Lessons of Darkness

Wicked Stepmother (1989): C-

Were I feeling more generous, I might try to make the case that Larry Cohen’s Wicked Stepmother is really an allegory about societal mistreatment of the elderly – how, shirking their familial obligations, many use television as an old fogy babysitter, shuttle off their parents and grandparents to live alone, and generally ignore seniors’ needs and desires in the hope that they’ll skulk off to some dark corner and die. However, I cannot make such an argument, for Larry Cohen’s film is, in most regards, so catastrophically bad that it would be foolish to imply that something serious is going on underneath its campy surface. Notable for featuring Bette Davis’ last performance, Wicked Stepmother barely even features the legendary actress, who ditched the project early on in production (because of script concerns) and – thanks to some illogical plot modifications – was replaced by Loverboy’s Barbara Carrera. Dedicated to delivering excruciating tongue-in-cheek fantasy and hysterical overacting (by Colleen Camp and David “Sledgehammer” Rasche), the film is unusually clunky (both aesthetically and narratively) even by Cohen’s standards. But though it’s awful save for some moments of unintended comedy, there’s enough of those to keep one mildly interested, from an animatronic cat smoking cigarettes and a cannily employed Joan Crawford photo to the sound of Camp uttering the staggeringly idiotic line, “I’ve never talked dirty in Babylonian before.”

The Stuff (1985): B

The Stuff is arguably writer/director Larry Cohen’s most disappointing work, not because it’s terrible but, rather, because its execution never lives up to its scrumptious satiric premise. Corporate saboteur Mo Rutherford (Michael Moriarty, in another entertainingly odd, mumble-mouthed performance) is hired by ice cream industry interests to discover the secret behind desert sensation The Stuff, a mysterious diet product that’s taken the country by storm but, it seems, has some strange side effects. During his quest to uncover the carefully guarded (subterranean) origins of the yogurt-y product, Rutherford teams up with karate-chopping disenfranchised Stuff competitor Chocolate Chip Charlie (SNL vet Garrett Morris), an advertising exec (Andrea Marcovicci) and a boy (Scott Bloom) who, in attempting to evade his Stuff-possessed family, learns that “everybody has to eat shaving cream once in a while.” A plot ripe with potential for skewering ‘80s-era consumerism, Cohen wastes an inordinate amount of time on tepid chase sequences, head-bashing effects, a brutally unfunny right-wing militant nut (Paul Sorvino), and exposition less engaging than an FDA-approved ingredients label. But if The Stuff – riffing on The Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers – amounts to little more than an amusing but unfulfilling lampoon of capitalist consumption, it at least deserves credit for the brilliantly random pairing, in a Stuff commercial, of Abe Vigoda and “Where’s the Beef?” icon Clara Peller.

Link Dump

I've got no reasonable excuse for falling behind on posting links to my latest reviews - I've just been swamped with work, and feeling kinda lazy. Nonetheless, here's two weeks' worth of critical goodness, including my thoughts on Harrison Ford's lame Firewall, the surprisingly sweet Curious George, and a bunch of films - especially Sorry, Haters and Running Scared - that I didnt' care for.

This Weekend:
Curious George (Slant magazine)
Firewall (Slant magazine)

Already Out:
Something New (Slant magazine)
When a Stranger Calls (2006) (Slant magazine)
What the Bleep?! Down the Rabbit Hole (Slant magazine)
The Tenants (Slant magazine)

Coming Soon:
Sorry, Haters (Slant magazine)
Running Scared (Slant magazine)
Winter Passing (Slant magazine)

Special Effects (1984): B

With Vertigo and Peeping Tom as his most obvious (but far from only) touchstones, Larry Cohen dives headfirst into meta territory with Special Effects, a self-reflexive thriller that deliriously dissects the boundaries between reality and fiction. With his career in shambles after having blown a $30 million special effects-laden project, director Christopher Neville (Eric Bogosian, in his screen debut) finds inspiration for a comeback after he murders a young would-be starlet named Andrea (Ms. 45’s Zoë Lund), films the dirty deed, and then blackmails the victim’s Arkansas-hailing husband (and baby’s daddy) Keefe (Perfect Strangers’ Brad Rijn) – detective Delroy’s (Keevin O’Connor) prime suspect in the slaying – to star in a reality-based film about the murder starring an Andrea doppelganger named Elaine (also Lund) with whom Keefe begins falling in love. It’s an insane set-up to be sure, and Cohen never seems fully in control of the myriad themes he’s addressing. But nonetheless, the whiplash combination of technical coarseness, tongue-in-cheek allusions, Day for Night-style in-jokes, and Bogosian’s presence as a mordantly villainous filmmaker (an obvious stand-in for Cohen himself) nonetheless makes Special Effects a significant (if ultimately chaotic) entry in the director’s canon of ramshackle tributes to the dark, dangerous, voyeuristic allure of the cinema.

Perfect Strangers (1984): B

Wholly unrelated to the adventures of Balki Bartokomous and Cousin Larry, Larry Cohen’s Perfect Strangers delivers off-kilter thrills via the story of a mob hit man named Johnny (Brad Rijn) who enters into a relationship with single mom Sally (Anne Carlisle) after her two-year-old son Matthew (Matthew Stockley) witnesses one of his contract killings. Johnny and Sally’s union is fraught with perils both related and unrelated to his murderous profession, as Cohen regularly spikes the action with not only a familiar element of child-related anxiety – recurring instances of baby-snatching give the film a hard-to-shake exploitative kick – but also gender warfare, most of which comes in the form of self-actualizing feminist retaliation against violent chauvinism (seen in a Take Back the Night rally and Sally’s male-bashing girlfriends). More entrancing than the director’s larger thematic preoccupations, however, is his film’s disquietingly ethereal atmosphere. Finding a harmonious match to its misty, dreamlike cinematography (including some striking shots of a World Trade Center-shadowed downtown Manhattan) in Carlisle’s vague, emotionally remote performance as the parentally inattentive Sally, Perfect Strangers finds Cohen successfully forgoing splattery gore in favor of a more menacingly unreal mood of urban malaise.

New vs. Newer

Without rehashing my thoughts on The New World, let me simply begin by restating my conviction that Terrence Malick’s masterpiece about the 1607 arrival of English settlers on the American continent was 2005’s best film. However, with two competing versions having hit multiplexes during the past two months – the 150-minute cut that screened for critics and played briefly in select theaters during December, and the abbreviated 135-minute cut that recently opened in wide release – a further question logically arises: to which version am I referring? The easy answer, of course, is that I’m talking about the 150-minute one, which is what I fell head-over-heels in love with before constructing my end-of-year lists for Slant magazine and The Village Voice (where it landed at #1). Yet having now also seen Malick’s current, leaner edition – created, by all accounts, not because of profit-driven studio pressures but because of the director’s genuine desire to reshape his film for mainstream viewers – such a definitive choice becomes a bit trickier, as the two aren’t wholly opposite beasts but, rather, spiritually conjoined creations that offer up complementary aesthetic visions designed to appeal to somewhat different cinephilic dispositions.

Having seen these alternate New Worlds almost two months apart, I’m ill-equipped to deliver a point-by-point comparison of the changes Malick has made. But what’s amazing is that, for the most part, said changes are frequently (though not always) imperceptible, as the auteur hasn’t taken out wholesale scenes in an effort to shorten the runtime but, instead, seems to have made minor snips to multiple sequences in an effort to reconfigure the rhythm, not the content, of the film. Consequently, whereas the original frequently seemed to find itself swept up by unexpected gusts of wind into ruminative tangents, this compact version appears to have that swirling wind largely at its back, propelling its narrative momentum forward in a more clear, uncomplicated manner. Such structural straightforwardness is coupled with Malick’s revised employment of narration – unlike the beautifully incongruous pairing of voice-overs with non-matching images that characterized the original (as well as The Thin Red Line), the new version more conventionally matches narration with shots of the corresponding speaker. Thus, the result is that this slimmer edition seems more attentive to the story of its three protagonists (superbly embodied by Colin Farrell, Christian Bale and newcomer Q’Orianka Kilcher) and less preoccupied with divergent reflections on the natural world’s intrinsic (harmonious and violent) kinship with mankind.

Does the new version’s augmented pace therefore make it superior? It strikes me that one’s response to that query largely depends on one’s inclinations (and expectations). Certainly, this second iteration’s better-developed (and, I think, a tad rushed) tempo contributes to a more accessibly configured mise-en-scène which will undoubtedly appeal to a wider commercial audience. And its more streamlined composition locates the film’s focus squarely on Pocahontas’ plight, whose status as both a tragic romantic figure as well as a symbol of national colonization feels more lucid, more cogently articulated. Yet somehow, I can’t fully shake my own partiality for the longer, more sprawling version. In its abridged form, The New World seems to dilute trace amounts of its elemental strengths: its dreamlike languorousness, its lyrical attunement to the unspoiled environment’s majesty, and its awe-inspiringly nimble linking of seemingly offhand images of nature to its larger thematic concerns. It’s not that both versions of the film don’t exhibit these qualities (as well as splendidly sublime, and thoroughly underrated, use of Wagner and Mozart); it’s just that I feel the longer film has a more organic poeticism – and recasts the United States’ origins as an Adam and Eve-ish fable with more poised, unhurried gracefulness – than the ever-so-slightly more traditionally put-together revision that’s now (hopefully) playing at a theater near you.

Or at least, that’s the stance I’ll stick by until Malick delivers a third, reportedly three-hour cut of The New World on the forthcoming DVD.

(One final note: For further effusive praise about The New World, be sure to check out the blog of NY Press critic Matt Zoller Seitz, who has been one of the film’s most vocal and vociferous champions)