Day Twenty-Three: A Mild Romero Sermon Masquerading as a Review of Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Essential. Iconic. Let’s go ahead and say a few more unoriginal things about George A. Romero’s debut, Night of the Living Dead. The film is one of the greatest of all horror pictures, and, unlike some, I respect the importance of such a statement. Night of the Living Dead is one of those perfect, wonderful accidents where the usual disadvantages of a making a movie (any movie, much less one of a significantly low budget) are blessings.
Dead looks like a home movie you might find in your attic one day. Something that documents an attack that went undocumented amongst all the other outrages of the time, such as Kent State, or the assassination of Martin Luther King. Imagine your grandfather, in the midst of boring you with a family history, suddenly saying “and this was the day your aunt ate your grandmother on your father’s side.”
This sort of macabre humor permeates Night of the Living Dead, though, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it doesn’t defuse the horror. The film has a strong script that feeds you bite size portions of exposition at just the right moments, amping the dread and violence as the dead slowly close in on our heroes. I’ve seen many films that attempt to dramatize the falling apart of a group, but few are as convincing as Dead. It has something to do with the total lack of artifice here, the performances are clipped and efficient, the dialogue unshowy. People say what they might actually say in this situation, not what a screenwriter needs them to say to ensure that his name is remembered for another project.
Romero would go on to push it further in subsequent films, but I find the scene where the ghouls eat whats left of the characters that have blown up in the truck to be one of the more unsettling scenes of violence I’ve ever seen, much less of Romero’s oeuvre. The gore is there, but its teasingly just out of sight. The creatures munch the guts in the shadows, and you catch a little glimpse of something and wonder if that was a stomach lining you just saw the creature eating. In Dawn, or Day, this question is resolutely answered.
With Dawn of the Dead, Romero would begin to push the series towards a more purposeful satire. His zombies are as much a joke as menace here, and he manipulates the tones with the seeming ease of a master. I’m a little split on the Dead pictures, I think Dawn of the Dead is the best film of the series, while Night is the sweat inducing, pretense free, single minded shocker of the bunch.
The satire or subversiveness of Night never takes reign over the story, and some have claimed that the pereceived commentary that Night offers on 1960s war torn, racially cancerous America was largely arrived at by accident anyway. This doesn’t really matter much either way, Romero made a film that caught the zeitgeist at the time, and could fuel one hundred different imaginations to go one hundred different ways with it. He didn’t have that level of trust in the other pictures, and it finally got a little out of control with his most recent, Land of the Dead, a God awful preachfest that was inexplicably acclaimed in certain circles.
A zombie learning to speak (sort of) English and recognizing that he has rights? Not scary. A zombie that’s a feral thing that’s all lumbering instinct that looks like your sister? Scary. A zombie that actually is your sister that you catch eating your dad in the basement? The stuff that nightmares are made of. We don’t need to have our nightmares rationalized for us, the nightmares and the real co-mingle in a way that’s best, at least in art, left in the realm of the sub-conscious. Romero once knew that, and his crude, low budget, little shocker is the one of great American horror movies. It doesn’t matter if the zombies are eating us out of social protest or not, what matters is that they’re eating us.
Day Twenty-Two: The Devil’s Rejects (2005)
What are we to make of The Devil’s Rejects ? I admit that I didn’t much care for Rob Zombie’s film when I first caught it over summer of 2005. I thought the film reveled in a certain vile killer chic, and laughed along with its band of madmen (who seem to be modeled after Charles Manson) as they indulged in relentless, prolonged scenes of torture. Zombie even perversely denies us the pleasure of a good guy, the cop pursuing them is just as insane as they are, the fact that he’s on the right side of the law seems to be more by accident than design.
I thought House of 1000 Corpses, his prior film as writer-director, was stylish, a more watchable than usual entry in the neverending chain that is the Texas Chainsaw Massacre ripoff. Rejects is interested in more though and I got on its wavelength in subsequent viewings. The film has an appealing lunatic bite, a flamboyant sting of lawlessness to it, and it’s in this acknowledgement of lawlessness that the film’s one truly great scene emerges. One of the killers, (Bill Mosely, in a performance that should get him more work) notices a potential victim praying to God, and laughs, and screams to the sky, if there is a God then strike me down with lightening. For a moment, we’re dealing in the pure, primal, animal fear of breakdown, of chaos that powers most great horror films.
You sense, like many recent horror directors, Zombie’s infatuation with past horror junk, but Zombie’s too head over heels in love with the tropes of the genres to overly intellectualize it or quote mark it like other filmmakers who’ll remain nameless. Zombie gets carried away and roots for the bad guy because the good guy’s squareness is repellent to him. He’s too busy embuing The Devil’s Rejects with a hellfire energy to instill it with any moral compass, and I dig the lack of hypocrisy, the cojones of Zombie. This thing rocks and rolls, and seems to be entirely uninterested in anyone’s opinion beyond it’s creator’s.
It also helps that Zombie has a found a mildly more original schtick this time. If Corpses was TCM, then Rejects is TCM part 2 as remade by Sam Peckinpah. The MTV splatter is gone here, and replaced by a dry, oversaturated Western cinematography that’s a breath of fresh air for the genre. We open with the mentally diseased Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe, if you’ve thought he’s chewed scenery in the past, you’ve seen nothing yet) opening fire on the Firefly Clan’s home, the family from Corpses, who murdered his brother in the prior film. Right away Zombie lays on the hyperbole: killers dressed in homemade armor, shotguns blazing with no apparent kickback, a Sheriff who walks in the line of fire like the Terminator, the mayhem reaching a gorgeous crescendo when a character fails to off themselves to spite someone else. Cue the Allman Brothers.
Zombie’s zeal is both his greatest asset and strongest limitation. One can’t tell where the satire ends and the misguided begins. Zombie lays on the purpilish dialogue, the Lynard Skynard, and the Tarantinoish digressions (though Tarantino would probably never sideline from the plot long enough to consider chicken fucking) and you’re left wondering if this filmmaker has any self-consciousness at all. That is, ulimately, the thrill of a Rob Zombie movie, or at least the first two Rob Zombie movies.
A teensy bit of self-consciousness might help though. Zombie could stand to learn that certain moments don’t need slow-mo to sell them or that some people don’t talk like ironically articulate white trash sailors (a much bigger problem with his Halloween) but, even as he is, Zombie is something to appreciate, he’s seemingly untouched by doubt, and he’s the only person working who’d showcase Sid Haig in something that could be called a star performance. What’s a matter honey? Don’t you like clowns? Don’t you think they’re fucking funny?
Day Twenty-One: Infection (2004)
Infection opens with several vignettes that gradually reveal to us the various nurses, doctors, and patients that populate a barren hospital one night. The stafff is overworked, underfunded and in danger of mental collapse. The patients, those that aren’t rotting away from burns or a very mysterious disease, are probably clinically insane, or don’t exist to begin with. The entire thing is absurd, particularly the design of the hospital from Hell, but then so are most nightmares, and for awhile director Masayuki Ochiai plays phenomenally on all the little things that nag you while you sit in a hospital waiting room. What if they re-used diseased syringes? What if something really deadly is incubating in the person who sits next to you? What if the doctor is crazy?
Infection appears to be one of those “people get picked off one by one by a mysterious thing that may or may not mutate them” kind of movies. I was thinking John Carpenter’s The Thing or Leviathan. Ochiai does incorporate some of those conventions, but there is also an emphasis placed, particularly in the third act, on something less tangible. Reality begins to crumble for these characters, and we wonder whether the disease is of the tell-tale variety, some sort of mass guilt that plagues the staff over a cover up that happens earlier in the film. The doctors turn on each other, try to figure out the source of the disease and…
…that’s right around when the film totally shoves its head up its own ass. Imagine the end of The Sixth Sense, only instead of Bruce Willis being the ghost, it turns out that yes, he’s the ghost, then, no, he’s not a ghost, then, well, yes, he may be a ghost, but then, no Haley Joel Osment is the ghost and he’s imagining that Bruce Willis is a ghost to deal with his own fear of being a ghost. What I just wrote is much more coherent than the last twenty minutes or so of Infection, which turns into an inescapable house of mirrors for its characters. By the end, convolution has become the disease and, believe me, Ochiai isn’t offering a cure.
It works though, and I normally don’t go for the Japansese horror films that get shipped to the U.S and are, inevitably, remade as more sensical but even more boring American films for teens. Infection maintains interest even in its knottier sections because it’s grounded in a very true, tangible anxiety of a total loss of control, of a fear that people who should know what they’re doing don’t.
Day Twenty: The Monster Squad (1987)
It can be risky to revisit a film from your childhood. As children we don’t have the calculation that we do as grown-up, full fledged film obsessives and it seems a little perverse to go back and ruin a past movie for yourself when you’re so busy ruining present movies for yourself. Let a bad film at least be a good film in false memory if nowhere else. You can’t go home again as the famed literary someone wrote, and he may have been thinking of 1980s childrens films that skate dangerously close to self-parody when he wrote it.
My fear of revisiting The Monster Squad could be summed up in two words, “the” and “goonies”. I knew even then that Squad was more than a little indebted to the Richard Donner film, and this is bad news indeed. The Goonies has aged terribly, and if I had been an adult at the time, I imagine I wouldn’t have gone for it at all. The film is loud, obnoxious, vaguely offensive (particularly with Chunk) and just a general headache of 1980s tastelessness. I’m not trying to steer us down the PC road that seems to be strangling our art today, but it should be made known that not all fat kids are bird brained, food crazed mad men. Chunk is to fat children what the Mickey Rooney landlord in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is to Asian stereotypes.
The Monster Squad is still a ripoff of The Goonies, but, aside from a regrettable Chunk wannabe, its not nearly as overbearing or desperate to be liked. The Monster Squad is agreeably slight, only 75 minutes, and makes sure to give most of the featured monsters, particularly The Gill Man, the Wolf Man, and The Mummy, a moment to shine. The Mummy gets a clever send off, and the Wolf Man has the opportunity to prove beyond a doubt that a silver bullet is the only way to kill him. For further analysis consult the aptly titled Silver Bullet.
Dracula and Frankenstein are a little disappointing though, even by the standards of nine year old boy who doesn’t question how easily the Van Helsing diary comes into a twelve year old boy’s possession. Dracula looks like a host of a notably unappealing Italian restaurant, and Frankenstein’s monster has the unenviable task of playing this movie’s version of Sloth. The Monster isn’t nearly as annoying as Sloth (it helps that he’s embodied by Michael Mann vet Tom Noonan), but one still can’t help but think the big guy’s getting sold a little short.
I’ve saved the best moment in the The Monster Squad for last and this scene alone marks the movie as ok to revisit: a scene of a boy and father, eating burgers and watching a slasher movie from the roof of their home through binculars as it plays at the local drive-in. This one moment, a reprieve from the trouble the father is having with the mother, gets at why some people turn to the movies at a very young age and never turn back. It has the gentle bliss of a Joe Dante film and for this I’ll forgive quite a bit.
Day Nineteen: Severance (2007)
The tedium and hypocrisy of office work is ripe for a smart horror film, but I’m afraid that Christopher Smith’s Severance is not that film. Severance is really just the same old slasher business, the old bit where nothing happens for two acts and we twiddle our thumbs and wait for the good stuff. We go to slasher films for rowdy ultra-violent perversity but the most perverse thing is usually how long we have to wait for the film to finally get on with it. We feel that time is being killed, and that if the director had made the film he really wanted, it would have been about twenty five minutes long.
Severance’s first couple acts do include a few nice barbs, but the film’s set up is really about as primitive as any other slasher movie. We have the goof ball, the sexy girl, the nerd, the clueless boss, and none of them are allowed too much personality. In the hands of a virtuoso (Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) this can be effective, but usually it winds up being about as hypocritical as anything Severance pretends to be lampooning.
To Smith’s credit, the third act here is pretty good. There is a truly wow moment featuring a rocket launcher, and a couple of the hack and slash scenes with the villians (a pack of possibly deranged soldiers freshly escaped from a loony bin) deliver the goods. But deep down you really don’t give a shit, and this wait until the third act structure (that’s probably a mutant of the structure of better movies such as Psycho or the original Chainsaw) needs to be retired or saved for the pros. Remember that film we discussed a few weeks ago, The Descent ? That film employed a similar wait and see peekaboo structure, ONLY THE FIRST TWO ACTS BOTHERED TO BE A REAL MOVIE TOO.
Day Eighteen: Cronos (1993)
Guillermo Del Toro’s Cronos is an unusual vampire film. You don’t become a vampire by being bitten by another vampire, you don’t spend long nights carousing and screwing and joyously killing bystanders. You are simply a corpse who is still animated, and who is powered by one urge, to drink blood so you can continue to be a corpse who’s sole purpose in life is to drink blood. But, even worse, you still have your soul, you still know what you’re doing, and you have to forever live with the mistake you made. Cronos is about greed, and the danger of a “quantity over quality” approach to life.
It’s also about the horror and the sadness of waking up one day to find that your grandpa (you’re father has died much earlier) is dying. Dying, and much worse, dependent on some mysterious golden bug that he found in a statue a few days ago. Most children, at one time or another, are afraid of something happening to their loved ones, and Cronos takes that primal fear, and fuses it with a black comic tale of a classic difference between youth and the elderly. The youth take life for granted, the elderly have a finer appreciation for each moment while it lasts, maybe too fine an appreciation.
I was going to post on Del Toro’s superb The Devil’s Backbone as an example of a contemporary ghost story that understands so well how the ghost story works, but I decided Cronos may have been a little less appreciated, and that perhaps a reminder was in order. Like all of Del Toro’s work, Cronos is a work of amazingly confident tone, Del Toro knows how to tug at the heart strings without mooting the horror. As wonderful as the relationship between Federico Luppi and Tamara Shanath (and grandfather and granddaughter) is, its never played for cheap sentiment and there are still revolting images to be found.
Including one of the more disturbing blood drinking scenes I’ve encountered in the vampire canon. Lupi, an elderly antiques dealer, now under the influence of the Cronos device, desperately licks a sick person’s blood off of a public bathroom floor. The taboo of cannibalism isn’t enough for Del Toro, he laces it with something much closer to home, and much scarier. Imagine seeing someone eat a twinkie off of a 7-11 floor, much less drinking blood.
Above all though, Cronos has a truly felt fear of death that puts it in the league of more primal, classical horror work. The deaths here, whether they occur out of vegeneance or greed or by accident, count, and aren’t laughed off or played as a gorehound come shot. Del Toro takes this genre seriously, and he makes some of the most transporting films in the business (regardless of genre.) His Pan’s Labyrinth is one of the best films of our current decade. It started nearly fifteen years ago with Cronos, which also deals with a young girl’s initiation into the complexities of death.
Day Seventeen: Cat People (1942)
A wonderful movie, one of the very best examples of the “heard not seen” type of filmmaking. Cat People has three very memorable sequences and none of them involve any wolfman style transformations on the part of the lead, Simone Simon. Simon plays a strange young woman who’s hesistant to make love to her new husband because she fears that stirring feelings of intense passion (or jealousy) will cause her to turn into a large panther.
There’s certainly a black joke in that summary somewhere. I’m not sure if Cat People was meant to be any kind of satire of bedroom politics (particularly of a time when couples slept in seperate beds on TV) but there’s a subtext there if you want to go looking for it. I doubt producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur were too interested in exploring the hypocrisy of marriage at the time, but that’s the fun of all these people turning into other creature movies, subtext can be mined in even the flimsiest entires of the genre (maybe not the Stephen King movie Silver Bullet, but that has Gary Busey in one of his best parts, a fair trade).
The funny thing is you don’t really root for Simon’s husband (played by Kent Smith) much at all. He’s ostensibly the hero but, like most heroes of these kinds of movies, he’s bland and uninteresting, a pretty boy who doesn’t appreciate what he has. There’s a particularly annoying scene where Smith confesses that he doesn’t know what to do with his potentially crazy wife, he’s never been unhappy before, he says. Never been unhappy before? Fuck you man. Its also clear that he would rather be off canoodling with his best friend (Jane Rudolph) anyway.The psychiatrist who tries to cure Simon of her suspicions may be a sleazy lech, but he at least knows a hell of a cat woman when he sees one.
Let’s get back to those three scares. One is set on a street near a park, one is in a swimming pool (its one of the most gorgeous scare scenes of any time or movie) and the final is set in the Simon-Smith home, when the good doctor finally discovers the truth of Simon’s heritage. All of the scenes work so well because Tourneur has patiently built to them, and has trusted that the scares would be worth the wait. The film also plays its secrets remarkably close to its vest, the nature of Simon’s problem is debatable until the very end.
I love this movie. The direction, that perfect, dreadful atmosphere, the wonderfully strange Simone Simon, the script that feeds us exposition at just the right times, that final look in Simon’s eyes toward the end of the film. Cat People is one of my favorite horror movies of the 1940s, and you’ll be surprised at how well it holds up. If only that doctor could’ve patented some sort of protective vest for indulging in the elusive, immensely pleasurable, but always difficult to survive panther nooky .
Day Sixteen: The Unknown (1927)
The Unknown is a frank, nasty bit of business by collaborators (and professional legends) Tod Browning and Lon Chaney. Browning directed and created the scenario, Chaney starred as Alonzo, an armless knife thrower who’s madly in love with the circus owner’s daughter, Nanon (a very young Joan Crawford). Alonzo’s disability looks to actually be an advantage with this young woman, as she’s terrified of men groping her (don’t ask, just go with it.) A strong man steps in the way though, spurring surprisingly brutal complications.
Chaney is, as usual, committed and superb as Alonzo, and two of his moments here are authentically scary and devastating. One of these scenes is justifiably famous: Alonzo, who turns out to be a criminal who really has arms, has them amputated so he can appeal to Nanon’s phobia. While he’s doing this, the strong man wins Nanon over, rendering Alonzo’s self-sabotage moot. Chaney’s realization of this, the slip from happiness to madness to madness dressed as happiness, is chilling, and in league with the unmasking scene of Phantom.
The second scene is toward the end, and again is centered on Chaney’s remarkable face. Alonzo watches as the strong man falls into his trap, and a devious, uncontrollable joy invades what’s left of the tortured Alonzo. I know the Joker from Batman is credited to The Man Who Laughs, but I have to wonder if Bob Kane saw The Unknown.
Browning would later go on to do the more famous Dracula and the (even better) Freaks, but, with The Unknown, we can see that the Browning sensibility had been in place long before those later pictures. The Unknown, like Freaks, sticks so well because Browning’s sympathies clearly lie with the deranged. The deck isn’t stacked here as it is Freaks either, Alonzo’s rage isn’t given any remotely rational excuse. It’s a testament to Browning and Chaney’s skill though, that we feel a pang of regret when Alonzo is trampled and the strong man and Nanon are allowed their happy ending. Alonzo was evil, selfish, insane, but he was the only character with any force to him. Everybody else is a pretty boy. Maybe the deck was stacked.
The Unknown is part of a two disc Lon Chaney Set from Turner Classic Movies. This also includes an engaging documentary on Chaney, as well as a still picture recreation of the “lost” Chaney/Browning film, London After Midnight. Chaney is essential, iconic, every bit as good as you’ve read from crusty film journals. I admit that I haven’t seen nearly as much as I should’ve myself. What better month to catch up with a neglected master?
Day Fifteen: Black Sunday (1960)
Black Sunday is the first film by the famed Italian horror director Mario Bava. The film is visually delicious, with a crisp, ripe atmosphere (think the Universal horror movies of 1930s and 1940s as shot by John Toll) that’s as impressive as any I’ve seen, but the story is just too poor, too non-existent.
The opening is impressive and promises a rich, flamboyant bit of gothic. We begin with a witch, or a vampire (the terms are used interchangably here) having an iron maiden hammered into her face, blood spurts and just before she’s to be burned, she swears her revenge. But she won’t burn, Satan seems to be protecting her, and so she’s thrown in a crypt that’s protected by a cross that can be seen by her corpse via a window in the coffin (a nifty image). The witch is Princess Asa (Barbara Steele, also in Shivers), and needless to say, she gets her reprisal when a couple of academics come screwing around the crypt two hundred years later.
Steele has presence, she’s sexual in that death kissed way that films like this require, but she’s given little to do. Over an hour of the film is the, slow, slow, slow set up of the rise of Asa. Bava spends an inordinate amount of time photographing doors closing, or opening, ominiously. I love a rich, dread inducing slow build, but its all in the service of very little. The Universal sequels of yesteryear were silly, but they at least had snap and a sense of fun. Bava takes himself dangerously seriously here, and that can be a killer for a film as purplish as this one.
Black Sunday does, as I say, have incredible black and white cinematography, it should maybe be seen once for this alone, but the story itself is bare bones and uninvolving. If you aren’t into this sort of thing, the ripe Italian horror of the 1960s, you may find the eightyish minutes to be a bit of a chore.
Day Fourteen: The Haunting (1963)
This week we’re going to look at a few movies that favor dread over any major grotesquerie, and The Haunting is one of the landmark examples of such a film, a psychological ghost story that holds up very well some four decades after release. The Haunting is Robert Wise’s adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and it stands as one of the legendary director’s most purely pleasurable films. Beautiful, creepy, exciting and memorable.
There are two major reasons the film holds up. Firstly, Wise favors exacting, subtle scares that rely more on the unstable mental terrain of the heroes than the usual F/X charged ghosts. The most we get here is a bit of slight movement, or awful, overbearing sound that suggests a group of giants marching up and down Hill House’s immense halls. Or, much worse, of an ancient heart that’s somehow learned how to beat within the house’s walls.
Secondly, the script, by Nelson Gidding, maintains the novel’s subtext of repressed and misdirected sexuality. Our protagonist, Eleanor (Julie Harris), bears an unmistakable resemblance to one of the House’s past victims: the daughter of its builder who holed herself up in the place for her entire life. Both women are probably untouched, shy, and faintly bitter. Both women were involved in a death that may have been purposeful, and both women are happy to channel all of this rage and loneliness into a malignant building that is more than happy to swallow them alive. Their names even have the same amount of syllables. Don’t laugh, nothing means nothing in a haunted house.
Eleanor is attracted to Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), who’s heading the experiment on Hill House, and it’s interesting to note that her obsession with becoming part of the house doesn’t reach fever pitch until she discovers that the doctor, who’s not entirely discouraging of her awkward advances, is married. At this point her true love no longer has a rival. At this point Eleanor, fragile, possibly mentally ill and emotionally broken from a just recently concluded lifetime of servitude, has no chance.
Further confusing Eleanor is the sexual current she also happens to share with Theo (Claire Bloom), one of the others along for the experiment. Theo is obviously meant to be taken as Eleanor’s opposite: free, confident, brash. But Eleanor is denied this potential pleasure also, because she’s too repressed for a man much less a woman, and also because Theo is as much a threat as an attraction. Theo resents the attention the doctor lavishes on the needy Eleanor, further ensuring that everyone has quite a bit to be stewing over as the house slowly works its mojo.
The Haunting is confident and rousing, and Hill House itself, while maybe a touch obvious, has been masterfully realized. The creepiest thing about Hill House isn’t the angles, or the towers, or the stairwell that looks to have been shipped in from Dr. Caligari, its the sheer clutter of the place: a suffocating, nauseating, inescapable clutter of mad furniture, books, mirrors, and tables, etc. Watching it you want the characters to go outside not so much to avoid the ghoulies as to not trip over a damn ottoman.
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