Sunday, August 2, 2015

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 4th
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 5th
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 6th
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.

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