A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
No movie director has as much control over what people see as prose writers have. The writer's universe is made of words; the reader only sees what's written. Adapt the writing into film, into images, and inevitably the viewer sees more than the original writer or the adapter intends. That's when people start asking questions. The writer's control is a slippery thing. Each reader can imagine Eric Packer, the protagonist of Don DeLillo's novel, looking a particular way, since DeLillo isn't too particular about describing him, but how you visualize Packer doesn't compel you to question what DeLillo tells you about him. Put Packer on film, however, and have Robert Pattinson play him, and some folks will begin to wonder. How is this guy so rich and powerful? What do the other characters in the story see in him? Watch him move through the envisioned rather than the written world, even in as controlled an environment as David Cronenberg crafts for him, and you question all kinds of things readers might not have questioned in the novel. Above all, you question the words themselves.
Cosmopolis should have been a perfect novel to make into a movie. The main idea -- Packer takes a long ride through Manhattan in his armored limo, constantly detoured due to riots, funerals, outbreaks of street art, and constantly stopping to pick up consultants, cronies, wife and girlfriends, just to get a haircut at a favorite old barber shop -- sounds like something that might have been thought up during the golden age of Hollywood. If someone at the studio had thought it up, it might have been a screwball masterpiece. Cosmopolis is comic at times, but not Hollywood funny by any means -- not the way you'd expect with its picaresque, day-from-hell plot. Cronenberg's Cosmopolis is more often unintentionally funny -- though you can't go wrong with a running gag about an asymmetrical prostate -- but the problem with it isn't that Cronenberg wasn't trying for belly laughs. The problem is that the writer-director is too faithful to his source.
"A specter is haunting the world!"
The Cosmopolis movie reminds me more than anything else of Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, the adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novels. Both films fairly slavishly attempt to reproduce the cadences of dialogue composed for media other than cinema. It was a bad idea in Sin City because dialogue designed to occupy one panel of many on a page doesn't translate smoothly to the flow of frames on a screen. With Cosmopolis the problem for Cronenberg is that Don DeLillo doesn't write in the realist or pop-realist tradition. His characters often talk in aphoristic statements that read more like the author's exercises in style than imitations of conversation. He can get away with that because a prose writer is master of his universe the way few film directors can be. Read Cosmopolis and you go in understanding that you're reading for style and ideas, and you judge accordingly. Watch Cosmopolis and you see people talking to each other, and that creates an expectation of realism, or the movie equivalent, that Cronenberg doesn't do enough to fulfill or dispel. Some might complain that the movie is overly stylized, but to do justice to DeLillo, to make him not look like a writer who simply can't write normal dialogue, it probably had to be more stylized than it actually is. It was up to Cronenberg to create a cinematic universe for which DeLillo's dialogue would seem like the natural language, or to make his screenplay more naturalistic, adapting rather than simply illustrating DeLillo.
Visually, Cronenberg often succeeds in conveying Packer's privileged alienation and staging the crowd scenes surging around the limo. It's too bad that he couldn't stage one of the novel's most memorable episodes, a Spencer Tunick style mass nude photo shoot, but the limo gliding slowly through an anti-poverty riot, Packer and another passenger nattering away on some abstract subject without acknowledging the mayhem banging on the car windows, is one of the film's best scenes, striking the right note of deadpan absurdity. Too often, however, the dialogue sits like lead weights in the actors' mouths. Cronenberg did poor Pattinson no favors casting him as Packer. Few will find him credible as a captain of finance, and many will blame bad acting for the artificial feel of his dialogue. But when not just Pattinson but Paul Giamatti also, playing a disgruntled employee out to kill Packer, sound like they're simply reciting it's unfair to blame any actor for the screenplay's limitations. DeLillo's dialogue lives on the page because that's its environment; putting it in people's mouths requires a different kind of life that Cronenberg can't create. His Cosmopolis is an act of admirable ambition -- he had already adapted a graphic novel to most people's satisfaction -- and there shouldn't be as much shame in its failure as some reviewers wanted to inflict. At age 70, Cronenberg should still have enough of a career left to make use of the hard lessons learned here.
The French have a term, "film maudit," for "cursed" films, by which they and film buffs everywhere mean those movies that suffer from difficult productions and/or box office rejection. By some standards, Andrew Stanton's John Carter qualifies as a film maudit because of the critical drubbing it's received and the abysmal losses it now represents for the Disney company. However, if we were to consider George Melford's The Viking a film maudit, few other films would merit the label. This early Canadian talkie may be the ultimate film maudit, not just for the horrific circumstances that ended the production, but for the way the film itself seems in retrospect to court doom. It was released in the summer of 1931, its title changed from "White Thunder" in an act of ghoulish exploitation. The Viking was the name of the vessel, a real working ship, that took cast and crew to the Labrador ice fields to film the seal hunts on the ice. After a preview of "White Thunder" played poorly, producer Varick Frissell ventured back to Labrador (without Melford, as far as I know) to shoot more actuality action scenes. On that trip, the explosives kept in store for ice breaking blew up on board, killing Frissell, his cinematographer and two dozen others. The story is told in a preface to the picture proper, following a title card that fairly identifies the event as the greatest catastrophe in the history of motion pictures. It so happens that The Viking is a film about a hero considered a jinx -- or "jinker" in the local slang -- who sails with the title vessel against the will of a captain who boasts that he's never lost a man on any expedition. That actor was the real captain of the Viking during the initial filming. He didn't sail on the fatal return trip, but his mate did, and died.
This awful backstory makes Melford's film even more breathtaking than it would have been otherwise. It's the last of three extraordinary films that I know of in the director's filmography, the others being that seminal romantic abduction fantasy The Shiek, and Universal's Spanish-language version of Dracula, which like The Viking was considered a lost film for many years before rediscovery. Like the "Spanish Dracula," The Viking leaves you wondering what Melford contributed to the visuals. Was he or Frissell the auteur of the piece? Whose eye -- or should doomed cinematographer Alexander Gustavus Penrod get the credi? -- captured the awesome images -- probably still irreproducible even with today's CGI -- of the vast rippling, pitching icescapes of the seal hunts, a white world in perpetual tumult, a rollercoaster on a continental scale? Who could not record pictorial wonders in such a setting? You have to wonder because the dramatic scenes before and after the expedition are nothing special, and those are the parts most certainly directed by Melford. Nor is the script by Garnett Weston that special. At its core it echoes The Four Feathers. A despised young man (future Durango Kid Charles Starrett), condemned for weakness if not cowardice and stigmatized as a jinker, proves himself by rescuing a sometimes-hostile acquaintance who's temporarily blinded. This human story is really a sideshow or subplot compared to the amazing actuality footage, which includes a seal hunt that offers a sop to animal lovers. We're supposed to identify with the hunters and their dangerous quest for wealth, but once they catch up with the seal herd and the shots start firing, Melford (or Frissell) cuts to a baby seal bleating helplessly by itself, too young or too frightened to know what to do to save itself. An older seal -- the baby's parent or just a conscientious seal citizen? -- lurches back onto the ice to steer and shove the baby to the shelter of the water. As the shots keep ringing out, the scene fades out on the baby's face peeking through the surface, presumably safe but plainly terrified. The individual's survival obscures the collective massacre, but I can imagine some selectively sensitive people feeling that Frissell and company got what they deserved later.
Varick Frissell was a disciple of Robert Flaherty, the pioneer documentarian and arguable forefather of "reality TV" who combined actuality with dramatization. The Viking's semidocumentary nature strikes me as preminiscent of today's "dangerous job" programs like Deadliest Catch, some of which have lost cast members in real-life accidents. Somehow I find The Viking's foregrounding of acknowledged fiction more honest than the modern pretense of many "unscripted" programs. Back in 1931, I think everyone understood that the story was the necessary excuse for the good footage that actually dominates the film and makes it memorable today. Whoever shot it or shaped it, that footage is so impressive that it'd impress people who have no clue of the fate of the ship and its crew. I'd like to think it'd impress people accustomed even to color and CGI and 3D today. The Viking proves that truth can still be more fantastic than fantasy.
If you missed the TCM broadcast of March 30, The Viking can be seen in its entirety on YouTube.
David Cronenberg is an exemplary case of thematic evolution in a movie director, having gone from grindhouse-ready horror to his latest lavish historical drama without really changing his creative identity. Known for his emphasis on "body horror," there is a clinical attitude in his work that makes the early days of psychoanalysis an ideal subject for him. That those early days include a lot of transgressive sexuality and human grotesquerie doesn't hurt, either. The Cronenberg touch comes through most clearly in Keira Knightley's performance as subject turned scholar Sabina Spielrein, and in a scene portraying an early sort of polygraph test. In the latter, Cronenberg focuses on the equipment and preparations as if the word-association test Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) performs on his wife (Sarah Gordon) were a mad-science experiment. As for Knightley, apparently a star pupil at the Natalie Portman Academy for Portrayals of the Disturbed, she contorts herself in such a convulsive, jaw-jutting manner while pantomiming Spielrein's hysterics that you expect her to turn fully into a werewolf. Knightley's performance is over-the-top but needs to be, I suppose, to demonstrate the danger in the method for the subject and the analyst. It also fulfills Cronenberg's purpose to disturb, and on that score Dangerous Method is a disquieting film on many levels. In a way, it's another horror film, but the subject is intellectual horror subtly expressed, the suspicion raised that no great good has come or can come from the methods of Jung and his erstwhile idol and eventual enemy Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson) -- that Freud is right in joking that he and Jung are bringing a "plague" when they first visit America. I can imagine the psychoanalytic community disliking this film quite strongly.
What's dangerous about the method is the intimacy it requires between analyst and subject, given Freud's founding emphasis, which Jung finds increasingly dogmatic, on sexuality. A worst-case scenario confronts Jung in the form of Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), a Freud protege for whom psychoanalysis has enabled a sex addiction resulting in the serial seduction of his patients. Jung rebels against Freud's monofocus on sex, in part because he entertains notions of parapsychology, but also because he'd like to rebel against the sexual urges building during his treatment of the virgin masochist Sabina. Despite giving in frequently to kinky temptations -- Sabina likes to be flogged -- Jung will continue to rebel by denying his relationship with Spielrein, which means hiding it unsuccessfully from his wife and lying about it to Freud. In time, just as Jung grows out of Freud's shadow, so Spielrein will grow out of Jung's -- but he'll just take up another mistress, living by the classic Victorian double-standard off his wife's wealth while still hoping to find a method to change people for the better.
Pessimism pervades Cronenberg's film of Christopher Hampton's script. By recounting the follies of a century ago, Dangerous Method also recalls the doomed optimism of the more modern sexual revolution. The film seems certain that neither sex itself nor any objective frankness about it will save the world or any individuals. Jung's hope that psychoanalysis (he pronounces it "psyche-analysis" to Freud's disappointment) can help people become what they're supposedly meant to be butts against Freud's almost conservative feeling that the best it can do is tell us why we are the way we are. The film's Freud is a condescending conservative if not a suspicious reactionary -- it's a great performance by Mortenson -- more concerned with defending his gains and fending off expected attacks than in pushing forward toward the greater discoveries Jung hopes for. The script is subtle enough to let us judge Freud either way. When he dismisses Jung's interest in telepathy and related subjects, it could simply be commonsense materialism or it could be closed-minded dogmatism. We see how factors of class and religion complicate the doctors' intellectual relationship. While Freud's home looks like a comfortable oasis of civilization to us, it can't help but look cramped and cheap compared to Jung's luxurious quarters. Is Freud jealous? Perhaps not, but in one of his last scenes he confides to Sabina, a fellow Jew, that ultimately gentiles like Jung can't fully be trusted. An epilogue confirms this to some extent, reminding us that Freud barely escaped the Nazi occupation of Vienna, and that Spielrein did not escape when the Nazis invaded Russia. There's no suggestion that Jung himself is anti-Semitic, but the inescapable awareness for Freud of widespread anti-Semitism is one of the factors that complicated and possibly compromised his thinking, just as Jung's was compromised by innumerable forces in his life. Were they really any better for their discoveries? The most the film can say is that at least Spielrein isn't having screaming fits like she used to, but Knightley undermined that message somewhat through her inability -- faithful to life or not -- to relax. But it's the film's own idea that a certain madness -- the pedantic-seeming Freud notwithstanding -- is necessary to the method. The film's moral could easily be: Analyst, heal thyself.
For me, the fact that the movie has me thinking of getting books on Freud and Jung is probably proof of A Dangerous Method's success. I confess to not knowing enough about the two, not to mention Spielrein, to know whether Hampton and Cronenberg have been fair to them. But I found the movie intellectually stimulating as well as disturbing in the characteristic Cronenberg manner. Right now I don't feel that I can just leave the things it brought up behind at the theater. I thought the film succeeded visually as well, apart from the CGI rendering of the doctors' transatlantic voyage, while Howard Shore's score was, if you can imagine it, subtly Wagnerian. The acting was impressive all around, Mortenson truly proving himself in a non-action role, Knightley fulfilling her purpose to disturb through excess, and the much-hyped Fassbender giving the best performance I've seen from him yet -- the moustache practically makes him a different man. The film got lost in the awards shuffle, perhaps because of its implicitly skeptical attitude toward psychoanalysis, but I'd have no problem saying it's one of the best 2011 films I've seen so far.
Did you ever have one of those days? One moment Tom Lewis (Keir Dullea) is stuck in traffic in the middle of some sort of evacuation, and in the next he finds himself dressed in prison garb in the middle of a wilderness. He meets a woman, Martine (Hollis McLaren), and several men, all similarly dressed. They tell him to consult a card in his pocket which tells him how many people he's killed. It seems that they're all murderers, though that's news to Lewis, and they seem to have escaped from prison with no idea of where to go. While they ponder their predicament, random letters appear on screen and the camera pans and scans desperately to keep up with them. These reveal that we're looking at an EMI production of a Peter Sasdy film with butchered cinematography, courtesy of Mill Creek Entertainment's Sci-Fi Invasion collection. The presentation doesn't inspire confidence, and that's probably for the best. This film would probably be just as stupid in all its original widescreen splendor.
Our wanderers are soon beset at a creekside by a potbellied road agent and his sidekick who confiscate everyone's boots and rape Martine. Observing from a discreet distance is Jack Palance on horseback, a man in black with a silver cross for a badge. After the rebooted desperadoes go their way, he identifies himself as Sheriff Friendlander and herds the barefoot victims into his town, Blood City, and deposits them in a secure house in advance of their choosing day. Blood City is a place with its own laws, imposed, from the look of things, by the totalitarian dictatorship of the Red Cross.
At the choosing day, Lewis and his new friends will be -- you guessed it -- chosen for a period of indentured servitude. Until that time, they're eligible to be killed by established citizens or their bodyguards, and they're not entitled to bear arms to defend themselves. Citizens themselves are entitled to kill one another until someone has killed twenty people. Such a person becomes an "Immortal," like Friendlander, whom no one may shoot at. Lewis isn't having this. When he wants footwear, he goes to a bootmaker and beats the man into providing what he needs. In general, he's full of gripes. He fails to understand why everything in Blood City boils down to "kill, kill, kill!" His complaints get to the sheriff, who suddenly flashes back to a better time when he (or Jack Palance) was a benign academic of some sort. This reverie sets off alarms in a distant laboratory where technicians in modern dress monitor a mannequin on a hospital bed. One of the technicians, Katherine (Samantha Eggar) pushes some buttons and Friedlander promptly forgets what he was trying to remember.
Above, the fantasy of the Blood City Slickers tour package. Below, the sad reality.
At this point, Welcome to Blood City veers away from its apparent destiny as a Westworld ripoff and reveals itself as an even more specific ripoff of that old Prisoner episode where Number Six and his tormentors dress up as cowboys. The ripoff is so thorough that Lewis is at one point informed, apropos of nothing, that he is "Number Nine." Gradually, tortuously, Blood City reveals its purpose. The citizens, prisoners, slaves, bodyguards, etc. are being cultivated or culled in the hope of finding a "Killmaster" to do an unidentified government's dirty work in distant parts of the globe. As an Immortal, Friendlander has been the most likely candidate so far (his scholarly background notwithstanding), but Katherine believes that Lewis is something special. She advances his cause by programming herself into Blood City as a citizen who throws Lewis a rifle so he can save his life, kill a man, become a citizen, join the Red Cross, and acquire his own bodyguards from the man he killed. While the real Katherine is in no way hooked up to the virtual reality (avant la lettre) simulation, she gets off watching video footage of her Blood City self done up as a saloon girl getting it on with Lewis, while a colleague complains that her interest borders on the pornographic. Forget about scientific objectivity. Instead, Katherine grows murderously jealous of Lewis's continuing interest in poor Martine. When Lewis plots to liberate her from slavery to the fat robber from the early scenes, Katherine and her posse intervene, and when the big slob uses Martine as a human shield, she coolly puts a bullet in her virtual (?) rival's brain.
Not satisfied with this result, Katherine resolves to terminate Lewis once and for all. From her control post in the lab, she can manipulate reality in Blood City to make Friendlander appear out of nowhere like Droopy Dog whenever Lewis tries to elude him. When Friendlander isn't sufficient to her purpose, she empowers one of Lewis's erstwhile fellow victims to whack the renegade. But something goes wrong here as well. Lewis is killed fair and square in Blood City, but he wakes up in the real world -- that's not supposed to happen, at least not so soon. But before Katherine can follow through terminating the man, her boss (Barry Morse) appears to insist that Lewis be retained to lead an Elite Force. In the meantime, in Sasdy's big would-be mindfuck finish, Lewis staggers around his room (where he'd at first looked a lot like the dummy previously playing Jack Palance), discovering first a bunch of TV monitors showing atrocity footage from around the world, and then a reject room where the real Friendlander, Martine, etc. stagger about in a white-clad stupor. Confronted with such horror, Lewis takes the only escape route available to him, somehow reprogramming himself into Blood City and riding off into the sunset.
Pay no attention to the people behind the curtain.
I see what Sasdy and his writers were trying to say, but no -- no one in their right mind, and compared to those other poor souls Lewis is in his right mind, would put themselves back in the idiot universe of Blood City. Hell, given a choice between becoming a Killmaster, or getting an apparent lobotomy, and watching Welcome to Blood City, I can cut the choice down to two pretty quickly. Sasdy finishes a remarkable two-part cinematic coup here; after making one of the worst horror films of the 1970s in the form of The Devil Within Her/Sharon's Baby/ I Don't Want to Be Born, he bounces right back to make one of the worst sci-fi films of the decade. It qualifies for that ranking because it confuses incoherence for originality when it isn't brazenly stealing used ideas and wastes an otherwise capable cast of stars. If anything, Blood City is worse than the baby movie because its ineptitude is less amusing. It's no surprise that it was television from then on for Sasdy, with the somehow fitting exception of the Pia Zadora vehicle The Lonely Lady. Need I add that Mill Creek's atrocious rendering does the film no favors? Since it does none for itself, I guess you can't blame Mill Creek too much.
You have to laugh. There's no other way to deal with Jason Eisener's attempt at an instant-cult film, an affectionate burlesque of 1980s vigilante movies. For my purposes, "burlesque" is a particular type of comedy, something different from parody or satire. While parody makes fun of genre conventions, and satire exposes their unreality, burlesque exploits the artificiality of genre and the artificiality of drama itself without repudiating or negating what it exploits. Burlesque laughs with its material, not at it, sharing with its audience the fundamental joke -- "that's not real!" -- while continuing to play the material with as straight a face as necessary. The core form of burlesque is slapstick comedy, which subjects characters to traumatic violence without truly traumatizing them. Hobo With A Shotgun is a slapstick comedy, as is only proper, since the action movie as we know it evolved from silent comedy. It's the sort of film where a character can have her arm ground to a gory point by the blades of a lawn mower, and can immediately use the sharp stump to stab her tormentor -- all this less than 24 hours after her head had nearly been cut off by a hacksaw. You may not find that funny, but it's meant to be funny. By hyper-exaggerating the already exaggerated violence of vigilante movies -- not to mention post-apocalypse films and spaghetti westerns -- Hobo takes cinematic ultra-violence back to its comedy roots. So it's probably no accident that its hero is what once would have been called a tramp.
The story is an amalgam of spaghetti western, vigilante film and post-apocalypse in a retro, 80s-ish setting. The man known only as the Hobo (Rutger Hauer) arrives in Hope Town, renamed Scum Town by a graffiti artist. The place is far behind the times, assuming the time to be the present and not the actual 1980s. A video arcade is one of downtown's main attractions and stereotypical spike-haired punks lurk in the background. An entrepreneur films bumfights with an old-timey camcorder. There's little evidence of an economy, even a criminal one. The town is ruled by a ruthless, nihilistic and sadistic family, "The Drake" and his two sons, who demand applause whenever they put enemies to death and freely dump sacks of cocaine everywhere to keep the populace dependent. They seem motivated by nothing more than cruelty, and they cultivate cruelty in their followers. Topless girls beat a man dangling upside down with bats like he was a pinata. In the arcade you can hit a homeless man in the foot with a huge hammer as if he was the bell-ringing test of strength at a carnival. Not even children are safe. They are torched alive in school buses and dumpsters, or else molested by Santa-clad predators. The unmotivated cruelty of Scum Town and its rulers reminded me of spaghetti westerns, and the impression would be reinforced by the arrival of a mysterious stranger. But the same lack of motivation costs Hobo much of the contemporary relevance -- apart from its essential compassion for the homeless -- that vigilante films may have had in their own time. It's less Death Wish than Death Wish 3, for those keeping score. Still, it's cool to see an action film with poor folk at its heart.
Once upon a time, Rutger Hauer was such a beautiful man that Anne Rice thought him the ideal actor to play the Vampire Lestat. Now he is a Hobo with a Shotgun, and there's no illusion that this film will do for him what The Wrestler sort of did for Mickey Rourke or JCVD might have done for Jean-Claude Van Damme. Hauer is clearly a limited performer at this stage of his career, but like many a beloved B-movie performer he gives his all here. At his best, he sells the salient point that, for all his heroism, the Hobo is as crazy as a bedbug. He's hobbled sometimes by writer John Davies's desperate attempts to give the character memorable lines, but he gives a completely sincere performance that helps make the Hobo a figure of pathos amid the carnage in keeping with the cinematic heritage of homelessness. To put Hobo in historical perspective, think of it as Chaplin's Easy Street with exploding abdomens, decapitations, and lots of wirework to sell shotgun blasts. Hauer's Hobo even has a girl to pine over, though his relationship with Abby the spunky prostitute (Molly Dunsworth) is more quasi-paternal than romantic. By modern standards, the Hobo's admirably free of backstory baggage; Davies and Eisener resist any temptation to explain why the old man is riding the rails at the start of the show. This sort of hero needs to be a stranger -- or an everyman -- in a way few action heroes today are allowed to be. There's something primal in his anonymity that'd be lost if there were a why to his wandering or his madness. When he grabs the shotgun off the pawnshop rack to stop an armed robbery, abandoning his dream of a one-man lawn-mowing business, it's not to resolve a daddy issue or to redeem himself for some past failure. It's simply the right thing to do, and would be for anyone, as far as this film's concerned.
Hobo With a Shotgun has a lot going for it creatively, from the queasily colorful cinematography of Karim Hussain and suitably grungy location work to a collaborative score that opens with a gloriously overripe pastoral theme that reminded me of Riz Ortolani's beautiful themes for such stuff as Goodbye Uncle Tom and Cannibal Holocaust and closes with a poignant train whistle. It's evocative and allusive in many ways, especially in its use of The Plague, a team of killers who show up like post-apocalyptic menaces and star in their own video game yet look more like robot refugees from a Republic serial.
There's a wonderfully gratuitous moment when the Hobo wakes up a captive of the Plague, and sees the duo tending, with considerable effort, to their pet octopus. The moment hints at depths of unsounded weirdness that enrich the film's fantastical feel. On the other hand, the primary villains are Hobo's main weakness. The Drake and his boys seem to see themselves as entertainers keeping the masses docile with dope and deadly circuses, but they're not very entertaining themselves. Neither the roles nor the actors really rise to the level of surreal supervillainy the concept needs to thrive. The weirdest any of them get is to wear hockey skates into battle; they seem pretty mundane otherwise. But there's a lot to enjoy here without them, whether you're a genre buff who recognizes all the influences at play or a fan of over-the-top violence. However, there's not much here for those with over-refined scruples or, alas, for people with purely contemporary taste in action. Hobo's retro approach will seem pointless -- or, worse, simply cheap -- to those accustomed to CGI mayhem and the god's-eye perspectives it makes possible They'll be hard-pressed to understand why Eisener made the film this way, and at that point an exploitation film arguably ceases to be pure exploitation. It may be scandalous to say so, but this gruesome exercise in deliberate obsolescence comes closer to being a work of art. But don't let that keep you away; if you're looking for a wild catharsis to break the tensions of the moment, Hobo With a Shotgun is a mad, epic, hilarious riot that lives up to its hype.
My friend Wendigo would like to make this as brief as possible. For a review, he suggests, "Crap," but I told him that we owe our readers a more detailed account of this Canadian erotic vampire debacle. "How about this?" he replied, "It was crap. That's a complete sentence at least."
To be honest, Wendigo agrees with me that Jerry Ciccoritti's film has some interesting ideas in it, but I have to agree with him that as writer and director Ciccoritti's realization of those ideas is breathtakingly inept. The movie's title has been changed for home video, presumably to avoid confusion with a Stephen King adaptation that's a stinker in its own right, and my Shriek Show DVD doesn't divulge how old the movie actually is. But it's very much a vampire film of its time, though not in any good way.
The title drifter is nothing of the kind. Stephen Tsepes (Silvio Oliviero) holds down a steady job as a taxi driver and has a nicely furnished apartment for his coffin. He has a taste for females who have suicide on their mind, figuring that if they want to go anyway, they may as well go his way. We meet him using his moves to save a woman from throwing herself into a river, only to vamp her instead. So far, so good; let's indulge in the fantasy and assume that he has a seductive power over women despite appearances. But then he goes and ruins it by turning into a gray-haired, gray-skinned fangboy with a breast fetish. Wouldn't you rather have the breast than the neck at a feast? Don't judge Steve, then -- yet.
The Mark of the Vampire and its Maker (Silvio Olivieri, below)
As we'll discover, Steve sort of loses the point of biting women who want to die. The problem is, they don't die. This works out for Steve because he can depend on one of his women to be around if he needs a quick nip on the nip. It doesn't work out when they get hungry in their own right. It emerges that Mr. Tsepes has little control over his brides. He can rebuke them for going out hunting before they're ready, but when he loses focus he loses all control over his bride-otches. Wendigo deems him one of the lamest master vampires he's ever seen on screen. If he's the master, it must be because no one else is available, for now.
Of course, he loses focus in a big way when he meets with music-video auteur Michelle Hayden (Helen Papas). She grows a morbid streak when she learns she has terminal cancer. All the doomed women in the city end up in Steves's cab, of course, but Michelle has something extra. She inspires flashbacks and dream sequences that seem to suggest that she was his love in a past life, but this film will never do something so crass as to state that as a fact. In any event, he wants to screw her, not bite her, and this is when things really go to hell. Steve seems to have a psychic bond with his past victims, and the activation of his libido puts all of them into a feeding frenzy. For a long while we don't know how many "all of them" really are, but we get a police report of ten men getting killed while Steve is doing the erotic-vampire thing with Michelle. We actually see two of these killings intercut with the sex scene in one of Ciccoritti's attempts to be artistic.
Little does Steve realize when he's invited to a costume party that everyone else is only wearing masks. He comes in full regalia, complete with opera cape (not shown here). Wendigo thinks the costume design was inspired in part by the cover art for early editions of Interview with the Vampire he remembers seeing as a kid.
Steve seems none the wiser about any of this, and he adds another bride to the lineup when he bites an actress from Michelle's video in a fit of blood hunger. By the time everyone converges on the video studio for the big finish, including Michelle's jealous husband and his vampire-scholar buddy, it seems like Stephen has at least nine brides, not counting the actress who attacks Michelle and a female cop last seen sucking blood from her own breast in a jail cell. Only one individual is going to walk out of that studio, and you may have guessed already who or what that individual will be. If not, we're not telling.....
Ladies' Night
Wendigo was particularly infuriated by Graveyard Shift because there are so many story angles and character conflicts that the film doesn't explore. The film has ideas, but it looks like they're just thrown in to pad the thing out. The most interesting part of the film is Stephen's relationship with his women, but we see too little of his interrelations with them to really understand what's going on with them later. The vampire himself is a cypher with an unexplored past and the actor can't do anything with the character. For an aspiring erotic vampire film (with obvious influences from The Hunger) Wendigo found the thing quite unerotic. It falls far short of The Hunger's standard of nudity, and in almost inexcusable fashion for a modern vampire film, especially one with so many female vampires or vampires in the making, there's not the least hint of lesbian action in the picture.
Still human, believe it or not: Helen Papas emotes in Graveyard Shift.
Ciccoritti strikes Wendigo as an ADD director and an incompetent writer whose script would have been impossible even for talented actors. Fortunately, Central Park Drifter has none of those. In the lead, Oliviero (also known as Michael A. Miranda) has what Wendigo calls the charisma of a turnip, while Papas goes screaming over the tops at inopportune moments, especially a scene in a park where she confronts Oliviero in a fit of hissing and howling and claw-baring -- even though she's not a vampire. It's bad acting all the way down, including the monotonous husband and the Crockett & Tubbs copycats who pass for a police force in this town. As for special effects, they're special the same way the "special" class was in school. The big finish when the vampire women are all supposed to be incinerated by the husband opening a stage door is laughably bad. Other effects scenes make no sense at all. In one scene, Stephen is stabbed in the back with a knife. Michelle pulls the knife out and it bursts into flames. Why??? Meanwhile, Oliviero's makeup is inconsistent. He often goes gray when he feeds, except when he doesn't. The music stinks, too.
The astonishing thing about Graveyard Shift is that it was apparently popular enough to inspire a thematic sequel, Graveyard Shift II:The Understudy, in which Ciccoritti directs Oliviero as a vampire infiltrating a movie set. Such success as the film had only points to the poor taste of vampire movie fans back then. I can recommend this one only to bad-movie buffs, but Wendigo won't even bother doing that. Remember, "It was crap."
But perhaps you'll disagree after watching this trailer, uploaded to YouTube by AussieRoadshow.
This weekend I invited my friend Wendigo, the vampire-cinema fan, to enter the avant-garde. He was not otherwise disposed; he is disabled in a way that makes it painful for him to sit in a chair without a footrest, so it will be just about impossible for him to see New Moon in a theater. At least he now has our weekly experiments to compensate a little, and this time I hit him with Guy Maddin's black-&-white (with exceptions), silent (with musical score) adaptation of a balletic interpretation of Bram Stoker's story. Actually, this was not as alien an experience to him as readers might expect. He is, in fact, the proud owner of a copy of the decade's other great neo-silent horror film, Andrew Leman's The Call of Cthulhu (2005). That small-budget miracle was as stylized, in its way, as Maddin's film is, and in any event as a fan of German Expressionist horror Wendigo isn't averse to stylization -- a good thing in this case.
We are at two removes from Stoker's original. The choreographer, Mark Godden, has broken the novel down into two acts, eliminating the opening scenes with Jonathan Harker in order to begin with Lucy Westenra's seduction, corruption and destruction.
With admirable symmetry, the Harkers are introduced in the second act, which takes place entirely in Europe, beginning at the convent where Jonathan recovers from his ordeal at Castle Dracula. Van Helsing and his gang (the whole crew: Holmwood, Morris and Seward) head there after they torture Renfield into divulging Dracula's plans, and Dracula is already on his way there after Lucy is exorcised and destroyed. Inevitably you lose the multiple-narrator format of the novel, but most adaptations have no use for that either. There are nods to the format; both Lucy and Jonathan keep diaries. The latter is so hot that reading it has Mina ready to bang Jonathan right in the convent. So whose is the singular Virgin's Diary of the title? Search me.
Above, Renfield is a relatively minor player in this version of Dracula who has to be tortured to provide some needed exposition. Below, the magic of dance injects a minor note of nunsploitation into Stoker's classic tale.
Wendigo wasn't as skeptical as some people might be about whether Dracula can be told through ballet, except for the geographic sweep of the climactic hunt. He took for granted that some parts of the story would be lost (including the Piccadilly Circus scene that is always lost in adaptations). He took an expressionistic approach for granted, as well as a romantic approach over Gothic horror. Whether dance can frighten you is debatable, but there are many deeper, arguably more horrific aspects of the story that fit the ballet's romantic format fairly well. Dance definitely draws out the sensual aspect of Dracula's domination of Lucy and Mina, which ties into Maddin's subtext of male sexual anxiety and xenophobia. The sexual awakening of both characters is an obvious subject for dance, and Maddin directs the action to emphasize the power of Dracula and the sort of bullying fear of the men that finds violent expression in their attacks on women and/or vampires.
Pages From a Virgin's Diary is a pretty obvious critique of the misogynist culture from which Dracula emerged. Women are treated as property by vampire and hunters alike, the latter being as outraged by the discovery that Dracula has stolen money from England as by the fact that he has polluted the women's blood. The group transfusion in which the hunters all offer blood to the ailing Lucy, and Seward complains that Holmwood gave her more blood, turns in Maddin's filming into a kind of tribal gang rape. Wendigo gets that same vibe from a later scene when the hunters slaughter Dracula's brides with stakes that are more like lances. The meaning is hard to miss when Maddin captions Holmwood staking a vamp with "Cuckold's Counter-Blow!" And this film strongly suggests that the hunters get perverse thrills from destroying females. That includes dear old Van Helsing, who is last seen stuffing a piece of Mina's petticoat into his vest, having sniffed it earlier when Dracula threw it at him.
Also obvious is Maddin's reading of Dracula as an expression of xenophobia, though I've always felt that critics overstate that angle. Again, title cards make the threat "From the East!" pretty blatant as a poll of black blood spreads west from the Carpathians toward England. The most obvious form the threat takes is the casting of a Chinese dancer, Zhang Wei-Qiang, as Dracula. There's nothing Asiatic about his interpretation of Dracula, but there's no easier way to identify Dracula as The Other than to make him non-European. As a virtuoso dancer he lives up to the romantic ideal of the vampire, but his brandishing of money and his apparent offer to buy Mina's love belies the smooth moves. This is most clear in the Lucy episode, in which it looks like he's vampirized her in order to feed off her after she bites babies. This Dracula is a seductive parasite, and Wendigo thinks that Zhang conveys that well.
Maddin seems to want to eat his cake and have it too, critiquing the politically incorrect patriarchal attitudes he finds in the original text while seeming to confirm the literal threats portrayed by Stoker. This is most perplexing in the Lucy sequence. She's shown as a monstrous baby killer, and yet you can't help but think that there's something wrong with the way the hunters finish her. They take too much pleasure in it, and it struck Wendigo as if they're punishing her, not for killing babies, but for losing her honor to the foreigner. He worries that there's no way anymore to portray the hunters as the sympathetic heroes Stoker meant them to be, because we now automatically see them as patriarchal oppressors. In our less religious age we're less likely to see the situation as putting the women's souls in jeopardy, or vampirism as the Fate Worse Than Death, and more about female sexuality being punished by society. To tell Dracula straight today you would have to deglamourize vampirism totally, or make it clear to the audience that the vampirized person is no longer the person you knew, and can be killed with impunity. Wendigo thinks feminist vampire stories that put positive spins on female empowerment or sexual awakening are perfectly fine -- he couldn't be a fan of urban-fantasy literature otherwise -- but even though he likes Pages From A Virgin's Diary very much he has to note the slightly troubling contradiction.
The hunters wash their hands of Lucy's blood. You be the judge.
Wendigo was impressed by Maddin's selective, symbolic use of color. Blood runs red for the most part, but money glows green and Dracula "bleeds" gold coins when you stab him. The use of color hints at an equivalence of these elements; gold and green paper, arguably, are the blood or life force of the West Dracula has invaded, and we see he's been gorging himself on bills and coins as well as virgins' blood.
We have our theories about the color of money in Maddin's film, but we're not sure exactly why that cross glows blue in one shot and no others.
Interestingly, Dracula bleeds money at one point to signify his invulnerability (the coins rush back into his wound) before Mina submits to him Nosferatu style, but afterward he bleeds blood like the rest of us. Likewise, Van Helsing's cross is ineffective in Round One, after Dracula, using Mina as a hostage, has convinced him to cover a sun-exposing hole in his castle wall so they can duke it out vampire to hunter.
A brave vampire this one isn't. A standoff from Maddin's Dracula.
Afterward, after she's bitten, Mina's cross has the expected potency. Wendigo wants to contrast that potency of female empowerment (for Mina resists Dracula a lot more than Lucy did) with the impotence of all the hunters, all of them (not just Holmwood) being cuckolded by the Other running amok among their women. Because she can now withhold what she had given, she can exploit Dracula's dependency in a way the guys couldn't.
Maddin's direction is anything but stagy. He gets his camera all over his sets, filming from all angles and editing quite furiously sometimes. Some of the action scenes are actually well staged and edited, and I suppose it shouldn't surprise us to see dancers capable of taking falls and doing other stunts. He also throws in some horror homages: Van Helsing's arrival at a steamy train station (above) is a nod to The Exorcist (most apropos, Wendigo says) while the business with exposing Dracula to sunlight in his castle is pretty much lifted from Horror of Dracula. But Maddin is naturally more concerned with putting his personal visual stamp on the story, and despite some occasionally arbitrary editing for its own sake, he succeeds admirably. Wendigo has one quibble about the copperplate font Maddin uses for his intertitles, thinking that something more expressionistic was in order for authenticity's sake, but he can live with that. Overall, he recommends it to vampire buffs who may have steered clear of the high concept. It's a worthy addition to the vampire-cinema canon.
And here's a French-language trailer, uploaded to YouTube by EDDISTRIBUTION. Never mind the words, anyway; it's a silent film.
Mondo 70 presents its first-ever guest review, the occasion being the local release of a highly-acclaimed documentary about a band that could be and probably has been called a "real-life Spinal Tap," right down to the uncanny coincidence of its drummer being named Robb Reiner. The reviewer is "Hobbyfan," who will be recognized for posting occasional comments on this blog. He's one of my correspondents with whom I have regular real-world contact, and I've been encouraging him to start his own blog. This he has agreed to do, so look out for the debut of "The Land of Whatever" in the immediate future. For now, here's his take on Anvil.We saw it together at the Spectrum theater in Albany in the second week of its run, with an audience of less than ten people total.
photo by Brent J. Craig.
They say that in show business, you've got to have a gimmick. In the 80's, it wasn't enough to call yourself a heavy metal band. You had to have some sort of gimmick to stand out from the rest. That's why you saw the emergence of "hair bands" like Bon Jovi (who've since lost the long hair and are more of a pop-rock combo), and "glam bands" like Motley Crue & Twisted Sister.Anvil didn't fit into either of those categories. They were a group of average guys from Canada trying to make it big. The closest they had to a gimmick was lead singer Steve "Lips" Kudlow wearing a bondage collar and using a dildo on his guitar. Kudlow and drummer/co-founder Robb Reiner had been friends since they were teens, and despite the arguments and disputes that come with the territory, they stuck it out, never giving up the dream.
"Anvil: The Story of Anvil" opens with the band sharing a bill at a 1984 concert with the Scorpions, Whitesnake (who'd actually break through 3 years later), and Bon Jovi, who were just starting out and had released their debut album. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich may have actually hit the nail on the head when he suggested that maybe what held Anvil back was the fact they were from Canada. The Great White North had given us in the 80's acts as diverse as Triumph, Bryan Adams, April Wine, and the McKenzie Brothers. Triumph was the closest thing to a metal band that Canada had to offer, though Anvil kept pounding on the door. What hurt Anvil more was a glaring lack of faith from the independent labels that signed them, and poor management. Yet still they soldiered on.
Anvil's story, really, is no different than the dozens, nay, hundreds of bands of every genre trying to make it in the business every day, every year. All the hard work that goes into cutting demos, rehearsing, booking gigs, etc., has to have a payoff somewhere. It's the fact that Anvil had been on the doorstep of fame 25 years ago, then disappeared practically overnight, that makes this story, coupled with Kudlow's unwavering vision. It speaks to the blue collar, aspiring musicians who've endured the same hardships, though perhaps not as extreme as Anvil's, in their quests to make the big time. Rating: A. ========================================================================== Hobbyfan adds: "I happen to think that the target audience in our market (mostly aspiring musicians), if they haven't seen it, will wait for the DVD. That's where this film will make most of its money."
For my part, the movie reminded me a lot of The Wrestler, though that may just have been because of all the hair. I think Hobbyfan has the right perspective on the band's predicament. I watched the film wondering what was exceptional about them that they didn't make it when their apparent peers did. I was looking for a "why" that the film never really decides upon. But Hobby reminds us that Anvil really belongs to the great majority that never make it, though they came closer than many. The band and by extension director Sacha Gervasi blame their failure (to date) on poor management and poor production, but that really begs as many questions as it answers. My own view is that, from what I heard of the songs, Kudlow is just a crap lyricist, but whether he's really much worse than more successful writers I can't say. In any event, I don't judge the movie by the case it made, but by the picture it presents, and Anvil is an often hilariously tragicomic portrait of perseverance in pursuit of fame. The band's travels in Europe, Asia and Canada give the film some of the flavor of an old-school mondo movie, and it raises some of the same questions about whether dramatic scenes were really spontaneous or whether events were manipulated by knowledge of the documentary being made. Those questions don't stop the film from being very entertaining, whether you come out liking Anvil or not.
You'll please forgive a lack of screen captures for this one. The Albany Public Library DVD behaved a little hinky on my living-room player, so I didn't want to put it in my computer's drive. As you see from the trailer, it's a car racing film with a stalwart-looking 1970s B-movie cast. It's better known now as an early film from David Cronenberg, and it's definitely the most cartoonish film he made until A History of Violence. It's also a film sure to touch the heartstrings of auteurs and their fans everywhere for its opposition of the pursuit of excellence to the corporate obsession with the bottom line.
Fast Company is the story of Lonnie "Lucky Man" Johnston (William Smith), something like a living legend among fuel-car drag racers. He drives for the FastCo fuel company team, and answers to corporate scumbag Phil Adamson (John Saxon). Adamson flies around in his own helicopter and likes the perspective it gives him. "They crawl, we fly," he tells Candy Allison, the new Miss Fastco (Judy Foster) as they hover above the Fastco caravan, "but sometimes the hired help don't like to be reminded." The race team exists only to promote the Fastco brand. Whether they win or not doesn't really matter to Phil. In fact, "Winning is too expensive." He's content if the cars are just competitive, but Lonnie and teammate Billy the Kid don't agree.
When Lonnie's car explodes (he luckily survives unhurt), Phil wants to cut a replacement dragster out of the budget and make Lonnie race the funny car, bumping Billy out of his spot behind the wheel. Facing both men's discontent, Phil schemes to replace them with Gary "the Blacksmith" Black, an ambitious driver who resents Lonnie's fame and apparent complacency. Gary is often obnoxious, but his mechanic, "Meatball," is downright vicious. Phil manipulates these people to the point where he has them plotting sabotage, if not murder, when Lonnie, Billy, Candy and their mechanics all quit (or are fired) and form an independent race team. The climax comes at a nighttime meet where Lonnie's luck may mean Billy's death unless Gary acts on his suddenly conscientious suspicions of the people around him....
It may be the late Seventies, and it may be Cronenberg behind the camera, but apart from some topless scenes (Billy pours a can of Fastco on a hitchhiker's boobs; she says, "My boyfriend will kill me, he hates Fastco!") this tale could have been told pretty much the same way in the Thirties or earlier. This is pulp cinema, with none of the ambiguity you'd expect from Seventies cinema. Lonnie and his pals are the good guys, and Phil is vile and evil. The heroes win and the villains get a hot dose of what they deserve.
You would have gone to Fast Company to see the racing or the stars. William Smith again proves that he's more a character actor than a leading man. He has a certain innate charisma, but I don't think he ever figured out how to project it apart from playing crazy brutes (see my review of Piranha, Piranha, for instance). He's pleasant enough here, but notice that Cronenberg has the Billy character carry most of the romantic load. That leaves third-billed Claudia Jennings with little to do in her final film role. She plays Lonnie's loyal wife, and that about sums it up. It's a disappointing coda from one of the pioneer action heroines of the decade, whom I know more by reputation than from seeing her major works. The mighty John Saxon is obliged to give a one-note performance as Phil and succeeds in making him thoroughly hateful. He can project his charisma, however, and he dominates everyone else whenever he's on the screen, except when Smith punches him down a flight of stairs for calling Lonnie's truckborne living quarters a "goddamn whorehouse" and "an insane asylum."
The Saturday matinee storyline is an odd fit on Cronenberg's atmospheric portrayal of the racetrack milieu and the details of fuel car racing. The more documentary moments have the vibe I was hoping for from the film as a whole. I don't mind a movie having a silly story and solving all its problems with fiery violence, but Fast Company is ultimately a little too mundane. I may be jaded for faulting a film that ends with a man on fire and a chopper crashing into a truck, but there was something perfunctory about the finale. Cronenberg did not take the story to "eleven" the way an exploitation film needs to, but with the story he was given he had no choice but to try, since the melodrama had surrendered any claim to realism. For that matter, going over the top may have been too expensive for the producers, just as winning was for Phil. Having said this, if you like redneck cinema in general, albeit set in Canada and just across the border, this show should push enough of your buttons to get by.