A Month of Stephen King (second week)

August 8^th

The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg, 1983)

John Smith (a cypher's name if ever there was one) is looking forward to marrying the love of his life when a traffic accident puts him in a coma for five years. When he awakens (no one thought he would) he finds his love has married someone else and time has moved on without him. He has also gained an unwanted ability with ESP, which complicates his life in unexpected and tragic ways.

By the time I read The Dead Zone I was already a fan of King. The movie made me a fan of Cronenberg who is now a favorite director. The Dead Zone is one of his best novels and I think this is one of the very finest King movies. That said, I don't watch it much.

There's nothing I want to say of the substance of the movie (questions of fate and free will, dealing with loss). I'd rather talk about Cronenberg's knack for surrounding himself with talent from longtime collaborator Carol Spier (production design) to his cinematographers (in this case, Mark Irwin), composers (usually Howard Shore, here Michael Kamen), screenwriters, actors, etc...

Jeffrey Boam wrote the script chosen by Cronenberg, the first time the directoed worked from a script not his own. Between them, I think they put the lie to the idea held by many fans of King that the barometer for a good adaptation is in it's to-the-letter fidelity to the source material. (Also see Firestarter, the next movie – together, Firestarter and The Dead Zone pretty much kill that misconception). The Dead Zone does not follow King's details without alteration, yet this is among the closest you'll get to recreating the flavor of the author and his sensibilities. The only thing missing is King's sense of tackiness, and I don't recall that I the book either.

Importantly to his career, Cronenberg  proved himself here as an actor's director. I say it's this one and not Videodrome because you already expect a great performance from James Woods and might overlook the director's contribution there but here you have one of Christopher Walken's finest performances, understated but powerful and compelling, playing against type and bolstered by a great cast all giving their best: Herbert Lom, Brooke Adams, Martin Sheen, Anthony Zerbe, Colleen Dewhurst, Tom Skerritt. This is an actor's movie, the major characters are fully dimensional while the lesser roles in their brief appearances manage to be fascinating and vibrant in their own right. In his next two films Cronenberg would go on to elicit star turns from Jeff Goldblum and Jeremy Irons, both career highlights for those actors.

Walken...man, he's amazing in this. I love seeing him play a sympathetic character for once. All Johnny wants is – well, not, that's not right, what he wants is his life back. He has watched his love spend her life without his having been able to share any of it with her, and though she loves him still he's not welcome there. So what he wants now is to crawl into a hole and be forgotten by everyone else. Walken makes that pain palpable.

The romance...aw, fuck. When I read the book in 1980 the romance was just...er, romantic. Derp. Oh, you know what I mean. Good melodrama, very moving. These days it has a personal resonance, it hits too close to home. I do not have the emotional space left in my life to wallow in downers, and this time through I really didn't care to engage with this movie the way I usually do. There are so many fucking downers in my favorite genre. I'd rather watch movies for fun.

Come to think of it, almost every one of my favorite director's movies is a downer. Well, that sucks.

Cronenberg often has opening credit sequences that are apropos to the movie. I love these,establishing the setting with still shots of bucolic Maine countrysides that are whittled away bit by bit, lost to void until they form the title.

August 9^th

Firestarter (Mark L. Lester, 1984)

Everyone has music that speaks to them gets into their soul, fills them with emotions that are impossible to explain. Songs, even whole albums. Tangerine Dream's score for Firestarter is that for me Go on, find it on YouTube and give it a listen. Listen to it on headphones at ocean's edge at night. That shit's nearly spiritual, that is. I took it with me to the beach for solace once when – well, never mind. It's powerful.

It might be worth noting how that score came to be. The members of Tangerine Dream were willing to take the gig but only in their terms - they didn't give a damn about the movie and refused to watch it, but would gladly take the money and compose some fresh themes. This they did, and handed the music over to the producers saying, essentially, “You tailor it to the film. Use it how ya want. Were done.” IMO it turned out to be maybe their best work, but that's no way to score a film. I'm amazed how well it works for the movie, but it works even better without the movie.

Why am I going on about tangerine Dream instead of the movie? Because the movie is not more than the sum of its parts. It's not a bad movie, it's reasonably good, but the parts by themselves are better.

First, you've got a solid Stephen King tale. Young Charlene McGee has a strong pyrokinetic ability that a shady and powerful Federal agency wants to cultivate as a weapon, and they'll do anything to have her. Charlie and her father Andy are on the run. Having been enticed to finally read King by the movies Carrie, Salem's Lot, and The Shining, and having been handed a paperback copy of The Stand, this was the first King novel I ever read and loved every page of it. (A personal aside, I was entranced by the cover art, as seen at the top of this post, as much ore than by the blurb on the back cover: those amazing liquid eyes, I thought, that's the kind of work I want to do!)

I've mentioned the score, so how about the cast? Adorable child actor Drew Barrymore is at the center, surrounded by David Keith (a good actor, though not how I pictured Andy so a little jarring), the great George C. Scott as an understated menace, Martin Sheen more lucid than he was in The Dead Zone, Art Carney and Louise Fletcher as decent folk who try to help. Freddie Jones is the scientist who regrets having started the ball rolling.

What else? Mmmmm...no, that's pretty much it. Those are the highlights. Oh, the smoke – the opening titles appear over a whiff of smoke that dances serenely. I liked that a lot too.

When the movie hit theaters, I saw it with a friend. He thought it was alright but I was so happy to see it given life that we sat through two consecutive showings. Ultimately he was right: it's okay. The story moves well enough, though the dynamic changes midway through from a road adventure to captivity. That slows the pace a tad, but not a lot as the first half was shot through with explanatory flashbacks. This follows the flow of the novel perfectly. Maybe a little too perfectly, I got the feeling that the energy inspiriting the tale comes strictly from the book, and that the screenwriter gave it none of his own – no passion for the material, no getting into the heart of the situation or characters. This is the other half of the argument I'd give (see The Dead Zone above) that King fans who prize strict adherence to the source novels above all else. Same with the direction: sturdy enough but artless. Firestarter does that and feels at times uninspired for it. We the audience seldom feel more than mere observers even if we like the story. The movie could have used a stronger identification between the characters and the the audience. Don't just tell us a story, put us there with them!

I like the movie well enough. I just don't watch it much. That Tangerine Dream album, though...


 

August 10^th

Cujo (Lewis Teague, 1983)

(Spoilers)

In the midst of a marital crisis, Donna Trenton and her son Tad become trapped in the Pinto when it's laid siege to by a rabid dog.

The dog isn't the story. You can think of it as fate, or the hand of God (as Donna does in the novel) or just a random life event, the St. Bernard Cujo is just a device.

Like Carrie, Cujo is another King story in which the women act while the men react. The story is about two women with sons making choices about what matters to them. One is very clear – Mr's Camber intends to get the fuck away from her abusive lout of a husband and save their boy a dismal future growing to be like his old man. The other, Donna, is still in a fog. She's got a wonderful son, a devoted husband who's a great father...a loving family all around. And she's jeopardizing all of that by having an affair with her husband's not-so-best friend. That's where the device comes in, she's about to have her priories brought into sharp focus via an expensive lesson. More expensive in the novel, wherein the child dies.

I'm not too big on the God angle and prefer to see it as life blindly stepping in. Fate I could be okay with but it's a harsh, Old Testament move if the Deus really is in the machina. It smacks of slut-shaming, a mindset and practice that pisses me off. Granted, the real offense isn't being sexually active (am I assuming too much of either King or readers/audiences to give them the benefit of the doubt on that call?) but that she has betrayed the faith of her husband and child. Even so, if this is punishment it outweighs the offense by a long shot (especially in the novel!) Abusing (killing!) the boy to teach the mother is a dick move. King as the god of his literary world goes for that OT grand gesture, and it leaves an open question of the survival of Donna's marrriage. The movie's ending can't help but be more upbeat after putting the characters and the audience through the wringer. No, the angry God rap isn't for me, but king has always been fascinated by it.

Director Lewis Teague does an evenhanded job of the family drama, never sentimental or overbearing. He and cinematographer Jan de Bont do some lovely, understated work (look at those scenic shots!) with a few nice flourishes (Tad racing to reach his bed in the dark before the monsters can grab him). For the most part it's a lightweight cast but Dee Wallace is a knockout as Donna, and Danny Pintauro gives a surprisingly credible turn as young Tad.

In a way, Cujo makes the third star. He's a magnetic presence – powerful, brooding, and progressively gooier. Great makeup fx, you can almost smell hot diseased dog wafting off him in the heat. The second half of the movie is a director's challenge, what they used to call an elevator drama (an entire story in which your characters never leave the confined setting). TV shows used to do elevator stories to save money, while masters like Hitchcock did them (Lifeboat) because they relished the challenge. Teague is well up to it, but again it's Dee that really sells it.

Important to King fans the story is set in Castle Rock and features Sheriff Bannerman, both of which first appeared in the serial killings segment of The Dead Zone. I don;t recall wither of them being mentioned by name in Cujo, however.

August 11^th

Creepshow (George A. Romero, 19882)

An anthology consisting of five stories of varying length and a wraparound. Creepshow was written for the screen by Stephen King and directed by genre icon George A. Romero in homage to the horror comic books published by EC Comics (Entertaining Comics). EC titles like Tales From the Crypt and Vault of Horror...well, to be honest I didn;t grow up on them and shouldn't be the one to describe them. King himself, in his book Danse Macabre, reminisces favorably about them as lurid tales of poetic justice, usually consisting of unlikable characters abut to get what's coming to them, and written under a child's logic. If we didn't have EC as kids, most of us encountered some equivalent. Like King we often have fond memories.

Romero does a first-rate job bringing the comic-book sensibilities to the screen with faux paneling, a lurid basic color palette for the horror stings, and King's script emulating the EC ethos of simplistic characters, horrible deaths, and crude comeuppances. It makes for a movie that stands out visually from the crowd. Better – if you're into this kind of thing – King and Romero really do evoke memories of the horror fare we had as kids. There's not a thing wrong with it. (You just said uh-oh). Yeah, sorry. Good movie but I never liked EC much, so I don't get much from Creepshow. My favorite segment would be 'They Creep up on You” with E.G. Marshall as a misanthropic millionaire and germophobe shut up Howard Hughes style and dealing with a cockroach advance. Marshall plays an entertainingly vile piece of work gleefully insulting the widow of a man he's just driven to suicide King must have had fun with the dialog here, it's fun to listen to and the bugs are well icky inside the antiseptic white of the apartment.

The best story, though, is also the most developed: The Crate, in which a ferocious creature lies dormant in the basement of a university. On being rediscovered, it starts eating the faculty. Doormat Hal Holbrook sees a way to be free of the abrasive harridan he's married to (Adrienne Barbeau, you never imagined she could be so intolerable). An explanation of the beast – where it came from , what it is, how it remained alive for over a century in a crate – is never offered and beside the point. It exists because without it there's no story.

I can get into the hang of this movie around Halloween, which IMO is the perfect time for a viewing of Creepshow.

August 12th

The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994)

(spoilers)

Is the prison drama an American thing? I know other countries have them but it seems to me that America in particular loves them. Something about our rebel history and nature draws us to outlaws like Jesse James and Billy the Kid, or the Corleones. Both real and fictional, they're a apart of our cultural mythology. IRL we have a justice system in dire need of rethinking, born of a crime-&-punishment mentality, a disproportionate percentage of our citizens in jail – we just keep building them. We've a fascination foe the death penalty. We also love prison break thrillers and tales of the long con. I've no information to base this on but I think Shawshank Redemption is an especially American story.

Andy Dufresne is a Maine lawyer wrongly convicted for the murder of his wife and the man she was having an affair with. Is that a spoiler? It's been too long, but I have the impression from the novella that we knew right away that Andy is innocent. The movie keeps that from us until late in the film, pulling us in by keeping the man a mystery and then dropping the info when it would have the most emotional impact.

The movie is an adaptation of the King novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, one of four King novellas published in the Different Seasons collection. Between this and The Body (filmed as Stand by Me), King had a winning one-two punch against critics who turned up their noses at the horror genre, as three of the novellas are non-horror and these two in particular are among his best works. Both are highly American in flavor, one about adult disillusionment and the other about children having their first realizations of an adult world. Already a popular cross-media success, King now had critical recognition not just as a genre star but as one of the great American authors.

The movie adaptation of Shawshank was something of a revelation. I remember well when the public at large started to turn on King, after a number of films had been successful and a string of bestselling novels, we also started to get a lot of adaptations that were mediocre or just plain bad. It was unfair to King as it was none eof his doing, but then he shot himself in the foot by declaring that if anyone was going to make a bad Stephen King movie it might as well be him – and he proceeded to do just that with Maximum Overdrive*. By now going to see a Stephen King movie was considered a gamble if not a losing bet. Frank Darabont's Shawshank was not only a damn fine movie, it was that rare beast that followed the source material nearly intact right down to King's dialog with few if any noticeable changes. I hate to criticize King but his attempts at more colorful dialog usually sound awful on the page and when spoken aloud by actors it just doesn't play. Darabont makes it all work, which is a remarkable feat. To a lot of King fans, if Darabont could do it then there was no excuse for other directors to take liberties.

Thing is, I think Darabont and King are two of a kind. They're both consummate storytellers brought up on the classical mold – King emulates the authors he loved and Darabont the old Hollywood greats. They both live for the little details, among other things. Their characters are storybook perfect. Both artists want their audiences to share in the emotional lives of their protagonists and sometimes their villains, and they find relevance in side ventures. Neither finds aesthetic pleasure in streamlining their tales – where are the unexpected pleasures in refusing to explore your fictional universe? All due respect to Mick Garris, Darabont is the director King was waiting for.

The Shawshank Redmption has a ton of little joys throughout but there are three standouts: the two leads, and the prison itself. The exterior of Shawshank was filmed at Mansfield Reformatory in Ohio, a magnificent and cold behemoth that could crush any man's soul. One we've had an introductory flyover of it, we never question the authenticity of the interior sets. Darabont and his crew make Shawshank a “real” place. In that setting its easy to to forget Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman are anything but Andy Dufresne and fellow con Ellis “Red” Redding. Andy is a quiet guy, aloof, and we see him through Red's eyes. To facilitate this we get a constant voiceover from Red. That also goes a long way to bringing the movie closer to its literary counterpart, King's own prose read aloud (and by none other than Morgan Freeman, how much classier can it get?). Very sly like the con itself, the focus of the story is on Andy but it's really about Red. We root for Andy but never really get into his head, always viewing him as outsiders. It's misdirection. Red's is the life that is changed most profoundly. We cheer when Andy is triumphant, but the strongest emotional fulfillment comes in the final sequence of the film, and we share it with first Red by himself and then Andy and Red together. Shawshank Redemption is neither sloppy nor maudlin, the emotions it evokes are hard earned.

*Maximum Overdrive is one of the movies I won't be watching this month, and hopefully not ever again. It gets a lot of love for being a superlatively bad movie but I was never able to see the charm in it. I saw it with a friend who was excited for it, and well before it was over he was begging m to leave the cinema. He stopped being a King fan almost overnight.

August 13^th

Stand by Me (Rob Reiner, 1986)

Someone posted on IMDb that kids today cannot relate to Stand by Me. Yeah, I remember back in my day when we'd tromp off across the countryside to see dead bodies because we didn't have wi-fi. Sometimes we'd do it two or three times a year. These kids today don't have cliques, or troubled home lives, misunderstanding parents, dishonest teachers, ambitions that feel too big for them, older bullies terrorizing them, or inane discussions over pop culture and junk food...and ya know what, the little bastards had best stay the hell off my lawn. Harrumph, that's what.

Come on, man, if the dog in Cujo isn't the story, then the plot in Stand by Me isn't what matters either. It's about the bonds, and that magic time in adolescence when one finds ones clique to share it with. I had mine in middle school and high school (with a slight change of cast). The first girl I ever loved had hers in 5^th grade, Mr. Sherrill's homeroom. The Separator had hers in Mrs. Collin' 8^th grade homeroom, and she and I clicked in another community in high school: the drama crowd. I don't know what her memories of her friends are, but I treasure that time with my friends. They're what made going to school worth it.

Nostalgia, that's one of the keys to King's success. He's a master of evoking it. Stand by Me is based on the novella The Body, from the Different Seasons collection of four novellas. Four friends learn where the body of a missing school peer can be found, in the woods off a railroad track, and make a cross-country trek to see for themselves before anyone else can find the boy. The Body was a proving point for King, as Different Seasons included three stories that strayed from the horror filed King had made his name by. Critics could no longer dismiss him based on genre snobbery. With The Body, King delivered something still further, a fiction steeped in his own deeply personal biography. As a boy he once came wandering home from roaming the Maine countryside with a case of amnesia, only to discover that the best friend he'd been roaming with had been struck and killed by a train – presumably right before his eyes. King wrote the Body in first-person singular as Gordie Lachance, the talented storyteller who doesn't believe in himself. Nostalgia being the key to the story, it is set up specifically as a reminiscence of the grown and published Lachance. King could do more than just write, he could open himself up in astonishing ways.

Stand by Me was the movie that proved Rob Reiner's merit as a filmmaker. A likable cast of young actors that would keep getting roles deftly, deftly handled in their camaraderie and bonding, sweet photography, a solid screenplay the only flaw of which is to arbitrarily relocate the story from Maine to Oregon (where it was filmed, a boon for me as an Oregonian but it screws with King's Maine mythology),. Reiner might well have been drawing on his own memories, because he sets just the right tone throughout. There's a subtle shot at the end of the movie where the body has been found, the kids have realized that rather than a lark this adventure has been a solemn discovery about the fragility of their lives, and as they head home again...they cross a field in which the late afternoon sun backlights the air filled with dancing seedpods. I'm pretty sure there's no similar shot earlier in the movie...it points to the film's substance. This isn't an ephemeral fancy, nor is it an ending. Their future has been seeded by their shared experience.

There's another moment that struck me as signifying a coming of age, and it points directly to another of King's maturation tales. Having crossed a small lagoon the kids find themselves covered in leeches. Gordie looks into his underwear and finds one on his genitals, removes....then stares in shock at the blood on his hand before passing out. It directly echoes Carrie in the shower, deliberately I believe, as Gordie's own pivotal awakening.

 

August 14^th

Apt Pupil (Bryan Singer, 1998)

(spoilers)

From the Different Seasons collection: High-schooler Todd Bowden discovers a Nazi war criminal living incognito in town, and instead of exposing him Todd takes over the man's life.

Apt Pupil is another example of an adaptation best viewed at a far remove from the source material. The longer it's been since you've read the novella, the more satisfying the movie. It's an excellent film in its own right, but has been considerably toned down in grottiness with violent acts removed and an altered ending.

Studying the holocaust in school sets off a flame in Todd's imagination and he becomes feverish to know more...to really sink into it entire. Not the politics, not questions of how it an entire civilization could have descended so low...just the cruelty, and the power to be cruel. We're clued in via montage that the victims are not who Todd identifies with, his face juxtaposed with those of Nazi officers, including one he will recognize riding a bus. Todd stalks the guy, identifies him via fingerprints as Kurt Dussander, then confronts him in his home. In exchange for Todd's silence, the boy demands that Dussander tell him all the most horrible details and sensations of what it's like to be a mass murderer...a slaughterer. Todd soaks it up, feeding his fantasies while his friendships and schoolwork deteriorate...nothing else is as important to him, he is addicted.

There are two lines I can pursue here, one being the nature of sociopathy. I think the novella is meant to make us ask whether Todd is seduced by evil or if he already had it in him. To me, the answer to that is clear: an innocent does not start a relationship by blackmailing a total stranger, nor could he be so unmoved by the atrocity he wishes to learn about. Todd is an evil seed before the opening credits roll, he only needs nourishing in order to blossom. We never learn Dussander's arc, how he became a Nazi, so his recollections mean nothing to us as they to to Todd. Bryan Singer started what that same assessment. For this sociopath it's nature, not nurture. The Bowdens (sans their son) are good people.

So, what about that need for murder and cruelty? The movie does an uneasy dance around the subject, never fully going there as King does in he book but playing up other aspects of it that are every bit as queasy and rather more questionable. There is an overt sexual tension between Todd Bowden and Kurt Dussander, made clear by the dialog and the staging of certain sequences. Should we infer that the bond is one of gay attraction? Well...it's hard for me to argue otherwise when Singer himself testifies that this is what he intended – not as a fact but as a suggestion. And that's a little troubling, given that Singer is gay himself and yet is flirting with the steretypes that homosexuality os inextricably linked with madness and criminality. I'd seriously like to question the guy on this, because I have no idea what he's thinking.

On the other hand, pay attention to just who responds to what. Dussander is not drawn to the boy, he finds Todd an unwelcome danger that has to be handled with craft and deceit. Todd, meanwhile, is not attracted to physical sex of either gender, it's power that he fetishizes. Watch the scene in which he dresses Dussander up in costume and forces him to march – it's not the old man that has him rapt, it's the uniform. Todd lies awake in bed fantasizing about the gas chambers and of medical experiments and other tortures. Singer has him photographed nearly naked in moonlight, a voyeur's layout. Perhaps to avoid a stronger rating, Todd isn't getting off...except that we know he really is. Like I said, it's an odd dance we're being led, one that skirts the issue in some ways but not others, in seemingly arbitrary manner. The book's Bowden cannot help himself but to sate his desires through the killings of transients. The movie doesn't go there. Horror beats missed. Dussander also begins to kill again, though not for sexual gratification but to restore his confidence and quiet his nightmares.

Which gets us to the finale, and the spoilers. King ends his novella with Todd sussed out by his school counselor. In a chilling foretelling of real-life school massacres to come, high-schooler Todd takes arms and ammo to an overpass to begin a shooting spree, knowing it is a suicide move. Death by cop, and he'll take as many innocents with him as he can. No such thing occurs in the movie, where Todd is confronted by the counselor and todd gets the upper hand by threatening to claim the counselor sexually abused him. The final shot of the film is of Todd smiling in triumph. “You have no idea what I can do” is the movie's last line.

So, which is the more powerful? Which the more chilling? I think it's a tossup. The book's is more visceral, certainly, and probably the more credible...but the movie leaves us to wonder how far can someone like this go? It plays on one of the same fears that fueled The Children of the Corn, that the next generation will form a world that does not hold the same values that we do. Some would say we've had people like this in office already. Are we looking at a future leader of the United States?

Already stated, Kin ties the story of Todd Bowden to real-life mass killings, especially those committed by kids. By implication it asks what drives someone to commit an atrocity like this. King may or may not have the right ending. I'm under the impression that most killings of this sort are committed by the mentally ill, and some who have felt bullied and victimized past the point of reason, not clinical sociopaths but people who are alienated. This is not Todd. Todd has spent the entire movie learning how to hide his twisted soul and survive.

So what we have then is a polished, professional piece of provocation that's also frightening for its subject matter, and a smart script that raises more questions than it answers. Singer's direction is quietly stylish and confident. It is broguth to life by pone very good performance (Brad Renfro as Todd) and one great one (Ian McKellen as Dussander). In all a superior film in the upper tier of King adaptations, getting the core of the material if not its full horrific impact of the plot.

Who'll Stop the Rain (Karel Reisz, 1978)

“Let me tell you the latest. Military Command has decided that elephants are among enemy agents because they carry supplies to the Viet Cong. So now they are stampeding elephants and gunning them down from the air. Of course, I filed a suitably outraged story about it. And that was my last one. I have no more cheap morals to draw from all this death. So I've taken action...I've started something here that I can't stop, and it's the right thing, I know. You see, in a world where elephants are pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high.”

Those words are written by John Converse (Michael Moriarty), a writer for a tabloid rag who has been in Vietnam in an attempt at being meaningful for once in his life. Demoralized by his experiences, burnt out, and alienated he has just made a deal to smuggle heroin into the states. He doesn't really know why he's doing it or what it's supposed to mean, it's just a gut reaction – his idea of protest. Little does his wife Marge, to whom the above missive is dispatched, know what's coming. The heroin may be the least of her problems once John's new associates come looking for the skag. For that matter, she's going to have her hands full with Ray Hicks, John's true friend who does the carrying.

Not that Hicks (Nick Nolte) wants to or thinks it's a good idea. Ray Hicks, a Merchant Marine and close to being temperamentally fried by the war himself, is a self-educated man whose two major influences have been Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles and Friederich Nietzsche. Learning that Hicks still reads Nietzsche, Converse declares it “piquant”: a typical comment from Converse, it's impossible to tell if he's being condescending. “'Piquant', I don't know the hell that means. You turned me on to that book.” Hicks doesn't like this scheme one bit, not the drugs or the risk. He'll do it, though, because Hicks has cultivated a strong sense of honor and John is his friend...besides which, his good friend John has backed him into it by telling his new associates all about Ray Hicks.

All of which leads to Marge's doorstep in liberal Berkeley California. Marge (Tuesday Weld)...well, she's a busy woman, alright? She's raising her young daughter, her father is John's publisher, she's got a modern, active life trying not to let the war touch her, and truth be told she's developing a mean little drug habit with Dilaudid, not that it's anyone's business, and now she's got this letter from her husband saying he owes one Ray Hicks some money and can you please pay him, so you'll just have to be understanding if she didn't take the time to get to the bank.. Nobody said anything about heroin or guns or about her and John being marks!

Yeah, and nobody told her that her evening would go bad as fast as it does, with Hicks not so much paying her a visit as exploding into her life. Ray: “You can't treat people in this outrageous fucking manner!” Ray and Marge do not “meet cute”. Cue a couple of thugs who work for a crooked Fed named Antheil (Anthony Zerbe). The drug deal is his, but guess what? Ray ain't rolling over.. “I spent my whole life takin' shit from inferior people. No more!”

Who'll Stop the Rain has a lot going for it, but above all it's an actor's movie. I've already named the principal cast, and Nick Nolte has long since proven his acting ability and his presence but please trust me that his Ray Hicks will bowl you over anyway. At the time Nolte was considered a pretty boy lightweight, a romantic leading man and not up for much more. Best known for The Deep, Rich Man Poor Man, and a Clairol hair lightener ad, his total ownership of Hicks was a revelation. He plays Hicks like a sore tooth best left alone. Treated gently he won't flare up on you. He can be a nice guy but there's a raw fragility to his carefully built self-esteem as if it is something he will lose the thread of if he doesn't react immediately and harshly to anything and everything that offends his sensibilities. Nolte finds that note and makes Hicks a force to be reckoned with. It's his movie, and much as I love 48 Hours I'll take this one for pure Nolte.

I should talk about Michael Moriarty as John next – the story is a look at the moral decay setting in with Vietnam and alienation, Hicks as the warrior soul with mission creep and Moriarty the pacifist conscience giving in to futility. There may be a bit of bias here as Hicks is unfailingly noble even as his reactions are a bit unhinged, and John Converse is pacifist to a fault, ultimately coming across as pathetic or despicable in the hands of Antheil's hired goons as they drag him in search of the fled Ray and Marge. Moriarty gives John a resigned air just spilling over into self-pity, hiding behind the last shreds of dignity. It's the right touch that lends a moment of contrast later when he sees his wife getting high and looks on in horrified self-realization at what he's done. An aspiring author, he's written a wartime play in which the protagonist is a version of himself. Antheil comments that the character isn't sympathetic: 'Why doesn't he do something?” Both Hicks and Converse, in their separate ways, want to vindicate their ideals and take a stand against “them” but neither knows who “they” are anymore.

That's all there, but when it comes right down to it the core of the film lies in the chemistry that emerges between Nolte and Tuesday Weld as Hicks takes Marge on the lam with a horde of unwanted heroin to get rid of. Marge would like to just dump the stuff but Hicks is locked into making some kind of deal because...well, just because. It's the principle of the thing. He agreed to the mission and he's gonna see it through no matter how fucked up or wildly astray it goes. That means his taking on the role of guardian and companion to Marge, helping see her through her addiction and keeping alive her hope of seeing her husband and child safe again. For her part, she has to navigate his moods and see the nobility on the man, not an easy task given interludes like the one with Eddie Peace, a Hollywood-schmoozy lowlife who promises to deal the skag but would rather play amusing games with Hicks and his prospective clients both. Charles Haid gives a brief gem of a performance as Eddie, oily and unpredictable. The scene brings out the worst in Ray who declares them all Martians after turning their lark into a nightmare.

Weld gives her role a decency and intelligence where many actors would have gone for a generic strung-out performance.

What develops between Marge and Ray is a respect that borders on an unspoken love. Thanks to cinematographer Richard H. Kline, their scenes together have a quiet intimacy that poses them as lovers not quite physically interacting except in psychic support of each other. If Ray's mission ultimately is to keep Marge alive, you end up emotionally invested in wanting the two of them happy and safe.

I don't know the ins and outs of directing enough to examine how director Karel Reisz gets us there, but he does. From rainy Saigon evenings to California suburbs, naval yards and an old Jesuit mission in the hills (based on the Kesey compound where the Merry Pranksters tried to drown their worldly worries in revelry), Reisz and Kline show as strong a knack for location as Reisz does for getting the best performances from his actors. The script also excels - written by author Robert Stone from his novel 'Dog Soldiers', his dialog has a wonderful lyrical quality to it that's often quotable and lends the cast plenty to work with. I've read the novel and found it to have a rather snarkier sense of humor than is apparent in the movie, at least in the passages that deal with Converse. Some of that humor makes it into the film in the form of Antheil's pair of goons Danskin and Smitty (Richard Masur and Ray Sharkey). Sharkey is an ex-con who would like to be important if only his natural inferiority would get out of his way, perpetually overshadowed and abused by the amiably sociopathic Danskin (“Most people will hit you when they lose at chess. Danskin hits you when he wins!”) Danskin's nature is perfectly reflected by the casting of perennial nice-guy Richard Masur, who will pleasantly call you 'bubbie” while he sits you down on a hot oven burner. These two are clowns you don't dare laugh at.

Rounding out the cast is Anthony Zerbe as Antheil... are you familiar with Zerbe? If you are, then you know what you're getting. The guy has a wry, sardonic edge as capable of being sympathetic as threatening, he can get by on a look and turn of phrase. Honestly, I can't think of one standout performance of his yet he's one of my favorite personae on film and television – pure charisma.

Let me caution you about the transfer. I have the DVD issued by MGM in 2001, and while most of the film looks great (original aspect ratio 1.85:1, non-anamorphic) the first 16 or 17 minutes are inexplicably just out of focus. This is clearly not deliberate as evidenced by the too-soft titles text, though it could be argued as reflecting the fuzzy morals of Vietnam where the movie opens. Saigon in the rain at night and Moriarty standing at the gate to a private estate...already atmospheric, these shots would be even tastier if MGM would give the movie the care it deserves. This problem was present as well on the earlier VHS release.

I have loved this overlooked gem since first seeing it on cable in 1980. Please, give it a shot. It deserves a revival.

A Month of Stephen King (first week)

31 days, 31 movies.  No reviews, just whatever comes to mind as I watch them (which may easily be nothing at all).

 I hope to keep this up throughout August, though I also hope to be busy with other projects as well.  Not sure if I'll make new posts or just keep adding to this one as I go.

Caveat, I'm posting this primarily to the Horror genre forum on IMDb and then transplanting them here, so I'm making the assumption that everyone is already familiar with the films in question.  I might get lazy and forget to outline the plots or premises when they go up here.  Sorry, I'll try to amend that in editing as I go.

Oh, and no screencaps.  I spent two hours yesterday fighting my computer trying to get it to play a movie so I could get some pics to complete a review.  Finally got the movie to play only to have it balk when I tried to forward to a promising timestamp.  The movie, BTW, is the criminally overlooked Who'll Stop the Rain with Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld, and Michael Moriarty.  Give it a look, I love that movie.


August 1st.
Carrie (Brain DePalma, 1976)

An unloved high school student is abused by her peers by day and at home suffers her mother's religious fanaticism.  Things spiral as she discovers that she is endowed with telekinesis..


Hard to find any kind of fault with, not like I was trying. Stephen King wasn't on my radar at the time so maybe my recollection is skewed but I don't think most people caught on to his name yet with just this one movie - this was DePalma's show, not Kings' despite the fidelity to the book. Reading the novel, I imagine something different in tone, more down to earth...DePalma's style is pretty slick and glossy with his camerawork, lighting, choice of score, etc. That's what I think when reading the book, but when watching the movie all that melts away.

It's a pretty flawless adaptation. Carrie's swath of destruction on the town would have been fun but probably would have been overkill. Piper Laurie, for all her insufferable condescension toward the material, provides a credible and memorable loon, and Spacek though she looks nothing like the novel's Carrie is still perfect for the role.

Not being a fan of bullies I always used to hate Travolta's hoodlum character, but he's out-hoodlumed by the Travolta-wannabe in Christine...really, in this movie he's just a stupid sh t, not actually menacing. None of the guys in Carrie amount to anything , they are the extensions (appendages?) of the female characters. This really is a female empowerment movie (I'm comfortable with that) - Carrie White has power she has smothered in her will regardless of her emerging psychic ability. Sue Snell and Chris Hargenson are the real story, using their boyfriends as proxies to enact their own choices for revenge or redemption. Miss Collins and Mrs. White both exert disproportionate influence (Collins slapping Chris is way out of line as is her interference with the dating arrangements of her students).

Complaints...well, of course actors who are too old to be high school kids. Some of the actresses can get away with it, William Katt sure can't. There were a few times I thought Pino Donaggio's lovely score was a little overbearing, and I outright hate the dated "playful" theme he uses for the detention exercise/prom primping scenes. Worse is the sped-up footage in the latter.

DePalma's signature splitscreen...I've seen people complain about this, that it isn't effective as it was in Sisters (well, that's true) or that it distracted. I like it now that I can see the movie in its OAR. Pan&scan ruins it. I think it underscores Carries psychological break at thee prom, stepping outside her own psyche and looking dispassionately at all these people who must be put down at once. That was the biggest failure of the recent sequel, reducing Carrie's psychotic break to mere anger. That's not scary, and it's not credible. This is a young woman who has freakin' snapped. She's unreachable, even to herself. Utilizing splitscreen confuses our POV: is it audience identification or not? Perfectly catches her fugue state, I think. Also, it catches a sense of her ESP, having an enhanced awareness of her surroundings from more than just her visual input.

I used to hav an unfair grievance about the movie because I kept running into a n alarming number of both critics and causal filmgoers who thought Carrie was about demonic possession or witchcraft, that old religious prejudice about the supernatural such as ESP. Jeez, did they think Mrs. White was some kind of heroic figure?? The s ting at the end didn't help, they didn't get the point (it's a nightmare indicating the lasting trauma brought about for the survivors), people really thought Carrie came back from the dead. I dunno...to some degree, in theory, a director is responsible for making sure his film is graspable, but should he really be held to account for his audience being frickin' morons?

 

August 2nd

Salem's Lot (Tobe Hooper, 1979)

The small Maine town of Salem's Lot has two new residents and one returning one. Ben Mears spent his childhood here and is still haunted by a supernatural incident involving an infamous house on the hill overlooking the town. That house has just bought by Mr. Straker and Mr. Barlow. As yet, no one has seen Mr. Barlow...and for good reason. He's a vampire.

Salem's Lot combines two of my favorite kinds of horror, vampires and the contagion film. In fact, it was SL that introduced me to the contagion subgenre, at least at least to a degree. Instead of focusing on one vampire with the spread of vampirism a side note, it makes the vampirism itself the major focus and the lead vampire is pushed to the peripheries. Since SL, this kind of story always plays on my fear buttons – Romero's zombie plague and all imitators, Rabid (David Cronenberg), King's The Stand, and so on. The chill is in the repetition, the detailing of the geometric progression of disaster.

This is more true of the novel than the movie made from it. SL was the first of King's panoramic novels that featured an entire community rather than a few protagonists. Even at three hours' running length, most of the town's citizens and their story arcs had to be left out. That hurts the impact of the story, I think, because it makes Salem's Lot seem like a ghost town before anything bad even happens. You can't kill a town if no one is living in it!

Even so, it moves well for three hours. Has a nice slow build crating a foreboding out of nothing but chilly stares from James Mason. It's forty minutes before the first spooky scene begins with a couple of hired hands hauling crates in a truck, and even that scene is paced for maximum to string out the tension. It's not a flashy movie, and it doesn't convey any of King's kinda trashy sense of humor. That's a little odd, since the director is Tobe Hooper, who's work is often marked by his own not-dissimilar but harder-to-pin-down puckishness. I haven't been able to spot anything in the way of a signature touch by director Tobe Hooper. Maybe that's because I'm still familiarizing myself with Hooper. I've seen most of his work over the years but only recently have I started looking at them as being his. From the jump scares (stingers: our attention is guided to one space, there's an abrupt leap into frame from another direction by something menacing, the scene freezes with a swift zoom) I'd have guessed Dan Curtis, ala his two Carl Kolchak films.

Anyway, I was saying SL isn't flashy. It does, though, have several standout sequences like the dead Glick boy floating outside his brother's window (the ghastly sound of his nails scratching at the glass is the icing on the cake, on top of everything else about the scene, is just intolerable – freezes your blood). There's a bit where a vampire has a cross that burns her skin – Hammer had already done this in their movies but it was the first time I ever saw it, and it left a mark. The further into the movie you get, the more the photography develops a filmic style (shots around the Marsden House in particular come to mind, some shot with a crane).

SL was a big deal back in the day and it holds up well now. It's been long enough that David Soul is no longer Hutch. I haven't decided whether casting Reggie Nalder was brilliant or a waste of talent...his unusual looks make for a startlingly creepy Nosferatu facsimile but he's not at all recognizable and he gets nothing to do but leap at the camera, not even any lines to speak. Barlow in the novel is the traditional vampire, urbane and eloquent. The change to unspeaking beast is a smart one, as Straker already fulfills that role and the more feral vampire as seen in the movie adds punch to a movie constrained by TV censorship standards.


 

August 3rd

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

Jack Torrance is a recovering alcoholic needing income to support his wife and child, and hires on as caretaker to an isolated resort hotel for its off season. He doesn't know that his son Danny is psychic. He also doesn't know that the Overlook is alive, that it's evil, and that it will do anything to acquire Danny.

There are some good movies coming up this month, but The Shining is the peak. It's all down-mountain from here.

The first time I saw The Shining it left me scratching my head (that closing shot of the 1921 photo). It also left a ton of indelible moments that got under my skin. Movie was divisive then and it still is today. So you know right away I'm a fan. I also enjoy the book, which I read later, and don't see the need to argue that either is unworthy as some like to, but if pressed as to which is the stronger piece I;d have to say it's Kubrick's.

Let's get right to it: Jack Nicholson. I've made this argument before, many aren't having it. Common wisdom is that he's crazy from go. I get why people think that, and it would be spot on if it wasn't dead wrong. Re-read the book – we're introduced to a Jack who is 5 months dry and barely keeping his resentments, anger, bitterness, and self-pity under his skin. When he lets slip, it comes out as physical violence usually aimed at children – including Danny. Whether he's a nice guy or not isn't the point. Nicholson brings all of this from King himself.

The problem – or is it? - is not that we don't get to see the insanity slowly creeping in, but that we don't get to see his love for his wife and son slipping away. That's the key element of the novel that's missing from the movie. We don't see Torrance struggling to hold onto his love of family because we never see that love in the movie in the first place. Kubrick never brings it forward. Until this most recent viewing I was swayed toward thinking this was a failure of the film and Kubrick, but now I'm not so sure.

King's Torrances are a perfectly literary creation in that they are...how to say it? They belong in a novel, not real life. By contrast, the movie shows us an unhappy marriage between a mean drunk trying to dry out and the wife who's afraid to rock the boat. Shelley Duvall's Wendy is a credible human being rather than a Hollywood wife (say, Rebecca DeMornay?). We watch them and are forced to ask why are these people together? Why did they marry? Was there love at some point, and is there any left? The immediacy of their situation is highlighted without any mitigating sentiment or extraneous drama. As much as I would have liked seeing some aspects of the book retained (the wasps' nest, the ledgers and journals of the Overlook, the elevator) these are unnecessary excursions. Everything you need from the novel is there.

Do the changes made by Kubrick alter the story? No, I don't think so. What changes is the emotional investment we make in Jack and subsequently the response we have to the story – but the story itself is intact. King writes a fairly conventional tale of a haunting which serves as the foundation for a family tragedy. Kubrick's Shining does not remove the hotel's evil presence as the fuel dumped on Jacks' fire as some have argued, the malevolence of the hotel and it's hauntings are incontrovertibly real. The movie states this plainly right up front through Danny's visions and the talk given him by the cook Halloran. The film blunts the more maudlin aspects of the narrative, giving us something more visceral, less narrated and more felt, and to me at least something that is more terrifying.  Anyone who ever rode a Big Wheel knows there's nothing else in the world that sounds exactly like those back wheels...and you can't experience that any other way than to hear it. it gets under your skin, puts you right there.  Only film can do that.

Finally, Nicholson again. It's true that between Nicholson and Kubrick, Torrance has nowhere to go but over the top. Then again, that is precisely where King took him (Roque, anyone? Time to TAKE YOUR MEDICINE?) take a look at the shot of Jack with the axe rising from the body ofhhalloran, that inhuman, slack-jawed face, and not be glad it's only a movie. Listen to his gibberings in the snow, robbed of consonants and coherence. It may not work for you but it works like mad for me. The finale of The Shining is one of the few sustained sequences of pure fright the genre offers.

Closing comment, I wonder...since the Overlook feeds on psychic energy, why did it not try to kill/absorb Halloran the way it wants Danny? The idea of a racist hotel is a bit much...as much as the building could be said to have a mind or personality, it seems to be above the individual traits of it's guests (ghosts).

 

August 4^th

Cat's Eye (Lewis Teague, 1985)

An anthology film, featuring two short stories published in the book Night Shift, and a third written by King for this movie. King himself wrote the screenplay, and the movie was directed Lewis Teague who had already adapted Cujo. A wraparound story follows a stray cat who is psychically called to a young girl across the country who is threatened by a supernatural menace.

Quitter's Incorporated is the first story, in which James Woods is introduced to a stop-smoking clinic run by the mafia who employ terrifying methods on their clientele. King's concept is brilliant and original, outrageous enough to be played for sharp-edged comedy. Personally, I think Lewis Teague takes it too far I that direction when Woods begins hallucinating at a party (far too cheesy), and maybe an off chord is struck by the murderous goon whose hardest profanity is “fiddlysticks”...but it's a fun segment. Woods does nervous energy superbly, and Alan King is an agreeable heavy. A light tone is set by an homage-heavy prologue and then this first short, letting us know the movie will never get more threatening than this.

The Ledge casts Robert Hays as a regular guy failing to escape Vegas with a rich man's girlfriend. The rich man (Kenneth McMillan), a compulsive gambler, will let hays reunite with the girlfriend if he survives traversing the hotel's highest ledge. This short has considerably less humor than the previous (it exists only in the jests of the bad guys, who aren't that funny to anyone but themselves). Hays has a natural affability that goes well to jacking up the suspense, and McMillan (maybe best known as Baron Harkonnen in Lynch's Dune) effortlessly provides the opposite. Predictable but riveting, and the short story even more so...the tension in King's story is excruciating. If you hate pigeons, you'll hat4e them even more after reading it. One happy aside, amid all the nods to King's other works they manage an nod to the TV movie “The Girl, The Gold Watch, and Everything”, the movie that first brought Hays fame.

The final tale belongs to the cat. Finally locating the aforementioned girl-in-peril (Drew Barrymore), our feline finds an evil troll that steals the breath of children and an ailurophobic (fear of cats - I had to look that up) mother who believes it's cats who do that. General, as the adoptive girl names hi, will have to get past mom to save the girl. This also is a good story but it throws people off by changing up tones from edgy tales of the criminal world for a kid-friendly supernatural story. None of this was ever R-rating-worthy, but the last loses what edge had been present and instead gives us a Carlo Rambaldi creation (cute little bastard!) and fx that wouldn't be out of place in a Spielberg production - Amazing Stories, most likely

Altogether, Cat's Eye is an innocuous little time waster, pleasant but not weighty. An appetizer. On the debit side, it has a low-rent score by the usually reliable Alan Silvestri that's dated and at times ill fitting (general's Theme).

August 5^th

Children of the Corn (Fritz Kiersch,1984)

 

From the Night Shift collection: a traveling couple find themselves caught by a murderous religious sect composed of children who have all but killed their own town.

Children of the Corn has become a signature piece for King. It really struck a popular chord with its mix of Old Testament-styled condemnatory religion and our fear of generational paradigm shift, set right in the Bible Belt heart of America, right in our amber waves. Whatever is at work in the story is potent enough to have made it intact through a cheap b-movie production with a witless script, a goofy finale, and a wimpy resolution that betrays King's intentions. People who have neither seen the film nor read the book recognize Children-of-the-corn jokes in pop culture and know it's King being alluded to.

If you're exploring a town in which you encounter not a single soul, where the buildings are empty and dilapidated, where the TV Guides, calendars, and bits or mail are all dated three years ago...how many houses do you have to visit before it dawns on you that maybe you're in a ghosts town? A dozen, maybe? Two dozen? Our protagonists never figure it out. The whole movie works on film logic, their actions dictated by the need to create tension and enable plot machinations. Things get worse as the movie gets progressively sillier.

At worst, the movie violates King's intentions. What is the worst thing you can do to a predominately Christian audience, as King's is (Western, or just plain American)? King's short story ends on the revelation that the bloodthirsty “he Who Walks Behind the Rows” is a a real God – presumably the real God, no other, accept no substitutes. I mean, that's the tenet that most people believe, that there can only one...therefore by implication, in this story the Christian God isn't real. Instead the world is run by a genuine blood-&-thunder psychotic. That's powerful stuff, as some of the children look to their own conscience and hope in vain for something better. We the reader hold out little hope for their escape. Scratch all that when it comes to the movie. Instead we have a Hollywood happy ending wherein God (the familiar peaceful one) prevails, the world is restored to all it should be, and everyone is happy. He Who Blahblahblah is not God, not even a god, just an easily defeated demon taken down if not by scripture then by a notion suggested by the Bible (and conveniently carried around in one of the children's wallets).

But like I said, the premise itself grabs people. And to be honest, most of the movie does have some effectively scary sequences and tension. The direction isn't fancy, the fx are poor, but the setting makes up for a lot. It's not as bad as I make it sound, it just ain't that good either.

August 6^th

Graveyard Shift (Ralph S. Singleton, 1990)

From the Night Shift collection of short stories: A drifter takes a job at a textile mile that suffers a bully boss and a serious rat infestation. The nest has been down there so long that it has spawned a few mutations.

I hated this movie when I first saw it. I'd had a bad attitude in the early to mid-Nineties, it was an unhappy time personally and it affected how I took in movies. Even my favorite genre (horror) brought little joy as I balked at most of it not holding up to scrutiny. Then you've got Stephen King adaptations in particular...it occurred to me to reread some of the King stories before starting this run, but when it comes to king often the more distance you put between the writing and the movies, the more you can enjoy the movies for their own sake.

Graveyard Shift is a better movie than Children of the Corn in most ways (production values, script, acting, coherence) yet is universally reviled where CotC is a beloved cult hit. I think that's primarily because Children has a premise that sparks the imagination and speaks to people's core values where GS has nothing of the like – it plays on a fear of rats. Nothing new in that. It's also a slower film – not dull by any means but deliberately paced, taking its sweet time getting to the goods. CotC throws us right into the horror. When expanding a short to feature film length, you can either blow the central premise into something it wasn't or you can build the characters and set the scene more thoroughly.. The first approach is dicey – it can pay off (ala The Box, a non-King story) or blow up in your face (like Children of the Corn). GS takes the latter road, though not always convincingly.

Another problem lies with the monster when it is finally unveiled: you can suspend disbelief for the sake of a written short but for a movie the creature’s existence is unsupported. There's no explanation of it, not even a lame b-movie attempt at justifying it through supernatural or pseudo-science boogeymen...it's just there. And it's not even a rat but a gigantic bat acting as mother/protector to this nest. With twenty minutes to go and after a steady, assured build the movie suddenly turns into an OTT rodent-themed Aliens clone complete with a panic-stricken member of the party who turns on the rest.

Our drifter protagonist is too 80's, a too-perfect softspoken feathered hairdo who's sensitive to women and stalwart against bullies. Oh, and he's an expert shot with a slingshot (plot point). As heroes go, he's a little dull. Stephen Macht as the bully is more watchable with his Maine accent (or what should be a Maine accent, I've never been there), never quite so bad that he's a cartoon...then there's Brad Dourif who goes happily camp. Early on he delivers a typical Vietnam war story, and his delivery alone makes it a parody of every bad-war-memory scene in cinema. It's not my favorite role of his, and it's a barely more than a cameo, he plays it every bit as grungy as the film itself is.

But that's where I start to like the movie – it's a dank, grimy, sweaty, nasty environment but a pretty well-realized one. Decent production values, good gore, really nice understated cinematography. While the script never shines, it also never pushes me out of the film...it treats its characters credibly enough in both dialog and action.

Having not seen it since that initial viewing, I bought it just for this Kingfest and was surprised to discover that I actually like the thing. Like CotC it's strictly b-movie, but entertaining b-movie.

August 7th

The Mangler (Tobe Hooper, 1995)

(Definitely spoilers!)

From the Night Shift collection: a detective investigates a series of deaths surrounding a folding press for laundry. The more he sees, the more he begins the believe the deaths were supernatural...as if the press itself was alive and malevolent.

What an odd movie! The first time I saw (when it hit cable in '96), I didn't even bother to finish watching. Last night I saw it for the second time. The difference was that this time I'm trying to learn about director Tobe Hooper. Where to begin? Maybe at the beginning? Sure, that will definitely start us us off on the wrong foot.

We know immediately that the factory is a miserable place to work, established by strokes exaggerated enough to belong to a comic book or an opera. Enter the villain, the owner of the business and local tycoon, played by Robert Englund who clearly thinks he's in a skit on SNL. He's so over the top he's gravity behind on the planet.

So this is the kind of movie we're gonna get? Well, no. Nothing like it. I have to wonder, was this the performance Tobe Hooper wanted? See, he often favors satirically overdrawn characterizations (Eaten Alive, Lifeforce, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) but in every case they have been organic to the tones of the films. Not this one, Englund clashes badly with the rest of the movie. He won't be the only element that does.

The bulk of the movie belongs to Ted Levine as police detective John Hunton. This man is the laughingstock of the gods, they hate him. Widowed, run down, on the outs at work, and every day is a slog. His brother-in-law Mark is a nice guy who keeps him company in the evenings, but the guy is seriously into some new-age spirituality that Hunton has to find amusing so as not to be annoyed. Bad enough these deaths at the factory without Mark making it worse, but the loon is excited for the notion that the thing has been possessed. With a delicately elegiac score (it really is lovely music, written by Barrington Pheloung who endows the movie with the same soulfulness he gave Inspector Morse) , lovely photography and gently unobtrusive colored lights cheering up the mostly nighttime scenery, the movie becomes less a scary piece than a melancholic mood piece centered on Hunton's myriad disappointments in life. These scenes are not well written (none of the movie is well written!) but between Levine, Hooper, and cinematographer Amnon Salomon make his quieter character-building scenes endearing. Hunton is cynical and sarcastic but you can see his affection for Mark despite Mark's puppy-dog naivety. Hunton likes people. It's what life does to 'em that gets him down.

You can see why this sits a little uncomfortably with the actual premise of the movie, which is that a laundry press wants to eat people. There's a post on The Mangler's IMDb message board that's helpful, from someone who worked with one of these presses. They really are huge, taking up an entire facotry floor, and they really are dangerous. Known in the business as a “mangle” (in the UK, per Wikipedia, in the States it's called a wringer), you always find them surrounded by employees with torn-out fingers or other injuries. People who work around them treat them with fear and awe, to the point of becoming superstitious and treating them as if they were alive. That real-world info ought to precede the movie on every print and disc, 'cuz to everyone else it's still a damn goofy idea.

That was probably what drew Hooper to the movie. His movies are always straight-faced but many of them are also satirical. Audiences (yeah, including me) have a hard time knowing when he's laughing and when he's not. Keep that in mind, because it helps if you know that the more preposterous dialog and action (most of Mark's enthusiasm, say, or beating up a refrigerator because it might have committed murder) are not unintentionally funny. Really, it's that hard to tell.

All of this is leading to a scene that must have had Hooper in stitches, one I'm afraid most miss the joke of. Having finally been convinced of the Mangler's evil, John and Mark confront the machine (stop giggling!) to displace the demon within it. Both shout scripture manically at the behemoth, hurt;ing holy water, crosses, and I think even whole bibles into it's maw. If you take it straight, it's very bad filmmaking but if you get Hooper it's hysterically funny. In any conventional horror b-movie that would be the finale. King's short story ends with the revelation that this act of amateur exorcism has been botched and instead of purging the demon it is made mobile. In Hooper's eyes, this is a grand jest. One critic asked why Hunton could not simply have gone to a local priest and asked for help: he didn't get the joke. Finally going well beyond the bounds of reason, The Mangler chases them into the basement and down a literal passage to Hell. It's absurd and Hooper knows it. It's also pretty damned awesome – for a moment you think Hooper has taken one of Lucio Fulci's best pages. But no, there's a third ending as Hunton and the girl he';s trying to ave (yes, there's a love interest) find a passage back to the surface (wait, why is a stairway to Hell conveniently linked to the city's sewage infrastructure?)

Checking on her the next day, Hunton discover that she too has been corrupted by the Mangler, which is back in operation. His efforts have meant nothing, and he doesn't get the girl. It should be a jarrin ending, it certainly isn't a happy one, but somehow it's fitting.

The Mangler is a universally reviled movie, and I can see why. Tonally it's a bit of a mess, some of the acting is atrocious, it suffers unexplained directorial whims (why are a few of the older characters played by young men in obvious makeup?), the dialog is at best merely serviceable. It's a misfire. Having finally seen it entire for the first time...I loved it. It's one of those oddities with personality, an underdog.

Be warned, should you seek it out because of this, that I am easily pleased. These reviews should make that abundantly clear before I'm through.

Programming Note

As I wish to reserve this blog primarily for movie and television reviews, and related images, I have launched a second blog for artwork.

Ahmmmm...yeah.  For artwork.  Yup.  Except that it's pretty empty so far because I didn't keep any, and haven't finished more yet.   Having it, in theory, will impel me to actually make something to post in it.  It is marked as "adult content", because eventually I will do some nudity, and possibly more explicit erotica... or maybe not.  We'll just have to see where I manage to go.

I'm guessing a link to the blog will be under my profile.  If not, I'll post one later.

EDIT:  The Smell of a Summer Attic
(And it's still got nothing new in it yet.  And it's not for family either.)

Just lettin' ya know.

Oh - and I will be writing more reviews, currently my mind is elsewhere - can't get in the mood to watch much, less so writing it up.

Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2009)

Spoilers follow.

What many fans of 1989's Tetsuo: The iron Man may not know is that it was a refinement of an earlier version of the same story. Allow me to place emphasis on 'refinement', because that's precisely what it was – an expansion and further explication of a rather incoherent and meaningless experiment in no-budget filmcraft. The reason I stress this is because there have since been two more Tetsuo films from Shinya Tsukamoto, and both of them have had a lukewarm reception at best from fans who feel that elaborating on the first feature has robbed it of it's essence...moved it from raw anarchic howl toward more conventional cinema. And they're right, it has, but it's only fair to the director to realize that he was already well along on that trajectory back in 1989. Just sayin'.

The son of businessman Anthony (Eric Bossick) is deliberately murdered right before Anthony's eyes. His wife Yuriko (Akiko Monô ) aches for revenge, but to her disgust Anthony cannot bring any kind of emotional reaction to the surface. That is, not until his body begins to morph into a metal instrument of pure rage. The killer comes after them both, leading Anthony to revelations about himself, his parents, and his father's research into recreating the human body through robotics.

In many ways this fourth Tetsuo (third feature film) is a throwback to a part of Tsukamoto's career that he was already finished with and left behind. Specifically it is a remake of sorts of Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, and it had no more creative impetus than the notion of making a Tetsuo film in America. and having the antihero fly. When it came down to it, neither of those made it into the film, except that the salaryman role played before by Tomoro Taguchi was replaced by Bossick, an American Taguchi lookalike. For many it was too little too late. However, I would like to suggest that this Tetsuo could not have been made at any other time in Tsukamoto's career. Where he takes it to is a complete refutation of the earlier films, honoring the spiritual journey his body of work had led him on.

Tsukamoto and co-writer Hisakatsu Kuroki (who co-scripted the Nightmare Detective movies) have pared the story down to the most simplistic possible characterizations and plot resulting in a brisk comic-book (or manga) film (fittingly, Anthony transforms through a number of stages, first looking every bit like a character from Marvel then like a metallic John Merrick – a face that might have inspired the look of The Scarecrow from Nolan's Batman Begin.). At only seventy minutes, it almost feels more of a sketch. Even the performances are lasered in on the moment like comic-book peoples, unnaturally flat or eschewing nuances they are dictated not by normal human responses but by the style of the film. Aesthetically, Bullet Man recreates the chaotic, micro-budget look of the first Tetsuo feature but with a very calculated, high-budget approach: not black and white but digitally desaturated: not grainy, grimy 16mm but crystalline HD. Again, YMMV – I found it exhilarating to see a Tetsuo flick that looks this good, not to mention hearing Chu Ishikawa's original themes again.

What's not readily apparent is the heart of the film. The earlier films – in fact, nearly all of the directors works until recently – had struggled with the conflict between the natural body and an aggressively artificial environment However, Tsukamoto had already succeeded in resolving that conflict, exorcised the demon, and moved on. There was no need to revisit it, and it is not revisited in Bullet Man. The story built around that theme remains, but the theme itself is no longer present as a driving force. 

On the other hand, Bullet Man has a few links to his more recent works. Echoing Vital, a flashback to Anthony's dying mother sees her requesting that her husband dissect her body, study every bit of her and recreate her physically, a request born of a concern for the peace of her continuing spiritual presence. This part of the story is the weakest, and I believe it of less importance thematically than simply owing to the conventional need to flesh out a quick plot. More substance can probably be found in a visual motif Tsukamoto has lately begin using in all his films, that of colorful microscopic footage and renderings of the human body's internal workings. As meticulous as Tsukamoto is with his metaphorical imagery, I'm sure it's not coincidental that the most colorful sequence in the movie has the killer/instigator stand before a gray wall on which a projector is shuffling slides of the human body in medical renderings, brightly colored and superimposed over himself. What it might mean, though, I have to confess goes right over my head. There is also a direct if obvious re-iteration from Nightmare Detective 2 that anger, hate, a refusal to forgive mutates the soul and effectively kills the self.

I'm not convinced that Tetsuo: the Bullet Man is actually exploring anything. That, I think, is what keeps the movie a slight work, neither Tsukamoto nor his characters are striving for meaning and so neither are we the audience asked to do any heavy lifting. Rather than working out a question, Bullet Man stands as a statement of principles from the director, gleaned over a lifetime of exploring his most personal concerns. It plays like a coda to his work thus far, the capping of an era. Iron Man and Body Hammer at the beginning of his professional career embraced an apocalyptic vision. Bullet Man walks us right up to that very same door of annihilation...and then says 'no' and resolutely closes the door. That's not a place Tsukamoto had reached before Nightmare Detective 2. 

Over the body of his work Shinya Tsukamoto has crafted tales of personal metamorphosis. Through his filmic explorations, it is Tsukamoto himself who has transformed.

Nightmare Detective 2 (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2008)

Kagenuma, the reluctant psychic of Nightmare Detective, has not found peace. His dreams are filled with the heartbreaking memories of his mother, a woman with an extreme social anxiety disorder. When Kagenuma innocently revealed his ability to read minds by asking her about her crippling fear of the world, it gave her a new one: that she was exposed to everyone, humiliated. She tried to murder her child, then she hanged herself.

It isn't just bad memories and dreams that come to him. As a child, was was terrorized by ghosts that visited him in the night or marched outside in the street. His father saw them too.

Now he spends his days shut up in his hotel room, surrounded by the children of families living there. They are fond of him, and are probably the only people he can stand to b around: bright, full of happiness, not filling his mind with adult disillusion and anger. Still, he'd rather be alone. The last thing he wants is to be called upon for his services as a psychic. 

That's when teenaged Yukie shows up. She and her schoolgirl clique pranked Yuko Kikugawa, an unloved student who has now shut herself off from the world but is appearing in their dreams. Yukie senses a threat, and she's right – soon they begin dying.

“Apologize to her”, that's Kagenuma's advice when he turns Yukie away.

Naturally he doesn't stay uninvolved for long, or we'd have no movie. When he does agree to enter Yukie's dreams, it isn't sympathy that motivates him. He sees in Yuko the same crippling terror that drove his mother mad, and he badly wants to understand. What did his mother see? Was he, her child, a monster in her eyes? What kind of fear makes someone you love unreachable?

This second film in a still unfinished trilogy about Kagenuma feels like a nexus for the character and for writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto as well. For more than half his career he has sought a reconciliation of the body with its environment. with a measure of empathy and compassion, and with a measure of optimism. Having finally achieved that his quest has moved inward to the troubled soul, and I'm finding his stories (Vital, Haze, Nightmare detective) far more tempered in their optimism. The first film featuring Kagenuma ended with nothing more spirited than a temporary respite from hopelessness for the title character.

That film was saddled with a routine police procedural plot that hindered the movie from feeling like a personal work. This time the film takes the visuals and plot logic of a Japanese ghost story, though the specter is that of a girl still living. Rather than being forced into a formula, that frees Tsukamoto to spend quality time with his characters, and to let them discover common ties (spoilers ahead)

Yukie has not been the nicest person toward her classmates, and she's fully aware of it, but then she hasn't had the happiest home life either with a mother who makes no effort to connect with her. At school she has surrounded herself with friends who are similarly uncaring of others. Yukie's insistence on reaching out to Yuko, the girl they hurt together, is alien to their nature and we gather new to Yukie herself.

Examining Yuko's bedroom, Kagenuma finds artwork she has done: dark, crowded, anxious but also among the works are pages radiating color and wonder, brightness. Happiness. If Yuko has joy in her, perhaps Kagenuma's mother did as well? In the very next scene we see Kagenuma as we've never seen him before: happily playing at games with the children of his apartment. Something in himself has been freed by the discovery. Note that Kagenuma can hear the inner thoughts of the girl's father wishing this stranger would leave his house, but importantly not until after he finds the happier artwork.

The film's coda is a sequence in which Kagenuma of hos own accord helps a child by ascending into the child's anxiety dream only to discover that the child is himself. His child self sleeps fitfully, sharing a futon with his older brother while his parents seem to find enjoyment in his suffering. It's an uncomfortable moment: on the one had, his mother is happy and laughing, and his father shares a moment of binding with her uncommon to Kagenuma's understanding of them; on the other, it's beyond him what they find delightful about their child's anxieties. It is, after all, only a dream, but one that plays on the cognizance gap between children and adults. Meanwhile, we've just learned a new detail about Kagenuma, that he has an older brother. It means nothing to the story proper, but it means something to viewers who know that Tsukamoto himself had an older brother and a troubled relationship with his own parents.

The key to setting them all free is empathy – Yukie, Yuko, Kagenuma, the troubled memory of his mother (or perhaps literally her spirit, after the ambiguous Vital, as the ghosts indicate), and maybe even setting free the director himself. Empathy comes with a price, openness to the unwanted pain of other people that warps their inner essences.  Yuko is caught in the middle. We see her and some of the figures in her art as having one eye shut and the other open too widely.  Yukie alone of her clique learns empathy, and it will forever alter her perceptions. The alternate course is to; hurt people in order to shut down one's ability to feel, which is tantamount to killing one's self (as Kagenuma's mother and Yukie's friends). Through empathy, Nightmare Detective 2 finds something more valuable than solace. The movie finds forgiveness, and through forgiveness catharsis.

Nightmare Detective (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2006)

Police investigate two cases, a young woman who has stabbed herself to death and a married man who has done the same. To Detective Sekiya the verdict is clear: suicide. Detective Kirishima isn't so sure. Shortly before their deaths both had called someone named '0'. The dead man's wife says that he was screaming for help in his sleep even as his arm, puppetlike, plunged a boxcutter at himself. The police chief decides that a psychic should be brought in to help locate '0'.

That psychic is Kagenuma, with the ability to enter other people's dreams. Kagenuma has never had a happy life. His mother feared and rejected him for his psychic gift. When he uses it, he sees nothing but other people's pain, their miseries, the darkest forgotten secrets that misshape their psyches. They come to him begging for his help, then resent him for what comes of it after he has endured their nightmares. Kagenuma would like for himself nothing better than oblivion and an escape from the company of others. 

Writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto has explored a number of disparate ideas over the course of his career, and now with his ninth feature release he draws most of them together in one film. Alienation and the deadening of the spirit have been a constant theme throughout his oeuvre, and suicide particular to Bullet Ballet and Vital (Vital especially explored the idea of suicide pacts). In recent films Tsukamoto's gaze had turned from the body itself to the inner essence (Vital, Haze). Suppression of memory to blot out pain was key to Vital and Haze both. ESP and the idea of shared psychic space between people (that is, people visiting each other's subconscious minds) appeared in Tetsuo: the Iron Man and resurfaced in Vital.

Tsukamoto himself plays '0', a more or less direct continuation of the morphing antagonist of Tetsuo and Tetsuo II, the man who has gone from seeking the destruction of his self to a perverse joy in the destruction of everyone and everything around him. '0' also is the more malevolent reflection of the instigator he played in A Snake of June.

Tsukamoto's films have a history of showcasing strong female characters. Those sensibilities are again put forward in Keiko Kirishima, the detective who presses Kagenuma to get involved in the case. She is new to the force, having been stationed a desk job with the police before now. Seeing her first dead bodies she has a hard time with the bloody aftermath. In a Tsukamoto film, squeamishness is a device like glasses were for Hitchcock: in the master's movies the wearing of glasses signified faulty moral vision. For tsukamoto, an inability to deal with blood, decay, etc. means a character who is not fully in touch with nature and often blind to something important in the story. Kirishima says that she asked for a transfer because she wants to do work that is more substantial, but we will learn later that it is more likely that an inner drive is seeking closer proximity with violence and death. Privately, Kirishima has been having her own series of nightmares in which she meets a wilder version of herself. 

All of this echoes the female protagonists of Tokyo Fist (Hizuru discovers her inner fury), A Snake of June (Rinko hides her true essence from herself), and Bullet Ballet (Chisato lives on the edge in search of self-destruction). And that brings us to the major problem with Nightmare Detective: Kirishima, not Kagenuma, is the central character here but she does not live up to Tsukamoto's heroines of his past efforts. Those characters were more fully developed and played by vibrant actresses. We've seen the likes before. The female cop who has to work harder than everyone else to prove herself equal to the men. Sad to say it's true to life, so the problem isn;t one of credibility. Unfortunately it's overly familiar – a cliché. Coming from a director renowned for his wild imagination establishes the movie on a disconcerting note. Compounding the problem, Ysukamoto has cast pop singer Hitomi in the lead, a decent actress of limited experience and without the range of his previous lead actresses. Kirishima doesn't resonate like Rinko, Hizumi, or Chisato.

I blame the premise of the movie. In tying together so much of his past work in one movie, this should be the Tsukamoto film to end them all, his crowning achievement. It is a good film, yet in sum it ends up one of his slighter works even as he brings his disparate strands together in one uniform piece. Weakening the piece substantially, these themes don't make themselves plain until late in the movie. In order to bring the audience to that point, Tsukamoto must take pains to build and support his premise. That takes the form of a standard police procedural, nothing like the fresh original storytelling the director is known for. We've seen criminal investigation movies of this flavor before, and coming from Tsukamoto it feels impersonal and uninspired. Nightmare Detective takes patience and probably multiple viewings before you see the real Tsukamoto in it. I didn't until I watched and reviewed his films in chronological order.

You can catch some sense of the director in the camera movements, like the nervous handheld shots. Here too, though, Tsukamoto departs from his usual tendencies. While he's still experimenting, true to his nature, this time his use of colors employs not gels and filters but digital manipulation with color timing and desaturation. Tokyo no longer seems a cold, sterile place to live, just another urban center with an alluring night presence. Chu Ishikawa tones it down as well, where an emotional montage is informed not by the director’s favored composer but by Erik Satie's Gymnopaedia.

I've always been fascinated by dreams and the dream experience, and the difficulty in recreating that experience on screen. Most directors fail – hell, most don't even try. I suspect they have never spent a moment recalling their own dreams, falling back on popular misconceptions (fill the screen with extravagant visuals, et voila). Have you ever noticed how in dreams you often know intuitively what a thing, person, or creature looks like even though you never actually see them? How would you convey that in a movie without heavy expositive dialog? In Nightmare Detective Tsukamoto has come close by creating elaborate nightmare creatures and then not letting us have more than shaky glimpses of what they might be. 

Repeating another motif of late is imagery of life in water, both fish and microscopic. In Nightmare Detective, water indicates the organic boundaries between the physical and spiritual, and between one consciousness and another. Kagenuma descends in and out of dreamastates and others' selves by sinking onto the keel of a sunken ship. We also see imagery of fish and microscopic life.

Preparing to enter someone else's dream state, Kagenuma dresses in a rain slicker, and beneath that pants and shoes he can easily slip out of. It's a psychological trick, helping him find the right mental state by shedding encumbrances. The rain slicker looks a bit like a cape – echoing the visual cue from M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable but much more amusing as a jab at superhero costumes.

Tsukamoto can also be found in a visual motif that recurs from Vital, an act of mutual asphyxiation between two characters seeking oblivion together. This is not erotic asphyxiation, but shared hopelessness. Both films trade in depression without solving it. In Nightmare Detective, one character finds his depression linked to a buried childhood trauma while another who suffers looks into her own past and finds abundant joy. How did they both end up in the same place? It's the mystery that preoccupies Tsukamoto's movie.

Nightmare Detective is the first in a trilogy proposed by Shinya Tsukamoto. To date he has yet to begin production on the third film.