Sunday, March 29, 2015

Monsters and Mullets

"Everything is true. God's an astronaut.
Oz is over the rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live."

Nightbreed: The Director's Cut (1990)

Nightbreed is another Clive Barker cult classic, based on his novella Cabal. It's from the 1990s, so it's bound to be a bit campy by modern standards, but it's quite a good movie and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in a movie that's as unique as its monstrous characters. (Netflix has the snazzy HD director's cut Barker just finished recently.) Our protagonist, Boone (Craig Sheffer), is a troubled man who finds himself plagued with nightmares. He fears that he is guilty of terrible deeds, as a serial murderer is going around slaughtering families in their homes and Boone is afflicted with mysterious blackouts every time it happens. (He also has this truly unfortunate early-90s haircut to worry about, but I guess he's got bigger issues on his plate.)

Get that crazy-ass mullet off your skull.

In truth it's Boone's psychiatrist, Decker, played by David Cronenberg of all people, who's committing the murders and setting Boone up to take the fall. His motivations are pretty simple -- he just hates people and wants to kill everyone, which seems like a fairly ambitious goal for one person to accomplish, but at least he doesn't bother coming up with some convoluted excuse for why he goes around butchering people. He also has this kind of murder-appreciation room where he keeps articles about the killings and an assortment of long bladed weapons, so he should probably hope nobody finds out about that. Anyway, after Boone escapes from the hospital, he flees to Midian, a secret city underneath a local cemetery that's been appearing in Boone's dreams -- calling him to join the other monsters.

Midian serves as a hidden sanctuary for all the hunted, near-extinct or unique creatures of the world. Here there are the faeries, the grotesquely deformed, the things that go bump in the night, the werewolves, the shapeshifters, the freaks of nature and the more traditionally monstrous, all known as the tribes of the moon or, of course, the Nightbreed. The denizens of Midian aren't too happy with a human seeking sanctuary with them, and when he's kicked out of the city, he ends up getting himself shot by the police as a suspect in the murders.

Shuna Sassi and Peloquin

This is obviously not the end for Boone, who wakes up in the morgue -- thanks to a bite from one of the Nightbreed -- and takes a second shot at life in Midian. It turns out that he's been chosen by Baphomet, the mysterious entity who serves as the heart and protector of Midian. Boone basically becomes a vampire from Buffy. He retains his personality, has some facial scarring, acquires superhuman speed and strength and healing, but he's still concerned for the safety of his girlfriend Lori, who's become a target for Decker, who seems to have realized that his quest to kill all of humanity is futile and decides instead to kill the tribes of the moon, which is a bit more realistic since most of them are the last of their kind.

Like most of Barker's work, Nightbreed is full of body horror, the interplay of the violent and the erotic, and the overarching theme -- one Barker shares with a lot of Guillermo del Toro's movies -- that humans are capable of horrific acts of evil, while something that appears outwardly monstrous can be as human as any of us, protecting their families and homes, wishing for the outside world to leave them be. As one of them tells Lori, the tribes of the moon represent everything that humans envy and misunderstand, and what is envied and misunderstood is to be destroyed. It's a perennially relevant point that was, at the very least, wasted on the film's producers, who apparently told Barker to rewrite some parts of the script because he had "made the monsters unintentionally sympathetic." (Barker went home and slammed his head into a wall a few times.)

Cronenberg'll shank ya.

I would hesitate to call Nightbreed a horror movie. Despite the guy tearing his own scalp off and the serial murderer going around chopping people's heads off, I'd say it's much closer to dark fantasy. Think of it as a gory adult version of Labyrinth. It's full of wonderful makeup work that reflects its creator's love of the monstrous. There's no doubt in my mind that at least one person out there finds Shuna Sassi attractive not in spite of the fact that she's some kind of porcupine lizard woman that shoots poison spines out of her back, but because she's a porcupine lizard woman that shoots poisonous spines out of her back -- and I also don't doubt that Clive Barker is happy about that.

If nothing else, you have to be at least a bit curious about a movie with David Cronenberg as the main bad guy.

Trivia: There was a Nightbreed action game on the Amiga. Check out those graphics.


Available On: Netflix.
 


Sunday, March 15, 2015

The Death and Rebirth of the Slasher Movie

Scream (1996)


Scream is an interesting movie, but not one that I liked all that much back when I saw it in theaters, though I was pretty much exactly within its intended audience -- 17-year-olds familiar with the conventions and cliches of horror movies. The whole series just went back up on Netflix a few weeks back, and...I still don't like it very much. So let's call it The Beatles of horror movies: a thing I'm not all that fond of, but whose influence is undeniable.

Scream starts out with the now-iconic scene of Drew Barrymore getting murdered after a phone conversation with a serial killer who quizzes his victims on their knowledge of horror movies. She gets a question wrong -- it was Jason Voorhees' mother who was the murderer in the first Friday the 13th, not Jason himself -- and she and her boyfriend end up getting stabbed to death. The real protagonist is Sydney Preston, a teen whose mother was murdered a year earlier among controversy and scandal, and the more recent killings seem to be connected in some way, drawing sensationalist reporter Gale Weathers to the small town of Woodsboro as more bodies start turning up.

Randy, who works at the local video store and knows basically everything there is to know about slasher movies, goes over the rules with everybody. Don't drink, don't have premarital sex, don't smoke pot or split up to investigate strange noises. Slasher movies have always been moralistic in nature, and conservative at that -- the killers are the scourge of God, there to punish young people who transgress. Otherwise there's no reason for it all. At the same time, there's a clearly titillating angle to it all that almost seems to run counter to the moral pecking order. Bare skin and blood. America has always been pretty confused about what it thinks of sex and violence and their relation to one another -- that's what you get when you have a country started by puritans, I suppose -- and you could probably write a book about the psychology that goes into the slasher movie formula.

 Crispin Glover wonders where the corkscrew is in Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter.
Three guesses what happens next.

As I said in my review of The Cabin in the Woods, which I think is a much better movie as horror-genre deconstructions go, Wes Craven intended Scream to kill the slasher movie by holding a spotlight on its cliches to the point where nobody could take the genre seriously anymore. There could be any number of reasons why it didn't turn out as expected. There are two that stand out as far as I'm concerned.

One is that Wes Craven tends to think he's cleverer than he is. People already knew slasher movies are full of cliches, and didn't really need him to point them out. Halloween and especially Friday the 13th -- not the first slasher movies, but certainly the most popular to date -- had resulted in such a flood of imitators, the cliches were established in a matter of months, and even as far back as 1982, there were parodies being made. The best is probably The Slumber Party Massacre, which was directed by Amy Jones (yes, the co-writer of Beethoven) and written by Rita Mae Brown (yes, the same one who writes all those mystery novels with cats). Executives meddled with it, and the end result was a more straightforward slasher movie than intended, but the edge is still there. A year before that -- only a year after Friday the 13th was released -- we had Student Bodies, a much more overtly comedic slasher-parody written and directed by Mickey Rose, best known for his writing on Johnny Carson.

So people were already well aware of the genre's foibles. Craven wasn't the first to point them out, but he was the first to do so in such an unambiguous, self-aware manner. This is part of what sets Scream apart. Take any horror movie, any science fiction movie, and they seem to exist in a vacuum. Nobody in a zombie apocalypse movie has ever watched Night of the Living Dead. Nobody in an alien invasion movie has ever watched Independence Day; maybe they'll mention The War of the Worlds, but modern movies? Never. Slasher movies were the same, until Scream. The Slumber Party Massacre and Student Bodies were comedic to varying degrees, but they didn't take place in a world in which anyone had seen a slasher movie. Scream does, everyone knows about Jason and Freddy and Michael.

No one could get iller.

The other thing that really made Scream backfire is that it wasn't even necessary. The slasher genre was basically on its last gasp by the mid-1990s anyway. Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street were played out, running on fumes, even by the late 80s, and nobody really cared about the genre anymore. Had Craven not made Scream it probably would have quietly died out, because nobody took it seriously anyway. Some of the weirder franchises like Phantasm and Hellraiser were unusual enough that someone could always pick them up and do something interesting with them, but the unstoppable guy in the mask killing teenagers for making out just wasn't making bank anymore. As it was, Scream basically took pot-shots at a dead horse and brought it back to life.

As a result of Scream's success, we had a second wave of sorts. Suddenly all these new slasher movies cropped up, starting with I Know What You Did Last Summer and moving on to flashes in the pan like Valentine and newer stuff like Chain Letter and Smiley, because the people who write horror movies aren't scared of sex anymore, now they're scared of technology. For a while in the late 90s and early 2000s there were a ton of slasher movies, all of them at least a little bit more self-aware than the genre was back in the early 80s, but still more or less playing it straight. Scream fell into that trap as well, as it was sort of indecisive whether it was a parody of slasher movies or just a slasher movie that was aware of its own cliches. In Scream 2, there's a part where the killer is completely knocked out after a car accident, and rather than doing the sensible thing and finding something to stab him about fifty times to make sure, the girls very carefully crawl out the other window so they don't wake him up. It's the sort of oversight that's all the more galling because it's a movie that takes aim at the stupidity of the victims in these things.

Scream is at its best when it's not directly referencing horror cliches in conversation. The first movie got a few laughs out of me with its sillier and more subtle moments, like when Sydney tells the killer over the phone that horror movie victims always run up the stairs when they should be running out the front door -- then ends up trying to run out the front door herself, gets surprised by the killer, and runs upstairs. Or when Craven shows up in a three-second cameo as a janitor named Fred who wears a hat and a black-and-red sweater. Or when the local comic-relief deputy, Dewey, seems like he gets killed in every movie but shows up in the next one -- and actually manages to survive all four movies. It's also unusual looking back on it now because it ends up being a sort of unintentional relic of its time -- a major plot point in the first movie is that the killer used a cell phone, and the police are tracing every cellular account in the county. (I remember this was about the same time when there was a big debate at my high school over whether students should be allowed to carry them -- I think one student actually had one.)

There are better, more recent slasher parodies out there, but the thing is, none of them would ever have been made without this one. I hope Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon shows up again on Netflix sometime, because it basically took the same premise as Scream and made a much smarter movie out of it. Scream itself became the Friday the 13th of its time, spawning legions of imitators. Slashers became postmodern, with Friday the 13th taking jabs at itself in Jason X and Freddy ending up with his own meta-movie, Wes Craven's New Nightmare. Then they tried making them scary again, with less-than-successful reboots of Friday and Nightmare. So now we're sort of back to where we started, with a bunch of stupid teenagers dying as a result of their transgressions. Still, while Scream may seem dated by current standards -- the way Seinfeld doesn't seem funny since we've grown up with a dozen other sitcoms that followed the same basic formula -- Craven can't be kicking himself too hard, as it put him back on the map as a horror director and made him a lot of money. Where does the genre go from here? I only know one thing for sure:

YOU'RE DOOMED!
YOU'RE ALL DOOMED!

Trivia: The instantly-recognizable and often-parodied "Scream voice?" Know who else he was? Mojo Jojo. No kidding.

Available On: Netflix.



Sunday, March 1, 2015

Colorful Metaphors

The sort of person who reads this blog has probably already heard that we lost one of the great minds of science fiction this week -- Leonard Nimoy, by all accounts a talented and gracious man who never let his fame go to his head and always had wise advice or a kind word for his fans. I never met him. I never considered myself a Trekkie -- I've been a Whovian since I was about three years old, with Star Wars in second place where the Big Three were concerned -- and my image of Nimoy is more recently tied to his role as William Bell on Fringe. His death has had me thinking that I should not only do something a little different this week, but also shake things up in general on this blog and review science fiction movies from time to time as well.

SF -- I generally use Harlan Ellison's preferred abbreviation, as he always thought the more common "Sci-Fi" was dismissive and sounded "like crickets fucking" -- is sort of a cousin to horror. It's usually larger in scale, but it's still about viewing humanity through the lens of the fantastic. It certainly shares horror's tendency to be unconditionally dismissed as brainless tripe by film critics, unless their name happens to be Roger Ebert. Whether it's the classics like Alien and Predator or cornier cult stuff like Roger Corman's Galaxy of Terror, the two genres also tend to overlap. Netflix and Amazon Prime have a lot of good science fiction available, so I hope to get a bit more into it on this blog from now on.

Nimoy directed our movie this week. I'm not often affected by celebrity deaths, but Leonard was such an iconic figure in nerd culture for so many years, and such a friendly, outgoing representative of that culture long before it achieved any sort of mainstream acceptance, that I find myself deeply saddened by his passing.

Live long and prosper in memory.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)


It's generally acknowledged that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is the best of the original-generation Trek movies, but that The Voyage Home is the most fun. This was my Star Trek, growing up. I watched this one about fifty times. The first three movies form a plot arc, and they're notably darker in tone than the original show tended to be. Kirk's character is torn apart layer by layer. He takes over command of the refitted Enterprise in the first movie and assumes he knows everything there is to know, nearly getting the ship blown up in the process because it's not the same ship he remembers. In the second movie, he's chomping at the bit to get back in the saddle, but he's been shoved behind a desk for so long that his instincts are rusty when it finally happens. The ladies' man turns out to have a son he never knew, who hates him. And way back in the original series episode "Space Seed," he stranded Khan and his followers on a desolate planet and then basically forgot to check in on them, which bites him in the ass big-time and results in the death of his best friend.

The Voyage Home wraps up most of that storyline in the first ten minutes. It also marks a complete change in tone, tossing the darkness of the previous three movies out the window in favor of comedy. An alien probe makes its way to Earth and starts vaporizing the oceans, emitting a signal nobody seems to be able to decipher. Spock figures out that it's replicating the songs of humpback whales -- which makes answering the probe functionally impossible, as humpback whales were long ago driven to extinction. Kirk, now demoted to Captain and given command of the HMS Bounty, the Klingon Bird-of-Prey they acquired at the end of the last movie, has an idea: slingshot the Bounty around the sun so hard that it flies back in time so they can bring some humpback whales back with them to communicate with the probe.

So that works, and the crew ends up in the "primitive and paranoid" culture of San Francisco in 1986, where they split up to accomplish the various things they need to do. Chekhov and Uhura go off to find a source of radiation to power up the Klingon crystals that crapped out on them when they landed, and sending the Russian to ask about a nuclear power source in a major American city during the last years of the Cold War turns out not to be the best idea. Scotty and Bones go to find a suitable material to build a giant fish tank out of. And Kirk and Spock go looking for the whales, which they find, fortuitously enough, in a mated pair of humpbacks at the nearby Cetacean Institute. After some trouble navigating the local culture.

"Well, double dumbass on YOU!"

While Kirk and Spock try to negotiate a solution with the whales' caretaker, marine biologist Gillian Taylor, Chekhov gets himself arrested after leeching nuclear power from a navel vessel in the bay. Scotty's mission isn't exactly going as planned either, as it turns out that the material they need hasn't been invented yet. He solves that problem easily enough by just inventing it himself, since he already knew its molecular composition. (They're playing kind of fast and loose with the Prime Directive in this movie, but it's funny, so we'll let it slide.) He also has to deal with those hideous off-white boxy Macs they had back in the 80s.

"Hello, computer?"

Another snag hits Kirk and Spock when Gillian, who finally more or less says "fuck it, okay, you're from space, let's go with that," because Kirk is really her only rescue option if he's telling the truth, reveals that the whales are about to be shipped off to the ocean and set free, where they'll more than likely be hunted down by whalers. The movie isn't particularly subtle in its message, but there are things you really don't need to be subtle about. It's also right about then that Uhura gets back to them and tells them Chekhov's being held by the Navy, who think he's a Russian spy, so they have to go bail him out after a wacky hospital chase scene. Eventually everything gets back on track and works out for the best, and Gillian comes with them since she'll probably be the only whale biologist around and the 20th century sucks anyway. (This, I can definitely relate to.)

This is one of my favorite movies. If I remember correctly, it's the movie that got me watching movies again, actually. When I was young -- I mean four years old young, or thereabouts -- I went to see Go-Bots and the Battle of the Rock Lords at the Eric Theater in the Tri-State Mall, which, at the time, was not the terrifying, mostly closed-down den of drug dealers it is today. The sound on that movie was about twice the volume it should have been, and I was terrified of loud noises at that age, so after over an hour of being temporarily deafened, I basically swore off movies for a few years after that. I'm pretty sure this was the first movie I watched after my irrational terror at the prospect of going to a theater had worn off.

"You're not exactly catching us at our best."

Everybody has their moments, but Spock is pretty much the best part of the movie. He walks around with his ears hidden by a headband, and since he's 1) recovering from being dead and 2) unfamiliar with Earth culture in the 1980s, he's acting super weird, which Kirk tells Gillian is because he did a little too much LDS back in the 60s. He also notices that the language is laced with "more colorful metaphors," and Kirk tells him that nobody listens to anyone in the 20th century unless they swear every other word, so Spock starts swearing every other word. Kirk eventually tells him he shouldn't use so many colorful metaphors anymore, and Spock says "Why the hell not?" He nerve-pinches a punk blasting a boom-box on the bus. He goes swimming in the aquarium. I think Nimoy must have come up with this story (with Harve Bennett) partly just so he could act like a total goofball without ever cracking a smile. Spock is great in this movie.

The special effects deserve a mention as well. In several sequences, the whales were small-scale animatronic models filmed in a high-school swimming pool, but they were so realistic that U.S. fishing authorities criticized the producers for being too close to whales in their natural habitat, unaware that they weren't using real whales for the ocean and bay scenes toward the end of the movie. The bizarre dream sequence Kirk experiences during the time-warp also marks one of the very first uses of primitive CGI. They may not look like much now, but it's important to remember where the effects of today came from.

I also have to say that every time I watched this movie on VHS back in the day, I would rewind this one part near the end and watch it over about five times, because my younger self found it completely hilarious for no apparent reason. I can't come up with a reason now any more than I could then, but it still gets a laugh out of me.


I can't think of much else to say, and writing this review is sort of making me cry. So I'll just say that if you have Netflix, you should watch this movie tonight. Whether it's in remembrance, or just because it's the best Trek movie out there.

Available On: Netflix.

Trivia: The punk on the bus is played by the movie's associate producer, Kirk R. Thatcher.