Day Twenty-Four: Braindead (1992)
I miss Peter Jackson from the early days, the unhinged horror comedy filmmaker who hadn’t yet conquered the world with a certain fantasy trilogy. I am quite fond of Lord of the Rings, but King Kong lost me somewhere in the two hours it takes for Kong to show up, and I wondered what happened to the Jackson who would’ve had a baby eating a person’s head in half that running time. I miss Jackson’s indulgences of the NC-17 variety.
Bad Taste is impressive primarily from a wannabe filmmaker standpoint. You respect how much Jackson does with so little but the movie, by movie standards, leaves you wanting. Meet the Feebles is foul and gloriously deranged. Braindead, though, is Jackson’s doctorate in the genre, it’s no wonder he left “splatstick” after this one. I’m not sure what else there would be left to do. Zombie sex? Check. Pus mistaken for custard? Check. Climactic set piece requiring a football field’s worth of plastic body parts? Check. Baby zombies? Check. Baby zombies ripping heads apart? Check. I know I already wrote that one, but “baby ripping heads” or “baby eating heads” are surprisingly fun phrases to type, they make the coffee go down that much easier.
The gory cartoonish horror comedy is harder to pull off than it may sometimes appear. The danger (I feel I wrote this somewhere before, my apologies) is that the comedy and the horror moot one another and yield just another exercise in filmmaker attitude that doesn’t make it as a real movie. Braindead works so well because it’s devoid of any attitude to begin with. Braindead isn’t chic, isn’t hip, isn’t cool, its the bubbly collective of Jackson’s daydreams while watching every possible monster movie he could get his hands on. Jackson is a wit and a talent, and he recognizes both the absurdity and the essentiality of these fantasies. The viewpoints of “absurd” and “essential” bounce off one another like billard balls in Braindead and yields what could be called a junior Buster Keaton cover of the zombie movie.
The zombies that Lionel (Timothy Balme) has to nursemaid throughout the movie are not that much worse than taking care of the human version of his mum (Elizabeth Moody), whom he has a conflicted, Norman Bateish relationship with. Jackson shoots the human scenes the same way he does the carnage that eventually ensues: in jarring, three ring circus style close up. The sound effects that accompany human Mum’s actions are also stylized and digusting. Lionel handles the zombies so well because he’s had experience with the vaguely living dead, and this isn’t that much of a stretch.
The madness that Jackson orchestrates toward the end of Braindead has to be seen to be believed, but part of me wishes that the film played in the “having to shield zombie Mum from society” sandbox a little longer. There is one truly uproarious scene in this vein: a dinner sequence with Lionel, Mum and a couple they need to impress. I won’t ruin the various grotesqueries that Jackson unleashes, but the obviousness of Mum’s condition, and Lionel and the couple’s determined obliviousness, is inspired. Part of my (mild) regret stems from Moody’s performance, she’s too good to be so quickly discarded in favor of a plastic zombie.
For all its violence, Braindead is surprisingly square and dorky, lovable even. Whatever your taste, Jackson’s passion is too damn pure to dislike. There’s a romance here, and it’s naive in a very old school silent movie way. Jackson’s playful indulgences are still evident in his more recent films, but he’s polished now, put on his tux so to speak. The little rugrat genius who throws mud at your windows and dreams of different ways to blow up a corpse occassionally returns in fits and starts (the T-Rex/Kong three way for instance) but he’s in disturbingly short supply these days .
Day Four: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
I love that the director of a few of the greatest American movies ever made, particularly the first two Godfathers and The Conversation, would, a decade and a half later, still have the inner fervor to make something as intense, enraptured, poignant and just plain masturbatory as Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Granted, Coppola, with many of his 1980s projects, had been down the intense and masturbatory road before, but most of those are little more than film school curiosities. Bram Stoker’s Dracula doesn’t feel like a test tube movie though, its felt, it means it, and its my favorite version of the novel.
The film was also my introduction to Gary Oldman. I was twelve when Dracula was released, and I had never seen anything as committed and deliriously oddball as Gary Oldman as Count Dracula. I had seen the Browning/Lugosi picture (which I find overrated, both men have done better), and I had seen the Palance film by this point, but Oldman was an entirely different thing altogether. I was used to my monster movies being a little more square, and now I’m watching a brilliant fusion of DeNiro method and presentational 1920s silent act to the rafters and back acting. Oldman, like the movie in general, was overwhelming.
The entire film was, and still is, overwhelming. I’ve already found that certain words, phrase, or thoughts have begun to dominate why I’m choosing certain movies for this series, and why I respond to certain horror films. “Means it”. “No apologies”, and so forth. I can deal with some bad acting, or low budget, or maybe ideas that should have been left on the cutting room floor. But I, in this genre, can’t deal with self-consciousness, with hedging your bets, with playing to the cheap seats. Horror should be about what we’re afraid of, but also what we’re afraid to admit we think about it, what we like, what turns us on, what we’re most afraid we’ll lose, etc. There’s no room, at least in the Greats, for parlor room tricks. I don’t give a shit about that stuff usually, life is too short.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula does play a lot of parlor tricks and it isn’t one of the Greats. Some of Coppola’s casting stunts don’t pay off (Cary Elwes, Keanu Reeves), and some of the scenes are overbaked even for this (a moment of temptation for Anthony Hopkins’ Van Helsing comes to mind.) The film has this unshakable, amazing lunatic intensity though, and Coppola’s experimentation with silent movie, in camera technique should make this required viewing for even the snobs who don’t buy into its purplish love story.
The love story works. Not drowning under all of Coppola’s ideas would be impressive enough, but Oldman, despite being a vicious, inhuman killer (his immorality is not shortchanged in a bid for sympathy either) elicits our sympathy anyway. Dracula’s romantic hunger and more base, animal instincts compliment, electrify one another, and Ryder contrasts, underplays into herself into the relationship beautifully. The building of the relationship here, subtracting the more obviously out of place plot points, would be acceptable in a more straight romance.
My favorite scene of the film is a perfect crystallization of every florid element I love: the costumes, the ripe music, the two actors going for it, the blunt passion. The self-loathing. It all comes together when Mina finally gives herself to Dracula, and his fangs slide out and he rasps (like an orgasm): “I can’t, I love you too much!” She begs and he finally sinks his fangs into her, and for a moment the bad guy who’s really become the good guy surrogate for the audience wins.
Besides Oldman and Ryder, who truly are the movie; Tom Waits and Sadie Frost also contribute memorable charaterizations. I like Tom Waits’ music, but I really like Tom Waits in films, particularly as himself in Cigarettes and Coffee and paired with Lily Tomlin in Short Cuts. He’s Renfield here, and his working man hipster dementia builds the foreboding of Dracula’s pursuit wonderfully.
Sadie Frost is Lucy, and she’s the most purely erotic object in an already overheated movie. She also, like Christopher Stone, is privy to the joys of werewolf nooky. Not sure if that counted as bestality in Old Time Britain, but I imagine Stone would have had some legal problems.
I love this big tangled erotic creepy mess of a clusterfuck of a movie, but, there’s a very simple image that always comes to mind as I ponder Bram Stoker’s Dracula: of Prince Vlad, watching Mina window shop. They don’t get along at first, and after a curt exchange, he says “I shall bother you no more.” And he disappears. I’ve followed Oldman’s career, like any movie lover, pretty intently since then, but he’s never had a line delivery that has haunted me quite as much.
Trespass (1992)
Trespass utlilizes the talents of alot of folks whom you’ve most certainly heard of, but may not appreciate quite as much as you should. First of which, there are the leads, Bill Paxton and William Sadler, who play firemen who get in way over their heads here after indulging in the titular act.
Bill Paxton has become a bit more famous, he’s headlining HBO’s Big Love now, but he remains underrated. Paxton is one of the best “straight men” in the last two decades, grounding far out premises and characters in an unshowy, ego-free realism that gets better upon each viewing. I’m talking A Simple Plan, Frailty, One False Move, Apollo 13 and Tombstone among others.
The definitive Paxton straight man performance would be either A Simple Plan or the brilliant One False Move (both happen to feature career best work from co-star Billy Bob Thornton as well.) It should also be noted that Paxton can steal the show when he wants to too, and I’m noting his work with James Cameron and his performance in Near Dark as exhibits A-D in support of this.
William Sadler has popped up in Tales From the Crypt (both show and movie), The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and made a particular impression as a sexual deviate in Bill Condon’s Kinsey a few years past, but in general he’s never really graduated from the minors in audience recognition. Sadler has a great no bullshit voice, and lined, craggy prescence; he can seem friendly, accomodating and completely feral within seconds of one another.
So yeah, the idea of these two guys mixing it up in an abandoned factory in the middle of a deadly gang territory presided over by Ices T and Cube pushes more than one B movie heaven pressure point. It also happens that Trespass was directed by Walter Hill, the third person you should be familiar with, who does unapologetic, high throttle machismo like no one else I can think of who is still living or working. I’ve listed enough, but what the hell: 48 Hrs, The Long Riders (underrated), The Warriors, Undisputed, Southern Comfort.
I had watched Trespass in the early nineties while on a WalterHill binge, and liked it and forgotten it. I caught it again a few days ago. The film is, like much of Hill’s work, remarkably lean and devoid of extraneous crap. Paxton and Sadler find the treasure map five minutes into the picture, they’re at the factory maybe another five minutes after that. They’ve witnessed a murder at the hands of King James (Ice T) maybe five minutes after that. Obligatory talk of wives and other expostion isn’t exchanged in the kitchen in one of the men’s homes the night before leaving, its tossed off in Sadler’s SUV on the way to said factory. Hill (and writers Robert Zemickis (!) and Bob Gale) are pros here.
Trespass would appear to be a hybrid of The Treasure of the Sierre Madre and a more urban us against them action picture like Assault on Precinct 13. This film is canny in blending the genres, and divides our sympathies effectively. Ice T is quite good as the gangster King James, and the character has been imagined as more than just a representation of all that middle class white guys fear. Refreshingly, the villian here is actually smarter than the protaganists.
But neither are the smartest. That honor would go to Art Evans’ Bradlee, a man who happens to be squatting in the factory, and who turns out, much to our amusement, to be a loose approximation of the Walter Huston character in Madre. Evans gets the film’s very satifying final image, which refutes the annoying cliche that no one can actually get the money or treasure in a feuding over money or treasure picture.
My only real problem with Trespass is a needless visual gimmick where we occassionally see from the POV of a home video camera (this may have been a little more controversial at the time, being how close this film’s release was to the Rodney King incident) but otherwise Hill keeps all the various elements of the story up in the air, and flowing with ease and finesse. Trespass is unassuming, taut and tasty.
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