Lessons of Darkness

The Long Goodbye (1973): A

Legendary private dick Philip Marlowe gets a ‘70s makeover in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, a droll, cunning and magnificently woozy adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s final Marlowe mystery. Counterculture über-schlep Elliot Gould transforms the detective from a tough-talking, fast-acting gumshoe into a sloppy, reactive dreamer, but the brilliance of Altman’s film is that it nonetheless maintains the essential essence of its lead character – as in Chandler’s novels, Gould’s Marlowe is a defiant idealist and altruist (whether it’s helping a pal in need or going out to the store at 3 a.m. to buy his hungry cat some food) disgusted by corruption and convinced that there’s some goodness left in sleazy, lousy L.A. Written by The Big Sleep scribe Leigh Brackett, The Long Goodbye is chockablock with plot twists and turns involving a blustery Ernest Hemmingway-type writer (Sterling Hayden), his alluring young wife (Nina Van Pallandt), a loan shark (Mark Rydell), and Marlowe’s friend Terry Lennox (former major leaguer and Ball Four author Jim Bouton) who’s accused of murdering his wife and then killing himself. Altman’s constantly roaming camera and multilayered sound design is as enveloping as a warm blanket, Gould’s seemingly tossed-off (but in fact expertly crafted) performance is a marvel of laidback cool and world-weary charm, and the film’s scintillating portrait of a West Coast – from its Los Angeles high rises to its neighboring Tijuana slums – mired in crime, filth and immorality would have made Chandler proud.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986): B+

It makes sense that Tobe Hooper’s 1986 sequel-that-nobody-wanted The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, rather than futilely trying to replicate its illustrious predecessor’s gritty, uncompromising terror, instead opts for campy humor. Still, it’s nonetheless surprising to discover that the 180-degree tonal switcharoo works. Thirteen years after the original Lone Star state slaughter, Leatherface (Bill Johnson), scalp-eating brother Chop-Top (Bill Moseley), and dad Drayton Sawyer (Jim Siedow) are still roaming the Texas countryside looking for a few good whitebread chumps to saw, grind, and turn into Drayton’s award-winning chili. When their slicing and dicing of two preppies is broadcast live on the radio program of disc jockey Stretch (Caroline Williams), Lieutenant “Lefty” Enright (Dennis Hopper) – the revenge-seeking uncle of the first film’s victims – uses the murder recording to lure Leatherface and company into the open, culminating in a chainsaw-on-chainsaw battle in the clan’s corpse-littered home underneath a wild west amusement park. Hooper wisely doesn’t attempt to reproduce the austere nastiness of his seminal horror hit, and his surreal, carnival-esque blend of excessive gore (thanks to Tom Savini) and tongue-in-cheek comedy, while far from graceful, nicely places his film in Evil Dead territory. Plus, there’s just something irresistibly demented about a Texas Chainsaw follow-up with the balls to feature a wacky pseudo-romance between Stretch and Leatherface, the loony tunes Hopper (who reliably spikes the action’s bizarre quotient), and the awe-inspiringly histrionic Moseley, whose maniacal Chop-Top – blessed with the Primus-worthy catchphrase “Dog will hunt!” – proves to be nothing less than the clown prince of cannibalistic chaos.

Prince of Darkness (1987): B-

Long regarded as John Carpenter’s first outright failure, Prince of Darkness is perhaps the greatest satanic horror story-by-way-of-quantum physics ever put to film. Which doesn’t, admittedly, make it all that great. But what’s lacking in Carpenter’s wacked-out thriller – decent make-up for his demonically possessed ghouls, passable performances from his bland cast, a credit sequence that runs under 15 minutes – is made up for by an insidious atmosphere of apocalyptic doom and a unique script (by Carpenter, using the pseudonym Martin Quatermass) that attempts to provide a real-world scientific explanation for supernatural phenomena. The director’s trademark electronic score is eerily effective, and Donald Pleasance, as a priest named (believe it or not) Loomis, is his usual over-the-top campy self. There’s no getting around the fact that this ludicrous saga about the return of Satan – who has been trapped for centuries (by a secret Church organization) in a vat of gooey liquid which he telekinetically shoots into PhD candidates’ mouths as a means of possessing them – is overburdened with near-incomprehensible exposition about tachyon particles and other such mumbo jumbo. Plus, there’s a strange implication that homeless people (including a pasty-faced Alice Cooper) are easily possessed by the Devil because they’re inferior beings on par with red ants. Nonetheless, with his reasonably chilling film’s finale, Carpenter shrewdly complements his gory scares with tantalizing, time travel-tinged paradoxes.

Land of the Dead (2005)

(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn)

George A. Romero returns to the grisly scene of his greatest ghoulish triumphs with Land of the Dead, and the results are about as lively as a piece of roadkill. Set some years after 1985’s Day of the Dead, Romero’s latest zombiefest posits a world in which the living and the undead tenuously coexist, and a society in which humanity has been divided between the haves (personified by Dennis Hopper’s evil businessman, who lives with other Ritchie Riches in a modern ivory tower) and have-nots. Unforeseen trouble arises, however, when the zombies begin evolving into thinking, communicating creatures led by a hulking, intelligent gas station attendant (Eugene Clark).

Romero’s blandly helmed film generates shockingly few frights from set pieces involving a ragtag group of scavengers (led by Simon Baker’s do-gooder, John Leguizamo’s unethical swine and Asia Argento’s tough vixen) venturing out into no-living-man’s land in their armored vehicle “Dead Reckoning” to scrounge up supplies. Unfortunately, with the exception of Hopper – who slyly underplays his villainy as the greedy capitalist baddie undermining this new supernatural-infested society – the performances are uniformly mediocre, and the clunky action is staged like it was still 1978. Even worse, though, is the film’s horridly simpleminded stabs at socio-political commentary. Having to listen to Dennis Hopper’s materialistic fiend pronounce, “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” and Leguizamo’s Cholo claim “I’m gonna do a jihad on his ass” is enough to make anyone want to permanently bury their head in the ground.

90-Degree Trio

As summertime temperatures rise here in the Northeast, the cool, air-conditioned confines of the movie theater become more and more attractive. Here are reviews for two current films and one July release, with Herbie being the dud of the bunch.

Herbie: Fully Loaded (Slant magazine)
March of the Penguins (filmcritic.com)
The Beautiful Country (Slant magazine)

And I've got eleven (!) site-specific reviews below, most of which provide a good reason to stay put on one's couch.

House of Wax (1953): B-

The first major studio production filmed in 3-D, André de Toth’s House of Wax wastes an idiotic amount of time showing off its then-nifty special effects (were two appearances by the man with the ping-pong paddle really necessary?). But as was so often the case, Vincent Price brings a touch of creepy class to this otherwise middling B-level horror story. A wax sculptor who loves beauty and loathes exhibitions that depict murder and mayhem, Henry Jarrod (Price) undergoes a monstrous transformation after he is disfigured in a fire started by his insurance money-craving partner. Emerging from the inferno as a maniac with a ghoulish new House of Wax featuring historical and contemporary villains (and Charles Bronson as his sidekick Igor!), Jarrod takes a liking to sweet, financially strapped Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk), who suspects that Jarrod’s Joan of Arc exhibit has been made with the corpse of her recently murdered friend Cathy (Carolyn Jones). Because we’re intimately aware of Jarrod’s cadaver-fueled waxadermic activities, de Toth doesn’t generate much suspense from his scenario (based on 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum). Still, the campy Price, skulking around the nighttime city clothed in a black cloak and hat (an outfit later worn by Sam Raimi’s Darkman), is nonetheless devilishly charismatic as the emotionally and psychologically scarred artist-turned-serial killer.

The Masque of the Red Death (1964): B+

Decadence, treachery, murder…and Satan! Such are the dearly beloved passions of Prince Prospero (Vincent Price), the 12th century villain of Roger Corman’s delectable Edgar Allen Poe adaptation The Masque of the Red Death. Very loosely based on its source material (as well as Poe’s short story Hop-Frog), this campy Corman classic is brimming with the type of lavish Gothic creepiness pioneered by Hammer Films, and its pedigree is enhanced by Daniel Haller’s gaudy set design, colorful cinematography by future director Nicolas Roeg, and one of the most delicious performances of Price’s storied career. Prospero’s boundless wickedness drives him to imprison a God-worshipping peasant girl (Jane Asher) and then force her to participate in his sadistic games of life and death with her father (Nigel Green) and her lover (David Weston), all while showing little mercy for the debauched nobility who have taken shelter from the Red Death plague inside his castle walls. Corman flirts with pretentious Ingmar Bergman worship throughout, but there’s an irresistible sumptuousness to his faux-medieval mise-en-scène (including the red robe-clad harbinger of death who plays cards outside Prospero’s depraved abode). And Price – whether smiling after the execution of a man who was willing to sell his wife in return for shelter from the Red Death, or delighting in his sister’s (Hazel Court) death after she burns an upside-down cross on her breast and undergoes a surreal marriage to the Devil himself – is at his most deliriously malevolent as the faithful servant of “the Lord of the Flies.”

Twentieth Century (1934): A-

Based on Charles Bruce Millholland’s celebrated play, Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century purports to champion the noble theater over the base cinema, yet this seminal 1934 screwball comedy is nothing if not a shining example of moviemaking magnificence. Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore) is a Broadway maestro whose newest Pygmalion, Mildred Plotka (Carole Lombard), is given the name Lily Garland, a round of caustic acting lessons (including Jaffe teaching her how to properly scream by pricking her behind with a pin), and the lead role in the director’s latest production. When Lilly becomes a sensation and bristles at Oscar’s increasingly possessive behavior, she flees for the bright matinee lights of Hollywood, becoming a mega-star and leaving the despondent, creatively barren Oscar – who possesses a habit of disingenuously threatening suicide – on the brink of ruin. Years later, the two are fortuitously reunited aboard the Twentieth Century train speeding from Chicago to New York, igniting a flurry of manic, lighthearted shenanigans involving the desperate Oscar’s attempt to resign Lilly to a contract with the help of his boozing staff (Oliver Webb and Owen O’Malley) and a deranged old coot (Etienne Girardot) who’s surreptitiously plastering religious stickers all over the locomotive. Hawks’ direction maintains a sublime grace even as his film rockets into stagey insanity, and Lombard and Barrymore wonderfully complement each other as the contentious artistic couple, the latter giving a tour de force performance of hilarious hysterics that embodies the very best aspects of the term “theatricality.”

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976): A-

John Carpenter’s neo-Western Assault on Precinct 13 (loosely based on Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo) is as formally compact and rigorously efficient as anything the genre filmmaker ever made. The story of a police station that, the night before its closing, is besieged by a mysterious gang known as Street Thunder, Carpenter’s early career triumph – his second film, following 1974’s Dark Star – is at once a grittily exhilarating action film and an intelligent, thinly coded allegory for 1970s racial tensions. From a discussion about coffee between just-transferred black cop Bishop (Austin Stoker) and ballsy white officer Julie (Nancy Keyes), to Bishop’s uneasy partnership with sardonic Caucasian criminal Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston), Carpenter posits a station under attack from both heavily armed assailants and shifting racial and gender attitudes. Not that such heady stuff interferes with the director’s combat-heavy set pieces, which feature their share of illogicalities – such as the gang members’ mindless attempts to infiltrate the station via broken windows, making them easy targets for Bishop and company’s bullets – but nonetheless exhibit an economical toughness epitomized by the infamous, delirious early scene involving gun-toting Street Thunder members, a little girl, and an ice cream truck.

Hide and Seek (2004): D

Is it too easy to say that one should hide, and never seek out, Hide and Seek? Probably. But there’s still no getting around the atrociousness of John Polson’s thriller, which pairs the once-great Robert DeNiro with the always-awful Dakota Fanning as a father and daughter trying to cope with their family matriarch’s suicide. DeNiro’s participation in this supernatural cesspit might be deemed “slumming it” if he hadn’t already made Godsend, and his shockingly bland performance perfectly fits this stilted spookfest, in which NYC shrink David Callaway (DeNiro) relocates to the suburban sticks with his traumatized daughter Emily (Fanning) and is forced to deal with crimes apparently perpetrated by Emily’s imaginary friend Charlie. Unfortunately, any hope that Charlie might be Satan is dashed by an insipid script, which rips whole pages out of the Identity and What Lies Beneath playbooks while delivering unconvincing red herrings involving the Callaway’s pseudo-pedophilic neighbors, David’s friend/colleague Katherine (Famke Janssen) and his new love interest Elizabeth (Elizabeth Shue). Devoid of believability, Hide and Seek winds up merely functioning as a lame showcase for DeNiro’s monotonous blankness and the hysterics of Fanning, whose terrified little girl (dolled up in sub-Adams Family goth makeup) alternates between staring into nothingness, spewing venom like a callous bitch, and weeping with award-baiting abandon. “Trauma causes pain,” is David’s common psychobabble refrain. Yes, and stupid, gimmicky thrillers cause irritation and boredom.