The World is a Bandpire: Ring of Darkness (David DeCoteau, 2004)

Clayface: Celebrity Dirt #4 is still on sale at comic shops and the usual digital outlets. Issue #5 will be out on November 11.

You can also pick up Dead Teenagers in trade paperback at any self-respecting bookstore – and the digital outlets, too. 

Recently, through no fault of my own, I was introduced to the fast-paced world of Men With Movie Podcasts. Seemingly every white man in media who is incapable of forming an interesting opinion has decided to start a Movie Podcast, where he and his friends take three or more hours to discuss a Movie that anyone with any cinematic literacy has already seen. 

Have you heard about Martin Scorsese? We’re watching Scorsese for our movie podcast. Have you heard about Michael Mann? Does anyone have any opinions on this movie Heat? Say, has anyone here watched Network? Has anyone here watched Sorcerer? What about horror movies with practical effects, are those good, are they better than CGI, do you think? What about when movies used to have sex scenes, wasn’t that fun? 

On and on and on and on, droning and droning — a boot stomping on a human face while recommending that it watch little-known television drama The Sopranos (I hear it’s actually pretty good!) forever. Not a one of these recommendations is new, or surprising, or even particularly individual; not only are these movies all well-canonized, they have been canonized for decades now, so you are essentially signing up to hear someone recite aloud the opinions Matt Zoller Seitz or Alan Sepinwall committed to print in 2007.

(While I’m rescuing The Sopranos from obscurity, is Mad Men good? I hear Mad Men might be pretty good. Is there anything else on HBO I should be watching? What about this show Deadwood? Is that one okay?) 

You’ve probably spotted the commonality in these recommendations: They are, exhaustingly, movies and TV shows about Men, typically Violent Men, sometimes Violent Men who feel bad about their violence, which constitutes Depth.

(Hey. Has anyone here seen Raging Bull? Has anyone seen Thief? Has anyone seen There Will Be Blood? Or, like, any other Paul Thomas Anderson movie? Has anyone seen Heat? I know I brought Heat up earlier, but has anyone seen it? Because I'm two days old, and I've literally never seen a movie before, so I've never heard anything about Heat. Is it pretty good?)

I get the sense that the Man With Movie Podcast industry, with all its terminally safe and pre-packaged opinions, exists, in part, as a backlash to the supposedly “woke” criticism of the 2010s, which did things like “ask that we not include rape scenes in every single goddamn thing” or “occasionally watch movies made by women.” All of these Men, with their Podcast-forged love of Sex Scenes, found Camp Miasma, like, totally unsexy, probably because the broads kept on yapping and wouldn’t show their tits. 

But that’s the easy criticism — the “woke” criticism, you could say! — so I’ll move on to the bit that really bothers me, which is this: I don’t think these guys like movies. I think loving any individual art form requires that you develop a distinct relationship to it, one that is formed on the basis of individual interests and tastes. If you actually love films, every movie you take in relates to you — to you, not to your idea of what a Smart Person who’s Smart About Movies is Supposed to Be Watching — and you respond to it on an individual level.

I know that the critic Roger Ebert genuinely loved movies, for example, not because of all the many times he shared or formed the public’s taste — a lot of podcast canon is, in fact, re-heated Ebert Canon — but because Roger Ebert was bugfuck head-over-heels in love with commercial and critical failure Dark City. He flogged it relentlessly. He never stopped praising it. Roger Ebert did the DVD commentary track for commercial and critical failure Dark City, not because he would get any credit for it, not because it made him look like a serious person, but because Dark City just pressed his buttons, and he thought it was a genuinely rockin’ film. (He was right.) 

So, sure, it’s okay to have widely shared tastes, even basic tastes. I, like, really really love David Lynch; I think Crash is Cronenberg’s best movie; I saw Gregg Araki’s Nowhere and got my mind blown; these are all queer millennial starter pack opinions, basic in the extreme. But if your only contribution to Film Discourse is watching the Serious Films pre-selected for you by Serious Critics, and re-iterating those Serious Critics’ Serious Thoughts about them, then I don’t think you enjoy watching movies. I think you enjoy being seen as an expert on movies. I think the actual work of fandom — going down rabbit holes, chasing down obscure and hard-to-find copies, developing unnerving expertise in specific mini-genres, getting attached to odd little pieces that no-one has ever seemed to love but you; all the million things you do purely for joy, purely for pleasure, just to have the experience of watching a truly fantastic movie for the first time — has been skipped so that you can sit down in front of that microphone and confidently Opine.

By the way: Martin Scorsese? He loves movies. Listen to him talk about Night of the Hunter some time. He loves it so much it drives him visibly insane, and not because of established critical consensus: Night of the Hunter was also widely regarded as a failure before Martin "Movies" Scorsese took up for it. Martin Scorsese didn’t devote his entire life to Loving Movies so his films could be the safe choice for some half-retired fiftysomething sportswriter. You’ve let down Martin Scorsese, and you should feel bad. 

And you know what your punishment is, don’t you? Don’t you??? You’re going to watch, and form an independent opinion on, the single greatest and most serious cinematic achievement of all time: Boy-band vampire movie slash Adrienne Barbeau vehicle slash Von Dutch lifestyle advertisement slash origin of the stunning acting career of seventh-place American Idol contestant Ryan Starr, Ring of Darkness, made for television in 2004 by the cinephile, auteur, and esteemed gay pornographer David DeCoteau. 

How did I first find Ring of Darkness? It’s never easy to say how any great love affair begins. (“We met working a double shift at TGI Friday’s!” — you, a person who can easily remember the beginnings of your love affairs.) It was my first, and, so far as I know, only DeCoteau movie; he’s a fellow that people have opinions on, though all I really know about him is that he directed PuppetMaster 3 and (shortly before that) a whole lot of movies with the pixelated cover art Letterboxd uses to indicate porn. 

Regardless, from the moment Ring of Darkness opened with the irresistible pop sounds of “Girl, You’re Sexing Me” — the hit single by boy band and heterosexual lifestyle enjoyers Take 5, which will be played, in full, at multiple points throughout the movie — I was entranced. My delicate cineaste’s sensibilities were further pleased by the song’s music video, in which Take 5 do sassy little head rolls and cavort together, laughing, through the surf; this footage, too, resurfaces at multiple points throughout the movie, typically (and poignantly) as a flashback shortly after one or more of the boy band members has died. 

Oh, yes: Boy band members die in this movie. Despite their seemingly wholesome lifestyle — five beautiful, radiantly heterosexual young men living together in a California McMansion that you absolutely cannot rent out to make pornography, thank you for asking — it’s not long before we see four members of Take 5 surround their crucial fifth member, the beloved “Gordo,” and use their eager, hungry mouths to drain him of every last drop of vital fluid. 

Yes, friends: I refer to vampirism. These fiendish vampires have taken on the guise of nature's dreamiest predator, The Boy Band, in order to find their victims. Now that the singers of Take 5 are down one member (which could have been avoided had they not, you know, eaten him — they’ll make this mistake several more times, so let’s simply acknowledge it and move on) it’s time to hold American-Idol-style public auditions for a new fifth guy. 

My cineastic reflections on this part of the movie are as follows: 

1) Boy, people in 2004 sure did love American Idol. 

2) Someone says the line “Columbus, Ohio! Funk capital of the world!” 

3) Any one of these people seems to have the musical talent required to execute “Girl, You’re Sexing Me,” which is the only song ever recorded by "the biggest pop act since The Beatles," boy band Take 5. 

Regardless, before long, the field is vampired down to three contenders: The Guy Who Dies First, The Guy Who Dies Second, and our protagonist, “Shawn.” 

Shawn is a striking illustration of the principle of convergent evolution: Just as the light-sensitive pupil and retina evolved, not only in humans, but in octopuses; just as five different animals all independently evolved into crabs; so, too, in Southern California in the 2000s, dozens of men evolved into right-wing media figure Milo Yiannopolous. 

This is also where we meet the movie’s other lead character. Just as the four gals of Sex & the City were forever shadowed by their Fifth Gal, the great city of New York, so the men of Take Five are forever accompanied by their Sixth Five, the apparel brand Von Dutch. 

Have you ever wanted to see a pair of black pants with VON DUTCH written across the crotch in enormous yellow letters? A black leather Von-Dutch-brand trucker cap, perched jauntily askew on a head? Von Dutch low-rise jeans made out of other, cut-up, patched-together Von Dutch low-rise jeans? All of these wonders await you in Ring of Darkness, a movie set in a totalitarian near future where no-one is allowed to leave the house without wearing at least two items of Von Dutch merchandise. 

At one point, we think we see Shawn wearing an entirely Dutchless outfit — Metallica t-shirt, jeans, etc. — only to have him turn around and reveal that he has a Von Dutch beanie hanging out of his back pocket, like it’s a hankie code, and he’s flagging “receiving (Von Dutch apparel and merchandise).” It’s that kind of movie. The great kind, to be clear. 

Anyway: Shawn is a real man, who likes real music, not this pussy boy band crap. (“He’s got edge,” says Adrienne Barbeau, describing a man who is dressed in the exact same amount and type of Von Dutch merchandise as the rest of the cast.) This stance is seemingly at odds with Shawn’s willingness to move into a California McMansion with the members of Take 5 immediately after meeting them. However, that’s nothing that a few dozen repetitions of “Girl, You’re Sexing Me” — the song so heterosexual that it specifies the gender of the love interest in the title of the song! — can’t smooth over. 

Now: Does Shawn discover his bandmates’ vampirism? What about his fellow contestants, Guy Who Dies First and Guy Who Dies Second? What happens to them, and in what order? Will there be numerous scenes of these fellows engaging in “vampirism” that are mostly an excuse to show them writhing around on top of each other, and, if so, will the dread act of vampirism occasionally require the members of Take 5 to stand around wearing nothing but matching ceremonial boxer briefs? These are the sacred mysteries of film, and I cannot possibly answer them.

You must answer these questions, friend. You must experience this movie, one Cinematic frame at a time. You must watch the scene where the members of chart-topping boy band and/or vampire cult Take 5 slowly, horribly burn to death, with their deaths being mournfully interspersed by clips from the music video “Girl, You’re Sexing Me,” as if to say “ah, better times” –  a scene which, though I watched it completely alone, and completely sober, in my living room, made me shout aloud with joy at the visions Cinema is capable of bringing into our lives.

To begin loving movies, you must genuinely, selflessly, and with no hope of being admired for it, love one movie. I think you might as well start here, with this one, which is – if not universally known, or feted – certainly expressive of the filmmaker's distinctive vision. I think, if you played Martin Scorsese the 2004 made-for-television vampire boy band film Ring of Darkness, he’d be into it. Or he’d die, and then he wouldn’t have to listen to your podcast any more. Either way, though, it would be a gift. 

Ring of Darkness is streaming on Tubi. My favorite Scorsese movies are Age of Innocence and Taxi Driver; I'd like to pick one or the other, but it's probably a tie.

Now, let's bid farewell with a song: