Black Christmas (1974)

Black Christmas (1974) movie poster

director Bob Clark
viewed: 05/11/2013

Bob Clark directed the modern Christmas classic A Christmas Story in 1983, a film that has gone on to play 24 hours back-to-back on cable television and to have cracked the canon of best loved films of the Yuletide holidays.  Clark made a lot of films in his career, including such titles as Porky’s (1982) and Baby Geniuses (1999), but little do probably most people know but that Clark made another Christmas classic of another kind nearly a decade before.

Clark’s Black Christmas is one of the original “slasher” films, a genre of masked or unkillable menaces murdering young adults in brutal but creative ways.  Clark’s film is frequently cited as the first of the genre, though the film has many antecedents including Psycho (1960) and Peeping Tom (1960).  It was after happening upon watching My Bloody Valentine (1981) that my interest was piqued for the genre and I decided to queue up some of the films of the period in somewhat chronological order.

What’s particularly interesting about Black Christmas is that while it’s a genre film, it also sort of isn’t adherent to genre because so many of what would become standard expressions, sequences, and elements had yet to be codified.  In a lot of ways, it’s very inventive as far as the concept of a sorority house full of nubile soon to be corpses could be.  The killer is never actually unmasked, nor seen even directly (is he even wearing a mask?)  At the end of the film he remains undetected and at large, and while this would be a common aspect of the genre, set up to beget sequels, here it is just an eerie comment on the failure of society to discover him.

We see through the killers eyes, hearing his breathing, accompanied by some musical motif (albeit a dissonant one), ideas that would be picked up and reused ad nauseum in the genre.  The nudity (doesn’t exist) and the gore (somewhat minimal) belie the film’s entrenchment in the genre it would ignite.  The film, if anything, plays on the edge of the mystery of who is killing the women, harassing them in dirty phone calls, and whether it is someone they know or not.  It’s a mystery, sort of.  A who’s doing it.

There are a number of familiar faces here including Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, and John Saxon to name a few.  There is an amusing amount of boozing going on.  Both Kidder’s character and the house mother are pronounced sots.  And like many films, it’s a bit of a time capsule back to the mid 1970′s.

Because the killer is never named, no backstory, except his maniacal rantings about “It’s me, Billy” and some probably tragic home life, we never really “know” the why of this happening.  In that sense, it’s much more grounded in reality.  Part of the eventual cult of personality around the slasher killer anti-heroes is the often elaborate and eventually fantastical qualities of their origins, which make for more in depth grist for fans in sequel after sequel, but move these deathless beings further and further from the horrors of actual spree or serial killers who essentially they depict.

The slasher film eventually disinterested me over time, though I came of age during its heyday and had a reasonable relationship with it throughout my younger years.  But as “horror” it’s come to be less of a “thing” for me, so I haven’t wound up watching many in the last decade or so.

This is something that I will change shortly.  I’ve got a number of films queued up.  We’ll see where it takes me.

 

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) movie poster

director Joe Dante
viewed: 05/10/2013

Clara and I did a Gremlins (1984) double feature, starting with the original and right after with the much later Gremlins 2: The New Batch which I am pretty sure that I never saw before.

I did have a friend who considered Gremlins 2 one of his favorite all-time movies.  He had a goofy, perverse sense of humor that, now that I have seen it, seems quite well attuned to director Joe Dante’s manic, chaotic meta sequel.  Where the original Gremlins felt a bit at odds with itself over its personality and identity, Gremlins 2 seems much the more pure Dante product, raging around pop culture like an incessant demon, beyond self-referential, just further and further into comic permutations.

Clara told me afterwards that she agreed with my friend and thought that the second film was funnier and slightly better because of it.

Me, I think it’s a hot mess of sorts, but one that seems to have strove for such a state of affairs.  It certainly takes that tack from the very outset, featuring a Warner Bros. logo with Bugs Bunny atop that breaks the narrative of movie language much like Chuck Jones’ great Duck Amuck (1953).  And this is just the opening sequence with characters who aren’t even in the movie the rest of the way.  Dante breaks the “fourth wall” again, if you will, when the gremlins take over the movie projection and the film dissolves onscreen.  They then start making shadow puppets and are finally yelled down by Hulk Hogan himself getting the movie back on track.

Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates are back on board, in New York now, in the employ of a Donald Trump type in a “smart” building.  Gizmo gets picked up by a genetic engineer for the company, but of course all the rules get broken again and the gremlins come out and multiply, evolve, do a little of this, a little of that, a little of anything they can think of.  It seems that the puppeteers and creative crew had a blast going off on every little thing they could.

It’s even more of a mess of a movie, but it’s chock full of film and cultural references, many right back to Gremlins itself.  It’s a chaotic ride and a sort of ridiculous one too.  It is kind of funny and pretty amusing.  It’s even got a rather comic performance from Christopher Lee.

I’d say that the end result is about as good as the original film.  It’s a more pure expression of the comic Id of Joe Dante, channeling his Tex Avery and Looney Tunes aesthetics ripping and riffing hardcore on the pop culture of the time.

Gremlins (1984)

Gremlins (1984) movie poster

director Joe Dante
viewed: 05/10/2013

For Friday night, we settled down for a Gremlins double feature, starting with the 1984 original to be followed by the 1990 Gremlins 2: The New Batch.  Felix was out on a sleep-over, so it was just Clara and I who decided to get nice and cozy with Gizmo and the Mogwai.

Weirdly enough, I think Gremlins, back in 1984, was my first “date.”  My mom took us there, her mom picked us up.  I think it was a one-off date, which I remembered for losing my wallet in her mother’s car and for not being overly enamored with the film.

Gremlins was part of the 1980′s when Spielberg seemed to be franchising himself with various productions much in his own vein and certainly produced by him, but with other directors taking helm of the films to varying degrees of success and failure.  Movies like Poltergeist (1982), Gremlins, Back to the Future (1985), Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), The Goonies (1985) and many more far beyond that all could have been Spielberg movies, maybe some bear his mark more than others.  But Gremlins turns out to be much more a Joe Dante movie, trying to be a Steven Spielberg movie.

Chris Columbus, who would go on to direct Adventures in Babysitting (1987), Home Alone (1990), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), and the first two Harry Potter films, was screenwriter for Young Sherlock HolmesThe Goonies  and here for Gremlins as well.  It’s set in the small town of Kingston Falls, an Everytown, USA, home to the Peltzer family, Hoyt Axton as dad, the failed inventor, Frances Lee McCain as good-natured mom and Zach Galligan as Billy, who receives the Mogwai Gizmo as a Christmas gift from his roving father.  It’s Christmastime.  And the film heavily references many films, including It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) as if you didn’t get what they were going for.

It seems that all this cross-referencing, movie-citing, and parodying is pure Joe Dante.  By the time he gets around to Gremlins 2, small town America is history and the whole film is a meta-reel of gags, asides, and cultural references.  He was way ahead of Mr. Tarantino on that front.

But Dante’s Gremlins is also quite a bit dark.  These gremlins kill.  They don’t just wreak comic havoc.  The produce a body count.  And it’s doubtless this is why this film was partially influential in bringing about the PG-13 rating to the MPAA.  But it’s also one of the film’s weirdnesses and potential shortcomings.  Parts of it are supposed to be cute, parts of it sort of scary, but its darkness outweighs its lightness, though the film manically swerves back and forth between comedy, mayhem, and traditional American idealism.

Arguably, it’s best qualities are its madcap comedy and these darker elements.  But it sort of feels like a Spielbergian film that’s gone off the rails a bit too much.

I don’t know that I’d seen it since the 1980′s.  But I feel that I liked it about as much as I did back then.  It’s okay.  It’s a mess.  It’s pretty fun.  But also disappointing.

The incredibly cute Phoebe Cates and Galligan are so ineffectual as hero/protagonists, it’s possible that Dante made the film far more of a critique of American culture than a paean to it.  He does blow up a classic small town movie theater playing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), or Galligan does for him.  Apparently, the pop culture infused Gremlins are ga-ga about Disney classics as well as the latest things like break-dancing and modern music.  The Gremlins might be humanity at its worst, but at least they are comical.  Galligan and Cates are humanity at its blandest.

Clara enjoyed it fairly well.  She was of course all over Gizmo the cutie.  But I had told her that I had a friend who preferred the sequel because it was funnier.  She was eager to watch it too.

Scanners (1981)

Scanners (1981) movie poster

director David Cronenberg
viewed: 05/08/2013

This is the one where the guy’s head blows up.  And it blows up real good.

There is this new race of humans, “scanners” they calls them.  See, they are psychic but generally don’t know it, so they run around society like schizophrenics, homeless, and troubled.  Except for one, one played by Michael Ironside with grotesque aplomb.  And then our hero, played by Stephen Lack, who is picked up by a scientist who is looking to help (a.k.a. “weaponize”) the scanners for a biomedical firm.  The doctor is played by Patrick McGoohan, and *spoilers alert* turns out to be their dad.

It’s all a rather convoluted plot in which a drug was administered to babies in utero to bring about these new skills, but which they then need to continue to take to keep the voices of the masses at bay.  But better than that, they have other psychic abilities including being able to connect to someone’s internal biochemical network and run it as their own.

And explode heads.  Of even other scanners.

Scanners is vintage Cronenberg and perhaps up until that point his most successful film.  It was another of the ones that I grew up with without having seen but knowing (or hearing) a lot about the exploding head.  So much so, you’d think that more than one head exploded in the movie, but it is just one.  And perhaps why it is so shocking and successful (besides the brilliant FX work) is timing it early in the film before much else has happened.  It sort of comes out of nowhere.  And boom.  Big bloody mess.

The finale between the brothers, a showdown of scanner skills, is the film’s other FX specialty.  It’s good too.  But the film lacks a bit which I think oddly enough falls mostly on star Stephen Lack who really is missing something in a movie star.  I much preferred Cronenberg’s Rabid (1977), an earlier “body horror” film from the Canadian horror maven turned intellectual auteur.

John Dies at the End (2012)

John Dies at the End (2013) movie poster

director Don Coacarelli
viewed: 05/05/2013

Mind-expanding drugs.  In this case, a black liquid known as “soy sauce” gives a user an expansion of reality that includes a variety of psychic powers and as a result a couple of guys gain an awareness of all kinds of nuttiness from this dimension and beyond.  Anti-logic, comic gruesome violence, and a high sense of the absurd rule the roost in director Don Coscarelli’s adaptation of David Wong’s novel of the same name.

It’s a manic mess of a thing, this film, but that sort of suits the material.  Coscarelli gets good comic performances from Paul Giamatti, Glynn Turman, and the rest of the cast.  He taps into some wonderfully analog throwback effects (true to his school, if you will, as Coscarelli is a film-maker from back in the day of analog effects), but he also delves into digital effects as the story gets more and more over-the-top, featuring more and more massive weirdnesses.  And frankly, the digital stuff lacks the charms of the animatronically writhing bizarre creatures.

Coscarelli made his name with the Phantasm films among others, but has made a couple of more out and out comic mashup types of films of late, the last of which I saw being Bubba Ho-Tep (2002), which was quite weird but not quite as satisfying as this new one.  The two films that John Dies at the End recalled for me was Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984), though it lacks that film’s social critiques and seems much more bent on wackiness, and David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991) which also delved into drug-induced realities, though again with perhaps more at stake.

I don’t say this necessarily as a criticism of John, but just a point.  It’s a pretty wacky, funny, entertaining oddball of a film.

The Sixth Sense (1999)

The Sixth Sense (1999) movie poster

director M. Night Shyamalan
viewed: 05/05/2013

The splash of 1999 (or one of them, at least) was M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense.  With craft and flair, the film was like a modern Twilight Zone episode, with the compelling story of a child psychiatrist, attempting to help a very troubled young boy, who sees dead people.  And of course, the surprise ending!  Which was a surprise if no one gave it away.  Right?  Both “I see dead people.” and the twist itself have moved on into cultural shorthand reference, while M. Night Shyamalan has become cultural shorthand for a one-hit wonder.

When The Sixth Sense came out, I, like many others at the time, were really impressed.  Bruce Willis was very good as the Philadelphia psychiatrist, whose failure comes back to haunt him. Toni Collette, as the single mother of the psychic boy, also was quite good.  And the other big talent besides Shyamalan that the film introduced us to was the boy himself, Haley Joel Osment, whose wise, vulnerable, amazing child not only delivered one of those great Hollywood movie lines, but totally compelled the audience of his character.

It’s actually Osment that brought me back to The Sixth Sense  for the first time since 1999.  In watching him in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), the kids were totally blown away by him.  In fact, when he shows up in The Sixth Sense finally, Felix commented, “Hey, it’s my favorite kid!”  Both he and Clara were really, really impressed with his performance, and when I thought of what else I could show them that he had performed in, The Sixth Sense was sadly the only other film I thought probably worthwhile.

Osment appeared in other films, but not a whole lot.  He dropped out of the Hollywood limelight for some time so it seems, and is just now, at age 25, looking to get back in.  Whatever comes of his work henceforth it will not ever take away from his performances in The Sixth Sense and A.I. Artificial Intelligence.  I would argue that he’s even better in A.I., but they are both wonderful, amazing performances.  Child performers are such unique expressions, often some mixture of their own pure nature and a director’s ability to draw performance out of them.  But Osment clearly had something truly amazing within his own abilities as a child.  He is most remarkable.

I kept the twist a secret from the kids (though it sort of confused them), first asking if Willis was dead when he got shot and then “What? He is dead?!” when the “reveal” comes.  I realized that another film from the same period that I was thinking of showing them operated on the same twist aspect (The Others (2001)) and I wanted them to see it as organically as possible, to see how it played out.

The film has its scary moments, though really, they are just a few, and occasionally just quick jolts.  They found it frightening.

I found it pretty good.  Shyamalan’s style is straight out of film school.  Which is both critique and compliment.  He’s very effective in his shots and sequences, he frames moments for punch, and works his story well.  He also tries to layer in aspects of meaning in color palattes, shot styles, and other stuff that might inspire and engross hardcore fans.

At the time it came out, I liked how he used his native Philadelphia as his location, as he would go on to do in many films afterward.  The personalization of that seemed nice and still some of the images, such as the car accident toward the end on the tree-lined street, have stuck with me over the years since I’d seen the film.

Shyamalan has become a bit of a punching bag for me since I began this blog.  His films have gotten progressively worse (though I have managed to see them all, haven’t I?)  I’ve always recalled The Sixth Sense  most positively and, now I can say I still do.  While it’s not a masterpiece of cinema, it is a very good, very effective piece of horror/supernatural filmmaking, far more tonal and atmospheric in its frights than in pure shock or gore.  And he did get that amazing performance from the young Osment.

It is a fine film.  Shyamalan’s best.  The kids both liked it quite a bit, too.

X (2011)

X (2011) movie poster

director Jon Hewitt
viewed: 05/01/2013

I can’t recall exactly where I read about X or what I read about it, but I think it got me at “the seedy side of Sydney” and the King’s Cross area.  On my trip to Sydney a few years ago, that was the general neck of the woods that I stayed in, and so the idea of seeing a thriller set in recognizable locales piqued my curiosity.

X is a mixture of good and bad.  Some of its dramatic components, the story of the girl from up north and the would-be magician taxi driver, or the high class hooker who wants to get out of the business and go to Paris where her mother took her once, this is the stuff of bad television, hokey writing with characters whose whole description has been cribbed from ancient cliches.

But oddly enough, the actors are kind of good.  I think.  Because something is a bit more compelling here.  It’s not successfully gritty or realistic, though it tries to slum it good.  Viva Bianca is good as the world-weary hooker trying to get out.  Hanna Mangan Lawrence is not bad as the young naif fresh to the Sydney’s seamy side.  And the psycho killer cop guy, he’s good too.  And the young girl who befriends the newbie, telling her what a great friend she is for loaning her a dollar.  She was good too.

It sways back and forth into Pulp Fiction (1994)-like surprises and violence and more brain-dead character development.  So in the end, it’s far from a fully satisfying thing.  But it’s not without its points of interest.

As for the sleazy side of Sydney, King’s Cross in particular,… it’s kind of intriguing, a tad resonant for me.  Vague.

Sinister (2012)

Sinister (2012) movie poster

director Scott Derrickson
viewed: 04/28/2013

You know what’s really scary?  Sadly, neither do most horror filmmakers.

Sinister is not a terrible movie, but it brings nothing really new or interesting to the table.  And ultimately, in trying to develop yet another franchise horror figure, a recurring supernatural creep out to kill everyone, it ultimately puts planned future profits above real scares.

Ethan Hawke plays a true crime writer, down on his luck after an initial success, who moves his family into the house where a notorious crime occurred.  An entire family was hung from a tree together while the youngest child mysteriously disappeared.   And in his research, he stumbles across a box of old 8mm films that show various families meeting various eerie fates.

The 8mm device is not utterly ineffective but it is pat and overused.  Old images freak us out, especially when weird things happen in them.   It’s sort of a technology thing.  In this dated technology, there is something eerie, dissociating, and whether it’s in The Ring (2002) and strange-walking well-dwellers crawl at you or in 8mm “snuff” films, creepier by being degraded, it’s sort of glib shorthand for freaky.

Hawke and director Scott Derrickson keep the movie going.  It’s not without heart and not without its qualities.  But when a guy who looks like he’s straight out of Insane Clown Posse or some Death Metal band appears on the images, goading children to slay their parents, it doesn’t matter if he is supposed to be some ancient Pagan god or the dude down the street.  Well,…I take that back.  The dude down the street is probably scarier.  I mean, he’s just down the street, not in the unlikely home movies of families been killed in your house.  Not everybody has those type of problems.

The idea of children being the killers does offer something potentially much more unsettling.  But children as murderers doing the mindless bidding of a black-and-white make-upped rocker dude…well, that is great for marketing.  Could be the next Freddy Kreuger!  A knowable, recognizable figure who can appear time and again in sequel after sequel as the point of seeing a horror film becomes more and more detached from anything resembling anything truly frightening.

Or maybe I’m just in a bad mood.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) movie poster

director Steven Spielberg
viewed: 04/26/2013 

In 1982, I was all about E.T.  I sat through it twice the first time I saw it.  I read the novelization of it.  I even got the Michael Jackson record thing with E.T.  I was 13, but I was totally into it.  I thought that Drew Barrymore was the cutest kid in the world.

That said, I don’t know that I ever actually saw the movie again.  At least after 1982.  I might have gone to see it again in the theater.  That was the old fashioned way of seeing movies multiple times.  Not necessarily pre-VHS or pre-Beta but certainly before we had them.  And when things didn’t go to pay cable right after the fact.

Anyways, I hadn’t seen E.T. in a long, long time.  The kids had seen it some years before, not with me.  Long enough ago that Clara didn’t remember it at all and Felix probably couldn’t remember it too well.  But after watching A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) the week before, certain parallel notions arose in my mind, though maybe it was just the style of the title, with two initials followed by the longer words for which they stood.  That and some crazy adventure for an alien being of great good and innocence.  Frankly, the parallels stopped seeming parallels after re-watching E.T.

E.T. is a good, probably not great movie.  It’s greatest strengths are the child actors Henry Thomas as Elliott, Drew Barrymore as Gertie, and Robert McNaughton as older brother Michael.  Director Steven Spielberg has always had a way with child actors, and E.T. was one of the films that really solidify that truth.

It’s also quite the snapshot of early 1980′s Southern California (as Everytown, USA).  I’ve always seen some parallels between the landscape of Poltergeist (1982) and E.T.  It’s almost as if they used the same landscape shots of suburbia.  Spielberg was producing Poltergeist at the same time and the film certainly feels a lot like a Spielberg movie in many places.

The nuclear family in E.T. is a broken one.  Dad is in Mexico with another woman.  The wounds on the family, particularly on Elliott and his mom (Dee Wallace) are still open and painful.  E.T. carries that other very Spielbergian sensibility of child endangerment and dissociation from the family.  Adults are almost entirely shot from the perspective of someone of either E.T. or Gertie’s height, simply waists and feet, no faces.  The mysterious government agents are just body parts, not men, until the very end when Peter Coyote shows up and has a face and a voice.

The magic that I felt in 1982 (in which I was far from alone) really doesn’t resound as powerfully today.  Felix and Clara enjoyed the film’s more comic aspects, like when E.T. gets drunk or gets dressed in drag, or simply gets knocked around.  As surprised by E.T.’s death and resurrection, neither of the kids seemed very overwhelmed by the emotion of the story.  I remember tearing up when I saw the film back in the day.  Again, I don’t think I was exactly alone in that.

I asked them what they thought about E.T. vis-a-vis A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which was sort of the notion of pulling E.T. out at this point.  Clara preferred the movie about the robot boy to the friendly alien invader.  And interestingly, I think that I too think it’s a better film.  While it’s certainly had less cultural impact, less commercial success, less notoriety, I think it’s a better film.

E.T. is as much a time capsule of a film as anything, so it seems.  While it was one of the films that really embedded product placement in its evil corporate form in earnest, it also maintains some image of a kid’s California life of the time, surrounded as one is with the cultural effluvia of one’s period: Star Wars toys, Hulk posters, Speak’n'Spells.  For me, it’s particularly evocative, as I stayed that summer in California with my grandparents and still vividly remember that time.  But that is the uniqueness of my experience, not the least objective.

It’s also sentimental and soppy and silly cutesy.  Some of the cutesy is still effectively cute (Drew Barrymore is still a doll as Gertie), some a little more groan-inducing.  And some of the “magical” images, such as Elliott riding his bike across the giant moon, flying in air, with the John Williams score grabbing at the heartstrings (heartlights?), it’s not necessarily ham-fisted but still most obvious.

Iconic, yes.  Masterful, maybe not.

Alien Resurrection (1997)

Alien Resurrection (1997) movie poster

director Jean-Pierre Jeunet
viewed: 04/24/2013

To complete the Alien cycle, sort of, I pulled up the 1997 film, Alien Resurrection, which I hadn’t seen since its initial release.  When it first came out, I was kind of excited about it.   Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, fresh off the amazing The City of Lost Children (1995) and featuring the ever-waifish Winona Ryder, this strange mix of elements seemed to bode of something unusual and potentially cool.  On paper, at least.

The screenplay was written by Joss Whedon, though at the time that wouldn’t have meant a lot to me.  Whedon’s contributions were not enough to rescue the film, either.

Set 200 years after Alien 3 (1992), the never say dead Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is “resurrected” via DNA with an alien queen inside her.  All hell, of course, breaks loose.

Ron Perlman and Dominique Pinon, also fresh off  The City of Lost Children show up, as do the tropes and ideas that comprise an “Alien” movie.  Sort of like a jazz take on material, flashing familiar elements of a song whilst reinventing and playing with the elements.  Though in this case it would be a rather poor rendition.

Winona does indeed also appear.  As the resident android, though apparently one with emotions.  She’s not bad here. Those big brown eyes are as luminous as ever.

Sadly, Alien Resurrection is probably the worst of the original four films.  It’s not unfun.  It’s kind of entertaining. If a sloppy mess of a movie.

The Alien series Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992), and Alien Resurrection (1997) doesn’t end here.  It moves into Alien vs. Predator (2004) and then Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007).  And then does it not become re-resurrected in Prometheus (2012)?  And beyond?

As I started my venture into the “quadrilogy,” I actually also became intrigued by its knock-offs.  I haven’t watched any of them yet, though I’ve queued some.  Maybe more to come.  Maybe.