Batman Forever

 

Batman Forever (1995)

Dir. Joel Schumacher

Written by Lee Batchler, Janet Scott Batchlet, Akiva Goldsman

Starring Val Kilmer, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey, Nicole Kidman, Chris O’Donnell

 

In which America sanctions a surprising amount of buffoonery.

You’ll notice I did something unusual in watching these 20^th-century Batman movies: I watched both pairs (the Burton duology and the related-but-distinct Schumacher duology) in reverse order, starting with the later film and then checking out the earlier one. This was somewhat happenstance, but it turned out to be an interesting way to view them: the rap on both duologies is that they each began with a somewhat staid first movie, while the second became a near-parodic catalog of the respective directors’ personal fetishes, to their detriment. Watching in reverse order, with the full expression of auteurial excess already on display, we can perceive more clearly what is absent from the first movie, rather than focus on the continuities between them.

 

All of which makes it kinda hilarious, in retrospect, that people loved BATMAN FOREVER when it came out and hated BATMAN & ROBIN two years later, because I can't help but notice that they're basically the exact same fucking thing. Same neon hellscapes, same duo of furiously over-acting villains, same incessant campy corniness, same nightmarish overproduction. Hell, even the Bat-nipples, so strenuously derided by the time BATMAN & ROBIN rolled around, were already clearly in evidence.* Everything people claimed to hate in the sequel was already omnipresent here.

 

There is one key difference, though: while BATMAN & ROBIN was obviously written as a comedy, FOREVER seems to have been written more or less earnestly... it's just played for comedy. Relentlessly so. As Ebert’s contemporary review remarked, “there was a feeling after ‘Batman Returns’… that the series had grown too dark and gloomy,” and one feels the movie self-consciously course-correcting in nearly every scene. Nothing is allowed to play out without being immediately undercut by some desperate mugging, even when there’s nothing even resembling a joke in the script… which is most of the time! BATMAN & ROBIN had terrible, corny jokes, but at least they were, unmistakably, jokes. FOREVER seems to have become a comedy more out of anxiety over being perceived as too serious than out of any apparent plan to be funny per se, but the result is that regardless of the actual story, nearly everything that happens is presented as if it was funny.

 

And this is a huge problem, because the only person who is ever even remotely funny is psychotic bat fetishist Nicole Kidman, who's playing her daffy character 100% straight, and seems to be the only person who isn’t aware of the buffoonery playing out around her. But this is at most a mild grace note, and is almost immediately drowned out by the maniacally overacting villains, in the form of the unlikely duo of Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey. Of the two, Carrey sucks up the most of the film’s attention; he is pitched at a frequency that can only be described as "the brown note," and is absolutely inescapable here, constitutionally unable to resist screaming and doing a weird voice and doing a wacky dance and running through sixteen different facial expressions and striking a comic pose and throwing in some kind of dumb joke, all while wearing an outfit that would make Cher blush. It's screeching, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard anti-entertainment, and it sucks up every single molecule of oxygen in the film, stopping the film dead in its tracks every time he's on-screen, which is constantly. Meanwhile Jones is so monotonous in his over-the-topness that he basically vanishes into the background, which is a pretty fitting description of the entire movie. If everything is turned up to 11, nothing is.**

 

A Batman movie is gonna live or die on its villains, and so FOREVER was doomed before it even began. But there's one other major problem on top of all that: I feel weird saying this, but for a movie so histrionic, its main problem is that nothing very interesting happens. The movie has many elaborate sets (MVP Barbara Ling of BATMAN & ROBIN infamy is doing basically the same thing here, just on a slightly smaller scale) but it has amazingly few set pieces. I’m not convinced that Batman himself does even a little bit more superheroing than he does in the infamous low-action Burton duology. It’s an oddly inert story, yet pitched at a manic tone – a mismatch that makes the whole thing feel like huge engine which is constantly revving but never drives anywhere. BATMAN & ROBIN, for all its many flaws, at least uses its garish silliness to do fun stuff. FOREVER just kind of sits there, yelling at you. 

 

So how to explain, then, the general positive response this one got at the time? Looking back, it’s a real head trip to see apparently sane people like Ebert treating this more or less as a normal movie, pointing out themes and motifs and stuff as if any of that mattered even a little bit, commenting that “Schumacher makes a generally successful effort to lighten the material” and (incorrectly) that there are “lots of laughs for the Riddler.” Everybody seems to have just accepted on faith that this was basically a normal Batman movie with a slightly lighter tone, rather than a weird camp parody which makes the 60’s Adam West Batman look solemn and dignified by comparison. I can only conclude that the mainstream still didn’t have an entirely clear idea of what camp was, or a solid idea about what a comic book movie should be – and so they simply took the script and the marketing department’s word for it that this was basically a serious Batman film with a little bit of silliness to lighten the mood. Its sequel made the mistake of assuming the audience was in on the joke, which apparently they were not, and did not appreciate being enlightened (perhaps because of the unavoidable implication that if they missed it the first time, the joke was on them). It seems crazy, but I don't have another explanation. We forget, sometimes, to what a shocking extent an audience can simply be told what to think of art, even when there’s a mountain of contradictory evidence sitting right there in front of their eyes.

 

Still, the degree to which you can tell an audience what to think has a lot to do with time and place. If you're going to gaslight them, you need to keep gaslighting them, and the subsequent sequel kinda blew it by owning up to its own silliness. Which means that in retrospect, people taking this movie seriously seem outright insane, and people enjoying it seem misguided to the point of outright fraud. Needless to say, BATMAN & ROBIN is not a good movie either, but it at least has the benefit of being entirely one thing. FOREVER, trapped between a script with no jokes and a tone so bracingly shrill that it can only play as comedy, doesn’t even have that solid foundation to fall back on. It’s all but unwatchable, a bizarre pileup of contradictory corporate notes, frantic and flop-sweating without ever producing any actual energy or momentum.*** The only appropriate response to a such a monster is the response Jones apparently had to his insufferably mugging co-star: “I hate you. I really don’t like you… I cannot sanction your buffoonery.”

 

* Schumacher later grumbled, “The bodies of the suits come from Ancient Greek Statues, which display perfect bodies. They are anatomically correct.”

100% medically accurate

 

** The heroes vanish into the background so completely that they're not even worth mentioning, except that at one point Robin does his laundry using karate. And even that isn't quite able to reach the level of sublime dumbness that it should, thanks to its manic, disruptive editing.

 

*** Interestingly, there is a fabled SnyderCut-esque “Schumacher Cut” which is reported to be less campy and more serious, potentially actually delving a little into the script’s fleeting lip service about Batman’s psychology (which intrigued Ebert enough that he opened his review by addressing it!). It’d be interesting to see, and basically anything with less Carrey and O’Connell could only be an improvement, but the essential problem that the film simply lacks incident and momentum seems unsolvable to me. We’ll see #ReleaseTheSchumacherCutIGuess         

APPENDIX A: Various Batmans or Batmen

BATMAN (1989)

BATMAN RETURNS (1992)

BATMAN FOREVER (1995)

BATMAN & ROBIN (1998)

BATMAN BEGINS (2005)

THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012)

BATMAN VS SUPERMAN (2016)

JUSTICE LEAGUE (2017 / 2021)

THE BATMAN (2022)

Batman & Robin

 

Batman & Robin (1997)

Dir. Joel Schumacher

Written by Akiva Goldsman

Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Uma Thurman, George Clooney, Chris O’Donnell, Alicia Silverstone

[[Originally posted on letterboxd, where most of my shorter reviews now go. Included here for posterity]]

 

In which Joel Schumacher learns the meaning of the word "Toyetic"

It's customary to begin any contemporary review of BATMAN AND ROBIN by stressing how terrible the reviewer thought it was when it came out, back in 1997. Alas, I cannot contribute to this venerable tradition, because I never saw it until now. And I probably wouldn't have seen it, except that my buddy Dan Prestwich was apparently going through some kind of latent emotional crisis and decided to undertake a thorough survey of modern Batman cinema. As his friend, I knew it was irresponsible to let him attempt such a reckless folly on his own, and so I bravely braced myself for BATMAN & ROBIN, a movie with a reputation so dismal that simply adducing its name as a comparison point is basically invoking Godwin's law.

But amazingly, everyone was wrong! Far from the expected disaster, BATMAN & ROBIN turns out to be a thoughtful and provocative high-water mark of modern pop art, crafted with the refined care of an auteur versed in the Apparatus theories of Althusser and Metz and steeped in the semiotics of nah, I'm just yanking your chain. It does suck, obviously. 

Still, 22 years of emphatic and uncontested public consensus that this movie was absolute dogshit is about the maximum possible level of expectation-lowering, and those low expectations certainly made this a much more palatable experience that it would surely have been in 1997. Being warned ahead of time about the garish ridiculousness, uber-campy tone, relentless ice puns, and bat nipples doesn't quite prepare one, emotionally, to be confronted by such things, but at least it allows a viewer to approach it in the right state of mind. Back in 1997, people somehow seemed to interpret its screeching archness as a mistake, some sort of malignant perversion of its real intent. Watching today, that archness is obviously the point, and can at least live or die on its own merits instead suffering in comparison to some imaginary version of how a film titled "Batman & Robin" should be.

Not that it's exactly any great shakes even on its own merits. The jokes are intentional, but that doesn't mean they're especially funny, and 125 minutes is a very, very long time to stay amused by what is essentially one joke, that joke being "haha, look at how campy this insanely expensive movie is." 

Still, it's a joke that's at least a little funny, and executed on a scale of Caligulan extravagance such as the world may never see again. If the pleasures of the story are slight (and they are slight to the point of being ephemeral), the pleasures of the colossal, stylized sets, wild lighting, frantic mega-acting and elaborate costumes are rather more intoxicating, at least for a while. Watching Shumacher play around in the neon-poisoned, transmogrified ruins of Tim Burton's austere modernist cityscape can occasionally even be a heady joy; witness the sequence where Batman and Freeze enjoy a lengthy car chase across the twisted body of one of Burton's colossal statues (now Schumacher-fied into an aesthetic considerably more buff and nude). In moments like this, Schumacher's complete lack of taste and restraint collide nicely with a comic book sensibility of freewheeling, fanciful vigor, and the movie becomes genuinely fun.

But those moments are pretty fleeting. Though there's certainly more action here than in either of Burton's morose modern gothics, very little of it is any good at all; it's mostly upstaged by the overwhelming mis-e-scene or just lost in the choppy, frantic editing (a grim portent of what was to come in the next decade). That leaves the actors to carry most of the movie -- which is to say, that leaves the villains to carry the movie, since after four separate Batman movies we can't at this point reasonably expect the title characters to be the real focal point of the film (though of the "Gough/Hingle quadrilogy," this is the only film to meaningfully put Batman at the center of the narrative, not that it matters much at this point). 

Thankfully, if you're relying on over-the-top charisma to anchor your movie, you could hardly do better than Schwarzenegger and Thurman (plus guest star John Glover and the absurdly over-muscled arms of wrestler Jeep Swanson). Schwarzenegger is as dialed-up as everything else in the movie, but this was his natural element, and perhaps even natural state, in 1997, playing into his strength for cheerful, energetic caricatures. Thurman, doing some kind of wild Mid-Atlantic accent and vamping it up like a coked-up Mae West, is easily the best thing in the movie (she falls into a giant venus fly trap and yells "Curses!"), entertaining on exactly the level the movie is shooting for, but without pulling so heavily from the usual bag of tricks as Arnold is. Both are compulsively watchable in almost any circumstances, and their combined enthusiasm and sheer frenetic energy bolster the movie far past the point it ought, by all rights, to start flagging. That doesn't get you quite to the end of that ridiculous 125 minutes, but it gets you much deeper into the runtime than you'd have any real business expecting.

As for the heroes, Clooney does an impressive job of looking only a little embarrassed and comfortably exuding his usual cool. He does little to stand out, but it's a testament to the actor's easy charisma that he manages to avoid entirely fading into the background in the face of so many wildly dialed-up distractions. His co-stars fare less well; O'Donnell is playing such an actively intolerable character that no actor could have really expected to save the role, but he doesn't even try. And Silverstone is giving one of the most spectacularly terrible performances in the history of English-language cinema, delivering her lines as if she's reading them phonetically, syllable-by-syllable, off a cue card that she can barely focus her eyes on. She looks legitimately confused and disoriented, like a hopeless drunk at a party desperately nodding along to pretend they follow a confusing conversation that has gotten entirely away from them.

Not that good acting was ever going to save --or even have any place in-- the outrageously exaggerated, senselessly overstuffed hodge-podge of neon and blacklight kitsch that is certainly the movie's true star. Despite the presence of actors and a script which, while dumb*, is in every way more coherent and straightforward than either of Burton's films, there is room for only one marquee star here, and that is production designer Barbara Ling (most recently of ONCE UPON A TIME IN... HOLLYWOOD), who dominates everything else to the degree that it's barely even worth mentioning anything as minor as a "plot." And just as in Burton's films, this is simultaneously the film's raison d'etre, its greatest success, and its ultimate undoing. With everything --the acting, the dialogue, the costumes, even the fucking scenery-- turned to its loudest, broadest pitch at all times, exhaustion sets in around the final 30 minutes. All the yelling eventually just fades into white noise, and what was once at least charmingly colorful and outrageous becomes kind of a drag. Which is, honestly, hardly surprising; it's actually more surprising how long the movie is able to consistently generate some level of modest pleasure than it is that it eventually flames out. 

It's still a long way from actively good, of course, but as huge-budget debacles of this scale go, it's mostly an amusing and unique enough bit of pop-art fluff that it's hard to understand the vitriol it generated at the time. It's of interest purely as an exotic cultural artifact, but modern anthropologists interested in this evolutionary dead end of the Hollywood blockbusters are likely to find it a less painful thing to endure than its reputation might lead one to believe.

Only one last thing remains to be said, and it remains my hottest, most dangerous take in what is otherwise a fairly safe review. There is one scene, and only one scene, which managed to surprise me, in this movie which features not just dancers costumed like apes, but pink apes (and, of course, two of them, because BATMAN & ROBIN would certainly never stop at just one). It is perhaps the film's least characteristic scene, a scene which has no neon light whatsoever, no campy costumes, no ice puns, no ape suits of any kind. It is merely this: Batman's beloved butler Alfred (Michael Gough, Hammer's THE HORROR OF DRACULA) has taken ill, and Bruce Wayne stops by to check on him. And Bruce simply, directly, tells the old man he loves him. 

They both know this, of course, but the gentle pleasure of Alfred's reaction, combined with the straightforward, unselfconscious sincerity of Bruce's delivery had the completely unexpected effect of slipping directly past my shell of ironic detachment and somehow making me feel a tiny twinge of real emotion, in this movie of all fool places. It's nothing major, and it has exactly zero to do with anything else in the movie (Alfred's illness barely even registers as a subplot). But it's genuinely sweet. It speaks to a different kind of movie that could have been, something which needn't have been less silly, which needn't have been anything like the oppressively, laboriously serious Nolan movies which would follow, but could have been a little more sincere. Comic books are for kids, but that doesn't mean that their simple, primary-colored emotions are shallow and easily dismissed. Quite the contrary, in fact. As modern comic book movies have increasingly settled into either the flippant (Marvel) or the ponderous (DC), this one little scene is a nice reminder that sometimes a direct approach is the best approach. You don't have to pretend this isn't a ridiculous concept to treat its essential, primal emotions seriously. It's the very ridiculousness of our emotions that lends them so well to abstract, simplistic fiction like a Batman story.

Anyway, outside that one scene, BATMAN & ROBIN comes absolutely nowhere close to doing that, which ultimately leaves it a wholly shallow, superficial thing. But as far as shallow, superficial things go, there's a lot of goofy, neat stuff on the surface to gawk at, and you could do a whole hell of a lot worse.

 

* While pointing out plot holes in BATMAN & ROBIN is beneath the dignity of a serious commentator, I do have to point out one particularly batty (ha! take that, Schwarzenegger!) detail I found rather charming: our heroes are told by Freeze (and apparently believe without question) that once a person is frozen, they have 11 minutes to unfreeze them safely. So naturally, the climax involves the city being frozen, and then it's a race against time to save the citizens of Gotham. And of course, that race against time is embodied by a literal countdown (or, in an unusual twist on this sort of thing, in this case a semi-confusing count up) on a digital clock. But fortunately our heroes arrive at Freeze's lair and wreck his machine, stopping the clock with only seconds to spare. But here's the thing; they only stop the clock, they don't actually unfreeze anyone until after a lengthy action sequence. Are they aware that time doesn't stop just because the second hand on a clock stops ticking? Anyway, it turns out I guess Freeze undersold how long you could safely stay frozen, because like 30 minutes later everyone still seems OK. 

While I have you down here, I also want to point out that before she decides to destroy the city or whatever, Poison Ivy actually comes to Bruce with a plan to green up his enterprise --which I hasten to add, actually was funding the villainous mad scientist who tried to kill her and was cooking up 'roided out super-soldiers for the highest bidder-- and he just brushes her off by smugly saying that everyone on Earth will die if they give up diesel. What the fuck, Bruce? I feel like we can try a little harder than that. Seems awful convenient for the insanely rich guy with the billion-dollar industrial empire that there's literally nothing we can possibly do for the environment and it would be stupid to even try.

APPENDIX A: Various Batmans or Batmen

BATMAN (1989)

BATMAN RETURNS (1992)

BATMAN FOREVER (1995)

BATMAN & ROBIN (1998)

BATMAN BEGINS (2005)

THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012)

BATMAN VS SUPERMAN (2016)

JUSTICE LEAGUE (2017 / 2021)

THE BATMAN (2022)

Dinner With A Vampire

Dinner With A Vampire (1989)

Dir. Lamberto Bava

Written by Lamberto Bava and Dardano Sacchetti, story by Luciano Martino

Starring George Hilton, Riccardo Rossi, Patrizia Pellegrino

It's technically Dinner with A Vampire, but apparently German audiences demand definite articles.

            If there is one immutable and universal iron law of pop art, it is this: when something achieves a certain level of popular success --no matter what the thing originally was, no matter how idiosyncratic the product, or how obviously a fluke the success-- you can count on at least one rich guy to grab the artist responsible and say “make me more like that.” In this case, the inspiration was the financial success of DEMONS and DEMONS 2 in 1985-86 Italy, the rich guys were executive producers Massimo Manasse and Marco Grillo Spina of Italian TV production company Reiteitalia, and the lucky recipient of this enthusiastic artistic patronage was DEMONS and DEMONS 2 director Lamberto Bava. The result: from 1987-1989, Bava cranked out four (out of a planned five) made-for-TV horror movies that played on the channel Italia 1. Needless to say, none of them matched the feverish frenzied perfection of DEMONS, none is very well remembered today, and considering Bava The Younger does not exactly have an unimpeachable track record of quality, I was little inclined to doubt that assessment. Little inclined, that is, until I unknowingly watched UNTIL DEATH back in 2016. Obviously it’s no DEMONS, and nothing ever could be or will be again. But I found it a surprisingly solid, well-made little film noire horror riff that managed to entertain me even without any tits, gore, or swears. So I figured, what the heck, might as well tempt fate and see if lightning sometimes does strike twice.

Lightning did not strike twice. But if DINNER WITH A VAMPIRE is monumentally cheesier and crappier than UNTIL DEATH, it is not utterly without merit. In fact, it’s a rare Italian horror movie which seems to be at least marginally self-aware of how batshit it is, leaning into its silliness with a zeal that probably crosses the boarder into intentional parody. Or at least, everything about the script and performances scream campy, tongue-in-cheek fun, and the only thing that holds me back from wholeheartedly believing this was intentional is the simple fact that it would require the director of DEMONS to be self-aware enough to know when a film has gotten ridiculous, and I don’t see how I can square that with reality as I understand it.

            Anyway, DINNER WITH A VAMPIRE will deliver its titular meal eventually, but it starts with a film crew unintentionally resurrecting a vampire and enthusiastically filming the results until he predictably murders them all. This is the first, but not the last touch which could be seen as a bit of meta humor; you can easily imagine Bava himself (dubbed by an American accent, of course) shouting at his cameraman, “don’t miss a thing! This is incredible!” even as his crew gets slaughtered. Tedious backstory now out of the way, we then move on to the euphemistically titled “talent” portion of the movie, where we’re introduced to various young people and future vampiric victims of dubious ability, who are auditioning to be a singer (“well, I’m trying to be. I don’t have a great voice, but I have a good ear!” [??]), an actor (hot take: the romantic words of the immoral bard in Romeo and Juliet don’t sound so hot via the medium of a dubbed Italian woman mumbling the English phonetically), a “dancer” (skipping around vaguely to the rhythm of a pop beat) and… I dunno, some guy who’s really into finger puppets? What, specifically, they are auditioning for doesn’t seem to be an immediate concern for them, so they are dangerously unsuspicious when, after the audition, all four of them get “the call” to a mysterious castle which they all happily assume has need of dancing, singing, acting, and finger puppetry.

And what a castle it is! If ever there was a castle where one was obviously going to have an unexpected Dinner With A Vampire instead of a finger-puppet routine, this is obviously it. “Where’s the headless horseman?” asks one dude, apparently not as familiar with the setting of The Legend Of Sleepy Hallow as he believes himself to be. When the door is answered by a hunchback who appears to have taken Marty Feldman’s YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN role as a challenge to go broader (and I’m not the only one who thought so, since the young guy actually calls him "Marty Feldman" -- guess he’s more up on his Mel Brooks than his Washington Irving), they’re only slightly more surprised than they are when they’re told they can’t meet the promised “director” until… after midnight (this by an assistant with a rather pronounced Transylvanian accent). Soon a old-timey lady with very nicely crimped hair is warning them about an unspecified danger, which they take as an invitation to split up and wander around alone (“where are you going?” “To the bathroom!” “Alone?” “I always go to the bathroom alone!”).

Once the plot is introduced, much running around in a line through the most stunningly beautiful castle I’ve ever seen ensues, and it’s all very silly and could certainly be set to the Benny Hill theme song without losing much in terms of spine-chilling terror. The characters are notable for panicking when there’s no reason to panic (at the start, when they don’t even know there’s any danger, just watching a black and white movie causes one girl to faint!) and then being bizarrely nonchalant once they actually have to face rampaging ghouls. Faced with an obviously real vampire sitting two feet away and monologuing about the torments of immortality, one of his guests can only think to nonchalantly ask, “Well don’t you have a vampires’ union or something?” At an hour and seven minutes, this mental giant solemnly mansplains, “girls, I think we may have to accept the fact that he’s a real vampire,” as if that hadn’t been established forty minutes before.

            Still, it makes its silliness something of a charm, best embodied in the titular vampire who eventually makes an appearance at an elegant dinner where he informs the motley assembled “talent” that they’re actually here for a very unexpected reason (and indeed, one which might be unexpected even to the audience, who doubtless assume our collected protagonists were summoned to be Dinner For A Vampire). The courtly vamp in question is played by Uruguayan actor turned Spaghetti Western star George Hilton (THEY CALL ME HALLELUJAH, ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK), camping it up gamely as an ageless supernatural menace bound and determined to have a good time with his unsuspecting guests, and fond of teasing them with phony hints about how to kill him (when they suggest killing him with a cross, he points out that he’s wearing one [“I wear it for good luck!”], and I like the implication that vamps have overcome their old nemesis of garlic and crosses by investing in big corporations which come up with scientific cures).

Hilton cements the movie’s sense of silly, giddy fun, and that tone is sufficient to keep things lively and tolerable, even when technically speaking there’s not a whole lot of whammy going on. The movie, for example, spends a surprising amount of time with our protagonists just watching a black and white film-within-a-film starring a suspiciously familiar vampire. This movie looks quite handsome in black and white and does turn out to be relevant to the events at hand, but somewhat typifies the film’s comically ineffective protagonists, who find it challenging even to successfully watch all the way through a movie. Their complete uselessness is kind of funny, but also makes them somewhat inert narratively, meaning we spend a whole lot of time basically watching them run around screaming. There’s some monsters and chasing and creepy dungeons backlit by an eerie blue light and all that, but it’s a little short on showstopper moments, which gets to be a bit patience-testing even at 92 minutes. Still, if one must watch a bunch of nitwits run around screaming for an hour and a half, one could hardly imagine a more pleasant setting for it. Shot in the Tuscan Sammezzano Castle, which sports 365 rooms each featuring a unique Moorish design, the location itself is such an eye-popping marvel that it almost doesn’t matter what’s happening in the foreground. Even when the movie is corny and kinda uneventful -- which is almost always—it’s never entirely uninteresting because it’s in such a sumptuously imagined palace, lit as elegantly as you would hope from an Italian production.

The juxtaposition of this stunning work of architecture against a dorky Scooby Doo story about a campy vampire film director is, perhaps, a fitting symbol for Italian genre filmmaking as a whole, especially by the late 1980’s: impressive technical artistry backing up a bunch of muddled, schlocky nonsense. Where the best films of this era blended those two things indissolubly (as in the immortal DEMONS), though, this one stratifies them almost entirely, leaving the schlocky stuff a little stranded and too lacking in the goods to stand on its own. But it’s a friendly, goofy enough experience to squeak by on charm and good looks, if only barely. Self-awareness is not the best lens through which to experience Italian genre films, but it’s at least unusual enough that I’ll allow it in a single TV movie that no one could reasonably have much hope for in the first place. Lightning may not have struck twice, but perhaps I was foolish to think myself capable of finding any Italian horror film from the 80s completely worthless. Bring on GRAVEYARD DISTURBANCE and THE OGRE!      

But seriously dawg, look at this fuckin' place!

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	None
TITLE ACCURACY	There is a literal dinner with a vampire in there, though it’s mostly just exposition. But I guess HALFHEARTEDLY RUNNING AWAY FROM A VAMPIRE wouldn’t be as good a title.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Italy
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Vampire, horror-comedy
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Not specifically horror, but George Hilton is something of an Italian B-movie God, appearing in Westerns, actions movies, and gialli
NUDITY?	One boob appears in the horror movie they watch
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	The vamp turns into one of those adorable 1930s bat puppets, but the poor thing looks like it can barely stay aloft, let alone harm anyone
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Vampire, but the building doesn’t seem to be the problem.
POSSESSION?	Vampiric hypnotism
CREEPY DOLLS?	One girl stumbles onto a prop room with a bunch of weird mannequins, including one with a arm for a head with one eye in the middle. Man, I wanna see THAT movie
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Vamp into bat, Sexy George Hilton into scary vampire Hilton
VOYEURISM?	None, oddly; you’d think this would be a prime opportunity to have the antagonist peeping on his guests while they’re vulnerable, but he’s actually quite the gentleman.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Finger-puppetry as a career won’t get you as far as your High School Career Councilor told you it would.