a new French film on Shudder (free if you do the 7-day trial period, which I do once a year because I’ve seen all the older stuff so I only revisit each Halloween when they add their best new content).

I’ll tell ya, I REALLY enjoyed this one.

I don’t wanna spoil it for you; if you’re so inclined, watch it (as I said, it won’t cost you a penny if you do the 7-day trial).

The film is shot in one continuous take, though not really (one-take films, like 1917, are never really one-take), but I only caught one obvious instance where two takes were blended together, so it’s by-and-large pretty craftily done (there’s a scene with a train that’s breathtaking from a single-shot perspective, and on the second viewing I found myself trying to puzzle out all the rigging that must’ve been necessary to keep the single-take moving as it did from foot to car to bike to scooter).

MADS is a movie that speeds you into the plot. No dialogue-filled character “set up;” you’re rushed right into the world of teenager Romain in a small French town in what used to be called Alsace-Lorraine. It’s Romain’s 18th birthday, and he stops at his dealer’s place to do some lines of a particularly powerful blend of coke before heading out in his dad’s fancy car to attend his birthday party — a boisterous house rave thrown by his friends.

And then things go to hell. Real quick. The first half of the film is exhilarating, as Romain encounters some very creepy shit…or does he? Is it a bad trip? Or has he picked up something worse than a hot dose? The film doesn’t get introspective; don’t expect a character study. It’s simply a real-time night gone bad.

The first half of the film might be more unsettling to me than it’ll be to you. During my “party animal” days, when I’d go to all kinds of deafeningly-loud drug-infused raves, even though I never did drugs, I’d sometimes get so drunk that the pounding noise — the music, the crowd, the people talking at me, the strobe lights, the notion that I was “trapped” in a sea of 300 humans — would temporarily disorient me, just for a moment, before I’d snap back to my senses.

It was a fear of mine to be slipped something like MDMA by one of my impish friends and become lost in my own head in a warehouse or club filled with chaos and sound. Keep in mind, I don’t drive and these were the days before Uber, so there was always that fear, at a rave or house party somewhere in the boonies, that I couldn’t get home if I became distressed.

MADS really triggered something in me, with Romain, the birthday boy, messed up as hell but trying to keep it together in a crowd.

Director David Moreau doesn’t waste your time with corny “is he hallucinating” sleight-of-hand; we, the audience, have witnessed something insanely creepy happen to Romain on his way to the party. If you’ve ever been “too” drunk or “too” stoned, and then, on top of that, something super fucked-up happens to you in the real-world, it can genuinely mess with your mind in the nastiest of ways (which is why, as a man who can no longer handle drink like he used to, these days during my binges I never set foot outside my house).

Moreau’s single-take artistry works beautifully as Romain is pulled along by his boisterous, drunk, stoned friends. We get pulled along for the ride as well, wondering, as Romain does, how much of what he’s experiencing is “bad drugs” and how much is a result of that freaky thing that happened to him on the road (I won’t spoil it for you).

Unlike some single-take shots that are gimmicky (De Palma’s Bonfire of the Vanities opening being a particularly egregious example), the technique is fully excused here, as it reflects Romain’s state of mind: coked up, panicked, confused, and harried by his friends. Romain can’t take a breather, and Moreau makes sure we can’t either, as the constantly-moving camera never pauses for a moment.

Moreau jettisons expository dialogue; this may be my #1 reason for liking the film. Economy with words is the greatest trait any writer/director can display. We’re never told that Romain’s dad is wealthy; we simply see it from their house and car. We’re never told that Romain’s dad is overbearing, and that Romain’s scared to death of doing something that might make the old man cut off his privileges. We’re shown it as Romain’s night goes south.

VERY south…

Young filmmakers need to watch this movie to learn the value of “show don’t tell.” Moreau does it expertly. An American writer/director would’ve had at least one character quip “oooh, rich boy Romain. Scared of his powerful daddy.” Moreau just lets us see it.

Comparing MADS to this year’s execrable talkathon Festival of the Living Dead (basically, bad drugs create zombies at Coachella), you can see that talent tops concept. Similar themes, but filmmakers of very different abilities.

Halfway through MADS, the film shifts from toying with the question of “bad trip or real-life catastrophe” to answering it firmly, and it’s the second half that most fans seem to prefer, and holy crap does Moreau keep it going at a fast pace. I did see several shout-outs, or homages to keep it French, to The Sadness in the second half…but Moreau puts his own spin on it.

I wish the film had a bigger budget for the climax, which isn’t bad but isn’t as grand as I wish it had been. Moreau does amazing things in tight spaces…he can make a simple ladies washroom in a bar seem like hell itself. But he continually downsizes right to the end, when a larger set-piece might’ve been more satisfying. MADS is like an amazing rollercoaster that does all these great loops and twists and then just kind of comes to rest at the station. You still had a good time, but one more closing loop would’ve been fun.

Still, I found the film worth watching twice…in fact, I enjoyed the first half even more the second time around, knowing the answer to what was wrong with Romain. The acting is top-notch; you really do think you’re watching regular teens. The kid playing Romain does a great job carrying the film through the first half, and the actress playing his girlfriend excels in the second, when the teens become quite “irregular.”

This one gets a Dave thumbs-up.

Funny story: I stayed up all night, I watched MADS twice, and I was feeling pretty good that I saw one effective horror flick this Halloween. Morning comes, and I’m full of energy; without booze, I never know what to do with myself, and if I’m all caught up on my columns, I just start doing shit because I have all this vigor. So I start house-cleaning.

Hours pass, and I’m cleaning this and cleaning that like some coked-up teen (the irony being, I only get this action-packed when sober), and I hear the mail come.

Remember what Sheriff Brackett says in the first Halloween film? “It's Halloween; I guess everyone's entitled to one good scare.” I get the mail from the box…election flier, election flier, plumbing flier, roofing flier, and one letter, hand-addressed to me. No return address, just a handwritten envelope to David Cole.

Keep in mind, the gist of MADS is a guy going about his day only to suddenly contract something dangerous.

I open the envelope, and I immediately see nothing inside. And instinctively, having on occasion received threatening letters and, five years ago, a glitter mail-bomb, I think, “oh FUCK…it’s a ‘white powder’ envelope” (Americans love fucking with political foes by sending “anthrax” — usually just baby powder or the like — the point being to totally scare the shit out of the person who opens the envelope. We’re mirthful little centaurs, aren’t we?).

And for a split-second, I was scared — shitless — especially after having had two viewings of MADS! I mean, if it were a white powder envelope I’d have to call the cops, and there goes my week, and my blood pressure, as I wait for the lab results.

Thankfully, by the good grace of God, I was still wearing my cleaning gloves, so I didn’t actually touch the envelope. I carefully looked inside and saw no powder. No nothing. Just empty. Normally in “anthrax letters” the powder is folded up in a piece of paper inside the envelope, so that it doesn’t leak out in transit.

Unless somebody mailed me an invisible bacteria, it was a false alarm, almost certainly one of the many real estate dicks who constantly send me personal letters asking if I want to sell my house (the market is never not-hot in this neighborhood), but this time Dickbag O’Toole likely forgot to enclose the actual letter in the envelope (it was a local postmark).

I’ve saved the envelope, and if I ever get a letter from a real estate asshole whose handwriting matches it, that muther will be the last guy on earth I’ll ever deal with.

I was only scared for a second, but that’s one second my BP didn’t need.

But it was funny that it would happen so soon after my MADS double-feature.

If you end up viewing the film, let me know your thoughts in the comments. Feel free to share other Halloween favorites, new or old.

Happy Halloween. I’ve had my trick so gimme a treat: BUY ME A BEER!