Day Five: Pumpkinhead (1989)
Another trip down memory lane here. I remember seeing Pumpkinhead on VHS with my father more or less as soon as it was released. I was constantly casing the video store (remember those?) for new releases, particularly in the horror genre. I was young so forgive the amount of time it may have taken me to realize that new movies hit the shelves the same day every week.
I remember the Pumpkinhead of Pumpkinhead as a huge, spidery, vine riddled agent of destruction. Not quite. Particularly when you compare him to the CG beasties of today, Pumpkinhead is a rather quaint man in a costume, a less specific Alien costume to be exact. As usual our imagination pumps up something in retrospect, but I wasn’t really disappointed to revisit this creature. I found him, and the movie, rather endearing.
Lance Henriksen is our lead, a leathery backwoods man who, as a child, gets an early education in the titular demon. Many years later, as an adult, Henriksen finds himself in the unenviable position of contracting Pumpkinhead’s services, and even novices of the genre can see that this will probably be a mistake.
Henriksen is, of course, a genre pro, a real man who invests characters that usually haven’t been given much on the page with a poignant, charged world weariness. He looks like a tough guy, and he’s played the tough guy before, but there’s usually a hesitation to Henriksen’s characters. He seems like the kind of guy who sits and drinks a beer in the roughest bar imaginable, but is reading a book in the corner, and isn’t being bothered. It’s a mild injustice if Henriksen has somehow managed to go his entire career up until this point without being asked to play the scene I just described.
Pumpkinhead was directed, in his debut, by special effects master Stan Winston, and his affinity for the genre shows. The film doesn’t feel calculated or impersonal like a random hack ’em up. The film’s atmosphere is over stylized (though effective) but imbued with a sense of passion. Winston likes Pumpkinhead, whether he be a vengeance demon or a misunderstood creature pulled out of a graveyard in the deepest, darkest nook of the woods.
The film isn’t too good, and the subjects of Pumpkinhead’s ire are as embarrassingly performed as the kids in your worst Jason movie. The film was obviously shot on very limited means with long passages of characters walking around because you know that’s all the crew could afford to shoot. But there are moments, such as Henriksen telling his dead wife that he’ll get revenge, or a few moments between Henriksen and a fellow woodsman who knows Pumpkinhead’s secret, that stick.
Half Formed Not Quite Posts Of Away From Her and Bug (2007)
To ensure the non-horror enthuasist’s continued loyality to BC, I have, of course, been watching stuff that doesn’t feature monsters or ghosts, or ghastlies of the soul. I’m not doing real reviews (or posts, the word review seems a little delusional for what I do here) of either film yet (or ever) but a few thoughts should be offered.
Bug is an intense little nitty gritty chamber play from Exorcist/French Connection director William Friedkin, and it features a rousing return to form from Ashley Judd. She isn’t playing a smooth cat avenger here, she’s fleshy and surprisingly vulnerable, and her voice cracks and betrays her at the least opportune times. She’s a drunk mourning the loss of a child, and she’s perfectly susceptible to the insanity that Peter (Michael Shannon) is selling.
Your enjoyment of the film will depend largely on whether or not you buy how quickly Judd’s Agnes succumbs to paranoia and insanity. I didn’t buy it, but I respected the typical to Friedkin relentlessness of the film, and Judd’s performance. Michael Shannon looks a little like Anthony Michael Hall at his most hungover, but his presence and surprisingly soft voice throws you off balance, you get why Judd might go for this guy. The ending is abrupt, unforgiving and the perfect capper for a very over the top last third. The film has been referred to as a thriller or a horror story, but its really a perverse romance.
Away From Her is another perverse romance, and its one of the most disciplined, pared to the bone debuts from a young director that I can remember seeing. The film has been directed by actress Sarah Polley (Go, Dawn of the Dead 2004), and its imbued through and through with the thoughtful refusal to sentimentalize that characterizes her best work. Ron Howard, Penny Marshall and all the other people who traffic in tear jerker up lift should be forced to watch what this young lady has done here.
It’s no surprise that Julie Christie is luminous and haunting (flashbacks to her as a young woman hammer home the effect, with little screen time, that Polley is going for) but Gordon Pinsent, whom I’ve never heard of, is heartbreaking here as a husband finding himself odd man out when his wife Christie, suffering from Alzheimers, forgets him and falls in love with another patient at the nursing home.
Pinsent was unfaithful many years before, and he can’t help but think that a certain black joke cosmic justice is coming about. This element steers the picture from schmaltz, though Polley’s approach is so dry and commanding that I imagine it would have been fine either way. I will never think of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” the same way again. See this one.
Day Four: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
I love that the director of a few of the greatest American movies ever made, particularly the first two Godfathers and The Conversation, would, a decade and a half later, still have the inner fervor to make something as intense, enraptured, poignant and just plain masturbatory as Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Granted, Coppola, with many of his 1980s projects, had been down the intense and masturbatory road before, but most of those are little more than film school curiosities. Bram Stoker’s Dracula doesn’t feel like a test tube movie though, its felt, it means it, and its my favorite version of the novel.
The film was also my introduction to Gary Oldman. I was twelve when Dracula was released, and I had never seen anything as committed and deliriously oddball as Gary Oldman as Count Dracula. I had seen the Browning/Lugosi picture (which I find overrated, both men have done better), and I had seen the Palance film by this point, but Oldman was an entirely different thing altogether. I was used to my monster movies being a little more square, and now I’m watching a brilliant fusion of DeNiro method and presentational 1920s silent act to the rafters and back acting. Oldman, like the movie in general, was overwhelming.
The entire film was, and still is, overwhelming. I’ve already found that certain words, phrase, or thoughts have begun to dominate why I’m choosing certain movies for this series, and why I respond to certain horror films. “Means it”. “No apologies”, and so forth. I can deal with some bad acting, or low budget, or maybe ideas that should have been left on the cutting room floor. But I, in this genre, can’t deal with self-consciousness, with hedging your bets, with playing to the cheap seats. Horror should be about what we’re afraid of, but also what we’re afraid to admit we think about it, what we like, what turns us on, what we’re most afraid we’ll lose, etc. There’s no room, at least in the Greats, for parlor room tricks. I don’t give a shit about that stuff usually, life is too short.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula does play a lot of parlor tricks and it isn’t one of the Greats. Some of Coppola’s casting stunts don’t pay off (Cary Elwes, Keanu Reeves), and some of the scenes are overbaked even for this (a moment of temptation for Anthony Hopkins’ Van Helsing comes to mind.) The film has this unshakable, amazing lunatic intensity though, and Coppola’s experimentation with silent movie, in camera technique should make this required viewing for even the snobs who don’t buy into its purplish love story.
The love story works. Not drowning under all of Coppola’s ideas would be impressive enough, but Oldman, despite being a vicious, inhuman killer (his immorality is not shortchanged in a bid for sympathy either) elicits our sympathy anyway. Dracula’s romantic hunger and more base, animal instincts compliment, electrify one another, and Ryder contrasts, underplays into herself into the relationship beautifully. The building of the relationship here, subtracting the more obviously out of place plot points, would be acceptable in a more straight romance.
My favorite scene of the film is a perfect crystallization of every florid element I love: the costumes, the ripe music, the two actors going for it, the blunt passion. The self-loathing. It all comes together when Mina finally gives herself to Dracula, and his fangs slide out and he rasps (like an orgasm): “I can’t, I love you too much!” She begs and he finally sinks his fangs into her, and for a moment the bad guy who’s really become the good guy surrogate for the audience wins.
Besides Oldman and Ryder, who truly are the movie; Tom Waits and Sadie Frost also contribute memorable charaterizations. I like Tom Waits’ music, but I really like Tom Waits in films, particularly as himself in Cigarettes and Coffee and paired with Lily Tomlin in Short Cuts. He’s Renfield here, and his working man hipster dementia builds the foreboding of Dracula’s pursuit wonderfully.
Sadie Frost is Lucy, and she’s the most purely erotic object in an already overheated movie. She also, like Christopher Stone, is privy to the joys of werewolf nooky. Not sure if that counted as bestality in Old Time Britain, but I imagine Stone would have had some legal problems.
I love this big tangled erotic creepy mess of a clusterfuck of a movie, but, there’s a very simple image that always comes to mind as I ponder Bram Stoker’s Dracula: of Prince Vlad, watching Mina window shop. They don’t get along at first, and after a curt exchange, he says “I shall bother you no more.” And he disappears. I’ve followed Oldman’s career, like any movie lover, pretty intently since then, but he’s never had a line delivery that has haunted me quite as much.
Day Three: The Howling (1981)
Joe Dante’s The Howling is a special object of nostalgia for me, as it was the first R-rated film I saw as a child (I almost said Jaws but then I remembered that somehow got away with a PG). The Howling was also my very first encounter with full frontal nudity, and its one of the most simulataneously arousing and terrifying bits of sexual business not featured in a movie by David Lynch.
Joe Dante is appreciated by the nerds, but it seems the more vaunted critics never really gave him a fair shake*, which is typical but too bad. Dante’s films, at their best, have wonderfully unhinged tones: part screwball comedy, part in joke, and part jolting malevolence. Watch Gremlins again, before the ending that was probably written by exec. producer Steven Spielberg (and the ending is fine), the film is one of the most subversive, unhinged so called children’s movies of the 1980s.
The Howling, a werewolf movie largely set in a bizarre backwoods rehab center, is another film that continually blindsinds you with tonal corkscrews. The film is truly goofy in places (there are even more werewolf puns here than the more obvious An American Werewolf in London), affectionate in others, and, at times, quite horrific.
The Howling doesn’t use its sense of humor as a license to not give a shit though. One of the cliches of the genre is that humor enhances fright, and The Howling is a lesser known Exhibit Z in support of that theory. The opening attempted murder scene that sets the story into motion is sleazy and claustrophobic, and the more explicit wolfiness that ensues at the rehab center is as impressive and weird as you’d hope from the f/x guy behind John Carpenter’s The Thing.
Dee Wallace Stone and Christopher Stone (married in real life) root the film in something a bit more tangible than what your usual scream queen would bring to the role. Dee Wallace always seemed very vulnerable, and just a little bit off, spacy, to me. You want to protect her but there’s an edge there that’s a bit of a mystery. She could be one of those housewives’ whose keeps their husband in the back freezer. This intangible domestic frustration served her well in Cujo and E.T. and it serves her even better in The Howling, which is her best personal showcase.
Christopher Stone (oh, how I miss when people in movies were allowed to look like normal, cool, middle aged people) plays off his real life wife well here, and he convincingly sells his frustration with his Dee’s growing remoteness. He betrays her early on here (a bit reminiscent of Cassavetes in Rosemary’s Baby) and both Dante and Stone know precisely how to undersell it so it lingers among the more obvious thrills.
As is normally the case with Dante, the remote rehab center is seemingly populated with a cast of nearly anyone who appeared in a horror film during a certain twenty year period of Dante’s adolescence. But, again, and this should really be stressed because so many filmmakers today don’t seem to get it, THIS DOES NOT DISTRACT FROM THE NARRATIVE.
The injokes, the background players, these add an element of appreciation, of tradition, of fun, of history, but they are never used in place of a story that wouldn’t work just as well without all of that. It should be noted that the script was written by acclaimed filmmaker John Sayles, and that he imbues the thing with a bit of the flakiness that can be found in his cameo appearance here as a morgue attendant.
I feel like I’m spinning my wheels here. I haven’t gotten to the bottom of why this film works so well, there’s something light, airy, eerie about it, a very specific sensual tone (its more than a little empathetic to the creatures and that helps) that carries on after the terrific effects have maybe worn off a little. Something about the dislocation of the rehab center, deep in the woods. The Howling, regardless of your appreciation or dedication, should also be seen for that priceless ending alone, which plays like Network as re-written by Stephen King.
*I say that having done little to no research in the matter.
Day Two: The Descent (2006)
We know the structure of most horror films. They are, to borrow an unoriginal metaphor, like mousetraps. The first act or maybe two is the pulling back, the latching. The last act or maybe two is the snap of the spring-the explosion of the tension the filmmaker has, hopefully, artfully set up.
The latching, the snapping into place of the elements that will bite you in the ass later on, is, of course, the most fun part of a great horror movie, and the part the amateurs tend to take the least seriously. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974*) is as good as people say it is, but it set a bad example of the the two act exposition that goes nowhere, that’s almost literally just watching paint dry until the killer shows up, the recent Wolf Creek is an example of this, but there are plenty more.
Even great horror films though, have a bit of nearly unavoidable inevitability, and this can damper the scares (or at least the shock). I’ve never seen a horror film that has a true coitus interruptus, that represents a total invasion, an authentic break from another story that was going on before the horror set in. You never feel that lives are being entered upon and shattered.
Instead, you feel you’re watching a bunch of people waiting for the horror to show up. Imagine a romantic comedy with Meg Ryan, where she’s brutally murdered halfway through after a charming evening of miscommunication with Hugh Grant, that would get people talking. And that would be true horror. People who are murdered in real life, haven’t, normally, been politely advised beforehand.
The Descent is one of the greatest pure visceral boo movies ever made, and, while we know we’re going into a horror movie before the horror starts, it comes about as close to capturing the violation mentioned above of as any film I can recall. Two thirds of The Descent’s running time concerns a group of over-zealous British female adventurers who venture into a cave that’s unmarked and dangerous, and details the humbling that Mother Nature deals as a result. This isn’t marking time, this isn’t a goof. The Descent is a gripping, convincing, claustrophobic, adventure film, all up until minute 55 or so.
The last third?
The last third is possibly the scariest monster movie I’ve ever seen.
But, as effective as Act III is (and its a doozy), much of The Descent’s effect can be credited to that opening hour. Neil Marshall, the writer-director here (this is his second film, after the charming but dorky Dog Soldiers) has talent, but, equally important, he actually gives a shit. He’s steeped in this stuff, the more movie saavy people in the room can play spot the homage, but Marshall doesn’t let his love for horror films past block his desire to contribute to the genre himself.
There’s a scene, about ten minutes before the true menace appears, where the women, convinced they’re trapped, find a map on the wall. They should be slightly happy, or at least buzzing with hope, which has been on short supply. We, as the audience, indulge in a little hope too, and that’s exactly when Marshall allows the primary riff of the score (familiar to anyone who’s seen John Carpenter’s The Thing) to be heard for the first time. It’s one of the great “oh, they are truly fucked” moments the movies have given us.
Marshall’s script should also be commended, as its a bit lighter on its feet than most in the genre. The ladies don’t have a whole lot of individuality, and they tend to fall under the James Cameron Fetish-Macho school of screenwriting, but their inner-relationships are confidently, organically established, with a minimum of fussy, boring exposition. Marshall even works in a betrayal that is shocking and ironic.
The Descent, with its images of people wriggling around in a Hellish underground populated by old, forbidden things, also recalls Henry Kuttner’s short story “The Graveyard Rats”, as well as Stephen King’s “Graveyard Shift**”, which was probably inspired by Kuttner’s story. I remembering reading Kuttner’s story as a child and craving a film that truly captured that dank, terrifying clamminess. Neil Marshall made that movie fifteen years later. And its a classic.
*Damn all these remakes! A horror title can’t be listed without including a year of release anymore.
**The story, not the movie, which leans a bit on the goofy side, though its fun in the right frame of mind.
The Kingdom (2007)
When you boil The Kingdom down to its essentials, paring away the name actors and the contemporary, showy in its lack of blocking choreography, you basically have a Rambo movie. A movie where one (or several) person/people are allowed to go to a foreign land and risk years of carefully maintained, vague civility in the name of justice (aka vengeance aka ensuring you’re still the biggest dick in the room.)
I’m generally not a logic person in an action film, but The Kingdom seems to think it takes contemporary issues seriously, so its fair game, and, in this case, pretty insulting to even the laziest follower of current events. What the FBI does to bully its way onto Saudi ground is absurd. What happens once they get onto Saudi ground is absurd. The brutal firefight that finally picks things up in Act three is awesome, but even more absurd, in that the global implications of such a free for all aren’t considered in the slightest bit.
I’ll confess. I’m part of what’s wrong with the American population in terms of current events, especially our never ending, impossible to decipher issues over seas. I don’t watch much news (although as biased, sensationalistic and ad oriented as it is, I don’t think I’m missing much). I don’t follow politics closely. I don’t, particularly, give a shit. I think things are fucked up, but I’m not interested in shouldering the responsibility to fix it.
Neither is The Kingdom, but at least I didn’t make a movie glorifying the American sense of entitlement that represents one of the core reasons that most nations hate us. The deck is unreasonably stacked here: we see the Jamie Foxx character at school with his son for no other reason than to excuse his gung ho fervor later on, we are given a Saudi who is (kinda) sympathatic to our cause so the film can’t be accused of racism. The top inner government brass are presented as the typical, candy asses that know nothing of the ass that needs to be kicked in order to preserve our, well, you get the idea.
If The Kingdom wasn’t boring, I’d probably forgive most of what I just said. Morality should not be strictly considered in pulpy action thrillers, id should be given free reign somewhere, and movies is a safe somewhere. But the film, until the last thirty minutes, is largely boring, a by the book procedural with little surprise and a lot of tedious governmental jargon.
Peter Berg, a character actor, and now director, has, up until this point, made a career in making films that were always better than you’d expect (Very Bad Things, The Rundown, Friday Night Lights). For once, I went into a Berg film with decent expectations, and I got mildly burned with a self-righteous, hypocritical ass kicker. Very Bad Things was immoral and exhilarating because it knew it. The Kingdom is frustrating, and a little more dangerous, because it presents an equally florid situation as a right to bear arms.
Day One: Shivers (1975)
David Cronenberg is one of the few horror filmmakers that has survived the prejudice that almost always greets one who chooses to work in the genre. It’s not hard to see why. Cronenberg respects the genre, respects the need for ambiguity, for slow burn, for inescape. Audiences do not go to horror films to be let off the hook by the filmmakers, they want to revel in the fear, and let themselves off the hook later, by assuring themselves of the film’s fiction. A happy ending, generally, is an anti-climax in a horror movie, you leave the theatre wondering “is that as bad as it can get?”
Cronenberg also deals, particularly in his early work, with the most sensitive of audience pressure points, the frailty of the human body and, much scarier, the changability of the human body. Early Cronenberg films are about caterpillars changinging into butterflies*, only they haven’t been blessed with the foresight of the process’s result. The films, and this has been said many times before, take the POV of the agent of change, and are generally actively rooting for said change, ending with an ironic sigh of relief.
All of this is true of Cronenberg’s first major release, Shivers, which plays a bit like Invasion of the Body Snatchers reborn as a satire of the just say yes liberation of the 1960s and 1970s. You don’t have to dig deep for subtext in the film’s plot, which concerns a bunch of little leech penis creatures who invade a remote high rise apartment building and turn its citizens into sex crazed zombies.
The remoteness of the setting is established in typically efficient, curt, masterful fashion by Cronenberg in the opening credits, where we see an advertisement for the Starliner Apartments complex bragging about the remoteness of the location. By minute three of the film we’re watching a couple’s introduction to the apartment, but, also typical to Cronenberg, this couple is not our POV, they are only our entryway into the picture (much like the Naomi Watts, Viggo Mortensen switcheroo in Eastern Promises).
Cronenberg is obviously an intelligent person. He knows he’s working in B subject matter on a B budget with a B (two weeks) amount of time to complete the picture. It’s fascinating in Shivers to watch how Cronenberg skates around the potential pitfalls of the subject matter. The acting in Shivers is, at best, adequate. Cronenberg works around this with limited exposition, limited back story, and a terrifying lack of feeling.
Like much early Cronenberg, Shivers feels less like a movie about penis leech creatures, and more of a retrospective documentary about a penis leech creature outbreak. Yes, this clinical style is born out of Cronenberg’s sensibility, but I think its also logical self-preservation. The less sentiment there is, the less potential there is for bad acting to laugh you out of the picture.
The potential hazard of going back and looking at the early work of a great filmmaker is that we give the earlier picture a special break because we know how these themes will be refined in the future. I tried not to do that with Shivers as I revisited it for this post. I found a film that holds up, its dated aspects (clothing, decor) only enhance the satire of the picture. The film’s climax is unnerving in a way that I can’t quite put my finger on. It involves a total invasion, that’s easy to pinpoint, but it occurs in a public swimming pool, and this is queasy in a way that I can’t identify. Maybe its something about all the fluid in a sexual invasion metaphor movie, but I’m not sure.
One final thing about Cronenberg’s satire, you can’t quite pinpoint which side of the satire he’s on in any given movie, especially Shivers. One could say that’s he’s totally in favor of what eventually happens, or one could say that he’s mourning a perceived loss of the discriminate fuck. Or he’s ambivalent (as he’s often accused.) Either way, its one of the principle reasons his films last, and linger, and will be revisited by anyone who gives a damn about the genre.
*I hadn’t considered this upon initial posting, but Cronenberg almost literally did the butterfly thing in his masterpiece, The Fly. The footage was rightfully discarded, but you should take a look on the most recently issued DVD (out a couple of years ago).
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