Stan Winston.

This is an intangible-inner-thing nearly escaping debate: if you are a movie-child of the 1980s, you love Stan Winston. It may have taken you awhile to put it together, but you eventually (as you grew into recognizing that certain memorable films bore certain similar end credits) realized that the majority of your commanding, iconic film nightmares could be blamed on the same man. Winston worked with directors both promising and already legendary to bring to the screen many of the definitive creatures of the 1980s and 1990s. Like Ray Harryhausen, Winston wasn’t satisfied with creations that merely scared, his creatures had an internal logic, a heart that was theirs and theirs alone; a heart that was respected and allowed to remain somewhat mysterious to the audience.

Winston worked with James Cameron on The Terminator, Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The first two are extraordinary achievements; both having a primal-familial-pull that anchors their stories in more than smoke and mirrors (T2 has moments, it moves, but it’s essentially a flabbier remake of the first picture). The families of these pictures, partially thanks to Winston, aren’t strictly human-his other beings have personality. I first saw The Terminator, in a double bill with Robocop, one Friday night at the age of nine, unaware of the general scenario. I thought Arnold Schwarzenegger was some sort of thug-assassin (partially true). The reveal of the true menace: a skeleton hand-dipped in chromium with glowing red beads for eyes and memorably awkward gait (a light Frankenstein monster on stilts); retains its power to horrify: unrelenting, unstoppable, hellishly impersonal technology at its monster zenith.

Stan Winston’s greatest contribution to Aliens is, of course, the Queen: a larger variation of the original H.R. Giger creation that elaborates on the insectile logic of the monster’s design and deepens the implication of an eerily human range of emotions. The alien of Alien was the boogey man-an unstoppable cipher; Michael Myers in space with more personality. The Queen of Aliens is the dark belly of Ripley’s maternal rage, prone to jealousy and vengeance. The Queen steals Ripley’s surrogate daughter and Ripley responds, in the picture’s true climax, by murdering dozens of the creature’s children and soldiers in front of her. Ripley caps it all by blowing the Queen’s reproductive organs to pieces-permanently “fixing” her. The Queen’s shrill, enraged scream is the finest moment of this picture-and a moment that many F/X maestros couldn’t have, especially seemingly nowadays, been burdened to help dream of.

Winston’s work on the calculating, ruthless hunter of John McTiernan’s Predator (the film is “The Most Dangerous Game” with an alien) is similarly unshakable. Clothed, the creature is the predictable next evolutionary step of Jason Voorhees: hulking, masked and appropriately Schwarzeneggerian in prideful macho swagger. Unmasked, the creature is subversively, disarmingly, feminine (disappointing this ten-year-old at the time) a spurned, intergalactic killer-mutant near-vagina; perhaps a canny joke of Winston’s on the genre that had been good to him, and that largely caters to male audiences around the world. Or maybe it’s just a neat movie monster.

One could go on. Winston’s filmography is rich with character and accomplishment. There are the obviously stunning achievements: the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, the protagonist of Edward Scissorhands, the lost robots of A.I, the penguins of Batman Returns. There’s also the neglected creations, such as the ghastly, squishy thing of Leviathan that suggests what a bunch of humans thrown in a working blender might look like if the mess could walk, stalk, and eat you (and, most ghastly of all, forcing you to join it). There’s also the deranged frogs of Tobe Hooper’s Invaders from Mars remake; the galloping dinosaur-thing of The Relic (which was sort of a Leviathan knock-off anyway, which itself, was probably a rehash of Carpenter’s The Thing, with which Winston also had some involvement). Two more favorites: the lobster aliens of the underrated pop masterwork Galaxy Quest (these baddies manage the near impossible feat of authentic, simultaneous satiric-menace); as well as the covers of the old Universal favorites in the otherwise not-that-great The Monster Squad. The Monster Squad should be noted though for admirably dotting one age-old question mark: no, nothing, other than silver, will vanquish the Wolf Man.

Winston also directed two pictures: Pumpkinhead and A Gnome Named Gnorm. The second picture remains unseen by me, but Pumpkinhead, despite having an uncharacteristically weak monster that’s a clear retread of the Alien design (probably due to budget) is a memorable, bizarre, atmospheric, slow shocker with an intense Lance Henriksen performance. See Pumpkinhead in a double-bill with Kathryn Bigelow’s superb Near Dark and try to explain to me what Henriksen’s doing reduced to appearing in crap like AVP. Pumpkinhead is a relatively obscure picture, particularly when compared to the films that Winston generally worked on, but it exudes Winston’s primary gift: the ability to find the humanity in the inhuman. Winston passed away yesterday at the age of 62. He earned the right to drink bourbon on the rocks and coast on his past achievements for the next three decades. He had just completed work on Iron Man and was gearing up for yet another Terminator instead. As the movies grow increasingly skittish, mindless, and corporately group thunk, Stan Winston was a valuable reminder of what the fantasy pictures were and could still be. Winston was one of the few that understood that awesome begins with awe.

Posted on June 17th, 2008 in Features |

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