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?
★★★
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Apparently 2007 is the year in which Hollywood set out to shut general malcontents like myself up and release a career summing masterpiece once every three weeks on the dot. Faithful readers, you probably think me a whore, or easily pleased. Not the case, at least I don’t think. Since writing for my little site though, the films have just happened to be, generally, pretty damn good. Come to think of it, maybe I should take some credit for that. I’m more than happy to assume some sort advisorial position on any film in which the producer would have me.
And so now we have Tim Burton, and his reworking of the famed production Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. In terms of comparing one production to the other, I’m afraid I’ll be of little service. My familiarity with the source material is limited to the knowledge that the stage had two levels. I also knew of Sweeney’s preoccupation with ventilating people’s throats and of a certain Mrs. Lovett who happened to have a practical and sound business solution to all the bodies piling around.
I do know, however, that Burton has made a wonderful film: robust, lean, vicious, extraordinary. Burton may have been leasing his talents in the service of another’s vision, but what arrives on the screen seems to be vintage Burton, only tempered with a refreshing, newfound discipline. Sweeney Todd is pitch black demonic outrage, undiluted by the John Waters Light satire that has aged some of Burton’s earlier work. Sweeney Todd, as embodied by Johnny Depp, gets to finally indulge in what was truly meant to be Edward Scissorhands’ vocation: cut the living shit out of the fat, the pretentious, the comfortable, the false.
One would think that a film like Sweeney Todd would be an excuse for an eccentric like Depp to really cut lose and chew the scenery. Not so. Depp’s thing has always been his unpredictability, but even that, obviously, can be predictable and comfortable after awhile. Depp senses this and withdraws, his Todd is aloof, barely tangible, barely a character really. The film is starkly unsentimental in his complete, total insanity. The notion that Todd will be a classically wronged character is abandoned early on when he slits the first total innocent’s throat, and gleefully sends them tumbling down to Mrs. Lovett’s oven. Todd only asserts himself in cold blooded murder, and in delivering ironically beautiful ballads that don’t seem to belong in the film…until you begin to actually take in the lyrics. Depp’s voice clearly wasn’t built for musicals, but that’s precisely the point: the barber Todd isn’t built, or meant, for anything.
Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) seems to think she’s built for Todd, and this becomes the most unusual and surprisingly moving unrequited love story in the Burton cannon. Carter has been criticized in certain circles for this performance, but I think she’s terrific: the perfect human embodiment of the sort of distorted gothic China doll that Burton almost always strives for. She may actually be why Sweeney Todd is so effective; right in the center of all the constricted brutality lays a perfectly sweet little romance between a cannibal and a mass murderer. Lovett’s appeal to Todd’s romantic side, “By the Sea”, stays with you as you walk out of the theatre.
So does Ed Sanders’ Toby, a little boy caught in the middle of Todd’s warfare with London, Lovett, and a barber named Pirelli (Sasha Baron Cohen.) Sanders has a dazzling number himself, “Not While I’m Around”, that manages to go for the heartstrings without being cloying or compromising the decay of the rest of the Burton production. Cohen’s Pirelli is also a near showstopper, confirming the Sellers comparison to be quite apt indeed.
But I seem to be writing in circles here, listing like a ticker tape the various things I enjoyed about Burton’s film. Sweeney Todd hit me in way I can’t quite articulate. Todd, again like many films this year, feels like the picture the director in question has been marching toward his entire career. The film is an intense, emotional, bloody, very bloody, intangibly brilliant filet mignon of a gothic musical, and a major return to form for a director I used to revere.
★★★★
I Am Legend (2007)
A couple of posts ago I had a mild, vaguely pissy attack where I wrote that respect for the Richard Matheson novel would bar me from catching the Will Smithing of I Am Legend. I wrote that there was no way that a 200 million dollar holiday movie would maintain the ending (which explains the title I might add) and that this is one Will Smith sci-fi de-balling that I could afford to miss.
So here we are. Now you know just how unwavering your principled, self-righteous writer can actually be. Cut to three or four days later and I’m writing a post of what appears to be an overwhelmingly popular film. And it’s going to be a fairly positive post at that.
Make no mistake. Director Francis Lawrence and writers Akiva Goldsman and Mark Protosevich and whoever else worked on I Am Legend, have, as anyone could have predicted, chucked the majority of moral ambiguity that makes the novel stick, hurt and move. The novel is about the nature of evil being a matter of perception, being determined by the majority, and the lead character evolves into something that it would have been extremely disconcerting for fans to see Will Smith play. The protagonist, Robert Neville, became the menace, the elusive thing that now haunted a different world. He became something that would probably be used to scare children a couple of hundred years down the road. All from just a garden variety human.
Here’ the rub. Now having seen the film, I think Will Smith could have pulled it off. No, I don’t believe him as an average man (to be fair, the film doesn’t try, he’s some sort of huge military crusader scientist), and some of his emotional marks feel a little pat, but he’s immensely likable and that shouldn’t be taken for granted. Smith’s star wattage could have been used to add just another layer of subversiveness to the material that would have made the ending that much tougher to shake. Will Smith, one of America’s biggest stars, slowly evolving into the next society’s boogeyman. Could have been something.
But this thing is expensive, and it’s Christmas, and we have cookies and happy meals to sell. We want our evil to be rote and one sided and comfortably tucked under the carpet by the time we reach the end credits. Smith’s sanity here is never tested too hard. He’s a very decent, Good Guy, and he wants to cure the new society more than kill it to ensure his own survival. His growing resemblance to the enemy is never under examination and a pivotal betrayal at the end of the book has been excised. This is, basically, a more mature variation of the same cocksure Will Smith that kicked E.T’s ass about ten years ago.
All that said, Francis Lawrence has made a huge leap as a director from the fussy, labored Constantine. The future New York City of I Am Legend is a beautiful, haunting creation, and Lawrence seems to know what he has with it. Lawrence doesn’t cut away or play around or dress things up with a bunch of camera convolutions, he instead plays with US or, more precisely, plays the ironically open spaces of the film against our expectations of the more traditionally cramped horror picture. Lawrence drops us head first in the desolation of the environment, and we feel for the Smith character that much more. This is the happiest surprise of the new I Am Legend, it most assuredly does not back down from the melancholia of the material. With the exception of his family dog and a few dummies he converses with in a hopeful attempt to preserve his sanity, Will Smith is alone, alone, alone. There are no “Ahh, Hell No!” appeals to our comfort here.
The third act is a problem, and the portion of the film that’s most in line with the fears I had going in. It’s dull and conventional, and relies too heavily on some of the worst monsters to appear in a reputable horror movie in quite some time. They look a lot like the robots in I, Robot actually, but at least those things were supposed to look fake. I assume. I Am Legend is a Christmas apocalypse freak show that largely works though, and it captures, however fleetingly, a bit of the chill of the source material; the loneliness, the terror, of change.
★★★
The Mist (2007)
The first act of Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s (enough possessives there?) The Mist gets it. This portion of the film, like good Twilight Zone, like the first third of Spielberg’s underrated War of the Worlds, understands that nothing is scarier than quiet. The storm leaves, the mist approaches, and we watch every little awkward expositional piece snap into place for the inevitable nightmare with a smile on our faces. I generally hate crowds, but this is a good film to see with a crowd, to recreate that huddled together to hear something scary vibe. To reaffirm the illusion that you’re stuck right with the characters in that little grocery store when someone discovers that a possibly really big octopus is hiding in the supernaturally photogenic mist (which is really fog, but John Carpenter beat King to the punch.)
I was enjoying this first act so much that I dreaded the inevitable reveal of the monster(s). This can be a buzz kill, particularly in our new school horror films, hard won mood dissipated over a few cheap CG beasties. I warn you. The beasties are cheap, and are definitely CG, but the The Mist, for the better part of another hour, continues to effectively mine the Monsters are Due on Maple Street vibe of a bunch of types slowly falling apart as the outward menace relentlessly presses in. Yes “types”, there’s not one recognizable human being in all of The Mist, and, with the exception of Marcia Gay Harden’s stale psychotic religious lady bit (a religious lady must have really screwed King over sometime in his young life, as he seems incapable of not including a damning portrait of one in his work) I didn’t care. This movie brought me back to my pre-teen days of reading Stephen King in my little bedroom.
There has been talk that Darabont, formerly of the more good natured King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile (one overrated, one barely watchable, I’ll let you guess which is which) has changed King’s open ending to something a little nastier. He has, and this is a stumbling block. I don’t mind the ending itself, but Darabont mucks up the staging; seeming a little too self-consciously “bad”, a sunny director’s attempt to break free from his reputation. Darabont is too proud of his ending and overplays it, lingering where a few quick cuts would have sufficed. I won’t spoil the surprise but imagine the ending of Night of the Living Dead as restaged by a trying to slum Frank Capra and you’ve got an idea of what you’re in for.
That’s why The Mist doesn’t ultimately stick. Romero’s film has true outrage. Carpenter’s The Thing (an obvious influence) is colored by a fuck it cynicism. Even Serling, as overbearing as his messages could be, seemed to be truly haunted by his visions. On the page, The Mist transcended its derivations by the sheer pulp force of the writing. Darabont, good intentions and fun aside, doesn’t quite escape the trying to be good for you sandbox.
★★★
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.
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