The 31 Days of Halloween: Week 4 Mini-Reviews (Part Two)

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31 Days of Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Child, Bone Tomahawk, cinema, Dead of Night, film reviews, films, Freddy Krueger, Freddy vs Jason, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, horror, horror anthologies, horror films, horror franchises, horror westerns, Lost River, mini-reviews, Movies, October, Pay the Ghost, remakes, Saw franchise, Saw: The Final Chapter, Wes Craven, Wes Craven's New Nightmare

Slowly by slowly, little by little, we continue to try to catch up with the avalanche of films from our October horror spectacular. Here are the mini-reviews from the second half of the fourth week of October, 10/22 to 10/25. Coming up, we finally approach the end of the 31 Days of Halloween with the fifth (and final) week of October. We’ll be discussing new films like Spike Lee’s Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, Contracted: Phase 2 and The Gift, as well as old favorites like Jaws, Trick ‘r Treat and Swamp Thing. Stay tuned, gentle readers: that light at the end of the tunnel might be daylight or it might be some sort of creepy ghost train…only one way to find out!

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Thursday, 10/22

A Nightmare on Elm Street — It all started here. There’s a reason why Wes Craven’s seminal creation would go on to spawn not only a blockbuster franchise but a genuine pop culture phenomenon: it is, quite simply, one of the best, most original films to come out of the entire history of the horror genre, from the silent days to modern times. By welding the burgeoning slasher genre to something explicitly supernatural and dream-like, Craven made a cinematic Frankenstein that would change the game for decades to come and introduce the world to one of the most iconic boogeymen of all time.

Much grittier than anything else in the series until Craven would return with New Nightmare, there is very little of the trademark wisecracks and villain worship that would come. In the original installment, Freddy Krueger is a terrifying creation, a scarred, insane, remorseless child killing demon who morphs and bends reality to his whim, far removed from the smarmier jokester that the character would eventually become. The setpieces (Johnny Depp sucked into his own bed; the body-bag dragging down the school hall; Freddy in the bath; the victim tossed around her room by an invisible Freddy) are as iconic as anything by Argento and the cast is likable enough to make us actually care what happens. In a long career, Wes Craven would never top this unforgettable blast of pure nightmarish nitro.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge — Coming off the high that was the original entry, the first sequel to Craven’s iconic creation was always going to have an uphill climb. It’s not that director Steve Miner didn’t try: there are certainly moments and setpieces (the opening school bus bit is pretty great, for one) that stand up with the first film. There’s a gleefully gonzo element to much of the film that allows for exploding parakeets, backyard barbecue massacres and an unexplained (but plainly obvious) homoerotic subtext that prevents the film from ever becoming boring.

On the other hand, however, Freddy’s Revenge is also sort of a mess, featuring an unnecessary possession angle (Freddy takes over a teen’s body in order to continue his killing spree), lots of rough acting and an unfortunately silly aftertaste to much of the proceedings: the aforementioned parakeet is one of those oddities that would never fit in anywhere, regardless of the film, context or era. If anything, Freddy’s Revenge stands as a fledgling franchise taking the first tentative steps towards immortality.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors — The first NOES film that I ever saw in the theater (I snuck into the showing when I was the ripe old age of ten), Dream Warriors is also my very favorite installment in the series, including Craven’s original. Hell, the third entry in the NOES franchise is actually one of my favorite films, of any genre, period.

For my money, Dream Warriors is the perfect culmination of what Elm Street has to offer: the kills/setpieces are inventive, unnerving and pretty glorious (Freddy as puppetmaster and “Primetime Freddy” are probably my favorites); the kids are likable and fun; the pop-metal soundtrack is appropriately kickass (in that patented late-’80s way) and, most importantly, Robert Englund’s Freddy finally perfected his trademark brand of razor-sharp snark here, finding a perfect balance between smarmy sarcasm and genuine dread. Dream Warriors also has the benefit of being one of only three Elm Street films that creator Craven was directly involved with: although he didn’t direct the film (that honor would go to The Blob remake’s Chuck Russell), Craven did co-write the script. As far as I’m concerned, horror films just don’t get much better than this.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master — Although it’s at least a solid half-step down from the utterly amazing Dream Warriors, Renny Harlin’s The Dream Master (his precursor to action juggernaut Die Hard 2) is still a great film and a more than worthy entry in the franchise’s “golden era.” We continue to get more of Freddy’s back story here and, although the humor is much more upfront, this is still, first and foremost, an inventive slasher film. Dream Master is also where Alice, NOES’ best final girl after the original Nancy, really comes into her ass-kicking own.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child — Although Stephen Hopkins’ (also known for Predator 2, Judgment Night and the criminally under-rated Ghost and the Darkness) Dream Child is much jokier and more gimmicky than its predecessors, it’s still a fun, highly watchable and suitably entertaining entry in the series. Although the film is never as inventive as the ones that immediately preceded it, the notion of Alice’s ever-sleeping unborn child is a great revelation/complication and the “doll party” death is still one of the ickiest and most disturbing in the entire franchise. The last truly good NOES film, since I’ve always considered New Nightmare to be a slightly different kind of animal.

Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare — When it first came out in theaters, I remember that I couldn’t get enough of Freddy’s Dead, the “supposedly” final installment in the Elm Street saga (at that time, at least): I know that I saw it at least twice but I might have actually seen it three times, to be honest. I do remember one thing quite distinctly, however: if I got any more excited about the film’s 3D aspects (we were given glasses at the screening and I think I still have a pair stowed away somewhere), I’m pretty sure that my head would have literally exploded, sending brain matter to every corner of my humble multiplex.

Time and perspective, as they often are, have not been kind to The Final Nightmare (feature debut for Tank Girl’s Rachel Talalay and one of only three non-TV credits to her resume, thus far). In every way, Freddy’s Dead is the absolute nadir of the series (including the goofy second film), a film that’s much more interested in throwing silly, random pop culture references at the audience (“You forgot the Power Glove!” is as immortal as it is idiotic) than it is in crafting anything approximating a legitimate scare. Gone is any notion of actually being frightening, in any way, shape or form: this is Freddy Krueger as stand-up comic, “slaying” the audience with the aid of things like an extended Wizard of Oz gag and cameos from Tom and Roseanne Arnold.

Despite a genuinely intriguing core premise (with all of the children on Elm Street finally gone, the adults have all gone insane), Freddy’s Dead is nothing but one lame, dated raspberry after another. Small wonder, then, that when the series did finally attempt to move past The Final Nightmare, it went in the completely different, meta-fictional direction of New Nightmare: when you’ve scrapped the bottom of the barrel straight to the wood, there’s just no further down to go.

Friday, 10/23

Saw: The Final Chapter — As hard as it is for me to believe now, there was once a point in time where I not only really liked the Saw series but actually anticipated each entry with something that probably approached a low-level kind of fanboyism. Youth, as we all know, is very much wasted on the young.

By the time I finally got around to watching the concluding chapter of the series recently, not only was I no longer a die-hard fan, I actually disliked much of what I previously enjoyed, finding only the first and third entries to really have any merit. Saw: The Final Chapter (or Saw 3D, if you were “lucky” enough to catch it in theaters) is, without a doubt, the absolute worst entry in the franchise, a feat made all the more impressive when one remembers how truly wretched the 4th and 5th installments were. Loud, chaotic, nauseatingly violent, lunk-headed, ugly, inane and tedious, The Final Chapter manages to wrap everything up with a bow by introducing so many deus ex machinas and “twists” that it’s pretty obvious the series’ caretakers must dislike it as much as we do. The very best, most succinct way I can describe this film is “obnoxious.”

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare — After the franchise went out in a cotton-candy bang of celebrity cameos, Nintendo references and more bad one-liners than an amateur open mic, it seemed that Freddy Krueger and his little spot of suburban hell might go the way of the dodo. Instead, creator Wes Craven would return to the series he kickstarted a mere three years later with New Nightmare, a smart bit of meta-fiction that would serve as a sort of dry run for what would become Craven’s “modern-day” legacy: the Scream series.

Much more serious, stream-lined and genuinely eerie than anything in the franchise since the debut film (not surprising, considering the genesis), New Nightmare uses the conceit that the actual creative personnel behind the films (writer/director Craven, original stars Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon, Freddy portrayer Robert Englund) are now being haunted by an honest to god demon, a creature which has decided to portray itself as Elm Street’s resident stalker for familiarity reasons (think of the various forms that It takes throughout the novel, as comparison).

The meta-angle is smart because it allows Craven to not only return to the franchise he created but to also comment on the violence, terror and nightmares he’s left behind in his wake. More so than his peers, Craven has always been at his strongest when he’s not only creating horror but actively commenting on it, perhaps due to his early turn as a member of academia. As a NOES film, New Nightmare performs lots of smart fan service, giving Elm Street acolytes the opportunity to spend a little more time with some beloved old friends: as a horror film, it’s generally successful, trading in the gaudy variety of the later films for a more streamlined sense of stalk-and-slash. That said, the film’s action can tend towards the cheesy, at times (the final confrontation, in particular, is pretty silly), and there’s never the overriding sense of fun produced by the best films in the series (3, 1 and 4, if we’re keeping score). It’s a good film, mind you, and exponentially better than what immediately preceded it: it’s just never been one of my personal favorites, that’s all.

Saturday, 10/24

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) — I actively avoided watching the 2010 remake of Craven’s immortal Nightmare on Elm Street for a few different reasons: I really, really dislike unnecessary remakes; the recent “reboot” of Friday the 13th not only didn’t add anything new to the mix, it wasn’t even a particularly good F13 ripoff and the NOES “reboot” looked identical; I didn’t think Jackie Earle Haley was a suitable replacement for Robert Englund’s take on Freddy; the implied ultra-serious tone turned me off in the pre-release buzz; there wasn’t anything particularly wrong with the original NOES and I wasn’t sure what the new one was supposed to “fix” or “improve” and, of course, the most important reasons: I really, really dislike unnecessary remakes.

When it came time for this year’s October programming, however, I decided to give the reboot a shot and programmed it at the tail end of my NOES “marathon”: if there was ever a time to approach this with fresh, unjaded eyes, this was it and believe me when I say that I absolutely tried to do so. Despite my preconceived notions, I was fully prepared to let Samuel Bayer (better known for directing roughly a million music videos) blow me out of the water with his vision.

And then, of course, I actually watched the thing. Too technically well-made to be called crap, I still don’t have a problem applying the descriptor: this is soulless, overly glossy, loud, inane garbage, the kind of by-the-numbers modern multiplex filmmaking that’s conducted by committee rather than imagination. The new take on the makeup is awful, Haley’s performance is so generic and beige that he completely fades into the woodwork and all of the numerous references to the far superior original film (such as the “Freddy in the wall” gag) only serve to show just how chintzy and lame the new version is.

Look, I get it: modern audiences don’t like old stuff. No problem. In that case, why not give them someone new, then, instead of some idiotic reinterpretation of something that they’re not going to give two shits about in the first place? The NOES remake is offensive precisely because it appeals to exactly no one: old school fans need this roughly like we need a hole in our heads, whereas “the youth” will probably find this tepid version about as fascinating as listening to Gramps talk about record stores.

Dead of Night — Perhaps the less said about this haphazard late-’70s TV anthology film, the better. Consisting of three stories, Dead of Night features a suitably interesting cast (Ed Begley Jr., Patrick Macnee, Elisah Cook Jr., Horst Buchholz, Joan Hackett and Lee Montgomery all feature prominently) and then doesn’t give them much of anything interesting to do. Ranging from a pre-Back to the Future time-travel jaunt to a clichéd vampire period piece to a grieving mother bringing her dead son back from beyond, nothing here hits with any lasting impact and the overall impression is of a strictly bottom-of-the-shelf product slotted into a lonely Sunday night in order to kill time. Hopelessly dated, Dead of Night is proof that not every wine becomes a classic with age: some just turn into vinegar.

Lost River — Although it’s often easy to forget, celebrities and matinée idols are really, at the end of the day, just human beings like every one else. As such, they love (or hate) corn chips, sing in the shower and idolize other celebrities, just like everyone else. Case in point: leading hunk and all-around indie-action renaissance man, Ryan Gosling. While he may be a mega-charged star, in his own right, it’s pretty obvious that the Gos also really, really looks up to writer/director/badass Nicolas Winding Refn. After all, Gosling was already a lead before Refn cast him in the enigmatic Drive but it was that film (and role) that have clearly resonated the most with him: his “legitimization” in the world of “cool” films, as it were.

For his directorial debut, it’s not surprising that Gosling would turn towards the Danish wunderkind for inspiration, nor is it necessarily surprising that the result would be a huge mess. After all, Refn had to walk before he was setting the asphalt on fire, priming the pump with his Pusher series and the kinda/sorta biopic Bronson before diving into the weird with his surreal Viking curiosity Valhalla Rising and the magical-realist brutalist epics that would follow. With Lost River, Gosling jumps in without testing the waters, aiming for something like the neon-lit melancholy and perversion of Only God Forgives.

The problem, of course, is that all of this is way beyond the abilities of a fledgling filmmaker, especially one who’s still getting the hang of essential storytelling elements. In essence, Lost River is a mishmash of several dozen disparate tropes and themes, pulling in everything from weird, futuristic sex clubs (ala Clockwork Orange) and submerged towns to wandering gangs and general dystopia. There’s a love story (or two) here, lots of evocative atmosphere, plenty of head-scratching strangeness (the sex club, in particular is exceptionally strange) and not a whole lot of narrative. We get random musical numbers, probably because Only God Forgives did the same thing, but the effect is more one of opening random doors and observing assorted activities rather than any sort of overriding theme or intent.

None of this would, of course, make a damn bit of difference if the actual film was as mesmerizing as it intends. It’s not, unfortunately, but it certainly does try: Ben Mendelsohn turns in another of those performances that reinforces his status as the modern-day’s go-to sleazebag, while Christina Hendricks and Iain de Caestecker are solid as the mother/son duo at the heart of the film. There are eye-popping visuals aplenty and the sunken town is a fantastic concept, even if the actual execution leaves a bit to be desired. Even better, Gosling and cinematographer Benoit Debie (who shot Gaspar Noe’s mind-expanding/exploding Enter the Void) turn Detroit into a virtual post-apocalyptic wonderland, a crumbling land of the dead that provides the best possible backdrop for what Gosling has cooking.

Which, as previously mentioned, just doesn’t amount to much, in the end. Films certainly don’t have to make sense: there’s no written (or unwritten) rule that’s ever enforced that, least of all in my personal rulebook. The chief sin of Lost River isn’t that it makes an imperfect kind of sense: the chief sin of Lost River is that it’s haphazard and random, mood and image for the sense of such. Gosling might be looking towards such stylish artisans as Refn, Bava and Argento for inspiration but he’s forgotten the most important part: first and foremost, those filmmakers could tell a story. Lost River might be an “experience” but it could (and should) have been a whole lot more.

Sunday, 10/25

Bone Tomahawk — Although I like and watch all kinds of films, there are two genres that definitely have a lock on my heart: horror films and Westerns. While I’ve loved and been obsessed with horror films since I was a little kid, I actually grew up disliking Westerns something fierce, although anything with Clint Eastwood in it was always at the top of my fave list, regardless of genre. Once I grew up and was actually able to appreciate the genre, I learned that I had been a pretty huge bonehead (sorry Mom and Dad!) and that Westerns could be every bit as glorious as the horror films that I always swore by. Doh.

Since that point, I’ve always had my eyes peeled for that perfect intersection of my twin loves, that Venn diagram of utter awesomeness: the horror-Western. Like most rare, reclusive creatures, however, the horror-Western is a mighty difficult one to pin down. In fact, in all of these years, I’ve really only seen two films that I would consider to be absolutely essential horror-Westerns: Antonia Bird’s criminally under-rated Ravenous (1999), one of my all-time favorite films, and J.T. Petty’s stunning The Burrowers (2008), which has been burned into my mind since the very first time I saw it. At long last, these past favorites can finally set another place at the table: writer-director S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk (2015) is not only the single best horror-Western I’ve seen since The Burrowers, it’s also one of the very best films of the year, hands down.

Bone Tomahawk, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love how Kurt Russell channels the world-weary air of latter-day John Wayne for his flawless portrayal of Sheriff Franklin Hunt, one of the most effortless cinematic badasses ever. I love how Richard Jenkins’ Chicory is the culmination of every sassy, ancient deputy in the history of the genre. I love how none of the characters, whether Patrick Wilson’s kind-hearted and “traditional” hero or Matthew Fox’s charismatic but odious “Indian-killer” are ever reduced to just simplistic stereotypes or lazy cinematic tropes. I love how the smart, Tarantino-esque dialogue adds to the overall feel and flow of the film rather than calling unnecessary attention to itself: there’s a great scene involving the relative merits (or lack thereof) of reading in the tub that provides big belly laughs without detracting from the film’s overall thoughtful, mournful air.

I love cinematographer Benji Bakshi’s gorgeous, panoramic imagery, beautifully composed shots that elegantly place our small, insignificant heroes into a massive, almost apocalyptic landscape that perfectly illustrates the immensity of their quest. I love that the horror element (cannibalistic, nearly inhuman cave-dwelling troglodyte savages who communicate via a series of eerie howling calls) is grounded in reality but never so ruthlessly explained as to lose its overriding air of mystery and menace. Did I mention how much I love the opening that features Sid Haig and David Arquette doing what they do best? No? Well, I love that, too.

To be frankly honest (as if it wasn’t already painfully obvious), I loved every thing about Bone Tomahawk. Just like with The Burrowers and Ravenous, this felt like an instant classic from the very first frame, a feeling which remained constant and consistent throughout its runtime. This is not only a quality horror film or a quality neo-Western: it’s a quality film, period, the kind of immaculately made, exquisitely acted piece of art that makes my heart soar and validates any and every shitty, boring or clichéd film I’ve had to sit through this year. It’s an absolute given that Bone Tomahawk will end up on my year-end Best of list: if most critics didn’t wear blinders when it came to horror films, I’d be willing to wager it would end up on their lists, too.

Freddy vs Jason — The worst thing about Ronny Yu’s Freddy vs Jason isn’t that it’s a dumb film, although it certainly is that. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the film is aggressively stupid, pitched at such a loud, blaring and bubble-headed level that it all but guarantees derision from anyone who grew up on the original NOES and F13 franchises: by comparison, Freddy’s Dead and Jason Goes to Hell both come across as downright Shakespearen.

No, the worst thing about Freddy vs Jason, by a long-shot, is how hard it tries (and overwhelmingly succeeds) in making Freddy Krueger look like a complete and total moron. Never more than one banana peel slip away from outright buffoonery (perhaps that’s on the Blu-ray extras?), this is even more terrible when one realizes that it will also probably stand as Englund’s last official outing behind the makeup. When I think of Freddy, I’d rather think of the cunning, wily and bloodthirsty monster of Dream Warriors or New Nightmare, not the dope in Freddy vs Jason who spends the entire film running around shouting the equivalent of “Those meddling kids!” while shaking his tiny fists at the sky. There’s never a point here where Freddy approaches anything like his former menace (although the Alice in Wonderland riff is a nice try): he’s the whiny nerd making threats while someone gives him a swirly in the boys’ room, the blowhard doofus who needs a little comeuppance from the “cool kids.”

Is it fun, though? Eh…it’s certainly loud, kinetic and action-packed…is that the same thing? Although Freddy gets the shortest possible end of the stick, Jason makes out slightly better, possibly because his constantly bemused expression stands as a perfect surrogate for our disbelief. It’s almost as if Mr. Voorhees is thinking: “Huh: get a look at this, will ya? This is some pretty out there stuff, man.” The actual fight between Freddy and Jason is fun, sure, even if the whole thing feels suspiciously like one of those Peter vs the Chicken fights from Family Guy: at a certain point, they might as well be smashing through panes of glass on the street and upending fruit carts, for all the actual impact it has.

I will freely admit one thing, however: I laugh my damn ass off each and every time I watch the scene where the stoner, referencing Jason’s murderous rampage, observes “Dude, that goalie was pissed about something!” My guess? He just got finished watching this stupid movie.

Pay the Ghost — When it comes to Nicolas Cage, it’s never a given as to which side you’re going to get: will it be the teeth-gnashing, out-of-control, bee-hating Cage of The Wicker Man remake or will it be the restrained, low-key artisan of Joe? The glory of Cage, of course, it that it could be either (or both!): like a box of mixed chocolates, you never really know until you’ve paid your money and taken your chances.

For Uli Edel’s Pay the Ghost, we get a little of both sides, albeit watered-down: call it diluted Cage, if you will. And it works, for the most part: Cage is a massively likable presence as Mike Lawford, the hapless professor who manages to lose his young son during a chaotic Halloween carnival and uncovers a supernatural conspiracy when he tries to find him. There are some genuinely eerie moments here, even if many of them seem borrowed from similar genre fare like Mama or The Woman in Black (perhaps the closest parallel to Pay the Ghost’s themes and execution) and Edel (who was also responsible for the fantastic Baader Meinhof Complex) builds up a reasonable amount of tension throughout.

The biggest problem, as it turns out, is that the film ends up being both too convoluted and too familiar: the moments where Edel and screenwriter Dan Kay (scripting from Tim Lebbon’s novel) break away from the usual “evil forces snatching children” tropes end up being some of the film’s weakest, mostly because it’s often difficult for us to make the connections that the characters are. Even now, I’m not 100% sure of what transpired, although I’m pretty sure I’ve got the gist. That being said, the film is still a reasonable solid, well-made piece of multiplex-ready fare and features a strong performance from Cage and lots of creepy vultures: if that sounds like your thing, I suggest you pay this particular ghost and see what happens.

8/10/15: Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here

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Adam Butcher, Alexander Conti, alpha males, Andre Chemetoff, Arnold Pinnock, Balmorhea, Bryan Murphy, bullies, Canadian films, cinema, co-writers, correctional officers, Dewshane Williams, Dog Pound, drama, emotional abuse, English-language debut, father-son relationships, film reviews, films, first-time actors, guard-prisoner relationships, hunger strike, independent films, indie dramas, inmates, Jane Wheeler, Jeff McEnery, Jeremie Delon, juvenile detention facility, juvenile offenders, K'Naan, Kim Chapiron, Lawrence Bayne, Lynne Adams, male friendships, Mateo Morales, mental abuse, Michael Morang, mother-son relationships, Movies, multiple writers, Nikkfurie, non-professional actors, pecking order, physical abuse, power dynamics, power struggles, prison films, prison rape, prison riot, rape, remakes, Scum, Shane Kippel, Sheitan, Slim Twig, suicide, Taylor Poulin, Trent McMullen, William Ellis, writer-director, youth in trouble

Humans are amazingly resilient animals. We can endure any number of extreme climates, fight back against overwhelming odds and turn veritable wastelands into virtual paradises. We can ponder questions both basic and metaphysical, learn to do just about anything we set our minds to and wrestle the world at large into submission by sheer force of our nearly boundless will. Humans can do all of this (and more) with surprisingly little: all we really need is air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat and a little something to keep the elements off of our heads.

While these biological necessities go without saying, humans also need something that’s a little harder to categorize, a little more difficult to study in a lab. We also need hope. Hope that bad situations can become better, hope that we can achieve our dreams by working hard, hope that we can not only survive, on a day-to-day basis, but find some measure of personal happiness and satisfaction. Humans need hope just as much as we need sustenance and oxygen: without either one, we’re just empty husks of decaying meat, carcasses too stubborn to know that we’re already dead.

There is no hope in French writer-director Kim Chapiron’s Dog Pound (2010), although that’s not really surprising: after all, there was precious little hope in his shocking debut, Sheitan (2006), either. As a filmmaker, Chapiron possesses an almost supernatural ability to submerge his characters (and his audience) into such unrelentingly dark, tragic and terrible situations that the very concept of hope is both elusive and rather laughable. We know that Chapiron’s characters are all doomed from the very first frame: that they often don’t recognize this futility makes their inevitable struggles even more sad. These characters aren’t waving their arms for rescue: they’re thrashing around, frantically, as their increasingly tired bodies drift further and further from the shore, closer to their ultimate ends than they are to any new beginnings.

Essentially a remake of the grim and unrelenting British prison film, Scum (1979), Chapiron’s English-language debut (the film is Canadian but set in Montana) concerns the Enola Vale Youth Correctional Facility and the various individuals who are imprisoned there, as well as the ones doing the imprisoning. We’re quickly introduced to three inmates who will become our entry-way into this particular world: 16-year-old Ecstasy dealer/born victim, Davis (Shane Kippel); 15-year-old repeat offender/car-jacker Angel (Mateo Morales) and 17-year-old hot-head/nominal protagonist, Butch (Adam Butcher).

After being thrown into the facility (Butch has been transferred to Enola Vale after laying a ferocious beat-down on an abusive guard at his previous facility), the trio are quickly brought up to speed by Superintendent Sands (Trent McMullen) and the boys’ immediate authority figure, CO Goodyear (Lawrence Bayne). The rules are easy: do everything you’re told, behave yourself and walk the straight and narrow. The boys who manage to do that become “trustees” and earn more responsibilities, perks and freedom, along with signifying black shirts. The ones who don’t follow the rules get orange jump suits and a one-way ticket to “Special Unit” or, in extreme cases, solitary confinement.

As with any prison film (or actual prison, for that matter), day-to-day life in Dog Pound revolves around a strictly observed pecking order: the alpha dog gets to call the shots and dispense the punishment in whatever way he sees fit. In this particular case, the alpha dog is one seriously scary bully by the name of Banks (first-time actor/former prisoner Taylor Poulin, in a genuinely frightening performance), a character who takes an immediate dislike to both Davis and Butch, albeit for different reasons.

In Davis, Banks and his cronies, Looney (comedian Jeff McEnery) and Eckersley (Bryan Murphy, another first-time actor), see the quintessential weak link, the eternal victim that’s as vital to any bully as oxygen is to those aforementioned humans. They steal his new boots, envy his short sentence, submit him to constant abuse and, in a particularly devastating moment, subject him to a particularly violent sexual assault. Davis is the naive lamb, the chosen sacrifice for those too hard and jaded to feel anything besides hatred and the need to dominant. He’s the face of every petty drug offender tossed into the correctional system, the minnows that feed the sharks.

With Butch, the bullies see something altogether different: a genuine threat to their established social order. In order to maintain his position at the top, Banks must bend Butch to his will, show the pugilistic teen that he may have been able to take out a CO but he’ll never stand against Banks and his minions. While destroying Davis is “pure entertainment” for Banks and his crew, taking Butch down is something much more important: it’s a matter of survival, plain and simple.

As Davis, Butch and, to a much lesser extent, Angel (Morales ends up with the least screen-time, overall, leaving his character rather under-developed) try to negotiate these increasingly choppy waters, CO Goodyear tries to reach the youths through a combination of “tough love” and an unyielding need to do the right thing, even when the right thing isn’t the most pleasant thing. He’s not a perfect man, by any stretch of the imagination: over-worked, under-paid, given to sporadic moments of anger and too thin-stretched to ever affect much change, Goodyear, at the very least, tries. That all of his goodwill becomes undone in one tragic, accidental moment is, unfortunately, to be expected: there is no hope for anyone at Enola Vale, whether they’re behind the bars or in front of them.

This, ultimately, is both the film’s source of strength and its ultimate weakness: since there is no hope for anyone, Dog Pound is an unflinching, full-throttle descent into a literal hell on earth. The camera doesn’t cut away, we get no reprieve from anything that has happened or is about to happen. Even when the characters find some tiny measures of individual happiness, such as when Davis regales the other boys with made-up stories about outrageous sexual dalliances and becomes, if only momentarily, the closest thing he’ll get to “respected,” there’s always the notion that more misery, tragedy and gloom lies just around the corner.

In one of the film’s most subtle, if icky, moments, Butch immobilizes a wandering cockroach by spitting on it until the crawling critter is stuck fast in a globular prison of phlegm and saliva. The insect twitches and moves, compulsively, doing its best to break free, to pull itself from its sticky bonds and scurry off into the safety of the nearest dark corner. By the morning, however, the cockroach is still in the exact same position, drowned in a tiny pool of Butch’s spit. Despite what it might have thought, the roach never had a chance: it was dead the minute Butch’s spit nailed it to the floor, whether it knew it or not. In Dog Pound, the differences between the youthful offenders and the dead roach are many but the similarities? Infinite.

Despite its constantly dreary subject matter, Dog Pound is beautifully made and exquisitely acted, no small feat considering the non-professional status of a good half-dozen of its cast members (many of whom, like Poulin, are actually youth offenders, themselves). Andre Chemetoff’s cinematography captures the inherent grit and claustrophobic quality of the facility perfectly, while the subtle, moody score (featuring the work of instrumental ensemble Balmorhea, among others) counters the often sudden, stunning violence to masterful effect. As with Sheitan, it’s obvious that Chapiron is a filmmaker in full command of every aspect of his craft.

For all of this, however, Dog Pound is still pretty difficult to recommend. The reason, of course, goes back to the point I’ve been hammering this whole time: there is absolutely no hope to be found here, in any way, shape or form. This isn’t to say that every – or even any – film needs to end happily: this is to say that Dog Pound makes a particular point of pounding each and every character so deep into the ground that there’s no possible outcome but the one we get. Each and every victory is false, any and all attempts at understanding or evolution are met with the harshest possible retributions. There is no need for comic relief here, no hope of any of the protagonists coming out on top of their individual struggles. If there is any kind of message to Dog Pound, it’s as basic, cynical and bleak as possible: if you end up in this situation, you are completely, totally and irreparably fucked.

As an example of “feel-bad cinema,” Dog Pound is nearly peerless: this is the kind of film destined to ruin any good mood, turn any optimist into a card-carrying misanthrope. While the world around us can be a harsh, grim place, the world inside Enola Vale is nothing but gray: a million little variations of the shade, infecting every single person that steps behind its walls.

It’s tempting to say that Dog Pound is the kind of film that could change anyone’s opinion about the correctional system (or, at the very least, the youth correctional system) but that just isn’t true: the guards don’t shoulder an inordinate amount of the blame here any more than the inmates do. This is not a tale of power-mad authority figures trying to beat their wards into submission, nor is it a story about hard-working correctional officers dealing with the soul-killing every-day business of keeping individuals locked away from society.

At its heart, Dog Pound is a story about average people making (and continuing to make) terrible decisions, the kind of decisions that can bring nothing but pain to all around them. This is a film about wasted youth, about squandered loyalty and altruistic intent blown to pieces about the terrible reality of the human condition. This is a tragedy, in every sense of the word. This is a hopeless film about hopeless people in a hopeless place, crafted by a singularly unique, uncompromising filmmaker. If you can stomach it, Dog Pound will rip your beating heart from your chest and smash it to smithereens on the floor. There is truth to be found here, some fractured beauty and hints at what could have been, under far different circumstances.

There’s a lot to find and appreciate in Kim Chapiron’s Dog Pound but hope? That, my friends, is one commodity that’s in perilously short supply.

2/19/15: Open Mouth, Remove Doubt

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Addison Timlin, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, Anthony Anderson, Ben Jonson, Charles B. Pierce, Charles B. Pierce Jr., cinema, Ed Lauter, Edward Herrmann, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, Gary Cole, horror, horror movies, Joshua Leonard, meta-films, Movies, remakes, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, slasher films, Spencer Treat Clark, Texarkana, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Veronica Cartwright

Despite an intense dislike of unnecessary remakes and reboots, I’m still able to concede one point: there are certain films that could actually benefit from a second take. Whether a good idea that was scuttled due to production issues or errant elements (bad script, bad actors, bad effects, etc…) or just something that could have used a little longer in the oven, some films just don’t get a fair shake the first time around. A prime example of this particular phenomenon is Charles B. Pierce’s The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976): while this proto-slasher – Pierce’s film actually came out a few years before Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and several years before it would influence Jason Voorhee’s sack-cloth mask in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) – has a lot to recommend it, including some truly ahead-of-its-time brutality and violence, it’s also plagued by a mess of tonal inconsistencies and unnecessary comedic elements. In fact, one of the single biggest problems with the film is director Pierce’s performance as a bumbling cop, a bit of comedic relief that’s as unwelcome as it is amateurish and grating. If ever there was a movie that could use the ol’ remake treatment, this would definitely be one of the front-runners.

This, of course, brings us to 2014 and a long overdue remake of Pierce’s original chiller, courtesy of TV director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. As previously mentioned, there aren’t a ton of crooked lines to straighten: keep the creeping sense of dread, the isolated Texas locations, the terrifying, masked killer, lose the stupid comic relief and voila: low-key exploitation shocker, ready to serve. In an era where remakes tend to become more straight-forward, streamlined, humorless versions of their predecessors, this seems like the biggest no-brainer of all time. Despite starting strong, however, Gomez-Rejon manages to screw this up more direly than Pierce ever could, all while breaking one of my cardinal rules of horror films: he turns a formerly silent killer into a chatter-box and, in the process, scuttles every last bit of tension, fear and power that the original film held. What we’re left with, unfortunately, is a meta-fictional mess that loses the intentional comedy but replaces it with a groan-worthy “tough talkin’ villain who’s hardly a better alternative.

The smartest thing that Gomez-Rejon’s remake does is to not only acknowledge the original film but to find ways to organically work it into the framework of the current one. To that end, we have a similar situation to something like Scream 3 (2000), wherein the events that took place in the original film are treated as fact: in this case, there really were a series of unsolved murders that were perpetrated in the Texarkana area in 1976. The burlap-masked killer was never caught, although suspicions and accusations have flown ever since. Pierce’s film became an ingrained part of the local culture and even became something of a Halloween staple in Texarkana. The events that we’re about to see, we’re told, took place in the area in 2013, nearly forty years after the original murders.

The events in question, of course, are more murders: copycats of the original killings, to be exact. It all begins when Jami (Addison Timlin) and her boyfriend, Corey (Spencer Treat Clark), leave a drive-in screening of Pierce’s film to go neck on Lover’s Lane. Faster than you can say “deja vu all over again,” the burlap-sack-bedecked Phantom shows up and brutally dispatches Corey, before letting Jami leave, albeit with a directive: make the towns-people remember. To that end, we get some bush-league detective work as Jami runs around and tries to dig up the backstory on the Phantom, all while the killer mows down the frightened civilians in pretty much the same ways as the original film. This all culminates in a final “twist” revelation that comes out of left-field, as surprise revelations, double-crosses and an ocean of red herrings come together to create one boisterous, if highly nonsensical, potboiler.

Before the killer speaks, Gomez-Rejon’s film actually builds up a decent amount of suspense and atmosphere. In ways, the beginning is reminiscent of the original Halloween (organically, not slavishly) and has no shortage of style. Once the Phantom opens his pie-hole, however, it’s almost as if the film takes a hard left turn into over-heated pulp and it never recovers. The style becomes gradually fussier and overly flashy, the dialogue becomes ridiculously pulpy and one unbelievable situation rolls into another stretch of belief with uncanny ease. It’s almost as if the arbitrary decision to make the Phantom talk necessitated pitching the film in a more frenetic, over-the-top direction than the original. It’s not a dark comedy, per se, but it’s also not a patch on the original film’s intentional comedy, either.

Case in point: the tough-as-nails Texas Ranger that Ben Jonson portrayed in the original has been replaced by Anthony Anderson’s outrageously over-the-top ‘Lone Wolf’ Morales in the remake. Anderson mugs and chews scenery ferociously, although he manages to stop just shy of original director Pierce’s slapstick performance. It’s an odd choice, especially when we get the scene where Lone Wolf watches a copy of the original film and studies Jonson’s performance: it’s a meta-moment within a meta-film but it doesn’t seem to reveal anything about either Lone Wolf or the film, itself. It’s a problem that comes up again and again: the remake seems to draw attention to or accentuate elements from the first film but to no end.

In certain ways, the film’s devotion to uncovering the Phantom’s backstory (his origin story, if you will) makes this akin to Rob Zombie’s redos of the Halloween series, rather than the murder-procedural of the first film. It’s a decidedly different tone, especially once the film really gets going and seems to be a way to humanize or sympathize (at least to some extent) with the killer, ala Zombie’s abused Michael Myers. I’ve never been a fan of the Halloween remakes and this sometimes brought those to mind in unpleasant ways.

Despite my numerous issues with the film, Gomez-Rejon’s The Town That Dreaded Sundown is certainly not without its charms. The film is constantly stylish, even if it often feels cluttered and overly busy and the effects work is quite impressive: while the original film was no shrinking violet when it came to violence, the remake ups the ante in some pretty significant ways. A setpiece involving a severed head is pretty silly but a protracted stabbing has the uncomplicated, reptilian zeal of a true nightmare. If nothing else, the film usually looks pretty good and is satisfying on a purely visceral level.

The film also has an impressive supporting cast, with familiar faces like Gary Cole, Ed Lauter and the late Edward Herrmann showing up in various capacities. While the whole film is over-the-top and rather feverishly pitched, there’s plenty of game performances to go round. For her part, Addison Timlin (one of the best things about the otherwise depressingly mundane Odd Thomas (2013)) does a fine job as the hero, even if the script keeps trying to saddle her with unnecessary love stories. If anything, I kind of wish that this cast could have come together in a better project: they’re all fun, in pieces, but don’t really add up to a cohesive whole.

Ultimately, I can’t help but feel that Gomez-Rejon’s film is a heap of missed opportunities. In many ways, Pierce’s original was a perfectly serviceable car that just needed a new door: the remake replaces the door, true, but also overhauls the engine in ways that cause the car to cease running. There’s nothing quite as terrifying as a silent, emotionless, motiveless killer: when you can’t reason, bargain or plead with someone, then there truly is no hope. Charles B. Pierce knew this, as did John Carpenter. By making his Phantom speak, taunt, bully and bluster, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon throws out the one element of the original film that unequivocably worked. It’s not how you’d work on a car and it’s definitely not how you build a horror film.

 

10/11/14 (Part Two): Who Goes There?

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31 Days of Halloween, aliens, Arctic setting, auteur theory, based on a short story, Charles Hallahan, classic films, cult classic, David Clennon, Dean Cundey, Donald Moffat, dopplegangers, Ennio Morricone, favorite films, Film auteurs, horror films, isolation, Joel Polis, John Carpenter, Keith David, Kurt Russell, paranoia, Peter Maloney, remakes, Richard Dysart, Richard Masur, sci-fi, sci-fi-horror, scientists, shape-shifters, T.K. Carter, The Thing, Thomas Waites, Wilford Brimley

Although we horror film fanatics tend to be a fairly diverse bunch, there are still a handful of films that are pretty much accepted as canon by discerning viewers. This doesn’t, of course, mean to speak for everyone: many fans who call themselves horror fanatics have no interest in the genre’s history, past or anything more academic than watching the newest collection of gore scenes. I’ve long argued that horror is a genre and field as worthy of deep exploration as any other but it doesn’t change the fact that many viewers are still just after a visceral, momentary experience.

For every “casual” fan of the genre, however, there are plenty of what could best be described as “rabid” fans, folks who live, breathe, eat and sleep the stuff, tearing into everything from silent, black and white films to the newest CGI spectacles. For these fans, there are a few films that have managed to stand out from the crowd, proving endlessly influential and sources of much repeat viewings and continued exploration: Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), the classic Universal monster films, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Peeping Tom (1960), Psycho (1960) and The Exorcist (1973) are but a small handful of the films that would probably show up on most hardcore horror fans “Best of” lists. One would be remiss, of course, if they didn’t also include one of the single most influential, popular and well-made horror films of the ’80s: John Carpenter’s ferocious, ground-breaking and utterly essential sci-horror masterpiece, The Thing (1982).

Although I’m pretty sure that almost everyone is, at the very least, familiar with the basics behind The Thing, the plot is pure simplicity. A team of American scientists at a remote research base in the frozen Arctic come into contact with something decidedly not of this world after they run into a group of Norwegian scientists who are violently pursuing a seemingly innocent dog. What at first seems like an extreme case of “snow madness” is soon revealed to be something much more terrifying: the dog is actually a grotesque, shape-shifting alien organism. The creature is cunning, quick and extremely hungry: with the Norwegians out of the picture, the Americans become the new snack du jour. As resourceful, gung-ho chopper pilot R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russell, in one of his most iconic roles) takes command of the increasingly paranoid and frightened group, he’s faced with a real devil’s dilemma: since the monster can look and act like any of them, how do the men really know which of them are from planet Earth and which are from a location just a little further away in our galaxy?

Full disclosure: I’ve been a pretty nutso fan of Carpenter’s classic ever since I first saw the movie, an impression that hasn’t changed one iota in all the years since. To be frank, The Thing is just about as perfect as a film gets, a classic case of intention meeting craft in a perfect creative spark. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been able to appreciate different aspects of the film: when I was younger, I was all about the ooky effects, rewatching the key setpieces so often that I practically had the creature’s movements memorized. Now that I have a few years under my belt and have become a little more jaded regarding special effects in films, I find myself focusing more on the film’s exquisite use of location and the exceptional ensemble cast: I still dig the ever-lovin’ shit out of the effects scenes, don’t get me wrong, but the subtler aspects of the film are the ones that really push it from something special to something essential.

There’s so much about The Thing that exemplifies the film as one of the very apices of the horror film genre, a perfect storm of disparate elements. There’s Carpenter’s sure-handed, expert direction, of course: the auteur is one of the very best filmmakers for combining action and horror into one Voltron of awesomeness and he has a rare eye for background detail that adds immeasurable tension to every frame of the film. The film was shot by Dean Cundey, the masterful cinematographer responsible for everything from Halloween to D.C. Cab (1983) and Jurassic Park (1993): the film looks absolutely gorgeous and Cundey is expert at making the principal characters seem as small and insignificant against the unforgiving immensity of the Arctic wasteland as possible. The score was done by the iconic Ennio Morricone, the creator of some of the most legendary, unforgettable film scores in the history of the medium. While Carpenter’s self-made synth scores have always a particular highlight of his films, Morricone’s epic, sweeping score really adds a new layer to the proceedings. The groundbreaking practical effects work was done by industry pioneer Rob Bottin and would go on to influence at least the next generation of effects creators, if not more.

And then, of course, there’s that cast. Jeez…what a cast. Taking a cue from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), Carpenter stocks his film with some of the best character and genre actors in the biz, ensuring that no one comes across as generic “cannon fodder.” Kurt Russell…Wilford Brimley…Richard Masur…Keith David…Richard Dysart…Donald Moffat…each and every performer brings their A-game to the proceedings, adding up to one hell of an ensemble performance. The shining star of the group, of course, is Russell: while he’s been behind some of the most iconic action heroes in cinema (any conversation about kick-ass heroes that doesn’t include Snake Plissken is fundamentally flawed from the jump), MacReady is easily one of the highlights. We first meet Russell’s character as he plays computer chess: when the machine beats him, MacReady pours his bourbon down its access panel, shorting the computer out. Classic Kurt, in other words. Regardless of what’s happening on-screen, Russell is always the magnetic, undeniable center of everything: MacReady is one of the great screen creations and much of the credit for this must go to Russell’s inspired performance.

In fact, the cast is so perfect that my one quibble with the film’s actors has always been the same: I’m disappointed that there are no strong female characters here, ala Alien or Aliens (1986). There are certainly room for them, as the previously mentioned examples state. While some have pointed out that an isolated research station wouldn’t be co-ed, this has always seemed like a rather spurious assumption: after all, women have been successfully integrated into many such films (Aliens pretty much makes and ends this argument, thanks not only to Ripley’s character but the other female space marines, as well).

Integration complaint aside, The Thing really is a perfect film. It’s unbelievably tense, expertly crafted, looks amazing and is an absolute blast to watch. So many of the film’s setpieces have been burned into my brain over the years that it’s hard to imagine a world without them: the dog transformation…the hot wire and the blood…the defibrillator gone horribly amok…the spider-head…the cynical, utterly badass ending…the jaw-dropping reveal of the UFO…to be honest, a good 80% of the film plays like a highlights reel, similar to an award-winning band that scores eight hit singles out of ten on their album. I attempted to watch The Thing with as critical an eye as possible, this time around, but my earlier impressions were all just reaffirmed: this thing really is one of the all-time classics. I can’t even knock the film down a few points for being a remake of the Howard Hawk’s classic The Thing From Another World (1951), since it’s one of the few remakes to not only do justice to the original but to improve upon it in pretty much every way: Carpenter’s film has never felt like a cash-grab to me, like other remakes. The Thing has always seemed like a complete labor of love, pure and simple.

As someone who constantly finds myself re-examining and re-evaluating my impressions and opinions on films, I find that my “Best of” lists are, likewise, in constant flux. One thing that’s always remained constant, however, is my love and appreciation for Carpenter’s film. I’m not sure that I’ve ever left The Thing off of a list, to this point, and I can all but guarantee that I probably never will.

10/6/14 (Part One) Et Tu, Spock?

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'70s films, 31 Days of Halloween, alien invasion, alien spores, aliens, Art Hindle, based on, Brooke Adams, cinema, classic films, clones, cult classic, Don Siegel, Donald Sutherland, films, films review, hobo-faced dogs, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin McCarthy, Leonard Nimoy, Michael Chapman, Movies, outer space, Philip Kaufman, pod people, pop psychology, remakes, San Francisco, sci-fi-horror, set in the 1970s, Veronica Cartwright, W.D. Richter

As a general rule, I don’t care for remakes, finding them to be alternately lazy, creatively bankrupt and, in worst case scenarios, downright offensive to the original property. That being said, there are always exceptions to every rule and I must admit that I do swear loyalty to a handful of remakes. John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing (1982) is the definitive version of that tale, despite not being the first. I’ll always feel that Gore Verbinski’s version of The Ring (2002) is a more frightening film than Ringu (1998) and I’ve always enjoyed Philip Kaufman’s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) more than Don Siegel’s 1956 original.

For the record, there’s not much wrong with the original version of Invasion, despite my predilection for the remake. Siegel’s always been one of my favorite directors and he brings a taut, razors’ edge sense of tension to many of the film’s scenes. Kevin McCarthy is a more than able hero and the shadow of the McCarthy Red Scare that hovers over everything is just as palpable a menace as those sinister pod people ever were. That being said, the 1956 version is not without its problems. The framing device, added at the insistence of the producers, dilutes the film to a considerable degree and the movie definitely comes off as more dated than many of its contemporaries. In many ways, the original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a product of its time, although its never been anything less than imminently watchable in the nearly 60 years since its release.

Kaufman’s re-do begins with one of the single most inventive intros I’ve ever seen, a superbly imaginative four-minute-epic that tracks the titular alien spores from their home planet, through the vast reaches of space and down onto the Earth’s surface via rain and condensation. Scored like an old-fashioned nature show, the sequence is a real eye-popper and sets a pretty high bar for the rest of the film. The effects in this scene, particularly the one where the leaf becomes “infected” and grows a pod, are superb, allowing for a pretty decent suspension of disbelief. The sequence also allows for a smooth transition into the film, proper, as we witness one of our protagonists, Elizabeth (Brooke Adams) pick the resulting flower off the plant: with that, we officially begin our descent into sci-fi madness.

Elizabeth works for the San Francisco Department of Health (the city’s various sights and locations are utilized to good effect throughout the film), where she works side by side with Matt (Donald Sutherland), our other erstwhile protagonist. Matt’s a stoic, by-the-book health inspector who brooks absolutely no bullshit from anyone: one of the film’s many highlights is the introductory scene where Matt finds a rat turd in a restaurant’s soup cauldron, only for the manager to argue that it’s a caper. After going back and forth for a few moments, Matt holds the offending item out to the manager: “If it’s a caper, go ahead and eat it.” Game, set, match.

The body snatching really begins in earnest after Elizabeth brings the sprouting pod home to her boyfriend, Geoffrey (Art Hindle). Geoffrey is kind of a jerk, right off the bat, but he gets distinctly odder after a little exposure to the unknown flora: he becomes rather strange and emotionless, leading Elizabeth to tell best friend Matt that her boyfriend isn’t himself…as in, really isn’t himself and might actually be someone else. Matt thinks his gal pal is going a little loony until his friendly neighborhood laundry owner makes the same strange comment about his wife. Something, clearly, is afoot.

After Elizabeth tails her husband and witnesses him handing off strange packages to various strangers around town, she’s pretty sure that her initial suspicions are correct: Geoffrey is involved in something very odd and, potentially, very bad. In the interest of “helping” his friend, Matt takes her to see his friend, Dr. David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), a pop-psychologist who’s seen more than his fair share of these “Person X is not Person X” cases lately. Meanwhile, Matt’s other friends, Jack (Jeff Goldblum) and Nancy Bellicec (Veronica Cartwright), have found something a little strange at their bathhouse: a partially formed humanoid that bears a striking, if rudimentary, resemblance to Jack. In one of the film’s most chilling moments, Nancy watches the humanoid’s eyes spring open at the exact moment that Jack’s close: the clone also has a nose bleed, just like Jack. It would seem that Elizabeth was right, all along: something very strange and terrible is going on.

As the situation around them continues to spiral out of control, Matt, Elizabeth, Jack and Nancy have only themselves to rely on, as any and everyone around them, including the police and government authorities, might very well be “pod people.” The group must also avoid sleeping, if at all possible, since that seems to be when the transformations become complete, resulting in a fully formed clone and a pile of dust where the “real” person used to be. Paranoia, both real and induced by lack of sleep, ensues and the group sees danger wherever they turn. With no one else to turn to, Matt seeks the counsel of Dr. Kibner but is the good doctor really on their side? Or has he become a part of something much bigger, something which could very well spell the end of humanity as we know it?

Above all, Kaufman’s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is one sustained chill after another, punctuated by several setpieces that tip the film into full-blown horror territory. There’s one moment, shocking for how untelegraphed it is, where Matt splatters his clone’s head with a hoe: in a film that’s remarkably restrained as far as violence goes, it’s a truly bracing, horrific moment. The film’s piece de resistance, however, has to be the skin-crawling sequence where Matt dozes on the lawn while pod people form on the grass around him. Not only is the scene unbelievably tense, as we, literally, are watching Matt sleep his life away but the effects are astoundingly grotesque and rather nasty, with the forming pod people resembling nothing so much as the soupy mess at the center of the exploitation class The Incredible Melting Man (1977). It’s a great scene, one that has no equal in the original film. Likewise, the discovery of Jack’s clone is handled with considerably more tension and rising horror than the parallel scene in the first film.

Overall, Kaufman’s remake has a slightly different focus than the original: whereas Siegel’s original bemoaned the increasing lack of cohesion within America, as an outside force sought to drive us apart, the remake takes the much more paranoid viewpoint that we, as individuals, are hopelessly surrounded by mobs of sinister, conspiring others. It’s the same notion that makes us believe people are talking about us from behind their hands or planning some terrible event whenever they meet in secret: it’s the modern notion that no individual should have privacy or secrets in order to “protect” the masses that drives such modern institutes as the NSA. Kaufman’s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers makes the point that sinister groups of people probably are making sinister plans at this very minute: how would we really know?

Despite enjoying McCarthy’s performance in the original quite a bit, I’m much more taken by Sutherland’s performance in the remake. Channeling the same sort of “lovably assholish genius” that Hugh Laurie mined for years in the TV show, House, Sutherland is a thoroughly charismatic presence. Brooke Adams, likewise, is a great relateable character, someone with just steel nerve to get the job done but enough vulnerability to still fill the “damsel in distress” quotient required of film’s from this era. Goldblum and Cartwright are great as the bo-ho best friends, with Cartwright bringing a particularly strong performance: she’s a vastly underrated actor who will probably always be best know for her performance in Alien (1979) but deserves recognition for so much more. And, of course, there’s the colossally fun performance by Leonard Nimoy as the platitude-spouting shrink with an agenda: his character is a great riff on the emotionless performance he perfected as Spock on Star Trek, featuring a truly wonderful bit where he appears to stuff all of the over-the-top emoting normally associated with former cast-mate William Shatner into one little diatribe. It’s a truly great performance, especially since it so ably plays against expectations.

The film looks fantastic, filled with the warm tones and vibrant colors (particularly greens) which always characterized the best of ’70s cinema. The man behind the camera for this one is none other than Michael Chapman, the savant who also shot Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Fugitive (1993) and Space Jam (1996): without a doubt, the remake of the film is a much better-looking film than the original and this comes from someone who really digs on the look of ’50s-era sci-fi films. Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is in a whole other category, however.

As a remake, Kaufman’s film sticks fairly closely to the original and its source material, Jack Finney’s novel, “The Body Snatchers.” Many times, scenes will parallel similar scenes in the first film, although writer W.D. Richter makes a few, significant changes from Siegel’s version. One of the niftiest bits of fan service in the remake is the scene where Kevin McCarthy reprises his role from the original: he jumps in front of Matt and Elizabeth’s car, pounding on the hood and screaming that “They’re coming! They’re already here!” just like he did at the conclusion of the original. A new addition that works spectacularly is the ultra-creepy “howl” that the pod people use whenever they discover a human: it’s a great, skin-crawling bit and Kaufman uses it to perfection in several key moments.

Truth be told, there’s really only one complaint that I have about the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and it’s a pretty specific one: the dog-hobo hybrid that makes an appearance during the pivotal “sneaking through the clones” scene is a real howler, so thoroughly goofy as to completely kill the mood of the film. I’m hard-pressed to think of any other cinematic moment that matches this bit of inanity but the stupid “Chaos reigns fox” from Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) certainly comes to mind. In an interesting bit of coincidence: co-star Goldblum would go on to appear in another remake that featured a human-animal hybrid when he starred in Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly (1986): what the hell are the chances of that?

As I stated earlier, there’s very little wrong with the original film and modern audiences would be well-served by checking it out, if they haven’t already. That being said, Kaufman’s 1978 remake is a much better film on nearly every level, not least of which is an ending that manages to not only beat the original by a country mile but to be one of the single best cinematic endings of all time. In a time and age when we find ourselves increasingly connected to the rest of the world and the notion of “group-think” is becoming more prevalent than ever, much of Invasion of the Body Snatchers has begun to seem rather prophetic. Perhaps the invaders were already here…how would we really know?

 

10/5/14: The Boy Who Cried “Martian!”

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'80s films, 31 Days of Halloween, alien invaders, Bud Cort, child heroes, childhood fears, cinema, Eaten Alive, film reviews, films, Hunter Carson, Invaders From Mars, James Karen, Karen Black, Laraine Newman, Louise Fletcher, martians, Movies, Poltergeist, remakes, sci-fi, sci-fi-horror, set in the 1980's, Spielberg, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Funhouse, Timothy Bottoms, Tobe Hooper

Despite beginning his career with ultra-gritty, low-budget chillers like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Eaten Alive (1977) and The Funhouse (1981), horror auteur Tobe Hooper quickly moved into an odd, mid-’80s phase that saw him tackle bigger budget, more mainstream fare such as the smash-hit, Spielberg-produced Poltergeist (1982), the bizarre space vampire/sci-fi shocker Lifeforce (1985), a remake of the ’50s-era sci-fi classic, Invaders From Mars (1986) and a more expensive, candy-colored sequel to his debut, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986). Since that time, Hooper’s career has been all over the place, although he hasn’t managed to return (as of yet, at least) to either his ’70s-era glory days or his inscrutable ’80s output. While none of his ’80s films, with the exception of Poltergeist, ever made much of a splash (indeed, his ’80s era Canon films actually helped to nail the lid on that studio’s coffin), they’re all infinitely better than the “paint-by-numbers” TV productions and Poverty Row genre pics that would dominate his ’90s-’00s filmography.

Of his ’80s-era films, Invaders From Mars is easily the slightest entry on Hooper’s resume. While Lifeforce wasn’t entirely successful, it was completely audacious, which certainly must count for something. Most critics and fans seem to detest The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 but I’ve never understood the derision or hate that gets heaped on that film: it may not be the same type of movie as the original but it’s a pretty genius production, in its own right, and handily slots into the series’ original mythology before subsequent sequels would scatter the storyline to the four winds. Poltergeist, of course, is almost universally revered, although the conventional wisdom has always been that Spielberg had as big a hand in the production as Hooper did (anyone familiar with films like Eaten Alive and The Funhouse, however, will see plenty of parallels in Poltergeist: Spielberg may have been a presence on the set…he is Spielberg, after all…but the film doesn’t feel like it was his, alone). Of these films, then, only Invaders From Mars seems to stick out like a sore thumb. Lacking the sheer, nutty verve of his other ’80s films, Hooper’s take on the ’50s sci-fi staple isn’t a bad film but it does feel slight and unnecessary, which certainly isn’t a particularly strong recommendation. More than anything, however, Invaders From Mars strikes me as a definite product of its era: unlike classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or even The Funhouse, Hooper’s Invaders has not aged particularly well.

One rainy night, young David Gardner (Hunter Carson) happens to see some sort of alien spaceship descend from the skies and land somewhere over the hills behind his house. David’s a bit of a space buff, so his parents don’t entirely (or at all) believe his story about the UFO but his dutiful father, George (Timothy Bottoms), nonetheless goes over to check it out. Next morning, Mr. Gardner is acting extremely odd: he seems emotionless and robotic, is walking around with one slipper as if it’s the most normal thing in the world and has a strange mark on the back of his neck. David is instantly suspicious of his father but the situation gets even worse after his mother takes a walk with George in the hills (after she finishes washing the dishes, of course): the following morning, she’s equally listless and strange, although she also appears to have developed an appetite for raw hamburger. Something, clearly, is going on.

The situation continues at school, as David overhears his much-detested teacher, Mrs. McKeltch (Louise Fletcher) discussing some sort of secret plans with an equally suspicious police officer, plans which somehow also involve David’s father. David flees his sinister teacher and lands straight in the arms of school nurse, Linda (genre vet Karen Black). Linda doesn’t quite believe David, either, but she’s noticed that something seems to be going on and is determined to get to the bottom of it. “It,” of course, is an evil plan by Martians to invade the earth, a plan which only David and Linda seemed equipped to stop. With time running out and the whole town seemingly under alien control, David and Linda must risk their own lives and freedom in a desperate bid to repel the intruders and restore order to their formerly sleepy little town.

For the most part, Hooper’s version of Invaders From Mars is no better or worse than most similarly constructed/plotted sci-fi films. The creature designs, courtesy of legendary effects artist Stan Winston, are pretty excellent, although it’s a little distracting that the Supreme Martian Leader is a dead-ringer for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle’s Krang: since Krang debuted sometime in 1987/88, I’m more than willing to wager that the character might have been influenced by Hooper’s film. On the other hands, many of the films other effects are absolutely awful, including some of the worst laser effects ever put to film. The musical score is thoroughly generic, although there are some nifty elements to the cinematography: in particular, the spaceship scenes are extremely well-done and favorably compare to similar scenes in Spielberg’s iconic Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

As with the technical side of the film, the acting in Invaders From Mars is equally hit-or-miss. Carson actually does a great job as David: he’s believable and only rarely irritating, two qualities that seem rather rare for ’80s-era child actors. The part where David calls the Martian leader “dickbrain” is pretty great, as it directly recalls the way that the kids speak in other ’80s films like Spielberg’s ET (1982) or Richard Donner’s The Goonies (1985). I also got a big kick out of character actor Bud Cort’s turn as Dr. Weinstein: the bit where he tries to talk sensibly to the Martians is just a hairbreadth away from greatness. On the flip side, Louise Fletcher is astoundingly terrible as Mrs. McKeltch, while Karen Black becomes tedious by the film’s final reel, reduced to no more than a living, breathing, running bag of scream. She begins the film strong but devolves into wet paste, which seems like a terribly shabby way to treat the scream queen.

Of all of these issues, however, none bother me quite so much as the obnoxious ending. Without giving (much) away, suffice to say that anyone who’s familiar with Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City (1980) will know exactly what I’m talking about. These kinds of endings always strike me as cheap, ridiculous cop-outs and it ends up being a severely deflating way to finish the film. Whatever good will had been built up by the final scene was largely squandered with one of those endings that seems designed to elicit nothing more than forehead slapping and audience groaning.

Despite my problems with the movie, however, I would still rather watch something genuine, if a bit clumsy, than something that feels like a carbon-copy of a million other films. When the film works, it’s a rousing, entertaining throwback to a time when effects were still mostly practical and kids’ movies (I still feel that this is aimed at slightly younger audiences) could feel dangerous and high stakes without seeming completely age inappropriate. It’s telling that my warm feelings once the film ended were largely nostalgia-based: while the film itself was fun, it reminded me pretty explicitly of my own youth, which really increased my appreciation of the finished product. Had I not grown up in this era, however, I wonder if I would find Invaders From Mars quite as charming? Despite its good qualities, I’m pretty sure that this won’t supplant TCM 2 as my go-to ’80s Hooper film, although it practically begs for a future double-feature with the original.

 

7/27/14: A Real Case of McCarthyism

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1950s movies, alien invasion, auteur theory, based on a book, black and white film, Body Snatchers, Carolyn Jones, cinema, clones, Communism, Dana Wynter, Don Siegel, dopplegangers, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, invasion, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jack Finney, Jean Willes, Joseph McCarthy, Kevin McCarthy, King Donovan, Larry Gates, McCarthyism, Miles Bennell, Movies, paranoia, pod people, remakes, sci-fi, sci-fi-horror, small town life, The Body Snatchers, the Red Scare, Tom Fadden, Virginia Christine, voice-over narration

What if the people around you, including your family and loved ones, started acting odd? Not tin-foil hat, playing-fetch-with-an-invisible-dog odd, mind you…nothing that obvious: more like a subtle, slightly out of your line of sight kind of odd. Maybe they seem a little out of it…a little too unemotional and disconnected. Perhaps you’d try to tell someone else, let them know that Uncle Johnny didn’t seem quite like himself or that your next-door-neighbor suddenly seemed a little different. What if nobody believed you because everyone was suddenly acting strange, including all authority figures? Where would you turn, at that point? Would you “give in” and join the masses or would you resist, standing alone against everyone else? More importantly, however…how could you be really sure that the problem wasn’t that YOU had suddenly changed? How can you tell when you’re just paranoid…and when you’re right?

This, of course, is the basic setup for Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the first of several filmed adaptations of Jack Finney’s sci-fi classic, The Body Snatchers. Coming as it did during the maelstrom that was McCarthyism and the “Red Scare” of Communism, it’s pretty easy to read both Finney’s original novel and Siegel’s original adaptation as commentary on the insidious nature of the communist infiltration of America during the mid-’50s (or, to be more accurate, the perception of certain high-ranking members of the U.S. government as to said subtle “invasion”). While there’s certainly nothing wrong with this reading, I’ve always felt that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was more a cautionary tale about the dangers of assimilation and the problems of “group think,” namely humanity’s inability to turn down any opportunity to “join the mob,” than it was explicitly about communism. Regardless of the particular focus, however, one thing is abundantly clear: Finney’s original tale of clones, pod people and alien invaders has proved remarkably resilient and has become part of the cultural zeitgeist in a pretty substantial way.

IOTBS’s begins with a wrap-around story (added later, against Siegel’s wishes, and easily the worst thing about the film) that introduces us to our hero, Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy), currently under a psych hold at the hospital. No one seems to believe Miles and the story we’ll see is his frantic explanation of events to one of the attending physicians, in order to convince them that he;s not bonkers. It’s an old-fashioned kind of affectation, similar to the whole “it’s only a dream” cliché, and exists purely to give the film a happy ending (the studio demanded the additional scenes after Siegel’s original cut was deemed “too bleak” for the general public).

Miles has been on vacation for a few weeks and returns to his small town of Santa Mira, California, to find that things have been a bit strange in his absence. Plenty of folks have been getting sick, according to his assistant, Sally (Jean Willes), but everyone refused to see the other town doctor or tell Sally about their issues. To compound the mystery, Miles’ old flame, Becky (Dana Wynter), comes to him looking for help: her friend, Wilma (Virginia Christine), has somehow become convinced that her uncle, Ira (Tom Fadden) is actually an impostor. According to Wilma, Uncle Ira looks, sounds and talks just like he always did but there are small, almost imperceptible differences: namely, the “spark” seems to be gone and Ira seems strangely emotionless. Becky has tried to convince her friend that she’s being unnecessarily paranoid, to no avail: she wants Miles to use his authority as a doctor to set Wilma straight.

After running into his psychiatrist friend Danny (Larry Gates), however, Miles comes to realize that there may be more going on in Santa Mira than he originally thought: some sort of “mass psychosis” is causing people to believe that their loved ones are actually impostors. The shit really hits the fan, however, when Miles gets a call from his good buddy, Jack (King Donovan): turns out that Jack has found some sort of “unfinished man” at his house, a seemingly dead (or comatose) creature that looks just like a human, minus things like fingerprints and distinct facial features. At first, Miles and the others seem rather blase about the whole thing (the body is just kept lying on a billiards table and they all sort of poke around it, as if it were roadkill rather than an unformed body) but an overnight development suitably shocks them: the body now looks exactly like Jack, right down to a recent cut on his hand. When Miles finds a similar “double” of Becky, in her basement, one thing is abundantly clear: extreme strangeness is afoot.

Surprisingly, however, the police seem decidedly nonplussed by the whole thing, waving off Miles’ concerns and cueing him in to the fact that there might be a deeper conspiracy going on. Sure enough, Miles, Becky, Jack and his wife, Teddy (Carolyn Jones) are witness to something truly horrific: weird, alien seed pods are spitting out the half-formed proto-humans. Putting two and two together, Miles and the others realize that they’re in the midst of an alien invasion: somehow, the seed pods are cloning the residents of Santa Mira, replacing them with emotionless doubles like Wilma’s Uncle Ira. Who can the friends turn to, however, when everyone seems suspiciously emotionless? When everyone, including law enforcement, seem like alien clones, it’s up to Miles and the others to resist and get the word out to the rest of the world…before it’s too late.

Siegel’s version of IOTBS has always been hailed as a sci-fi masterpiece and there’s quite a lot to like here: the pod scenes are always creepy and suitably icky, there are plenty of well-staged, intense chase sequences (Siegel, after all, was the gritty action-auteur behind such classics as The Killers (1964), Dirty Harry (1971) and Escape From Alcatraz (1979)) and there are several pretty unforgettable images (one of the very best is the bit where Miles kills his own clone with a pitchfork). It’s also quite obvious that Siegel’s film has influenced modern-day filmmakers: the scene where Miles and Becky try to pass themselves off as “pod people,” in order to pass through the clones unnoticed, should be rather familiar to anyone who’s ever seen Shaun of the Dead (2004), while the notion of Miles and Becky taking pills in order to prevent falling asleep couldn’t have passed by Wes Craven unnoticed. The film maintains a fairly tense, claustrophobic atmosphere and Siegel’s original, “downer” ending may be old-hat in these pessimistic times but surely would have been a strong jolt of pure moonshine back in the mid-’50s.

While there’s a lot to like here, however, there’s also quite a bit that doesn’t work. The aforementioned wraparound story is fairly awful and clichéd, while the musical score is always overbearing and too “obvious”: in certain ways, IOTBS is scored like a silent movie, with all of the bombast that the descriptor entails. I also never felt like the romance between Becky and Miles caught heat: it always hovered somewhere between silly and (ironically enough) emotionless, which allows Becky’s latter-half declaration that “I want to love and be loved! I don’t want a world without love!” to come across as both sarcastic and kind of sad.

It’s also kind of difficult to figure out just what the “rules” for the pod people are: sometimes they’re emotionless, sometimes they form mobs of shouting, angry people…sometimes the clones act normal, sometimes they don’t…sometimes the very act of falling asleep is enough to get someone “replaced,” sometimes it isn’t. Without a clear establishment of these basic guidelines, IOTBS comes across much less like a “hard” sci-fi film and more like a drive-in feature (not necessarily a bad thing, to be honest, but still a thing).

Quibbles aside, however, Siegel’s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is always entertaining and, frequently, more than a little creepy. The suffocating feeling of paranoia is a palpable thing and when the film is firing on all cylinders, it’s pretty unstoppable: the scene where pods are handed out to the town-members, in preparation of a larger scale invasion, is a real corker and there’s the very real sense that IOTBS features a fun-house warped version of a Norman Rockwell painting. Kevin McCarthy is a suitably fun, if occasionally over-the-top hero and if the rest of the cast ends up a bit generic, they all provide fine, consistent support. The black and white cinematography is also quite nice, if not quite as evocative as something like The Bad Seed (1956): it’s fairly workmanlike but gets the job done. As far as the various film versions of Finney’s story go, I’ve always been more partial to the 1978 version (they always have me at “Donald Sutherland”) but Siegel’s original is a close runner-up. If you’ve never seen the original, give it a shot: the film might feel a tad bit “old-fashioned” today (and that’s coming from someone who tends to place somewhat excessive emphasis on older films) but there’s still a lot of value here.

After all, as our world becomes smaller and more homogenized, it’s increasingly easy to see the notion of “pod people” as being a little too close for comfort: to paraphrase Pogo: we have seen the pod people and they is us.

7/19/14 (Part Two): Sucker’s Bet

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13 Sins, bad cops, bad decisions, brothers, cinema, conspiracy theories, corrupt law enforcement, Daniel Stamm, deadly games, desperate times, Devon Graye, dysfunctional family, Elliot Brindle, film reviews, films, horror films, Mark Webber, Movies, Pruitt Taylor Vance, remakes, Ron Perlman, Rutina Wesley, The Game, The Last Exorcism, Tom Bower, writer-director

Just what, exactly, would you be willing to do for complete financial freedom? It’s an interesting question, especially in this day and age where any and everyone seem desperate to secure their “15 minutes of fame” by any means necessary. The formerly notorious but now (presumably) passe game show, Fear Factor, sought to answer this question with a variety of stunts and “dares,” although the rewards usually fell far short of the aforementioned “complete financial freedom” angle. In this case, contestants would eat reindeer testicles, sit in glass boxes filled with tarantulas and perform “hazardous” stunts (hazardous, of course, being a relative term when network television takes as many precautions as humanly possible to avoid on-air death), all for a cash prize that, if memory serves correctly, was nowhere near the amount required to make someone financially independent.

In the case of Fear Factor, people were willing to do some pretty icky things (eating balut, as far as I’m concerned, will always be a deal-breaker) but everything was undertaken with the assurance (again, born of network television, the “safe word” of the entertainment industry) that no harm could really befall the contestants or those around them: the very worst that could happen would be someone puking, which falls pretty low on the “soul-shattering” scale. What if the safety nets of polite society were removed, however? What if the stakes were raised and someone were actually offered complete financial security in exchange for completing a series of ever more heinous tasks? Where would we end up drawing the line? Would we draw a line? These are the questions that writer/director Daniel Stamm asks in 13 Sins (2014), a remake of the earlier Thai film 13: Game of Death (2006). When basic morality stands in the way of a truly life-changing amount of money, is the world really as black and white as we wish it were? Or are the obvious shades of gray that fill the margins more terrifying than any potential monster under the bed?

After a truly dynamic, disturbing opening that introduces us to the closing moves of a previous “game,” 13 Sins begins proper by introducing us to our hero, the put-upon sad-sack known as Elliot Brindle (Mark Webber). As far as problems go, Elliot has a fairly full plate: he’s just about to get married to his pregnant fiancée, Shelby (Rutina Wesley), while also taking care of his mentally disabled brother, Michael (Devon Graye) and his bitter, racist, hateful father (Tom Bower). To make everything better, Elliot has just been fired from his job as an insurance salesman (he isn’t able to “do what it takes,” which is about as obvious as the foreshadowing really gets), his brother is getting kicked out of his care facility and his father is getting kicked out of his retirement home. Holy insurmountable problems, Batman! To whit: Elliot now has no income, an expensive wedding to take care of and needs to move his vile father (Shelby happens to be black, which makes her a constant target for the father’s virulent racism) and loving but “challenging” brother into his small home. For most people, these might be the kind of issues that would completely crush and destroy someone’s spirit. Turns out, Elliot may just be one of those kind of folks, after all.

Our hero’s luck changes, however, when he gets a mysterious phone call while stopped at a deserted intersection in the middle of the night. The unknown, excessively jovial person on the other end of the line tells Elliot that he has the opportunity to be on a game show: when Elliot, rightfully, expresses his disbelief, the caller proceeds to reveal several aspects about Elliot’s personal life that no one should really know. He then tells Elliot to swat the pesky fly that’s currently bopping around his car: if he does, he’ll automatically earn $1000. After swatting the fly, Elliot receives a text message that alerts him to the successful completion of Task 1. A follow-up calls gives Elliot his next task: eat the dead fly and receive $3622, the exact amount that Shelby owes on her credit card. This would make an awfully nice wedding present, according to the voice, and a perfect way to begin Elliot and Shelby’s life as a married couple.

After getting home and checking his bank account, Elliot realizes that the caller isn’t joking: $1000 has recently been deposited to his account. After roughly a second of forethought, Elliot eats the fly, completing Task 2 and receiving his next payment. At this point, the mysterious caller fills him in on the rest of the details: Elliot must complete a total of thirteen excessively more difficult tasks, each task worth an increasingly large sum of money, all the way up to the 13th task, which will reward Elliot with a “life-changing amount of money.” Failure to complete any task will result in “losing it all,” including all money won up to that point, as will trying to interfere with the game in any way. Telling anyone about the game, whether his loving fiancée or law enforcement officials, will also result in a loss: according to the voice, the game is solely Elliot’s to win (or lose). If he wins, Elliot and Shelby will begin their new life on their own terms. If he loses, well…how much worse off could he get? Elliot completes his registration process by facing the bathroom window and intoning “I will dance with the golden toad”: with that, the game is afoot…and Elliot’s fate is sealed.

The kicker, of course, is that Elliot really has no idea how bad things will get until the shit hits the proverbial fan. While the initial tasks seem harmless, if decidedly odd (killing and eating a fly may be nasty but it doesn’t exactly turn someone into Ed Gein), the follow-up tasks find Elliot going down an increasingly grim rabbit hole of public disturbance and reprehensible behavior: making a child cry, burning up a church’s nativity scene (handcrafted by blind children, naturally), getting revenge on a childhood bully. As Elliot completes the increasingly more unpleasant tasks, he must take great pains to keep Shelby, Michael and his father from figuring out what’s going on. Things become even more complicated when a gruff, no-nonsense police detective (Ron Perlman) begins investigating Elliot’s various “crimes.” As the caller continually reminds Elliot, he’s now so far into the game that winning it is the only way out: otherwise, he’ll end up serving some pretty decent jail time for his various “crimes against humanity.”

Elliot is fundamentally a good guy, however, and really just wants to provide for his family under some pretty difficult circumstances. As a nice guy, he begins to balk at some of the tasks but an odd thing begins to happen: as Elliot completes more and more tasks, he begins to get a bit…well, acclimated, to the whole thing. He begins to swagger around and get back some of his old self-confidence. While Elliot may not be doing particularly nice things, he is, at the very least, taking direct steps to dig his way out of the financial hole he’s buried in. He’s doing what all of us would like to do: pulling himself up by his own bootstraps and initiative. Once the tasks take a horrifying turn, however, Elliot is left with a very basic but all-important question: what does it benefit a man to gain it all if he loses his very humanity, in the process? As his life spirals completely out of control and Elliot comes ever closer to that feared 13th Task, he will quickly learn that there are more than one way to play any game. And, sometimes, winning can be worse than losing.

While watching 13 Sins, I was constantly reminded of an old saying: “If this is the kind of thing you like, then you’re gonna love this.” In some ways, Stamm’s film is the very epitome of this ideal: certain people (myself included) will eat up the film’s concentrated nastiness with a spoon, whereas others will find the whole thing to be such a despicable little bit of coal-black misanthropy that they probably won’t make it past the first 10 minutes. To be fair, both viewpoints are completely valid: 13 Sins is absolutely not for everyone and anyone with a decidedly “sensitive” palette should approach this with extreme caution. While the film does go to some pretty intense places, gore-wise, it goes to some even more intense places, concept-wise, which will probably be the dividing line for most folks.

In many ways, the film acts as a sort of moral barometer, asking the audience just how far “too far” really is. I can think of very few people who would have significant moral quandaries over eating, much less killing, a fly. I even know plenty of people who might not balk at making an anonymous child cry (if you know who you are, for gods’ sake, keep your damn hand down!). Suffice to say, however, that I’m eternally grateful for not knowing anyone who could surf through all 13 tasks without feeling at least some sort of pang to the conscience area, especially once we get to the dreaded 13th task. This, then, is the film’s greatest coup and its biggest virtue: it sets up a slippery-slope of dubious actions that traps the viewer half-way down, like a Venus Fly Trap. As we find more and more ways to justify what goes on (I could do that, if I really tried…I could do that if I didn’t think about it…I could do that if I really had to…I could do that if I had absolutely no other choice), it becomes painfully clear that morality and the notion of “good vs evil” are much less concretely defined than many of us might have previously hoped. Even when one adds in the supposed assurances of organized religion, there’s still the unspoken notion that we would violate any and every taboo if only to safeguard our loved ones: hard-and-fast rules are all well and good until it’s your husband/wife/baby/parents/siblings/best friends on the chopping block. At that point, many of us might find ourselves rethinking long-held notions of right and wrong, arriving at a definition that’s a bit more conditional and less rigidly enforced.

But this is all, of course, almost completely academic: a film can worry us with moral quandaries until the cows come home (Are the cows properly treated? Have they been fed growth hormones and kept in tiny pens? Are we raising them simply to be slaughtered or do realize that all living creatures have inherent value as individuals? What if the cows can’t find their way home?) but still have as much impact as one of those old videos from high school health classes. How does 13 Sins hold up as an actual film? Does it work as both a thriller/chiller and a thought-provoking dissertation on our modern malaise? For the most part, despite a few rather sizable plot holes, the answer is a resounding “absolutely.”

While I’ve never seen Stamm’s previous films (I’ve never cared enough for demonic possession films to have really paid The Last Exorcism (2010) much attention and his debut, A Necessary Death (2008) sounds intriguing but was, likewise, off my radar), 13 Sins is a thoroughly well-made, effective little film. Mark Webber channels the working-class relateability of someone like Sam Rockwell in his portrayal of Elliot, which makes it much easier to empathize with his character’s oftentimes terrible decision-making. Devon Graye is excellent as the developmentally-disabled Michael, managing to make the character seem less stereotypical than might previously be possible for a character of this type in a genre film. Perlman, of course, is spectacular but when is the guy ever bad? Even if he were phoning in the performance (which he doesn’t), Perlman would be an utterly magnetic, charismatic presence: there’s one throwaway bit where he sticks his tongue out at a little girl that manages to be hit so many character “buttons” at one time that it’s kind of ridiculous…in a completely badass way, of course. My big complaint with Perlman’s performance in 13 Sins is the same from any film that he doesn’t star in: there’s way too little of him here, although what’s here is suitably excellent. The rest of the cast, from Tom Bower’s obnoxious father to Rutina Wesley’s eternally faithful, if utterly confused, Shelby provide great support for Webber but, ultimately, this is his film and his journey to make.

From a production standpoint, 13 Sins is top-notch: while the film often has a glossy, heavily produced look, the subject matter is pure exploitation, taking a certain perverse glee in presenting a raft of unpleasant situations in as visually appealing a way as possible. When they saw an arm off in the film, it looks great, even if the scene is so protracted as to practically demand nausea: it’s the film’s great blessing (curse?) that everything is delivered in as hyper-realistic a way as possible, even as the scenarios become increasingly fanciful and “unrealistic.”

Since 13 Sins is, technically, a mystery (at least in the same vein as Fincher’s The Game (1997)), the script becomes all-important and Stamm (working with co-writer David Birke) has crafted a particularly smart, strong foundation. While I found the ultimate resolution to be a little problematic (without going into much detail, it bothered me that Elliot didn’t think through the ultimate ramifications of his final bit of revenge: could he have really been that short-sighted?), the plot is exceedingly tight. The tendency to group certain tasks together felt a little arbitrary and more than a little lazy, on occasion (Wait…we really have to think up 13 different tasks? What if we just came up with…I dunno…11 or so and just fudged the rest?) and there were a few elements that seemed unnecessarily vague (I still have no idea what the 5th Task entailed, although I’m pretty sure the filmmakers didn’t, either) but these are, ultimately, pretty small quibbles. When 13 Sins works, it works amazingly well, provided the same sort of gut-punch, visceral reaction that I had to the first Saw (2004). When it doesn’t work, it’s a quick-paced, highly entertaining and suitably sleazy thriller: in my book, that’s kind of a win-win situation.

Ultimately, 13 Sins, like American Mary (2012), is one of those films that is easy for me to like but difficult for me to recommend. While the subject matter is certainly less immediately reprehensible than the body modification/torture scenarios of American Mary, I can’t help but feel that many viewers will feel completely shut out of the pitch-black heart that beats at the center of 13 Sins. In many ways, Stamm’s film is holding a cracked fun house mirror up to society and asking us if we like what we see: in a day and age where, literally, “anything goes,” Stamm asks us to reconsider that notion just a little further. After all, you might be willing to do just about anything to provide yourself with a viable future but how far are you actually willing to go to test that hypothesis? Killing that fly is a small step, sure, but it’s still the first step: at this point, what step are we all on and how far will we go before we say “enough is enough?”

5/19/14: Everything Old is New Again

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Bill Moseley, black and white film, cinema, color vs black & white, film reviews, films, George Romero, horror, horror films, isolated estates, isolation, Katie Finneran, McKee Anderson, Michael Haneke, Movies, Night of the Living Dead, Patricia Tallman, practical effects, remakes, special effects pioneer, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the living dead, Tom Savini, Tom Towles, Tony Todd, William Butler, zombie movies, zombies

As a general rule, I’m not a fan of film remakes, especially remakes of classic or iconic films. I can see the merit, to a point, in remaking a bad or compromised film, especially if you were a fan of the original…sort of a take two, if you will. Remaking a well-made, well-received film, however, seems completely pointless. I’ll go to the grave stating that no modern audience member will die if they’re forced to watch something that’s more than a few years old. I promise: sitting through a black and white film or something from any of the various decades before 2010 will not cause internal bleeding, memory loss or phantom limb syndrome.

With that being said, however, I’m a little more ambivalent when it comes to filmmaker remaking their own films. While this seems like kind of an odd, specific situation, it has happened a few times, usually when a popular foreign director makes the transition to Hollywood films: German misery merchant Michael Haneke remade his original Funny Games (1997) as an American version in 2007; Takashi Shimizu remade Ju-On (2002) as The Grudge (2004) for American audiences;  George Sluizer turned Spoorloos (1988) into The Vanishing (1993); and Ole Bornedal’s Nattevagten (1994) became the Ewan McGregor starring Nightwatch (1997). In each of these instances, the originals were popular films, especially on the festival circuit, which prompted American remakes to capitalize on the buzz (although it’s interesting to note that Haneke waited a decade between his versions of Funny Games): the thought, it seems, is that American audiences aren’t big on reading subtitles, since some of these films are only different by virtue of the language spoken. The 1990 remake of George Romero’s iconic Night of the Living Dead doesn’t really fit any of these bills but it’s also the furthest thing from something like the modern remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Friday the 13th, since Romero produced, wrote the screenplay and handpicked the director: special effects pioneer Tom Savini.

If you’ve never seen the original Night of the Living Dead (1968), your first move should be to go watch that, right away: I’ll wait. All done? Excellent. Here’s what you saw: a raw, visceral, black and white nightmare that’s equal parts siege picture and sly social commentary, the kind of film that features a child consuming her mother and a black hero (in 1968, no less) who survives the zombies only to be shot dead by rednecks. It’s an independent film in every sense of the word, featuring a bunch of amateur filmmakers wearing as many hats as they can pile on their heads and going for broke in a way that only hungry, young artists can. It’s an unmitigated classic, almost singlehandedly responsible for nearly 50 years of zombie movies.

Remaking a film like Night of the Living Dead doesn’t seem like such an impossible task: after all, the first film was a crude, zero-budget production where local business people who donated funds took on roles as zombies, newscasters, police, etc. It was a black and white film that required gore effects at a time when that just wasn’t the norm. With all of the advances in filmmaking technology, special effects and computer-generated effects, making something like Night of the Living Dead in this modern era should be easy. The problem, of course, is that Night of the Living Dead was a labor of love: it was a real film that became a classic, similar to Hooper’s original Texas Chainsaw or Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980). Catching lightning is a bottle twice is no easy feat: manufacturing impact and meaning is impossible.

For the most part, Savini’s remake of Night of the Living Dead isn’t drastically different from Romero’s original but there are a few subtle changes/differences. The film still takes place in an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, although the place now looks like a cross between the Sawyer homestead in Texas Chainsaw and Norman’s taxidermy-crammed residence in Psycho (1960). We still get Barbara but Patricia Tallman’s version is a huge improvement from Judith O’Dea’s original: this Barbara is no catatonic babe-in-the-woods but an ass-kicking “final girl,” more Ellen Ripley than doe-eyed victim. Her character development feels very organic, although the scene where she trades her skirt for a pair of pants seems a bit on the nose. Ben is still here but Tony Todd’s version is more of an angry, shouty bloke, not too far removed from Tom Towles’ obnoxious Harry Cooper. This version of Harry manages something that I’d always felt impossible and actually makes the character more repellent and crude: as portrayed in Savini’s version, Harry Cooper is a Jersey Shore-meathead, a ridiculous character who’s just one “You’ze guyz!” away from being a complete stereotype.

This, then, isn’t a carbon-copy of the original, aside from the obvious color vs black and white issue. While many of the ideas and themes from Romero’s original have been kept (Romero did, after all, write the screenplay for the remake), there are many aspects that have been changed completely. The horror of Barbara confronting her own zombified brother has been done-away with in the remake by having her come across his already dead body: it robs a chance for some genuine emotion from the story and feels like a surely missed opportunity. Whereas the original had Ben survive the ordeal only to killed by humans the following morning, the remake does away with this, as well: Barbara is the final survivor and Ben emerges from the house as an obvious zombie, only to be shot and killed by the rednecks. This is a subtle but big difference: in the remake, there’s no mistaking Ben for a zombie and the kill is just about as necessary as you get. In the original, however, it’s never made clear whether Ben is killed because the trigger-happy rednecks think he’s actually a zombie or because they see an opportunity to kill a black man without penalty. Barbara is the one, in the remake, who gets to use the zombie apocalypse for her own ends: when the loathsome Harry Cooper emerges, unscathed, Barbara calmly and coldbloodedly shoots him, proclaiming him another zombie. In this instance, there’s no mistaking her intent, as with the rednecks killing Ben: she means to get vengeance for Harry’s assholery. Whereas the final scene in the original finishes off Ben’s character arc, the final scene in the remake finishes off Barbara’s character arc: a different focus for a different era, as it were.

For all of the subtle differences between the two versions, both Romero and Savini’s Night of the Living Deads are remarkably similar. For my money, though, the original still has more impact: there’s something that’s undeniably sad, lonely and terrifying about the original and I can’t help but feel is has something to do with the black and white. The cinematography in Savini’s remake is often quite good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s never very evocative. There’s very little atmosphere in the film and it functions much more as an action film than an honest-to-god horror movie. The effects and makeup in the remake, as expected, are excellent, although I found quite a bit of the prosthetic work to be a little rough: there’s one damned rubber hand that seems to make an appearance everywhere and it never looks like anything more than a cheap haunted house prop. I was actually surprised to find that the effects work and gore seemed a little tamer in the remake than the original, something which made no sense to me until I read that Savini’s remake was severely edited to earn an R rating: that makes a lot more sense. Still, what’s here is suitably excellent, although there isn’t anything groundbreaking. Careful observers might also note that the ending seems to prefigure Romero’s later Diary of the Dead (2007), with zombies being used for target practice and as opponents against human wrestlers/fighters.

Ultimately, Savini’s remake stands as a well-made but, ultimately, rather pointless exercise, aside from the obvious benefit of putting more funds into Romero’s coffer. Since his copyrighting issues with the original film resulted in the almost complete loss of any exhibition revenues, it’s only fitting that he would get a “second chance,” as it were, via the remake. Some of the changes strike me as worthy: It’s always refreshing to have a more feminist take on female characters in horror films, so the remaking of Barbara as strong heroine strikes me as a great, welcome change from the original: I always found the original character to be one of the weakest, most pewling characters in cinema. At the end of the day, however, Savini’s Night of the Living Dead is still the same film about a small band of survivors trapped in a farmhouse by the living dead that Romero’s was. Romero’s film may have been the more impactful, personal and iconic of the two but that should be a given: a perfect copy of a Picasso will never be worth as much as a Picasso…unless you don’t know it’s a copy, that is. Savini’s film is obviously a copy but, in this case, that’s probably alright.

3/10/14: Once More, with Feeling

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Ambyr Childers, auteur theory, Best of 2013, Bill Sage, cannibalism, cannibals, cinema, family, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, horror films, Jim Mickle, Jorge Michel Grau, Julia Garner, Kelly McGillis, Larry Fessenden, Michael Parks, Movies, Nick Damici, remakes, responsibilities, We Are What We Are

As far as films goes, I have very few hard-and-fast rules although I do have a few: I dislike “MTV-style-editing,” although there’s probably a better way to describe that notion nowadays…I think that character development is a must, even in a Z-grade slasher film…if the subtitled version is available, the dubbed version is persona non grata…gratuitous gore better have a purpose or it better be so over the top that I laugh…and I dislike remakes/re-imaginings/re-dos with a passion. As with anything, these rules were made to be broken but they’ve served me pretty well over the years, nonetheless. Of all of these, however (although the subtitled/dubbed rule is one I rarely violate and then only from necessity), the one that probably sticks with me the most is the one about remakes.

For the most part, I find modern remakes to be pointless, crass money-grabs that are all about the almighty dollar: modern filmmakers don’t remake films because they think they can do them better…they remake films because there’s already a built-in audience, cutting down the need for excessive advertising and (possibly) guaranteeing a big box office take, at least initially. Here’s the funny thing about modern remakes, however: they’re pretty much the ultimate in head-scratching, “who-are-they-trying-to-please?” marketing. In most cases, modern remakes don’t do much more than sub in younger, more attractive casts, polish up the production values and add elements that might appeal to modern viewers (current pop culture references, pop music, nods to current events, etc…). Let’s take the (fairly) recent Platinum Dunes remakes of the slasher chestnut Friday the 13th. If you’re a fan of the gritty, low-budget original film, are you really going to be interested in a big budget, glossy remake? Likewise, if you’re a hip modern kid, are you really going to be interested in a moldy old relic like Friday the 13th when you have everything from The Human Centipede to August Underground to feast your little peepers on? Probably not. These films seem to exist in a no-man’s-land where the only line of reasoning seems to be “This movie once existed and people watched it. If we remake it and release it again, they’ll watch it again.”

That being said…rules are made to be broken. Every great once in a while, a come upon a remake that I actually like. In the rarest of occasions, I can even find myself loving a remake: what horror/genre fan doesn’t absolutely adore John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing? Cronenberg’s The Fly? I found myself really impressed by the recent remake of Maniac and I’ve always preferred the American remake of The Ring to the original Ringu. I even find myself really enjoying Zach Snyder’s remake of Romero’s classic Dawn of the Dead, which is something that approaches heresy in my belief system. Keep in mind, however: this is five films (with another possible five or so to go) out of dozens and dozens of films…possibly more than that. At this point, everything from The Toolbox Murders to Patrick to I Spit on Your Grave and Poltergeist are being remade, often with no more forethought or insight than any other direct-to-video release.

When remakes work (if at all) they work because the filmmakers actually have a vision, rather than a money-making idea. Whether trying to improve on an older, beloved film (Del Toro’s re-imagining of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark) or taking the original property in a wildly divergent direction (Cronenberg’s The Fly, which resembles the Vincent Price original in name only), successful remakes actually have something to say: they aren’t just empty calories, the cinematic equivalent of Ho-Hos. Jim Mickle’s striking, sobering remake of Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are manages to take the impressive original to amazing new heights, taking the basic story and twisting and contorting it in fascinating new directions. It’s the best way to approach remaking a film and, in this, Mickle has created one of his best, most enduring works yet.

In a rural America which may be the Ozarks, Oregon, Washington State or right around the corner from the folks in Jug Face, we meet the Parker family: mother Emma (Kassie DePaiva), father Frank (Bill Sage), young son Rory (Jack Gore) and daughters Rose (Julia Garner) and Iris (Ambyr Childers). The Parkers are friendly, if distant, and seem to subsist by renting out their large property to folks in mobile homes (including Larry Fessenden, whose turned these sort of “backwoods” roles into a kind of cottage industry). Times are hard, especially since nearly continuous rain has produced flooding which has forced many of the tenants from their lands. On top of this, Mrs. Parker suddenly grows sick and dies while grocery shopping in town. Aside from cooking, cleaning and tending to the kids, Mrs. Parker was also responsible for acquiring their “meat,” the kind which isn’t available in butcher shops. Now, Rose and Iris must step up and assume their place in a time-honored tradition, a tradition that is necessary for the continued survival of the Parkers but deadly business for anyone around them. As the local doctor (Michael Parks) and Deputy Anders (Wyatt Russell), who’s sweet on Iris, begin to piece everything together, Frank Parker becomes increasingly unstable. Will Rose and Iris be able to hold everything together or will the modern world finally wash them all to oblivion?

From the very first frame of the film, where we watch a leaf fall from a tree before continuing its journey down a river, We Are What We Are exudes a very austere, melancholy atmosphere, giving the film the veneer of a prestige picture that just happens to be about rural cannibals. Imagine a Merchant/Ivory version of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and you’re in the right ballpark, although the corresponding image is way too flip to do the actual result justice. Plain and simple, We Are What We Are is a beautiful film, gorgeous to look at and filled with the kind of powerful, subtle performances that would draw raves were this any other kind of film. This is a film that deals with big issues (matriarchy vs patriarchy; the loss of traditional ways in the of modernity; the morality of a carnivorous lifestyle; family vs society; the death of a parent/spouse; the Electra complex) but manages to weave them organically into the fabric of the movie, making this the furthest thing from a “message picture,” while being one of the most thoughtful, cerebral genre films in quite some time.

In many ways, We Are What We Are is a companion piece to Alfredson’s Let the Right One In or, perhaps, the aforementioned Jug Face. These are all slow, solemn, character-heavy films that apply their drama and dread in equal measures, letting everything simmer and slow-burn before gradually amping things up to an inevitable fever pitch. We Are What We Are may begin in a quiet, pensive way but it climaxes in a fury of blood, an orgiastic feast that manages to subvert and subsume traditional notions of family all in one big gulp. That the film never loses its footing in between these polar opposites is impressive, but only if you don’t know who’s behind the wheel of this particular big-rig: Jim Mickle.

Mickle has been one of my favorite new directors and one of the shining stars on my Best New Directors list ever since I saw his debut feature, Mulberry St, back in 2006. The film, a gritty yet strangely dreamlike, claustrophobic zombie film that subs in mutant rat-men for the walking dead, was a helluva debut but the follow-up, Stake Land, was the kicker. After one viewing, Stake Land (2010) became my favorite vampire film ever and, to be honest, one of the best films I’ve (still) ever seen. After watching the film more times than I can count, my opinion still stands: Stake Land is one of those rare perfect films, the kind of impossible gem where every element is in complete synchronization. It’s hugely emotional without being manipulative (I still tear up every time I get to the end), full of jaw-dropping fight sequences and deliciously gory practical effects, features a smart, economical script and actually has new, interesting things to say about a very old genre. In short, Stake Land was going to be difficult to equal, impossible to best. While We Are What We Are isn’t better than Stake Land (honestly, I’m not sure that there’s much out there that is better, at least that I’ve seen), it is certainly the film’s equal and yet another feather in Mickle’s already impressive cap. His newest film, Cold in July, has been earning rave reviews on the festival circuit, ensuring that his star is only on the rise.

I went into We Are What We Are expecting a lot, despite the film’s status as a remake, and was not disappointed in the slightest. The film is a complete marvel, the kind of experience that patient genre fans will remember for years to come (possibly the rest of their lives). The movie is filled with what seem to be a million little bright spots, like clouds of fireflies on a summer day: Marge’s vegetarian lasagna; the flashbacks that reminded me of Ravenous (another favorite film); the subtle but strong sense of feminism that informed the film; the terrifyingly tense, almost Hitchcockian dinner scene; the flood that reveals God’s wrath in ways that no tent-revival preacher ever could; another wonderful performance by Fessenden; the revelatory performances by Julia Garner and Ambyr Childers; the ending that inspires hope and fear in equal doses…all of this and so much more.

As a remake, Mickle’s We Are What We Are does everything I want it to do (and more): it actually has a function. As a film, We Are What We Are does so much more. Like Carpenter’s The Thing and Cronenberg’s The Fly, Mickle’s film refuses to rest on the laurels of its predecessor, blazing bold new paths into the unknown. It’s an instant classic, pure and simple, but I really didn’t expect less.