Okay. You've witnessed the cinematic tragedies that are Plan 9 from Outer Space, Robot Monster and Night of the Lepus. You believe you've seen the worst of the worst. You believe you're strong.
You're wrong. Heaven help you, you're wrong.
Dracula vs. Frankenstein flopped out of the festering mind of one Al Adamson, whose films are just as bad as anything Ed Wood produced, but Adamson was much more prolific. He was squeezing out cinematic stink bombs through most of the 1960s and 1970s, all of which were put together over time out of various scraps of film (sometimes wedding foreign horror films
with the domestic variety)--and all of them suck. This movie may suck worse than the rest, though, because it uses old monster movie stars to no good end and severely fucks with the two most famous fiends in all of horror literature.
The plot revolves around a blonde, busty Vegas entertainer (Regina Carrol--who, by sheer coincidence, was Adamson's wife). After we're forced to watch her pathetic act, we see her receive a telegram informing her that her sister has gone missing in sunny California. Like most good sisters would, our entertainer goes off to investigate. She meets with a cranky cop (Jim
Davis from Dallas) and tries to dig up more leads at a local hangout, where she's slipped LSD and has a not-so-groovy trip. A hunky guy (Anthony Eisley) takes her in and joins the investigation.
Meanwhile, Count Dracula (Zandor Vorkov, who looks like an anemic Elliot Gould) digs up Frankenstein's Monster (John Bloom, whose head looks like an overdone marshmallow) and heads over to the seaside House of Horrors owned by Dr. Duray (J. Carroll Naish, who dresses like Colonel Sanders), the last living member of the Frankenstein Clan. Duray has been conducting
experiments on pretty young girls (guess where the sister wound up?) and sends out his huge, mute assistant (Lon Chaney Jr.) to do the dirty work.
Dracula and Duray revive the Monster using equipment left over from the set of Bride of Frankenstein and use the Monster to get revenge on the scientist who ruined Duray's career (Famous Monsters of Filmland editor Forrest J. Ackerman).
Eventually, monster, vampire, mad scientist and blonde all collide, and most everybody dies in some nasty way. The funniest death scene goes to the Monster who, in his climactic battle with Dracula, suffers about the same amount of damage as the Black Knight did in "Monty Python & The Holy Grail.
Does this sound bad? It gets worse. This is the last film for both Naish and Chaney, both of whom had been horror stars back in the 1940s. Naish gives his performance from a wheelchair and is obviously reading cue cards most of the time. Chaney has no dialog and sweats a lot. Angelo Rossito, a dwarf who appeared in many horror films (including Freaks) is also on hand,
suffering along with everybody else. Russ Tamblyn, who starred in some decent movies (including The Haunting) in the 1960s (and later played Dr. Jacobi on Twin Peaks), shows up as a biker. Ackerman, a respected horror film expert (listed as "Technical Advisor" in the credits), should have known better than to lend his name to this piece of absolute trash, but at least his part is small and he dies quickly and painfully.
Dracula vs. Frankenstein is a low point in cinema history. Viewers get sucked in by well-known actors and get rewarded with bad writing, worse photography and the last, weak performances from a couple of horror legends. You may think you've been slipped some LSD yourself after viewing this waste of film.
Friday, November 7, 2003
Thursday, November 6, 2003
Review: Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003)
It's obvious from the opening frames of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 1 that he has a deep, abiding love for the Hong Kong action flicks of the 1970s--Tarantino appropriates the Shaw Brothers' "ShawScope" logo, provoking knowing giggles from the audience members who are either old enough to know who the Shaw Brothers are (producers of numerous Kung Fu epics, including films starring Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan) or die-hard fans of the genre themselves.
And that love of impossibly high-flying kicks, swords drawn and brandished, and limbs severed and spurting carries all the way through this, the first of two parts. (Kill Bill was split in half after completion, supposedly for "artistic reasons"--three hours of martial arts violence might be too much for even the most ardent admirers of either Tarantino or the genre. There is precedence for such a release maneuver: Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler and Indian Epic were released in two parts; and, for more contemporary examples, look at the Lord of the Rings trilogy or the two Matrix sequels. I have the sneaking suspicion, though, that economics had more to do with it: with the back half of the film rumored to be even more gory than the front half, and thus almost certain to receive the dreaded NC-17 rating, Miramax may have decided to get their money up front with the first half, with anything they make on the second half becoming gravy.) But while Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is unquestionably an effective homage, is it anything more than that? And does it need to be?
Tarantino's previous directorial efforts all nodded toward their respective genres: heist dramas in Reservoir Dogs; film noir in Pulp Fiction; and Blaxploitation in Jackie Brown. But those movies weren't bound and gagged by genre limitations--they used film history as a springboard for storytelling and character development, not as an destination unto itself. Jackie Brown, in particular, played on the audiences' memory of African-American cinema of the 1970s--especially with the casting of Pam Grier, the lead actress in many of those movies--while going into greater depths of character and emotion and drawing career-best performances out of Grier (who should have been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar) and Robert Forster (who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and lost) than one would expect given the limitations of the genre. (It probably didn't hurt that Jackie Brown was based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, either.)
Kill Bill, on the other hand, lovingly embraces its genre's limitations and tries to turn them into virtues.
Uma Thurman plays The Bride (she has a real name, but it's bleeped out for whatever stylistic reason), whose wedding party gets wiped out by her former partners in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad: O-Ren, the Cottonmouth (Lucy Liu); Elle, the California Mountain Snake (Darryl Hannah); Vernita, the Copperhead (Vivica A. Fox); Budd, the Sidewinder (Michael Madsen); and, of course, Bill, their leader (David Carradine). Bill shoots the pregnant Bride in the head and leaves her for dead at the alter, but that's not enough to keep her down--she awakens in a hospital bed four years later, a metal plate in her head and no baby in sight. Once awake, she sets out for revenge, picking off her former partners one by one in armed combat.
(In Vol. 1, only Fox and Liu are dealt with. Madsen and Hannah are seen only briefly, and Carradine not at all. But even though Carradine is never shown, his voice is the first we hear at the beginning and last we hear at the end--calm, confident, measured as if his words come out of his mouth carved in stone.)
And that's it. That's the plot. Thurman moves lithely from one confrontation to another, with a side trip to visit a master swordsmith (martial arts legend Sonny Chiba, in an effective cameo) and get a blade capable of cutting down her formidable foes.
In all of his previous films, Tarantino has shuffled the time frame around, shifting the order of events for greater effect or to provide views of the same event from different perspectives. Here, the time frame changes from scene to scene, sometimes from shot to shot, and the effect is disorienting. It calls attention to itself as a device rather than actually accomplishing anything in terms of storytelling. Also, Tarantino's signature verbal gymnastics are consipicuous by their absence. The dialog here comes in two flavors: Stilted and mannered, presumably in imitation of the ridiculously dubbed dialog from the movies he seeks to ape; and awkwardly foul-mouthed, like an inferior screenwriter trying to do a Quentin Tarantino impersonation. (The scene between Thurman and Fox after the movie's first fight scene is particularly bad.)
Tarantino even riffs on his own works. Some specific scenes recall moments from previous QT films--O-Ren giving a speech from atop a conference table echoes back to Honey Bunny's tabletop screaming at the beginning of Pulp Fiction, while a friend points out that the walk through the House of Blue Leaves is very Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino also uses actors from his previous movies, like Thurman (Pulp Fiction), Madsen (Reservoir Dogs), Michael Bowen (Jackie Brown) and Samuel L. Jackson (who has a cameo in Kill Bill, Vol. 2). Not that Tarantino is required to be original--most of Shakespeare's plays are based on previous sources, and scenes or dialog from one of his plays can echo scenes and dialog from others. And if QT is intentionally lifting images, music, even sound effects (like the leaping sound from Infra-Man when Thurman does a backflip in battle), then aren't scenes and actors from his previous movies fair game as well?
That doesn't mean that all of Tarantino's best tricks are used up. There are still pop culture references aplenty--from Pussy Wagon, the name of the car Thurman drives away from the hospital (taken from a particularly racy lyric in Grease), to the outfit Thurman wears when confronting O-Ren's bodyguards in the House of Blue Leaves (a replica of Bruce Lee's outfit from his last, uncompleted film, Game of Death), to quoting a Klingon proverb about revenge, Tarantino is still able to get laughs of recognition from the audience. Similarly, he also maintains his knack for putting the right song with the right image: Darryl Hannah sashays down a hospital corridor while whistling Bernard Hermann's "Twisted Nerve"; O-Ren and her posse glide through nightime Tokyo to Al Hirt's "Green Hornet Theme"; the slow walk down the hall of the House of Blue Leaves to Tomoyasu Hotei's "Battle Without Honor or Humanity"--all moments of unqualified cinematic beauty and brilliance, perhaps because they aren't intended to imitate anything, but instead take on personality all their own.
(Other song cues don't work nearly as well: The first time Tarantino uses a snipet of "The Ironside Theme" as a revenge horn, it gets a laugh, but when he uses the device a couple more times, it evokes only silence, if not groans.)
Then there are the fights scenes, which are so gloriously over the top and outrageous that they have to be admired and appreciated. Thurman gives a performance that's physical, gruelling and hard-nailed out of sheer necessity--if the audience doesn't buy that she's really that tough, that angry, that intent on revenge for the wrongs inflicted on her and her loved ones, then the movie would become a lampoon rather than an homage or, worse, fall apart entirely. But she holds it together with her scene-to-scene intensity and is ably supported by Fox and Liu, all of whom had to train rigorously for their roles. Liu, in particular, gets what may be the best part of her career in O-Ren, who rises to the top of the Japanese underworld despite her mixed heritage (Japanese/Chinese-American) and gender. She's ruthless, intelligent and perfectly capable of defending herself, whether it's from the verbal assault of an crime boss on her heritage or the physical assault of The Bride thirsting for revenge.
The violence in the fight scenes is so cartoonish--with limbs flying about, bodies split in two, heads lopped off--that it's hard to take seriously. (Nonetheless, Tarantino shifts the more extreme violence from color to black and white, apparently in an effort to appease the MPAA. So...violence is less graphic if the blood isn't red?)
Some viewers have come away from Kill Bill, Vol. 1 with a message of female empowerment--understandable, given how many women kick substantial ass in this movie. The Bride, Vernita, O-Ren and Go-Go (Chiaki Kuriyama), O-Ren's schoolgirl-outfit-wearing, mentally unstable lead bodyguard, all take turns taking no shit from nobody, particularly not from men. But consider what the women have to go through to get to the position of being empowered. In a sequence played out entirely in anime (a brilliant strategy by Tarantino, given the subject matter), we learn that O-Ren's parents were murdered (and, it's implied, her mother gang-raped) while she watches from under the bed, and she has to prostitute herself to the pedophile crime lord who executed them to enact her revenge. Similarly, The Bride is rented out as a living love doll by her male attendant, Buck (Bowen), while she lies in her four-year coma in the hospital. Is the message, then, that women can kick substantial ass only after suffering more than their male counterparts? And if Kill Bill is essentially a comedy, as Tarantino has maintained in interviews, why is the audience treated to two scene of children witnessing their parents being brutally murdered, or the squick-worthy details of The Bride's hospital stay?
Am I trying to read too much into Kill Bill, Vol. 1? Am I missing the point? Is there even a point to miss? Is there hidden depth here as in previous Tarantino movies, or is this really just the expertly made B-movie tribute it appears to be?
That I have so many questions and qualms is, I think, good. If I'd hated Kill Bill, Vol. 1, it wouldn't have lingered in my mind for so long, wouldn't have frustrated me so, wouldn't have made me ask so many questions. I'd have dismissed it as trash and moved on. And I wouldn't be anxious to see Vol. 2. Unfortunately, Miramax is making us wait until February for the second half, damn them. Don't they know or care that I have questions? That I crave answers? That I want to know what happens next?
And isn't that the highest compliment I can pay to Quentin Tarantino--that even though I'm not sure how I feel about the first half of the movie, I'm still eager to see the second?
And that love of impossibly high-flying kicks, swords drawn and brandished, and limbs severed and spurting carries all the way through this, the first of two parts. (Kill Bill was split in half after completion, supposedly for "artistic reasons"--three hours of martial arts violence might be too much for even the most ardent admirers of either Tarantino or the genre. There is precedence for such a release maneuver: Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler and Indian Epic were released in two parts; and, for more contemporary examples, look at the Lord of the Rings trilogy or the two Matrix sequels. I have the sneaking suspicion, though, that economics had more to do with it: with the back half of the film rumored to be even more gory than the front half, and thus almost certain to receive the dreaded NC-17 rating, Miramax may have decided to get their money up front with the first half, with anything they make on the second half becoming gravy.) But while Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is unquestionably an effective homage, is it anything more than that? And does it need to be?
Tarantino's previous directorial efforts all nodded toward their respective genres: heist dramas in Reservoir Dogs; film noir in Pulp Fiction; and Blaxploitation in Jackie Brown. But those movies weren't bound and gagged by genre limitations--they used film history as a springboard for storytelling and character development, not as an destination unto itself. Jackie Brown, in particular, played on the audiences' memory of African-American cinema of the 1970s--especially with the casting of Pam Grier, the lead actress in many of those movies--while going into greater depths of character and emotion and drawing career-best performances out of Grier (who should have been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar) and Robert Forster (who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and lost) than one would expect given the limitations of the genre. (It probably didn't hurt that Jackie Brown was based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, either.)
Kill Bill, on the other hand, lovingly embraces its genre's limitations and tries to turn them into virtues.
Uma Thurman plays The Bride (she has a real name, but it's bleeped out for whatever stylistic reason), whose wedding party gets wiped out by her former partners in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad: O-Ren, the Cottonmouth (Lucy Liu); Elle, the California Mountain Snake (Darryl Hannah); Vernita, the Copperhead (Vivica A. Fox); Budd, the Sidewinder (Michael Madsen); and, of course, Bill, their leader (David Carradine). Bill shoots the pregnant Bride in the head and leaves her for dead at the alter, but that's not enough to keep her down--she awakens in a hospital bed four years later, a metal plate in her head and no baby in sight. Once awake, she sets out for revenge, picking off her former partners one by one in armed combat.
(In Vol. 1, only Fox and Liu are dealt with. Madsen and Hannah are seen only briefly, and Carradine not at all. But even though Carradine is never shown, his voice is the first we hear at the beginning and last we hear at the end--calm, confident, measured as if his words come out of his mouth carved in stone.)
And that's it. That's the plot. Thurman moves lithely from one confrontation to another, with a side trip to visit a master swordsmith (martial arts legend Sonny Chiba, in an effective cameo) and get a blade capable of cutting down her formidable foes.
In all of his previous films, Tarantino has shuffled the time frame around, shifting the order of events for greater effect or to provide views of the same event from different perspectives. Here, the time frame changes from scene to scene, sometimes from shot to shot, and the effect is disorienting. It calls attention to itself as a device rather than actually accomplishing anything in terms of storytelling. Also, Tarantino's signature verbal gymnastics are consipicuous by their absence. The dialog here comes in two flavors: Stilted and mannered, presumably in imitation of the ridiculously dubbed dialog from the movies he seeks to ape; and awkwardly foul-mouthed, like an inferior screenwriter trying to do a Quentin Tarantino impersonation. (The scene between Thurman and Fox after the movie's first fight scene is particularly bad.)
Tarantino even riffs on his own works. Some specific scenes recall moments from previous QT films--O-Ren giving a speech from atop a conference table echoes back to Honey Bunny's tabletop screaming at the beginning of Pulp Fiction, while a friend points out that the walk through the House of Blue Leaves is very Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino also uses actors from his previous movies, like Thurman (Pulp Fiction), Madsen (Reservoir Dogs), Michael Bowen (Jackie Brown) and Samuel L. Jackson (who has a cameo in Kill Bill, Vol. 2). Not that Tarantino is required to be original--most of Shakespeare's plays are based on previous sources, and scenes or dialog from one of his plays can echo scenes and dialog from others. And if QT is intentionally lifting images, music, even sound effects (like the leaping sound from Infra-Man when Thurman does a backflip in battle), then aren't scenes and actors from his previous movies fair game as well?
That doesn't mean that all of Tarantino's best tricks are used up. There are still pop culture references aplenty--from Pussy Wagon, the name of the car Thurman drives away from the hospital (taken from a particularly racy lyric in Grease), to the outfit Thurman wears when confronting O-Ren's bodyguards in the House of Blue Leaves (a replica of Bruce Lee's outfit from his last, uncompleted film, Game of Death), to quoting a Klingon proverb about revenge, Tarantino is still able to get laughs of recognition from the audience. Similarly, he also maintains his knack for putting the right song with the right image: Darryl Hannah sashays down a hospital corridor while whistling Bernard Hermann's "Twisted Nerve"; O-Ren and her posse glide through nightime Tokyo to Al Hirt's "Green Hornet Theme"; the slow walk down the hall of the House of Blue Leaves to Tomoyasu Hotei's "Battle Without Honor or Humanity"--all moments of unqualified cinematic beauty and brilliance, perhaps because they aren't intended to imitate anything, but instead take on personality all their own.
(Other song cues don't work nearly as well: The first time Tarantino uses a snipet of "The Ironside Theme" as a revenge horn, it gets a laugh, but when he uses the device a couple more times, it evokes only silence, if not groans.)
Then there are the fights scenes, which are so gloriously over the top and outrageous that they have to be admired and appreciated. Thurman gives a performance that's physical, gruelling and hard-nailed out of sheer necessity--if the audience doesn't buy that she's really that tough, that angry, that intent on revenge for the wrongs inflicted on her and her loved ones, then the movie would become a lampoon rather than an homage or, worse, fall apart entirely. But she holds it together with her scene-to-scene intensity and is ably supported by Fox and Liu, all of whom had to train rigorously for their roles. Liu, in particular, gets what may be the best part of her career in O-Ren, who rises to the top of the Japanese underworld despite her mixed heritage (Japanese/Chinese-American) and gender. She's ruthless, intelligent and perfectly capable of defending herself, whether it's from the verbal assault of an crime boss on her heritage or the physical assault of The Bride thirsting for revenge.
The violence in the fight scenes is so cartoonish--with limbs flying about, bodies split in two, heads lopped off--that it's hard to take seriously. (Nonetheless, Tarantino shifts the more extreme violence from color to black and white, apparently in an effort to appease the MPAA. So...violence is less graphic if the blood isn't red?)
Some viewers have come away from Kill Bill, Vol. 1 with a message of female empowerment--understandable, given how many women kick substantial ass in this movie. The Bride, Vernita, O-Ren and Go-Go (Chiaki Kuriyama), O-Ren's schoolgirl-outfit-wearing, mentally unstable lead bodyguard, all take turns taking no shit from nobody, particularly not from men. But consider what the women have to go through to get to the position of being empowered. In a sequence played out entirely in anime (a brilliant strategy by Tarantino, given the subject matter), we learn that O-Ren's parents were murdered (and, it's implied, her mother gang-raped) while she watches from under the bed, and she has to prostitute herself to the pedophile crime lord who executed them to enact her revenge. Similarly, The Bride is rented out as a living love doll by her male attendant, Buck (Bowen), while she lies in her four-year coma in the hospital. Is the message, then, that women can kick substantial ass only after suffering more than their male counterparts? And if Kill Bill is essentially a comedy, as Tarantino has maintained in interviews, why is the audience treated to two scene of children witnessing their parents being brutally murdered, or the squick-worthy details of The Bride's hospital stay?
Am I trying to read too much into Kill Bill, Vol. 1? Am I missing the point? Is there even a point to miss? Is there hidden depth here as in previous Tarantino movies, or is this really just the expertly made B-movie tribute it appears to be?
That I have so many questions and qualms is, I think, good. If I'd hated Kill Bill, Vol. 1, it wouldn't have lingered in my mind for so long, wouldn't have frustrated me so, wouldn't have made me ask so many questions. I'd have dismissed it as trash and moved on. And I wouldn't be anxious to see Vol. 2. Unfortunately, Miramax is making us wait until February for the second half, damn them. Don't they know or care that I have questions? That I crave answers? That I want to know what happens next?
And isn't that the highest compliment I can pay to Quentin Tarantino--that even though I'm not sure how I feel about the first half of the movie, I'm still eager to see the second?
Wednesday, November 5, 2003
Review: Cat People (1942)
My junior-year English teacher once assigned me to write a short story using 250 words or less. With my lousy handwriting, that came out to one page of notebook paper, front and back. I don't recall what the story was about--something sappy and sentimental about a kid whose brother died in Vietnam, I think--but it got an "A." I was
challenged by the restrictions placed upon me and found myself rising to the challenge.
I mention this memory because I think of it whenever I think of Val Lewton.
Lewton was a producer at RKO who was given the task of creating a string of B horror movies, but with numerous creative and budgetary restrictions: The studio provided the often-sensational titles (Cat People, Ghost Ship, Body Snatcher, etc.), but provided little cash. Lewton worked with what he was given with. The result? Some of the most intelligent, elegant and suggestive horror films ever made.
Cat People is the first--and, many reasonably argue, the best--of this string of B pictures (nine in all) and stars Simone Simon as Irena, a beautiful young fashion artist from a small European village who meets, falls in love with and marries an architect (Kent Smith). But Irena has a superstitious fear that, if emotionally (i.e., sexually) aroused, she'll turn into a black panther and kill her mate. Hell of a hang-up, that. This, as you'd imagine, causes all sorts of problems, so she winds up seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Judd (Tom Conway), who tries to convince her that it's all in her head. But when one of her husband's co-workers (Jane Randolph) seems to be more than casually interested in the architect, Irena stalks her.
It's in these scenes of stalking that Cat People really takes hold. Nothing is really shown--we never see Irena turn into a panther, and there's only one scene in which we see a panther that's even assumed to be Irena--but plenty is suggested by screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen and director Jacques Tourneur. Randolph walks down a dark, deserted street seemingly pursued by the clicking of Simon's heels...until the clicking stops. Why? Did she just change into a panther? Is Randolph about to become a meal? And what about the scene in which Randolph swims in a hotel pool, only to see shadows and hear noises that would suggest a large cat is about to pounce. Is this Irena? Has her jealousy transformed her into a killer? A non-human killer at that? And is the "transformation" sexual in nature? If so, is there an element of lesbianism involved? Could you even do that in a '40s monster movie?
Cat People is a great film to look at (and no, not just because of the exquisite Simon), thanks to the sure-handed direction of Jacques Tournier, who would handle other horror films for Lewton and RKO (I walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man) and make further contributions to the genre in later decades (Night of the Demon in the '50s and The Comedy of Terrors in the '60s). And, as with all of the other Lewton-produced horror flicks, the quiet moments are the creepiest. Characters aren't comfortable being alone. Empty streets are more menacing. Even an empty room can fill one with dread. Where other filmmakers might have shown a complete transformation scene (as in Universal's Wolf Man pictures), Lewton has neither the interest nor, bluntly put, the budget for such gimmicks. The horror, for the most part, is off-screen...and is all the more effective for it.
Cat People started a great winning streak for Lewton and RKO. And horror film fans were the beneficiaries.
I mention this memory because I think of it whenever I think of Val Lewton.
Lewton was a producer at RKO who was given the task of creating a string of B horror movies, but with numerous creative and budgetary restrictions: The studio provided the often-sensational titles (Cat People, Ghost Ship, Body Snatcher, etc.), but provided little cash. Lewton worked with what he was given with. The result? Some of the most intelligent, elegant and suggestive horror films ever made.
Cat People is the first--and, many reasonably argue, the best--of this string of B pictures (nine in all) and stars Simone Simon as Irena, a beautiful young fashion artist from a small European village who meets, falls in love with and marries an architect (Kent Smith). But Irena has a superstitious fear that, if emotionally (i.e., sexually) aroused, she'll turn into a black panther and kill her mate. Hell of a hang-up, that. This, as you'd imagine, causes all sorts of problems, so she winds up seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Judd (Tom Conway), who tries to convince her that it's all in her head. But when one of her husband's co-workers (Jane Randolph) seems to be more than casually interested in the architect, Irena stalks her.
It's in these scenes of stalking that Cat People really takes hold. Nothing is really shown--we never see Irena turn into a panther, and there's only one scene in which we see a panther that's even assumed to be Irena--but plenty is suggested by screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen and director Jacques Tourneur. Randolph walks down a dark, deserted street seemingly pursued by the clicking of Simon's heels...until the clicking stops. Why? Did she just change into a panther? Is Randolph about to become a meal? And what about the scene in which Randolph swims in a hotel pool, only to see shadows and hear noises that would suggest a large cat is about to pounce. Is this Irena? Has her jealousy transformed her into a killer? A non-human killer at that? And is the "transformation" sexual in nature? If so, is there an element of lesbianism involved? Could you even do that in a '40s monster movie?
Cat People is a great film to look at (and no, not just because of the exquisite Simon), thanks to the sure-handed direction of Jacques Tournier, who would handle other horror films for Lewton and RKO (I walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man) and make further contributions to the genre in later decades (Night of the Demon in the '50s and The Comedy of Terrors in the '60s). And, as with all of the other Lewton-produced horror flicks, the quiet moments are the creepiest. Characters aren't comfortable being alone. Empty streets are more menacing. Even an empty room can fill one with dread. Where other filmmakers might have shown a complete transformation scene (as in Universal's Wolf Man pictures), Lewton has neither the interest nor, bluntly put, the budget for such gimmicks. The horror, for the most part, is off-screen...and is all the more effective for it.
Cat People started a great winning streak for Lewton and RKO. And horror film fans were the beneficiaries.
Tuesday, November 4, 2003
Review: Candyman (1992)
Some horror movies thrill me. Others disappoint me. Still others make me laugh out loud, whether they are meant to be funny or not. But very few horror movies make me as spitting, throw-shit-at-my-TV mad as Candyman.
I avoided Candyman for a long time, mostly because it's based on a story by Clive Barker (who also acted as executive producer), who was declared "the future of horror" by no less than Stephen King. (Gee, thanks, Steve.) I'd seen the first two Hellraiser movies and found them both to be gory, illogical messes. But I'd heard good (well, better) things about Candyman from a variety of reliable sources, and I've always loved me some Virginia Madsen, so I picked up a used VHS copy and gave the flick a try.
And those sources were right--up to a point.
Madsen plays Helen, a grad student at the University of Illinois-Chicago preparing her thesis on urban legends. She and her friend Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons) stumble across the legend of the Candyman, who, if you say his name five times into a mirror, will appear and wreck havoc with his hook hand. (Why five times? It only took three times to summon Beetlejuice, and Mary Worth was supposed to appear only if you said her name repeatedly.)
Helen's investigation leads her and Bernadette to the Cabrini-Green housing projects, where a young mother (Vanessa Williams) fills them in on a murder supposedly committed by Candyman. A rival at the college helpfully tells Helen and her philandering professor husband Candyman's story. He was the cultured son of a former slave who had an affair with a white woman, got chased by an mob into the Cabrini-Green neighborhood (which wouldn't have been called Cabrini-Green for several more decades, but okay, I'm nitpicking--again) and got killed by having his hand cut off "with a rusty sawblade and being smeared with honey so that he'd be stung to death by bees. (Doesn't that seem like an awful lot of work just to kill somebody?)
Helen continues to probe Candyman's story and, while checking out the site of another murder victim, is brutally beaten by a gang of thugs whose leader brandishes a hook and claims that HE is really Candyman. One police report later, the thugs are rounded up and thrown in jail.
Up to this point, Candyman is well-paced and stylish (despite the parenthetical nitpicks above), engaging the audience with restrained storytelling; smart, subtle acting (especially from Madsen and Williams); and creepy visuals that make great use of the Chicago cityscape (a point I may be prejudiced on, as a native of the Windy City). So far, so good.
Then Candyman himself shows up. And this movie goes straight to shit in record time.
Candyman (Tony Todd) confronts Helen in a parking garage, blaming her for pressing charges against the thugs and thus weakening belief in his legend. He also implores Helen to "be my victim." Don't know how Helen could resist such a charming invitation, but when she does, Candyman gets nasty, kidnapping the young mother's baby and framing Helen for that crime and a bunch of seriously violent murders. (And Kasi Lemmons gets to find out why it's not so much fun to play "the best friend" role in horror movies.)
In just those few moments, Candyman goes from being an intelligent, thoughtful thriller to being a gory, illogical mess.
In other words, Candyman becomes a Clive Barker movie.
All of the good will generated by the first half of the movie, with its sophisticated, intellectual approach to the material, is blasted away by the second half, which gives us a villain who is nothing more than a less witty, more pretentious Freddy Krueger. And while the concept of an urban legend taking physical form through the strength of belief is intriguing, the back half of this movie can't do anything more interesting with that idea than serve up typical slasher-flick splatter.
Candyman also abandons all pretense of being logical and reasonable and raises far more questions than it could possibly answer. Like...Why does Candyman kidnap the baby in order to make Helen do his will, then continue to threaten the baby when she finally gives in? How will making Helen appear to be a serial killer make her love him (since she's apparently the reincarnation of his lost lover)? If Candyman was killed by a racist mob, why does he spend his time offing people in the projects? Shouldn't he be over on Michigan Avenue knocking off tourists or something? Why doesn't cut up the guy pretending to be him? (You'd think he'd be offended.) Are urban legends really as flammable as this movie implies? And why the fuck is he called Candyman in the first place? (Aside from a bag of chocolates with razor blades jammed into them, we get no clue.)
The only thing worse than a bad horror movie is a good horror movie that goes bad. And Candyman turns very bad very quickly, blowing an opportunity to evolve the slasher film to a higher form, to elevate it above the rest of its less-ambitious brothers and sisters, to make not just a good horror film, but a good FILM, period. Instead, Candyman gets lazy around the midway point and goes on autopilot from there, and I couldn't have been more disappointed.
(NOTE: despite being a gory, illogical mess, Candyman still did well enough to generate a couple of sequels.)
I avoided Candyman for a long time, mostly because it's based on a story by Clive Barker (who also acted as executive producer), who was declared "the future of horror" by no less than Stephen King. (Gee, thanks, Steve.) I'd seen the first two Hellraiser movies and found them both to be gory, illogical messes. But I'd heard good (well, better) things about Candyman from a variety of reliable sources, and I've always loved me some Virginia Madsen, so I picked up a used VHS copy and gave the flick a try.
And those sources were right--up to a point.
Madsen plays Helen, a grad student at the University of Illinois-Chicago preparing her thesis on urban legends. She and her friend Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons) stumble across the legend of the Candyman, who, if you say his name five times into a mirror, will appear and wreck havoc with his hook hand. (Why five times? It only took three times to summon Beetlejuice, and Mary Worth was supposed to appear only if you said her name repeatedly.)
Helen's investigation leads her and Bernadette to the Cabrini-Green housing projects, where a young mother (Vanessa Williams) fills them in on a murder supposedly committed by Candyman. A rival at the college helpfully tells Helen and her philandering professor husband Candyman's story. He was the cultured son of a former slave who had an affair with a white woman, got chased by an mob into the Cabrini-Green neighborhood (which wouldn't have been called Cabrini-Green for several more decades, but okay, I'm nitpicking--again) and got killed by having his hand cut off "with a rusty sawblade and being smeared with honey so that he'd be stung to death by bees. (Doesn't that seem like an awful lot of work just to kill somebody?)
Helen continues to probe Candyman's story and, while checking out the site of another murder victim, is brutally beaten by a gang of thugs whose leader brandishes a hook and claims that HE is really Candyman. One police report later, the thugs are rounded up and thrown in jail.
Up to this point, Candyman is well-paced and stylish (despite the parenthetical nitpicks above), engaging the audience with restrained storytelling; smart, subtle acting (especially from Madsen and Williams); and creepy visuals that make great use of the Chicago cityscape (a point I may be prejudiced on, as a native of the Windy City). So far, so good.
Then Candyman himself shows up. And this movie goes straight to shit in record time.
Candyman (Tony Todd) confronts Helen in a parking garage, blaming her for pressing charges against the thugs and thus weakening belief in his legend. He also implores Helen to "be my victim." Don't know how Helen could resist such a charming invitation, but when she does, Candyman gets nasty, kidnapping the young mother's baby and framing Helen for that crime and a bunch of seriously violent murders. (And Kasi Lemmons gets to find out why it's not so much fun to play "the best friend" role in horror movies.)
In just those few moments, Candyman goes from being an intelligent, thoughtful thriller to being a gory, illogical mess.
In other words, Candyman becomes a Clive Barker movie.
All of the good will generated by the first half of the movie, with its sophisticated, intellectual approach to the material, is blasted away by the second half, which gives us a villain who is nothing more than a less witty, more pretentious Freddy Krueger. And while the concept of an urban legend taking physical form through the strength of belief is intriguing, the back half of this movie can't do anything more interesting with that idea than serve up typical slasher-flick splatter.
Candyman also abandons all pretense of being logical and reasonable and raises far more questions than it could possibly answer. Like...Why does Candyman kidnap the baby in order to make Helen do his will, then continue to threaten the baby when she finally gives in? How will making Helen appear to be a serial killer make her love him (since she's apparently the reincarnation of his lost lover)? If Candyman was killed by a racist mob, why does he spend his time offing people in the projects? Shouldn't he be over on Michigan Avenue knocking off tourists or something? Why doesn't cut up the guy pretending to be him? (You'd think he'd be offended.) Are urban legends really as flammable as this movie implies? And why the fuck is he called Candyman in the first place? (Aside from a bag of chocolates with razor blades jammed into them, we get no clue.)
The only thing worse than a bad horror movie is a good horror movie that goes bad. And Candyman turns very bad very quickly, blowing an opportunity to evolve the slasher film to a higher form, to elevate it above the rest of its less-ambitious brothers and sisters, to make not just a good horror film, but a good FILM, period. Instead, Candyman gets lazy around the midway point and goes on autopilot from there, and I couldn't have been more disappointed.
(NOTE: despite being a gory, illogical mess, Candyman still did well enough to generate a couple of sequels.)
Monday, November 3, 2003
Review: Fall of the House of Usher (1928)
This French Avant-Garde version of Edgar Allan Poe's famous short story is often pointed to by film historians as the best evocation of the gothic spirit of many of Poe's tales. And they have a valid point. Many movies named for Poe stories either pad the story out to the point of totally diluting the atmosphere of gloom and paranoia so essential to Poe, or they discard the story entirely and just retain the title, like any of the movies called The Black Cat or The Raven.
This House of Usher runs just over an hour long, and the only real filler comes in the form of details lifted from another Poe story, "The Oval Portrait." And director Jean Epstein (and assistant director Luis Bunuel, who reportedly quit the film over the usual "artistic differences") shows admirable restraint in many ways, setting his story in sparse sets populated only by flickering candles and dusty floors.
Like everybody else who's ever made a Poe movie, though, Epstein does wander away from the original story's details. In this version, Roderick Usher and Madelaine (who's played by Margeuritte Gance, wife of famous French director Abel Gance) are husband and wife; they were brother and sister in Poe's story. Madelaine is dying of some unknown, unnamed disease, and Roderick is obsessed with painting her portrait, which seems to be alive (it breathes and moves its eyes). Roderick asks his friend, Allen, to come for a visit, and Allen witnesses his friend's mental disintegration when Madelaine dies--or so it appears.
As with any experimental film, House of Usher has its peaks and valleys. Madelaine's "death" scene is really nightmarish, with effective use of slow motion and smashing, distorted close-ups driving home the despair and insanity washing over Roderick. And Madelaine's return from the grave, in which we see her long, flowing white gown long before we actually see her, is also finely hallucinatory.
But some of Epstein's touches are so bizarre as to be unintentionally funny: The procession with Madelaine's coffin is so exaggerated that it looks more like it belongs in a Monty Python skit, and the intercut images of penetration--nails being driven into the coffin lid and two frogs fucking (no, I'm not kidding)--is downright ridiculous.
And then there's the ending, in which everybody gets out of the obviously (intentionally?) fake house as it burns to the ground against a starry nighttime sky that has all kinds of symbols in it, including a crucifix--hey, wasn't Allen the only one to make it out alive in Poe's story? And why bother carefully building a sense of overwhelming doom, only to undercut it with a happy ending?
Epstein's Usher tries harder than most adaptations do to retain the heavy atmosphere of Poe's stories, and it succeeds better than most adaptations do. But it evokes as many unintended laughs as it does intended chills, so the experiment is not a wholly successful one.
Still, I'd rather watch this again than, say, Murders in the Rue Morgue, which has more Poe spirit in its title than it does in the film itself.
This House of Usher runs just over an hour long, and the only real filler comes in the form of details lifted from another Poe story, "The Oval Portrait." And director Jean Epstein (and assistant director Luis Bunuel, who reportedly quit the film over the usual "artistic differences") shows admirable restraint in many ways, setting his story in sparse sets populated only by flickering candles and dusty floors.
Like everybody else who's ever made a Poe movie, though, Epstein does wander away from the original story's details. In this version, Roderick Usher and Madelaine (who's played by Margeuritte Gance, wife of famous French director Abel Gance) are husband and wife; they were brother and sister in Poe's story. Madelaine is dying of some unknown, unnamed disease, and Roderick is obsessed with painting her portrait, which seems to be alive (it breathes and moves its eyes). Roderick asks his friend, Allen, to come for a visit, and Allen witnesses his friend's mental disintegration when Madelaine dies--or so it appears.
As with any experimental film, House of Usher has its peaks and valleys. Madelaine's "death" scene is really nightmarish, with effective use of slow motion and smashing, distorted close-ups driving home the despair and insanity washing over Roderick. And Madelaine's return from the grave, in which we see her long, flowing white gown long before we actually see her, is also finely hallucinatory.
But some of Epstein's touches are so bizarre as to be unintentionally funny: The procession with Madelaine's coffin is so exaggerated that it looks more like it belongs in a Monty Python skit, and the intercut images of penetration--nails being driven into the coffin lid and two frogs fucking (no, I'm not kidding)--is downright ridiculous.
And then there's the ending, in which everybody gets out of the obviously (intentionally?) fake house as it burns to the ground against a starry nighttime sky that has all kinds of symbols in it, including a crucifix--hey, wasn't Allen the only one to make it out alive in Poe's story? And why bother carefully building a sense of overwhelming doom, only to undercut it with a happy ending?
Epstein's Usher tries harder than most adaptations do to retain the heavy atmosphere of Poe's stories, and it succeeds better than most adaptations do. But it evokes as many unintended laughs as it does intended chills, so the experiment is not a wholly successful one.
Still, I'd rather watch this again than, say, Murders in the Rue Morgue, which has more Poe spirit in its title than it does in the film itself.
Sunday, November 2, 2003
Review: The Birds (1963)
For just under five years, I worked for a small publishing company on the northern fringes of Evanston, IL. To get to this job, I had to take a long train ride north from Chicago to the next-to-last stop on the CTA's Purple Line and walk along Central Street, crossing a bridge over the North Shore Channel and passing a public golf course.
The river is lined with trees on either side, and wildlife liked to pass through on occasion. (Once, on a sub-zero January afternoon, I saw a fawn standing in the middle of the frozen river, staring at me as I was staring at her.) And occasionally--sometimes in morning, sometimes at night, sometimes in springtime, sometimes in fall--crows would gather in these trees and call to one another incessantly, almost loud enough to drown out the traffic rushing by. The sight of these crows, gathered in large numbers for no reason explicable to human eyes, always made me unspeakably nervous and invariably quickened my step even though, had they decided to take flight and blacken the sky with their wings, there was no place for me to hide.
And I blame this unspeakable nervousness entirely on Channel 7 and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.
Channel 7--also known as WLS, the local ABC affiliate--ran movies every afternoon at three (just in time for kids coming home from school) and liked to have theme weeks, like "war movie week" or "western week"--or "horror movie week." And even within this structure, there were variations: They would show a week's worth of Christopher Lee's Dracula flicks or giant monsters on the rampage, like Kink Kong or Godzilla (or, if we were really unfortunate, King Kong vs. Godzilla). But one of Channel 7's favorite movies to show during their mini-horror-film fests was The Birds. And unlike most of the other films they showed, The Birds never failed to frighten me--perhaps because has plausibility that most horror films lack.
Think about it. We know that vampires and werewolves don't exist and that you can't build a human being out of spare parts dug up in graveyards (not yet, anyway). Mummies don't get up and walk around after 3,000 years, and dinosaurs are dead, dead, dead.
But birds? We see and hear them every day. Sparrows chirping merrily in bushes. Cardinals calling their mates from the heights of maple trees. Seagulls scavenging for scraps in shopping mall parking lots. Crows massed along the banks of an otherwise peaceful river. As one character in The Birds helpfully points out, there are millions of species of birds in the world, and if they ever got the idea to get together and start killing people, "we wouldn't stand a chance."
The Birds is adapted from a novella by Daphne du Maurier, modified by screenwriter Evan Hunter to move the setting from England to the California coastline and modifying the ending to lend a sliver of hope to the audience. Newcomer Tippi Hedren stars as Melanie. (Funny, but that's her real-life daughter's name as well--Melanie Griffith. Coincidence?). She's another in a long line of tall, cool Hitchcock blondes, and she becomes involved with hunky Mitch (Rod Taylor), who has a young daughter (Veronica Cartwright) and a strong-willed mother (Jessica Tandy).
Mitch and family live in Bodega Bay, a quiet coastal community--quiet, that is, until birds start attacking human beings.
Wisely, no explanation is ever given as to why the birds do what they do here. Any explanation would undercut the terror the attack scenes instill, and such attacks, while exceptionally rare and never involving more than one species of bird at a time, do take place in real life. (While getting ready for work this morning, I heard a news report of a bald eagle attacking vacationers at a beach--it seemed to be especially fond of footballs--and, yes, the newscaster played an audio clip from The Birds.)
The bird attacks scenes themselves are frightening technical marvels. Back in the days before computer-generated effects, Hitchcock and Universal's special effects department resorted to optical effects, paintings, mechanical birds and horrible makeup to lay out the devastated landscape. But terrific special effects and momentary scares, which would be plenty for most directors, aren't enough for Hitchcock. He takes his ability to build tension until it's nearly unbearable before springing his traps. Is a disaster worse when you can see it developing but are powerless to prevent it? That's the position Hitchcock puts the audience in again and again.
Consider the scene in which Melanie goes to the local school to pick up Mitch's daughter. Melanie waits outside the school, smoking a cigarette while listening to the children sing. She faces the audience, and behind her we can see a small playground with a set of monkey bars. One by one, crows gather on the monkey bars. The audience can see this, but Melanie can't. So she continues to smoke calmly. The children continue to sing. Crows continue to gather. Each close-up of Melanie is tighter and tighter. Finally, Melanie catches sight of a crow in flight and follows its arc until it lands in the playground, which is now black with crows. Melanie's eyes widen with horror. She realizes what the audience did minutes before her: she and the children are trapped, and there may be no way out.
Combine this talent for constructing tension--honed by Hitchcock in many thrillers before this one--with the realistic setting and sympathetic characters, and you have one seriously unsettling moviegoing experience that stands the test of time. The Birds never ceases to amaze and scare me.
And I'll never cease to be weirded out by crows.
Thank you, Mr. Hitchcock.
The river is lined with trees on either side, and wildlife liked to pass through on occasion. (Once, on a sub-zero January afternoon, I saw a fawn standing in the middle of the frozen river, staring at me as I was staring at her.) And occasionally--sometimes in morning, sometimes at night, sometimes in springtime, sometimes in fall--crows would gather in these trees and call to one another incessantly, almost loud enough to drown out the traffic rushing by. The sight of these crows, gathered in large numbers for no reason explicable to human eyes, always made me unspeakably nervous and invariably quickened my step even though, had they decided to take flight and blacken the sky with their wings, there was no place for me to hide.
And I blame this unspeakable nervousness entirely on Channel 7 and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.
Channel 7--also known as WLS, the local ABC affiliate--ran movies every afternoon at three (just in time for kids coming home from school) and liked to have theme weeks, like "war movie week" or "western week"--or "horror movie week." And even within this structure, there were variations: They would show a week's worth of Christopher Lee's Dracula flicks or giant monsters on the rampage, like Kink Kong or Godzilla (or, if we were really unfortunate, King Kong vs. Godzilla). But one of Channel 7's favorite movies to show during their mini-horror-film fests was The Birds. And unlike most of the other films they showed, The Birds never failed to frighten me--perhaps because has plausibility that most horror films lack.
Think about it. We know that vampires and werewolves don't exist and that you can't build a human being out of spare parts dug up in graveyards (not yet, anyway). Mummies don't get up and walk around after 3,000 years, and dinosaurs are dead, dead, dead.
But birds? We see and hear them every day. Sparrows chirping merrily in bushes. Cardinals calling their mates from the heights of maple trees. Seagulls scavenging for scraps in shopping mall parking lots. Crows massed along the banks of an otherwise peaceful river. As one character in The Birds helpfully points out, there are millions of species of birds in the world, and if they ever got the idea to get together and start killing people, "we wouldn't stand a chance."
The Birds is adapted from a novella by Daphne du Maurier, modified by screenwriter Evan Hunter to move the setting from England to the California coastline and modifying the ending to lend a sliver of hope to the audience. Newcomer Tippi Hedren stars as Melanie. (Funny, but that's her real-life daughter's name as well--Melanie Griffith. Coincidence?). She's another in a long line of tall, cool Hitchcock blondes, and she becomes involved with hunky Mitch (Rod Taylor), who has a young daughter (Veronica Cartwright) and a strong-willed mother (Jessica Tandy).
Mitch and family live in Bodega Bay, a quiet coastal community--quiet, that is, until birds start attacking human beings.
Wisely, no explanation is ever given as to why the birds do what they do here. Any explanation would undercut the terror the attack scenes instill, and such attacks, while exceptionally rare and never involving more than one species of bird at a time, do take place in real life. (While getting ready for work this morning, I heard a news report of a bald eagle attacking vacationers at a beach--it seemed to be especially fond of footballs--and, yes, the newscaster played an audio clip from The Birds.)
The bird attacks scenes themselves are frightening technical marvels. Back in the days before computer-generated effects, Hitchcock and Universal's special effects department resorted to optical effects, paintings, mechanical birds and horrible makeup to lay out the devastated landscape. But terrific special effects and momentary scares, which would be plenty for most directors, aren't enough for Hitchcock. He takes his ability to build tension until it's nearly unbearable before springing his traps. Is a disaster worse when you can see it developing but are powerless to prevent it? That's the position Hitchcock puts the audience in again and again.
Consider the scene in which Melanie goes to the local school to pick up Mitch's daughter. Melanie waits outside the school, smoking a cigarette while listening to the children sing. She faces the audience, and behind her we can see a small playground with a set of monkey bars. One by one, crows gather on the monkey bars. The audience can see this, but Melanie can't. So she continues to smoke calmly. The children continue to sing. Crows continue to gather. Each close-up of Melanie is tighter and tighter. Finally, Melanie catches sight of a crow in flight and follows its arc until it lands in the playground, which is now black with crows. Melanie's eyes widen with horror. She realizes what the audience did minutes before her: she and the children are trapped, and there may be no way out.
Combine this talent for constructing tension--honed by Hitchcock in many thrillers before this one--with the realistic setting and sympathetic characters, and you have one seriously unsettling moviegoing experience that stands the test of time. The Birds never ceases to amaze and scare me.
And I'll never cease to be weirded out by crows.
Thank you, Mr. Hitchcock.
Saturday, November 1, 2003
Review: Day of the Dead (1985)
In the years since its initial theatrical release, Day of the Dead has, in some circles, gained a reputation for being the darkest and most intellectual of George Romero's three Living Dead epics. And this, bluntly, confused the living hell out of me. When I bought my first VCR back in 1988, I rented three movies, one of which was Day of the Dead, (the other two were The Hidden and a porn flick called Sex Star--but did you need to know that, really?) and while I didn't think it was the worst horror film I'd ever seen, it was probably the most bitterly disappointing. I was (and am) a huge fan of the first two Dead movies, and I found Day to be loud and stupid, tossing aside the atmosphere carefully constructed in the first two films for a cheap, sloppy and ultimately depressing conclusion to the series.
But I'll be the first person to admit that I'm fully capable of being wrong, so I recently sat down and watched Day of the Dead again for the first time since that initial viewing. And found that my contempt for it has only grown.
I can't argue with the perception that Day is the darkest of the trilogy; that's stating the obvious. The dead rule the world, and humanity has been driven underground into cavernous bunkers like the one we find our characters in. The big problem, though, is that the remaining survivors all seem to be either idiots, assholes or idiot assholes. From Sarah (Lori Cardille), a pill-popping shrew, to Captain Rhodes (Joe Pilato), a maniacal military freak, to Dr. Logan (Robert Liberty, who gives the film's best, most eccentric performance), a scientist so removed from reality that even his subordinates refer to him as "Frankenstein," everybody in this movie seems to be in varying stages of mental disintegration. That's understandable-if the world were ending and the dead were waiting right outside the door to belly up to the table with me as the main course, I'd pretty well lose it, too. But these characters are so universally unpleasant and poorly drawn that spending time with them for even a few minutes gave me a ringing headache. And interminable stretches where actors unconvincingly scream at one other qualify as "intellectual," then Day of the Dead may be the most dizzyingly cerebral movie ever made.
Many of the quieter moments in the movie, in which the more marginally likable characters discuss theories as to why the zombies do what they do or how it would be better to forget the past and just start the whole worldover again, are much more effective than the more "dramatic" scenes, even if they echo moments from the previous two Dead movies. And Tom Savini's special effects reach their ultimate zenith--or valley, take your pick--withan ending so overrun with spilling guts that they must have raided every butcher's shop on the East Coast to pull off those gushy effects.
But it all comes back to the script, which was reportedly severely reworked because funding had fallen through for the zombie picture Romero had wanted to make. That's no excuse. Romero has had zilch to work with on many ofhis movies, but has most often turned out startling work. Day of the Dead only startles in how easy it is to predict which of the survivors will make it to the end of the flick and in how shallow and, inevitably, disappointing the whole exercise is. What a shame it is that the one horror series entirely controlled by its main creator still ends with an entirely unworthy entry. Maybe, someday, Romero will revisit the material and come up with a more fitting conclusion to the Dead saga.
Till then, Day of the Dead is what we're left with--and we deserved better.
But I'll be the first person to admit that I'm fully capable of being wrong, so I recently sat down and watched Day of the Dead again for the first time since that initial viewing. And found that my contempt for it has only grown.
I can't argue with the perception that Day is the darkest of the trilogy; that's stating the obvious. The dead rule the world, and humanity has been driven underground into cavernous bunkers like the one we find our characters in. The big problem, though, is that the remaining survivors all seem to be either idiots, assholes or idiot assholes. From Sarah (Lori Cardille), a pill-popping shrew, to Captain Rhodes (Joe Pilato), a maniacal military freak, to Dr. Logan (Robert Liberty, who gives the film's best, most eccentric performance), a scientist so removed from reality that even his subordinates refer to him as "Frankenstein," everybody in this movie seems to be in varying stages of mental disintegration. That's understandable-if the world were ending and the dead were waiting right outside the door to belly up to the table with me as the main course, I'd pretty well lose it, too. But these characters are so universally unpleasant and poorly drawn that spending time with them for even a few minutes gave me a ringing headache. And interminable stretches where actors unconvincingly scream at one other qualify as "intellectual," then Day of the Dead may be the most dizzyingly cerebral movie ever made.
Many of the quieter moments in the movie, in which the more marginally likable characters discuss theories as to why the zombies do what they do or how it would be better to forget the past and just start the whole worldover again, are much more effective than the more "dramatic" scenes, even if they echo moments from the previous two Dead movies. And Tom Savini's special effects reach their ultimate zenith--or valley, take your pick--withan ending so overrun with spilling guts that they must have raided every butcher's shop on the East Coast to pull off those gushy effects.
But it all comes back to the script, which was reportedly severely reworked because funding had fallen through for the zombie picture Romero had wanted to make. That's no excuse. Romero has had zilch to work with on many ofhis movies, but has most often turned out startling work. Day of the Dead only startles in how easy it is to predict which of the survivors will make it to the end of the flick and in how shallow and, inevitably, disappointing the whole exercise is. What a shame it is that the one horror series entirely controlled by its main creator still ends with an entirely unworthy entry. Maybe, someday, Romero will revisit the material and come up with a more fitting conclusion to the Dead saga.
Till then, Day of the Dead is what we're left with--and we deserved better.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
