In short: The Omen (1976)

When the baby of ultra-rich American ambassador Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) and his wife Katherine (Lee Remick) is stillborn, Robert all too quickly accepts the offer of a shady priest (Martin Benson) to secretly adopt a child born orphaned. Without even telling his wife, obviously.

As we all know, that turns out to have been a very bad idea, because little Damien is the Anti-Christ, as evidenced by various bizarre deaths that begin to occur around him once he’s a couple of years older (and played by Harvey Stephens), deaths which he seems to cause by very vigorous and loud playing (now that’s what I call true horror). Eventually, thanks to the efforts of a doomed priest (Patrick Troughton, the Second Doctor himself) and an equally doomed but more long-lived photographer (David Warner), and because Satan’s really very unsubtle about his work, Thorn does find out what’s what, but alas, the forces of good in this one are just terrible at their jobs.

No, seriously, given how big a thing the Anti-Christ is, and how obvious the stuff going on in Richard Donner’s film, it’s pretty weird that there’s not a whole commando unit of exorcists sticking magic knives into the kid. But then, it’s also pretty weird that rich guy Thorn never bothers to acquire or simply hire some practical help when it comes to fighting off Satanists, evil doggies and so on. That’s really the film’s major problem: a script by David Seltzer that’s often painfully implausible even if a viewer is perfectly willing to accept its idiot version of pulp Christianity. Not that it’s terribly good at characterisation, either, for the Thorns, and even the gosh-darn anti-Christ stay half removed from the audience, or from much of what you’d want to interpret as believable impressions of actual human emotions. Don’t confuse this with the Italian approach to horror though, these people are deeply uninvolving and boring instead of strange and moody. While I’m bashing the script, it’s also sometimes dragging its heels painfully, coming in at twenty minutes or so longer than the material can carry.

However, there’s one saving grace to Seltzer’s script, namely the ability to come up with weird, often disquieting murder set pieces, which fits perfectly with director Donner’s ability to stage them. Indeed, it is Donner’s work at letting these weird elements come to life by using every camera trick, every skewed angle, every moody matte painting or creepy set he can come up with, throwing basically the whole visual history of horror cinema up to this point on screen that has turned this into a perennial classic. In fact, Donner’s so good at creating a mood of the Gothic in a contemporary guise, all the film’s weaknesses feel more like small problems than the critical failures they should be, so a film that should objectively be a bit of a polished turd feels rather a lot like a classic of its genre. I blame the Anti-Christ.

Three Films Make A Post: They Say No One Can Save The World. Meet No One.

6 Underground (2019): Obviously, not being named Rex Reed, I usually talk about movies here I have stayed awake watching throughout, and seen all the way through to the bitter end. However, given the clear disrespect – if not even outright hatred - Michael Bay shows for us poor idiots watching this particular thing, and having inflicted half of it on myself, I think I do deserve at least a little compensation (like a couple of months of free Netflix, the other party responsible for this roaring garbage fire). So, even having only seen half of the film, I can most certainly say that Bay is still completely unable to stage and film action sequences, he’s even worse than he was when he shot the unparsable car chase in The Rock. Today, his action isn’t just over-edited and makes no structural sense, it has also learned to shake and strobe like a Tony Scott movie, adding the epilepsy to the headache. The “script” was written by the guys who brought us Deadpool, Zombieland and Life, so you know it was going to be some smug meta-masturbation at best, but is just probably cocaine-addled and deeply mean-spirited nonsense by writers who are so much less clever than they obviously think they are. Screw, Michael Bay, seriously.

Dog Eat Dog (2016): This Paul Schrader film with Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe and Christopher Matthew Cook as luckless and pretty stupid small time crooks getting themselves killed over their inability to kidnap a baby sort of fits 6 Underground. Not because it’s also one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen but because it is pretty damn mean-spirited and excessive, too, Schrader apparently trying to very belatedly make the kind of black comedy which feels heavily influenced by all those would-be Tarantinos that cropped up after Pulp Fiction. The characters are your typical Schrader troubled males with violent tendencies (or in the case of Dafoe’s aptly named “Mad Dog” more than just tendencies) but drawn with a meanness that turns them into nasty caricatures, something the film, as well as the actors clearly revels in. It’s what you call an “interesting effort” while stroking your chin thoughtfully. Also features Nicolas Cage doing a Bogart imitation, it you’re into that.


Scrooged (1988): I know, Christmas is over, but Richard Donner’s version of the old Dickens number with added media critique that still seems rather fitting today, with Bill Murray despite being in a very bad mood during production actually giving a fantastic performance, fits these other two films rather well in its often very mean-spirited vibe. Unlike the other movies in this post, it is an actual artistic success, though, and does its very best to use said mean-spiritedness to say something to, as well as do something with the audience. Even if it is only to upset us pretty terribly about humanity (our Scrooge stand-in isn’t even the worst person in the movie) and then make up for it by having Murray give a “be kind to one another” speech where he seems to be teetering at the edge of an actual breakdown. Which, I’d argue, is exactly the right way to go here, for what the more polite versions of the material tend to gloss over is that we witness a man whose every belief (nasty as those may be) has just been curb-stomped and who is trying to recreate himself as a human being live on camera.

In short: Lethal Weapon (1987)

Having watched quite a few films written by Shane Black in the last couple of months, I very much saved the best for last, and have now come up with my own private theory (not to be confused with my own private Idaho) about him: Black is a much better writer when he has clear constraints to work in. At the early stage of his career when he wrote this, he just couldn’t quite indulge himself as he can do now most of the time - I assume one reason Iron Man 3 is as great as it is because there are constraints in working with Marvel getting in the way of most of Black’s flaws while helping his virtues as a writer - so he couldn’t indulge in endless variations of having characters mumble “life is pain” but instead had to show us this philosophy (as far as it goes) through the actual plot of the film. There’s also no room for his four-letter word based humour to become obnoxious – there are about half the fucks and bad jokes as in a contemporary Black film in Lethal Weapon, but here all those fucks are perfectly placed and not everyone seems to suffer from Tourette’s, and the jokes are expertly timed at moments when levity is actually useful to the film. Also very atypical for the writer today: the third act is as well constructed and as tight as the rest of the film.

Sure, the action scenes are somewhat more constrained in their dimensions then they would quickly become deeper into Black’s career, but they are tightly constructed and effective, and there’s nothing as lazy needed to set them up as to have a little girl crawl into a truck loaded with explosives. Things are still larger than life, mind you, they are just larger than life in a more effective manner. And the action on screen is great,  showing off stunt work as good as you’ll see it in a US film of any era.

But the human parts of the film work just as well, with leads that are just slightly larger than life (it’s a big screen they are on after all) but have human problems; and when their life is pain, it’s much more believable, and actually a bit touching, which always comes as a surprise in an action film. But then, Black’s script really does seem to know most of the time that the macho culture particularly Riggs breathes is not a healthy place to live.

Acting-wise, this is mostly Danny Glover’s show, who projects a plethora of nuances and feelings through posture and slight changes of the timbre of his voice; Mel Gibson clearly has no idea how to play a guy with Riggs’s problems (as if the first Mad Max didn’t exist) but does his best, even though he tends to default to bug eyes and is usually drawn in useable directions by a Glover who clearly is the Carl Weathers to Gibson’s Schwarzenegger, to stay in 80s action cinema that pairs an excellent black actor with a not that excellent white dude.


This thing is a classic of US action cinema for a reason.

A Couple of Remarks About Superman (1978)

For a long time, Richard Donner’s film and its sequel were the best contenders for superhero movies that successfully took their material somewhat seriously and were able to make an actual emotional impact on their audience.

Seen today, it is a weirdly paced movie, going through about three prologues (including the set-up for the sequel!) featuring a lot more Marlon Brando than it strictly needs before something like a plot develops, but it also does the difficult job of getting Superman right. It does this by accepting the cornball elements of the character, realizing the dignity of its core ideals (and as with Captain America that “American Way” in his motto doesn’t mean the practice of America, but instead the dream of it) but also giving him, with large assistant from Christopher Reeve’s lifetime best performance, a humanity the character can easily lack. The film’s main flaw is that its Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) is basically a long-winded (unfunny) comedy routine instead of a proper villain. It’s a curious decision in a film full of thoughtful and good ones, and Hackman’s performance stands out like a sore thumb between Reeve’s mixture of earnestness as Superman and twinkling eyes when he’s Clark Kent, and Margot Kidder’s note perfect Lois Lane.


However, I’m not sure the film as it stands even needed a big villain at all, seeing how much of its genuine impact is driven by the childlike (not childish, mind you) sense of wonder that may be the best way to treat its main character at all. This guy’s just not meant to be grimdark, and the film realizes this much better than most attempts at Superman that came after. I do understand what later filmmakers (and comics writers) attempted to do with acquainting Superman with the Dark Side, or just making him less powerful. An all-good and all-powerful being is, after all, pretty difficult to relate to, not exactly an obvious engine for dramatic conflict, and unless you’re Grant Morrison, perhaps not even all that easy to like – or rather, not someone where “liking” is a concept that really applies.

Ladyhawke (1985)

At some point in time in medieval fantasy France. Notorious thief Gaston Phillippe (Matthew Broderick), generally called “the Mouse”, manages a lucky escape from prison. Marquet (Ken Hutchison), the man whose supposedly inescapable prison Gaston escaped from, and who clearly doesn’t take too well to the stress of pleasing his boss, the evil bishop of evil (John Wood), is so angered he and his man spend quite some time trying to hunt the thief down again.

Gaston is rescued from probable (he is very lucky, after all) doom by the knight Navarre (Rutger Hauer), former captain of the guard Marquet now captains. Navarre has an old grudge against Marquet and the Bishop, and has returned to finally put an end to their shared story. Navarre and his lover Isabeau (Michelle Pfeiffer) have been cursed, you see, and he has to spend his nights in the form of a black wolf, while she turns into a hawk by day, both doomed only ever to catch a short glimpse of each other as humans at dawn and at dusk.

At first involuntarily, but once he learns the whole story and meets Isabeau increasingly voluntarily, Gaston is drawn into the lovers’ story, and his help, and that of a monk (Leo McKern) with his own share of guilt for the curse, just might be what will keep it from turning into a tragedy.

Ladyhawke’s Richard Donner always has been one of these curious directors to me whose films as a whole never seem to cohere into a directorial personality. There does seem no philosophy, nor a shared approach beyond technical slickness visible in his films. That isn’t to say the films of Donner and directors like him can’t be worthwhile, because there is something to say for direction that steps behind the story it is telling, even though it does make it rather difficult to declare someone an auteur. At the very least, these films will be worthwhile when these stories are actually worth telling.

Ladyhawke’s story certainly is that. Actually, I find it difficult to avoid the word “perfect” to describe it, seeing as it seems to never take a wrong step in any direction it takes (let’s just pretend the main theme by Alan Parsons doesn’t exist), effortlessly mixing comedy, fantasy, and romance in just the right way. This is a film told from the perspective of what would usually be a mere comic relief character, after all, who never becomes annoying, and never is just a comic relief character even in the scenes when he’s bumbling. As a matter of fact, there’s a suggestion that things turn out well in the end (oh, come on, that’s not a spoiler) because Gaston’s metier isn’t tragedy, and he can therefore choose the part he wishes to take in a doomed romance and turn it right.

But really, this sort of consideration pales behind the way the film uses a pretty perfect – and pretty – cast, beautiful photography of extremely photogenic Italian locations, and a script that’s tighter than you’d expect to tell a romantic story in both meanings of the word, what could be seen as (and most probably is) the film’s slick sheen of commercialism turning into its own kind of poetry. That is an effect a more discrete director like Donner can probably achieve easier than somebody more pushy, for what’s more distracting from (a) romance than a director shouting “look at me! I’m an artist!” when in fact the audience really should look at the tale itself instead of the teller.

Ladyhawke as a whole projects a certain kind of conviction, as if the film itself would believe in its own story enough to produce a sense of wonder out of thin air (certainly the best place for senses of wonder to come from), taking what could have turned out trite and unpleasantly manipulative (the film is of course still manipulative, as all art is, but in a way I at least didn’t mind being manipulated), romantic.

Of course, one person’s poetry is another person’s insufferable kitsch, and one person’s romance is another person’s voluntary slavery but at least today, and with Ladyhawke, I’m one person, and not the other.

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