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.
Best of 2007
10.
Black Snake Moan
Your love of Craig Brewer’s second film will depend on how much you buy its tonal U-turn half way through, some felt cheated out of a good old fashioned Tennessee Williams B movie Southern sleazefest. I think the film’s transformation is ballsy; it deepens and expands the picture in a way that Tarantino has been unwilling to do since Jackie Brown. Black Snake Moan is Samuel L. Jackson’s best work since JB, and Christina Ricci’s best work period, she manages to humanize a virtually unplayable Madonna/whore/ fetish role. The film eventually becomes a story of unwavering love as an answer to unmanageable, inexplicable anxiety, and I bought it wholesale.
9. Away From Her
Actress Sarah Polley stepped behind the camera and made the directorial debut of the year with Away From Her, an adaptation of the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”. This film is that rare thing: an honest, graceful weepie, a work of intimidating maturity from any filmmaker much less one so young. Everyone is talking about Julie Christie’s work, and they should be, but the success of the film hinges on Gordon Pinsent. Away from Her is HIS story, HIS movie, and his gradual acceptance of his new situation, and feeling that this may be just a teensy weensy bit of poetic justice, is romantic and heartbreaking.
8. Black Book/ Lust, Caution
I usually find the critics who hide forty movies in their Best of Lists to be indulgent and annoying, but I couldn’t help doing it just this once. Black Book and Lust, Caution are both contemp covers of the age old screwing someone you hate but you might actually love but you might still hate for the good of the government tale. Black Book is a thrilling adventure with a surprising anti-war after taste. Lust, Caution is a more obsessive tale of bedroom politics. Together they cover the gambit of the story’s potential, and carry Hitchcock’s Notorious into the new millennium. Together they also contain the two strongest female performances of the year in Carice van Houten and Wei Tang’s sexy, star making portraits of the irrepressible will to survive.
7. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
I enjoyed Burton’s revamp of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but Sweeney Todd is the true return to form that Burton fans have been waiting for since his career best Ed Wood thirteen years ago. Todd may be an adaptation of another’s work, but it feels like pure, unhinged Burton, the true gothic that’s been driving his films all along. Unlike some certain past Burton films, Todd is a bloody, bitter, enraged work that doesn’t feel the need to dilute with half-assed satire, this thing stings and offers no apologies.
6. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Possibly Sidney Lumet’s most purely entertaining film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is streamlined and focused in a way that Lumet films rarely are. Lumet’s classics are (in a good way) more humane and meandering, Devil is a black heist aftermath noir with good actors rivaling their career best work. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, and Albert Finney gave us the most fascinating, stylized, uncomfortable family of 2007.
5. I’m Not There
I normally don’t go for the super duper art house stuff, call me a philistine but there you go. I normally find those films to be just as false as Hollywood’s only self-congratulatory and boring. Not I’m Not There though, this film rocked me in a primal, existential way that I still can’t quite articulate. This is the brilliant Todd Haynes’ best work, a passionate, lonely, fleeting look at the intangible little somethings that fill in our lives. Yeah, it’s also about Bob Dylan, but the universality of the film is going to stun you, as is the cast, which includes a traditionally underrated Richard Gere.
4. Zodiac
In year where half a dozen of America’s best filmmakers made their best film, David Fincher rose above the dated Gen X chic of his prior work to make a timeless masterpiece about the universal urge to explain the boogeyman away. Robert Downey, Jr., Mark Ruffalo and Jake Gyllenhaal lead a top to bottom terrific cast.
The ending is a stunner.
3. The Host
I forgot, The Host is just a monster movie. Then why does the film nearly bring me to tears every time I re-watch it? The Host is an uncompromising dark comedy about a family that tries and tries to overcome their personal limitations when faced with an unimaginable tragedy. And they just can’t. And director Joon-ho Bong plays our hopes and expectations against us again and again. The Host is an amazing tightrope of a film, a film that crosses every imaginable genre boundary without the slightest hint of strain. The monster is terrifying. The little girl is brave and charismatic. This is just a plain and simple great fucking movie.
2. No Country for Old Men
Yes, it IS that good. No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brother’s best film, is also about the boogeyman, only this time it’s us, and our apathetic refusal to save the society that’s slipping through our fingers. I know, I know, that sounds like a slog, but the Coens are more interested in entertaining than preaching. They’re too hardwired into the meat and potatoes mechanics of the thriller to make a boring movie. Javier Bardem, as the personification of the payback that’s coming down the pike, is one of the iconic human monsters of the American cinema.
1. There Will Be Blood
Again, I feel the need to preface: it IS that damn good. The year of 2007 seemed to be the year when our best filmmakers faced the anxiety of our current period (and I’m not talking about the Iraq movies) in a variety of original and disarming ways. The cinemas were bleak last year, and one of my friends, before a midnight show of this picture, said “why aren’t any of the good movies fun?”
I laughed her off, but I shouldn’t. It’s a good point, depending on your perspective. I happen to think bleak movies ARE fun. If I have one wish for 2008 though, it’s that Hollywood come closer to producing some of the great comedies of yesteryear without the bullet proof snark that seems to come with the territory these days. Unlikely I know. Hollywood doesn’t seem to be able to do light and frothy anymore, all of our wits are too cynical. Alexander Payne has it in him, and it’s about time we hear from him again anyway.
Of the bleak cinema of 2007, There Will Be Blood was the least compromising, the most nightmarish, the confirmation of our darkest fears of consumption and betrayal. The film marked a staggering leap forward for its filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, who was already one of the most daring and interesting directors working, and it showcased one of our best actors, Daniel Day Lewis, in an unforgettable vaudeville of cunning, animal, cluelessness, hunger, and pitiful loneliness. The final line of the picture is unforgettably simple and direct: “I am finished.” Anderson certainly isn’t.
Day Thirty-One: John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)
And so we reach the end. I, after some debate, have decided to conclude our little month long thing here with one of my very favorite movies of any genre, John Carpenter’s The Thing. There’s a strange thing about Carpenter’s film, I re-watch it once a year, and I always forget some of the surprises of the movie, the identity of some of the attackers, the timing of some of the scares. The Thing is an almost incomparably satisfying shocker, and it’s a horror movie that keeps on giving throughout the years.
I remember that creepy VHS cover of The Thing in the video store when I was child, showing a man in a heavy coat with a face that appears to be a pure beam of light. The cover promised the ultimate in alien terror, and I was too young to find that honor dubious. I also remember early conversations with my father regarding The Thing; he considered it a gory, junky reworking of a movie he held dear, the 1951 Howard Hawks film of the same name. At the time my dad’s opinion was scripture, and I assumed that it was some mental infirmity that kept me from understanding that the 1951 version was better when the Carpenter movie chilled me so much more.
The mental infirmities issue may have never been entirely worked out, but it has nothing to do with preferring the Carpenter approach to the story. I don’t wish to have a Thing cage match here, I think the Hawks version is very good, and holds up remarkably well. But Carpenter’s is scarier, and takes a track similar to one of the incarnations of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or perhaps an early Cronenberg film, the thing isn’t a giant vegetable space man. It’s you, or your buddy; unless it’s provoked and forced to reveal an ever changing true form that’s an incalculably hideous combination of every specie it’s come in contact with.
Carpenter’s film doesn’t have the deeper sociological scares of a Cronenberg or Body Snatchers movie; it’s a mean, single minded thing that’s only interested in scaring you. Carpenter is a long time Howard Hawks aficionado, and he’s revisited Hawks subject matter time and time again, so it’s a wonderful bit of poetic justice that he finds his masterpiece in a remake of a Hawks film. Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Thing is one of those magic movies where everything goes right. Carpenter’s usual habits, which can be mannered and overly ticky in lesser films, serve him in The Thing.
The bare character development fits the limited time frame of the story, and adds an element of impersonality that makes the thing’s assimilation that much scarier. The clean, uncluttered, very obviously composed framing suits the wide open Antarctic desolation beautifully, the minimal (usually synth) score (by Ennio Morricone, though he’s been directed by Carpenter to do a Carpenter impersonation.) is the best to grace a Carpenter film. I remember humming both The Thing and The Shining scores at an early age, I couldn’t get them out of my head.
Russell gives his most authoritative performance here as MacReady. It’s inarguable that Russell is, disappointing filmography be damned, one of our definitive badasses. It’s also no accident that he was asked to do a John Wayne impersonation in Death Proof. Russell has the same man’s man vibe; an I don’t give a shit because I don’t have to give a shit electricity that can’t be faked. Russell is also a better actor than Wayne, funnier, looser, and can play more of an everyman without compromising said badassery.
MacReady is more effective than Snake Plissken because there’s no quote marks around him, MacReady isn’t a goof, and his motivations are fueled by a basic, unglorified self-preservation that this picture’s script builds to quite elegantly. Russell has a few great tough guy lines here, my favorite (I’m paraphrasing) being his response to Wilford Brimley’s plea that he doesn’t know who to trust: “Trust is a tough thing to come by these days.” It’s a very movie line, but it’s delivered as a desperate throwaway, Russell’s attempt to keep face in an increasingly terrifying situation.
Hawks famously said that a good movie should have three good scenes and no bad ones. This is the one Carpenter film that passes that test. Besides the exchange I just mentioned between Russell and Brimley, there’s the justifiably famous “alien blood test” scene, and the ending, which is one of the best of all horror movies. Russell and Keith David sit down in the snow and watch as the remains of their compound, their only shelter and means of heat, slowly die. They have a drink, and smile, and slowly drift towards death themselves. After all the carnage that has taken place, these two are allowed the dignified demise of a Howard Hawks hero. Except one of the heroes may not be human, and he may not be dead. Only contagious.
★★★★
Day Thirty: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Tobe Hooper’s film opens with a bit of narration (courtesy John Larroquette) and then fades into a series of news reports explaining a bizarre series of grave robbings. We then fade into an image of a corpse real close, and pull out to reveal that the corpse has been perversely dug up and rearranged on top of a tombstone. We then cut to the title: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
No further than three minutes into his picture, Hooper has set the mood, and established a tone that he will masterfully maintain for another seventy nine minutes. I haven’t read the script, but I would imagine that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre would read like a slightly above average example of the kind of movies that have been popular ever since: A group goes where they shouldn’t, receives a little off the track vengeance, the end. Hooper’s film though is one of the masterpieces of the genre, and that’s because it’s an unusually precise, evocative exercise in pure terror.
The characters continually talk about the unforgiving heat, and Hooper makes you feel it. You can feel the sweat beading up on the character’s skin, the filth under their collar. You feel the clutter, rot and chaos in the deranged Sawyer family’s house, you feel the weeds blowing in the scant wind the environment will allow. Like many films that would follow, Hooper takes his time setting up the carnage the title promises, but it doesn’t feel like he’s padding a slim running time. The deliberateness of the film sets us up for a fall, leaves us vulnerable, with the title we obviously know we’re in a horror picture, but we don’t know when we’re going to get a horror picture.
Ten minutes in, the lead characters, a group of early twenty somethings, pick up a hitchhiker on the side of the road. Hooper plays with us here, we feel that we’re meeting one of the villians of the picture, but we can’t be sure, it may just be one more stop on the seemingly unending tour of backwoods weirdness. The dialogue is natural and unforced, the dread mounts with an unsettling lack of calculation. Then, before we’ve caught up, we realize that we’re in one of the scariest scenes of the movie, and a scene that will come back to haunt the characters in surprising ways.
This Texas town feels like no other weird little town in the horror genre. We don’t sense an art director high fiving a cinematographer immediately outside of the camera’s periphery. We wonder why the hell these dumb kids want to see their grandparent’s old house so bad. When an older gentlemen says “You may want to be careful, some folks don’t like you poking around, and aren’t afraid to let you know about it”, you laugh at the delirious understatement. This is a chaotic, apparently lawless town that’s inspired, not by hundred other movies, but by an authentic fear of the tearing of social fabric. Some people just don’t fucking like you, and they’re not afraid to show it.
Let’s go back to word authentic. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is so damn good because it feels real, uncalculated, unscripted, untested against a hundred age groups to see if it’s the next Saw, it just feels like it’s always existed somewhere waiting to be found. Thank God it was found before the idiotically overused catch phrase “torture porn” was coined.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was probably a happy accident, Tobe Hooper certainly hasn’t made a film ever again of it’s caliber, but that doesn’t matter. Hooper probably set out to make a little shocker that would get his foot in the door, and he accidentally made true art that remains relevant and unshakably disturbing, regardless of how many times it’s ripped off or remade. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a cathartic, relentless, black comic realization of the most familiar of nightmares: the one where you are chased by people you don’t know for no reason, and you can’t ever seem to get away.
★★★★
Day Twenty-Nine: The Shining (1980)
I read in a Stephen King interview somewhere that claimed Stanley Kubrick aimed to make the scariest movie of all time with The Shining. He certainly made one of the most interesting, one of the most debatable. I’ve always been mixed on The Shining, it’s a very effective piece, but I thought the traditional emotional remoteness that goes with a later Kubrick picture sabotaged him a little here. In other words, I was with the Stephen King guys who said that Kubrick had undermined the humanity of the novel in favor of something more cynical and abstract.
It’s not surprising that Kubrick said that he wanted to make the scariest film of all time, Kubrick certainly had that chutzpah, but he doesn’t seem to like horror movies. The Shining feels like a professor’s doctorate on the limitations of the horror film. Kubrick doesn’t believe in anything, and he doesn’t want to really get his hands dirty. He’s Stanley Kubrick the Great American Filmmaker after all, why would he lower himself to make a typical haunted house movie, based on something by that novelist Stephen King of all people?
The above would have represented my thoughts on The Shining up until about a year ago. In high school, I revered Kubrick because I was supposed to. Then in college I wondered why I was supposed to and began to resent the idea that I’m supposed to like anything if I’m to appear well read. I began to dislike the films, and was frustrated by Kubrick’s overly deliberate technique, which I viewed as posturing to maintain his acclaim and nurture the legend. I preferred earlier, livelier work like The Killing and Dr. Strangelove, films that seem to be blessedly free of such pressure.
A year or two ago I began to revisit the films, and, excluding 2001, which I can’t bring myself to pretend to like on any level, I’ve gotten to a place where I authentically love the majority of Kubrick’s work. Both prior viewpoints were the posturing of an insecure child. Now I’m an insecure child who likes Stanley Kubrick movies. His films are remote, are chilly, but there’s an element of friction, particularly in the masterpiece, Barry Lyndon, you where sense the presence of two Kubricks on the set, the cynical intellectual, and a more approachable guy who’d like to believe in things beyond cruelty and isolation.
The Shining, upon revisitation, has a similar friction. This is Stanley Kubrick’s Death of the Family picture, and viewed in a particular light, it is a supremely moving achievement. Yes, Jack Nicholson appears to be crazy from the outsight, that’s one of the bigger cliches that detractors use to dismiss the film. But let’s think about that, yes, it subtracts something from the story that King wrote, but it adds something to the film that Kubrick made. That the Jack Nicholson character is crazy in the beginning is the point. The life of this family is a charade, and it’s through the intervention of The Overlook Hotel that the family is forced to realize it. This is a more original, more daring take than the story that Stephen King wrote (and I say that as an admirer of the novel.)
As in other Kubrick films, the only emotion that comes through with any real conviction is the malice of the Nicholson character. The nicer words, the exposition are plain and flavorless and delivered as so. The Nicholson character’s relationship with his son Danny (Danny Lloyd) is a farce of the father/son dynamic, and some of the most unsettling material in the film. The Shining is about Danny’s realization that the world is a violent, dangerous place, and it’s one of the least sentimental coming of age stories I’ve personally seen.
Wendy’s (Shelly Duvall) relationship with Jack is even worse. Jack addresses Wendy with naked contempt before they get to the Overlook, though she turns a frequent deaf ear to it. Jack’s hostility is a little harder to ignore when he picks up an ax. Here Kubrick again plays a different note than expected, Duvall’s character IS shrill, IS annoying, her sunny side up exterior a very real defense again her husband’s introverted self-absorption.
It’s a mark of The Shining that we’ve gotten this far before even mentioning the supernatural goings on that fuel the second half of the film. Again, Kubrick’s conflicted attitude powers the picture. He evidently didn’t believe in the supernatural, and it shows, the film has an uncertainty, a lack of conviction in the subject matter, that actually enhances the dread. Again, it does feel more like a college doctorate on the horror film, removed, aloof, a Godless world where anything goes, safety is guaranteed nowhere, particularly in your family.
Let’s go back to the cliche of the Nicholson casting, which is partially legitimate. Nicholson’s performance is problematic not for the “insane at first glance” reasoning, but for the “insane in a chic, stylized way” reasoning. Nicholson is doing his cool cucumber Nicholson thing here, and it’s a bit too much for the movie. We watch The Shining and think, “yeah that’s pretty cool, so cool in fact that Nicholson would spend twenty years doing it”, but it doesn’t mesh with the other performances, particularly Duvall, who is terrific. I’ve never much warmed to Shelly Duvall, but she’s fearless in playing someone so afraid; this is strong, raw work, and one of the best performances in the later Kubrick canon.
If The Shining had absolutely nothing going on beyond Kubrick’s technique in realizing it, then the picture would still be worth seeing. The amazing tracking shots have been endlessly elaborated upon, so I won’t belabor the point, but they accomplish a sense of geography that is rare in the horror film. Kubrick’s vision of The Overlook is amazing, the building is a timeless creature that waits to swallow it’s inhabits whole. My favorite shot is the very first, the God’s Eye View as we watch Jack drive to his interview as that iconic score sounds. The credits sequence is impressive the first time you watch it, the second and third and fourth it’s quite moving. There’s a mourning to be found in these opening images, an unforgettable inevitability.
★★★½
Day Twenty-Eight: A Bucket of Blood (1959)
I first noticed Dick Miller as a reoccurring supporting performer in the films of Joe Dante. Miller has one of the best scenes in Dante’s Gremlins as a man who seems to know more about the creatures than anyone else in town and subsequently pays for it with a bulldozer through his living room window. Miller is also terrific in a small part in The Howling, which we discussed earlier in our celebration, as one of the only people who respects the delicacy of werewolf execution. Dick Miller is always the guy in the know, the seasoned character kinda badass actor who’s never the star because he’s too competent. He’d kill the monster in fifteen minutes, and we’re conditioned to expect that it take our heroes at least ninety.
Dick Miller was called Walter Paisley in The Howling, and that name turns out to be another of the dozens of horror movie references to be found in that very endearing film. Paisley may be a small town bookstore owner looking to make a buck in The Howling, but he was once a very troubled young man who bussed tables at a pretentious cafe, where he hoped to one day make an impression with it’s self-absorbed, hypocritical patrons, particularly a sweeter girl in the group played by Barboura Morris. Paisley wants to be an artist like the others (who seem to talk of creating art more than actually creating it) but he’s painfully untalented. Then he discovers that sculpting is a breeze when you kill the subjects and just dump a little plaster on them. Quicker that way too.
Roger Corman directed A Bucket of Blood and my typically half assed research indicates that it’s the only film to feature Dick Miller front and center as the star. Miller was only twenty nine or thirty when he made A Bucket of Blood, and it’s a bit jarring to seem him devoid of some of the wrinkles that the years would eventually carve. That no-nonsense tough guy rasp is softer too, Miller sounds a little like Jerry Lewis in his nerd days, and, murder subtracted, it’s a similar kind of part.
A Bucket of Blood is charming and self-aware, not afraid to be a little (ok, a lot) goofy. The film’s idea of Bohemians is hilariously broad (very much in the “ok daddy yo” line of caricature) and it’s hard to separate the intentional from the unintentional. Corman keeps things zipping along, and, we find ourselves rooting for Miller’s serial killer to get the girl and rescue her from all of that blinding self-importance. The film has one very inspired line, a sorta poet approaches Miller and tells him that his work might net him twenty five grand. Miller looks at him, incredulous, and says that he thought money didn’t matter. The poet, startled, considers this and replies “of course money doesn’t matter, but this is twenty five thousand dollars!”
We’re in the middle of a remake craze now, mostly unnecessary, but I would like to suggest to Hollywoodland that A Bucket of Blood get the remake treatment. The film is a one joke movie, but it’s a funny joke, and one that could really be explored in a sharp satire of the various artistic putons that critics, artists, and viewers put themselves through on a daily basis. I only have two requests, an exec producer credit and Dick Miller again as the lead. Surely he can put the Gremlins and werewolves aside for a moment to stick it to the artistic elite again, old school style, with, of course, new school rules.
★★
Day Twenty-Seven: The Old Dark House (1932)
James Whale’s horror films (Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man) age better than most other movies of the era, even the good ones. This has something to do with Whale’s sense of humor, his dry wit, Whale manages to tweak the genre without playing as if he’s above it (truly having your cake and eating too). I’ve recently said that horror and comedy shouldn’t be mixed by amateurs, Whale may have been the ultimate pro in this regard, and The Old Dark House is one of the most purely enjoyable of his work.
The story is simple and well traveled. A group of travelers (including Gloria Stewart, Melvyn Douglas, and Charles Laughton) get lost in a storm and stumble into a creepy, old mansion that looks to be abandoned. Lucky for us though, it isn’t, it’s occupied by Boris Karloff (in a much smaller role here), Ernest Thesiger (Bride of Frankenstein) and Eva Moore in one of the film’s funniest performances as a deaf, superstitious woman who’s given up on anyone taking her frequent warnings seriously. Throughout the film we discover other inhabitants, but to reveal more would diminish some of the fun.
The Old Dark House doesn’t quite have the lunatic sting of Whales’ Bride of Frankenstein (there’s no moment here to equal Karloff’s final words in that film) but House is equally effective in a more free form, shambling way. The film is a revue of haunted house cliches, a buffet that bounces from one joke and character bit to another. Like other Whale horror films, the pace is superbly even, the tone sustained remarkably well. There are no groaners, no long stretches, this is well-performed tonic by a master of low key dread and quiet chuckles. The Old Dark House of The Old Dark House, is little more than an insane asylum, but the desperation rarely undermines everyone’s good manners, which is, of course, Whale’s ultimate joke.
Ironically, legendary ham Charles Laughton lends House one of its subtler performances. He has a wonderful scene, played relatively straight, where he defends his ambition, his aim for what others see as profit above all else. Laughton’s character has never gotten over his lost wife, and he loses his new girl too over the course of the picture. His acceptance of this, and his ultimate character, compliments the farce of The Old Dark House with something sadder, he shows you why one would consider living in such a place.
Day Twenty-Six: The Roost (2005)
The Roost is an exceptionally low budget shocker that concerns a group of young adults (heading to a friend’s wedding) who run afoul a deadly roost of vampire bats. This would be awful enough, I’d imagine being eaten alive by killer vampire bats to be extremely unpleasant, except, the bats also turn you into a sort of zombie upon biting, and then the zombie can turn another person into a zombie, and before long we’ve got more bats and zombies than we know what to do with.
The Roost is not very good, in fact, its so poor in places that it plays more like a film you’d see on campus than a real theatre. The writer-director, Ti West, is obviously trying to pad a short into a feature film, and the result is some of the longest 78 minutes you’ll find at your videostore, or mailbox, or however you come about meeting your viewing needs. Among other things The Roost features a particularly pointless framing device: Tom Noonan (always welcome) appears in the beginning, middle and end to comment on the story like a host from one of those 1970s specials, or the Crypt Keeper. What this has to do with vampire bats and zombies is beyond me. The first five minutes of the film is the camera almost literally spacing out around Noonan’s castle. You may not make it all the way through this one.
Still, there’s some potential here. West is very young, and I imagine he had little to work with, and there is the occasional image that works. West has also found a slightly different menace and an effective setting for his film. The horror filmmaker Larry Fessenden executive produced and appears in The Roost, and he did the same for West’s forthcoming Trigger Man, which has already received some very favorable notices. West is also currently finishing Cabin Fever 2. If West makes it, perhaps The Roost will one day be a bizarre curiosity, until then though, its something you’d watch five minutes of before flipping the channel.
Day Twenty-Five: The Mummy (1932)
Bowen’s Cinematic’s 31 Days of Horror has largely been a catch as catch can affair. No master plan, no attempt at writing a horror canon. I always knew there would be a Karloff film though, and I always knew it wouldn’t be Frankenstein. Nothing wrong with Frankenstein at all, actually there’s quite a bit right with it. But we all know Frankenstein. We all know The Mummy too, but how many of you have actually sat down and watched The Mummy?
The Mummy was directed by noted German cinematographer Karl Freund (he shot Metropolis, Dracula, Key Largo, among others) and he lends this film, as expected, an assured visual tone that resembles the crumbly, dusty, old as the ages look of the mummy himself. Freund’s framing is cramped, stuffy, entombed, impressive. Watch how Freund handles the marvelous opening scene, a mummy resurrection scene as suggestive as any of the feline shenanigans in Cat People, we see the young moron laughing madly, and we pan to a strip of the mummy’s wrapping disappearing out the door. The most terrifying part has already happened though, and that’s the opening of the great Karloff’s eyes.
It’s fitting that Freund shot Dracula, because The Mummy is essentially a remake of that film with a different creature. Unfortunately, The Mummy inherits Dracula’s flaws too. Both films devote quite a bit of running time to the spouting of various romantic banalities by the boring heroes, and both films keep the monster off screen for far too long. Dracula was stilted and obviously lifted from the stage, the superb atmosphere by Freund and the legendary Tod Browning its only real asset. Dracula himself, as embodied by Bela Lugosi, has always been a bit of bust for me. I think he’s one of the more overrated approaches to the monster. He’s overdone, clownish, and not nearly as frightening as some of the other vampires of the time.
The Mummy may have the boring heroes, the laughable dialogue, the creaky pace, but it has a wonderful monster. Karloff’s work here isn’t as showy as his (also brilliant) work as the Frankenstein’s monster, but he’s no less interesting. We nearly sympathize with his aim here, his single minded urge to find his love, but Karloff’s portrayal is couragously unsentimenal. Karloff’s Imhotep may have began his quest with a romantic desire, but the ages of unrewarded pursuit have whittled him down to pure, malignant rage. He truly is a corpse, a forgotten relic who refuses to surrender to the inevitability of time.
Beyond this performance, the film is hit or miss. The other performances are largely awful, and the story is, as I said earlier, Dracula all over again. The Mummy setting up shop in the museum is rather nifty, as is Imhoteps’s scheme in the beginning of telling the archaelogists where the ruins are so they can dig them up for him. It’s also worth noting that the only real mummy shot is near the beginning, the rest is Karloff. I was reading a bit and playing with the extras on the DVD, and it was said that Karloff was so huge after Frankenstein the year before, that all the marketing had to say was “Karloff….Mummy”. Karloff more than justifies the fervor here.
Day Twenty-Four: Braindead (1992)
I miss Peter Jackson from the early days, the unhinged horror comedy filmmaker who hadn’t yet conquered the world with a certain fantasy trilogy. I am quite fond of Lord of the Rings, but King Kong lost me somewhere in the two hours it takes for Kong to show up, and I wondered what happened to the Jackson who would’ve had a baby eating a person’s head in half that running time. I miss Jackson’s indulgences of the NC-17 variety.
Bad Taste is impressive primarily from a wannabe filmmaker standpoint. You respect how much Jackson does with so little but the movie, by movie standards, leaves you wanting. Meet the Feebles is foul and gloriously deranged. Braindead, though, is Jackson’s doctorate in the genre, it’s no wonder he left “splatstick” after this one. I’m not sure what else there would be left to do. Zombie sex? Check. Pus mistaken for custard? Check. Climactic set piece requiring a football field’s worth of plastic body parts? Check. Baby zombies? Check. Baby zombies ripping heads apart? Check. I know I already wrote that one, but “baby ripping heads” or “baby eating heads” are surprisingly fun phrases to type, they make the coffee go down that much easier.
The gory cartoonish horror comedy is harder to pull off than it may sometimes appear. The danger (I feel I wrote this somewhere before, my apologies) is that the comedy and the horror moot one another and yield just another exercise in filmmaker attitude that doesn’t make it as a real movie. Braindead works so well because it’s devoid of any attitude to begin with. Braindead isn’t chic, isn’t hip, isn’t cool, its the bubbly collective of Jackson’s daydreams while watching every possible monster movie he could get his hands on. Jackson is a wit and a talent, and he recognizes both the absurdity and the essentiality of these fantasies. The viewpoints of “absurd” and “essential” bounce off one another like billard balls in Braindead and yields what could be called a junior Buster Keaton cover of the zombie movie.
The zombies that Lionel (Timothy Balme) has to nursemaid throughout the movie are not that much worse than taking care of the human version of his mum (Elizabeth Moody), whom he has a conflicted, Norman Bateish relationship with. Jackson shoots the human scenes the same way he does the carnage that eventually ensues: in jarring, three ring circus style close up. The sound effects that accompany human Mum’s actions are also stylized and digusting. Lionel handles the zombies so well because he’s had experience with the vaguely living dead, and this isn’t that much of a stretch.
The madness that Jackson orchestrates toward the end of Braindead has to be seen to be believed, but part of me wishes that the film played in the “having to shield zombie Mum from society” sandbox a little longer. There is one truly uproarious scene in this vein: a dinner sequence with Lionel, Mum and a couple they need to impress. I won’t ruin the various grotesqueries that Jackson unleashes, but the obviousness of Mum’s condition, and Lionel and the couple’s determined obliviousness, is inspired. Part of my (mild) regret stems from Moody’s performance, she’s too good to be so quickly discarded in favor of a plastic zombie.
For all its violence, Braindead is surprisingly square and dorky, lovable even. Whatever your taste, Jackson’s passion is too damn pure to dislike. There’s a romance here, and it’s naive in a very old school silent movie way. Jackson’s playful indulgences are still evident in his more recent films, but he’s polished now, put on his tux so to speak. The little rugrat genius who throws mud at your windows and dreams of different ways to blow up a corpse occassionally returns in fits and starts (the T-Rex/Kong three way for instance) but he’s in disturbingly short supply these days .
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