The Strangers (2008)
The Strangers works for a little while, but it doesn’t get in your bones. The picture may eventually scare you accidentally though, by forcing you (if you’re a critic of some sort anyway) to consider what you’ll do if this run of pastiche horror films continues much longer unabated by even the slightest originality. Recite the weather forecast below the title and the running time? Stocks, perhaps? How much more can be said about the visually competent, or even assured, but hopelessly unimaginative home invasion by masked marauder(s) of vague motivation picture? Funny Games was a crock, but its contempt for its audience gave it a mild pulse. If I had seen The Strangers five years ago, I would have probably been more glass-is-half-full in my approach, but these pictures that are just passable enough to squeak by without offense are beginning to be the most offensive of all.
See the French picture Inside instead. It’s tasteless. It’s uncomfortable. The directors, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, may have crossed the line, but it’s a home invasion picture that’s artfully made, courts absurdity (stumbling into it often) and goes feeling around in a primal, sticky place of guilt, loss and legitimate, appalling, violation. You watch Inside and wonder how long it’s been bubbling in the back of its creators’ minds. You watch The Strangers and wonder how director Bryan Bertino, who shows talent, could have possibly roused himself, in his debut, to stage yet another picture that works the laughably tired, obligatory based-on-faux-true-events narration device; or that features the typically idiotic marching around the house outside of safety, completely divorced of any tangible, terrestrial reason to do so routine. Or the relentless, one-sided, pounding the heroes of these pictures must always endure, never scoring even a minor win against the villains. Never making one decision that is met with success. Future horror directors: if your picture doesn’t have the courage to stake out its own convictions, misery isn’t uncompromising, it’s tedious.
★★
The Orphanage (2007)
Of the various chambers that exist in the manor that is the horror genre, the haunted house picture may be the picture that’s most encouraging of that potentially exhilarating, disconcerting wedding of appealing cinematic surfaces (think of the smooth, deep, ironically beautiful cinematography that characterizes The Innocents) with the dank emotional textures that constitute our everyday fears. Of all the possibilities the horror genre offers, the haunted house picture is perhaps the ripest metaphorically, which is saying something. We know that haunted house pictures, or stories of the supernatural in general, deal with the fear of dying, with fear of the dark, of change and moving on, with deep buried skeletons in the closet, but they’re usually just as concerned with the breakdown of the family unit; the fear, not of the skeletons, but of the necessity to face the judgment and pent-up emotional heat of our family once said skeletons are revealed; the fear of discovering your relatives, not as your relatives, but as flawed beings with their own agendas and damage.
The Orphanage is clearly, undeniably, indebted to many of the usual suspects of the haunted house genre, particularly those that concern themselves with the fragile mental state of young-middle-aged women such as the aforementioned The Innocents or The Others; but this film has an emotional intensity that transcends the puzzle-box tropes (the red herrings, the bumps in the night, the doubts of sanity) that dominate some of the modern movies; this picture is beautiful, but it doesn’t have a vice directorial grip, there’s an empathy here. New director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez have invested an old genre (that I love) with a tang of real passion and undoing; you watch the picture less for the punch-line and more out of a legitimate, rare, fevered concern for the protagonist. Bayona has unavoidably been compared to Guillermo Del Toro (who serves as “presenter” here) and that’s partially valid, but it’s a mark of the picture’s generous, human appeal that Pedro Almodóvar just as easily came to mind. The Orphanage, like much of Almodóvar’s work, is concerned with women first and foremost: their fears, their burdens, their reservoirs of strength and pain.
The Orphanage has you from the title; it’s an uneasy word, signaling an uncomfortable reality of injustice and partial breakdown. We don’t like the word under the cheeriest of contexts (providing there are any) much less as the title of a horror picture. The film opens, as many of these pictures have a habit of opening, in the past. Children are playing a game outside of the orphanage, which is appropriately, diabolically grand, elaborate and beautiful; the ideal breeding ground for ill will and wrong doing. An adult watches the children play from inside, and informs a caller that Laura has not yet learned that she is to leave the orphanage.
The image fades and we are then introduced to the adult Laura (Belén Rueda), the implications of that past day left hanging as one of many question marks that soon follow. Laura has returned to reopen the orphanage, accompanied by her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and child, Simón (Roger Príncep). Bayona has a young filmmaker’s fun (as well as a talented filmmaker’s flair for) taunting us with the various clicks and uh-ohs that traditionally comprise the first act of these pictures. A social worker with sad, bug-eyed glasses (Montserrat Carulla) appears, projecting all around strangeness as well as a disturbingly specific knowledge of Simón’s background; Simón, already socially troubled and drawn toward the imaginary, tells Laura of new invisible friends that bear a disturbing resemblance to Laura’s own childhood peers, they also have a disconcerting habit of leaving very real footprints behind. Simón, in one of the more unnerving bits in the film, even leaves seashells behind so his new friends can find their way back…
It would be unfair to discuss the picture’s plot any further, but I will say that these films hinge on their ending as much as any other genre in the business. The Others is a luscious, scary ghost story with a fine Nicole Kidman performance (perhaps her best) but the ending was disappointingly derivative of another recent scare picture, and I guessed it before the half-way mark. The Haunting’s implication that poor Eleanor would forever be among the house’s many tortured spirits is satisfyingly eerie and circular, and helped put that film (as well as the book) over to legendary status. The ultimate resolution of The Orphanage is far-flung, but it’s also a simple, ghastly doozy. Bayona almost squanders the force of it with an epilogue that’s leftover Pan’s Labyrinth, but that’s splitting hair.
Rueda (The Sea Inside) is a beautiful, expressive actress and she invests Laura with a survivor’s guilt and distance that deepens the themes of the genre without editorializing or killing their livelihood. Laura is a woman, a possibly failed, self-loathing protector, not another princess ripe for murder. Carulla is frightening in a bit that skirts cliché to lend the picture its quiet, admirably gray moral longing. Geraldine Chaplin appears, in a bit that resembles Poltergeist in conception but (thankfully) not execution (that picture relied on effect after effect for affect). The Orphanage sketches Chaplin in green light, and lets you do the rest, that haunted, piercing face another indelible portrait of the fade that powers all of these pictures and that eventually comes to consume everyone.
The Orphanage isn’t a classic, it’s ultimately more about past genre films than anything else, but it’s a visually magnificent, rewarding picture, and Bayona already, refreshingly, understands that the dark can’t rival what you’re faced with when you catch your reflection unexpectedly, whether it be during the day or at night.
★★★½
Inside (2007)
Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s Inside is a beautiful junk painting of your worst nightmares, probably the most potent exploitation of unyielding, inexplicable violation that I’ve seen since Takashi Miike’s Audition. Like Miike at his more unhinged (and Audition isn’t it) Bustillo and Maury announce their total lack of regard for all notions of good taste and restraint with their opening image: a severe car accident as seen and experienced by an unborn child. One moment the child is soothed by his mother’s loving (if still somewhat alarming) words, the next he’s jolted and throttled, blood rising and floating from the inside.
The pregnant Sarah (Alysson Paradis) and her unborn child do manage to survive, but Sarah’s husband isn’t as fortunate. Sarah, her face plastered in distinctly French movie blood, looks over at her husband and wails. Four months later, it’s Christmas Eve and Sarah’s doctor informs her that she’s to give birth the following day and advises that she go home and relax in that cool, condescending manner with which doctors, or people who know you’ve recently lost someone, speak so fluently. Sarah’s employer and mother separately beg her to spend Christmas with them, but Sarah, confused, bitter, lonely, demurs and returns to her home to spend Christmas Eve alone. Sarah, inevitably of course, comes to regret that decision when a strange woman (Béatrice Dall, unforgettable), referred to simply in the credits as “la femme”, knocks on Sarah’s door in the black of the night and asks to be let in. Sarah, seeing only a dark shadow, and not as stupid as many in these types of pictures, tells the woman to scram, but this femme isn’t so easily dissuaded. Soon it’s unavoidably evident that the woman has come for Sarah’s child, and she doesn’t intend to leave without it.
Inside’s opening act is superb; a stylish, slow-burn emotional penetration that seemingly plays every one of your primal campfire fears against you: the inexplicable stranger, the dark, dank lonely night, the policemen who come and go to little avail, the dreams of your child revolting inside you. Sarah’s home is distinctly stylish; a movie place of dread; of unspoken, hellish domestic resentment, lit in such pale dusky yellows as to suggest a warm, humid womb itself. The title is, needless to say, multi-tiered in meaning. La femme wants to get inside, inside, inside, and nothing will stop her multiple invasions of Sarah’s taken for granted boundaries: her peace, her house, and ultimately her pregnant body. Bustillo and Maury exploit and extend Sarah’s sudden, burning revulsion and panic with masterful craftsmanship: la femme is equal parts specter (of guilt and bourgeoisie complacency and entitlement), butcher, psychotic and unstoppable culmination of every mother, or human’s worst nightmare. Bustillo and Maury, unlike virtually everyone else working the genre these days, aren’t afraid of being labeled tasteless or psychotic, they want to hammer your pressure points, and they don’t intend to play fair.
The film is surreally, shockingly, grandly, unbelievably, absurdly violent. Inside, because it’s horror and French, has been likened to Alexandre Aja’s High Tension, but that picture blew its load on gory pyrotechnics that had nothing to do with theme or atmosphere. That film was an unintentionally laughable, boring cartoon, with a twist ending that only further highlighted its pointlessness. Inside is, and this is the confusion of it, subjective and exploitive in equal measures. As accomplished as the picture is, it still exudes a problematic carny freak show “look at that!” vibe that borders on inhuman. The film is more original than many slasher pictures, but it’s still rooted in movies above all else. Rear Window? Check. Blood Simple? Check. Wait Until Dark? Check. Every gross horror movie ever made? Check. Woman finally saying fuck it and going all Ripley on us whether it makes sense or not? Check.
The male (probably young) filmmakers get these women, and portray their insecurity, rage, and psychosis with surprisingly fluid ease (until the end, where the Ripley factor kicks in, and we suffer the obligatory “someone’s dead, no they’re not” fake out) but the very male filmmakers also seem to be at a distance that might be inevitable with such a loaded, unavoidably female subject. These guys think this is gross, a woman would think it’s tragic (and gross). The references to the French riots of 2005 hint at a subtext of class resentment that the picture doesn’t seem too interested in capitalizing on, it’s a red herring, a sketch of the boogeyman’s origin that doesn’t really inform the film much one way or the other (though it does season the ultimate punch line). The body invasion of Inside lacks the self body-bewildering kick of an early Cronenberg film because the second and third acts are too indulgently disgusting: Bustillo and Maury don’t have enough faith in their final assault; they threaten to turn it into yet another exhibit in the Grand Guignol theatre of well lit cruelty.
Inside is still a notable, stunning piece of genre filmmaking. (There’s a brilliant, non-violent moment near the beginning where Sarah discovers, via just developed photographs, that la femme has known her for some time.) The violence, before it goes haywire, is ghastly and remarkably apt thematically. The tides of blood flow and spurt and explode, and hauntingly confirm and underline a terrified young woman’s mental implosions. The worst has finally arrived. The film treads uneasily towards High Tension farce near the end but reins it in for a devastating final image that threatens to sink into moral quicksand. Perversion and chaos have stolen life and motherhood and then just as strangely handed them right back, in a Grimm’s fairy tale finale that the filmmakers, in their audacity, seem to believe is a happy one. The ending reveals the filmmakers to possibly be more in touch with their inner woman than we initially assumed, though the horror lies in which woman they appear to be in touch with.
★★★½
They Live (1988)
No we haven’t, excluding the Allen picture, stumbled into another thirty days of horror, but They Live was on television the other night, and though it has been written about endlessly by other enthusiasts, I watch no questions asked when that picture is playing, regardless of what DVDs may be stacked in the corners of the room. I briefly mentioned the film over at Joe’s place the other day, but wasn’t going to write about it for fear that my readers think me possessed of some tunnel vision.
I’ll risk it. They Live may, along with Big Trouble in Little China, be John Carpenter’s most purely pleasurable picture, seemingly less interested in pressing its effect upon the audience than most of Carpenter’s work. The film is flakey and loose; wearing its frustration bluntly on its sleeve, blessed with a total absence of self-consciousness, effectively reflecting the personality that Carpenter exudes in his generally appealing, self-effacing interviews.
And this may be what the current political war pictures are missing, a feel for the everyday as well as a punk cover screw the critics outrage. Filmmakers concerning themselves with Iraq seem less interested in making a great Iraq movie than being the director of a great Iraq movie, ego divorcing them from any immediacy of feeling, we generally feel as if we’re just sitting through another disingenuous politician’s platform, and critics wonder why we skip the pictures! My readers have convinced me that I was probably too kind on Stop-Loss recently, I essentially reviewed the first act, only to shut my eyes and ears of everything that followed, but that picture signaled, in the beginning, a bit of hope for the current coming home movie. Peirce at least had conviction and, dare we get a little maudlin, heart which needn’t be encased in quotation marks.
If Stop-Loss has conviction, They Live has conviction in its lack of conviction, the thing has a flip despair. Carpenter’s pictures, with few exceptions, normally receive shitty notices, and this seems to free the director to take on a vaguely political B picture without any illusions as to how it will ultimately be received. The “message” is front and center, in your face, a gifted amateur’s outrage. Ridiculous looking skeletons have taken over Earth, aligned with the government, and are assuring our complacency through a solid middle class lifestyle, which is why it falls upon the bums on the edge of town to save the world, primarily because they haven’t been cut in on the deal; aided by a cheap pair of sunglasses that exposes the aliens, as well as their subliminal messages which include SLEEP, MARRY, and CONSUME, they seek to set matters straight.
The film has an undeniably quaint those were the good old days (in genre cinema) quality, but there is an inspired black joke that Carpenter should’ve further played up, that the difference between the aliens’ reign and our own is negligible, the stakes non-existent. Our heroes, Roddy Piper and Keith David, are intent to free the human race from enslavement, but we never understand why the victory matters, which is to say that it doesn’t matter, except to establish to which victor goes the spoils, which will never be Rowdy Roddy Piper or Keith David or anyone of their social standing anyway. Their plight is bitter, not particularly well-intentioned, and pointless. They Live captures American indifference in a more honest and memorable fashion than any five Jarheads.
Some have expressed disappointment in the stunt casting of Rowdy Roddy, but that’s essential to the film’s junk ennui vibe. Some have suggested that this would have been an ideal collaboration with Carpenter’s favorite leading man, Kurt Russell, and while I generally make it my practice to encourage casting Russell in anything, he would be too flexible, too commanding, too just plain good, of an actor for the part. They Live needs a square, clunky hero, with just enough self-awareness to be in on the joke, and that’s precisely what Piper supplies. His delivery of the film’s oft quoted “kick ass and chew bubble gum” line is labored, and perfect; a construction worker seizing the end of the world as ultimate opportunity to blow away bankers whom he (probably) would’ve killed even if they were human. Russell’s approach would’ve been too outright satirical (a bit like his funnier than the movie deserves role in Overboard) and would’ve elevated the film a bit too much out of the muck.
Casting Russell would’ve also denied us just a bit of the primal charge of the film’s most famous scene, where David and Piper beat the unholy shit out of each other, for no other reason than neither of them have anything else to do. Many have commented on the scene’s comic effect, that it goes on so long that it crosses the divide from funny to tedious to funny again (and I couldn’t help but notice parallels between it and Cronenberg’s vicious bathhouse scene in Eastern Promises, any college students reading are welcome to that term paper), but the scene also firmly belongs thematically, tapping into an emasculated poor beefy guy rage that Fight Club doesn’t satirize nearly as well as people claim. Carpenter’s picture has a Samuel Fuller outrage from the economical pits of pulp thing going on, and I bet if Fuller had made the exact same picture it would enjoy considerably higher critical regard.
The ending is broad, tasteless and perhaps the closest the picture comes to being legitimately brilliant. The world is saved, but you’re still left fucking an alien. The sunglasses revealed, more than anything, to be a pain in the ass.
★★★½
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
It’s my understanding, after thirty seconds of cursory research, that Warner Brothers gave director Joe Dante the keys to the kingdom for The New Batch. Dante wasn’t interested in another gremlins movie, the studio tried to proceed without him, nothing went anywhere, so they granted him the right to do whatever he wished with the property. The result is probably the most anarchic picture Joe Dante has ever made. The original Gremlins is a witty, surprisingly vicious mating of Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, and every monster movie Dante has ever seen. Gremlins 2: The New Batch is lighter, more self-aware (the outright horror dialed down), and even more insane. The pretense of human feeling, that leftover E.T. pathos that executive producer Spielberg always seems to instill (even, most ridiculously, in Transformers) has been dropped, any conventional three act structure discarded.
The New Batch sets itself a daunting task: to sustain the delirious, deranged cotton candy high of the first film at its best for the entire running time. This Dante picture, made at the height of an earlier wave of blockbuster testosterone fever, could cynically be reduced to the formula that was on all ambitious studio execs at the time. Dante had essentially given Warner Brothers Die Hard with Gremlins, or, more accurately, a tongue in cheek screw you to everyone who wanted a Die Hard with Gremlins. Or, even more accurately, an affectionate tongue in cheek screw you to everyone who wanted a Die Hard with Gremlins. The trick that Dante pulls in picture after picture is an affectionate, silly, satirical vibe that somehow manages tonal coherence. The New Batch fully plays to Dante’s strengths, a seemingly never ending trip-wire invention laced with an intoxicating love of movies that many don’t take too seriously.
One could draw parallels between The New Batch and Batman Returns, which seems to have been made under similar “the first for you, the second for me” circumstances, but the truth is, while the Burton films have an admirable personality that’s lacking in most expensive filmmaking, they don’t age that well. The New Batch mostly holds, melding a surreal, bent, soul consuming work environment that could have informed Office Space with a mischievous post-modern sensibility that precedes Tarantino’s later films by more than a decade. The picture even sports Christopher Lee before it was cool to cast Christopher Lee in anything beyond Hammer films.
The film, again like Batman Returns, seems to be an excuse for the filmmaker to unload all of the bric-a-brac that had probably been accumulating at the back of his mind for years. A likeable Trump daydream embodied by John Glover appears (though Dante’s goodwill doesn’t serve him here, Glover’s stoned Santa portrayal doesn’t jive with the cooperate hell the film has implied he created, the character should have closer resembled Glover’s shark in Scrooged); as well as a washed-up horror show host (Robert Prosky), harboring dreams of respectability, who lands a key interview with the talking “Brain” Gremlin (voiced, of course, by Tony Randall); we also get a spider gremlin; a bat gremlin (yes, the film elicits a laugh from a Batman parody); an electro-gremlin, and a starlet gremlin that is actually, and this is no mean feat, the ugliest of all the gremlins.
The film has the pleasure of a pinball machine, with Dante’s various hazards and inventions banging off one another in a series of vignettes of surprisingly even quality. It’s a testament to Dante’s mojo that he even ends his so-called children’s film on a triumphant note of bestiality without somehow compromising the overall good will of the endeavor.
I miss Joe Dante. He recently directed a doesn’t quite suck as much as the all others episode of Masters of Horror (though I didn’t see his second episode), and before that, Looney Tunes: Back in Action (that subtitle having the similarly inane on purpose ring of The New Batch), which, truthfully, I never caught either. Pauline Kael wrote, in a review of The Howling, that Dante seemed to be equal parts talent, amateur, style and flake. That’s precisely why his films are so engaging, he’s a talent with a child’s awe of genres many artists feel beneath them, capable of spinning his daydreams into an Americana rhapsody of monster-mania. Dante, similar to many of his characters, would seem to be an idealist from a past world, and I’m hoping that he hasn’t quite been swallowed yet. The horror film needs him. The comedy needs him. The bloated blockbusters could even use his teasing again, perhaps a third Gremlins, which I guess nowadays would be called something along the lines of G3. If anyone could make that idea tolerable it would be Joe Dante.
★★★½
The Ruins (2008)
This probably won’t strike many as too logical, but watching The Ruins brought me back to the 1980s, a time where there were, in addition to a bounty of slasher pictures, little biological curiosity horror films that always gave me nightmares (not that I would admit that to my parents, these movies were a hard enough sell as is). Biological curiosity movies are those monster movies where the human screws with a harder to describe than usual monster (you can’t just throw an ape or dinosaur label at these nasties) and turns into said monster themselves. The Ruins particularly reminded me of a strange, disturbing at the time film called Leviathan, where an underwater crew headed by Peter Weller drank ancient, drugged vodka and turned into fish men whose malleable, intangible design seemed, to me at least, to represent a mild theft of Chris Walas’ work on the Cronenberg Fly.
And again this might not seem too logical, because no one turns into anything in The Ruins, the young people of this film get off just a little easier comparatively. But The Ruins is similarly blunt and artless; lean and unpleasant in execution. Audiences who tire of the horror film for kids approach can at least be assuaged by that fact; the victims of The Ruins die, and quite hard. And the monster, while not capable of transferring his (or her, if you wish to be polite) identity to others, is invasive in other, at times unsettling, ways. The film, at its best, taps into one of those primal pressure points that can inspire sweat and insecurity at night: a festering something under the skin: the fear that you might pick up an unheard of malady while strolling through the woods one day.
On its own terms, The Ruins works, unfortunately though, I’ve read the book, so I’m inclined to introduce my own terms to the negotiations. The book and the script were written by Scott B. Smith of A Simple Plan, and in the book it was clear that Smith was trying to instill in the horror genre a bit of the character that made Plan so potent. The book built slowly, artfully, to a group disintegration that was unusually convincing for the genre. While they tend to be weak on characterization, the film of The Ruins could have used a bit of the slow wind of Carpenter’s The Thing or The Descent. The director here, Carter Smith, is choppy and matter of fact, intent on getting us atop the titular structure as fast as editing will allow. The misdirection of the book is still accounted for but considerably less elegant. The book leads us to believe that a Predator is about, only to sucker punch us with something more frighteningly banal, the film tips its hat a little early.
The characters, embodied by Jena Malone, Jonathan Tucker, Shawn Ashmore, and Laura Ramsey, remain surprisingly unsentimental though, and it’s in this department that the film scores its modest points. The most haunting death in the book, a self-mutilation, remains unshakably icky, but one can’t help but feel that it’s in the service of not too much. I don’t normally play the often unfair, generally irritating “but this isn’t like in the novel” game, but The Ruins was clearly conceived in cinematic terms to begin with, and promised a pop thriller that could’ve been in line with Jaws or The Silence of the Lambs, instead we got something closer to Jaws 2 (though better than that); not bad, scratches the itch, but that’s partially my issue with the film, there’s no itch left to ponder at night, when the things should really be eating at you.
★★½
Funny Games (1998)
It’s a bit too flattering to the film to be enraged by Funny Games, the original Michael Haneke picture that’s inspired the shot for shot remake (also by Haneke) that is currently playing in theatres. Funny Games is a horror movie re-staged as an elitist, post-modern wank; think Straw Dogs by way of Godard, only stripped of the profundity of either, and you’ve got the general idea. People complain that the film is hypocritical and a bit of a cheat (and it is hypocritical) but the real problem is that it fails even by its own ambitions.
The film isn’t a cheat, as many have said. Haneke may claim to hate the exploitive, violent, largely American thrillers that are the source of his ire here, but he clearly gets off on them. The first hour of Funny Games is legitimately tense; Haneke, like any crank contemptuous of his audience, excels at the sort of audience manipulation that he supposedly resents, playing the quiet suburban dread against his viewers in a way that recalls early Polanski.
A family of three (Ulrich Mühe, Susanne Lothar, Stefan Clapczynski, all effective) drive toward their vacation home in a series of opening bird’s eye view shots that clearly recall The Shining and eventually stop at their neighbors to confirm that a golf date the next day is still on. The neighbors are strange, but tell the family that tomorrow is indeed still a go. The wife asks the husband who those two boys in the white were. The husband seems to remember one of the neighbor’s brothers having a boy in business school.
As the family unpacks, one of the young men knocks on the door and asks the wife if he could trouble her for a few eggs, the neighbors are making something. This conversation over the eggs, and its intangible slip from the banal to the terrifying (I had to re-watch it), is the one truly brilliant scene in the film. But the brilliance highlights the film’s schizophrenia: Funny Games claims to punish us for our jollies while really just giving us the jollies with a chase of self-delusion; embodied by such second-rate tricks as fourth wall shattering commentary and, most famously, a blunt, Brechtian switcheroo near the end of the film.
I went in to Funny Games with the mind to like it. I admit that I’m a bit of a contrarian at heart, if everyone hates a film I probably want to get something out of it. But Haneke’s tricks nurture the tension rather than subvert it. The first time one of the killers addresses us, with a wink as the wife discovers her unfortunate dog, is unsettling in a conventional thriller way, and doesn’t work as disruption or satire. The film’s ending has the same problem; it doesn’t work because it IS authentically cathartic. I’ve read Haneke’s interviews and he would appear to be an intelligent man, but does he honestly find his bad guys emerge victorious only to torture another family ending subversive? One can find a variation of this ending in any less hip to hate slasher film.
A few months ago I watched a similarly themed horror picture that unnerved me, and succeeded in shaming me for my appreciation of disreputable, gory pictures. That film was The Girl Next Door, a direct to DVD release that didn’t get a tenth of the new Funny Games’ ink because it was made by Gregory Wilson, an unknown filmmaker who is unfashionable to love or hate. That film dared the audience to actually consider the moral ramifications of the sort of blood lust that they normally clap for, Funny Games is just a self-hating, confused example of the usual usual, with none of the lasting power of Girl, much less Repulsion, or Knife in the Water or the original The Vanishing. The problem with the Brecht approach is that you can’t change most audience members (particular the audience Haneke’s targeting here) by appealing to their minds, it’s emotions that save the day in the film game. Haneke could have at least probably succeeded in his aim if he had the courage of his convictions. He shouldn’t have bothered to the end the film at all, cutting us off mid-sentence, no catharsis, no ending, nothing to
★★½
Alligator (1980)
Special Thanks to Christian for this recommendation, you all owe it to yourselves to check the QT series he’s currently running on his blog.
The movies bring us beautiful women on a weekly basis, but there’s a scary, plastic Stepford quality to many of them nowadays that can be a bit of a turn-off, particularly for your traditional pasty, movie-going nerd who makes little in the way of actual money. These women are beautiful in that pre-planned way, seemingly more likely to ask for a resume than a drink. You may dream of them carnally (our principles, after all, only go so far) but they probably don’t inhabit your fulfilling, fanciful, dreams of companionship and romance. You don’t want to solve a mystery with most of these new girls. You don’t want to build a clubhouse or play under the covers with most of these new girls. And you most certainly don’t want to chase a giant runaway mutant alligator with these new girls.
In 1980, the girls of the not quite taken seriously genres seemed rougher, sexier, more mysterious and more human. These girls would most assuredly pass the entrance gate of your most intimate dreams too, but would be equally at home wielding a two by four or a pistol or drinking you under the table at your favorite bar. They could, needless to say, also contend with that big alligator that seems to keep intruding on our vague discussion of sexy girls.
Sorry, you probably care about the alligator, but it’s a mark of the appeal of John Sayles’ and Lewis Teague’s Alligator that I care more about the beautiful, almost convincingly nerdy, alligator expert Marisa Kendell, played by Robin Riker. The girl in horror movies normally functions as anesthetic for the boring exposition that normally eats up half of the film, but I actually liked Kendall, and you know from the moment she enters the picture that she’s the little girl in the opening whose pet is now a Jaws imitation, eating people sleazy or dumb enough to enter a sewer drain that looks like the Castle of Dr. Frankenstein if it was renovated and re-opened a few months later as an S&M dungeon. That she wanted a pet alligator is charm enough, that said alligator inspired her line of work is positively bewitching.
Riker is actually the sidekick here, the hero proper is Robert Forster’s David Madison, a rough and tumble, gruff, balding, instinctual guy who might not be the brightest bulb on the force (he needs Riker’s gator expert to underline things that your average four year old could grasp) but he makes up for it in lack of pretense and pure, no bullshit goodness. Forster, as he did in Jackie Brown years later, is one of the most laid back, appealing cops the movies have given us. He’s mournful and self-loathing, but it’s not the self-loathing of the manipulative, self-congratulatory 1980s cop variety. This guy has average guy issues and Riker, a closet nerd, sees that and goes to bed with him, and we believe it. Their scenes, while brief, have an off the cuff charm that many Oscar pictures could use. Forster gets Riker in his apartment and confesses that he thought she was a real tight-ass. Riker says she took one look at him and figured he’d have an apartment just like the one she currently, unexpectedly, finds herself in.
Ladies who read Bowen’s Cinematic (I’ve counted at least two): this is what men want, at least this is what the men you should want want: a dialed down bust your balls sass that really translates as true affection. Do Riker and Forster fall in love? Of course not. They have something that will probably age better and bring them more retrospective pleasure: a brief, sugary acknowledgement: a respite from cuffing perps and bagging gators.
John Sayles, the horror movies want you back. The horror movies need your gift for off the wall flakery, for airy parody that turns toward violence with unsettling ease. The horror movies need your gift for characters that you actually give a damn about despite the flimsiest of shadings. The well-intentioned but increasingly boring social conscience pictures are fine without you. Drop that genre and any fifty directors will happily be there to pick up the slack in the morning.
But I don’t want to discount director Lewis Teague. He doesn’t imbue Alligator with the erotic charge that Joe Dante brought to Sayles’ The Howling, but, truthfully, he probably doesn’t need to. Alligator is a blunter affair, a romping, stomping creature feature knock-off/spoof that was already exhibiting Sayles’ patent distrust of politicians of all sizes. Sayles’ bad guys here, including an amusingly sleazy Dean Jagger, are only slightly less subtle than his Dickie Pilager of Silver City. The rage that clearly drives Jagger’s death scene almost overwhelms the picture; the alligator, for a moment, isn’t an alligator, but a vengeful demon, crushing Jagger in his own cocoon of self-absorbed privilege. Teague keeps the picture and the gator moving, cutting the moments of violence into necessarily (for the budget) brief nuggets of chaos that prove that Teague and Sayles were hip to more in Jaws than just the giant critter. And bonus points to these gentlemen for the perverse explanation for the alligator’s enormity.
Mr. Tarantino needs to get Riker’s number.
★★★
Cloverfield (2008)
For the first twenty minutes (more than a quarter of the film’s running time) you lean back, cross your legs, and smile in tedium inspired good humor. Does producer J.J. Abrams really have the cojones to do what it appears he’s done with his friend Matt Reeves’ film, Cloverfield? Did he really launch a massive, annoying internet campaign hyping a shallow little “will they or won’t they?” picture with shitty cinematography as the Godzilla of the Bratz generation?
The possibility irritates and amuses in equal measure, it would make for a VERY long movie, but you almost have to admire a man who’d so brazenly screw you over, Abrams’ ultimate reprisal against the people (myself included) who eventually saw Lost as the masturbation that it actually is. You want pointless? Abrams will give you pointless in spades, and this time you have to pay for it! Maybe the Statue of Liberty beheading was shown in the trailers out of context, it was the movie the characters in Reeves’ film were going to see, before catching a sushi special.
Eventually though, the monster does show up in largely fleeting glimpses and the advertising turns out to be fair; Cloverfield becomes a shockingly effective picture, exploiting its two primary influences (Godzilla, The Blair Witch Project) for all they are worth. I promised myself that I wouldn’t mention The Blair Witch Project in this post, no matter how pertinent, but all of the comparisons are unavoidably apt. Cloverfield is EXACTLY how you imagine that crossbreeding, and the film milks the dread that’s inherent in the limited vantage point of view that’s taken from Witch. Something can be, will, is, anywhere, chaos ready to spring at any moment. This gimmick revitalizes the cliches of the stomping giant monster movie; everything feels more immediate, disorienting, and jarring.
There’s actually a third influence, and it’s been just as roundly cited by the critics: the 9/11 attacks. Can I make a deal with all directors of giant critter movies in the next decade or so? If you want to make a just plain, balls out monster movie, great. If you want to make a richer film that deals in some sort of metaphorical way with the anxiety and ego deflation that the 9/11 attacks have brought on, then great, more than welcome to do so. I would, however, like to halt all future orders of the plain monster movie that makes just enough allusions to something deeper in the effort to get taken seriously when it really, truly has nothing else on its mind. Spielberg came close with his visceral, brilliant War of the Worlds, but mucked it up with an ending that’s anti-climactic and insulting even for him. The Mist’s pretensions get more and more absurd the farther you get from the theatre, etc, etc.
And I imagine that some will try to pin a tag of satire to Cloverfield. The characters are so intensely shallow and irritating that you can’t help but feel that somebody’s leg is being pulled somewhere. You keep waiting for the filmmakers to show some bit of awareness of the characters’ self-absorption, but they never do. Family is, with the exception of one brief, careless scene, never broached, all we’re supposed to care about is whether one tootsie can find another in a building that turns out, in a nifty development, to have partially toppled over.
The film, on its own terms, does work though, and the monster, when he properly appears, is a humdinger (all that “impossible to describe” hype is nonsense, I could sum him up in about five words) but the problem is that the film works just well enough for you to wish that the filmmakers had been a touch more ambitious and actually, for once, explored the society that’s getting eaten for a change, without the hypocrisy. Will someone ever do that? That’s a “will they or won’t they” for another day.
★★★
The Girl Next Door (2007)
What to do with The Girl Next Door? The film is an unusually brutal (and effective) genre picture, adapted from the novel of the same name by controversial author Jack Ketchum. The critics will be able to write it off, it has enough shortcomings (some of the acting and writing), but it shouldn’t be written off, the film has a savage power that I’ve rarely encountered in a horror picture (or any other for that matter). Stephen King has called The Girl Next Door the most unsettling American horror film since Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and he’s not exaggerating.
A man walks out of an office building in the middle of the city and heads down the street. Another older man, who would appear to be literally living on the streets, passes him and collapses a few feet away in an intersection. The man bends over and tries to save the older person. It would appear that he has some success in doing this and he sees the older man taken away in an ambulance. The man goes home, he’s clearly doing well, and sits down with a drink and looks at a picture that he’s had for some time. He begins to tell us a story.
So far, so Stand By Me, and for twenty minutes of so The Girl Next Door appears to be an inadequate cover of that film. We’re in the 1950s, we’re watching young boys play and trade bad dialogue and deal with their obvious fear of the opposite sex in the usual ways, and…but are they dealing with their fear of opposite sex in the usual ways? The opening feels off. Like many low budget horror pictures, it’s hard to tell whether the surreal stiffness is intentional or not. 1950s America is normally approached by the movies in one of two ways: as nostalgic utopia or as nostalgic utopia as hypocritical mask of unspeakable corruption. One guess as to where we’re going here.
Slowly though The Girl Next Door finds it’s footing, and, having seen the entire film, I think it’s fair to say that director Gregory Wilson’s execution in the beginning is at least partially purposeful, he’s seducing us, tricking us into putting our Jaded Horror Filmgoer hats on, and then, then…well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, the subgenre of “torture ______” has been too popular, too significant for it not to. Someone had to eventually go and make the Bonnie and Clyde of those films, a film that challenges and punishes us for allowing human suffering to be turned into a game show. The Girl Next Door is that film.
Two young girls move into the neighborhood after losing their parents in an accident. They are to live with their aunt now, who has several boys of her own. Our protagonist, the young version of the man we met in the beginning, is accustomed to visiting Aunt Ruth (Blanche Baker) and the boys. And he’s immediately taken with the older of the two girls, Meg (Blythe Auffarth). Ruth doesn’t seem to like Meg too much, and she has an uncomfortable way of letting Meg know that. She punishes Meg, doesn’t let her eat because (according to Ruth) she’s getting too fat. The boys tickle Meg, and touch her in a way that’s inappropriate. Meg slaps one of them. Ruth responds by beating the younger sister. Then the boys and Ruth begin playing truth telling games with Meg in the basement, games that develop with remarkable speed and cruelty. Our protagonist is appalled, tries to tell his mom…but can’t. He tries to tell his dad….but can’t. He continues to visit the house, to check on the games, and things keep getting worse and worse and worse and, as viewers, we’re stuck, along for the ride.
Have you ever read Harlan Ellison’s “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”, a short story in which a woman is murdered in a city neighborhood and no one does anything? The Girl Next Door has the same unblinking relentlessness. Many will hate this film, will resent what it’s doing to them, but Wilson plays fair. The film, visually, is tamer than most R-rated slasher movies. But Wilson isn’t staging a gory, cathartic exhibition, he’s watching a family bind together to torture and demean a young girl and he’s appalled. How novel. I confess. I almost turned this DVD off several times. This is 90 minutes that feels like two and half months and there’s no way out, and no real payback for the Aunt and her children. By the end of the film, other neighborhood boys and girls are watching, joining in the fun, and NO ONE does anything to stop it.
I can’t imagine watching The Girl Next Door again, but the film should (maybe) be seen once. Our cages should be rattled like this occasionally. I’ve read a few responses to this film on the web, some people called the movie “absurd” and “pointless”. The “absurd” issue is not entirely untrue, more context of the dynamics of Ruth and her household would have probably helped, but I can’t imagine how someone could watch the film and disregard it entirely. And one question for those who call The Girl Next Door pointless, if the man hadn’t seen Meg die all those years ago, would he have stopped to help the older man in the street?
★★★
© Copyright 2007 Bowen's Cinematic.
Site Designed by Ben Markowitz.
Bowen's Cinematic is powered by WordPress | RSS
