Lessons of Darkness

Treats and Tricks

This Halloween, I've got reviews of movies that are scary in both the good (i.e. terrifying) and bad (i.e. horrible) way. I'll let you guess which are which.

Saw II (Slant magazine)
The Weather Man (Slant magazine)
Three...Extremes (filmcritic.com)

One of my all-time favorite films finally gets the Criterion DVD treatment:
Le Samouraï (Slant magazine)

Also, I've kicked off Slant magazine's coverage of Showtime's new Masters of Horror anthology series - a project in which iconic horror directors each helm a one-hour episode - with a look at Don Coscarelli's debut contribution:
Incident On and Off a Mountain Road - Masters of Horror (Slant magazine)

And finally, I've got five new site reviews posted below - for Jean-Pierre Melville's classic Le Cercle Rouge, and for each Phantasm film.

Le Cercle Rouge (1970): A-

Jean-Pierre Melville introduces Alain Delon’s character in 1970’s Le Cercle Rouge just as he did in 1967’s Le Samouraï – with the actor slumbering on a bed. Such a gesture not only links Melville’s two Delon-embodied protagonists as kindred alienated antiheroes, but immediately marks the director’s second-to-last film as yet another of his cooler-than-cool existentialist crime pics. The story of a heist organized and perpetrated by just-paroled thief Corey (Delon), fugitive-on-the-run Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté) and alcoholic ex-cop Jansen (Yves Montand), Melville’s tightly focused epic is the epitome of neo-noir stylishness, an entrancingly fatalistic love letter to tough guys and the meticulous precision with which they carry out their unlawful activities. Whether expertly choreographing the central jewelry joint swindle or simply reveling in Delon’s stoic elegance, Melville’s film is a paean to masculinity (the only women who appear are either traitorous vixens or floozy showgirls) and an exercise in genre efficiency. And in the character of Montand’s Jansen – who suffers through nightmarish DTs (replete with visions of creepy-crawly creatures swarming his bedridden body) and then sacrifices his share of the loot after preparations for the burglary cure him of his addictive thirst – Le Cercle Rouge also hints, until its typically pessimistic conclusion, at the therapeutic benefits derived from a devotion to ritualistic occupational craftsmanship.

Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998): D

“Cheap” is the most accurate way to describe Phantasm IV: Oblivion, a direct-to-video sequel that splits time between Mike (an old-looking Michael Baldwin) and Reggie’s (Reggie Bannister) time-traveling fight against The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) and lots of silly, pointless outtakes from the first Phantasm (here presented as “flashbacks”). I guess Don Coscarelli deserves some credit for making every one of the Phantasm films rather than handing over his career-defining series to second-rate hacks in the manner of Wes Craven (with A Nightmare on Elm St.), John Carpenter (with Halloween) and Clive Barker (with Hellraiser). The problem is that Coscarelli is an inconsistent director at best, and his increasingly convoluted Tall Man saga ran out of steam after Phantasm II. In this supposedly final installment, Mike travels back to the Civil War with the help of dead brother-turned-flying death ball Jody (Bill Thornbury) to learn of the Tall Man’s origins, while Reggie tries to find Mike in Death Valley after evading a strange woman (Heidi Marnhout) with death balls for breasts. No, I’m not kidding. That the film provides no real revelations about Scrimm’s corpse-loving fiend is to be expected. But watching Coscarelli shoot almost this entire feature on deserted highways and in the empty desert simply exemplifies the low-budget shoddiness that, by its conclusion, eventually came to characterize the Phantasm franchise.

Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1993): C-

Having already exhausted all the horrific and action-adventure possibilities of his Phantasm series, writer/director Don Coscarelli falls back on mystery-sapping exposition for Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead, a direct-to-video catastrophe that continues the story of Mike (Michael Baldwin, returning to the role after James LeGros’ turn in the first sequel) and Reggie’s (Reggie Bannister) fight against the otherworldly Tall Man (Angus Scrimm). With Scrimm’s gaunt ghoul intent on capturing Mike (for reasons left unexplained), the heroic duo are joined by the ghost of Mike’s dead brother Jody (Bill Thornbury), who’s been turned into one of the Tall Man’s blood-draining spheres. If that weren’t ridiculous enough – and trust me, it’s plenty ridiculous – Reggie also eventually teams up with nunchaku-wielding, Grace Jones-wannabe Rocky (Gloria Lynne Henry) and sharp-shooting kid Tim (Kevin Connors), the latter of whom has been repelling the Tall Man’s undead minions since his parents’ death via Home Alone-style booby traps in his abandoned home. After a few tepid murder scenes, all of these dorks meet up for a final confrontation in which Coscarelli’s ho-hum cliffhanger takes a backseat to his hilarious dedication to ending each Phantasm with a character being pulled backwards through a window. More often than not, however, Phantasm III isn’t as funny as it is lame.

Phantasm II (1988): C

For Phantasm II, writer/director Don Coscarelli piles on more gore, more tongue-in-cheek humor, and more elaborate set pieces in an attempt to enliven what turns out to be little more than a big-budget rehash of his 1979 cult hit. Seven years after the first film’s events, Mike (now played by a young James LeGros) is released from a psychiatric hospital and, with friend and former ice cream truck driver Reggie (Reggie Bannister), goes in search of the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), who’s traveling cross-country harvesting the dead for his otherworldly slave trade. Outfitted with a flamethrower and a quadruple-barreled shotgun, respectively, Mike and Reggie hit the road in search of both their gaunt grave-robbing nemesis and a young girl named Liz (Paula Irvine) who shares a psychic connection with Mike, traveling through one burnt-out apocalyptic town after another while searching for an undead creature they illogically hope to kill. Substituting the original’s disquieting otherworldly vibe with an aggressive, action-tinged bluntness, Coscarelli’s sequel is louder, flashier and duller, its gratuitous bloodshed wholly unimaginative and its attempts at Evil Dead-style cartoonishness (replete with a subtle nod to Sam Raimi) decidedly flat. And without an unsettling atmosphere to make up for the story’s brainlessness or the series’ plagiarism of Star Wars – via both the Tall Man’s Jawa-like demon dwarfs and his lethal orbs, which too closely resemble Darth Vader’s torture droid – there’s little to enjoy about this second outing save for Scrimm’s deliciously menacing specter of death.

Phantasm (1979): B

An example of ambiance making up for incoherence, Don Coscarelli’s dream-like Phantasm is a film that benefits from repeated viewings, as its surrealistic story about a supernatural grave-robber, his demonic hooded dwarfs, and his deadly flying spheres makes next to no sense the first time around. Young Mike (Michael Baldwin) and his super-cool older brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) are the heroic duo tasked with uncovering the mystery surrounding The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm, in his iconic role), a pale-faced fiend whose malevolent modus operandi involves plundering graves, reviving the corpses and smushing them to 3-foot-tall stature, and then shipping them to another dimension (Hell, perhaps?) to be used as slave labor. What any of this means is – to put it diplomatically – “open to interpretation,” but though Coscarelli’s seminal low-budget horror indie is narratively muddled beyond recognition, it’s nonetheless also quite efficiently directed, radiating a nightmarish dread from an early jump-cut close-up of a murderous sex goddesses’ face (which transforms into Scrimm’s gaunt countenance) to the eerie peek through the doorway into the Tall Man’s home world. That the Tall Man’s globe of death only appears twice (and looks horribly cheesy in both instances) is somewhat disappointing, but those looking for more blade-impalement bloodshed always have the option of checking out Coscarelli’s inferior, more gruesome sequels.

Kiss Kiss, or Transvestites and Doom

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang provides enough bang for your buck, Doom is a pretty gloomy (if moderately entertaining) affair and the upcoming Transamerica - with an Oscar-ready performance by Felicity Huffman - confronts transexual identity issues with the simplicity of a television movie.

Out Now:
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Slant magazine)
Doom (Slant magazine)

Coming in December:
Transamerica (Slant magazine)

And as always, there are a bunch of new site reviews below, including my takes on Jarhead, John Carpenter's original The Fog, and yet another gruesome Italian cannibal flick.

Jarhead (2005): C+

Eschewing politics in favor of an intimate look at life in the Marine Corps during 1991’s Gulf War, Sam Mendes’ Jarhead (its title the moniker for marines, whose crew-cut heads resemble jars) functions primarily as a prolonged metaphor about suppressed sexual urges. Reluctantly entering the military because of his father’s distinguished service in Vietnam, Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) is dehumanized by his unrelentingly vicious boot camp training into a murderous automaton, programmed to spew Ooh-Rah Marine proverbs while blindly swearing allegiance to the Corps. Swofford and his varied sniper unit mates – including an ex-con (Peter Sarsgaard) who embraces the inclusive Corps for giving his life a purpose, a wise-ass (Lucas Black) who questions the justness of the campaign, and the sergeant (Jamie Foxx) who passionately loves his job – endure months of tedious, ennui-festering downtime in the Iraqi desert waiting for Operation Desert Storm to commence, partying when alcohol becomes available, insulting one another’s ethnicity and purported “gayness,” discussing the wives and girlfriends they believe are surely cheating on them, and masturbating like madmen.

This last activity is the one on which Mendes’ straightforwardly shot, not-quite-unreal-enough film is most fixated, as Swofford’s mushrooming mental breakdown – due to an explosive cocktail of boredom, fear and disgust with his transformation into a zealous, combat-obsessed grunt – is depicted as a case of brain-addling pent-up frustration from not being able to shoot off a few rounds from his phallic firearm. Such hackneyed symbolism (ripped right from Kubrick’s markedly more haunting Full Metal Jacket, as is the film’s opening drill sergeant scene) is what Mendes provides in place of character development, failing to get underneath the armor of the vacant Swofford or his equally blank comrades. Yet if his one-dimensional protagonists elicit little empathy, Mendes nonetheless effectively articulates Swofford’s contradictory attraction-repulsion impulses regarding the military’s gung-ho ethos through both a climactic shot of the marine, having been refused his ejaculatory battlefield release, watching carpet bombing through a closed window, as well as a languorous nightmare set to Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” – both instances in which lunacy and sanity are separated by nothing more than translucent glass.

What ultimately gets in the way of Mendes’ film, however, is a disinterest in engaging the larger geopolitical issues of its narrative and a miscalculated refusal to link (either overtly or covertly) his film’s decade-old operation against Saddam with today’s continuing debacle in Iraq. By not sufficiently commenting on any of the catalysts, methods or foreign policy legacies of the original Gulf War in favor of trite, tired critiques of military self-interest (such as Foxx’s sergeant forcing the men to demonstrate procedures for the visiting media) and inefficiency (Swofford’s sit-around-and-achieve-nothing plight being primary evidence of the armed forces’ wasteful incompetence), Jarhead feels painfully narrow in scope and, thus, pointless. Even more detrimental, though, are Mendes’ misfiring attempts to inject the proceedings with the surrealism of its oft-referenced predecessor Apocalypse Now (as well as Catch-22, M*A*S*H, and David O. Russell’s far superior Gulf War-set Three Kings), resulting in a film that only barely conveys wartime insanity and never comes close to expressing the insanity of war itself.

Cannibal Ferox (1981): C-

More crudely constructed and slightly less gory than the similar Cannibal Holocaust, Umberto Lenzi’s putridly shot Cannibal Ferox (aka Make Them Die Slowly) charts the journey from New York City to the Amazon jungle of a NYU anthropology student named Gloria Davis (Lorraine De Selle), her brother Rudy (Danilo Mattei), and slutty sidekick Pat (Zora Kerova). For her dissertation, Gloria is intent on proving that cannibalism doesn’t exist, but after meeting up with sadistic thief and drug dealer Mike (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) and his pal Joe (Walter Lucchini), the arrogant student comes face to face with the Amazon’s flesh-eating inhabitants. As with Holocaust, Ferox disingenuously vilifies white Westerns as the world’s real savages (and actually blames the natives’ barbarism on modern civilizations’ aggressive actions, because violence begets only more violence), all while shamelessly staging and orchestrating the kind of repugnant and misogynistic nastiness it supposedly decries. Phony scenes of castration, Hannibal-esque brain munching, and naked women being suspended by hooks through their breasts are interspersed by despicable, gratuitous instances of authentic animal murder, a regular stream of tedious unpleasantness that’s periodically interrupted by a NYC-set subplot involving Holocaust (and Debbie Does Dallas) star Robert Kerman as a cop searching for Mike. But for all its boundary-crossing indecency, the most shocking thing about Cannibal Ferox is that it remains a somewhat popular entry in the largely worthless Italian cannibal genre.

Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997): A

A stunning tale of survival in which director Werner Herzog once again crafts the portrait of a kindred adventurous spirit, Little Dieter Needs To Fly focuses on Dieter Dengler, a German-American who recounts his youthful dream of being a pilot, his success at fulfilling this aspiration by flying warplanes for the U.S. military during Vietnam, and the terrible ordeal he suffered as a POW in Laos after being shot down during combat. Candid and courageous, Dengler speaks in rushed, rapid-fire sentences that – when coupled with Herzog’s recreation of Dengler’s hand-bound trip through the Laotian jungle with local men posing as his captors – create the haunting impression that Dengler, while at once confronting his personal history via participation in this documentary, is also in some way also eager to hurriedly put distance between himself and the traumatic ordeal. Using stock footage of Vietnam bombing and and evocative singing for his soundtrack, Herzog creates a mood of existential surrealism that’s nearly as gripping as the grounded-in-reality stories told by Dengler, a staunch nonconformist who endured a childhood in post-WWII Germany by eating wallpaper (which contains nutrients), and who now habitually paints pictures of open doorways – symbols of safe passage and freedom that speak volumes about Dengler’s tireless, tumultuous attempts (at least until his death in 2001) to come to terms with his horrific past.