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What Has Sunk May Rise: Die, Monster, Die! (1965)

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

1965 (UK / USA)
Director: Daniel Haller
Viewed: February 17, 2013
Format: DVD - MGM (2005)

Based On: “The Colour Out of Space” (1927)

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Part of a series on film adaptations of the works of H. P. Lovecraft.]

The titles of H. P. Lovecraft’s 1927 short story “The Colour Out of Space” and its 1965 film adaptation Die, Monster, Die! promise very different experiences, and both works deliver on their pledges. “Colour” is one of Lovecraft’s finest short stories, a frightening alien encounter tale that stands as both a paragon of the author’s distinctive prose and the purest expression of science-fiction-as-horror in his bibliography. Like most of the writer’s work, it’s an exercise in slow-burn dread, in which stalwart but guileless New Englanders slowly discern that a terrifying, unfathomable entity squirms just beyond the borders of their understanding.

Die, Monster, Die!, meanwhile, is what one would expect from American International Pictures in late 1965: a low-budget, flamboyant horror film replete with hammy dialogue, lush sets, and gruesome makeup effects. The film’s climactic rampage by a glowing, super-strong Boris Karloff is a weirdly emblematic moment, an almost perfect embodiment of the schlocky yet shamelessly entertaining character of Hollywood horror and science-fiction in the 1950s and 60s. Yet despite Die, Monster, Die!’s significant divergences from “Colour” in terms of both plot and tone, it quite capably conveys its source material’s mingling of secular and Puritan dread.

“The Colour Out of Space” is in some ways the essential Lovecraft story, as it concerns humankind’s inability to adequately describe the breadth of the universe with its primitive scientific vocabulary. The meteorite that falls on the Gardner farm near Arkham, Massachusetts in 1882 is subjected to all manner of experiments, producing remarkable yet perplexing results. Most prominently, spectrographic analysis indicates an otherworldly new color that is dissimilar from any conventional hue. (Lovecraft performs some fascinating linguistic acrobatics in order to convey the striking qualities of this alien shade without referencing the familiar colors on the red-to-violet spectrum.) The meteorite and the mutagenic, mind-shattering entity that it carries to Earth are not mystical in nature, but “hyper-scientific”. They represent natural cosmic phenomena that lie so far outside the bounds of human understanding that our species’ crude science can characterize them only incompletely.

Cunningly, Lovecraft embeds this extrastellar nightmare within a rural New England landscape that is thick with spiritual fears, spooky folklore, and all manner of whispered Indian and colonial legends. While “Colour” suggests that a secular framework is ultimately the correct one for understanding the alien horror that gradually overtakes the Gardner farm, the occult anxieties of the locals lend the story a unsettling resonance. Moreover, the learned men who are so flabbergasted by the meteorite’s properties eventually return to town after collecting their specimens and recording their observations. It is the superstitious country folk who witness the area’s subsequent slow-motion ecological catastrophe, as the local flora and fauna—and, most chillingly, the Gardners themselves—undergo disturbing changes. In this way, Lovecraft portrays the demon-haunted bumpkin worldview as flawed, while simultaneously enjoining the reader to value rural people’s intimate familiarity with their natural surroundings.

Exasperation with the wild fears of rural landowners, combined with dismissal of their environmental observations, would eventually became a hallmark of government and corporate attitudes wherever twentieth century progress sought to extend its reach into “underdeveloped” American spaces. Significantly, “Colour’s” tale of 1880s terror is couched within a 1920s framing narrative about just such an endeavor. The “blasted heath” where the Gardner farm once stood is scheduled to be drowned beneath a new reservoir, and a nameless land surveyor has coaxed local eccentric Ammi Pierce to provide his recollections of the weird havoc once wreaked by the meteorite. Upon hearing Pierce’s fantastical and unnerving tale, the surveyor confesses relief at the forthcoming inundation of the accursed area…and a resolve to never, ever drink Arkham city water in the future.

As H. P. Lovecraft short stories go, “Colour” has obvious advantages as source material for a cinematic adaptation. Its core scenario is relatively straightforward—a falling space rock brings radioactive terror to a small town—and would have been quite familiar to the young Atomic Age filmgoers that AIP notoriously coveted. The story contains several fascinating visual hooks, from the ominously glowing meteorite to the twisted vegetation spawned by its alien emanations. There is, of course, the vexing matter of that ineffable color that plays such a prominent role in Lovecraft’s tale, a hue that by definition no cinematic work could adequately convey. (This is likely the most abstract example of one might term “the Lovecraft problem,” the difficulty in translating the author’s baroque yet ambiguous descriptions into effective images.) The screenplay for Die, Monster, Die!, penned by genre television writer Jerry Sohl, sidesteps this problem by cutting out references to the impossible color altogether. Indeed, the script completely strip-mines “Colour” for its essential components and then recasts them in a more conventional gothic horror mold, complete with a forbidding ancestral estate and a comely virginal damsel.

It’s easy enough to see why executive producers Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson would push the film in this direction, even if it resulted in a feature that bore little resemblance to Lovecraft’s original story. AIP had just completed its Corman-Poe Cycle of films with The Tomb of Ligeia in 1965. Faithfulness to Edgar Allan Poe’s works had not been a prominent characteristic of those features—to put it mildly—and yet the films had been wildly successful. Doubtlessly, this was due partly to Poe’s status as an iconic American horror brand, partly to the presence of lead actor Vincent Price, and partly to viewers’ complete ambivalence of concepts like “literary fidelity”. Certainly, Lovecraft’s name did not enjoy the same level of mainstream recognition in ‘65 as Poe’s. Indeed, this is what led AIP to disingenuously market 1963’s The Haunted Palace as an adaptation of the latter author’s work, when in was in fact based on the former’s novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Even in the case of Die, Monster, Die!, the first film to properly credit a Lovecraft work as its sole source, the writer’s name is spelled out on the movie poster in the tiniest text not reserved for legalese. A cinema patron could surmise from this graphic design snub that the faithfulness of the adaptation was not a significant concern for the filmmakers.

Although short on devotion to its source material, Die, Monster, Die! possesses a bevy of classic horror landmarks that quickly orient the viewer. Indeed, a filmgoer who had dutifully lined up to see the features in the Corman-Poe Cycle would have been right at home in Die, Monster, Die’s crumbling, fog-shrouded surroundings. Upon disembarking from a train in the English village of Arkham, American scientist Stephen Reinhart (Nick Adams) questions the local residents on where he might acquire transportation to the outlying Witley estate. He is rebuffed with almost comical gruffness by the villagers, who treat him as though he were asking for a lift to the Ninth Circle of Hell. Forced to make his way on foot, Reinhart passes by an enormous earthen crater surrounded by decimated trees and shrubs that crumble to ash at his touch. He eventually arrives at the Witley grounds, where he is unknowingly followed by a veiled, black-clad figure to the front door. Upon entering the grim manor, Reinhart is quickly confronted by the elderly, wheelchair-bound Nahum Witley (Karloff) and his owlish manservant Merwyn (Terence de Marney). The master of the house acidly but reasonably demands to know why Reinhart is trespassing despite ample signs that visitors are not welcome.

The scientist hastily explains that he is a former classmate of Nahum’s daughter, Susan (Suzan Farmer), and it was she who extended an invitation to visit the estate. On cue, Susan delightedly bounces down the stairs to embrace Reinhart, providing a fresh-faced, almost jarring counterpoint to the suffocating Old World atmosphere of the Witley manor. Despite the glowering objections of her father, Susan insists that Reinhart meet her ailing mother, Letitia (Freda Jackson), who wheezes behind the curtains of a massive four-poster bed in her chambers. Susan and Reinhart’s not-so-secret engagement pleases Letitia, but she asks to speak to her future son-in-law alone. In fearful whispers, she tells him of a servant girl who was similarly ravaged by a mysterious illness and subsequently vanished, and then begs him to take Susan far from the estate as soon as possible.

The encounter with Mrs. Witley rattles Reinhart, but he and Susan resolve to stay at the manor for least another evening, notwithstanding Nahum’s smoldering hostility to the younger man’s presence. It’s at this point that Die, Monster, Die! settles into a narrative pattern that consists almost entirely of Reinhart wandering around and attempting to untangle exactly what sort of foul strangeness is transpiring at the Witley estate. The film is not entirely beholden to his perspective, as it occasionally follows Nahum while he skulks about and pursues his own sinister agenda. In the main, however, Reinhart’s halting explorations are the means by which the plot unfolds, creating a sense of a piecemeal revelation. Bizarre occurrences abound: Merwyn collapses suddenly at dinner, an unnatural light pulses within the greenhouse, Letitia’s condition suddenly worsens, and Reinhart is violently ambushed by the veiled stranger. As he begins to unmask the estate’s secrets, Reinhart finds that all of the weird goings-on seem to point to the aforementioned crater and the force that created it. Meanwhile, Nahum seems to be losing what little control he once possessed over a mysterious glowing object in the cellar.

This narrative approach doesn’t exactly lend itself to propulsive drama, as most of the film’s plot points consist of Reinhart discovering horrible things about the Witley manor and about Nahum’s schemes. Many of the film’s significant events would arguably have occurred whether or not Reinhart was even present at the estate. This leaves the protagonist in the awkward position of having no particular role in the story other than as a vessel for exposition, although he does ultimately deliver Susan from the film’s requisite climactic inferno. In this respect, Die, Monster, Die! is actually comparable to many Lovecraft stories—including “The Colour Out of Space” itself—in that the “hero” plays the part of a glorified bystander while fearsome cosmic forces lurch to and fro. Such stakes-free storytelling is risky, but it’s to the credit of Sohl and director Daniel Haller that the film is still quite engaging, even when it’s doing little more than gaping in fear at mutant horrors. The filmmakers maintain an appropriate sense of the uncanny throughout the feature, keeping the viewer slightly off-balance with intense but carefully parceled shocks.

Neither Haller nor cinematographer Paul Beeson have the same flair for widescreen compositions that Roger Corman and Floyd Crosby exhibited in The Haunted Palace and the other AIP Poe films. Still, while Die, Monster, Die! is not exactly a visually stunning film, it is rich in memorable sights thanks to the vivid special effects by Ernie Sullivan and Wally Veevers and the downright stomach-churning makeup by Jimmy Evans. Nearly all of the film’s standout scenes center on a bizarre practical effect that sears itself into the mind’s eye. Karloff’s regression into a blank-eyed atomic brute at the film’s conclusion is a particular highlight, as is a startling sequence in which a revolting mutant stumbles through the estate in a bloodthirsty frenzy. There is even an all-too-fleeting glimpse of a formless, classically Lovecraftian monstrosity gibbering in a darkened cell. Haller and editor Alfred Cox—a veteran of Hammer Films horror features—present all of these weird, disturbing components in a manner that maximizes their horrific impact.

This sense of ghastly showmanship distinguishes Die, Monster, Die! from its more academic-minded source material. Nonetheless, both the literary work and film adaptation skillfully exploit the narrow, unsettled area where science-fiction and horror overlap. On paper, Die, Monster, Die! is a “pure” example of the former genre, given that the film’s menace originates from outer space and the story has no place for magic or other supernatural forces. (Indeed, the film draws attention to the hokiness of the “Satanic” devotions that were once perpetrated by the Witley ancestors.) However, Die, Monster, Die! relies to a significant extent on well-worn horror elements, from the mysterious locked room to the suspicious midnight burial. The result is a curious hybrid of an atomic monster feature and a cobwebby gothic mystery. While it doesn’t ever discover the singular, almost agoraphobic dread that characteristics “The Colour Out of Space,” the film does succeed in resolving its disparate generic constituents into a satisfying and genuinely frightening work.

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Warm Bodies

Saturday, February 2nd, 2013

2013 (USA)
Director: Jonathan Levine
Viewed: January 29, 2013
Format: Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20 Cine)

Warm Bodies

Zombie films are now such a ubiquitous aspect of contemporary pop culture, it’s difficult to believe that a little more than a decade ago the subgenre was in a bit of slump. A mere month after George Romero’s original Living Dead trilogy was completed in July of 1985, the sophomoric goofiness and embarrassing “punk” aesthetic of the Return of the Living Dead franchise rose up to take its place. Occasional bright spots such as Tom Savini’s remake of Night of the Living Dead (1990) and Ryuhei Kitamura’s undead-against-yakuza feature Versus (2000) managed to keep the zombie flame alive during those dark days. However, it wasn’t until 28 Days Later hit the ground running in 2002 that the zombie tale was truly reborn as a borderline-respectable cluster of horror conventions, one that could eventually support lavishly produced hour-long television dramas. This resurrection happened quickly, too, if one can assess the maturity of a trend by events of sub-subgenre fission. Only two years passed between 28 Days and Shaun of Dead (2004), the first post-revival zombie comedy and unquestionably the finest example of the form.

Sadly, the zombie comedy has had a lackluster unlife in the wake of Shaun, delivering one reasonably strong also-ran (Zombieland) and a string of forgettable features that range from the merely dull to the howlingly unfunny (Dead & Breakfast, Boy Eats Girl, Fido, Dance of the Dead, Dead Snow). Writer-director Jonathan Levine’s new film, Warm Bodies is the latest clammy-skinned hopeful in this particular category of cinema, and unfortunately it stumbles far more often than it succeeds.

Adapted from Isaac Marion’s post-apocalyptic “zombie romance” novel of the same name, the film strikes an unusual tone that is somehow both earnest and acerbic. Its narrative is a rather shameless mash-up of warmed-over love story fragments: both Romeo and Juliet and Beauty and the Beast lend their contours to the story. The former work, in fact, is referenced so overtly that the film is practically a zombie retelling of the Bard’s tragedy (with a happy ending!). Warm Bodies presents the bland, star-crossed romance between awkward pretty-boy zombie R (Nicholas Hoult) and tough, sensitive human Julie (Teresa Palmer) in a blithely matter-of-fact way. (R and Julie: get it?) The ardor of their forbidden love is more asserted than illustrated through dialogue or action, and Hoult and Palmer lamentably don’t have much chemistry with one another. Levine’s screenplay dresses up this tale of necrophilic puppy love with doses of tiresome action-horror and equally tiresome science-fiction allegory, but these elements only serve to draw attention to the thin, unengaging romance.

Yet despite the straightforward, shallow stance that the film assumes towards its central love story, Warm Bodies strives to be a satirical riposte to the serious-minded angst of most fictional adolescent romance. The resulting tone is damn strange. While the film never feels phony, there is a smug heedlessness in the way that its winking ridicule is scrawled in between moistened, unconvincing declarations of emotion. To the film’s credit, R’s professions of love are groaned in a gurgling Tarzan pidgin, consistently underlining the vacuousness of the couple’s fairy tale yearnings. However, this sardonic impulse never convinces, if only because the film is never truly bloody-minded about attacking mindless storytelling formulae.

Nonetheless, Warm Bodies does score some critical hits against deserving targets: the leaden longing of post-Twilight young adult lit; the creepiness of male characters in Sundance-bait relationship films; or the rotten, god-awful cliches of mainstream romantic comedy cinema. (One standout gag involves a character putting a screeching halt to the use of “Oh, Pretty Woman” during a Makeover Scene.) Most of the film’s mockery is delivered loudly and unambiguously—often via R’s pointedly ironic internal voice-over—but there are some exceedingly sly moments here and there. When R haltingly insists on the superiority of vinyl over digital music, it’s presented in such a deadpan manner that it’s difficult to discern if the script is satirizing actual music snobs, the Hollywood conception of music snobs, or the lazy use of music snobbery to denote character depth. The film’s humor really only falls flat when it lamely attempts to ape Shaun of the Dead by pointing out the similarities between the pre- and post-undead worlds.

Zombie movie purists will likely find the entire premise of Warm Bodies objectionable on a certain level. The story is predicated on R having retained a sliver of intelligence and emotion within his moldering brain, an idea that flies in the face of the normally strict depiction of the living dead as mindless horrors that are beyond salvation. What’s more, the plot presents Juliet’s love for R as a sort of redeeming contagion, capable of stirring not only her undead boyfriend’s putrid heart to beat, but also the blood of other zombies with whom he comes into contact. While this concept is faintly ridiculous, it’s not self-defeatingly stupid, nor is its contravention of zombie tropes especially bothersome. Works of fiction can, after all, posit whatever rules that the creator wishes, and there’s only so many living dead films that can be made in the unremittingly bleak mode of 28 Weeks Later and [REC]. Far more annoying than the film’s conceit of a curable undeath is its failure to play fair by its own rules. The zombies seem to move slowly, until the plot necessitates that they need to sprint. They can smell human flesh with shark-like precision, but are easily bamboozled by a smear of undead ooze.

These might seem to be the nitpicky gripes of a horror obsessive, but they are indicative of the slipshod quality to the broader story. The filmmakers add a third prong to the human-vs.-zombies conflict in the form of the feral, desiccated “Bonies”: living dead who have become sightless, walking strips of beef jerky. It’s an arguably necessary device in order to maintain a sense of threat even as the less monstrous “Corpse” zombies are being humanized, but it nonetheless seems narratively cheap. There is an obligatory showdown with the Bonies in the film’s final act, during which the spacial relationships between the three factions are so hopelessly muddled that it’s unclear where the hell events are even occurring.

Indeed, the geography of the film’s post-apocalyptic landscape is downright ridiculous at times. R force-marches Juliet from the human survivors’ walled city to the zombie-infested airport in an afternoon, but their later return by car inexplicably takes a couple of days. The majority of the interior spaces are governed by a kind of fractured geometry: subterranean crawl spaces seem to connect to parking ramps, which connect to subway stations, which connect to baseball stadiums, which connect to chemistry labs. This sort of careless disregard for spatial coherence is the marker of a third direct-to-DVD horror sequel, not a theatrical film in wide release (even if it is a February wide release). Ultimately, the biting humor that Warm Bodies occasionally exhibits is not sufficient grounds to overlook either the banal romantic plot or the laxness of the film’s construction.

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Mama

Sunday, January 27th, 2013

2013 (Spain / Canada)
Director: Andrés Muschietti
Viewed: January 15, 2013
Format: Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20 Cine)

[Note: This post contains minor spoilers.]

It’s a tough call as to whether there is a salvageable, halfway-decent horror flick lurking somewhere within the dismal boundaries of Mama, but the film would almost certainly need to be demolished and rebuilt from scratch in order to reveal it. The feature exemplifies quite a bit that’s banal and irksome about contemporary horror filmmaking. There’s the over-reliance on repetitive, lazy jump-scares, a horror “method” that migrated from Asian to Western films well over a decade ago and is now applied with absolutely no sense of artfulness or restraint. There’s the colorless-to-crummy performances, which do not in any meaningful way reflect how actual human beings would behave if placed in the film’s circumstances. (This holds even for the lead actor, the suddenly-ubiquitous Jessica Chastain, who is almost unrecognizable in a short black wig and “rock” wardrobe.) Then there is the film’s worst sin: Its absolute mess of a screenplay, larded with ridiculous dialogue and festering narrative missteps.

It’s a bit of a shame, because there is a nugget of potential in Mama. A great horror film is waiting to be made based on the “feral child” folk tradition, perhaps something akin to François Truffaut’s The Wild Child by way of David Cronenberg. Mama is absolutely not that film, but Argentinean writer-director Andrés Muschietti at least seems to have an appreciation for the disturbing potential of such a story. The film is at its unsavory, discomfiting best when it dwells on the fragility of adults’ efforts to civilize children, and on the arbitrary nature of moral urges that are assumed to be intrinsic to humankind. To the film’s credit, it doesn’t blink when it wanders into some harrowing, even downright appalling, places. The first ten minutes of Mama feature an unhinged man who intends to shoot his oblivious three-year-old daughter in the head, and the rest of film offers some comparably unsettling situations. The feature’s climax posits that if a child suffers severe psychological trauma between ages one and five, they may be a total lost cause, and no amount of tender loving care will make them “normal” again. It’s rough stuff, but no one ever suggested that the aim of a horror film is to make the viewer comfortable.

If only Muschietti and his co-writers (sister Barbara and Luther creator Neil Cross) had the discipline to leave out the supernatural elements and explore the chilling possibilities in a story about two little girls abandoned in the woods and discovered years later. That is where Mama seems to be heading at first, as fugitive wife-killer Jeffrey (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) hustles his fearful young daughters Victoria and Lilly into the snowbound wilderness of rural Virginia, and eventually to a remote, run-down cabin. There, Jeffrey’s murderous plans are abruptly thwarted by a sinister ethereal entity (Javier Botet) that materializes out of the shadows. This is about the point where it becomes unfortunately apparent that Muschietti intends to cram a vengeful ghost story into his feral children story—and nothing brings out the unimaginative side of a horror filmmaker like a vengeful ghost story.

Five years later, a backwoods search party employed by Jeffrey’s twin brother Lucas (Coster-Waldau again) stumbles upon the cabin, where it is discovered that the girls are now filthy, scrawny, animalistic CGI effects. Three months in the care of state psychiatrists is evidently all that is needed to restore eight-year-old Victoria (Megan Charpentier) to relatively well-groomed normalcy, but six-year-old Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse) is another matter. Having never learned to talk, she isn’t much interested in doing so now that she’s back in the bosom of central heating and Nick Junior. Standard kindergartner play isn’t her strong suit: when she’s not skittering around creepily on all fours, she’s devouring the black moths that mysteriously proliferate around the girls. None of this dissuades Lucas from his plans to adopt Victoria and Lilly, although his contentedly child-free girlfriend Annabel (Chastain) is less than enthusiastic about the assumption of such a responsibility. And that’s before she learns about the baleful spirit from the cabin, which the girls call “Mama” and which has apparently followed Victoria and Lilly back from the wilds.

The film presents “Mama’s” backstory as though it were an absorbing puzzle whose solution will herald some vital turning point in the plot, but nothing of the sort happens. Most of the second half of Mama consists of Annabel following the breadcrumbs left by child psychologist Dr. Dreyfuss (Daniel Kash), who is in turn a step or two behind the viewer in his understanding of what is unfolding. There’s little in the screenplay that asks for the viewer’s emotional or intellectual engagement, and as a result, the film just sort of muddles along. Annabel mopes about in an exasperated way, Victoria furrows her brow and glares, and “Mama” pops up every seven or eight minutes like a spring-powered Dracula in a cheap funhouse. Even on the most exploitative level, the film flops: Mama is strictly PG-13 violent, and none of the characters are garish or unlikeable enough for the viewer to get a sadistic thrill out of watching them blunder into the clutches of an undead monster. (Annabel’s baffling compulsion to open doors that any sane person would be nailing shut doesn’t prompt much but eye-rolling.)

Narrative problems abound in Mama, which is overflowing with convenient turns, frustrating cul-de-sacs, and a laughable understanding of how social service agencies function. In one particularly egregious case of storytelling fail, a sidelined Lucas receives a plaintive vision from his dead brother’s spirit, in an apparent attempt to draw him back into the story and prod him to assist in the unraveling of “Mama’s” origins. This leads to… nothing. Lucas makes an urgent journey into the forest at night, and is then forgotten until he shows up suddenly at the film’s climax, at which point he is hastily sidelined again so that Annabel can have an obligatory (and ambiguously written) one-on-one confrontation with “Mama”.

These sort of plot fumbles are distracting on their own, but the film further annoys with its obnoxious regard for motherhood as the most sacred and worthiest of all human endeavors. It’s unfortunately familiar sexist nonsense, but what’s novel is Mama’s reactionary disdain for Annabel and Lucas’ childless, hipster-lite urban lifestyle. It’s not enough that Annabel is scolded for preferring band practice and bourbon shots to diaper duty, or that her lack of maternal rapport with Victoria and Lilly is portrayed as a deep character flaw that needs correction by dire supernatural means. The film also sneers at the very notion that she and Lucas could raise two children in (gasp) an apartment, one filled with artwork and music, no less. Narrative potholes are one thing, but even a stellar screenplay would have trouble recovering from that sort of clueless classism and cultural contempt.

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What Has Sunk May Rise: The Haunted Palace (1963)

Saturday, January 19th, 2013

1963 (USA)
Director: Roger Corman
Viewed: January 14, 2013
Format: DVD - MGM (2003)

Based On: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941)

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Part of a series on film adaptations of the works of H. P. Lovecraft.]

In 1963, the revelation that the first cinematic adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s work would be an American International Pictures production was probably not greeted with enthusiasm among devotees of the author’s distinctive stripe of Weird Fiction. Set aside for the moment the still-simmering question of whether Lovecraft’s particular brand of cerebral, cosmic horror can be successfully translated to film at all. AIP’s output at that time did not suggest a studio that was capable of (or all that interested in) the cinematic equivalent of the author’s fussy, vividly descriptive prose. James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, the founders and executive producers at AIP, had developed a simple formula for cranking out low-budget features that generated robust ticket sales: they made the kind of movies that teenaged boys wanted to see. By 1963, the company was accordingly known for its “wild youth” pictures featuring hot rods and untamable coeds (Reform School Girl, Daddy-O), its grim yet cheesy science-fiction and horror features (It Conquered the World, The Amazing Colossal Man), and the occasional gestalt of those two currents (I Was a Teenage Werewolf). (The company also produced, improbably enough, La Dolce Vita). In other words, aficionados of verbose, obscure Jazz Age sci-fi magazine authors were not generally in AIP’s target audience.

That said, films based on works of American horror literature were not completely outside AIP’s wheelhouse. In 1963, the company was in the middle of its highly successful “Corman-Poe Cycle,” a series of exceedingly loose Edgar Allan Poe adaptations helmed by AIP fixture Roger Corman and starring (with one exception) the lusciously menacing Vincent Price. The Haunted Palace was the sixth film in this cycle, and it has the dubious distinction of not being an actual Poe adaptation at all. (The author’s 1839 poem provides the title and the tacked-on closing lines, but that’s it.) The film is, in fact, the first feature film based on one of Lovecraft’s works; specifically, his masterful novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, penned in 1927 but not published until 1941, four years after the writer’s death.

The Haunted Palace is the thinnest sort of adaptation, drawing little from Lovecraft’s tale other than the rough outline of its scenario, the names of the principal characters, and a memorable detail here and there. (Compared to some of the other films in the Corman-Poe Cycle, however, it’s positively reverential.) The film opens with a prologue set in the fog-shrouded New England village of Arkham, in what one can reasonably deduce to be the late eighteenth century. The menfolk of the village have just reached the point where their outrage over the nefarious deeds of wealthy eccentric Joseph Curwen (Price) has overtaken their fear of the man. The suspected necromancer has been making a habit out of magically luring Arkham’s lovely maidens to his palace at night, to do Devil only knows what to their minds and flesh. Gathered at the local tavern, the villagers are spurred to action by the sight of yet another victim (Darlene Lucht) shuffling through the gloom towards the wizard’s estate. Led by the hotheaded Ezra Weedan (Leo Gordon) and the considerably more perturbed Micah Smith (Elisha Cook, Jr.), the residents of Arkham take up pitchfork and flame in order to confront Curwen on his own doorstep. Unconvinced by his flimsy explanations for all the recent virgin-enchantment and grave-robbing, the mob ties Curwen to a tree and sets him aflame. In his final moments, the doomed sorcerer speaks a dreadful curse, declaring that the descendents of his executioners will suffer for all time.

The film then jumps ahead one hundred and ten years, as Charles Dexter Ward (Price again) and his wife Anne (Debra Paget) arrive in an Arkham that seems not to have changed one jot since the time of Curwen’s unholy trespasses. As it happens, Ward is the wizard’s descendent, and has recently come into possession of Curwen Palace. The superstitious villagers—who, like Ward, bear a startling resemblance to their 1700s forebears—do their best to dissuade the Wards from venturing up to the estate, and even the more rationally inclined Dr. Marinus Willet (Frank Maxwell) advises that the couple return to Boston posthaste. Ward, of course, is not about to walk away from his inheritance on account of a few ghost stories. Within the structure’s walls the couple discovers not only an unsettling portrait of Ward’s necromancer ancestor, but also an unctuous live-in groundskeeper named Simon (Lon Chaney, Jr.), whose grayish-green skin is just one of numerous glaring signs that all is not right in Curwen Palace.

The painting of Curwen both spellbinds and disturbs Ward, and in short order he is acting quite strangely, as the spirit of the damned warlock begins seizing control of his body for extended periods of time. Unbeknownst to Anne, Curwen-as-Ward meets secretly in the bowels of the palace with Simon and another sickly-complexioned retainer, Jabez (Milton Parsons). The diabolical trio labor to not only resurrect Curwen’s exhumed mistress Hester (Cathie Merchant), but also to complete the twisted ritual that was interrupted over a century ago by the little matter of the sorcerer’s lynching. The logistics of this rite are a bit unclear, but it culminates in the offering of a living woman to an abomination dwelling in a pit beneath the palace. Meanwhile, Curwen finds himself distracted by the fleshy opportunities afforded by his Ward guise, not to mention by his longing for a blazing revenge against his murderers’ families. There is also a somewhat neglected subplot about the strange deformities have proliferated in Arkham; in particular, Ezra Weeden’s descendent Edgar (Gordon again) is imprisoning a Thing that seems to be his own feral, misshapen child.

Corman’s film deviates extensively from Lovecraft’s story, such that The Haunted Palace is less a straight adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward than a complete reconception of it by way of the cinematic horror conventions of the 1950s and 60s. If one were feeling generous, one could ascribe the same single-sentence summary to both novella and film—dead eighteenth century necromancer takes over the body of his modern descendant—but there the similarities end. In the book, Ward is an introverted university student and hobbyist antiquarian who is quite familiar with the unsavory legends surrounding Salem refugee Joseph Curwen, even before his genealogical connection to the sorcerer is uncovered. Charles Beaumont’s screenplay changes Ward into a devoted middle-aged husband (Price was fifty-two in 1963) who has never heard of Curwen prior to Dr. Willet’s somewhat redundant explanation of the events from the film’s prologue. In Lovecraft’s tale, Curwen’s eighteenth-century lair—a country bungalow with concealed catacombs and arcane laboratory—has vanished into ruin, and its present-day location is one of the book’s more significant mysteries. The film, meanwhile, observes darkly that Curwen’s opulent estate was reassembled stone-by-stone from “somewhere in Europe,” which has evidently preserved it against the ravages of time. (Simon apparently responded to his master’s incineration by throwing white sheets over all the palace’s furniture and working out an upkeep agenda for the next century.) The film script also switches the setting from Lovecraft’s hometown of Providence, Rhode Island to the more provincial fictional village of Arkham, which elsewhere plays a central role in the author’s “Weird New England.”

These various alterations make it easier for the filmmakers to ground The Haunted Palace in conventions that would doubtlessly have been more familiar to a mainstream audience than those of Lovecraft’s musty, bookish brand of horror. None of the elements in The Haunted Palace would feel out of place in another low-budget period horror picture from AIP or from its British equivalent, Hammer Films. There are almost too many classic horror signposts to count: the glowering, undead lord who wishes to reclaim his former power; the lost scion of a noble lineage who exactly resembles an antecedent; the outraged mob that storms the palace; the twisted man-thing locked in an attic; the cobwebby secret passage; the magical painting; the cursed village; the women swooning about in ludicrously lush, revealing costumes.

This kitchen sink approach to the narrative makes the film feel a bit unfocused at times, cluttering up the story with B and C plots and too many underdeveloped avenues that might have paid dividends, terror-wise, if they had been given more space to breathe. Often, it’s not clear precisely whose story Corman and Beaumont are interested in telling. Lovecraft’s novella benefits from the unambiguous presentation of a pitiable victim in Ward and a stalwart (if a bit slow-on-the-uptake) hero in Dr. Willet, but Beaumont’s script muddles this clear-cut approach. Price is clearly the lead of The Haunted Palace, so the filmmakers understandably feel a bit obliged to linger on him. However, Movie-Ward is not much of a protagonist. He isn’t really characterized beyond his dismissal of the supernatural and his fondness for his wife. After the arrival at the palace, Ward spends most of the film doing one of three things: staring into space in fright as Curwen’s spirit slowly works his mind-control voodoo; being temporarily but wholly consumed by the necromancer’s personality, and therefore effectively off-screen; and occasionally rousing himself from his ancestor’s enthrallment in order to wince and grimace and thereby convey the battle of wills raging inside him. (None of this is a slap to Price, who—with an assist from the makeup department—does a fine job of smoothly switching between the malevolent Curwen and the anodyne Ward, often within the space of a line or two.)

If not Ward, then, who is the film’s protagonist? Compared to the rest of Arkham’s villagers, Dr. Willet is honorable and at least somewhat clear-eyed, but the physician is far too passive and spends too little time on-screen to be the Real Hero. Anne is mainly present to look concerned about her husband’s eroding sanity, to be verbally abused and sexually menaced (at a PG level) by Curwen-as-Ward, and to be rescued from the necromancer’s clutches at the film’s fiery climax. The blinkered, snarling Edgar Weedan gets an unusual amount of screentime, given how little the subplot about his mutated son eventually matters, but he’s plainly a secondary character (given that he is dead before the third act). This leaves the film in a rather unpleasant situation where its loathsome villain turns out to be the most active, compelling character, if not exactly the “real” protagonist. There are films that have pulled off this trick, but they tend to be pitch-black, modern-day character studies (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, American Psycho, Spider), not Roger Corman horror flicks from the 1960s.

Conspicuously absent is the novella’s focus on Curwen’s necromantic experimentations, which entail not only the creation of twisted servitor creatures but also the summoning of deceased ancients in order to plunder their knowledge. In the film, the only undead resurrection is that of Hester, who doesn’t seem to have much of a purpose given that Anne becomes the object of Curwen-as-Ward’s’ carnal appetites. This watering down of Curwen’s supernatural activities turns him into a much more vague antagonist. Book-Curwen is almost monomaniacally bent on acquiring esoteric knowledge and magical power in order to secure his position in a future Earth ruled by the unfathomable Outer Gods. Movie-Curwen, meanwhile, pursues several different, unrelated schemes, including a rather prosaic revenge plot to burn alive the descendents of his original murderers. Moreover, the wizard’s most far-reaching plan is annoyingly fuzzy: evidently, it involves breeding women with gibbering horrors in order to spawn monstrous demigods… or something… for some reason.

Its story problems aside, The Haunted Palace is nonetheless an entertaining work of camp horror, chock-a-block with shockingly gorgeous widescreen visuals and a typically lip-smacking (if lesser) performance from Price. Both Corman and regular AIP cinematographer Floyd Crosby are in fine form, and there is an abundance of aesthetically breathtaking sequences, particularly for a low-budget film with repurposed sets. An early highlight is the first foray into the cavernous Curwen Palace, filmed in a single shot that pushes in through the front door and sweeps through the Great Hall. Moreover, for all its silliness, the film succeeds in being genuinely frightening at times, alternating adroitly between suffocating dread and pure shock. One of the most memorable scenes in the film falls unambiguously into the latter category: Curwen suddenly emerges from the shadows of nocturnal Arkham, douses a passing Peter Smith (Cook) in oil, and sets the unfortunate man ablaze, barely lingering to watch him burn. Corman perfectly conveys the out-of-left-field, appalling violence of this moment, leaving the viewer dazed and unsteady.

Given that The Haunted Palace is such an carelessly loose adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward—not to mention the studio’s shameless Poe bait-and-switch—it’s unsurprising that the footprint of Lovecraft’s wider mythology in the film is light. During one of Dr. Willet’s three or four exposition scenes, he mentions both Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth almost offhandedly, as though the non-fan should know exactly what those nightmarish god-things are and shudder appropriately. (Aside: How strange is it from the vantage point of 2013 to hear Cthulhu’s name spoken aloud in a film made during the Kennedy administration? Really strange.) The notorious grimoire The Necronomicon makes a faintly ridiculous appearance, its leather cover helpfully printed with its English title in gold lettering. At least Willet has the good sense to dissuade Anne from opening and reading from it, as she is plainly and inexplicably tempted to do. The most disappointing object to be borrowed from Lovecraft’s work comes directly from the source novella. In the book, Dr. Willet’s encounter with the Thing in the Pit is one of the standout moments of raw horror, a slow-burn descent into stomach-flopping dread that culminates in a characteristically hazy glimpse of the monstrosity. In the film, when the creature is finally revealed as an unmoving rubber prop under a wavering green light, it’s a colossal letdown. Moreover, this sight demonstrates just how unsatisfying it is when Lovecraft’s unspeakable abominations, described with his long-winded and yet unsettlingly nebulous prose, are plucked out of the mind’s eye and put to celluloid. (Many similar disappointments will no doubt emerge as this series of posts proceeds.)

The film’s thematic kinship with Lovecraft’s body of work, although thin, is more substantial than its literary allusions. The bleak, almost nihilistic worldview of the author’s fiction doesn’t receive much attention, but it is there, bubbling beneath the surface. It’s most evident in the film’s final shot, which intimates with a sort of cynical smirk that Ward can never completely escape Curwen’s control, and that he was doomed from the moment he set foot in Arkham. The passivity of most of the characters throughout the story creates the sensation of a downhill slide to the film’s nasty conclusion, underscoring that the warlock is ultimately unstoppable. The “victory” for Good at the end of The Haunted Palace represents little more than a speed bump, a short-term disruption in Curwen’s generation-spanning efforts on behalf of the Outer Gods. One of the film’s more disturbing, distinctly Lovecraftian lines actually contradicts the book’s portrayal of Curwen. The novella paints him as a power-crazed wizard, not an actual worshipper of blasphemous entities, and certainly not a fanatic in the service of anyone’s goals but his own. However, the film presents the madman as a devoted disciple of the Outer Gods, and even permits him a moment of fearful humility. Late in the film, Curwen betrays a flicker of awestruck dread, as he admits to Anne and Dr. Willet that his masters are beyond his comprehension: “We don’t fully understand ourselves. We obey. That is all. We obey.”

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Paranorman

Saturday, August 25th, 2012

2012 (USA)
Directors: Chris Butler and Sam Fell
Viewed: August 18, 2012
Format: Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20 Cine)

Rather unexpectedly, Henry Selick’s kiddie-goth bedtime story Coraline revealed itself as one of the best feature films of 2009: an unassuming masterpiece bursting with sensory wonders, psychological depth, and pitch-perfect storytelling. The film was an absurdly auspicious feature debut for stop-motion animation studio Laika, and it was perhaps unavoidable that their sophomore effort, the zombies-and-black-magic horror-comedy Paranorman, would prove to be a lesser work. Nonetheless, Laika’s latest film successfully claws its way out from under the long, skittering shadow of Coraline and reveals itself as a marvelous, PG-gruesome cauldron of delights. Moreover, beneath its giddy vibe of dime-store Halloween scares lies an emotional potency that is positively startling.

Certainly, Paranorman operates in an entirely different register than Coraline, although like Laika’s previous film, its exquisite design has a magical, immersive character that benefits significantly from the tactile qualities of stop-motion. Where Coraline was a bedtime story streaked with mythic nods and Grimm ghoulishness, Paranorman is much more aggressively satirical. It is not, however, principally a satire of the horror genre, but of the cheap ugliness of contemporary life in general. Writer and co-director Chris Butler sets his tale in the New England settlement of Blythe Hollow, an unrepentantly tacky little town that is spiritual kin to Springfield of The Simpsons fame. The populace is generally dimwitted and self-absorbed, having long ago elected to make a quick buck off its history of Puritan witch-hanging with a proliferation of burger joints and tchotchke shops.

One would think that grade-schooler Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee), as a zombie movie aficionado, would be at home in a town where the spooky has been rendered banal and kitschy. Alas: Norman possesses a talent for seeing and speaking to ghosts, and while this ability has enabled him to maintain a relationship with his departed grandmother (the marvelous Elaine Stritch), it has alienated him from his living family and peers. His father (Jeff Garlin) and mother (Leslie Mann) react to Norman’s claims of otherworldly socializing with hostility and anxiousness, respectively, while his narcissistic teen sister Courtney (Anna Kendrick) simply sneers and huffs. School, meanwhile, is a gauntlet of ostracism and bullying, the latter perpetrated chiefly by mean-spirited lunk Alvin (Chrispterh Mintz-Plasse). Friends are in short supply, which is perhaps why Norman reacts with bafflement to the genial entreaties of cheerful, rotund schoolmate Neil (Tucker Albrizzi).

Mystery worms its way into Norman’s unhappy routine when his batty, hygiene-challenged uncle Mr. Penderghast (John Goodman) approaches him, offering dire warnings liberally sprinkled with mad cackling. Blythe Hollow, it turns out, is afflicted by an ancient curse that Mr. Penderghast holds at bay through an annual ritual, and it is presently Norman’s turn to take over for his uncle. Naturally, the curse is connected to the town’s legend of the hanged witch, and, naturally, the Real Story is nothing like the sanitized tale presented in the annual school pageant for which Norman and Neil are currently rehearsing. Unfortunately, the under-prepared Norman ends up fumbling his curse-warding duties, and things go pear-shaped awfully fast. Seven remorseless Puritan zombies rise from the grave and lurch towards town, while a storm of crackling black magic begins to gather…

There’s quite a bit going on beneath Paranorman’s screwball surface, but the film hangs together remarkably well. Butler and co-director Sam Fell mostly keep the broad, dialed-up comedic horror in the foreground. To be sure, the film makes space for moodier, atmospheric scares and more than a few emotionally wrenching moments. However, Paranorman’s diverse elements cohere that much more effectively because the viewer knows that satirical jabs and wacky zombie gags lie waiting in the wings, ready to shamble onscreen at a moment’s notice. Ultimately, the film is attuned to the wavelength personified by Norman himself: the fearless kid who adores the freakish and revolting, and holds very little sacred. Paranorman gets plenty of mileage out supernatural-related humor, but also out of poking fun the rampant stupidity, gluttony, and propensity for violence in American culture. That’s a fairly nasty stance for what is theoretically a family film, and the result feels like an uncanny cross between Idiocracy, Beetlejuice, and an Abbott and Costello monster feature.

The film’s phenomenal design reflects its cynical bent: every character is a grotesque, even the ones who are theoretically intended to be “attractive,” such as apple-bottomed cheerleader Courtney, and her latest romantic infatuation, Neil’s none-too-bright bodybuilding older brother Mitch (Casey Affleck). Equally vital are the environments, which exhibit a remarkable level of detail—Norman’s zombie-themed bedroom in particular is a day-glo wonderland of eye-popping minutiae—and establish a dense, amusingly garish substrate for the film’s nightmarish events. The filmmakers even manage to work in allusions to classic horror films without being smug and detached about it. (One particular visual nod to Halloween is quite satisfying, and placed at an entirely appropriate moment.)

At times, it becomes glaringly apparent that Paranorman’s narrative is fueled more by momentum and laughs than by dramatic urgency. The exact mortal threat posed by seven wobbly zombies is never quite clarified, and the characters spend a good deal of time fleeing to and fro without any particular plan or destination. (The fact that the film itself lampshades the silliness of its scenario doesn’t prevent the relentless running and screaming from dragging in spots.) Like The Simpsons, however, Paranorman accomplishes the deft feat of being a mildly acidic send-up of, well, everything awful about America, while also making space for earnest emotional beats. Norman’s loneliness is palpable without veering into adolescent miserablism, and the risks he eventually takes for a town that barely tolerates him reveal a selflessness and wisdom that is truly heroic.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the film is its message, which is both stridently anti-bullying and critical of fear-based reasoning. Moreover, the film ties these two threads together expertly, illustrating that cruelty in the adult world is rooted in the same cultural and personal fearfulness that drives pint-sized bullies like Alvin. Butler and Fell work this theme in sneakily, seeding the early scenes with lines that at first seem like pablum from an after-school special, but are later revealed as key psychological observations that relate directly to the tale of the witch’s curse. Paranorman’s poignancy and the surprising gravity of its lessons are driven home with a stunning reveal that occurs roughly at the beginning of the third act. Nothing in any film in 2012—animated or live-action, kid-friendly or adult-serious—has come close to equalling the affecting gut-punch of that moment, and for that alone, Paranorman is a welcome treat.

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Beyond the Black Rainbow

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

2010 (Canada)
Director: Panos Cosmatos
Viewed: July 6, 2012
Format: Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

[Beyond the Black Rainbow was screened on July 6 and 7, 2012 as a part of Destroy the Brain's monthly Late Nite Grindhouse program, featuring cult and exploitation films from the past and present.]

Writer-director Panos Cosmatos’ oneiric science-fiction feature, Beyond the Black Rainbow, is deeply entrenched in a veritable encyclopedia of genre landmarks, drawing on its antecedents for theme, mood, and evocative production design detail. Particularly evident are the fingerprints of David Cronenberg’s late 1970s and early 80s horror films, with all their distinctive markers: the creepy religio-political factions and cult-like self-help movements; the nightmarish “fifteen-minutes-into-the-future” technology, replete with sinister black-box devices that bridge the gap between the analog and digital; the affectless, drawn-out performances; and the pointedly Canadian atmosphere to the art direction. There’s a bit of later Cronenberg in Cosmatos’ film as well, in that Rainbow calls to mind the druggy disconnectedness and Wonderland randomness of the former director’s William S. Burroughs riff, Naked Lunch.

Other apparent forebears abound: Ken Russel’s Altered States, Mark L. Lester’s Firestarter, and Saul Bass’ sole directorial effort, Phase IV. There are also a plethora of stylistic and thematic echoes from the works of Kubrick and Tarkovsky. Heck, even Silent Running gets a visual nod, a jarring reference given that Rainbow is, tonally speaking, worlds apart from Douglas Trumball’s eco-futurist parable of a space-faring Garden of Eden. However, the deep cinematic traditions that Cosmotas draws upon are something of a distraction from the task of approaching the film as a trippy, difficult work in its own right. And Rainbow is nothing if not keenly aware of its own unconventional character. The film isn’t quite desperate about wallowing in obtuse weirdness, but it is damn determined to be as challenging and impenetrable to the viewer as possible.

The film opens with a promotional film that describes the Arboria Institute, a psychological research center devoted to ensuring the “happiness” of patients through vague technological, pharmacological, and spiritual means. The year is 1983, although it is a menacing, parallel 1983 illuminated by a baleful red LED glow and scored by a relentless electronic drone. The film posits an alternate universe where the late 1970s have simply continued and Reagan-era gaudiness and sentimentalism have yet to arrive. Inasmuch as Rainbow has a plot, it is this: Elena (Eva Allen), a young woman who barely speaks and has ill-defined psychic powers, is being held at the Institute under the “care” of the turtleneck-favoring and obviously sinister Dr. Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers). Why exactly Elena is imprisoned at the Institute and what Dr. Nyle wants from her are unclear, but there is much about Rainbow that is unclear. Suffice to say that stuff happens: Elena is subjected to a series of bizarre interrogations; jump-suited, helmeted guards menace her; she is permitted to psycho-kinetically murder a nurse who snoops through the Institute’s files; Dr. Nyle meets with Arboria’s elderly founder (Scott Hylands), and has a flashback to his own early days in the man’s care; Elena stumbles upon a means to escape; Dr. Nyle has a kind of psychotic breakdown; a pyramidal machine emits light and smoke.

The film doesn’t make much sense, but it’s difficult to say whether this is by design or not. Often, Cosmotos seems to be working in an almost avant-garde mode, where narrative is an afterthought and the film occupies itself primarily with conjuring an unsettling mood and creating disturbing, potent images. In this it succeeds, for Rainbow proves to be a legitimately creepy film. It does, however, seem wildly inappropriate to term it a “thriller” when, from a purely objective standpoint, nothing at all happens for long stretches at time. The film’s stylings seem designed to be oppressive, creating a haze of nauseating light and sound that echoes the psychological demolition that the Institute is inflicting on Elena. The boundaries between individual days dissolve as Elena awakens again and again in her spotlessly clean white cell to the same spinning Arboria logo on the video monitors. The performances from the two primary actors are pitched to be overtly alienating: Rogers softly moans out his lines, punctuating every word with a long pause, while Allen has exactly one expression of slack terror that she wears throughout the film. They aren’t really “acting” in the usual sense, but, then again, Cosmotos doesn’t seem to want acting cluttering up his bench project in mood and design.

The overall effect is that of a narcotic trance, where every detail seems significant, but slips away from the viewer with maddening ease. It’s a bracingly audacious way to make a film, demanding a staggering tonal discipline that Cosmotos nearly (but not quite) pulls off. However, a film in which lots of nothing happens and the few somethings that do happen are mysterious (or downright opaque)… well, that can be wearisome for any viewer, even a viewer who is accustomed to glacially-paced experimental film. It’s not a pleasant experience by any stretch, but pleasure doesn’t seem to be Rainbow’s aim. It is, in its way, pure cinema, but it is a cold, somewhat aimless cinema. Cosmotos lacks the talent that master surrealist film-makers like Lynch and Jardowsky demonstrate in selecting inexplicable images that seem intuitively, emotionally “correct”. Rainbow, in contrast, often feels calculatingly weird, in the most joyless, serious-minded manner possible.

Cosmotos’ film eventually collapses, but, surprisingly, it is not due to its unyeilding atmospherics. Rather, it is when Rainbow executes a baffling sprint into slasher-film convention and black comedy camp in its final scenes. This suggests that, oddly enough, it is a lack of dedication to confounding strangeness that ultimately defeats the film, undermining its potential as an enduring acid-trip cult feature.

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Troll Hunter

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011

2010 (Norway)
Director: André Øvredal
Viewed: November 19, 2011
Format: Netflix Instant Queue via Playstation 3

In most respects, the Norwegian horror-fantasy Troll Hunter is a fairly representative “found footage” thriller. It possesses the jittery camerawork, generally unpleasant characters, and old-school matinee-monster teases that are now bedrock elements of that sub-genre. What most distinguishes director André Øvredal’s film is the engaging mythological framework that it constructs for its story, a framework that the film regards with affection and sincerity while also acknowledging its innate absurdity. Absent an intense and detailed viral marketing campaign—as in The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield—most found footage features do a dreadful job of conveying the broader fantastical universe that rustles outside the audience’s field of view. Too often, every aspect of these films is pitched slavishly to the camera’s eye, with little regard for textured world-building, as though a first-person camera automatically bestows all the necessary verisimilitude. Not so with Troll Hunter, which utilizes expository dialog, creative set design, and four or five thrilling special effects set-pieces to intimate a rich and dryly amusing pagan-fantasy mythos. (In this respect, Troll Hunter plays as a wily, lo-fi cousin to the Nordic-influenced How to Train Your Dragon.)

The conceit: All the footage that the film presents was ostensibly shot by a group of student documentarians—director/interviewer Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), sound woman Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen)—who are shadowing a suspected bear poacher in western Norway. Despite being curtly warned off by their subject, Hans (Otto Jespersen), the trio doggedly follows his movements through campgrounds and rugged wilderness areas, going so far as to tail him during a nocturnal expedition into the forest. Eventually, the students stumble upon the outlandish truth: Hans is no poacher, but a government-employed field agent (the only field agent, actually) for the Troll Security Service (TSS). Disillusioned by decades of thankless work under an agency that values secrecy above all else, Hans agrees to allow the students to film his lonely, day-to-day routine, as well as his matter-of-fact explanations of troll biology and behavior. This proves to be the set-up for the real meat of Troll Hunter, which is a succession of fearsome, often funny encounters with different varieties of troll.

The unsuccessful aspects of Troll Hunter are distressingly familiar within the annals of found footage cinema. The only truly compelling character in the film is Hans, a reserved and hard-nosed old salt who doesn’t have a shred of romanticism left about his life’s work, but betrays a streak of wary fondness for trolls. Every other character is either featureless or actively unlikable, which necessarily restrains the tension of the various action-horror sequences. The film drags a bit in spots, and is liberally padded with lingering shots of the admittedly gorgeous winter landscapes of rural Norway, to the point where it seems to have ambitions as a promotional film for Scandinavian tourism. However, fifteen or so minutes of bloat notwithstanding, the story is neatly structured around Hans’ investigation of a recent, unprecedented rise in troll rampages, with each scene revealing new details and flowing smoothly into the next. The whole thing is a bit schematic and predictable at times–when a 500-foot-tall troll species is mentioned in passing, its eventual appearance is virtually guaranteed–but still gratifyingly executed.

Troll Hunter never quite figures out whether it wants to treat its titular monsters as wholly scientific subjects or émigrés from a lost magical era. The film offers some biological gobbledygook to explain why trolls turn to stone when exposed sunlight, but elsewhere ridicules other alleged attributes as fairy-tale nonsense. On the one hand, Hans states flatly and without elaboration that trolls are definitely mammals. On the other, the film doesn’t even attempt to present a pseudo-scientific explanation for trolls’ ability to smell Christian blood, a characteristic that proves to be a crucial plot point. Such contradictions might have been more vexing if Troll Hunter weren’t having so much vintage monster-movie fun with its signature creatures. The sheer spectacle of seeing mythological brutes marauding through a contemporary landscape is half the appeal of the film, which does a marvelous job of conveying the threatening nature of the trolls while also portraying them as faintly ludicrous. Blessedly, the viewer is spared the sight of “darker, edgier” trolls. Instead, the creature designs draw from the works of whimsical contemporary fantasy artists, such as Brian Froud’s witty creations and Rien Poortvliet’s seminal illustrations for Wil Huygen’s gnome books.

Troll Hunter takes sardonic aim at a wide variety of targets: romanticism and revisionism regarding Europe’s pagan past; the glib flimsiness of hero myths; government bureaucracy and its aversion to transparency; and the tension between development and environmentalism. It’s not what one could call a vicious work of satire—it is Norwegian, after all—but in the end, the modesty of the film’s cultural commentary proves a wise decision. Troll Hunter functions first and foremost as an old-fashioned creature feature, one that boasts an absurdly deep mythology and abundant moments of giddy, comic terror.

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Take Shelter

Monday, October 31st, 2011

2011 (USA)
Director: Jeff Nichols
Viewed: October 28, 2011
Format: Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Jeff Nichols’s riveting new film, Take Shelter, is perhaps the most frightening work of cinema I’ve seen this year, and unquestionably the best new horror film to land in theaters since Thomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. Nichols’ film boasts vivid nightmare sequences and a bit of computer-generated creepiness, but its boogeymen are predominantly creatures of the mind, and therefore all the more plausible and terrifying. Fundamentally, Take Shelter is a film about the deforming qualities of dread itself, and about how it can devour a mind and all the lives that surround it. The fact that the mind in question is perfectly, horribly aware that this all-consuming dread is absurd… well, that just makes the disintegration all the more disturbing.

Curtis (the ever-enthralling Michael Shannon) is a geological driller in rural Ohio, blessed with a lovely, forthright wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and a sweet young daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart), whose deafness has only nurtured her parents’ devotion. Their life is simple but gratifying, the kind of existence that Curtis’ partner and friend, Dewart (Shea Whigham), will readily admit to envying once he has a few Friday night beers in him. Curtis, however, has begun to have distressing nightmares about an approaching thunderstorm, a storm that is somehow Different and Wrong. In addition to spawning fierce tornados, this storm unleashes a dark, thick rain resembling motor oil, and drives humans and animals alike to homicidal madness. Confronted with such harrowing visions, Curtis becomes distracted during his waking hours, and increasingly mystified by the omens that he sees in flocks of birds and arcs of lightning. Quietly, he begins to prepare for the apocalyptic storm that haunts his dreams. Frightened and embarrassed in equal measure, he conceals these preparations from his family and friends for as long as possible, while taking steps to evaluate his sanity.

Take Shelter functions chiefly as a character study of a splintering mind, a study presented from its protagonist’s unreliable perspective. It isn’t the first film to utilize this approach, of course. Just last year, Black Swan offered a similar first-person view of a mind losing its grip on reality, a mind trapped in a pitiless vice of rivalry and perfectionism. In contrast, Curtis gives every appearance of being an easy-going family man with no unusual mental strains beyond those common to just about every working-class American household. Therein lies the strength of Nichols’ script, which trenchantly mines the ashen pits of our collective anxieties, be they economic, cultural, religious, medical, or environmental. Eventually, the film reveals that Curtis’ mother suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. Although this provides a rationale for his sudden outbreak of apocalyptic visions, it doesn’t diminish the horror of his situation. Indeed, it only serves to heighten Curtis’ most pragmatic fear: That he is hurtling towards a genetic destiny that will transform him from a provider into a shameful burden on his family.

What makes Take Shelter distinctive from previous films about the terror of mental illness is the resounding self-awareness of its protagonist. Curtis understands that his predicament is psychiatric in nature, and yet he is unable to stop planning for the unnatural threat he perceives on the horizon. He calmly (and secretly) takes out a loan to pay for the construction of an elaborate tornado shelter, even as his rational mind screams, “This. Is. CRAZY.” Shannon conveys this contradiction marvelously, providing an anguished and largely shuttered portrait. (When Curtis does finally explode with terror and fury, Shannon plays it utterly unhinged.) Curtis is a man caught between two distinct kinds of dread. On the one hand is the fear of the loss of identity, the terror that one’s own mind has a frantic life of its own that cannot be denied. Then there is the fear of an overwhelming threat that will tear apart the world, a fear that Nichols presents with startling acuity, while never forgetting that it is essentially chimerical.

The filmmaker’s effortless evocation of the rural Heartland setting is crucial, just as it was in his debut feature, Shotgun Stories, a rattling tale of Biblical retribution in the archetypal Shitty Little Town. In Take Shelter, the setting provides a credible, willfully prosaic substrate for Curtis’ dissolution. The film presents a rare reverse-shot examination of the proverbial Ordinary Guy who just snaps. Nichols’ film proffers that no one “just snaps.” True, Curtis is caught in a whirlwind that begins with his unlucky birthright. However, that whirlwind is fueled by his dumb Midwestern pride and a series of increasingly faulty decisions, each hastily made in the shadow of his waxing terror.

The film’s treatment of fearful conviction and looming Armageddon recalls several exceptional forebears, including Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture, Todd Haynes’ Safe, and Bill Paxton’s Frailty. It shares with those films the phenomenon of “paradigm isolation,” wherein the protagonist is the lonely steward of a fearful, disruptive worldview. Of course, the psychological character of Take Shelter’s central conflict does not lessen the creepshow potency of the film’s nightmare sequences. Those are pants-shitting scary in their own right. The vividness of Take Shelter’s spine-tingling apocalyptic horror is one of the reasons its more down-to-earth chills of eroding sanity are so effective. There is little doubt that Curtis’ nightmares are the progeny of a malfunctioning mind, but those visions are so unsettling that they render his situation all the more pitiable.

Indeed, the film that Take Shelter brings to mind most readily is Night of the Living Dead, as it shares with that film a fear of a destructive reordering of the world into something unrecognizable and savage. Supernatural and science-fiction horror films such as Living Dead embody common human fears within literal monsters, but Nichols’ film seals its monsters within the mind of the hapless Curtis. This is cold comfort to the viewer, who sees what Curtis sees and feels his fear just as acutely as he does. In one of the most memorable shots in any film in recent memory, Nichols summons icy, stomach-flopping terror from little but a character’s slow, dead-eyed half-turn towards a kitchen knife. Cinematic moments don’t come much more elemental than that.

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Rosemary’s Baby

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

1968 (USA)
Director: Roman Polanski
Viewed: October 2, 2011
Format: DVD - Paramount (2000)

[Spoilers] Roman Polanski’s most thematically absorbing and persuasive works are what I term his Dupe Films: Stories in which sinister forces manipulate and mislead the protagonist, who plays a central but unwitting role in their Machiavellian plots. In the films that comprise this narrative current—Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Tenant, The Ninth Gate, and The Ghost Writer—the hero eventually becomes aware of such exploitation and subsequently challenges their exploiters. However, in each of these films, whatever fleeting successes the protagonist claims are outweighed by the triumph of the puppet-masters in the end. Needless to say, Polanski’s Dupe Films are exceptionally bleak works, especially in aggregate, as they posit a world where the hapless victim of a conspiracy has no realistic hope of outflanking the coldblooded conspirators. The Tenant and The Ghost Writer (and to a lesser extent Rosemary’s Baby) are also secondarily “Dupe” Films in the sense that the hero follows the footsteps of an unfortunate predecessor, down to sleeping in their bed and tracing their route turn-by-turn.

Rosemary’s Baby offers the most uncluttered and successful expression of this narrative framework. It was Polanski’s fourth English-language film in as many years, and yet the script exhibits the kind of straightforward elegance that few native British or American filmmakers ever muster, particularly when it comes to the treacherous realms of supernatural horror. I hesitate to label it the best of the Dupe Films. Chinatown is undoubtedly a more daring and exceptional film overall, and The Tenant’s cracked-mirror reality has a visceral appeal for me, but it’s hard to deny that Rosemary’s Baby is an exemplar of clean-and-simple storytelling when laid alongside the other Dupe Films. No feature with a 136-minute running time can be brisk, but every minute of Rosemary’s Baby feels necessary and proper, like the individual stones in a garden labyrinth spiraling into an ever-tightening circle. Polanski relies on thriller and horror narrative conventions that were familiar even in 1968 (and are now downright mildewy), but somehow the film never seems schematic, even when the viewer can see exactly where it is going.

The film is an outlier in other ways: It is the only feature among the aforementioned five with a screenplay credited solely to Polanski, and also the only to boast a female protagonist. Needless to say, Rosemary Woodhouse’s (Mia Farrow) femininity (and fecundity) are essential to the film’s story and its thematic preoccupations. Perhaps it’s a little hackneyed that the emotional terrain of Polanski’s most prominent female lead is so thoroughly dominated by the twin motives of fear and protectiveness. Consider that Chinatown’s Jake Gittes, The Ninth Gate’s Dean Corso, and The Ghost Writer’s nameless hero react with bristling resentment at being played for fools, and pursue their manipulators more out of offended pride than anything. (The Tenant’s cringing protagonist, Trelkowski, is the exception that proves the rule, as his malevolent neighbors aim to transform him into his female predecessor.) Still, Rosemary’s personality has a willowy realism that matches Farrow’s physical presence. She’s lamentably naive, but also a little unruly, and posseses enough aptitude to ferret out the Satanic conspiracy that has designs for her unborn child. (Although, admittedly, she requires a male character’s posthumous help to point her to a crucial clue.)

Indeed, Rosemary’s Baby may not be a feminist film, but it portrays the social obstacles that women confront with devastating clarity. One quickly loses count of how many times characters patronizingly soothe Rosemary’s fears, or utilize gender-tinted guilt tactics to manipulate her. Ironically, Rosemary isn’t especially threatening to the male-dominated social order (secular or Satanic) that surrounds her. Her rather traditionalist yearning to settle down and have two or three children appears to be genuine, and she exhibits an eager-to-please submission to the demands of her actor husband’s (John Cassavetes) vanity. However, even her tiniest defiances are sins in the eyes of her devil-worshipping tormentors, who ruthlessly quash the influence of the outside world while nudging her in their preferred direction. Polanski tips his hand by having all the male characters react with revulsion to Rosemary’s ultra-short haircut: Stray outside the role assigned to you and you will face scorn.

Such cultural criticisms are consistent with the broader conflict of traditionalism vs. modernism that the film establishes. Following the path of many horror films, Rosemary’s Baby exploits the dichotomy of the old and the new for its thematic ends. However, unlike, say, Night of the Living Dead, the film’s anxieties are directed backwards to the fossilized past rather than forward to an alien future. Fear of aging and the elderly pervades the film, but its terrors are more complex than mere illness and mortality. Rosemary, for all her professions of maternal longing, seems to sense that she will lose something ephemeral (Her freedom? Her hipness?) after she becomes a mother and locks her life into a particular, conformist narrative. The Satanists profess a forward-thinking ideology that rejects Christian moral norms and declares a glorious Year One, but their designs for Rosemary are dreadfully retrograde, a point underlined by the fact that the film’s diabolists are all old enough to be cashing Social Security checks.

Disturbed by all the time her husband is spending with the dotty neighbors forty years his senior, Rosemary at one point proposes a party with their “old” (read: young) friends. It’s telling that once Rosemary’s female peers have a moment to sit down and listen to her miseries, they acknowledge and bolster her fears rather than dismissing them. Neither is it a mistake that Rosemary’s Satanic obstetrician warns her away from the advice of such young women, while urging her to take herbal concoctions rather than modern vitamin pills. The demonic is explicitly connected to the old-fashioned and traditional, down to the the “Anti-Virgin Mary” role that the more pragmatic Satanists have in mind for Rosemary. There’s something gratifyingly audacious about a film in which the gravest threat to a Luciferian cabal is not the Church (which is complicit with Rosemary’s demonic rape in her drug-addled dreams), but a few liberated and levelheaded women.

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Look/Listen: Q at the WUFS

Friday, September 30th, 2011

The fellow in the above screenshot (the monster on the left, not the suspiciously plastic-looking policeman on the right) is the titular Aztec monster from Larry Cohen’s cult classic Q. I mount something akin to a defense of the film’s merits at Look/Listen in anticipation of next week’s screening from the Webster University Film Series.

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