Another Labor Day brings the close to another movie summer season, one that was, if almost totally devoid of fun, top-shelf blockbusters, devoid as well of anything tremendously bad. In its place comes the month that heralds the Toronto and Venice Film Festivals, thereby ringing in the official start of awards season; otherwise it's just a repeat of February or April, months that largely serve as a receiving area for movies that nobody has quite enough faith in to give them a proper release date. I will confess to thinking enough of the new releases have enough promise, usually in the trashiest possible way, for me to be more excited about this month than I was for any of the tentpoles. But this is only because I am perverse.
2.9.2011
At any rate, perversity and perversity alone can explain why Shark Night 3D is so near the top of my Must-See list for the month. I have made no secret of my belief that tacky and stupid 3-D is the only kind of 3-D of any real merit, and a movie that title is apt to be both of those adjectives - if it has even a trace of the energy of Piranha 3D, on whose bandwagon it is so clearly jumping, I'll be a happy schlock fan. The only thing keeping down my enthusiasm is that PG-13 rating, which can be no good sign, not at all.
Making it a double weekend of absolute trash, we also get Apollo 18, a found-footage horror film about killer aliens on the moon. Color me doubtful. And more than a little insulted on behalf of the actual Apollo astronauts.
9.9.2011
There are two actual, legitimate films coming out in wide release, both of them genre-type movies that are probably looking to get into the year-end awards derby early, before the glut of tastefully literary prestige pictures crowds them out. The first is Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, a celebrity-packed dark thriller about a disease that kills the whole world. Making it officially one of the sub-themes of 2011 cinema, after Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Longtime readers are aware that I would follow Soderbergh off the edge of a cliff, and the magnificently grim trailer leaves me with no reason to doubt my faith now.
There's also Warrior, which has that uplifting sports movie thing going on that means, I suppose, that they think it's going to get awards play, but nothing about it, other than the presence of the always-reliable Tom Hardy, makes it look like much of anything. Porn industry comedy Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star is assuredly not looking for awards, and I for one have about no tolerance whatsoever for Nick Swardson, but I guess it has that whole big market segment that thought Boogie Nights would have been perfect if it was a farce to look forward to.
16.9.2011
I was just talking about the two actual movies, and here's the other one: Drive, starring Best Actor of His Generation Ryan Gosling and winner of the Best Director award at Cannes for Nicolas Winding Refn. It's a crime thriller of some sort - based on the orgasmic hype, I decided early on to learn as little as I possibly could about this one going in - and the trailer is outstandingly lo-fi for something that is meant to sell a movie to a mass audience.
It shares space with an inordinately tepid-looking post-feminist comedy starring professional post-feminist Sarah Jessica Parker, I Don't Know How She Does It, and a remake of Straw Dogs of all random things - aren't we still, as a culture, arguing about the original? Why even bother?
Speaking of "why bother", Disney didn't get the memo that 3-D is on the way out, and is proudly unveiling a converted version of The Lion King, to get us all revved up for its Blu-Ray debut at the start of October. Those of us who made the questionable decision to see Cars 2 in 3-D have had the privilege of seeing the iconic "Circle of Life" number in its new multidimensional glory, and know just how fucking awful the conversion of 2-D cel animation into 3-D looks. 90 minutes of that for $14 is literally nothing more than asking you to pay for the privilege of having a migraine.
23.9.2011
I think the reason I'm actually kind of excited for this month is that every single weekend, there's something I'm genuinely looking forward to, even if it's only in the hope of some fun, no-brow trash. Case in point: Killer Elite, which pretty much just looks like The Jason Statham & Clive Owen Action Movie, which is also the title of the dream I have every single night of my life.
(Being a diehard Jason Statham fan really sucks sometimes).
It enters wide release alongside two based-on-life stories: Dolphin Tale, one of those cloyingly tender family movies about wild animals and hugs, and Moneyball, a tale of number-crunching and sports management that was a lot more exciting before the proficient but hardly soul-stirring director of Capote took over. But hey, Brad Pitt makes good choices.
The film that's probably going to win the weekend, though, is Abduction, which assembles a mouth-watering cast of Maria Bello, Jason Isaacs, Alfred Molina, and the always-welcome Sigourney Weaver, and then ruins it all by trying to turn Taylor Lautner into an action star. Perhaps we will be lucky, and it will be hilariously incompetent. Perhaps.
30.9.2011
A busy month wraps up with four quiet movies in wide release: 50/50, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt battles cancer - and I love that actor so much, but I won't pretend that the concept doesn't put me on the defensive; an Anna Faris comedy, What's Your Number? that looks at least slightly better than most of what she wastes her talent on; Dream House, a psychological thriller directed by Jim Sheridan, who for my money is one of the most reliable filmmakers presently working - though none of his films have been flat-out masterpieces, they've all been at least pretty good; and Courageous, a feel-good movie that's making not even the slightest attempt to cast its nets outside of the faith-based set.
The biggest news, of course, is that after an ungodly time in post-production, Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret is supposedly finally getting a release date, eleven years after You Can Count On Me came along and knocked us all on our collective ass. I'll believe it when the end credits start to role, and not a second earlier.
31 August 2011
30 August 2011
FOR FEAR OF LITTLE MEN
The new film is pretty okay, I should hasten to point out before I start ripping into. In its current form, written by Matthew Robbins & Guillermo del Toro, the story is about Sally (Bailee Madison), an 8-year-old girl being treated for an unstated emotional disorder (which does not mean, we should note, that she suffers from an emotional disorder) who is shipped from Los Angeles by her frustrated mother to a damp corner of Rhode Island, where her architect father, Alex (Guy Pearce) and his new interior designer girlfriend (though everything in the film itself led me to assume she was his wife), Kim (Katie Holmes), are busy restoring a sprawling mansion once owned by the renowned nature painter Lord Blackwood (Garry McDonald), who we've already seen in the pre-title sequence, when he attacked a maid (Edwina Ritchard) spouting nonsense about his missing child and "they", before getting sucked into a fireplace).
Presently enough, Alex and Kim's rehabbing leads them to break open the wall that had been sealing up Blackwood's downstairs studio - the same room where he met his demise - over the protestations of Harris (Jack Thompson, the caretaker and son of caretakers past, who clearly knows but can't say that Something Dark lies in the building's past. We learn what it is soon enough: Sally starts hearing voices just on the edge of sound, the kind that hiss and rush and sound altogether like beings you don't really want to encounter in a rattle old building, unless you are a precocious child with more creativity than sense, and a passel of adults on all sides who simply do not know what the hell to do with you. Sally thus befriends the beings, and even manages to spot them out of the corner of her eye: they are spindly humanoids with thick, bushy bodies, less than a foot high, and they are extremely reluctant to come into the light.
That's kind of it, as far as plot goes: the rest of the film is a bunch of variations on Alex blowing Sally off, while Kim tries everything in her power to make Sally like her, coming to believe along the way that the little creatures the girl is describing might not be the product of an over-worked imagination; Sally grows slowly but steadily convinced that her new friends do not have her best interests at heart. On and on it goes, with the single biggest change being that shortly after the halfway mark, we get our first nice long look at the creatures, and find that in the grand tradition of horror movie monsters, it was better when we could fill in the details ourselves.
All of this is del Toro through and through - the most substantive and far-reaching change to the material was to turn Sally into a child, and thereby make his version of Don't Be Afraid into an American-set Pan's Labyrinth without the socio-historical context. But it is important to note that del Toro did not follow through and direct the picture; he left that duty to Troy Nixey, a first-timer with only a single short under his belt, although he is something of a well-established comic book artist (at least it's a visual form of storytelling, even in the use of "shots"). How much of a hand del Toro had in the day-to-day work on set, I cannot say, nor anyone who was there, and it's at least not the case that Don't Be Afraid specifically calls to mind any particular del Toro project, visually speaking. What it does call to mind is the del Toro-produced horror picture The Orphanage, along with every other "big scary house" movie of the last several years. We shouldn't hold it against a newbie that he felt compelled to use the same clotted shadows and horrified low angles and suffocating hushes on the soundtrack - and the sound mix is, at least, a pretty fantastic piece of work - but you can't pretend it's not there.
The flipside is that, by dint of doing all the things that have always worked, Don't Be Afraid itself works, basically. It's not as rollicking as Insidious, and not as fucking scary as Paranormal Activity, but it acquits itself well enough for a haunted house-type picture in the 21st Century. The sound design, I mentioned, is pretty much aces, and the lighting is appropriately brooding. As with far too many horror films that come up with a semi-plausible explanation for what's going on - and it's a real doozy in this one, giving the childhood tooth fairy ritual a phenomenally ridiculous background in the realm of northern European folklore - it gets a lot less scary once we know what's happening, and the more we see of the beings (which are rather closer to the creatures the screenwriter of the TV movie had in mind than the ones that movie depicted), the more they look like CGI effects that aren't tremendously scary. I would go so far as to say that the scariest images in the film are what we see of Blackwood's paintings of the creatures, in fact, and not the creatures themselves, and for a reason I can't quite vocalise, this strikes me as a tremendous failing.
Still, it's as creepy as it needs to be, and not even remotely as creepy as its asinine R-rating would indicate, and it's pretty shallow beyond that: any attempts at child psychology along the lines of Pan's Labyrinth run aground at the simplistic characterisations in the script, and a couple of terrible performances - not Madison, though, who is remarkably good for a girl her age. Pearce and Holmes manage to do a far worse job than she does: Pearce by failing in any way to modulate his character's airy indifference to his child until the moment the script demands it, a moment that makes no sense given the actor's refusal to that point to suggest that Alex does, in fact, love his daughter; Holmes by being breathy and sugary and acting generally like she decided for some unspeakable reason that the best way to play the character was to constantly ask herself "What would Audrey Tatou do?" Holmes in particular comes awfully close to ruining the movie, or at least making it worse than it has to be. But it's honestly pretty actor-proof. This one is all about the atmosphere, and while Nixey is not at all comfortable in the storybook mode that his producer and mentor self-evidently wanted to enforce over the material, he at least manages to marshal that atmosphere in the right ways to end up with a movie that's effective, if predominately unmemorable.
6/10, and it might have just crawled up to a 7/10 if I didn't feel compelled to punish it for using Comic Sans in the end credits.
28 August 2011
BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: CREEPY HOUSES
Every Sunday this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: movies about rattly old houses that may or may not host an assortment of disturbed ghosts or other paranormal nasties, including the new Don't Be Afraid of the Dark haven't been a truly in vogue since the 1930s. At the same time, it's a horror subgenre that absolutely refuses to die, and when it works, there's nothing better; so it is that I'm taking this opportunity to finally write a review of just such a movie, in my opinion one of the scariest things ever made.
There are two lines of thought that dominate any discussion of what makes a movie scary: either it is a great deal of subtlety and implication that allows the viewer to imagine all sorts of terrible things just out of sight, or it is being explicit in the most hideous, disconcerting way possible. It is the difference between a creepy ghost story and a bloody slasher flick; I think it's not an undue generalisation to suggest that the side any given person comes down on is going to be reflected in their age. As recently as 1999, the battle between these two poles flared up (though it wasn't really defined that way that I know of) when The Blair Witch Project divided people into the "it's outstanding because it's completely vague about everything" and the "ferchrissake, it's a handful of sticks" camps (also the "this movie is amateurish and stupid" camp, but let's not dwell on them), but for the most part, subtlety has long since lost, following the loosening of standards over the course of the last four decades, especially the eruption of hyper-violent horror movies in the 1970s and what followed.
For those who prefer their scary movies heavy on the atmosphere and the slow boil and light on the gory monsters and screaming teenagers - and I guess I fall mostly into that category, even though two of my three favorite American horror films* are the decidedly explicit Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Shining - one of the most reliable standards to bear has been 1963's The Haunting, adapted from Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House: read any positive review of the film, and nine times in ten they'll spend at least a little bit of energy praising its exemplary restraint. I am not prepared to break with this tradition, though it seems to me that any film that uses ghastly threatening shadows and production design that suggests a collaboration between E.M. Forster and H.P. Lovecraft with the reckless abandon of The Haunting can't be fairly said to be restraining itself, so much as refraining from explicit violence.
Anyway, I bring this up mostly because it seemed dishonest to try to write about The Haunting without observing that it serves as a symbol of an extinct style of horror filmmaking to so many people. But really, the style of The Haunting was never terribly widespread to begin with: truly great movies by definition can't also be typical, and The Haunting is at least truly great. Borderline perfect, I'd say myself, and not just because it's one of the few movies that scared me so much that it ever gave me a sleepless night. Strip away all of its frightening elements, and the film remains a sophisticated, complex, and tremendously subtle (there's that damn word!) character study: I would say easily the best work in director Robert Wise's career, if not for the presence The Day the Earth Stood Still. As it is, anyone who best knows him for making the handsome, but indefinitely hollow and unsatisfying Broadway adaptations West Side Story and The Sound of Music certainly wouldn't expect that he had this kind of brooding Gothic elegance in him, right square in between those Oscar-winning megaliths.
We enter the film by means of an oddly chummy narration provided by an Englishman whose identity we don't know: he recites for us the history of Hill House, a gargantuan 90-year-old mansion in hidden away in a corner of New England. From the moment of the house's completion, it has been the site of death and misery, all involving the family of the wealthy and, it would appear, beastly Hugh Crain (Howard Lang); and that is why, the narrator concludes, he wants to go there to study it. For our Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson) is a researcher in the paranormal, and he has heard many enticing stories about the dark psychic energies infesting Hill House.
He arranges for several people to join him, all of them known to have significant psychic events in their past: but in the end, only two show up. One of these is a woman who only goes by Theodora (Claire Bloom), and her ESP is the strongest that has ever been studied by parapsychologists. The other is Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris), whose own psychic past was so upsetting that she has repressed it, or at least redefined what happened to her back when she was a child. In the meantime, her interest in Markway's experiment is much more earthly: her invalid mother has just died, bringing to a close 15 years of nursemaiding that have devoured Eleanor's adult life. She's presently living on the couch of her sister and brother-in-law, and is desperate for anything remotely new or exciting to color her painfully dull life. Along for the ride as well is Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn, of West Side Story), nephew to Hill House's present owner and heir apparent to the property; he doesn't believe in ghosts at all, but he does have a keen interest in assessing the value of the building.
I refuse to give away any more of the plot than that, on the grounds that anyone who hasn't seen the film deserves better than to have me give away any of the details. It's worth letting the shocks that happen to the characters come as a shock to the viewer as well, though this much isn't a spoiler: The Haunting is emphatically not one of those haunted house movies where it turns out to have been a con by an unscrupulous crook all along. What exists in Hill House, if it is not necessarily ghosts in the normal sense of that word, is anyway not human.
Admittedly, saying with objective certainty that something "is scary" is almost as impossible as defining what is funny, but at least this much has to be conceded: Wise and his crew do their very damnedest to make The Haunting scary. There is first the matter of Hill House itself: designed by Elliot Scott and decorated by John Jarvis, it is about as compelling wrong as any haunted house in any movie could be. We are told that there is not a single square corner in the building; later the characters assert that something in the very bones of the building is fundamentally warped and evil, and based on the evidence of our eyes, both of these contentions seem entirely reasonable. It's in everything from the big details, such as the dark wood that sucks all the energy out of everything, and the clashing architectural styles on display throughout, down to the littlest touches of a creepy angel statue here, an incredible unpleasant wallpaper there, or the incidental detail, off in one corner of the frame but hard to miss, in the very nursery that is the heart of all the suffering in the house, where the cruelly religious Crain emblazoned the legend "Suffer little children" over his daughter's doorway.
This is shot by Davis Boulton with lighting straight out of film noir, using shadows to bring out the horrible textures of the place, the boosted contrast making everything seem hard and edgy; he and Wise further use camera movements that lurch about and look at things from grotesquely canted angles and switch from subjective to objective viewpoints with no warning. I do wish that it hadn't been shot in anamorphic Panavision; the filmmakers are mostly at a loss what to do with the wide frame. But that is my only real complaint against the film.
Into these creepy, uncanny, disorienting visuals, comes one of the finest sound mixes in cinema: indeed, as important as the visuals are to The Haunting, it's the soundtrack that actually makes the movie scary. The big showstopping scene that is probably the most famous bit of the whole film is made up of almost nothing but a knocking sound and the heavy breathing of Eleanor and Theo: and while the close-ups and insert shots in the scene help, I don't half wonder if it would be almost as effective with the picture turned off.
So what we have is a well-shot, good sounding haunted house movie, and it scares the bejeezus out of many people, including your humble blogger. But that is, as things go, kind of a shallow reason for conferring masterpiece status onto a film. What gives The Haunting that extra push is that in addition to being the best-made haunted house movie of all time, it's also one of the greatest psychological thrillers, creating in Eleanor Lance a tremendous character, an woman who was barely out of her teens when she was obliged to become her mother's caretaker, and has emerged from that job with a healthy sense of resentment that she refuses to acknowledge, and it at once sex-starved and sex-phobic, a perfectly amazing mess of neurotic impulses. Her sweetly pathetic attempts to flirt with Markway - motivated, presumably, not because he is a handsome man but because he's the first one who has ever really communicated with her - is one thing, but her relationship with Theo, strongly implied to be a lesbian - is stunningly off-kilter: here Eleanor is clinging to her and lying in bed with her, desperate for comfort and an adult woman to baby her; here she is screeching at her friend and calling her unnatural and filthy.
Eleanor is, in short, a broken and fragile and at times incredibly nasty person - in her fight with her sister, it's not terribly hard to agree that she's in the wrong while finding her disgustingly passive-aggressive† - and her descent into madness and possession, helpfully marked out by a constant stream of narration that becomes harder and harder to parse into anything rational as the movie goes on, is every bit as terrifying as the malevolence of Hill House. More so, because it's real: and yet the ultimate brilliance of The Haunting is that it collapses the distinction between paranormal horror and psychological horror, that a character study this intense is exactly cotangent with such a deliciously goosebumpy ghost story. The house wants a victim, and it chooses her because she is too weak in her self-identity to resist; at the same time, the ghastly happenings are a metaphor for, and extension of, Eleanor's internal disintegration. Only The Shining has ever matched the accomplishment in this film of binding those two strains together so tightly, and as fun as it is to watch Jack Nicholson go overboard in that movie, he's not doing anything as nuanced and fine as Harris - the most Tony'd actor in stage history - does in every scene of this film, balancing sex, childishness, irrational matricidal guilt, mortal fear, and the enthusiasm of an adventurous tourist constantly, in a ever-shifting war for dominance. It's too easy to say they don't make 'em like this anymore: in fact, they never really did. This kind of all-round excellence is a bolt of lightning, not a generational marker, and The Haunting is an exemplary, stand-out work regardless of its era.
For those who prefer their scary movies heavy on the atmosphere and the slow boil and light on the gory monsters and screaming teenagers - and I guess I fall mostly into that category, even though two of my three favorite American horror films* are the decidedly explicit Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Shining - one of the most reliable standards to bear has been 1963's The Haunting, adapted from Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House: read any positive review of the film, and nine times in ten they'll spend at least a little bit of energy praising its exemplary restraint. I am not prepared to break with this tradition, though it seems to me that any film that uses ghastly threatening shadows and production design that suggests a collaboration between E.M. Forster and H.P. Lovecraft with the reckless abandon of The Haunting can't be fairly said to be restraining itself, so much as refraining from explicit violence.
Anyway, I bring this up mostly because it seemed dishonest to try to write about The Haunting without observing that it serves as a symbol of an extinct style of horror filmmaking to so many people. But really, the style of The Haunting was never terribly widespread to begin with: truly great movies by definition can't also be typical, and The Haunting is at least truly great. Borderline perfect, I'd say myself, and not just because it's one of the few movies that scared me so much that it ever gave me a sleepless night. Strip away all of its frightening elements, and the film remains a sophisticated, complex, and tremendously subtle (there's that damn word!) character study: I would say easily the best work in director Robert Wise's career, if not for the presence The Day the Earth Stood Still. As it is, anyone who best knows him for making the handsome, but indefinitely hollow and unsatisfying Broadway adaptations West Side Story and The Sound of Music certainly wouldn't expect that he had this kind of brooding Gothic elegance in him, right square in between those Oscar-winning megaliths.
We enter the film by means of an oddly chummy narration provided by an Englishman whose identity we don't know: he recites for us the history of Hill House, a gargantuan 90-year-old mansion in hidden away in a corner of New England. From the moment of the house's completion, it has been the site of death and misery, all involving the family of the wealthy and, it would appear, beastly Hugh Crain (Howard Lang); and that is why, the narrator concludes, he wants to go there to study it. For our Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson) is a researcher in the paranormal, and he has heard many enticing stories about the dark psychic energies infesting Hill House.
He arranges for several people to join him, all of them known to have significant psychic events in their past: but in the end, only two show up. One of these is a woman who only goes by Theodora (Claire Bloom), and her ESP is the strongest that has ever been studied by parapsychologists. The other is Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris), whose own psychic past was so upsetting that she has repressed it, or at least redefined what happened to her back when she was a child. In the meantime, her interest in Markway's experiment is much more earthly: her invalid mother has just died, bringing to a close 15 years of nursemaiding that have devoured Eleanor's adult life. She's presently living on the couch of her sister and brother-in-law, and is desperate for anything remotely new or exciting to color her painfully dull life. Along for the ride as well is Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn, of West Side Story), nephew to Hill House's present owner and heir apparent to the property; he doesn't believe in ghosts at all, but he does have a keen interest in assessing the value of the building.
I refuse to give away any more of the plot than that, on the grounds that anyone who hasn't seen the film deserves better than to have me give away any of the details. It's worth letting the shocks that happen to the characters come as a shock to the viewer as well, though this much isn't a spoiler: The Haunting is emphatically not one of those haunted house movies where it turns out to have been a con by an unscrupulous crook all along. What exists in Hill House, if it is not necessarily ghosts in the normal sense of that word, is anyway not human.
Admittedly, saying with objective certainty that something "is scary" is almost as impossible as defining what is funny, but at least this much has to be conceded: Wise and his crew do their very damnedest to make The Haunting scary. There is first the matter of Hill House itself: designed by Elliot Scott and decorated by John Jarvis, it is about as compelling wrong as any haunted house in any movie could be. We are told that there is not a single square corner in the building; later the characters assert that something in the very bones of the building is fundamentally warped and evil, and based on the evidence of our eyes, both of these contentions seem entirely reasonable. It's in everything from the big details, such as the dark wood that sucks all the energy out of everything, and the clashing architectural styles on display throughout, down to the littlest touches of a creepy angel statue here, an incredible unpleasant wallpaper there, or the incidental detail, off in one corner of the frame but hard to miss, in the very nursery that is the heart of all the suffering in the house, where the cruelly religious Crain emblazoned the legend "Suffer little children" over his daughter's doorway.
This is shot by Davis Boulton with lighting straight out of film noir, using shadows to bring out the horrible textures of the place, the boosted contrast making everything seem hard and edgy; he and Wise further use camera movements that lurch about and look at things from grotesquely canted angles and switch from subjective to objective viewpoints with no warning. I do wish that it hadn't been shot in anamorphic Panavision; the filmmakers are mostly at a loss what to do with the wide frame. But that is my only real complaint against the film.
Into these creepy, uncanny, disorienting visuals, comes one of the finest sound mixes in cinema: indeed, as important as the visuals are to The Haunting, it's the soundtrack that actually makes the movie scary. The big showstopping scene that is probably the most famous bit of the whole film is made up of almost nothing but a knocking sound and the heavy breathing of Eleanor and Theo: and while the close-ups and insert shots in the scene help, I don't half wonder if it would be almost as effective with the picture turned off.
So what we have is a well-shot, good sounding haunted house movie, and it scares the bejeezus out of many people, including your humble blogger. But that is, as things go, kind of a shallow reason for conferring masterpiece status onto a film. What gives The Haunting that extra push is that in addition to being the best-made haunted house movie of all time, it's also one of the greatest psychological thrillers, creating in Eleanor Lance a tremendous character, an woman who was barely out of her teens when she was obliged to become her mother's caretaker, and has emerged from that job with a healthy sense of resentment that she refuses to acknowledge, and it at once sex-starved and sex-phobic, a perfectly amazing mess of neurotic impulses. Her sweetly pathetic attempts to flirt with Markway - motivated, presumably, not because he is a handsome man but because he's the first one who has ever really communicated with her - is one thing, but her relationship with Theo, strongly implied to be a lesbian - is stunningly off-kilter: here Eleanor is clinging to her and lying in bed with her, desperate for comfort and an adult woman to baby her; here she is screeching at her friend and calling her unnatural and filthy.
Eleanor is, in short, a broken and fragile and at times incredibly nasty person - in her fight with her sister, it's not terribly hard to agree that she's in the wrong while finding her disgustingly passive-aggressive† - and her descent into madness and possession, helpfully marked out by a constant stream of narration that becomes harder and harder to parse into anything rational as the movie goes on, is every bit as terrifying as the malevolence of Hill House. More so, because it's real: and yet the ultimate brilliance of The Haunting is that it collapses the distinction between paranormal horror and psychological horror, that a character study this intense is exactly cotangent with such a deliciously goosebumpy ghost story. The house wants a victim, and it chooses her because she is too weak in her self-identity to resist; at the same time, the ghastly happenings are a metaphor for, and extension of, Eleanor's internal disintegration. Only The Shining has ever matched the accomplishment in this film of binding those two strains together so tightly, and as fun as it is to watch Jack Nicholson go overboard in that movie, he's not doing anything as nuanced and fine as Harris - the most Tony'd actor in stage history - does in every scene of this film, balancing sex, childishness, irrational matricidal guilt, mortal fear, and the enthusiasm of an adventurous tourist constantly, in a ever-shifting war for dominance. It's too easy to say they don't make 'em like this anymore: in fact, they never really did. This kind of all-round excellence is a bolt of lightning, not a generational marker, and The Haunting is an exemplary, stand-out work regardless of its era.
SUMMER OF BLOOD: FLESH FORWARD
So does the very last credit to flash up: "Directed by Alan Smithee". If that isn't enough to sap the oxygen out of your blood and make you curl up and die, nothing is. For those not in the know, Alan Smithee doesn't exist; it was the name provided by the Director's Guild until 1997 for projects which have run so far afoul of what the actual director wanted to make, typically because of massive executive interference, that the director wants to officially sever himself or herself from any association with the finished project. It is a desperation step, not taken terribly often over the years, that says in bold, unambiguous letters: "What you are about to see is a fucking hatchet job".
So that's two major strikes before we have seen even a single frame of actual movie. And then we see the first frame.
Hellraiser: Bloodline takes place in outer space.
Not entirely, as it turns out. Not even predominately. But the "Horror Franchise Goes to Space!" trick has been known from the first instant it was ever used (which may, in fact, have been with this very film; it beat the legendary Leprechaun 4: In Space to the punch by almost a full year) as the clearest sign of raw, animal desperation since Universal stopped throwing their monsters in a blender with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, and even the least-savvy horror fan could not, at this point, expect Bloodline to be anything but pure agony, as severe a punishment as anything Pinhead himself might be able to whip up. As it turns out, that's overstating it a bit: Bloodline is a bad movie, but it's better in almost every direction than Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth. At the very least, it lacks that movie's novelty Cenobites, and manages to restore something vaguely resembling order and coherence to the franchise's hallucinatory mythology.
Still, you don't get a "fuck you" much more resounding than the first two minutes of Bloodline, and nothing about the opening sequence does much to change that impression. In the year 2127, on the Space Station Minos - which looks uncommonly like a factory basement shot through a blue filter, making it arguably the most clever and original setting for a sci-fi/horror film ever - a gaunt bald man named Paul (Bruce Ramsay) manipulates a remote-controlled robot into completing the selfsame puzzle box that has been so benighting the characters in all these films; the successful opening of the box blows up the robot and brings Pinhead (Doug Bradley) briefly into existence, but just at the same moment, a group of space marines (they're never defined actually called space marines, but this being the kind of movie it is, it's likely that they're space marines) led by a woman named Rimmer (Christine Harnos). They interrupt Paul's experiment, to his great dismay: practically weeping with frustration, he sits down with Rimmer and explains that he was in the midst of a procedure that would eliminate a powerful evil from the universe, one that his very family was responsible for introducing centuries earlier.
By now, some eight minutes into the film, Bloodline has subjected the poor viewer to such a merry garden of worn-out clichés, and those executed with such little effectiveness, I would have been severely tempted to stop the movie and go out and do something useful with my life, if not for the whole bit where I was reviewing my way through a Hellraiser marathon (for Hell on Earth was still fresh in my mind, and that film's badness is not the zesty, playful badness of a Friday the 13th sequel - not even one set in space - but the sour, mercenary badness of a movie whose makers hated it almost as much as I did). My reward for muscling through was finding out that, while all of Bloodline is bad, none of it is so bad as the opening, and that there are just enough good ideas sitting around in their loneliness that you can imagine a version of this story that is actually worthwhile; maybe that's the version that director Kevin Yagher was aiming for, and it was his fury at what Dimension turned the story into that led him to demand his name be removed. (Yagher has shown up already this Summer of Blood: outside of this first and last effort in the director's chair, he was one of the main designers of the Chucky puppet in the Child's Play films).
In short, there's a toymaker in France in 1796 (or "200 years" before 1996, anyway, and it's sort of hard to imagine the story we're about to see happening in that particular country at that particular moment, what with the nation-devouring revolution and all), a certain Phillip L'Merchant* (Ramsay) has been hired by the Vicomte d'Evil (Mickey Cottrell) - that is the name I gave him in my notes, anyway, and I will not be persuaded that he has a better one - to build an ingenious puzzle box for Purposes Unknown But No Doubt Sinister. As a matter of fact, the sadistic aristocrat has found a way to open the door to Hell itself using that puzzle box, and wishes to use the aid of whatever demons he can scrounge up to continue indulging in his ghastly bloodlust. This backfires when the demon he calls into the skinned flesh of a handy peasant, a certain Angelique (Valentina Vargas) conspires with his assistant Jacques (Adam Scott) to murder the Vicomte and establish an unending reign of terror† with the puzzle box as their toy for luring the souls of men into a hell dimension of eternal suffering.
That story runs out and Paul starts a new one: in 1996, another Merchant, John (still Ramsay) is a much-fêted architect who has just designed a bold new building in New York, the same one with the box in its foundations from the climax of Hell on Earth. This acts as something of a magnet for Angelique, who endeavors to make certain that the box is opened, letting Pinhead run free once again to help her create a ruling order of Cenobites to take over the world. The largest fraction of the movie takes place in 1996, as the two demons conspire to force John to help them, while engaging in low-rent terroring as like happened in Hell on Earth, but not remotely so fucking gaudy. There is no CD Cenobite, nor a Cenobite with a camera face. Eventually, we end up back in 2127, and Rimmer has apparently been convinced that the obviously insane man in front of her can be trusted, and so the film becomes a routine Alien knock-off with sadomasochistic demons subbing in for the xenomorph.
I have no idea, due to a general lack of interest, what parts of the film, specifically, cause Yagher's little heart attack, but there's no doubt at all that Bloodline is a shambles, feeling for all the world like a Hellraiser anthology film with three stories that kind of stall out rather than link in with one another; and it doesn't help that a plurality of the film's running time is stuck in 1996, easily the most pedestrian sequence. It's here that Bloodline doesn't even try to be anything other than a mid-'90s body count picture, and there is nothing redeeming about mid-'90s body count pictures. (I do, however, enjoy the tiny moment where a rubber chain prop whacks Doug Bradley right in the face, and they didn't even stop as he kind of blinked for a split second).
The other two stories, however, are at least interesting in their failure: it's not terribly vital that we know how the box came into being, nor is the explanation all that groundbreaking, but the mere fact of making what amounts to a proto-torture film set in Enlightenment France is bizarre enough that it's hard not to sit up and take notice; and I might add, it's very nice to have the increasingly tortured explanation of how and why the Cenobites and their Hell exist ignored completely, and replaced with a perfectly functional "this is a dimension of evil torturing corpse-beasts" notion. It's a hell of a lot more appealing than the idea that Pinhead was a captain in the First World War, anyway, even if the little scraps we see of the Hell dimension - a wonderfully terrible hell-hound puppet, or Cenohound if you will, and something that appears to be a Bantha, or hell, maybe it's just a different angle of the Cenohound. It's that kind of movie - make it clear that by the time of Bloodline, the Hellraiser pictures were securely in the "cheap and fast" stage of horror franchise evolution.
As for the Pinhead-in-space bit, it's not half as bad as you'd suppose: as Alien clones go, there have been many worse.
If the net result is still pretty shoddy, well... 1996. At least Doug Bradley appears to have gotten a second wind, and screenwriter Peter Atkins has endeavored to give him some lovely lines to speak in that deep down threatening bass of his - "Pain has a face. Allow me to show it to you" and "I am so exquisitely empty" are my personal favorites - and the moment when he tries to figure out what the hell the robot has to do with anything is the first genuinely successful comic moment in the Hellraiser franchise. So this is what we're reduced to: a script that pursues none of its ideas to any satisfying end, but at least it has the ideas in the first place, and a performance of an iconic monster that does nothing whatsoever new, but works as comfort food. That's not much as far as praise go, but hell: this was the generation of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, and in that context, Bloodline looks like a minor masterpiece.
Body Count: 12, a blissfully straightforward answer for the convoluted franchise. There's also a dove, a robot, a hellhound, and potentially the villains - never a good idea to write off horror franchise villains in the middle of the franchise, but since this is technically the last film in the Hellraiser timeline, it's at least a point for debate.
Reviews in this series
Hellraiser (Barker, 1987)
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Randel, 1988)
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Hickox, 1992)
Hellraiser: Bloodline (Smithee [Yagher], 1996)
27 August 2011
SERGIO LEONE: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
We do not, however, talk about those films as merely the ones where Clint wore a serape and had no given name. We talk about them instead as near-legendary works of mythmaking, two legs of a trilogy that changed everything that a Western could be or do. And not to take anything away from the Dollars pair, because I have a great deal of fondness for them both, but most of that legend comes from the reflected glory of Eastwood's third go before Leone's camera, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It's with this film, by far the most ambitious Italian Western made to that date (nearly three hours long and with a wildly high, by the industry standards, $1.3 million budget) that Leone secured his place as a pantheon director, and did all of those things he remains beloved for: using the CinemaScope frame to create a unique vision of the American West as place of desolation and ruin on a truly epic scale. It is, in many ways, the culmination of his art - while I privately prefer his next film, Once Upon a Time in the West, it's easy to argue that the later film simply builds upon the aesthetic space Leone created with the final film in what history has come to call the Dollars Trilogy.
In this case, there are no dollars in the title, in either language (the Italian Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo actually translates as The Good, the Ugly, the Bad; I think we can all agree that in both cases, the right choice was made to create the most mellifluous flow); there are, however, dollars, - 200,000 of them - and the three figures identified in the title are all in pursuit of the cache, hidden somewhere in Texas (once again, Leone, abetted by co-writer Luciano Vincenzoni, appears uncertain whether New Mexico is in fact a separate place from Texas or not - but since it's the American Civil War, and specific reference is made to "laws of the state", I'll go with history on this one). Not immediately: in fact, it takes over a third of this vast, lumbering thing for two of the three to even learn that there is a buried treasure in gold. But I'm doing this all wrong.
Of the three men in the title, the only one whose proper name we ever learn is the Ugly: he's a Mexican bandit working in the States, name of Tuco Ramirez (Eli Wallach), who we meet as he escapes from a trio of bounty hunters. He actually has the most screentime in this purported Eastwood vehicle, though the film lacks a "protagonist" as such; but in between the implacable forces of nature on either side of him, he's arguably the most recognisably human character, so it's just as well. Next up is the Bad, a bloodless sociopath who goes by Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef), who first appears in the act of capturing and interrogating a target (he, too, is a bounty hunter), and indulging in some mean-spirited cat-and-mouse games before killing the man and, just for lagniappe, his son. The Good, and it's only in the context of the other two creeps we have to choose from, is a stone-faced, unspeaking gunslinger that some call Blondie (Eastwood); he's not wearing that famous serape, but it's obvious from the mannerisms and the squint and the cigarettes that this is the same man with no name.
Blondie and Tuco have a little con going: the American captures the bandit, takes him in for the reward, and shoots the rope out just when he's about to be hanged. In exchange, they split the loot (though, as we're introduced, it seems that Blondie is just a random stranger to Tuco; I am always in awe, every time I watch the film, of how well Leone carries off that little dollop of subterfuge without having to lie to us even a tiny bit). Blondie, however, is getting tired of Tuco's constant whining, and double-crosses his partner; Tuco manages to survive a 70-mile trek through the desert, and immediately starts planning his revenge. While this lover's spat plays out, Angel Eyes is on a new, private mission: his last mark told him of a Confederate soldier named Jackson, who made off with a huge pile of gold and is now back in the war under the name "Bill Carson". The bounty hunter sets off on the trail to find this soldier and wring out of him the exact location of that missing gold.
Unfortunately for him, "Bill Carson" is just about dead when Tuco and Blondie stumble across him (by this point, Tuco has found his former partner and is currently marching him through the deathly hot desert sun). Tuco listens to his gasps just long enough to learn that the gold is buried in Sad Hill Cemetery; but while he's hunting for water, Blondie listens to the soldier's dying breath, and is thus the only one who hears the name on the marker, out of the hundreds of graves, where they have to dig. The two men form an extremely reluctant alliance that takes them from the desert to an apocalyptic war zone where the Confederates and the Union are battling back and forth over a strategically dubious bridge; and in a fit of very peculiar luck, Angel Eyes happens to be in the same battlefield, disguised as a Union officer.
That's a relentlessly pared-down version of the story: as I said, Tuco and Blondie don't even meet Carson until the one-hour mark has been passed.
(A moment to discuss running times: the film was cut by 16 minutes for its English-language release, and for 35 years, this was the only version available outside Italy. In 2003, an extended cut was assembled, including one scene that Leone might have taken out on purpose; since the full 177-minute version was never released in an English-speaking region, the now considerably older Eastwood and Wallach gamely dubbed in their new lines, and replaced some old ones as part of a general restoration. Without question, the longer version is better: this is a case where the new material adds nothing of particular narrative value, but deepens the mood and atmosphere, which is of paramount importance in a film of this kind anyway. That said, the 2003 edition suffers from an abominable 5.1 audio remix that does simply terrible things to off-screen speakers, and it is tremendously gratifying that the same DVD/Blu-Ray that boasts the extended cut also makes the original Italian mono soundtrack available).
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is certainly not a movie driven by the mere contents of the plot, however, but by the world in which that plot unfolds. It is a war-ravaged Southwestern landscape in which there is only death, all around. A lot of the movie is dedicated solely to scenes exploring the places and people: a protracted sequence in a Catholic mission filled to the rafters with wounded soldiers from both sides, a lengthy visit with a drunk Union captain (Aldo Giuffrè) whose cynically humanist view of warfare confirms what is already easy to tell, that the extreme (by 1966 standards) violence and devastation on display is presented for our horrified disgust, not our entertainment. The film surely does depict a vision of the West that is mythical and epic and all that - but it also makes it clear that the myth is rotten to its very core. Only in a horribly dysfunctional world could a man as selfish and casually nihilistic as Blondie deserve the title "the Good", after all.
Even more than it is brutal and hard and nihilistic, the film is primarily a sensualist Western. "Sensualist" meant in a special way, of course, which is that Leone and cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli put so much effort into capturing the physical essence of the landscape they're shooting that watching the film is very nearly a physical experience itself. The scene in which Tuco torments Blondie out in the desert is a great example of the tactility of the whole feature: we are aware, to a dreadfully uncomfortable degree, of the brightness of the sun, the dryness of the sand, the sweat on the faces, and the crackly texture of the not-entirely-convincing sunburn makeup Eastwood wears, as revealed in the trademark Leone close-ups.
This sensuality is itself, obviously, as brutal as the film's narrative content; but it is unmediated. I have not tried it, so I do not know if The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of those films that you can watch with the sound off and still be able to follow the plot, but I am certain that you would be able to follow the feeling of the thing, the decay and desolation. You would, admittedly, lack the music... but more on that shortly.
In addition to capturing the feel of the Spanish landscape to an absolutely uncanny degree, there are of course those close-ups: Leone, as much as any filmmaker this side of Ingmar Bergman, had a particular gift for filling the frame with a human face and letting that image be its own kind of landscape, of work and emotion. There may not be a better example of his use of this kind of shot than in the film's justly renowned climax - for my tastes, the second-best sequence in any Leone film - in which Blondie, Tuco, and Angel Eyes have a standoff in a dusty ring in the middle of the cemetery. It's too well-known a sequence for me to add anything to it, but certainly the fact that only three kinds of shots are used - extreme close-ups of eyes, close-ups of hands near pistols, and a couple of wide shots of the three of them, standing what feels like a mile apart - and that the whole exchange (which lasts for several minutes) can thereby still be so absurdly tense, is beyond impressive.
Let us not give too much credit to Leone, though: this sequence relies, to a great extent, on the work of composer Ennio Morricone; it is likely that even if you've never seen the film, you know its theme music - even if you don't know that you know the theme music. It is, after one or two marches from Star Wars, probably the best-known composition in the history of film scores. And like many things that everybody knows, it's hard to describe it: the composer wanted it to recall the howl of a coyote, what it's always suggested to me is a surf rock song played by Hell's mariachi band. Whatever the case, it is a deranged piece of music - just how deranged is, I suspect, obscured by how familiar it has become through over-use.
It's also not the best piece of music in the film, though it dominates the soundtrack. The piece that always knocks me on my ass is a cue titled "L'estasi dell'oro" a choral piece accompanying Tuco's frenzied search for the buried gold (throughout, Tuco is paired with choral music, including a choral statement of the main them), building in intensity until it is at pitch that fully earns the word "ecstasy" in its name, before cutting off dead and then building up again in the straining, sun-bleached horns of "Il triello", the cue that accompanies the standoff. Honestly, Leone's gift with close-ups is almost unnecessary at that point: the soaring, fatigued melody could pretty much do all the work of the editing and cinematography all by itself, and still result in a climax that is one of the very best sequences in the history of action cinema - and all of it based on people standing as still as possible.
There is no defense against the claim, frequent in the '60s and still likely to crop up sometimes here and there, that the movie is nasty and cruel and violent - it is all of those things. There is as mixture of fascination and disgust regarding the evil men do found in every scene of the film that is too harrowing and at times too borderline-exploitative to ever say, with a straight face, that it's nice, or morally uplifting (which is not the same as calling it immoral: it is, at any rate, fairly outraged at the excessive violence it portrays, and cannot be held accountable for those viewers who don't get the joke). Even the overwhelming operatic scope of its narrative and aesthetic are, ultimately, brutal: the audience leaves feeling worn out and battered; happy for it, maybe, but battered. But that's the thing about legends and myths, they reveal our darkest nature as well was - better than! - they reveal our best selves. And in this film, Leone managed to turn that darkness into visual and aural poetry of the most electrifying sort.
26 August 2011
THE WORLD OF ROBERT E. HOWARD, PART 4
By no means do I actually think that this is what director Marcus Nispel, remake specialist, intended: his natural state has customarily been to ramp up the seriousness and nastiness of anything he touches, for that whatsit, edginess (I do not care to guess what the writers intended, particularly given that two-thirds of them also collaborated on A Sound of Thunder). At the same time, intentions aren't as important as results, and the new Conan rather comes across as though it has a vendetta against its own target audience. It is a dreary film, a film that is not half as much fun as it seems like it ought to be. Not in the same way that this summer's Cowboys & Aliens wasn't fun, where it's too damn serious; no, Conan isn't just absent joy, it feels like it is actively anti-joyful. Watching the film is, albeit in a small way, kind of like being punished for enjoying barbarian films.
It tells the story of, naturally, Conan of Cimmeria (Jason Momoa), a member of a warrior tribe who is specially warlike himself on account of having been "battle-born"; this means that his nine-months-pregnant mother was herself right in the middle of a brutal battlefield, and one of her opponents managed to gouge her in the womb, and she was able to deliver herself of the child before dying. We get to see this event from inside her uterus, incidentally, and so the film gets to prove right early that it's not going to be squeamish about things that it might, possibly, have been okay for it to be squeamish about.
Conan grows to boyhood (played by Leo Howard), and learns the ways of swordsmanship from his father (Ron Perlman, ideally cast in an extended cameo); when his village is decimated by a horribly evil bandit (Stephen Lang), the boy vows revenge and dedicates himself to a life of barbaric adventuring and thieving until the day that he is able to find and destroy his nemesis. Some 20 years later, that same bandit, Khalar Zym, finally makes his presence known; he has re-assembled an ancient mask of unmentionable wickedness and needs the blood of the last scion of a dead race to activate it; he and his sorceress daughter Marique (Rose McGowan) track this scion to an ancient monastery; her name is Tamara (Rachel Nichols), and she has the good fortune to bump right into Our Conan immediately after escaping from the villains' clutches. Cue, on the one hand, her attempts to escape and prevent evil from taking over the land, and on the other, his attempts to use her as bait so that he can wreak sweet, sweet revenge all over Khalar Zym.
As plots go, that one is pretty functional, nothing special but not as bad as the movie it's attached to. For one thing, Nispel lets every moment - every single one - go on for too long, resulting in a movie that lags fiercely - at 113 minutes, it is a significant amount shorter than the original, but it feels far longer. That problem is compounded by a remarkably chatty script, for a barbarian picture; the best of the classic '80s vintage of that genre (and heck, even the terrible ones) were at least elegant in their simplicity: five lines to establish "go here and kill this guy for that prize", and then it's just a lot of bellowing and clanging swords. But it's the 21st Century now, and we have to have all kinds of context and characterisation, and that's only tolerable when the writing is good. Decent, at least.
Making matters even worse, the battle scenes - and those are, without question, the reason why we are here - are far too infrequent in the early, miserably boring part of the movie. That said, the fights themselves are well done: in this, at least, one gets the impression that Nispel understands directing and wants to do it well. Conan vs. an army of sand monsters is just good garbage popcorn cinema; Conan over a swinging bridge of death is chopped up a little bit too much in the editing, but the heart is right. A few good fight scenes, however, is not enough to keep the movie as a whole from running out of steam right about the same time that it starts.
The cast doesn't help: Momoa, while technically more competent that Schwarzenegger ever was in the same role, is so busy muttering and explaining and chatting that he doesn't have so many chances to be a bad-ass, and when he is, he doesn't look like an epic hero but like a rapist hiding in an alley. He's still better than either of the women: Nichols suffers from a fawn-like terror of her own dialogue, while McGowan is a sheer, unmitigated airplane crash of bad acting: never the finest thespian, she's usually capable of giving back something at all to her characters, even if it's just a sassy pout; she allows herself here to be trapped in a single expression, and a single way of moving her hands, and despite the fact that they both look ridiculous, she commits to it all for the whole movie. If she had ever once shown an inclination toward acting campy, I'd suppose that she was deliberately trying the throw the movie off its rails; instead, it's pretty obviously just atrocious acting. Leaving just Lang, who manages to at least understand that he's playing a broad stereotype straight out of silent melodrama, and gives us plenty of evil smirks and snarls. It's not terribly good work, but it has to do here.
None of this comes as a surprise: the original was, after all, not a good movie, it just had X-factors out its ass (Schwarzenegger, John Milius's extravagantly straitlaced direction, Basil Poledouris's exquisite score) to be a shitload of fun on the way. The new movie lacks any and all X-factors: it tries to coast by on nothing but a dark attitude and a brand name, and the result is at once tedious and unpleasant, and as much as that sounds like a perfect summer movie, it's actually kind of hard to make it through to the end.
3/10
BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE WORLD OF ROBERT E. HOWARD, PART 3
By any name, Kalidor isn't the main character; in the first half of the movie, he just pops in like a wacky neighbor on a sitcom. Being called Red Sonja, the film is, naturally enough, about Sonja (Brigitte Nielsen), whose family was massacred by the evil Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman), leaving Sonja to swear revenge on Gedren and train herself to become the finest swordswoman of the Hyborian Age. This is all tossed at us in a flurry of narration accompanied by a Cliffs Notes montage of the scenes in question, and for this, at least, I am thankful: shorn of any flabby exposition - I take that back, shorn of some flabby exposition - Red Sonja is able to come in under 90 minutes, as well it might. Sometime later, there is a temple of priestesses, among whom number Sonja's sister (Janet Agren); their job involves protecting a big green orb that can only be touched by women and can, in the wrong hands, be used to destroy everything. Naturally, the wrong hands in this case belong to none other than Queen Gedren, who steals the orb and throws all the priestesses into a convenient dark airless pit, leaving only Sonja's sister to escape and die in a much less stuffy field, though not before she has told the story to Kalidor, an apparent wandering barbarian who will, in due order, turn out to have a secret, though it doesn't end up seeming like his secret matters a damn, so I don't know why they bothered.
Kalidor finds Sonja and explains all of this, and the red-haired warrior immediately leaps into a quest, which takes her first to the ruined kingdom of Haplock, where the bratty child prince Tarn (Ernie Reyes, Jr. - son of the film's martial arts consultant) and his zaftig retainer Falkon (Paul L. Smith) plot their own revenge against Gedren. It takes a couple of more wacky adventures before Sonja actually teams up with this pair, and a while yet longer before Kalidor joins her team officially, saving the trio from a metal sea monster and dedicating himself to the task of getting in Sonja's loincloth. Thus does the band of four finally march on Gedren and her snivelling lacky Ikol (Ronald Lacey) who reminded me in some ephemeral way of Wallace Shawn.
Both of the Conan films, I have found, suffer in their way from plots that are cobbled together rather uncertainly and leave plenty of space where it's not entirely clear why things are happening quite the way they are; but Red Sonja is just fucking daft. The whirlwind exposition dump has the excuse of being rushed and contracted, and in that respect it is probably the most well-written sequence of the whole movie. Everything going forward from that point is arbitrary and random: in particular, the re-introduction of Tarn and Falkon to the plot makes no damn sense at all, almost as though (and I don't think this is what actually happened) the script had two completely new characters in there at first. For that matter, the presence of Tarn and Falkon does not, by itself, make very much sense, unless it is that the filmmakers decided that having a shitty little kid was a surefire way to cover their marketing quadrants.
Still and all, I'd have to say in good faith that the film is at least as good as Conan the Destroyer. Which is faint praise, indeed. But at least Red Sonja includes two vital things that Conan the Destroyer lacked: messy decapitations and one abbreviated appearance of naked female breasts (it only being the second year that PG-13 existed, they were a bit more lenient than they'd become, before getting more lenient again). And in these two respects, at least, it is much more of a respectable sword & sorcery picture.
Admittedly, it feels on the whole a lot cheaper than either of its predecessors: the sets look awfully set-ish, and Ennio Morricone's score is appalling lazy, recycling barbarian film clichés with an absolute lack of artistry (let us not judge him too harshly: he as in the lull between the pinnacles of Once Upon a Time in America and The Mission). The costumes in particular look absolutely ridiculous, hardly one step above the sort of get-ups that '70s-era Doctor Who might run into on a vaguely-themed medieval planet.
But the acting is, sort of, passable: Nielsen is kind of terrible, and it's not a shame that her film debut didn't turn into a career of any real vitality, but hearing her thick Danish accent sparring with Schwarzenegger's Austrian is good for the soul in its way, and her badness recalls his in Conan the Barbarian: it's similarly boiled-down to just the essentials of "look mean" and "hold a sword". Bergman (the initial choice for Sonja) has fun tearing it up as the purely evil queen, though as it did in Conan, her slightly Nasal All-American '80s voice does absolutely no favors to her attempts to portray a barbarian queen. Everyone else... "sort of passable" might have been over-praise. Certainly, Schwarzenegger just looks humiliated.
All right, so it's a shitty film. At least it's short as hell, and cheesy in the fun way, not in the aggravating way. Which is as much to say, it's a fairly typical '80s barbarian picture, and worth watching for the reason any of them are: it's restfully stupid and has lots of clanking swordplay and ridiculous costumes. Junk food doesn't have to be tasty to be satiating.
25 August 2011
VAMPING THE SUBURBS, JUST LIKE CHRIS SARANDON DID
Not a great remake. Certainly not a great remake. But the vampire movie is in enough of a state here in 2011 that Fright Night doesn't have to be great to be good enough.
Briefly, the film tells of a teenager, Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin), living in a ruthlessly planned-out subdivision on the outskirts of Las Vegas. He has a gorgeous girlfriend, Amy (Imogen Poots), and he's maneuvering his way into the right crowd, and has just about left his embarrassing geek years behind him, when his onetime best friend Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) comes along with a theory about how their old buddy Adam has gone missing on account of being murdered by Charley's new neighbor, a suave ladykiller named Jerry (Colin Farrell). Who is, in Ed's version of things, a vampire. Charley believes this not at all - and it seems his distaste for the way of life Ed represents has something to do with his skepticism - but it takes surprisingly little time before Ed has gone missing as well, and weird damn things keep happening at Jerry's house, and very shortly, Charley, his mother (Toni Collette), and Amy are on the run from a terrifyingly self-assured vampire lord, aided only by an alcoholic magician in the Criss Angel knock-off mode, a vampire fancier named Peter Vincent (David Tennant).
As far as the script goes, two things leap to mind: the first is that the new Fright Night is a lot more sensible than the old one, setting up all the pieces in a manner that doesn't require nearly so much suspension of disbelief, and generally just being a much more effective story (the relocation to Las Vegas ends up paying surprisingly good dividends in this regard). The other is that while the original Fright Night more or less expected us to like everybody, the new Fright Night more or less expects us to like nobody at all. Or rather, it presents us with a lot of largely unlikable people. Screenwriter Marti Noxon is best known for writing all the episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that make the protagonists seem like the biggest douches,* so it's equally possible that she is a student of the J.J. Abrams school of thought, that incredibly unlikable people are in fact likable. Either way, Charley is kind of a dick, and Amy is a colossal bitch, and Vincent is a miserable asshole redeemed only by Tennant's absolutely crackerjack comic performance.
A third thing comes to mind a bit slower, which is that the new Fright Night is comparatively quite shallow: partially because the characters just aren't as sympathetic, partially because Tom Holland, writer and director of the original, was obviously in love with the tropes he was playing with. Noxon and director Craig Gillespie (who has now made three features in three wildly disparate genres) are just looking to make a cool, flashy, 3-D vampire story (in wholly underwhelming 3-D, but at least it wasn't done that way in post-production), with the gimmick that they're bringing back the wholly evil demon of old, rather than the plaintive, sad vampires who have been growing in popularity ever since Anne Rice first decided to write a book, and are now just about the only game in town. It is a remarkably nice change of pace, though I'm a bit sad the present filmmakers weren't old school enough to let Jerry turn into mist or a wolf, like Holland was.
With effectively gloomy cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe (who has now made up for shooting not one, but two Twilight pictures), and some nifty, not tremendously imaginative CGI vampire tricks, and a nice vein of sexual terror just to keep it from being too teen-friendly (though there's nothing remotely like the covert homoeroticism of the first movie), Fright Night is at least a good, fun vampire movie; Farrell is, perhaps a little bit too pretty to really sell the idea that he's a brutal killer (he certainly lacks Chris Sarandon's oily quality), but this isn't meant to be a unending string of brutality; it's a sly black comedy. And that much, at least, Gillespie gets perfectly, aided considerably by Collette and Tennant (of the several young people in the cast, only Mintz-Plasse does anything terribly interesting at all, and he's not in nearly enough of the picture). And that's ultimately why the not-so-threatening vampire and the replacement of Roddy McDowall's bumbling coward of a vampire hunter with a sarcastic drunk Brit both work: the new film is very much intended as a late-summer refreshment. Not that the original was afraid to play for comedy, but the remake has no pretensions about mission statements or generational commentary. It is a textbook August movie, the kind that serves to pass the time on an afternoon and leave you feeling that it was, if not time well-spent, certainly not anything to regret.
Yeah, there's an ending that doesn't: the last beat of the story is wildly unsatisfying, after a climax that manages to improve upon the original in scope and gory ambition, if nothing else. Yeah, Yelchin's attempt to play a likable everyday kid hero go hideously awry. This ain't any kind of classic, and 26 years from now, it will still be the '85 Fright Night that people have in mind. But good enough is, well, good enough; it's more, frankly, than I was expecting on my way in.
6/10
24 August 2011
BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE WORLD OF ROBERT E. HOWARD, PART 2
The third important thing isn't a fact, but a sort of a notion or hunch, which is that though Conan the Barbarian was hugely popular and influential, most of the films it influenced were a lot different: not so self-consciously serious-minded, not so deliberately epic in their scope. They were also, in the main, cheaper. So when the inevitable Conan sequel came out, it wasn't altogether in the same mold as its predecessor, taking its cues instead from the distinctly campier, funnier, friendlier movies that made up the vast majority of the sword & sorcery ranks. In other words, Conan the Destroyer is what happens when you take everything that makes Conan the Barbarian memorable, and strip it down to a light-hearted, PG-rated version of itself. In other other words, Conan the Destroyer is a ridiculously stupid and boring and generally unintelligible movie.
It suffers from the inverse narrative problem of the first movie: where Barbarian starts out as just a random series of scenes happening in chronological order, but not otherwise constituting a linear story, Destroyer proceeds in a nice, smooth, orderly fashion for a solid third of its running time. And where Barbarian eventually turned into a much more sensible quest movie around the midway point, Destroyer devolves into a cluster of confusing "this happens and then this happens and then this happens" incidents for the other two-thirds. The bigger difference between the two films is that while Barbarian made up for the parts that were a narrative shambles by being boisterous and rousing, Destroyer can't even carry off the parts that make sense: the whole thing is about as boisterous as a cold bowl of canned chicken noodle soup. The film's saving grace is that, at about 100 minutes, it's nearly a full half-hour shorter than its predecessor, so we're not subjected to it for very long.
The film opens with Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger) praying to an altar of the barbarian god Crom, that his dead lover Valeria be returned to him. He is interrupted in this devotion by his new sidekick, Malak (Tracey Walter), who establishes himself within about five seconds as being a horrible, awful jackass whose function in Conan's band of adventurers is apparently to be so totally incapable of anything that it makes everybody else feel better whenever they make a mistake. And boom! we've already in the first scene run into two perfectly formed expressions of just how and why Conan the Destroyer is going to be hardly a hair on the ass of the trend-setting original. Firstly - or secondly, rather, but it's the easier one to deal with - we have in Malak the purest form of the grueling slapstick comedy that infects nearly every corner of the film, instead of the immaculately somber sword-fighting that made up most of Barbarian. Then, there's the matter of Conan's prayers.
I realise only now, only after having seen Conan the Destroyer, that I gave Conan the Barbarian a bit of a hard time when I reviewed it. Taken on the absolute scale of all movies everywhere, it's awfully dense and violent for violence's sake, but in the context of '80s barbarian pictures, it's actually pretty damn thoughtful, and one of the most well-explored corners of its philosophy is its take on religion. Conan, in that film, was something of a pagan atheist: he believed that Crom existed, sure, but he didn't have much of a connection to his chosen god, and certainly didn't believe that Crom or any other deity gave much of a shit about human beings or their troubles. It was all part and parcel of that film's overarching message that we can only rely on the things we win and defend for ourselves, and the gods deserve to be ignored far more than worshiped. It takes new screenwriter Stanley Mann and new director Richard Fleischer (whose career deserved to end far more nobly than the crappy string of pictures he was reduced to in the '80s) hardly any time to throw all that out of the window for... nothing at all, in fact, and that was my point. Conan the Destroyer doesn't replace the first film's themes and philosophies with different themes and philosophies, it replaces them with a bland quest peppered with wacky incidents.
At any rate, it comes to pass that Conan and Malak are invited by Queen Taramis (Sarah Douglas) to help her in a most important quest: it seems that her virginal niece Jehnna (Olivia d'Abo, all of 14 at the time of shooting, and sexualised to a degree that is just not at all okay) has been chosen by destiny to acquire a magical gem that shows the way to the lost jeweled horn of Dagoth, the Dreaming God, the sacred deity of Sharazad, Taramis's kingdom. In exchange, Taramis will revive Valeria, and Conan can hardly say "yes" fast enough. Off he and Malak go, then, to protect Jehnna from danger; Taramis sends along her guard Bombaata (Wilt Chamberlain, in his only film appearance) to protect Jehnna's purity from Conan and Malak, which is a good idea given how desperately the girl wants to jump Conan's mighty broadsword, if you know what I mean. I mean that she wants to have sex with his penis. Olivia d'Abo was 14 when this movie was made, incidentally. Did I mention that? Because she totally was. Besides defending the girl's chastity, an acting challenge for which Wilt Chamberlain was uniquely ill-suited, Bombaata is also there to kill Conan the second he's not needed, because Taramis is transparently up to No Good.
Off they go, and the party picks up a couple other members along the way. Akiro (Mako), the wizard from the first movie (only now given a name), joins after Conan saves him from cannibals. A little while later, they encounter a lady barbarian named Zula (Grace Jones, nothing but sinew and a snarl, and very much the best part of this whole movie), who is about to be stoned by some townspeople, except that even chained she's giving them a run for their money. And once Conan frees her, it's a matter of a few seconds before she levels the people trying to kill her and pledges herself to the protection of Jehnna as well. From this point on, the movie doesn't exactly stop making sense. Everything that happens mostly makes sense in terms of filling a hole in the plot. A better way of putting might be: the movie stops being sensible. We've entered the stage of the film that is largely just arbitrary happenings one by one, so that Schwarzenegger will have opportunities to swing his sword around.
It's tedious. I could wrack my brain looking for all the different ways to describe it, and never come up with a better way than that one adjective. Gone is the sense of holy-shit-this-is-amazing urgency, and it's pretty clear why: John Milius and Oliver Stone believed fervently in the story they were telling, while Fleischer and Mann did not. To them, Conan was just an inarticulate man in an indiscriminate fantasy setting. It couldn't have helped matters that they were obviously charged with making a "nicer" picture: no, Conan the Destroyer is nobody's idea of a Disney picture, but it earns its PG rating, let us say. It is still a film at the maturity level of a 12-year-old boy, but instead of being full of the things 12-year-old boys want (tits, decapitations, snake monsters), it is full of the things adult movie executives think 12-year-old boys want (loony comedy, shiny production design, a climactic monster that looks precisely like a dude in a toothy suit).
Along with that deflated anti-urgency, everything else goes away: Basil Poledouris's score is still all misty and epic and all, but so much thinner and blander than it was the last time (a crime in and of itself), and paradoxically, as Schwarzenegger became a better actor - for he is noticeably more comfortable speaking English sentences this time - he became a worse Conan, since Conan is largely just a hollering brute (in the films, at least; not, I am given to understand, in the source stories. There's really nothing at all to like about the film: as '80s sword & sorcery pictures go, it's not specifically terrible, but the genre was sufficiently puerile that "not terrible by the standards of its stablemates" is by no stretch of the imagination a compliment. Ah well. Sequeldom in the 1980s was ever thus.
23 August 2011
SUMMER OF BLOOD: ALL GONE TO HELL
No, no, no, younger and more innocent version of me. Getting it right once means not a damn thing, and sure enough, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth sucks. Like, a lot. And that's disappointing, but not at all shocking - after all, Hell on Earth didn't make itself known until 1992, four whole years after the second film, and if the late '80s were a rough and uncertain time for horror movies, the early '90s (by which I suppose I mean 1989 through 1995) might very well be the worst stretch of horror cinema since the genre was born in the silent era. Add that time frame to the long gap in between entries (never a good sign in horror franchises, though it must have been nice for that four years when there were only good Hellraiser movies), and the elementary fact that horror sequels are already a dodgy prospect, and, well... I will not say, "it's surprising Hell on Earth is as good as it managed to be", because that would be horribly misleading. "As good as it managed to be", in this case, is pretty fucking bad. But it is, anyway, gratifying that Hell on Earth didn't find a way to be much, much worse.
Oh my, where to begin? With the beginning, I suppose, where we meet a man it's pretty much impossible not to detest immediately. He is, though we don't know this yet, J.P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt), the smug owner of a popular nightclub in whatever indeterminate city the film takes place, and he's looking for decoration in a tiny little art gallery that keeps peculiar hours to suit its shady business model, or at least this is the obvious presumption to make, given that J.P. shows up there in the middle of the night, and that the particular objet d'art that catches his eye is the very same pillar in which the souls of the four Cenobites were trapped at the end of Hellbound, along with the puzzle box that lets them out into the world - the Pillar of Souls, I take it to be called, in Hellraiser circles, but I don't believe that name ever appears in the movie, and so I will call it the Hellpillar, like I was doing in my head the whole time I was watching.
With this little taste of things to come, we switch over to find Joey (Terry Farrell), a resentful TV news reporter who has just finally managed to convince her bosses that she deserves a big break, only to find that her "big break" involves being given a shitty assignment about which there is nothing interesting to say, at the local hospital. You can tell she's the protagonist because she has an androgynous name; and it was at this exact moment that I stopped wondering if Hell on Earth was going to be better than I'd heard, because any 1992 film that couldn't be bothered to avoid even the laziest '80s horror tropes is not a 1992 film that is going to be very much fun to watch. At any rate, Joey and her cameraman Doc (Ken Carpenter) are just about to pack it up when an emergency case comes in: it's a young man covered in the spiny chains that we certainly ought to recognise by this point in the series can only mean that Hell is breaking loose. Joey hasn't quite processed what's going on around her when the man is ripped apart, but she does note two things he says: "Boiler Room" and "Terri".
At this point, her reporter sense kicks in, and she tracks the dead man back to The Boiler Room, that very same nightclub that J.P. runs. We now get to find out that J.P. has become so successful by catering to literally every possible niche audience: The Boiler Room appears at first to be a BDSM-themed bar (complete with darling little decorations of baby dolls about to be pierced by spikes), but inside a little bit more, and it's just your average industrial rave club, and what's through this door here? Well, duh, it's an elegant full-service restaurant with white linen tablecloths and crystal place settings.
The Boiler Room makes no goddamn sense.
While she's poking about, Joey eventually finds a path of breadcrumbs* that lead her straight to Terri (Paula Marshall), who stole the puzzle box in the first place. Seems that she had a bit of a flirtation with J.P. that ended badly, and that is why she stole the only removable piece of the hideous new statue he just installed in his private bedchamber behind The Boiler Room. Taking pity on the young girl, Joey lets her stay the night, while continuing her hunt: eventually, she finds that the Hellpillar was bought from an estate sale at an old asylum, and it's connected somehow to a girl named Kirsty Cotton. From then, it's a simple matter to get hold of the tapes of Kirsty's interviews with the doctors, providing Ashley Laurence with a tremendously unnecessary cameo. More importantly, the tape is interrupted by a mysterious figure of a British WWI officer (Doug Bradley) who addresses Joey by name and gives her cryptic advice.
While all this has been happening, an errant spot of rat blood has ended up on the Hellpillar, and sure enough, it revives our beloved Pinhead (Doug Bradley, as well), though he doesn't make his full self known until after J.P. brings a random clubgoer back to his pad for a one-night stand that ends with her being devoured flesh-first by the statue. Pinhead quickly appeals to J.P.'s lesser nature, and they make a pact: J.P. will keep bringing bodies, and when Pinhead is able to escape his bonds and bring Hell itself to Earth, J.P. gets to stay alive. This backfires fairly spectacularly, for when he manages to cajole Terri into coming back for another go-round, J.P. ends up being eaten by the Hellpillar himself. And so is Pinhead able to manifest himself in the flesh, as it were.
The good news is that Joey is ready, sort of. She's been having terrible dreams involving that British officer, who turns out to be the ghost of Captain Elliot Spencer. Spencer is the man who found the puzzle box during his quest to find greater and more exotic physical sensations following the shell-shock of the war - this is, incidentally, the only point at which Hell on Earth taps into anything resembling the metaphysics of Clive Barker's original script and novella that got the whole franchise going - subsequently being turned into Pinhead through the box's dark powers, and he explains what is going on. I will not also explain what is going on, because it makes the entirety of the Hellraiser series worse to know the details.
And so it is that Pinhead destroys God knows how many people in The Boiler Room, turns a bunch of them into Cenobites, and tromps down a few city streets until he faces off with Joey. I'm told that the big draw of this movie during its original release was "Pinhead walks free on the Earth!" and if that's the case, it must have been powerfully disappointing to see that this consisted of a few dingy city streets late at night, and an idiotic battle between neo-Cenobites whose designs are so ridiculous I would just as soon not describe them, and cops, ending in a bit of flashy ending that presumably makes sense to someone. I am not he.
If you walked into this cold, I think it might be possible to find Hell on Earth a leaden, but not especially wretched example of early-'90s body horror. Not a good movie, by any stretch: director Anthony Hickox has no sense at all for visual flair or pacing, and the interiors have a hideously over-lit feeling. Not in the sense of being too bright, but in the sense that the lighting that's there feels like stage lighting, a little bit too present for its own good. And the acting is pretty damn bad: Terry Farrell, later of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is mediocre to fair in a role that only really asks her to be flinty, but that's enough to make her the best member of the main cast: Bernhardt is a clown, and Marshall's flailing and reedy line deliveries are indescribable (Bradley, of course, does as he does: but he's out to sea with some of the dialogue given to him). The make-up is effective, if sort of idiotic; the CD Cenobite in particular is something that should have remained on the drawing board.
As the third Hellraiser, though, Hell on Earth is beyond worthless. Once again, the whole concept behind the franchise has been rejiggered: first the Cenobites were masochistic sensualists beyond human kenning who lived in an alternate dimension, then they were former humans who had been turned into the guardians of what may have been the actual afterlife, and now... there's some in-movie dialogue explaining it, but in a nutshell, Pinhead is just a horror movie villain. He does evil because it delights him to do evil, and whatever the hell place he comes from, and what the box has to do with it, is left unexplained.
But no, despite how carefully screenwriter Peter Atkins makes certain to include the word "flesh" in the dialogue, there is no trace of the disturbing intersection between the physical and psychological that were the backbone of the first two films, and even though Bradley plays Pinhead in all the same ways, the villain feels much different, and more hollow: he's just a killer with outré fashion sense. He isn't actually dangerous, any more than any given movie psycho slasher is dangerous, because he just fills a story role. The old Pinhead represented a coherent and suitably disturbing philosophy, and was an infinitely better villain as a result.
Again, I do not hold this against the movie. Hellbound was already supposed to have committed all of these exact same sins, and we should count ourselves lucky that it ended up turning out so well. Hell on Earth simple fulfilled its duty as a delayed horror sequel, to suck all the air out that made the first movie good, and count on a brand name and an iconic killer to do the work of crafting a world or holding a point of view. The only real surprise with this is that Clive Barker was still onboard as an executive producer; one would have thought that he'd be a little more careful about what was happening to his baby, but in the end, money is money. And that is the only reason why Hell on Earth was made in the first place.
Body Count: There are so many people killed in the destruction of the club that I can't imagine how to count them. So if we focus on the "featured" deaths, it's 12, plus scads, plus another handful in Joey's dreams.
Reviews in this series
Hellraiser (Barker, 1987)
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Randel, 1988)
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Hickox, 1992)
Hellraiser: Bloodline (Smithee [Yagher], 1996)
22 August 2011
BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE WORLD OF ROBERT E. HOWARD
Every Sunday this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the remake of Conan the Barbarian introduces a new generation to the pop hero of Weird Tales, one of the most durable fictional characters of the 1930s. This is not, of course, the first time Conan has been seen in film, nor the first time he's been portrayed by a mostly unknown, muscle-bound actor.
It is often suggested that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the man primarily responsible for whatever value there is in the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian, but this is wrong. Aye, the Austrian bodybuilder, in the role that shot him to stardom from out of nothing in the blink of an eye, is such a perfect fit for the character that it's quite impossible to imagine the same film being made without him. But he's not the most indispensible figure in the film's production history.
That would instead be Basil Poledouris, who composed the score. Conan the Barbarian, as I trust you can guess even if you have not seen it, even if you know nothing but the title, is a retrograde adolescent fantasy about a physically indestructible hero using swords to kill all kinds of people in all kinds of ways in between bouts of making out with his hot barbarian girlfriend. It is a film that only wants to be described by the single adjective "awesome", though "epic" would do in a pinch. It is a film whose effectiveness, if it is to be effective at all, lies in keeping the audience constantly at a fever pitch of adrenaline, gawping at the crudely enthusiastic spectacle.
It is, however, also a film which sees a significant percentage of its running time given over to scenes of people running, riding, striding, crawling, or otherwise achieving motion through the landscapes of a mythical pre-medieval world of mountains and fields, obligingly portrayed by Andalusia. And a film, moreover, in which the lead actor was perhaps literally incapable of speaking the English language in any meaningful way when the thing was produced. Between these two things, that results in a movie with quite a few passages during which nobody says anything and nothing happens, primarily in the first half, and this is altogether not the sort of thing that anybody is likely to call "awesome" unironically.
Enter Poledouris, a man whose previous and subsequent career doesn't do much to show him off as a Talent To Notice, but it doesn't have to: with Conan the Barbarian, he became immortal (if nothing else, the choicest bits were recycled in other trailers for I don't even know how many years afterward - maybe they still are). Poledouris's score isn't just awesome, it is possible the most awesome ever. It is everything any 12-year-old has ever daydreamed about sword-and-sorcery fantasy distilled into music, a preposterously dramatic mixture of thundering beats and screaming woodwinds. If you stuffed Mussorgsky, Wagner, Carmina Burana, and the Requiem Mass into a blender, it might be nearly as blasting and portentous as this score. It is the most anti-subtle music that I think I have ever heard, and it is impossible to avoid being completely smothered and overwhelmed and swept up by the sheer insane grandeur of it. At least, if you could avoid it, you're not likely to be a person who'd voluntarily watch Conan the Barbarian.
And here's why this is all so necessary: if you are watching an activity, any activity, with Poledouris's God-smashing music playing, you will be absolutely struck by how thrilling that activity looks. There are shots of Schwarzenegger doing literally nothing but trotting through tall grass, but by God, in that moment trotting through tall grass looks peerlessly masculine. The opening credits involving a sword being forged in the tiny barbarian village where Conan was born, and between the music and the pornographically lingering shots of smoldering metal, it's enough to convince a body that sword-smithing is the pinnacle achievement of humanity.
This is how it must be - I will not say "should", because it's definitely an open question whether Conan the Barbarian "should" exist at all. The film is unapologetically immature in its views of nearly everything: women, warfare, violence, snakes. Its worldview is expressed in a line of dialogue delivered by Conan's father (William Smith) early on: "No one in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts. This you can trust". In which "this" is the sword he's just finished crafting. This is a moment delivered without shame or the mildest hint of camp - it's hard to imagine, in fact, how a film so devoted to the objectification of the male body could be this anti-campy, but that's director John Milius for you: between this and the later Red Dawn, he might well be the most aggressively sincere purveyor of the most reductive view towards the glories of combat that the 1980s have to offer. The movie he wrote (alongside Oliver Stone, another fellow with as you might say, a distinctly chauvinistic worldview) is breathtakingly free of any kind of self-reflection or mirthfulness: it is a paean to destroying everything to prove that one is the most manly of all men.
I will admit to having only cursory exposure to the Conan stories written in the 1930s by Robert E. Howard, and thus I can't say that this is true at all to the character; but the pulp fiction of that era has a certain unmissable tendency to be somewhat regressive about violence and gender issues. I don't think for a moment Milius and Stone were deliberately trying to recapture the sensibilities of a bygone era; I think that's genuinely how they thought, at least Milius did (Stone's contributions to the project being watered-down, anyway). Life would be better if we could all just mow down the bad guys with a sword.
That is, to put it mildly, an eyebrow-raising philosophy, but the movie works in despite of that: Milius's exorbitantly serious visuals, alongside Poledouris's score, are simply too damn rousing not to be swept up in the moment. Conan the Barbarian is a morally bankrupt movie, and it is at times a willfully stupid and silly movie, but it is, more than that, a damnably persuasive movie. It really shouldn't be: the plot is a hacked-together patchwork quilt of notions about life in a fantasy world, in which the main plot isn't revealed until well more than 40 minutes in, after we've already been subjected to a puzzling sequence that establishes Conan's life story, from slave to gladiator to thief, without bothering to make much sense in the incidental details. Even after that, the plot can't make up its mind to get going until it's almost too late. There's only one credible character and performance in the whole movie: James Earl Jones as Thulsa Doom (I believe I mentioned that the film is silly?), a petty warlord who turns himself into a charismatic religious leader and has just enough holes in his backstory that we get to imagine any number of terribly compelling things about him, while Jones makes sure to play him not as an outrageously evil villain but as a largely satisfied warrior turned politician. Otherwise it's Sandahl Bergman, in the horribly thankless role of the love interest in a movie written at the maturity level of a barely-pubescent boy, sounding and looks like she stopped into the studio on her way back from a suburban shopping mall, and a steady-handed pro like Mako foundering as the wacky Asian comic relief in a film that has absolutely no sense of humor. Schwarzenegger is a special case: he's objectively terrible, but the character as written is such a shallow cartoon that it would unquestionably make the film worse to have even a slightly better performance: as it is, Schwarzenegger nestles into everything which makes Conan the most ridiculous, which is also what makes him the most fun.
The film ought to suck. Even while you're watching it, there's a nagging feeling that it's all very tacky. And yet it believes in itself so very much, and has such courage in its convictions, and you absolutely cannot fake that sort of thing. When we first see Conan all grown up, in a nifty scene that shows how he alone of the little slave boys survived and turned into a huge mountain of muscles, turning a giant wheel that doesn't obviously serve a purpose; when Milius slides into his first close-up of Schwarzenegger's angry brow, as Poledouris has a musical orgasm, it's thrilling, because the film does not care about our opinion. It cares only about pleasing itself. By all means, this is crass and tacky: the geysers of blood, the unimaginative leering at naked women, the elevation of self-serving violent acts to religious status (literally - the film has a surprisingly well-developed idea about the role of religion in daily life, which boils down to: "It's fine to believe in God or gods or whatever, but don't count on those bastards for anything". There's even a famous speech near the end with almost that exact sentiment being lovingly manhandled by a parody of an Austrian). But it's boldly and bravely crass. And the result is so colorfully bad that it ceases to be bad at at all: just dazzling in its tawdriness and weirdness, collapsing irony and sincerity in upon each other so that it becomes impossible to tell if one is laughing at the movie's juvenile excesses, or with them.
That would instead be Basil Poledouris, who composed the score. Conan the Barbarian, as I trust you can guess even if you have not seen it, even if you know nothing but the title, is a retrograde adolescent fantasy about a physically indestructible hero using swords to kill all kinds of people in all kinds of ways in between bouts of making out with his hot barbarian girlfriend. It is a film that only wants to be described by the single adjective "awesome", though "epic" would do in a pinch. It is a film whose effectiveness, if it is to be effective at all, lies in keeping the audience constantly at a fever pitch of adrenaline, gawping at the crudely enthusiastic spectacle.
It is, however, also a film which sees a significant percentage of its running time given over to scenes of people running, riding, striding, crawling, or otherwise achieving motion through the landscapes of a mythical pre-medieval world of mountains and fields, obligingly portrayed by Andalusia. And a film, moreover, in which the lead actor was perhaps literally incapable of speaking the English language in any meaningful way when the thing was produced. Between these two things, that results in a movie with quite a few passages during which nobody says anything and nothing happens, primarily in the first half, and this is altogether not the sort of thing that anybody is likely to call "awesome" unironically.
Enter Poledouris, a man whose previous and subsequent career doesn't do much to show him off as a Talent To Notice, but it doesn't have to: with Conan the Barbarian, he became immortal (if nothing else, the choicest bits were recycled in other trailers for I don't even know how many years afterward - maybe they still are). Poledouris's score isn't just awesome, it is possible the most awesome ever. It is everything any 12-year-old has ever daydreamed about sword-and-sorcery fantasy distilled into music, a preposterously dramatic mixture of thundering beats and screaming woodwinds. If you stuffed Mussorgsky, Wagner, Carmina Burana, and the Requiem Mass into a blender, it might be nearly as blasting and portentous as this score. It is the most anti-subtle music that I think I have ever heard, and it is impossible to avoid being completely smothered and overwhelmed and swept up by the sheer insane grandeur of it. At least, if you could avoid it, you're not likely to be a person who'd voluntarily watch Conan the Barbarian.
And here's why this is all so necessary: if you are watching an activity, any activity, with Poledouris's God-smashing music playing, you will be absolutely struck by how thrilling that activity looks. There are shots of Schwarzenegger doing literally nothing but trotting through tall grass, but by God, in that moment trotting through tall grass looks peerlessly masculine. The opening credits involving a sword being forged in the tiny barbarian village where Conan was born, and between the music and the pornographically lingering shots of smoldering metal, it's enough to convince a body that sword-smithing is the pinnacle achievement of humanity.
This is how it must be - I will not say "should", because it's definitely an open question whether Conan the Barbarian "should" exist at all. The film is unapologetically immature in its views of nearly everything: women, warfare, violence, snakes. Its worldview is expressed in a line of dialogue delivered by Conan's father (William Smith) early on: "No one in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts. This you can trust". In which "this" is the sword he's just finished crafting. This is a moment delivered without shame or the mildest hint of camp - it's hard to imagine, in fact, how a film so devoted to the objectification of the male body could be this anti-campy, but that's director John Milius for you: between this and the later Red Dawn, he might well be the most aggressively sincere purveyor of the most reductive view towards the glories of combat that the 1980s have to offer. The movie he wrote (alongside Oliver Stone, another fellow with as you might say, a distinctly chauvinistic worldview) is breathtakingly free of any kind of self-reflection or mirthfulness: it is a paean to destroying everything to prove that one is the most manly of all men.
I will admit to having only cursory exposure to the Conan stories written in the 1930s by Robert E. Howard, and thus I can't say that this is true at all to the character; but the pulp fiction of that era has a certain unmissable tendency to be somewhat regressive about violence and gender issues. I don't think for a moment Milius and Stone were deliberately trying to recapture the sensibilities of a bygone era; I think that's genuinely how they thought, at least Milius did (Stone's contributions to the project being watered-down, anyway). Life would be better if we could all just mow down the bad guys with a sword.
That is, to put it mildly, an eyebrow-raising philosophy, but the movie works in despite of that: Milius's exorbitantly serious visuals, alongside Poledouris's score, are simply too damn rousing not to be swept up in the moment. Conan the Barbarian is a morally bankrupt movie, and it is at times a willfully stupid and silly movie, but it is, more than that, a damnably persuasive movie. It really shouldn't be: the plot is a hacked-together patchwork quilt of notions about life in a fantasy world, in which the main plot isn't revealed until well more than 40 minutes in, after we've already been subjected to a puzzling sequence that establishes Conan's life story, from slave to gladiator to thief, without bothering to make much sense in the incidental details. Even after that, the plot can't make up its mind to get going until it's almost too late. There's only one credible character and performance in the whole movie: James Earl Jones as Thulsa Doom (I believe I mentioned that the film is silly?), a petty warlord who turns himself into a charismatic religious leader and has just enough holes in his backstory that we get to imagine any number of terribly compelling things about him, while Jones makes sure to play him not as an outrageously evil villain but as a largely satisfied warrior turned politician. Otherwise it's Sandahl Bergman, in the horribly thankless role of the love interest in a movie written at the maturity level of a barely-pubescent boy, sounding and looks like she stopped into the studio on her way back from a suburban shopping mall, and a steady-handed pro like Mako foundering as the wacky Asian comic relief in a film that has absolutely no sense of humor. Schwarzenegger is a special case: he's objectively terrible, but the character as written is such a shallow cartoon that it would unquestionably make the film worse to have even a slightly better performance: as it is, Schwarzenegger nestles into everything which makes Conan the most ridiculous, which is also what makes him the most fun.
The film ought to suck. Even while you're watching it, there's a nagging feeling that it's all very tacky. And yet it believes in itself so very much, and has such courage in its convictions, and you absolutely cannot fake that sort of thing. When we first see Conan all grown up, in a nifty scene that shows how he alone of the little slave boys survived and turned into a huge mountain of muscles, turning a giant wheel that doesn't obviously serve a purpose; when Milius slides into his first close-up of Schwarzenegger's angry brow, as Poledouris has a musical orgasm, it's thrilling, because the film does not care about our opinion. It cares only about pleasing itself. By all means, this is crass and tacky: the geysers of blood, the unimaginative leering at naked women, the elevation of self-serving violent acts to religious status (literally - the film has a surprisingly well-developed idea about the role of religion in daily life, which boils down to: "It's fine to believe in God or gods or whatever, but don't count on those bastards for anything". There's even a famous speech near the end with almost that exact sentiment being lovingly manhandled by a parody of an Austrian). But it's boldly and bravely crass. And the result is so colorfully bad that it ceases to be bad at at all: just dazzling in its tawdriness and weirdness, collapsing irony and sincerity in upon each other so that it becomes impossible to tell if one is laughing at the movie's juvenile excesses, or with them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
