Lessons of Darkness

Clash of the Titans (2010): C-

Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans may be a re-do of the beloved 1981 Ray Harryhausen fantasy saga, but in its thudding rock soundtrack, its grim, bloody vision of ancient Greece, and its horror-movie-monstrous mythological beasts, the template the film really follows is that of the Playstation’s God of War franchise. In said comparison, this would-be blockbuster comes out looking downright woeful, paralleling the video game series’ nominal narrative concerns – namely, a hero’s quest to exact vengeance on, and thus end the rule of, Mount Olympus’ deities – and yet lacking not only its aesthetic originality but also its fiery, all-consuming sense of rage, anguish and bloodlust. Chalk that up at least partially to a protagonist, Perseus, who’s been sketchily conceived and is embodied with titanic blandness by Sam Worthington, now firmly established (after similar turns in Terminator Salvation and Avatar) as action cinema’s preeminent bore. As in Harryhausen’s Clash, Perseus must defeat a series of colossal adversaries, though here his prime goal is to reach Olympus and slaughter Gods – specifically Zeus (Liam Neeson) and Hades (Ralph Fiennes) – played by slumming thespians. It’s a quest that’s filled out with embarrassing supporting characters (including a wood-faced specter who does little other than comically roar his approval) that Leterrier shoots with visceral vigor if a tad too much blurry-vision cinematography designed to mask some of his CGI’s shoddiness. His over-the-top aesthetics are further sabotaged by 3D (added as a post-production afterthought) that is superfluous to the point of grating, the effects providing no extra depth-of-field but plenty of indistinct fuzziness around the frame’s edges. Yet even more than its technical limitations, and despite the minor cheesy pleasures afforded by its man-vs.-monsters action, Clash is truly undone by the dramatic void at its center, an abyss so wide and deep that even the sight of the gargantuan Kraken generates only indifference.

Jennifer’s Body (2009): B

Snarky teen banter, ‘80s-era spring formal attire, overly clever and self-conscious pop culture-inflected quips and bon mots –Jennifer’s Body has screenwriter Diablo Cody’s fingerprints all over it. And yet while those signature elements are what largely made Juno an insufferable too-cute-for-school hair-puller, here, in the service of a campy horror-comedy about a sexpot possessed by a demon, they feel far more at home. Directed with an uneven tone but witty flair by Karyn Kusama (who repeatedly indulges in, and screws around with, classic genre clichés), the film casts high school sexscapades as a deadly contact sport via Jennifer (Megan Fox, far funnier than expected). Decked out in cleavage-baring hoodies and miniscule short shorts, she’s a borderline-nuclear hottie, and after an indie rock show that literally goes up in flames, she ditches her nerdy best friend, the embarrassingly named Needy (Amanda Seyfried), to join the band on their bus, where she winds up becoming the eyelinered rockers’ human sacrifice (for stardom, naturally) and emerges later with a flesh-eating spirit inside her svelte frame. Cody’s look-at-me dialogue (“Nice hardware, Ace”) can still grate on the ears, but its smarty-pantsness fits Jennifer, the type of adolescent bombshell who knows she has it and likes to flaunt it – a quality that serves her well, given her need to lure men into isolated areas for consumption. Cody’s plotting is rough and, at about the midway point, loses its satiric sharpness, with Jennifer – at her most magnificent when strutting down the school hallways, her hair lustrous after a hearty meal – never positioned quite consistently enough as a Carrie-esque figure whose superhumanity is an outgrowth of ascendant female puberty. And Needy, right up to and through a third-act showdown with her BFF over bland boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons), gets too short shrift as a stand-alone character. But in its playful, salacious inversion of horror cinema’s typical attitude toward female sexuality (replete with in-your-face titillating lesbian undertones), in its mockery of emo rock as a destructive byproduct of the devil, and in Fox’s ravenous embodiment of T&A as an annihilating carnal weapon – when she swims nude in a lake to the thunderous guitars of The Sword, she’s hilariously elevated to the status of mythic sex titan – Jennifer’s Body has substantial bite.

Dog Soldiers (2002): C

Strong creature design is the sole calling card of Dog Soldiers, in which Scottish military men engaged in a training mission in the deep dark woods square off against a pack of tactical werewolves. In his feature debut, writer/director Neil Marshall (The Descent, Doomsday) falls back mainly on army squad clichés and rote conflicts, along the way delivering a group of protagonists woefully short on personality. Aside from Kevin McKidd’s team leader, who squandered a spot in special forces by refusing to follow his commander’s orders to murder a dog, the only person with anything resembling a characteristic is the grunt who’s angry about missing an English soccer match. Tonally, Marshall straddles the lines between humor, action and horror with relative aplomb, but his scripting is stolid, resulting in a story that alternates between generally pointless exposition (since most of the soldiers are destined to be wolf food) and skirmishes that are hectic and bloody in all the routine ways. Once McKidd and his men meet up with a suspicious zoologist (Emma Cleasby) and take refuge in her remote forest cabin, the film becomes a cross between Night of the Living Dead and [insert werewolf pic here], a combination that would deliver more thrills and laughs if Marshall were capable of crafting heroes of any distinction. As it is, though, Dog Soldiers’ inspired B-movie-cheesy premise merely rehashes old genre tricks.

The Men Who Stare At Goats (2009): C-

A war satire woefully short on laughs, The Men Who Stare At Goats is about precisely nothing – other than stars desperately trying to energize humorless material – until its concluding moments, at which point it futilely attempts to make a statement about the need for innovative, non-violent dreamers in our current war-entrenched country. Directed by Grant Heslov and starring his Good Night, and Good Luck partner George Clooney, this feeble farce concerns a reporter (Ewan McGregor) who, while struggling to gain entrance into Iraq in 2003 (to prove to his unfaithful wife that he’s a man) finds himself at the side of a lunatic (Clooney) who claims to have been part of a top-secret military operation from decades earlier that turned soldiers into psychic warriors. These self-described “Jedis” were created by an army hippie (Jeff Bridges) convinced that using one’s mind rather than bullets was the path to true success, a bit of heavy-handed allegorical mush that Heslov, working from Peter Straughan’s lethargic script (based on Jon Ronson’s book), makes neither funny nor insightful. Given the talent participating (which also includes Kevin Spacey as a rival of Clooney’s), Goats should be expected to elicit at least a few chuckles or sparks of genuine drama. Alas, as it flip-flops between Clooney and McGregor’s escapades in the Iraqi desert and flashbacks to new-agey drug-ins and goofy extrasensory experiments conducted on military bases, the film – amounting to a series of barely tethered surrealistic shenanigans perpetrated by coasting A-listers – finds neither a rhythm nor a purpose.

Whip It (2009): B-

Drenching itself in ‘70s and ‘80s stylings merely reinforces the fact that Whip It has been seen a hundred times before in slightly altered incarnations. Still, as a saga of rebellious youth achieving self-actualization, Drew Barrymore’s maiden behind-the-camera effort could be far worse, excessively prolonging its tale but injecting it with enough vivacious you-go-girl energy to help make up for the sense of familiarity. In tiny Bodeen, Texas, outcast teen Bliss (Ellen Page) is stuck participating in pageants at the behest of her living-vicariously mother (Marcia Gay Harden) until she stumbles upon an Austin-based roller derby league populated by tattooed outsiders and immediately falls in love. Covertly joining the team (dubbed the Hurl Scouts) behind both the backs of Mom and non-confrontational Dad (Daniel Stern), Bliss discovers her true self. Hers is a tale of individuality found and embraced that, predictably, is complicated by her parents eventually discovering her ruse, her new rocker-dreamboat boyfriend (Landon Pigg) turning out to be less than he initially seemed, and her loyal best friend (Alia Shawkat) suffering for Bliss’ own selfish goals. Whip It’s plot adheres so smoothly to its formulaic structure that it barely makes an impact, and Barrymore’s direction can occasionally go a tad slack in the editorial-pacing department. Yet between the soundtrack’s sweet rock cuts, a cast (including Kristen Wiig, Juliette Lewis, Jimmy Fallon and Barrymore) that imbues sketchy roles with lighthearted joviality, and a performance by Page free of Juno-esque quirk, the film has verve to spare, not to mention a message – namely, that fighting (of the literal and figurative kind) is always preferable to conformist pageantry – refreshingly delivered with more blood and sweat than tears.

Armored (2009): C+

Nimród Antal’s sleek direction is the only thing of interest in Armored, a rote B-movie in which a heist goes wrong courtesy of one robber’s nagging conscience. Having just lost both his parents, which left him with a house the bank wants to repossess and a delinquent kid brother social services wants to snatch, armored truck guard Ty (Columbus Short) is convinced by his colleague and friend Mike (Matt Dillon) to help steal $42 million from two trucks they – and their mates, including Laurence Fishburne, Jean Reno, Amaury Nolasco and Skeet Ulrich – will be transporting. Ty joins the plot under an agreement with Mike that “no one will get hurt,” thereby meaning that someone is bound to do just that. Unfortunately, the way things spiral out of control in James V. Simpson’s script are too mundane to deliver the blistering, no-frills thrills such a set-up suggests. The cast is fine as far as their one-dimensional roles go, and Antal’s eye for widescreen results in compositions that efficiently speak to characters’ isolation, claustrophobia and menace. The problem is that Armored isn’t clever or inventive enough to seem like a high-stakes game, barreling through its stand-offs, shouting matches and car chases with reasonable panache but also a dearth of imagination.

Evil Dead II (1987): B+

Not a sequel so much as an elaborate do-over, Evil Dead II amps up the ghastly laughs to generally thrilling results. Though its characters aren’t, the film is distinctly aware of its predecessor, as evidenced by its blowing through an intro – in which Ash (Bruce Campbell) takes Annie (Sarah Berry) to a remote cabin, accidentally plays a tape recording of a man translating the Book of the Dead, and winds up having to slaughter his demonically possessed girl – that more or less covers a good chunk of the original Evil Dead. From there, four new guests arrive at the woods-surrounded residence to join Ash in some goo-saturated demon-killing, mayhem enlivened by writer/director Sam Raimi’s unparalleled tilt-a-wheel cinematography. Raimi’s splatterfest habitually takes the point-of-view of the invisible evil forces stalking his protagonists, from a technically brilliant, giddy single take in which the camera chases Ash through the house, to a later sequence featuring the frame lurching, zooming and jumping about as a spirit attempts to cross over into our world. That Raimi (via his camera) is the film’s monster subtly speaks to the filmmaker’s tormentor role in works of horror. But first and foremost, his gonzo aesthetics are interested in high-wire kicks, of which there are plenty throughout Evil Dead II, and which benefit from the pitch-perfect, alternately terrified and disgusted reaction shots of the perpetually doused-in-blood Campbell.

Doomsday (2008): C+

Neil Marshall deliberately avoids reinventing the wheel with Doomsday, a post-apocalyptic thriller that bluntly melds 28 Days Later, The Road Warrior, Robin Hood and the Flesh Fair sequence from A.I. That, for a time, this hodgepodge works at all is a testament to his no-nonsense approach to the material, which is played fast, cheap and loud during its establishing segments. Having fallen victim to a deadly Reaper virus, Scotland has been quarantined for thirty years behind a giant wall. When the virus reappears in 2035 London, the English prime minster’s (Alexander Siddig) nefarious right-hand man (David O’Hara) – knowing that survivors somehow exist in Scotland – sends in a crack squad of commandos to reenter the closed-off country to find a cure. What team leader Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) discovers behind the iron curtain is a wasteland filled with mohawked, tattooed rejects from Mad Max’s future, as well as a separate colony of medieval knights led by a doctor-turned-king (Malcolm McDowell). Marshall’s orchestration of action is sturdy enough to offset the obvious fact that everything in Doomsday is recycled material from better sources, and Mitra certainly has enough warrior-goddess sex appeal to at least keep one from dozing off. Yet as it slogs through one hectic yet mundane set pieces after another, the film slowly drowns in its own pool of clichés, culminating in a finale that gets the triumphant poses correct but makes no sense.

Alien³ (1992): B+

Critically assessing Alien³ is inherently problematic, thanks to creative interference by Twentieth-Century Fox that so thoroughly frustrated director David Fincher, he continues to refuse to discuss (much less revisit) his feature debut. Yet while the theatrical cut is notable mainly for the abominable changes made to it by studio suits, the DVD “assembly cut” – which restores 30 minutes of footage, and is modeled after an early Fincher version – is a fascinating, often fantastic, film, one simultaneously indebted to and self-consciously divorced from its acclaimed predecessors in ways both clunky and inspired. Fincher’s set-up – in which Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), now stripped of all but minor traces of warmth and optimism, crash-lands on remote male-only penal facility Fiorina ‘Fury’ 161 populated by religious extremists – provides another dank, isolated environment full of wet, shadowy corridors for his creature and its inevitable victims to navigate. However, while his milieu and its eventual hunter/hunted tensions prove somewhat familiar, the director paints his material in distinctively morose shades. And does so from the outset, in which he callously kills off Newt (Carrie Henn) and Hicks (Michael Biehn) in order to recast Ripley as a hardened borderline-fatalist driven less by self-preservation instincts than by defiant fury at space-mining industrial titans Weyland-Yutani, whose at-all-costs endeavors to capture an alien for use in military applications continue to stalk her even on Fury 161.

During its breakneck centerpiece sequences, Alien³ leaves a been-here, done-this impression, failing to generate requisite suspense from scenarios that, for the most part, have only one possible outcome. Still, in-between well-orchestrated but relatively unimaginative chases, Fincher morphs the franchise to his liking. The director employs a barrage of upward-tilted low-angle compositions which, aside from their disorienting and dizzying visceral effect, strikingly express his characters’ hellbound circumstances. A funereal sequence proves a technical and emotive gem, boasting not only a magnificent panorama of crematory fires overlaid with triple close-ups, but generating potent death-rebirth dynamics via intercutting to the ox-belly nativity of the alien. Even in his maiden studio outing, Fincher’s technical skills are imposing and firmly wedded to his tale’s underlying emotional core, a black hole that becomes increasingly bleak as Ripley and her zealot-criminal comrades begin to face the threat at hand. Only rarely do glimmers of happiness peek out from beneath the film’s midnight shroud courtesy of Ripley’s warm, comforting relationship with the facility’s doctor Clemens (Charles Dance), though even then, sex is a romance-free affair and the lingering bliss it leaves proves short-lived, a mere fleeting pleasure in a life beset by hostile forces.

Fincher’s early exterior landscape of Fury 161 has an apocalyptic gorgeousness that’s in tune with the pessimism of his story, which replicates many elements of Alien and Aliens (more the former than the latter) while seeming intent on killing the series off. The much-ballyhooed revelation about Ripley’s physical condition struck many in ’92 as unforgivably mean but, in retrospect, it plays like the natural evolution of the franchise’s running birth-mother-child subtexts, downbeat thematic threads well-suited to Fincher’s gloomy, cynical Christ-like conclusion. Alien³’s emotional and spiritual desolation is encapsulated by Fury 161’s inhabitants, led by homicidal rapist-turned-preacher Dillon (an intense, empathetic Charles S. Dutton), whose severe faith maintains tenuous order in the compound and is tested – to negative consequences – by the appearance of the female Ripley. In the assembly cut’s finest addition, the alien, having been successfully trapped by Ripley and company, is released from captivity by Golic (Paul McGann), a disturbed lunatic enraptured by the extraterrestrial “dragon.” It’s an act of fanatical faith-run-fatally-amok that sums up the film’s disdainful critique of religion, merely another dead-end avenue for salvation in a random, vicious universe where hope is a fool’s luxury and even the altruistic sacrifice of heroes is less likely to grant others deliverance than merely provide said martyr with a true, final means of escape.

Predator (1987): B+

“I ain’t got time to bleed,” Jesse “The Body” Ventura’s commando famously retorts in Predator, and likewise, John McTiernan’s 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle ain’t got time to waste on subtlety. The early, prolonged close-up of Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers’ steroidal biceps as the men clasp hands encapsulates this muscular sci-fi saga, about a special ops unit that’s sent into the Central American jungle to locate a missing diplomat and winds up the prey of a camouflaged alien that hunts humans for sport. McTiernan’s second directorial effort is just about the epitome of ‘80s macho action, with human action figure Schwarzenegger kicking ass while leading a team of racially diverse (and stereotypical) juiceheads prone to spouting one-liners, posing like pro wrestlers (hence The Body’s participation), and firing machine guns with wild abandon. The racial connotations of the Predator (thanks to his dreadlocks) provide a queasy minority-monster subtext, though if that’s true, Jim and John Thomas’ story also functions as an allegorical portrait of indigenous Third World forces rising up against American might, as well as of said U.S.A. power triumphing only through the cooption of foreign tactics. Such undercurrents, however, are just about trampled underfoot by the film’s vigorous tough-guy bluster. Schwarzenegger is in prime action-icon form throughout, chomping on cigars with a gusto that suggests nothing can fell him, even as his band of merry men – which also includes the inimitable Bill Duke and his trusty chain gun “Old Painless” – are felled by a crafty extraterrestrial who, at least until Predator 2 and the misbegotten AVP spin-offs, seemed like cinema’s next great otherworldly creature.