10/27/14: Disease as Love, Death as Eroticism

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'70s films, 31 Days of Halloween, Allan Kolman, alternate title, apartment-living, auteur theory, Barbara Steele, body horror, Canadian films, Cathy Graham, cinema, David Cronenberg, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, Fred Doederlein, horror films, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Joe Silver, Joy Coghill, Lynn Lowry, Movies, parasites, Paul Hampton, possession, rape, Ronald Mlodzik, set in the 1970s, sexual violence, Shivers, Silvie Debois, Society, Susan Petrie, They Came From Within, Vlasta Vrana, writer-director, zombie films, zombies

In the world of horror filmmaking, it’s not uncommon for fledgling directors to first cut their teeth on low-budget zombie flicks: after all, ever since George A. Romero kicked the door in with his revolutionary Night of the Living Dead (1968), the walking dead have become an ingrained part of the horror industry, even bleeding over into pop culture over time. Over forty years removed from Romero’s modest black and white chiller, we now live in a day and age when graphic fare like The Walking Dead can become a hit television series: stick that in your pipe and smoke it, NYPD Blue!

Why do zombie films make such good “starter projects,” however? For one thing, zombie films lend themselves well to a low-budget aesthetic: as Romero proved, you don’t really need more than a willing group of actors, a dedicated location and rudimentary special effects to capture an audience’s attention…in fact, grainy, visceral images tend to heighten the impact of zombie films, not detract from them. The same can’t really be said for any other over-arching horror subset, for the most part, unless one is discussing slasher films: trying making a sci-fi-horror film “on the cheap” and see how effective it is. For another thing, zombie films readily lend themselves to a filmmaker’s desire to “shake things up”: individual filmmakers can mess around with the origin of the infection, the behavior of the dead, the general world around the characters, the internal politics, etc…and come up with a hundred different films off of the same basic “the dead get up and eat the living” log-line. It’s a generic “recipe” that can be turned into an awful lot of different dishes.

To this group of filmmakers who got their start with zombie flicks, be sure to add the inimitable, confounding, living legend that is Canadian body horror auteur David Cronenberg. Although Cronenberg’s first films were actually a pair of art features, he first gained notice with his third film (technically his first feature, as the others were right around an hour apiece). Shivers (1975), known in some circles by the far kitchier title They Came From Within, might be early Cronenberg, but anyone familiar with his career will see the through-line with little trouble: chilly, clinical, unemotional, obsessed with yet disgusted by sexual activity, full of skin-crawling body horror elements and ooky practical effects…in other words, classic Cronenberg.

Kicking off with an effective faux-infomercial for Starliner Island, a self-contained community with everything from apartments to stores and recreational areas, we’re given a sneak peek into what will become our besieged farmhouse, as it were: Starliner Towers. We’re introduced to a number of characters, including Nick Tudor (Allan Kolman) and his wife, Janine (Susan Petrie); the apartment’s manager, Mr. Merrick (Ronald Mlodzik); resident physician Dr. Roger St. Luc (Paul Hampton) and his nurse/paramour, Miss Forsythe (Lynn Lowry); the Svibens (Vlasta Vrana, Silvie Debois) and, perhaps most importantly, Dr. Emil Hobbes (Fred Doederlein) and teenager Annabelle (Cathy Graham). When we first meet Hobbes and Annabelle, the good doctor is strangling the young woman, after which he cuts her open and proceeds to pour acid into her chest cavity before slitting his own throat. As we might gather, all is not sunshine and warm summer breezes here at Starliner Towers…not by a long shot.

As it turns out, Dr. Hobbes, along with his partner, Rollo Linsky (Joe Silver), was working on a way to use parasites as an alternative to organ transplants: the researchers wanted to breed special parasites to take over the organs in a sick person’s body, allowing them to opportunity to heal internally. Somewhere along the way, however, something went drastically wrong (or drastically right, as we’ll come to learn later): the parasites are now jumping from host to host, taking over their victim’s bodies and transforming them into mindless, sexually ravenous zombies. As more and more residents of Starliner Towers fall prey to the disgusting, fleshy slug-things, Roger and Nurse Forsythe, along with Dr. Linsky, must do all they can to remain uninfected, all while frantically searching for some cure to this disorder. In no time, however, the trio find themselves trapped in a house of horrors that’s one part orgy, one part stone-cold nightmare. This is no ordinary “zombie infection,” however: as the ill-fated protagonists will discover, what’s taking place may be as simple and terrifying as the next step in human evolution…an evolutionary move that may see humanity wave goodbye to its cosmic neighbors and embrace a way of life that can best be described as primal, animalistic and completely free of the niceties of polite society.

As with the majority of Cronenberg’s “body horror” films, Shivers can be a massively unpleasant piece of work, especially once one takes into account the added weight of the violent sexuality aspect: if you’re the kind of audience member who shudders at the thought of nasty little slug creatures crawling into every orifice imaginable, you might want to give this a wide berth. For everyone else, however, Shivers serves as an interesting reminder of where Cronenberg started, a particular psychosexual neighborhood that he still lives in, even though his most recent body of work has tended to minimize the sci-fi/horror elements while playing up his more violent tendencies.

Like The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983), Shivers is a chilly, spartan, clinical film, all blown-out whites, hard-shadows and insidious things happening in the background. It’s a meticulously crafted film, which is par for the course with Cronenberg, but it’s also a very detached film, so unemotional as to occasionally seem aloof. Paul Hampton, in particular, has a bearing about him that seems to speak more to extreme boredom and ennui than the “normal” emotions one might expect from someone under attack from mind-controlling parasites. Truth be told, much of the acting in the film is rather rough and detached, with the exception of genre-vet Barbara Steele, who turns in one of her typically hot-blooded performances as Mrs. Tudor’s friend, Betts. Shivers is also one of the few Cronenberg films, his adaptation of Stephen King’s Dead Zone (1983) being another, to feel distinctly dated and “of its time.”

For all of its rough edges and occasional tonal missteps (one scene involving a slug “jumping” at a woman is very silly and reminds of something Paul Bartel might have snickered his way through), however, Shivers is still undoubtedly a Cronenberg film. When the film is firing on all cylinders, such as the horrifying finale that handily presages Brian Yuzna’s equally yucky (if brilliant) Society (1989), it’s an unbeatable, claustrophobic nightmare. The notion of the “new flesh” that Cronenberg explored so brilliantly in Videodrome seems to get its genesis here, as does his career-long melding of disease, sex and bodily functions. Shivers is also a much more streamlined, “simple” film than Cronenberg’s later work, which helps to amplify the genre elements: in many ways, this is one of the auteur’s purest horror films, hands down.

Despite being a lifelong fan of Cronenberg’s horror films, I must admit to really relishing his more recent “non-horror” films like Spider (2002), A History of Violence (2005), Eastern Promises (2007) and A Dangerous Method (2011). As of late, it seems to me that Cronenberg has sharpened his already lethal skills into a fine, diamond-edged blade: his films may be decidedly less “icky” than they used to be, but the grue has been traded for devastating insights into the human condition that are that much more powerful for being delivered relatively straight-faced. That being said, however, I’ll always have a soft-spot in my heart for his early genre work, especially when I’m feeling down on the human condition, in general. As Cronenberg knows so well, despite all of our innovations, art, emotion and high-minded morality, we’re all just sacks of meat, at the end of the day: clockwork piles of blood, guts, sinew and muscle that may aim for the heavens but spend the majority of our lives wallowing in the muck.

3/19/14: A Real Simple Man

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auteur theory, beached boat, boat up a tree, broken families, character dramas, cinema, coming of age, David Cronenberg, drama, Ellis, eponymous characters, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, houseboat, Jacob Lofland, Jeff Nichols, Joe Don Baker, love story, man with a secret, Matthew McConaughey, Michael Shannon, Movies, Mud, Neckbone, Paul Sparks, Ray McKinnon, Reese Witherspoon, river, riverboats, romance, Sam Shepard, Sarah Paulson, scrappy kids, small town life, teenagers, townies, Tye Sheridan, writer-director

Fun is fun, when it comes to movies. There’s nothing wrong with mindless action shoot-em-ups or faceless slashers: those are usually more fun than being night watchman in a bubble-wrap factory. Lots of adrenaline, some snappy dialogue and some rousing set pieces…that’s been a sure thing for quite some time. Likewise, mega-budget “event” pictures can be mighty entertaining, in the right doses. Throw a bakers’ dozen of the biggest actors in town into the cinematic equivalent of making your He-Man figures fight your GI Joes? Don’t bother to call: I’m already out in the lobby. That being said, there’s a lot to be said for a good old-fashioned, low-budget, character-driven drama. Sometimes, there’s nothing finer in life than getting a bunch of talented actors together and letting them do what people have been doing since the dawn of time: live. Jeff Nichols’ Mud may not be flashy but it’s a mighty fine coming-of-age film and an intriguing peek into the human condition.

Our film begins on the waterways of Arkansas, as we’re quickly introduced to our young protagonists, Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacob Lofland). They’re a couple of precocious teen boys, best friends and the products of rather fractured homes: Ellis’ mother and father (Sarah Paulson and Ray McKinnon) are at each other’s throats, the harshness of the country and the financial uncertainty of their riverboat existence tearing the family apart, while Neckbone is being raised by his uncle Galen (Michael Shannon) and never knew his parents. One day, while exploring a nearby island, the boys come across a busted-up houseboat, inexplicably beached atop a tree. Boys being boys, they decide to poke around the abandoned boat and discover evidence that it might not be so abandoned: bread, cans of beans and a few nudie magazines. In short order, the lads are introduced to the boat’s current “resident,” a scruffy hobo who calls himself Mud (Matthew McConaughey). According to Mud, he’s waiting for his girlfriend, who he describes to the dubious boys as “long blonde hair, long legs…beautiful…nightingales tattooed on her hands.”

Ellis and Neckbone doubt Mud’s story almost absolutely, right up until the point where they notice that a mysterious young woman (Reece Witherspoon) has just showed up in town, a woman who happens to be blonde and have nightingales tattooed on her hands. She looks an awful lot like Mud’s description, leading the friends to believe that the hobo might be telling the truth, after all. As the trio get friendlier, Mud reveals more and more about his backstory, including the fact that he’s on the run from some pretty bad people. As the boys help Mud get the houseboat up and running and serve as messenger between him and Juniper, they also contact an old friend of his, Tom (Sam Shepard), a mysterious older man who seems to know an awful lot about Mud’s past. As these disparate elements come crashing together, the boys must also maintain their home lives and deal with the conflicting emotions of adolescence: in Ellis’ case, this means falling in love with a high school girl (Bonnie Sturdivant) and navigating the pitfalls of young hormones, while Neckbone must balance his own need to become an independent man with his desire to help his uncle. Everything comes to a head as malevolent forces descend on the small town, intent on making Mud atone for his past as the boys are forced into the first throes of adulthood.

Despite some latter-half action elements that move the film more in the direction of Straw Dogs (minus the rape) than a Boy’s Story, Mud is most certainly a coming-of-age drama. Although the film, ostensibly, is about Mud and his quest for love and redemption, these aspects are always balanced against the larger picture of Ellis and Neckbone growing up. In fact, the more explicitly action-oriented elements (despite being decidedly audience-amping) have an unfortunate tendency to drown out the more mature dramatic aspects that precede them. While it’s certainly rousing to watch McConaughey whup ass righteously, the finale ends up seeming a bit reductive, almost as if the romantic/dramatic elements were a sort of smoke-screen for the more standard action beats. This is doubly unfortunate since, up to that point, Mud as a slow, meditative feel that lends itself more to contemplation than to increased adrenaline.

Acting-wise, the film features an embarrassment of riches, not the least of which is another rock-solid, dependable performance from good ol’ Matthew McC. Sheridan and Lofland are outstanding as the teenage protagonists and there’s never a moment where their friendship feels anything less than genuine. While Sheridan has to do a bit more of the emotional heavy-lifting than Lofland does, owing to Ellis’ slightly more central position in the narrative, neither actor is a slouch: I predict really good things for both of these actors. On the more established, old-guard end, we have excellent turns from Sarah Paulson as Ellis’ mother Mary Lee: she really makes the terrible conflict between what she wants and what her family wants a concrete thing and her interactions with Ray McKinnon frequently have a heartbreaking sense of authenticity. Nichols’ regular Michael Shannon is typically sturdy as Neckbone’s uncle, leading me to reiterate the same thing I always say whenever he’s in a film: get this guy more roles. Joe Don Baker shows up in a small but pivotal role as the grieving father/unrepentant killer and Paul Sparks oozes real menace as his second-in-command.

Writer/director Jeff Nichols has, very quietly, begun to build up quite the impressive resume. His debut, 2007’s Shotgun Stories, was a gut-punch about the special hell that only family members can put each other through and featured a scorching lead turn from Michael Shannon. Nichols followed this up with Take Shelter (2011), another Michael Shannon-starrer, about an average, everyday, Midwest man confronting the dubious possibility that he’s either envisioning the end of the world or is going completely bonkers. Across his three full-length features, Nichols has proven especially adept at examining the ways in which small-town folks are torn asunder by extraordinary circumstances. Some are able to regroup and rebuild…others are completely and utterly washed from the face of the earth. Even though Nichols may not have many films under his belt, he’s revealed himself to be an extraordinary filmmaker with a keen, razor-sharp edge and a knack for upending the stone of Middle American life and examining the squishy bugs beneath. In many ways, Nichols is like a softer-edged, more humanistic version of modern-day Cronenberg: they both plumb the rural interstates and byways of America, looking for the reasons behind the madness. Their America might not look like a Rockwell painting but it’s home, nonetheless.