31 FLAVORS OF HORROR!: ROAD GAMES (1981).

Now THIS is how you do homage. When I talked about 1986′s LINK, I mentioned how Australian director Richard Franklin was a devoted acolyte of the work of Alfred Hitchcock. You wouldn’t know it from watching LINK, but you’d absolutely know it from watching 1981′s ROAD GAMES.

ROAD GAMES, sometimes known under the more claustrophobic title ROADGAMES, stars Stacy Keach as Pat Quid, an American trucker making his way through the dry plains of Southern Australia in order to deliver a freezer full of frozen meat. His only companion is a dingo, which Quid has named Boswell, who rides shotgun. (Attention, English majors…) This is the first clue that Quid is an unconventional guy. It’s not exactly legal in this time and place to be riding with a dingo, no matter how docile and domesticated Boswell seems to be. Also, Quid is a bigtime chatterbox. He barrages poor Boswell with constant conversation, which for us viewers is a pleasure, since these monologues are delivered in the plummy stentorian register of Stacy Keach. Keach has come up with names for all the fellow travellers who he spots recurring along the highways, including Benny Balls, Fred Frugal, Captain Careful, Sneezy Rider, and, most ominously, Smith Or Jones.

Smith Or Jones is the driver of the dingy olive-green van that Quid spots driving suspiciously at the same time he’s hearing radio reports of a deranged killer at large. It’s a long time before Quid himself gets a look at Smith Or Jones, but right from the outset we the audience know that Quid’s not crazy, due to the eerie early scene where a young woman is strangled in a motel room with a mean-looking length of wire. For better or worse, and probably the latter, we know, we’re going to see that guy again. It’s when Quid picks up a young hitch-hiker (Jamie Lee Curtis, just a year fresh off THE FOG and three off HALLOWEEN) who he nicknames “Hitch” that the trail really starts getting warm.

Quid calls this young lady “Hitch” A) because it’s what he calls hitch-hikers and he likes nicknames for everyone, but to the film fanatics in the audience it’s a clear nod from Franklin and his writer, Everett De Roche, to the master filmmaker who made a movie much like this one in spirit. (And it’s no accident that Quid’s first name, “Pat,” was the also name of Alfred Hitchcock’s daughter. Nice little gender-reversal on the shout-out, there.) If you’ve seen 1954′s REAR WINDOW, there can be no doubt which Hitchcock movie Franklin and De Roche have taken as inspiration. REAR WINDOW is also a film about a hero stuck in an enclosed space, who catches wind of a crime and is deemed crazy by the authorities, leaving him to take matters into his own hands. Both movies make effective use of diagetic music, which means that you sometimes see the source of the music on screen — Stacy Keach plays the harmonica throughout ROAD GAMES, and at times his playing blends in with the score (which is a very good one, by Brian May of THE ROAD WARRIOR fame). Both movies have fun with nicknaming. And both movies are very romantic, despite all the bleakness and the overcast of murder. ROAD GAMES is romantic not just in the nicely-played relationship between Quid and Hitch, but also in the romance of the open road, of that dream some of us have of gassing up a truck and driving down highway as far as the eye can see — it’s a bonus if you’ve got a dog and a pretty girl riding shotgun.

I suppose it’s a minor stretch to classify ROAD GAMES as a horror film — it’s more of a suspense thriller than anything else, although Smith Or Jones is a truly spooky presence in his few fleeting appearances throughout the film. I feel justified grouping ROAD GAMES into horror because of its prime status in the genre of “Oz-ploitation” and because of its interesting proximity to HALLOWEEN. Richard Franklin was reportedly friendly with John Carpenter (I’m still looking for more information on this but it seems they studied at USC at the same time), and Franklin cast Jamie Lee Curtis in ROAD GAMES after meeting her on the set of THE FOG. And of course, the same year Jamie Lee Curtis appeared in ROAD GAMES she would soon appear in HALLOWEEN 2.

Much is said about John Carpenter’s affinity for the work of Howard Hawks, but less is said about how much Carpenter’s sensibilities also reflect a love for Hitchcock. (One clue is how HALLOWEEN‘s Dr. Loomis is named after a character in Hitchcock’s PSYCHO.) While Carpenter was subtly — and stylistically — paying homage to Hitchcock in HALLOWEEN, Richard Franklin would go on to do so directly with the sequel to PSYCHO, 1983′s PSYCHO 2, which I’ve not seen personally but if you’re interested to read more on it, you should read this review by the great Vern.

All of which is to say that if you loved John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN, and who doesn’t?, you will most definitely love Richard Franklin’s ROAD GAMES.

Ride with me on Twitter: @jonnyabomb

31 FLAVORS OF HORROR!: BAIT (2012).

I fell in love once.  It was just about perfect for a while, but then it ended.  I took the loss hard, ending up in increasingly seedier neighborhoods, experiencing increasingly trashier replacements in my desperate search to fill the void left empty after that one perfect moment. 

That story could be a description of my love life, or I could just be talking about great-white-shark movies.  When I first wrote about JAWS on my site, I argued that it’s the one great great-white-shark movie, the monarch in its genre.  It’s not the hardest argument to win, really.  After JAWS, the pool of competitors is pretty shallow.  Just about every aspiring horror filmmaker feels up to taking a crack at a zombie movie or a vampire movie, but hardly anyone wants to touch the great-white-shark genre.  Part of that is no doubt a budgetary concern, as the legend behind the troubled JAWS shoot is almost as well-known to cineastes as the movie itself.  CGI sharks don’t look right, but we all know the probable pitfalls of having a practical shark model too. 

The other problem is that having a man-eating shark as the villain of your movie is limited by circumstance and the boundaries of imagination; in other words, as long as the characters stay on land or on the boat, there’s no movie.  You need reasons to get people into the water, and there are theoretically only so many ways to do that.

To that end, Australia’s BAIT (3D) has a decent high-concept, at once supremely silly and once you think about it a little, weirdly believable.  A tsunami batters the Australian coastline, destroying a supermarket and killing most of the people in it, and stranding the small group of survivors inside with a great white shark washed in from the ocean.  It could happen!  The odds are about as likely as a Victoria’s Secret model personally delivering a pizza to me sometime this evening, but it is physically possible to occur upon this realm of reality.  The best horror movies are able to convince an audience of the believability of their extreme concepts.  BAIT is not among the best horror movies, but one could do plenty worse as a starting point than JAWS meets DAWN OF THE DEAD.  It’s a great set-up for a joke, anyway.

The problem with BAIT is that its makers seem undecided as to whether to treat their premise with solemnity or camp.  The initial script for BAIT was co-written and meant to be directed by Russell Mulcahy, who managed the tonal balance better in the 1984 killer-boar movie RAZORBACK.  I’m not fully aware of the circumstances behind Kimble Rendall (second-unit director on movies such as 2007′s GHOST RIDER) replacing Mulcahy, and it’s unclear as it is with most movies where to apportion credit or blame, but let’s just say that BAIT is a movie of mixed pleasures. 

The cast of characters who serve as the titular fodder are part of the issue.  The main pair of protagonists, Xavier Samuel and Sharni Vinson, as an estranged couple of lifeguards brought together by fate and nature, aren’t exactly unlikable but are ultimately pretty dull, and a more callow couple trapped underwater with their yipping pet lapdog are even more obnoxious than intended.  More interesting, at least on paper, are a pair of armed robbers played by Dan Wyllie and Julian McMahon (who played Doctor Doom in the recent FANTASTIC FOUR movies and is now almost entirely done morphing into Kevin Spacey.)  For me anyway, I didn’t like anyone enough to worry about them, and I didn’t loathe anyone enough to want to see them munched on by sharkteeth.  It’s the oldest criticism in the book but it’s a mistake movies like this one keep on making:  If the characters aren’t worth caring about, the movie isn’t worth remembering. 

Still, BAIT has engaging moments.  The shark CGI isn’t great, but the tsunami scenes are actually convincing.  The main sets — the submerged parking garage and the flooded supermarket — are believably-rendered environments.  One of the early character deaths isn’t the fault of the shark and is surprisingly effective for it.  (It’s reminiscent of a similar scene in THE GREY, though not as well-executed.)  The final scene, with its real-world implications, tries to give the movie an emotional resonance it hasn’t really earned, but at least it indicates that someone somewhere was thinking about issues other than mangled viscera.  Thinking is the fun part of a movie like BAIT — it’s not remotely as gripping as the movie it compares to unfavorably, but like that movie, it makes you think twice about getting in the water.  At the very least, it leads you to imagine what you might do in a situation like this one, and if it’s better to have a movie that wraps you up in its every moment, it’s some small consolation to have a premise that sparks the imagination.

Word of warning, however:  Whatever you do, don’t make this movie a double-feature with THE MASTER.

 

More sharp-toothed wordplay on Twitter:  @jonnyabomb

Overlooked & Underseen: WALTZ WITH BASHIR (2008).

 

 

Waltz With Bashir is an astonishing piece of work – it’s a dreamy reconstruction of one man’s recollection of his experiences in the Israeli military during the Lebanon War in the early 1980s.  The director, Ari Folman, wrote for the original Israeli incarnation of the TV show “In Treatment” and that background in pop psychology shows – this is a searching and introspective story.  It’s not entirely fictional, but it’s certainly not a documentary either.  The harsh world in wartime and the realm of dreams swirl together and co-mingle.

Necessarily then, Waltz With Bashir is an animated movie.  The choice is crucial to the movie’s effect:  It’s colorful and mesmerizing and upsetting.  It is NOT rotoscoped.  All of the animation is meticulously choreographed and depicted, under the art direction of David Polonsky with contributions from, among others, two artists whose work I adore, the brothers Tomer Hanuka and Asaf Hanuka.  (If you’ve picked up a newspaper or a magazine in the past decade, you know their work.)  On a visual basis alone, Waltz With Bashir is a necessity.  Combined with the emotionally conflicted and self-exploratory storytelling method which Folman employs, Waltz With Bashir is a film unlike any other.  It’s not an exaggeration to pronounce that I have very rarely seen a medium so well matched to its message.

I can’t exactly say that I loved this movie – it left me feeling more than a little anguished and sad.  But it is very clearly a work of cinematic art that has made some valuable observations about the real world, and as such, I sincerely recommend that it be seen by as many people as possible as soon as possible.  See it with your deepest friend.

@jonnyabomb

Movies I Wasn’t So Nice About: CATS & DOGS: THE RETURN OF KITTY GALORE (2010).

In the realm of faceless people writing about movies from the safety of the internet, I like to think I’m one of the more reasonable you’ll find. But I could be wrong. (See?) It’s a point that’s come up before, but it bears repeating: Unlike most people who write about movies online, I’ve spent A LOT of time working in all corners of the film and television industries in virtually every position there is. I know well how hard people work, around the clock, to bring every show to an audience. I try not to take that hard-earned knowledge lightly. Besides, I have friends who still work in film and TV, and I’m not even all the way out myself. I try mighty hard not to put anything on a computer screen that I don’t feel ready to say to someone’s face. On top of all of that, I grew up with movies. I love this stuff as much now as I did when I was young — if not more. It doesn’t make me happy to be unkind. I’m in this to share my enthusiasm, plain and simple.

All of that said, and try as I might, it’s way harder to find new ways to be nice. It’s certainly harder to be funny that way. And sometimes, a movie is put in front of me about which I just can’t find much nice to say and still remain honest.

These are the movies that forced me to be unkind.

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This is from August 5th, 2010:

It’s true.  I’ve seen Cats & Dogs: The Revenge Of Kitty Galore.  It really happened.  I was on a pretty good streak of seeing really solid movies there for a while, and such streaks are inevitably made to be broken.  The real reason why this occurred is that I am uncle to an adorable niece and I am bound by my will to honor her every request, within reason.  Hopefully the rest of you love the children in your lives significantly less.  Just this once, love is not the answer.

This Cats & Dogs movie is nominally a sequel to the previous movie called Cats & Dogs, but I’m not sure that there’s any kind of story to follow.  The first movie came out in 2001, which makes the gap between movies comparable to the time James Cameron took between Titanic and Avatar.  But whereas Cameron spent all that time working on new technologies and designing a movie that would appeal to the widest audience possible, Cats & Dogs does the opposite.  If anything, it seems like the makers of Cats & Dogs spent nine years accumulating all the crappy dog and cat puns in the world.  Seriously, I haven’t seen a movie with this many crappy puns since Batman & Robin, and we all know how that one went.

I’m not even going to bother recapping the plot for you, because… who cares?  The dogs and the cats are in some secret war, where this one police dog (voice of James Marsden) gets recruited by the dog side to stop this one evil cat (voice of Bette Midler), but it’s really all just an endless, crappy, James Bond riff.  Now there’s an original fount of comedy; no one’s ever spoofed James Bond before.  (Besides only Our Man Flint, In Like Flint, Fathom, the original Casino Royale, The Pink Panther, Get Smart, For Your Height Only, The Cannonball Run, Austin Powers, just about every cartoon ever made, and probably every third episode of Family Guy… just for starts.)  Can you possibly feel good about yourself as a creative person if you’re doing sustained James Bond spoofs in the year 2010?  Do you realize that kids, your target audience, don’t get the joke?  Do you realize that kids don’t actually find animal puns all that funny?  No, they don’t!  But more on that in a second.

Some of the voice cast is done by actors who I actually like (usually), such as Christina Applegate, Nick Nolte, Neil Patrick Harris, Michael Clarke Duncan, and comedian Katt Williams, but let’s face it, they’re all just cashing paychecks here.  And those people who complain about cartoons being aimed too much towards adults these days might be reassured by this movie.  There was nothing for me here.  There is nothing here for any fan of these performers.  Having Christina Applegate in a movie doesn’t do any good if I can’t look at her.  Having Nick Nolte in a movie doesn’t do any good if he doesn’t growl, “Damnit Reggie!” every once in a while.  Having Katt Williams in a movie will surely disappoint his many fans if he’s not allowed to use the N-word.  I mean, you see the name Katt Williams in the credits, and it’s fair to expect that the N-Word is going to happen.  I’m not saying that it’s right, or that anyone should feel good about it, but devil’s advocate:  Would this movie be any better if the pigeon voiced by Katt Williams was running around saying the N-word?  Well no, but it couldn’t have been any worse either.

So grown-ups will be miserable; that’s a given.  Then again, this movie isn’t not really for kids either.  It leans heavily on butt-sniffing humor, which seems to be leaning dangerously close to gay-panic humor at moments.  (The Bette Midler fans in the audience won’t dig it.)  The movie comes close to insinuating an interspecies romance. There’s a scene with stoner cats.  Good luck explaining that one to your kids.  The human performances are wincingly bad, particularly Jack McBrayer, who really better hope, employment-wise, that 30 Rock stays on the air for as long as possible.  But I’d rather cringe at human behavior than have to ponder the questionable morality of putting words in animals’ mouths.  It’s one thing if we humans decide to act like dickheads – at least that’s a choice – but these dogs and cats are not being given the option over how they’re portrayed.  I know it’s a big-philosophy question, but if this movie doesn’t have a brain in its head, that doesn’t mean I have to turn mine off.

Besides all that, here’s the only review you need.  On the way into the theater, my niece tugged at my hand and smiled, “This is going to be the greatest movie I ever seened!”

After twenty minutes or so, the fidgeting started.  Then it turned into full-blown roaming.  Somehow we made it through the whole thing.  But.

On the way out, she turned to me and said, “I don’t want to see Cats & Dogs again!”

This is a kid who can tolerate more hours of Dora The Explorer than even the toughest guy in the county (her uncle) can handle, and this one she couldn’t stand.  I think I just inadvertently told you that we’d both rather watch Dora The Explorer.  There can be no more dire condemnation of a supposed kids’ movie than that.

Happier news, usually, at: @jonnyabomb

Screenings in NYC: EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960).

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Why do we watch movies?  It’s a simple question with an entire bookshelf’s worth of answers.  There are so many reasons: To cheer up, to laugh, to cry, to get scared, for an ego boost, for an assist in the romantic process, for smartening up, for dumbing down, for an education, for wasting time, for monsters or pretty girls or explosions or a look into a past that doesn’t exist anymore.

And sometimes it’s about the imagery.

I saw Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE only once, almost fifteen years ago, and yet there are several images from the film that have stayed with me.  There are movies with dialogue I can recite by heart from start to finish, and then there are movies like this one, which only needed a single viewing to plant root in my consciousness.  EYES WITHOUT A FACE is a film that haunts.

The story is centered around a ghostly young woman named Christiane (Edith Scob), who was horribly disfigured in a car accident.  Christiane roams the halls of the family mansion wearing a white mask that covers her every feature, besides her eyes.  Her father, a wealthy surgeon, is dedicated to reconstructing his daughter’s face, to the point where he abducts and subdues young women in order to attempt elaborate skin graft procedures, swapping their faces onto Christiane’s.  The experiments have varying degrees of success, but are never permanent.

 

The essential theme of the movie is that Christiane is a prisoner of her father, who has lost all humanity in pursuit of his goal and is more concerned with scientific success than his daughter’s comfort and recovery.  And despite the disturbing countenance of Christiane, with and without her mask (but mostly with), there is a purity and a strange beauty to her that makes these experiments hardly necessary.

But more than anything, what you’ll remember are the images.

 

Georges Franju, the director, had a history of non-fiction filmmaking before this, which was his second feature.  He made documentaries about factories and veterans’ hospitals (this not long after World War II) and, most pertinently to some of the most squirm-inducing scenes in EYES WITHOUT A FACE, slaughterhouses.  The grisly, lengthy face-transplant scenes are shot by Franju with an unblinking eye, almost as if it unfazes him and he expects it not to faze us, his audience, either.  That’s filmmaking as character – the evil doctor would look at his subjects that way.  These scenes would be upsetting enough here in 2012, after five decades of gore films – just imagine what they would have felt like back in 1960!

 

 

Franju has a lyrical eye as well, though – those scenes of Christiane gliding through the darkened corridors of a mansion too large for its occupants, with orchestral accompaniments by Maurice Jarre, are as eerie as any ghost story.  These sequences are as simultaneously creepy and pretty as other sequences, most notably the final fate of the doctor, are savage.  It’s an indelible juxtaposition, and that’s why this film is so well-remembered despite initial misunderstanding, disinterest, and disgust.  Hilariously, according to Wikipedia, EYES WITHOUT A FACE was originally screened in the States on a double-bill with THE MANSTER.  Most people in 1960 didn’t know what they had:  A true work of cinematic art.

EYES WITHOUT A FACE is also an important film for readers of this site due to the profound influence it has had – the second you see Christiane, you know exactly where John Carpenter got the inspiration for Michael Myers’ mask in HALLOWEEN.  Yes, we all know the apocryphal story of how Carpenter’s art director, Tommy Lee Wallace, used a William Shatner mask and melted it down in order to create Myers’ featureless mask, that spooky pale death’s head with only openings over the eyes to indicate the scant humanity within.  But the image, see, the image, that’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE.  It got into John Carpenter’s head too.

 

 

When I first saw EYES WITHOUT A FACE way back when, it wasn’t long after FACE/OFF had come out, and it could be said that the face transplant scenes in that film were also influenced by Franju’s film, but I’m not so sure.  John Woo cut away quickly from the face transplants in FACE/OFF (or was forced to by studio test screenings, who knows).  EYES WITHOUT A FACE, on the other hand, showed the operations in all their awfulness.  Despite my adoration of John Woo, or in fact as a statement of how impressive Franju’s unflinching method is, I have to say that, in this respect at least, FACE/OFF is a pussy next to EYES WITHOUT A FACE. 

 

 

The Billy Idol song, however, is absolutely a response to this movie.  Whether that is a virtue or a travesty is in the ears of the beholder.

 

 

Sorry – eyes.  I meant eyes.

 

 

EYES WITHOUT A FACE is playing at NYC’s Film Forum as part of their “French old Wave” Series.  It’s screening on a double-bill with Henri-Georges Clouzot’s DIABOLIQUE, which I haven’t yet seen, but can assume is a far better fit than THE MANSTER.

 

Find me on Twitter:  @jonnyabomb

 

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The Unintentional Comedy of the DARLING COMPANION Trailer.

Darling Companion, which opens today in limited release, has a trailer which had me laughing loudly and obnoxiously for its entire duration every time I saw it pop up in the theaters over the past month.  First watch it, then I’ll give just a few reasons why I think it warrants more ridicule than it’s gotten so far.

Obviously, this is so white it makes Grand Canyon look like Do The Right Thing.  But there are other reasons to make fun of it first:

1. Richard Jenkins yelling out “Shit!” and being blatantly, hysterically over-dubbed to say “Shoot!” (oo:35)

2. Sam Shepard, who only a couple years ago could have had the Kevin Kline role, is now playing the obligatory cantankerous coot. (00:37)

3.  All the old white people sadly screaming “Freeway!” with no apparent awareness that by now, no one under the age of 70 wants to see this movie.  (oo:40)

4.  One of these honky assholes pets the dog with her stinky bare feet.  No wonder he ran away.  (00:47)

5.  “You know more about your patients than you do about your own family.”  Yeah well, you married a doctor, sweetheart.  That country house ain’t gonna pay for itself.  (00:50)

6.  The heavily-accented woman starts a monologue about her certainty that the dog is alive.  “The women in my family have a gift. They see things.”  In white-people movies, many times the “racial other” has mystical powers that the more urbane honkies do not possess, so rooted in the material world are they.  (01:00)

7.  This film could use some hot sex appeal.  Cue the Richard Jenkins/ Dianne Wiest sex scene!  (01:15)  Who needs Eva Mendes?

8.  This film could use some quirky humor that all those Zooey Deschanel hipster kids love so well.  Cue Kevin Kline barking at rams!  (01:25)

9.  This film could use a reference to Lethal Weapon 2!  Cue the old dislocated-shoulder gag!  (01:37)

10.  I wonder if they find the dog by the end of the movie?  (02:08)

 

How does this happen?

Do you know who Lawrence Kasdan is?  You should!  He’s only the guy who wrote Raiders Of The Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back.  He almost literally wrote the book on what we want to see when we go to the movies.  Now he’s writing movies with his wife about rich people who lost a dog that wasn’t technically theirs in the first place.  I’m a huge fan of escapism, clearly, but for some reason movies like Darling Companion explicitly make me remember that our country is in a crippling recession and people are starving every day on the streets while genocide and ill-considered wars rage overseas.  Somehow, I don’t think I will have that problem watching The Avengers.

I think it’s because I know (with reasonable certainty) that Iron Man and Captain America don’t exist, so ironically I’m more willing to play make-believe and to get interested in their imaginary story.  Conversely, I know for a fact that people like the ones Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline are playing in this movie do exist, and I hate those people. I CANNOT BRING MYSELF TO GET INVESTED IN THE STORY OF WHINY RICH PEOPLE WHOSE BIGGEST PROBLEM IS GETTING A QUIRKY PSYCHIC TO CONVINCE THEIR RUNAWAY DOG TO COME HOME.

Who is this movie for?  And once you identify them, best to keep them apart from guys like me.  We’re clearly not on the same wavelength.

@jonnyabomb

 

 

 

31 FLAVORS OF HORROR #14: THE THING (2011).

It’s possible there might be something new, insightful, and complimentary that can be written about John Carpenter’s The Thing, but luckily that’s not the task in front of me today.  Here’s what I once wrote in brief about The Thing (1982 edition):

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What can be said, at this point? John Carpenter remade a sci-fi classic by his hero, Howard Hawks, and arguably, he beat it. It’s still a brilliant set-up – a malicious shape-shifting alien being plagues twelve guys manning a research station in Antarctica – and the follow-through is equally brilliant, between the direction by Carpenter, the imagery by cinematographer Dean Cundey, the monstrous effects by Rob Bottin, the dying-heartbeat of a score by the legendary Ennio Morricone, and the eclectic ensemble cast of character actors (some you’ve seen before; some who were never seen again), led by Kurt Russell and the legendary Keith David.  The end result is the greatest movie T.K. Carter was ever affiliated with NOT named Doctor Detroit.  It’s arguably Carpenter’s masterpiece.  It’s a classic in science fiction, a classic in horror, a classic study in isolation and paranoia, and it’d be all of those things even without that remarkable ending, which is legendarily, chillingly, ambiguous.

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The Thing started out as a pulp story called Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr.  Howard Hawks (with Christian Nyby) turned it into a movie in 1951, and then Carpenter, who regards Hawks the way I regard Carpenter, took a phenomenal script by Bill Lancaster (Burt’s son, who also wrote The Bad News Bears) and turned it into one of the great horror films of the past thirty years.

Carpenter’s film was a remake, technically — one of the most artistically successful remakes in cinema history.  This new version of The Thing, written by Eric Heisserer and directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., is NOT a remake.  (Although, confusingly, its credits claim to be based on Campbell’s original story, which featured none of these new characters or situations.)  The new version purports to be the account of the events leading up to Carpenter’s movie, which began with a ranting Norwegian taking rifle-shots at a dog, Palin style, from a helicopter in hot pursuit.  So the new version is not a remake, but a thing they like to call a prequel, a movie made after an earlier movie which dramatizes events that preceded it.  Basically, this new movie is setting itself up as a companion piece to Carpenter’s movie, and as such it fails.

For the job of re-envisioning one of the greatest movies in their tremendous catalogue, Universal turned to a man named Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.  “Junior” — that means there are two of them.  Aside from being a strong argument in favor of stage names, this guy has got a set of balls on him.  I’m assuming.  Why else take on such a monumental fool’s errand?  You’d certainly want to come at it with some major cinematic mojo — John Carpenter had already made Assault On Precinct 13, Halloween, and Escape From New York (among other things) before he took on The Thing.  By contrast, this new guy has made a short film (in 1996) and a bunch of car commercials.  Like I said: balls.

One element that saves the watchability of The Thing (2011) is its star, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, from Death Proof and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World.  She’s pretty wonderful, I think.  She’s the kind of female star who can claim to be a paleontologist and make you believe it, the kind of girl who can take over a room full of beardy dudes when stuff goes wrong and make you believe she knows what she’s doing.  That’s not reverse-sexism — not many MALE stars can do these things, let alone the lady parts.  Comparisons to Jamie Lee Curtis and Sigourney Weaver seem totally fair and adequately complimentary.

She plays Kate Lloyd, a paleontologist who is called up by a co-worker named Adam (Eric Christian Olsen) and his creepy boss Sander (Ulrich Thomsen) to head down to Antarctica with them to check out a major discovery.  The movie gives us no idea where Kate’s office is; I guess the production couldn’t spring for an exterior shot.  It also gives us no idea why Kate jumps at the opportunity aside from Sander’s “now or never” deadline, what her relationship to Adam might be, or even really how she feels about it.  This movie, unlike Carpenter’s, has little time for character.  The only other actors who register are Jameson (Adewale Akkinuoye-Agbaje, whom van Heijningen must love for his prodigious spellchecker-killing ability), and Carter (Joel Edgerton).  Edgerton in particular shows some real star quality, but maybe I just like him because he’s like a badass action-hero version of Conan O’Brien.

These characters head to a Norwegian base in Antartica, where a bunch of heavily-bearded Norwegian scientists have accidentally discovered a spaceship the size of a football field under the ice.  As we all know, what comes out of the spaceship is a horrific alien squid thing with the ability to take on the physical appearance of anything it touches, whether that be man, dog, or otherwise.

But back to those Norwegians for a moment, because this is an important point:  The only way you can tell these dudes apart is due to the length of their beards and the shade of their ’80s-vintage overalls.  They’re all just fine, acting-wise, but they’re cast too similarly.  No one pops off the screen more than another, which is a major failure of clarity on the part of the filmmakers.  And here’s another method of distinction:

Note the naming of the principal characters from Campbell’s story, Lancaster’s script, and Carpenter’s movie:

MacRready. Childs. Blair. Garry. Clark. Palmer. Norris. Bennings.  Fuchs. Nauls. Copper. Windows. (They have a fucking guy named WINDOWS!)

By contrast:

Kate. Adam. Carter. Jameson. Sander. Colin. Edvard. Peder. Karl. Olaf. Griggs. Jonas. Henrik. Lars.

Which cast list shows more creativity?  More importantly, which cast list makes each character immediately distinguishable from the others?

That’s such an important question.  Character naming and casting are two very important arrows in the quiver when you’re making a movie with large casts, especially when the large cast is quickly winnowed away by a murderous alien.  It is of absolute importance that an audience is able to tell who’s been killed, who’s still alive, who’s on what side of the camp, and so on.  I know who Kate is because she’s the pretty girl.  I know who Jameson is because he’s the only tall black guy in a roomful of guys who look like Tolkien dwarves.  I know who Carter is because I’ve seen Joel Edgerton in movies before.  I know who Lars is because he’s the only one everyone keeps pointing out speaks no English — which also, for the record, lets me know who will live until the end of the movie, because he’s meant to be the guy from the start of the Carpenter film.  But after those four, sorry, I’m lost.

Another smart filmmaking technique 1982 has all over 2011 is the idea of geography — Carpenter very smartly has his cameras roam across the base, sometimes following that dog around, so that audiences get a sense of the location.  When people are running around, hiding from The Thing, later on, we are able to mentally recall from before where they are on the base.  The new movie shows no such forethought.  New rooms are constantly introduced.  There is no consistent sense of the layout of the base.  Who’s where?  Who knows?  Carpenter’s movie disorients the characters and the viewer with concise, methodical intent.  The new movie is far, far sloppier.  And these people had thirty years to think about this shit.

Other issues I noted, real quick:

For a movie which isn’t meant to be a remake, there sure is a lot of familiar ground being re-tread.  A scene where a character watches human cells being imitated by the alien cells through a microscope is essentially identical to the original, which is weird when the character making the observation is a paleontologist.  Where does a paleontologist suddenly get all this knowledge of micro-cellular genetics?

For a movie which takes place in Antarctica, it sure doesn’t look very cold.  One of the best virtues of Carpenter’s movie is that it looks like the coldest winter you never want to get near.  The new movie just looks  a little chilly, like an L.A. soundstage on a cold night.  Carpenter’s movie made it clear that these characters can’t go outside for long or they will DIE.  In the new movie, there are scenes where the characters don’t even bother to put on coats, just rush right out in their cute little sweaters.

For a movie where one of the few significant alterations from the earlier and better movie is the introduction of a strong and capable female protagonist, those alien creatures sure do look a whole lot like angry vaginas.  It ain’t just me who noticed it — The New York Times even made a point of it, and they’re so polite they call everyone Mister and Mrs.  What’s with the fear of vaginas, fellas?  Is that really what happens when this many dudes get together?  Because I really can’t relate.

At best, The Thing 2011 is an expensive-looking, sporadically-diverting fan-film (with way too much distracting CGI).  At worst, it’s a blatant money grab, assuming that people like me who adore Carpenter’s movie will be curious enough to check it out (correct, but still ugly) and that people who haven’t seen it are so starved for horror films that they will take a hasty recreation of a masterpiece.  Repertory screenings of Carpenter’s film in cities like LA and NYC still pack ‘em in — why not give that a shot on the national level?  Carpenter’s Thing still lives.  I’m so sorry to be so cruel, but the new one won’t.

Sometimes having huge balls isn’t a virtue.  Sometimes, when they’re that big, you want to get those things checked.

http://twitter.com/jonnyabomb

31 FLAVORS OF HORROR #13: BLACK SHEEP (2006).

Note: This is the New Zealand horror-comedy from a few years back, not the Chris Farley/ David Spade horror-comedy from the decade prior.

 

To watch Black Sheep all the way through – what’s more, to enjoy it – you need to have been born with or developed a very specific sense of humor. This is a movie from New Zealand about an outbreak of murderous sheep, which is an inherently, terrifically, hilariously, monumentally stupid premise. 

 

There is nothing at all scary about sheep; they are some of the funniest animals on earth. Like all of the great funny animals, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why sheep are so funny: maybe it’s the sounds they make; maybe it’s the way they stand; maybe it’s the sounds they make while they stand that way.

 

The creature effects are by Richard Taylor and Weta Workshop, best known for their work with Peter Jackson on The Lord Of The Rings movies. For FX freaks and geeks, that’s reason enough to see this modest little gorefest, and I’m with those guys: Once you’ve seen a giant lumbering were-sheep, your life will be just a little bit better than it was two hours before. And, on a less frivolous note, there’s also some lovely photography of the New Zealand valleys and coastlines amidst all the sheep carnage.

 

The very first image of the movie is that of a herd of sheep crowding into frame right. That’s the first time (of many) that I laughed. The protagonist has a crippling fear of sheep; by the time we meet him as an adult he’s cowering in a taxi cab stopped in the middle of a street entirely swarmed by sheep. From there, things get silly: 

 

An evil sheep drives a runaway truck off a cliff. 

 

A sheep farts. 

 

A sheep bites a guy’s butt. 

 

A guy talks to sheep in a conspiratorial whisper. 

 

A bunch of sheep eat a guy. 

 

There’s a brief transformation scene where a human being transforms into a giant were-sheep. 

 

A guy throws mint sauce at said giant were-sheep. Mint sauce is like holy water to vampires. Were-sheep are also uncommonly timid around sheepdogs.

 

There’s a pretty blond girl in the movie, and there’s romance, and those two statements are unfortunately unrelated.  (Think about it.)

 

The movie ends on one gigantic what-the-fuck.

 

Considering how many sane human beings it takes to get a movie made and released, it’s just so weird to me that something like this got through in the first place.  I’m happy they pushed this thing all the way up and over that mountain, don’t get me wrong.  I’m just pointing out how unusual an achievement this represents.   I had a good time with Black Sheep.  It’s short and it’s silly.  Will it float your own personal boat?  Depends on your threshold for animal humor. If you get a chuckle out of the still frame below, you’re very likely the target audience for Black Sheep.

 

 

 

http://twitter.com/jonnyabomb

 

31 FLAVORS OF HORROR #7: CHAW (2009) v. PIG HUNT (2009).

 

Movies about giant killer pigs are not a common occurrence, but every continent seems to have one.  The best-known feature in the genre is probably 1984′s Razorback, an Australian movie from the director of Highlander.  I haven’t seen that one recently enough to confidently write about it, and I’m not sure I can do better than this, so let’s look at the dark horse candidates.  (Mixing metaphors now…)  Asia’s entry in the competition is Chawz and America’s is called Pig Hunt.  Let’s take a look at these two prize hogs and see who takes home the blue ribbon. 

Chaw, sometimes known as Chawz, is a horror-comedy from Korean director Shin Jung-Won.  Why is it called Chaw? I don’t know. Why is it also known as Chawz?  I don’t know.  It’s a Korean horror-comedy. We may not need to ask such questions, because there may not be an answer. The only word we have in America that makes any sense of the word Chaw has to do with chewing tobacco, and that product has no correlation with this movie, except for the fact that somebody was probably smoking something somewhere.

Apparently, in Korea there is a very real problem with wild boars. Their territory is being encroached by development, and so as a result of these belligerent animals being displaced, there have been several incidents of farm animals, pets, and even people being attacked. 

 

So one could conceivably read Chaw as a commentary on modern events. One could do that. But why must one justify their enjoyment of a giant killer pig movie by referencing its timeliness and environmental conscience? And why must one refer to oneself as “one”?  One sounds just a little bit pretentious.  One needs to loosen up  Anyway:  Chaw.

 

The story of Chaw is blatantly, blissfully derivative. A young policeman with a ripe pregnant wife is re-assigned to a mountain village that is famously “crimeless” — anybody else here seen Hot Fuzz? – and of course the body count starts rising. Much like the Mayor of Amityville, the cloddish town officials are hesitant to close down the mountain, until the death toll becomes too big to ignore. At that point, they call in a big game hunter (who looks like All-Star ex-Yankee Hideki Matsui), and a super-team of monster-trackers hits the trail.

 

Most of the movie’s action is cribbed from Jaws, almost shockingly brazenly so, although there are direct swipes from Aliens, Predator, the aforementioned Razorback, Sleepy Hollow (!), and Jurassic Park (the whole bit with the footsteps causing water to ripple). 

 

It’s most like Jaws, only doubled and enhanced – the young scientist character that we Americans remember Richard Dreyfuss for is recast here as a cute chick (an improvement). The pony-tailed Matsui hunter guy isn’t the only Quint-like character in Chaw – there’s also an old recluse with a personal vendetta against the beast –  but he’s the most memorable one because he has much weirder quirks than stewing shark jaws and scratching chalkboards. What I’m telling you is that he talks to his dogs. What I’m really telling you is that his dogs talk to him. His pair of hunting dogs, Mighty and Mickey, get killed by the giant boar, and then later appear in hallucinations and demand revenge.

 

I’m going to stop here and declare that if you’re not at all interested in a Korean remake of Jaws that swaps out the shark for a giant killer pig and has a talking ghost dog in it to boot, I don’t know what to tell you. You might be on the wrong website, and you’re most definitely reading the wrong writer. 

 

I loved this movie. It’s crazy, it’s silly, it’s way too long for what it is, it’s well-photographed, it’s sharply satirical, it’s occasionally really dumb, and it has the most bizarre and unnecessary post-script sequence in recent memory.

 

(SPOILER: After the monster pig is vanquished and the sequel is set up via a Leone-style close-up over a baby pig’s vengeance-crazed eyes, we find out what has happened to a character we previously assumed was dead. He’s trussed up and tortured in a Fatal Attraction kind of scenario by a peripheral eccentric character, which just makes one more random reference for this movie to add to its checklist.)

 

Before I got to see Chaw. I’d seen many comparisons to The Host, but Chaw is much sillier than The Host, and that’s a movie which has a pretty good sense of humor to begin with. Chaw has its own anarchic sense of humor, and a giddy enthusiasm about movies in general and giant killer pigs in particular. I wish that more movies would take themselves less seriously, the way this one does. It’s a whole lot of fun.

 

 

Rating:  “Squeeeeeeeeeeee!”

 

________________________________________________________

 

 

Meanwhile, the Americans have served up Pig Hunt, a low-budget creature feature from the director of Skinwalkers, which was a decent movie by werewolf-genre standards.  That’s shorthand for saying that while I’d rather watch a werewolf movie than a Meryl Streep movie, most werewolf movies aren’t very good at all.  So if Skinwalkerswas an okay movie by those standards,  it won’t warrant a mention in Cahiers du Cinéma.  And Pig Hunt is actually a step backwards in the quality department. 

 

Pig Hunt stars no one I’d ever heard of, as a conspicuously diverse group of friends who leave San Francisco to go on a weekend hunting trip.  There’s the main hero, just short of a redneck, his badass Asian girlfriend, a gun-crazy black guy in camo gear who wields a .44 Magnum and no discernible acting ability, a supremely dopey Filipino guy in a wool cap, and a chubby dork with the kind of frantic expression on his face that tells an audience that before movie’s end, he’s either going to be raped or killed.

 

The press materials for Pig Hunt advertise it as a blend of Jaws, Deliverance, and Diner.  On that last point, seriously, what the fuck?, but at least you can see what they were going for on the first two reference points.  It’s just that Pig Hunt was not made on the level of craft of a Steven Spielberg or a John Boorman.  (No pun intended; he’s the director of Deliverance.) Which is weird, because the problems with Skinwalkers weren’t technical — despite whatever story concerns there were, it was an accomplished, stylish movie that looked like a movie.  There are a few pretty shots, but not many, and besides, taken together the movie doesn’t fit together smoothly.  Pig Hunt looks like a SyFy movie, at best.  It’s not just a budgetary question.  I mean, they clearly had some money.  The giant pig looks pretty good!  That is, when the movie finally gets to him.

 

The biggest problem with Pig Hunt is pretty simple to pin down: Not enough pig.  This movie concerns itself with a whole lot of things besides a giant pig, like weed farmers, angry hicks, and dog murders, and actually seems to forget about the giant pig until the very end of the movie.  There is an awful lot of character interaction between some pretty awful stock characters before you ever get to THE THING ON THE DAMN POSTER THAT MADE A WEIRDO LIKE ME WANT TO WATCH THIS MOVIE. 

 

 

Look, if you want to make a political allegory or a social satire or whatever else somebody (such as SF critic Mick LaSalle) thought was going on in this movie, maybe it muddies the point a little bit when you punctuate it with a gigantic pig puppet.  Because ultimately, and maybe I’m just not much of a political guy, but I’d rather just see the pig puppet. 

 

I’m no Communist, but if I’m being honest, after Chaw I have to concede that Pig Hunt is only the second-best giant-boar movie released in 2009.  The Asians did it better, basically.

 

Rating:  Not so “Squeeeeeeeeeeee!”

 

________________________________________________________

 

Africa, South America, Europe, and Antarctica… you guys are up.  Time to enter the intercontinental hog run.  Let’s see what you guys can do with a giant pig and a movie camera.

 

http://twitter.com/jonnyabomb

Cult Classics: WHITE DOG (1982).

Earlier this year, the lesser-known Sam Fuller film, White Dog screened at the Maysles Institute. This weekend, White Dog returns to New York screens courtesy of the IFC Center (click here for showtimes).  Once again, I can’t recommend this movie enough.  It’s very risky material, and it’s up to each individual viewer to decide whether Fuller & his collaborators pulled it off.  In my personal opinion, it’s a profoundly valuable and unsettling parable about a uniquely American sickness.  You may feel differently.  I’d love to start some conversations about it.

Meanwhile, here’s what I wrote about White Dog when it was re-released on DVD by the Criterion Collection:

A movie that I saw for the first time in 2008, and would like to recommend, is a rarity that was released by the great Criterion Collection on DVD – White Dog.

As you couldn’t possibly have guessed just from the title and the poster image I linked to, this is the story of a racist dog: Basically, a young actress (Kristy McNichol) living in the hills of Hollywood, finds a German Shepherd, white as the blank page, who is sweet and loving, but, she eventually finds out to her horror, trained to attack at the sight of black skin.  If the premise sounds like a toss-off joke from a Dave Chappelle sketch, that’s because it eventually became exactly that. But this is a more sober, somber treatment of the concept.  White Dog was released in 1982 by Paramount Pictures and was promptly misunderstood by the majority of the viewing public. It was directed by Samuel Fuller, co-written by Fuller and Curtis Hanson.

Now, here is really a case where the IMDB is your friend. There’s a whole world of Hollywood stories happening in this credits scroll. Curtis Hanson, of course, went on to become the acclaimed director of LA Confidential and 8 Mile. The composer of the eerie, haunting White Dog score is Ennio Morricone. The prosthetic effects were done by Stan Winston, among others. The cinematographer is Bruce Surtees, a frequent collaborator of Clint Eastwood (High Plains Drifter) and Don Siegel (Dirty Harry).  The producer is Jon Davison, who later produced Robocop and Starship Troopers, and it turns out in the supplemental Criterion documentary, one hell of a raconteur. The second assistant director is Daniel Attias, who in addition to a long television career, took what he learned from White Dog to develop further canine themes in Silver Bullet.

But the key name in the credits is Sam Fuller, a name well worth seeking out. His work is generally consistent in taking loud, kinetic, possibly exploitative material and finding moments of depth and poetry within. Honestly, I still am catching up on Fuller’s filmography, but so far, I’d say White Dog fits in there neatly, though sadly towards the end of it. How fascinating that this is the movie he made directly after his World War Two masterpiece, The Big Red One (which you should rush to see if you haven’t yet – one of Lee Marvin’s best-ever roles and a superior treatment of that point in history.)

Fuller treats the pulpy, outlandish-yet-realistic premise just right, I think. Like the actress character, you love the dog and want it to “get better” – to rise above its training. When the dog stops being tender and protective and goes on its vicious attacks, it’s horrifying. It’s amazing how blatant the metaphor is, yet how powerful and affecting at the same time. That is the intangible work of a master filmmaker, although it also has a lot to do with the grounding performance of veteran character actor Paul Winfield (you’d know him if you saw him) as Keys, the expert trainer and “deprogrammer” who takes on the white dog as his mission statement. I don’t have enough superlatives to lay on this performance – he really convinces.

Anyway, most of the joy of discovery is in surprise, so I won’t describe more than I already have. If my recommendation counts for anything, and even if it doesn’t, check White Dog out. I’d be interested to see what kind of conversations it starts.