Manhater

Directed by Anthony Doublin
Canyon Falls Productions



I recall visiting a horror movie convention soon after Kill Bill had come out. Nearly every film production table had at least one "sexy lady getting revenge" movie poster predominantly on display. Attractive female murderers are the perfect shortcut to fulfilling violence and sex in films. Over the years, the number of "lady revenge" movies has dwindled.

However, there are a few stragglers being produced, like Manhater. Manhater is described as "horror... with a good, unique story," but to consider it a horror film is questionable. Instead, I consider it a supernatural film with a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde plot, punctuated with gore and nudity.

The story is neither good nor unique. The plot is, well, this: An abuse survivor takes a magic potion from a witch, and the potion makes a demon appear. The demon kills all the men that hurt the woman, but the witch is actually involved with the woman's rapist. The rapist wants to control the demon and has a glowing necklace that he holds while talking gibberish at the demon. Yes, you read correctly.

First, kudos to the crew and performers who stuck it out until the end! I wonder if they were paid; hopefully, they were at least fed lunch. Some of the performers went by aliases in the credits. Were they embarrassed to be in this film? Also, the film score earned "Best Original Soundtrack at Idyllwild," though I hardly noticed it.

This film’s creators don't seem to have valued good production in any form. The camera work varies anywhere from poor to acceptable quality. I noticed camera shakes, awkward movements, and questionable shots. The lighting is sometimes off or completely absent. There are a few outdoor scenes in pitch-black darkness. The audio doesn't always sync up with its source. Lips are moving without sound at times, like in poorly dubbed kung-fu films. The editing is unclean. Many cuts did not mesh well with others or were abruptly cut off.

The makeup is better meant for a theatrical stage, not a film screen. Big, false eyelashes are distracting and corny on movie performers. Also, at one point, a woman has paintbrush stripes on her cheeks for blush. The acting talent ranges from non-existent to lukewarm. These performers would have shone more if they were given character roles with more than one dimension. The characters are unrealistic, unlikable, or both.

Also, there is a Token Black Female Best Friend in this film. You know, in predominantly white films, we sometimes see a black female best friend who has no real personality other than to act as a cheerleader for the (usually bitter) white female protagonist (as in the film Julie and Julia). The story gets more ridiculous by the second, the plot holes are vast, and the dialogue is vapid. The special effects, while respectable on such a low budget, are pretty dorky.

Most problematic, this film begins with a rape scene. It's obviously fake, but still graphic, and insensitive to both performers and viewers alike. If a movie absolutely requires such a scene, then it needs to do it with understanding and discretion. Later in the movie, the survivor talks to the abuser; not just once, but often, and in a mildly annoyed tone more appropriate towards someone who owes her money, not someone who has brutally assaulted her. She even accepts an invitation to join him alone in his house.

The writer of this film clearly does not understand the seriousness of sexual assault, instead confusing it with edgy sex. The fact that he botched this topic, as well as the film’s overt objectification of women and senseless gore, proves that Manhater is just another cheap combo platter of sex and violence to be devoured by stupid people.

Review by Jacquie Piasta

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

By Maryse Condé
University of Virginia Press

This fascinating novel, which won France's Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme, offers readers a vivid re-imagining of the life of a historical figure mentioned only briefly in the transcripts of the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials: a slave woman of Caribbean origins, accused of practicing voodoo. Angela Davis, in her foreword to the current edition, asserts the importance of “the retelling of a history that is as much mine as it is hers,” a story of great significance to Black women who are “Tituba's cultural kin.” The first person narrative gives Tituba an opportunity to recount her life as she sees it, to overcome the silence imposed on her by official histories of the period. Maryse Condé, herself born in Guadeloupe, begins by evoking the beauties and horrors of the West Indies—of Barbados in particular—where Tituba is born to an Ashanti woman “as lithe and purple as the sugarcane flower,” who had been raped by a British sailor. Little Tituba flourishes at first in her island home, but her mother comes into conflict with their master and is hanged for striking a white man. At the age of seven, Tituba is taken in by old Mama Yaya and raised in the traditional healing ways inherited from African ancestors. The growing girl learns to respect everything in nature, to make the proper prayers and sacrifices, to devise “potions whose powers I strengthened with incantations,” and to communicate with the spirits, including her deceased mother.

The idyll in the wilderness ends abruptly when the adolescent Tituba falls in love with a merry rascal, a slave named John Indian. She soon moves to the capital, Bridgetown to be with him. John Indian jokingly calls her a witch, because of her special magical gifts, but others suspect her of commerce with the devil even though, as she protests, “Before setting foot inside this house I didn't know who Satan was!” In an interview published in the afterword to the present edition, Maryse Condé describes Tituba as “doing only good to her community” through her relations with “the invisible forces,” and therefore not a witch in the bad connotations of the term, but the bigoted people with whom she comes in contact—especially after she is sold along with John Indian to a Puritan minister, Samuel Parris—do not see her in a positive light.

One of the themes of the book is the unlikely (and, unfortunately, often temporary) alliances that can form between persons divided by race, class, or religion. When Parris moves with his household to Boston, a strong friendship develops between Tituba and Elizabeth Parris, the minister's wife, as well as with her child Betsey, It is one of the ironies of the novel that Tituba's efforts to amuse and aid the girls in her charge at Salem Village arouse the villagers' fears and turn them against her. The Caribbean folktales she tells about sorcerers and vampires titillate everyone and feed their fears of damnation and demonic possession. When Betsey tells her cousin Abigail about the secret magic rites Tituba has used to protect the frail little girl, the situation gets out of control. Condé locates the ultimate source of the hysteria that sweeps through the village as a combination of the repression of healthy sensual pleasures along with the accumulation of small-town jealousies and resentments among the populace, together with unacknowledged guilt at the mistreatment of Blacks and American Indians by the white settlers. The village girls accuse many local figures of magically tormenting them.

Arrested and interrogated in 1692, Tituba at first protests her innocence: she has done no wrong, has not hurt any of the afflicted children. Her husband John Indian advises her to play along with her accusers, to tell them what they want to hear. He even pretends to be possessed, himself. In a controversial sequence criticized by many reviewers, the novel's heroine encounters a character called Hester in prison, clearly based on the wholly fictional heroine of The Scarlet Letter. Certain historians have condemned this intrusion of Romantic literature into a historical novel, yet Condé in her interview defends it on two different grounds: a) that her work “is the opposite of a historical novel,” that her Tituba is an invented “female hero, ... a mock-epic character,” and b) that as a novelist, she felt “there was a link between Tituba and Nathaniel Hawthorne,” persons inhabiting the same region at times not too far apart for comparison. The conversation between the two prisoners gives Condé a chance to explore the social constraints on women and the difficult relations between men and women. Ann Armstrong Scarboro's afterword asserts that here Condé “parodies modern feminist discourse,” but it seems to me that Condé gets to play both sides against the middle in these passages by intermixing humorous and serious notes and leaving it up to the reader to decide how to interpret them.

While Tituba's testimony at trial is quoted from actual transcripts, the additional context Condé provides suggests that the accused woman is merely mouthing words that others are saying, going along with other people's superstitions. As a confessed witch she is sentenced to jail but escapes the death penalty. Thus she survives, while many of the people condemned for witchcraft are executed. The historical note to this edition of the novel states that in 1693 the slave Tituba was sold to pay her prison fees and the price of her chains. It is unclear what happened thereafter to the historical woman, but Condé chooses to have her Tituba purchased by Benjamin Cohen d'Azevedo, a Portuguese Jewish merchant whose wife had died. Benjamin and Tituba slowly become friends and eventually lovers. After a terrible house fire set by Puritan persecutors in which Benjamin's children are killed, he frees her and buys a ship passage back to Barbados for her. There she becomes involved with a group of maroons—wild Blacks who seem to be working towards freedom for the plantation slaves—but even there she finds betrayal and a revolt that fails. She is finally hanged by the British authorities. The epilogue finds the spirit of Tituba still active in the island, heroine of a popular song going about encouraging the slaves to fight for liberty.

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is a work I highly recommend to people interested in African-American and Caribbean literature, colonialism and post-colonialism, post-modernism and feminism, as well as to any reader interested in a colorful adventure tale. The additional scholarly materials provided in this edition make this book helpful even to readers familiar with the original French text.

Review by Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring

Graylight

By Naomi Nowak
NBM/Comicslit

The field of comics, also sometimes known as graphic novels, is dominated by male creators and readers. However, there's been increasing push in the last few decades by women to enter the field and make their mark. Though comics drawn by women are gaining popularity, most are classified as "indie," distributed by small publishers that may not be able to advertise or place volumes in prominent bookstores. Naomi Nowak's most recent graphic novel, Graylight, is designated indie, though it deserves to be appreciated by a wider audience.

Sasha is a German photographer on assignment somewhere in northern Europe, where the sun stays up all night in summer. She is a mysterious person, a foreigner. She attracts the attention of a journalist, and he invites her to join him on his quest to interview a famous recluse. The woman takes a disliking to both of them and refuses to grant him an interview. But Sasha leaves with her own prize—a book stolen from the house.

The woman's son follows her home to demand its return, and attraction sparks. But the reclusive old woman is no ordinary woman. She is a witch, with a grudge against women like Sasha, who play with men. When the witch's son takes an interest in Sasha, his mother takes action to destroy her. The witch's son is not Prince Charming, but he does save Sasha, changing his relationship with his mother. He asserts his independence, but in the end Sasha, true to form, leaves town to find some other hearts to break.

The plot summary is intriguing, yet its execution is not entirely clear. I found myself re-reading several times, trying to spot clues I may have missed. Plot is not Nowak's primary concern here—impressions of character and mood supersede coherency of plot.

Nowak is an artist who studied painting and illustration. She brings those skills to her comics, creating page after page of exquisite visuals. The colors are watercolor shades, ranging from pastel to flamingo and lime. The inking is both intricate and vague; symbolic or decorative flowers and crystals are detailed while faces and unimportant objects are only partially defined. Every knot in a sweater is drawn to give its precise texture but the shoes disappear into the background. Nowak focuses attention on what she wants the reader to notice. Pages where there's almost too much detail are deliberately overwhelming.

The style reminds me of the Japanese manga Paradise Kiss. Graylight is exquisitely rendered, and worth looking through for the art alone. Nowak's website contains examples from the book, a more compelling argument to pick it up than I could ever make.

Comics and graphic novels are not as easy to create and produce as some may think. Nowak has made something beautiful, if imperfect in its storytelling. I look forward to seeing her skills progress.

Review by Richenda Gould