Tainted (1998) Dir. Brian Evans
Written by Sean Farley
Starring Dean
Chekvala, Greg James, Sean Farley
“Somebody
there is having stupid sandwiches, and that’s for damn sure”
Ah, and here we discover the other
side of the 1990’s. With I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, we had an
opportunity to examine the bland, homogenizing corporate iron curtain that
descended upon the culture in the second half of the decade. But with TAINTED,
we have something quite different: a relic of the multi-media indie boom that
shattered the recursive stasis of the remnant 80’s culture and briefly infused
the American artistic scene with some energy and unpredictability. There is a
side of the 90’s that was Boy Bands and WB teen dramas, but there was another
side that was PULP FICTION, FARGO, CLERKS, Twin Peaks, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee,
Richard Linklater, Gus Van Sant, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, the Flaming Lips,
Public Enemy, Digable Planets. Legitimately offbeat, adventurous art with a hip,
self-aware edge and a plethora of distinct artistic voices so unexpected and
compelling that for a few years in the early 90’s they managed to knock the
corporate behemoth back on its heels. Movie and record execs never saw it
coming, and responded by fumbling around, blindly handing out checks to every
new weirdo who showed up with some new project they didn’t understand but
seemed hip, disaffected, and dangerous.
This was for the best, all things
considered, and some of the defining art of my life came from this period. But
of course, you can’t have the kind of success that these (initially) independent
artists enjoyed without everyone else wanting a piece of the pie. Imitators
quickly surged into the newly-opened space, beguiled by that most persistent
and compelling of questions: If Kevin Smith can do it, why not me?
TAINTED is a pretty definitive
answer to that question. You cannot do it, it turns out, because you are not
Kevin Smith. Very few people these days would be eager to defend the idea that
Smith is a visionary artistic genius or that CHASING AMY has held up well, but
on the other hand, he does have something. There’s a voice there, a
point-of-view, and, more than anything, a relentless drive to get that point of
view out there, so strong, in fact, that Smith has more or less abandoned
cinema altogether and become a podcaster, cutting out the middle man and just getting
to deliver his monologues directly. In short, he made CLERKS not because he had
any expectation that it would make money and cement a comfortable
three-decades-long career as a cultural fixture; he made it because he had
to, because he was compelled by something inside him that could not be ignored.
You can argue about the merits of the art he produced, but you cannot argue
about the specificity of his voice, or the compulsion that produced it. Like
much of the art of the 90’s, its value was in its distinctness: it was produced
wholly and without reservation from the subconscious of a genuine weirdo, and
not something you could fake or recreate.
But faking and recreating it was exactly
what the next wave of indie wannabes had in mind. They were inspired by
Smith and Tarantino and Nirvana and NWA, but they were not compelled the
same way the best of the 90’s indie artists were, and so they sought to
imitate, rather than produce their own unique vision. They didn’t, by and
large, have their own vision, they just recognized something cool and thought
it looked easy enough that they could do it too.
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Hell yeah, NADJA
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Hence, TAINTED, which wears its
influence so proudly that it’s all but impossible to ignore. In its seven-sentence
writeup of TAINTED, VideoHound namechecks CLERKS in the very first sentence. I
mention this because it’s the reason I watched the film. Around 20 years ago, I,
like the protagonists here and like Randall in CLERKS, was employed at an
independent video store, and back then, since you weren’t gonna see IMDB unless
you dialed into your desktop PC browser at home, we had a physical media
substitute: VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever “The Complete Guide To
Movies on Videocassette, DVD, and Laserdisc” (which I’m just now discovering is
still an annual print publication to this very day!). Much of my workday back
then was spent trawling through this book for new movie suggestions, and here,
in their brief write-up of TAINTED, I found something that sounded kind of
interesting. “Script has many laughs, lots of attitude, and plenty of pop
culture knowledge,” raves the review (which is what we wanted back then), and I
thought I’d give it a try. Except that I never found it available anywhere. Our
normal supplier didn’t have it. Our arch-enemy Blockbuster Video didn’t have
it. Hollywood Video didn’t have it. Nextflix, when it came along as a
mail-order-service, didn’t have it, and has never gotten it. So this year, I
figured I’d waited long enough, and ordered it from Troma (who distributed, but
were not involved in its production). So this review is, in a way, the
culmination of a 20-year quest.
My confidence in VideoHound’s
bullish assessment of the film’s merits –which had left such a strong
impression on me all those years ago-- was quickly thrown into question when my
buddy noticed that there is an extremely prominent product placement in the one
of the first scenes… for none other than VideoHound! Uh-oh. Possibly a little
conflict of interest here. Not a great sign. And the assertion that the “script
has many laughs” quickly began to seem dubious as well, as the introduction of
our arguable protagonist Ryan (Greg James, G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA
“Submarine Sailor, uncredited”) finds him awkwardly kicking a one-night-stand
out of his apartment (“Willing to bet you never pull any sensitivity muscles,
huh?” she fumes) and then turning to the camera to deliver a monologue about
easy women so harrowingly wrongheaded and smugly certain that it’s an
in-your-face bit of ballsy truth-telling that it might just turn your hair
white. A little sample, which is as much as I can bring myself to transcribe:
“I didn’t promise her a thing. I stuck
my dick in her! Last time I checked, that wasn’t proposing!...There’s no way
you can respect, let alone commit, to a woman who will sleep with you on the
first date! Am I wrong or what?”
It
probably doesn’t help that he has the
long-on-top-short-in-back-parted-down-the-middle haircut that every dipshit had
when I was in middle school, but this Ryan has to be one of the most
unwittingly intolerable characters this era produced, and there’s no shortage
of competition. This is the kind of thing I need you to warn me about,
VideoHound.
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#HoundGate #CorruptionInVideoReviews
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In short, this monologue (and
basically every line that follows it during the unhurried and uneventful 98 minute runtime)
sums up the fundamental problem with this era of indie outsiders clambering out
of the shadows and into the spotlight: they had all listened to a little too
much Bill Hicks. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Bill Hicks too – remember, I
grew up in the 90’s, these are my people. But having emerged from the
fatuous 80’s –an era so culturally regressive and conservative that people were
genuinely scared of Heavy Metal bands that now seem about as dangerous as Benny
Goodman—we emerged with a burning, insatiable desire to cut through the
stifling niceties and tell it like it is. This was a laudable impulse,
and a much-needed course correction after spending a whole decade where the
most dangerous thing in music was, like, Phil Collins. The problem, in
retrospect, was that when “we” –the legion of disaffected, largely white male artistes
and pop-culture nerds who gained ascendency in the 90’s indie boom— got a yin
to tell it like it is, we may not have known what it is as much
as we assumed. That’s how you can end up with a movie that kicks off with a
lecture about clingy one-night stands, as if we’re just going to naturally be
on board with that. Or, for that matter, a movie entirely set and filmed in the
Detroit area which has exactly zero black people in it, (give or take the
prominent placement of a mural which I believe to be Detroit Pistons’ small
forward Grant Hill, based on his #33 uniform). Or a gay vampire who delivers
his own cringe-worthy monologue about “fence-sitting” bisexuals.
Oh yeah, the movie is about
vampires. Probably should have led with that. I mean, it’s really about
the late 1990s, of course, but the plot is literally CLERKS meet Anne Rice:
intolerable deadwood Ryan and his sarcastic, noticeably Randall-like
video-store co-worker J.T. (screenwriter Sean Farley, who apparently had a
small role in fellow Michigander Sam Raimi’s ill-fated CRIMEWAVE) hitch a ride
to a midnight showing of BLADE RUNNER with their new colleague Alex (Dusan
“Dean” Chekvala, who would revisit the vampire game years later with a run in True
Blood), only to get dragged into an underworld of unflashy midwestern
vampires when Alex reveals he’s a bloodsucker and gets embroiled in a plot by a
crazed vampire to contaminate (or, “taint” if you will) the city’s blood
supply.
That’s the plot, and it’s largely
structured as a kind of vampire procedural, where Alex, with an unwilling Ryan
and J.T. in tow, travels around to various secret vampire locations and shakes
down the locals for info on the rogue vamp.* But in practice, this is all very
transparently a flimsy excuse to set up an endless series of painfully overwritten
pop culture diatribes, in which no idea is ever
stated in five words that could not be overstated in 50. This is lamentable,
but perhaps more understandable in context: people forget this today, but there
was a time --and not all that long ago!-- where bickering all day about comic
books or sci-fi movies was not looked upon as a socially acceptable activity.
It was the province of weird, socially awkward outsiders, and if you were known
to engage in this sort of tomfoolery, you were likely to be branded a “nerd,”
which back then was an epithet with the power to significantly limit your
social options, rather than something gorgeous celebrities call themselves as
they do press tours for 250-million-dollar comic book adaptations.
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Would you believe there was a time that this guy wasn't considered cool?
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Back in the 90’s, though, the conventional social order was deep
in the throes of a violent upheaval. CLERKS, of course, had blazed the trail,
turning unabashedly nerdy conversations which had previously been confined to
basements and comic-book shops into something that played on-screen as a little
bit edgy and rebellious, which was exactly what the kids were looking for. And
when the movie became a minor hit, the culture noticed, and the gatekeepers
eagerly ushered the once-maligned nerds (and their wallets, fattened with
disposable income by a burgeoning tech industry and no dependents) into the
mainstream. By the late 90’s, the nerds, emboldened by Tarantino and Smith’s
nonstop pop-culture pontification, hadn’t just gotten their revenge, but were
well on their way to overthrowing the popular kids altogether and establishing their
brutal hegemony over the culture which persists to this day.
Even by 1998, however, it wasn’t
obvious that the tide had turned, and that in just a little under two decades,
BLADE RUNNER would have a sequel with a budget of 150 million bucks, while
nobody under the age of 30 would know who Jennifer Love Hewitt was. The nerds
were still feeling newly liberated from the unwanted margins of society, and ready
to flaunt their newfound countercultural chic, by, for example, making a movie
where two video store clerks and their vampire pal blather on endlessly about
the merits of RAISING ARIZONA and BLADE RUNNER and smugly trash the hoi polloi
who fail to adequately appreciate their charms.
That trashing is an important thread here, because if part of this
newfound feeling of liberation took the form of celebration, it also had a
darker side, as newly empowered dorks turned to some sadistic score-settling
with old enemies. The most immediate and deeply resented of those enemies were
women, who by 1998 were being dealt the opening salvo of a relentless,
bone-deep campaign of misogyny perpetrated by the bitter beta-males they had
ignored in high school, but who had finally seized some power of their own and
were anxious to pay back with interest the indignities they felt they had
suffered as unwanted adolescents with no social skills. Consequently, the 90’s
was a time of roiling, omnipresent misogyny, barely concealed beneath a
cresting wave of smug sarcasm and edgy provocations. And thus it is that we
wind up with the situation at hand, which cheerfully introduces us to its
protagonist reciting a bitter harangue against women who would have the gall to
sleep with him and expect him to remember their name the next day, as though
this was a lot of impish fun.
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I mean, this fuckin' guy, amiright?
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In the defense of TAINTED, I would point out that it took time
before it was clear that the balance of power had shifted, and that the nerds
had definitively shifted from taking cathartic pot shots at their social
betters to ugly, sadistic punching down. They still felt powerless, and their
own misery blinded them somewhat to their burgeoning position to do real harm.
In fact, that misery is a key element to understanding the form
this cultural shift took. The angsty early 90’s had turned self-destructive
anguish into something akin to heroism, and the culture was ready to lean into
it. Even at their most savagely misogynistic, the nerds knew, at least on some
level, that their grievances were more deeply rooted in self-hatred than in
unfair oppression. In yet another cringy monologue, TAINTED’s J.T. drives away
a friendly female bar patron with his caustic self-loathing, and the movie
clearly recognizes that he’s the problem, not her. But at the same time, it’s
so consumed by his self-sabotaging unhappiness that it’s utterly incapable of imagining her
as a being with any inner life whatsoever. Ryan has a similar scene just
minutes later, when another former one-night stand excoriates him for… well,
again it’s not really clear, exactly. The movie seems to vaguely understand
from pop culture that women want you to call them back after sex, but has no
more explanation as to why that might be than it has explanation for why women
are so desperate to sleep with this doofus in the first place. Women are, if
not actively hostile, at least alien creatures whose desires and motivations
are inscrutable to the point of meaningless abstraction. These scenes are about
the boys’ feelings about themselves – the women are just props, objects by which the men to evaluate their relative strengths and weaknesses. The movie
wants Ryan to have some conflict over his status as an unmoored lothario
–something it obviously takes from CLERKS**, which locates its own pathos in its
characters self-destructive misery—but the point is to foreground his own
alienation, not to seriously interrogate his behavior and its consequences for
others. Which has the effect of seriously limiting TAINTED's perspective. It understands why socially awkward pop-culture nerds feel alienated and put-upon, but is utterly unable to see anything beyond them. It's why the movie so persistently mistakes whiny sarcasm for comedic
truth-telling. Self-flagellation, it turns out, is a kind of all-consuming
narcissism in its own right. Telling it like it is sounds great, but you
also reveal something about yourself by what subjects you choose to tell about,
and what subjects you ignore.
The cumulative effect is of a film –and a time and place—which
feels itself to be on the bleeding edge of woke canniness, and yet constantly
reveals the unexamined ignorance of its creators –and, by extension, the ethos
of its era. It’s a tragic portrait of people eager to speak truth, but too
unable to see beyond the limits of their own navel-gazing to discern the truth
they want to proclaim. To whit: the movie is very proud of itself for its
openly gay vampire –which, in 1998, was at least a little edgy and
provocative—but its idea of portraying an out-and-proud, in-your-face gay
character is to have him arrogantly bash bisexuals, just to let you know the
movie isn’t fucking around with any watered-down half-assed gayness. It recalls
Willem Dafoe’s equally cringey homophobic gay character in THE BOONDOCK SAINTS;
obviously intended to shake up the squares and dispel some lazy stereotypes
about gay men, but at the same time so profoundly lacking in any real
understanding of their life and circumstances that it ends up feeling empty and
ignorant. It is as clear a case as any you could hope to create as to why
simple on-screen representation is not enough. I genuinely believe the filmmakers’
hearts were in the right place, and they showcased a gay character with the
intention destigmatizing and challenging stereotypes (as well as showing off
how cool and down with it they are), but without any genuine insight into this
culture, it just comes off as performative and phony. It certainly makes one consider
that there’s a possible upside to having no black characters in the script at
all.
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The only black person in the movie. Sorry, Grant Hill. Your tenure with the Pistons didn't turn out so hot, but you deserved better than this.
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The movie’s inability to consider the perspective of anyone other
than its perpetually adolescent white pop culture nerds unfortunately extends
to its generic elements as well; for all the time spent bumbling through the
vampiric underworld of the Detroit suburbs, it feels disappointingly
underdeveloped. And that’s a shame, because there was something potentially
kind of funny, maybe even genuinely subversive here. The low budget means that
these vamps must eschew the standard Eurotrash decadence we associate with the
trope, and tend to lurk in drab apartments and aging, dingy commercial
properties. They’re Midwestern vampires; unglamorous, gloomily polite, suffused
with a nameless sense of glacial, inevitable societal decay. They’re mostly
unhappy but resigned to their vampiric condition, more interested in trying to
live semi-normal lives than embracing their supernatural otherness. Here,
at least, the filmmakers are on more familiar footing, even if they're
not necessarily aware of that fact enough to make much of it. I don’t
think this is intentional, but they do somewhat capture the scrappy, mordant
angst of the real-life lower-class Rust Belt white people who are more or less
playing themselves here. There’s a sense of being quietly damned that comes
along with this milieu, the inheritors of a fifty-year-long backslide from dimly
remembered glory days, but also a kind of ramshackle pride at soldiering on and
building a life amidst the ruins. Vampirism turns out to be a worthwhile
evocation of that spirit, and so it’s a shame that the surface is only barely
scratched, mostly for the purposes of tin-eared exposition. The movie, of
course, never seems remotely aware that it might actually be onto something subtly interesting here; all the protagonists want
to do is get back to bickering about BLADE RUNNER. Figures.
Consequently, all things considered, TAINTED does not offer the good time promised
by VideoHound. But it is something of a timely warning about how wretchedly
miserable the 90s were. And not just in terms of amateurishness and stylistic
awkwardness and way, way too much agonizingly overwritten "clever" dialogue --although also those things, and very very much of all of
them—but just in the sense of how myopic and self-centered much of the vaunted 90’s
indie wave was. Part of its initial charm was in the foregrounding of distinct artistic
voices, but that turned out to have something of an unforeseen dark side, as the
very distinctness of those voices was frequently an effect of their unrelenting
self-absorption. Kurt Cobain was a hero to so many young people because of how
deeply in touch he was with his own pain – but that very insight was so
overwhelming that it made him selfish, in a way, so unable to see beyond his
own pain that he ended up killing himself, in the process orphaning his two-year-old
daughter. A suitable metaphor, maybe for the whole decade: taking stock of one’s
own inner world was a necessary course correction after the punishing emotional
superficiality of the preceding Reagan years, and arguably a step towards a
kinder, more empathetic culture. But, in retrospect, also a good signpost of
how much further we had to go before that same intense awareness of our own
pain could be broadened out to include other people.
Still, at least Nirvana rocked. TAINTED very much does not rock. It
isn’t even mic’d adequately. What few appealing ideas it possesses get
completely lost in a sea of bloviating pop culture doggerel and petty sarcasm,
which it disastrously offers as entertainment. Maybe in 1998, it really was a
little bit exciting for nerds like me to see ourselves on screen – but today,
in 2020, it reads more like a wince-inducing cautionary tale of just how
intolerable people like me are capable of being, especially when they were trying to emulate others. Speaking of which, the credits end with an
extensive list of “Thank yous” to other artists, “for their inspiration.” The list includes the expected Kevin Smith and Tarantino, along with David Fincher (who had only just released THE GAME), Tim Burton, um, Dennis Miller (?), and Martin Brest (BEVERLY HILLS COP, MEET JOE BLACK[?], GIGLI). But also Ken Russell, David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, the Coen Brothers, Peter Greenaway, Abel Ferrara, John Woo, and Carl Franklin (ONE FALSE MOVE, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS). Honestly, it's a pretty good list of inspirations. Those guys were, by and large, the real deal.
Proof enough that you can like the right things and still not get
it at all.
Still, the movie begins with a Sarah
McLachlan quote, apparently in complete earnestness. That's just barely lame enough to be endearing, and I find myself unable to wholly condemn it. It's pretty rough watching, but it's also a little unfair for me to saddle this one tiny indie flick with the accumulated social problems of an entire era. And after all, I'm just some asshole writing reviews on the internet; these guys actually did what I desperately wanted to back in 1998: they made a film. A film that looks a heck of a lot like it probably would have looked if I had scraped together enough pennies to shoot one of my own impossibly-pleased-with-its-own-cleverness teenage pitches. If it's hard to watch, it's at least in part due to my own chagrin at this time-capsule mirror into my own myopic adolescence. I take it, then, as a humbling opportunity to do what TAINTED can't: introspect. Take stock of where I am, what I'm doing to others, and how far I still have to go to get where I should be. After all, in 20 years I'll probably be looking back at myself and whatever the 2020 equivalent of TAINTED might be with just as much disgust.
Even so, I like to think that if I'd made this movie I'd at least have got some gore in there somewhere. I mean, I'm not a monster. The 90's were bad, and that's not TAINTED's fault. But at least they usually had more whammy than this.
*In fact, the movie it most
structurally resembles is Steven Seagal’s OUT FOR JUSTICE. But it really makes
one realize that the Aikido, and possibly the ponytail, were a big part of what
makes that one good.
** Since his influence is never far
from the movie, I think it’s worth noting that whatever Kevin Smith’s problems
may be, I don’t think this sort of passive misogyny is among them. The female
characters in his films are typically about as well-drawn as his male
characters, which makes sense, given that everyone in a Kevin Smith movie,
regardless of sex, race or creed, all just talk like Kevin Smith anyway. Still,
it’s worth noting that the vanguard of the indie film boom of the 90’s featured
more interesting and varied female roles than most of the films that
subsequently tried to rip them off.
CHAINSAWNUKAH 2020 CHECKLIST!
The Man Who Queue Too Much
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TAGLINE
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If
it ever had one, it’s not included on the blatantly misleading Troma DVD
cover, which depicts two buxom vampires who are absolutely not in the movie.
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TITLE ACCURACY
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The plot sort of centers around a vampire “tainting” the water
supply, although it’s a weird title any way you want to look at it
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LITERARY ADAPTATION?
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No
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SEQUEL?
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None
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REMAKE?
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None
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COUNTRY OF ORIGIN
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USA
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HORROR SUB-GENRE
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Vampires, horror-comedy
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SLUMMING A-LISTER?
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None
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BELOVED HORROR ICON?
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None
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NUDITY?
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None.
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SEXUAL ASSAULT?
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None;
although Ryan is depicted as a bit of a cad, there’s never any suggestion
that his sexual encounters were anything but wholeheartedly consensual.
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WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!
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No animals
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GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?
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None
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POSSESSION?
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No
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CREEPY DOLLS?
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Nope
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EVIL CULT?
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None
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MADNESS?
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None
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TRANSMOGRIFICATION?
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None, as far as we know these vamps cannot turn into bats or
wolves or anything
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VOYEURISM?
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A short, and unusually adequately-constructed, stalking sequence
opens the film
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MORAL OF THE STORY
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The
cooler something seems at the time, the more embarrassing it’s going to seem
20 years later.
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