Cellar Dweller

Cellar Dweller (1988)

Dir John Carl Buechler

Written by Don Mancini (as “Kit Du Bois”)

Starring Deborah Farentino (as Deborah Mullowney), Brian Robbins, Yvonne De Carlo, Jeffrey Combs

Obviously the Germans didn't get how delightful the almost-rhyme of CELLAR DWELLER is, but I think they came up with a pretty good alternate title.

Well, we seem to be developing something of a “mystery-killer locked in basement” theme this year, what with THE UNSEEN, BEAST IN THE CELLAR, and, one would assume from the title, the irresistible almost-rhyming CELLAR DWELLER. Oddly, though, there’s no weird inbred mutant cannibal locked in a basement here; Cellar Dweller is just the name of the in-movie 1950’s horror comic (obviously in the vein of EC Comics’ Tales From The Crypt or The Haunt of Fear) drawn by Colin Childress (Jeffrey Combs, RE-ANIMATOR, NECRONOMICON, and apparently more Star Trek guest characters than any other actor?). That sounds worrisome, but fear not! Unlike BEAST IN THE CELLAR, CELLAR DWELLER actually delivers what you would want from a movie called CELLAR DWELLER, namely a weird-looking monster that gradually kills a bunch of sometimes-topless girls in an isolated boarding school. He does sometimes hang out in the cellar, but does not dwell there, specifically. But that’s neither here nor there.

Our story begins with a beautiful cartoonist (Deborah Mullowney née Farentino, SON OF THE PINK PANTHER, Eureka) arriving at some sort of arts academy (though there are no classes and no teachers and only five students as near as I can tell; not sure exactly what she’s paying for here) which happens to be in the former home of her idol, the very Colin Childress we were just discussing. Childress, it seems, died 30 years earlier (the film opens with a flashback and the title “30 years earlier” and then flashes to the present with the title “30 years later,” which gets confusing because it’s unclear where we should start adding) in what police sort of haphazardly guess must have been a murder-suicide. Of course, we were privy to this event, so we know that --apparently in doing more research than one would assume would be necessary for his dumb comic about a jacked up wolfman eating semi-nude women-- he read in a mystical occult book that, “Nothing in hell lives without man’s consent. Woe unto you that gives the beast form; to contemplate evil is to ask evil home.” This abstruse admonishment turns out to be super relevant almost immediately, because suddenly the werewolf-monster-star of his Cellar Dwellar books appears and starts acting out the murder scene Combs just finished inking, prompting him to douse himself (and the monster) with gasoline and burn the whole thing down. Exactly the sort of thing you just can’t really get insured for. 30 years later (or maybe 60, depending on where we’re supposed to start counting), guess who finds his old stuff in the cellar and inadvertently brings back the beast, to start bumping off her irritating classmates?

Since the victims are all residents of this so-called Arts Academy, it’s a good opportunity for the cast (including Yvonne De Carlo, The Munsters, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS) to go broad and have fun playing ridiculous caricatures of moony artsy types. This they do with gusto, in particular this total douchecanoe Phillip (Brian Robbins, who wisely gave up being a terrible actor shortly thereafter and subsequently graduated to being the terrible director of stuff like NORBIT and GOOD BURGER*) who fuckin’ has something he feels is cheeky and irreverent to say about every single fucking situation he becomes aware of (even his own miraculous return from beyond the grave). I guess he’s supposed to be the romantic lead or something, but he’s such an outrageously annoying douchebag that the actress treats the very idea that she’s supposed to be attracted to him as a charming joke. At the end, when he literally comes back to life in a big triumphant reappearance, his first request is for a kiss. “I’m not tawlkin’ about some quick peck awhn the cheek heyah, I’m talkin’ bout a real kiss!” he says, confidently. I’m 99% sure the script called for his request to be fulfilled, but watch as our heroine grabs his face, pulls him in... and then decides she can’t go through with it and settles for a hug. Which is still much more than he deserves.

The oddest thing about the movie (and keep in mind, this is a movie about a jacked-up werewolf who came from a 50’s horror comic) is its weird anti-imagination subtext. If that passage from the occult book Combs is reading at the start is correct, “to contemplate evil is to ask evil home,” which is the only explanation we ever get for what the fuck is happening here. The suggestion seems to be that by virtue of imagining this evil and depicting it on the page, the artist has “invited” it into the world. Kind of reminds me of THE DARK HALF. At the end, she burns all her drawings to destroy the evil one, but of course, A) she didn’t even imagine this evil, she copied someone else’s trademark monster, and B) wait, by this logic isn’t this horror movie also inviting evil to exist? And also C) she didn’t even draw the comics which end up becoming reality; they just appear, so how does this even work? Weird. I guess I’m not complaining because at least it’s something of a novel way to provide us with a weird monster, but I’m not sure writer Don Mancini (all the CHILD’S PLAY movies, in his sole non-Chucky screenplay) really thought this subtext through. I don’t see any way of avoiding a weirdly judgemental moral about how artists shouldn’t depict anything that they wouldn’t want to see in the real world. Or at least when it comes to musclebound wolfmen menacing scantily clad women. “Wherever there is imagination… I shall Dwell,” says the Dweller. Which, aside from being a bizarre idea in general is particularly so coming from a horror movie.

But anyway, parsing Charles Band productions for a clear moral is not especially germane to the task of enjoying them. This is exactly the kind of moronic concept I go for, especially since the creature is a big, meaty-looking werewolf kinda puppet thing with an almost comically expressive face, who spends a lot of his time cannibalizing the remains of his victims with a thoughtful look in his eyes. Director John Carl Buechler helmed a handful of film, including DUNGEONMASTER, TROLL, and FRIDAY THE 13th PART VII, but was primarily known as a special effects guy, so he makes sure you get a good look at his handiwork here, even on a very limited Charles Band budget. Obviously this isn’t going to be the kind of thing which terrifies and disturbs you on a profound, psychological level, so no reason to be stingy about delivering the good stuff. It’s a slight and silly movie, but it delivers a hint of Jeffrey Combs, some light nudity, some moderate gore, and a whole lot of big monster puppet, which is pretty much exactly what you’d want in a movie like this. At the very least, the movie looks to be a lot better than the Cellar Dweller comic, which, at least from what we see, is entirely composed of cartoony scenarios where, for no apparent reason, the Cellar Dweller appears in front of some nude lady, chases her for two panels, eats her, and then says something like “I’ll be back.” Pretty lame. It seems a little unfair to hold artists responsible for the murderous rampages of their fictional creations, but if that’s the level of effort they’re putting in, it’s hard to have much sympathy for ‘em.

*Although to be fair, Robbins also directed VARSITY BLUES and the underrated Keanu Reeves BAD NEWS BEARS riff HARDBALL. But that doesn’t forgive NORBIT.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	It Will Eat You Out Of The House (don’t know what that means) and The Shape of Nightmares To Come (equally baffling).
TITLE ACCURACY	While a cellar does feature prominently, the monster doesn’t exactly dwell there, but rather in our imagination. However, the comic series Jeffrey Combs created is titled Cellar Dweller, so there is a logical explanation. I still feel the title could have done more to convey the actual content of the movie, but it’s not exactly wrong.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Monster movie/ Creature Feature
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	It was towards the end of her carrer, but it’s still kinda amazing they could get Yvonne De Carlo from THE TEN COMMANDMENTS in here. She seems to be having fun.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Jeffrey Combs, although mostly a cameo role.
NUDITY?	Yes, some of it before the friggin’ opening credit.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	There’s some kind of, I dunno, dream or vision or something where Jeffrey Combs returns as a zombie and plants an ax in someone. I don’t know what that means, but obviously I’m for it.
POSSESSION?	I’m not exactly sure how it works, but the stuck-up headmistress seems to get possessed and transformed into the demon.
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Yeah inexplicably the headmistress turns into demon.
VOYEURISM?	Yes, a rival student secretly films our hero through a window
MORAL OF THE STORY	Don’t create art or you’re basically a murderer.

The Raven

The Raven (2012)
Dir. James McTeigue
Starring John Cusack, Luke Evans, Brendan Gleeson, and apparently M. Emmet Walsh is in there somewhere too.

    I wish I could say THE RAVEN is a piece of shit. If it were, it might almost be interesting. As it is, it’s just a giant tease, a clever idea with some inspired elements which doesn’t even seem to care enough to be memorably awful. It just sits there, treading water, occasionally glancing at its watch until its 111 minutes are up and it can slink away.

And that’s a damn shame, because you and I both know there’s a fucking awesome movie to be made out of this concept. Edgar Allan Poe --maybe the most romantically tortured of all the great masters of the English language-- is a character who has little been explored on the big screen, and due to the miserable details of his life and the brilliantly dark nature of his work, all but screams for a story which plumbs the depths of his misery and reveals what went on in the mind of a man who had endured so much and imagined so richly and darkly. His work is both literal enough to cull concrete meaning from and ambiguous enough that we could imagine all kinds of likely scenarios as to what inspired him and what it meant, particularly given that biographical detail on Poe is notoriously sparse and clouded with misinformation, rumor, speculation, and legends. And you can add in the genuinely mysterious and colorful details of his death (found incoherent in the streets of Baltimore, wearing mysterious clothing and rambling about an unknown person named “Reynolds” before succumbing to an unexplained death) which generate a special layer of lugubrious mystery to a man who was already a darkly compelling riddle. His life alone is interesting enough to justify a whole trilogy of films, but if you’re gonna throw a serial killer mystery into it I’m not gonna complain. It might be gilding the lily, but you can’t deny that it could work -- It fits perfectly into Poe’s literary output (he was, after all, the father of detective fiction!), and could work as a nifty foil to externalize Poe’s own inner darkness. 

Seriously, how is a movie with a poster this badass not amazing?

But for reasons unknown, director James McTeigue and writers Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare chose to make a movie with Poe in it that is not actually about Poe, and is instead about a bunch of half-baked serial killer cliches vaguely based on some inconsequential details of Poe’s writing*. It lends credence to the idea that there’s really just one Mad Libs-style serial killer script floating around Hollywood, and from time to time people just pick it up and fill in the nouns and verbs. Honestly, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that, PUMKINHEAD 2-style, some producer acquired the rights to make a movie about Poe and just had some jerk write his name into a pre-existing script so they could make it before the rights expired. Perfunctory doesn’t even begin to describe it; sleepwalking comes somewhat closer.

Literally nothing interesting in the premise is properly explored, and most isn’t even touched on. Instead, the name of the game is Edgar Allen Poe: action hero. Poe’s young, hot, blonde, feisty, rich, articulate, fiance (?) gets kidnapped by one of those tiresome serial killer who want to play a cat and mouse game with our hero, and Edgar rides horses, fires guns, blows things up, knocks down walls, punches through doors, and chases suspects across shaky rafters to get her back. Shit, it might as well be a 19th-century adaptation of Donkey Kong. 

Stark Raven Mad.

 And the damndest shame of it is, there are some frustrating promising elements here. Cusack is an inspired choice for Poe, easily evoking his slightly doughy, childlike face and deeply tired eyes. He’s not so great with the half-assed olde-tyme dialogue, but he’s definitely working hard, courageously taking a few of Poe’s freakouts to epic mega-acting levels in a vain attempt to distract you into thinking you care.The production design is gorgeous, really impressively conjuring a believable and expansive world for the characters to inhabit. It’s immaculately lit, amiably scored, and features a decent cast. Brendan Gleeson seems glumly resigned to the fact that he has nothing at all to do in this story except be the one other recognizable cast member so you’ll suspect it was him, but hey, he’ll never be bad in his life. And Luke Evans, who has done an impressive 13 movies in the past 2 years without me noticing him in any of them, really stands out as Detective Exposition. Seriously, he’s at least as pointless and maybe more pointless than the rest of the characters in the cast, but he really puts his all into the role and consequently you perk up slightly whenever he comes around. Combine all that with a few nice lamp-lit scenes of corpses, a dusting of historical trivia, and a couple clever deaths and this one should have been impossible to bungle.

  And yet, bungled it is. McTeigue and his screenwriters studiously focus on all the wrong things, emphasize all the stupidest aspects of the story, and piss away all the obvious strengths they have working for them. It’s a mystery where the clues are meaningless and arbitrary. A police procedural without any credible detective work. A horror film without any scares. An action film without any action. And the only intriguing thing in the whole mess -- Poe himself -- barely factors in. McTeigue can’t seem to get it through his head that this is not a kinetic chase film -- it’s a moody, period horror piece. So every once in a while, out of the blue, there will be some ridiculous jarring stylistic flourish, like Poe suddenly dodging a gunshot in bullet time or the killer leaping off a building and slicing someone up with a knife like a ninja. Making these things self-consciously stylish doesn’t make them more exciting, it just serves to illustrate how painfully pedestrian they are, while at the same time immediately and catastrophically expunging any amount of atmosphere the film’s superb production design has torturously managed to work up. If the film has a spiritual parallel in shittiness, it’s got to be Tim Burton’s heartbreaking SLEEPY HOLLOW, another gorgeous production which seems for all the world to mistakenly believe that what we want from our eerie, nightmarish horror films is small-scale action scenes, explosions, and cheeky one-liners. At least RAVEN has the decency to be consistently dismal.

Wait guys, major brainstorm happening here. What if, instead of "Quoth the Raven: Nevermore," we change it to: "Quoth the Raven: Fuck you and Die!"

    Ultimately, what the film forgets is that Poe, for all his clever mystery plots, was about much more than set pieces. The poem version of the The Raven is one of the most truly horrifying works of art ever not because it’s gruesome or bloody or filled with monsters and sadistic killers -- but because it plumbs the depths of our imagination and respects that what we find there is infinitely more horrifying than a lot of CG blood. It’s about despair, loss, and the arbitrary cruelty of a world which would give you the capability to love so powerfully, only to twist those feelings into wrenching, neverending pain. It was Poe’s understanding of the abyss within mankind that made his works classic, not his clever murderous gimmicks.

That necessary fact is completely lost on the filmmakers here, who fail to understand something even as simple and cinematic as The Pit and The Pendulum. Yes, we see that setup recreated here, but here’s the problem: The pendulum drops about four inches every swing, so we see the guy screaming, see the thing cut into him, and in about 30 seconds of screen time he’s sliced in half in a admittedly somewhat satisfying display of CG gore.** The entire point of the story was the sadism of waiting, waiting, waiting as your death gets slowly, inexorably nearer. But McTeigue and company clamber in like excited teenagers about to get laid for the first time and predictably fail to see that the point is not to cut to the finale, but rather to savor the character of the experience. Like the film itself, the sequence gamely gathers the right ingredients, but forgets to cook them into a meal, instead just dumping them in your lap and then staring at you expectantly. It stands to reason, then, that the film’s one truly chilling bit is Cusack giving a really excellent reading of the last verse of the titular poem. Even without the rest of the poem’s context, Poe’s words and Cusack’s desolate reading provoke and unsettle us more than some cheeseball murder plot ever could.  

Still the best Poe adaptation I know of.

*Just how inconsequential? The first clue the police find that the work is related to Poe is that a seemingly locked room actually has a spring release on a window. Which is a worthwhile detail in the original Murders in the Rue Morgue only because the culprit is actually an ape, capable of getting out the window onto the roof (spoiler: that’s not the case here, because that would actually be interesting). That’s it, that’s the only connection. Another tenuous link? One of the guys the killer murders is just a random sailor, killed in an unimaginative way, who happened to be sailing on a ship called the Fortunado (the name of the victim in A Cask of Amontillado). Seriously, that’s the only connection. You call those taunting clues? Put down the Cliff’s Notes and read a real book, you lazy philistine. What a pathetic excuse for a murderous psycho.


**By the way, the guy who gets sliced up is Rufus Griswold, who in real life published an unflattering and patently untrue biography of Poe in an effort to slander him after he died. His biography colored peoples’ perceptions of Poe for years afterwords, but unexpectedly ended up up having the effect of helping cement Poe as a pop art fixture due to its sensational description of his (mostly fictional) debauchment. Now, Poe is revered as a literary genius and Griswold is mentioned only as body count in a third-rate serial killer flick. Now that’s a poetic twist worthy of Poe himself.

The Dark Half

The Dark Half (1993)
Dir. George MotherFucking A Romero
Starring Timothy Hutton, Timothy Hutton, and Michael Rooker.

You forget sometimes, that Romero did other things than zombie movies. Or I do, anyway. I don’t know what you do. You never talk about your feelings. How am I supposed to know if you don’t tell me? The key to any successful relationship is open communication regarding George Romero and his perceived confinement to the zombie subgenre. I mean, I always try to bring it up, but you’re always getting all offended and telling me to stop talking about George Romero while we make love. As if that’s just something I should magically know not to do. But if that is how you think of him, I don’t blame you. I mean, after all, the guy basically invented the very concept of a zombie which now permeates our culture pretty much to the point of saturation. Before his seminal NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, zombies were basically the fare of racially questionable British Voodoo movies (perhaps understandably, since that’s where the word originates) like WHITE ZOMBIE and KING OF THE ZOMBIES and PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES. These zombies were more likely to be possessed humans than corpses, and were more interested in doing their masters’ bidding than eating braaaaaaiiiinnnnnns or pulling out someone’s intestinal track (those were dark days.)*

Romero changed all that. He pretty much completely changed the definition of a zombie (not intentionally, of course -- as he points out, no one calls them “Zombies” in his films) and created an entirely unique iconography which has since lurched into the popular consciousness so completely that having zombies start running in the early 2000’s seemed like a stunning reinvention. As he made more “Dead” films, it quickly became clear that not only had he created a new monster, but a new metaphor for listless, directionless American consumerism and unfocused aggression. By the time LAND OF THE DEAD rolled around in 2005 (nearly 40 years after the original) the series had established itself as a bleak, ever-refining dark satire on the American cultural, political, and economic landscape. They stand as scrappy, scruffy, unmistakably recognizable milestones not just in cinema, but in popular culture.

But what’s funny is, Romero directed or co-directed a stunning 10 other films in- between the “Dead” films. KNIGHTRIDERS. MARTIN. SEASON OF THE WITCH. Even a romantic fucking comedy! And in contrast to the Dead series’ sometimes shoddy production and inelegant scripts, after 1988’s MONKEY SHINES these films were often big studio pictures with mid-level movie stars, professional lighting, the whole deal. Aesthetically, you would never guess that the guy who made DAWN OF THE DEAD made THE DARK HALF, or even that the guy who made LAND OF THE DEAD more than a decade later made it. There’s almost nothing in common except that they’re filled with little unexpected elements of greatness.  

THE DARK HALF is adapted from a Stephen King book of the same name, and actually feels way more like a King project than a Romero one. I mean, it’s pretty much got all the hallmarks. Troubled writer (Thad Beaumont, played by Timothy Hutton**) ; Northeast Hometown (Castle Rock, Maine), clever poetic device (parasitic twin, sparrow swarms), extremely literal title (“the Dark Half”) etc. If this randomly came on TV and you were too lazy or drunk to check*** you would probably never guess Romero had directed it, but you’d definitely guess that King wrote it. In fact, the novel is apparently somewhat autobiographical in that it was a response to King’s own exposure as the man behind the pen name Richard Bachman, a name under which he published his own more lurid, cynical stories throughout the seventies. So it’s a veritable treasure trove of King’s themes and fixations, including a few of his recurring characters.

Tim “Youngest Person Ever to Win An Oscar For Best Supporting Actor” Hutton is an interesting character in that he’s a nice guy, a family man, and a classy writer of well-respected respectable classy writing, but on the side he’s been writing trashy crime novels under the name George Stark. We’re told that he’s a recovering alcoholic, but we never see him be anything other than charming and responsible. But everyone knows that when he’s writing as Stark, he retreats from the world, starts drinking, becomes a different person. A “Dark Half,” if you will. This might not seem as strange if someone had bothered to explain to him that when he was born there was this giant swarm of sparrows that engulfed the hospital, and when he was young he used to get horrible headaches which could only be cured by writing, and when they cut his skull open to get out what they figured was a tumor they actually found his unborn twin fetus stuck up there, staring out (apparently at the top of his skull, before it was opened) with a giant creepy eyeball of obvious sparrow-induced evilness. OK it still might have seemed strange, but still seems like the kind of thing someone ought to have mentioned to him. I mean, I’d want to know. 

I mean, honestly he seems pretty well adjusted for a guy named Thad Beaumont, a name so outrageously douchey it honestly makes me want to unlock the secrets of time travel just so I can go back in time to the sixth grade and give him a wedgie so powerful they’ll name it after him. But the film implies that his nice guy persona is only part of him, a cover which can exist only because he can also escape to his Dark Side through his fictional alter ego. So when said alter ego comes under threat of exposure and Beaumont resigns to retire Stark for good, a part of him reacts violently, inasmuch as it dresses like Henry Fonda from ONCE UPON THE TIME IN THE WEST and goes about slicing up anyone responsible for Stark’s shit-canning. The question is, though, is the evil murdering Stark actually Beaumont losing his marbles, or has his pen name someone wormed his way into the real world? And granted that second possibility makes perfect sense, but even if it’s true, does Thad have some responsibility for his alter ego’s crimes?

 For a King novel, it’s surprisingly hard on --and maybe even a little unfair to-- its protagonist. Stark, real or not, IS a kind of wish-fulfillment empowerment fantasy for Thad, a way to get his dark side out and still be the nice responsible husband and father he acts like. The film intriguingly challenges Thad to look at the physical embodiment of his darker leanings, and by proxy challenges us to do the same with our voyeuristic interest. In lots of ways, George Stark is a much cooler character than Thad -- he has black cowboy boots, he drinks, he smokes, he’s seductive and powerful and has a menacing folksy wit to him. He’s a seductive fantasy in our imaginations, but when he’s out in the real world he’s a horrifying nightmare. And to the audience, the implicit challenge is the same: you wanted this, right? Wouldn’t you rather watch murderous George Stark than affable nerd Thad Beaumont? I mean, wouldn’t you rather watch a film about Dirty Harry than a thoughtful, fair, effective cop who did his job and tried to help the community? And yet, which one would you prefer to actually have on the job in your home town? But when you fantasize about it, you make it real, at least on some level, and maybe you bear some responsibility for that. It’s not enough that Thad is a nice guy who cares about his family -- just because he can control himself doesn’t mean he’s not a bad person on the inside, on some level.  

Obviously, this is a weird outlook for a horror writer, of all things, to have. But honestly, after so much horror apologist rhetoric about how violent, sadistic, or otherwise fucked-up art helps channel our own darker impulses into something harmless and positive, it’s kind of an interesting perspective. Don’t shrug it off just because you didn’t do it. Look at yourself in horror because you thought about it. Existentialist that I am, I don’t buy the film’s way of looking at things and I can’t exactly imagine that Romero or King do either, but it’s an interesting and different perspective which is built seamlessly into the story itself. It challenges its protagonist not just to act better, but to be a truly better person on the inside, the kind of person who genuinely wants no part of any kind of George Stark, real or imaginary.

The novel Dark Half was published in 1989, so King couldn’t yet have known that his own George Stark would come back to haunt him, but that’s exactly what happened when a series of school shootings from 1988 to 1999 were materially tied to his Richard Bachman 1977 novel “Rage,” which he eventually took out of print over fear it would lead to more violence. Let’s be clear: I’m 100% against censorship of any kind. But not because I don’t think art is harmless -- art can have great power, and sometimes can be dangerous. I don’t think King’s book was to blame for what happened, but I also think it would be foolish to completely dismiss it as irrelevant and meaningless. Fantasies, when shared or even harbored, still have unintended effects on both their creator and the world. THE DARK HALF is a horror movie not about a murderer, but about the unintended ramifications of the darker side of our imagination. 

That said, it’s not a perfect film. Romero is no stranger to cinematic metaphors, but as a director his approach is an entirely literal one. That works for the hordes of zombies, which function as both a literal threat and a literal metaphor. It works slightly less well with the metaphysical nature of this particular horror story, since it removes any ambiguity about what’s actually happening and hence we just have to accept that a lot of this is caused by undefined “magic.” Romero creates some great images, like the oscillating swarms of sparrows which seem to be everywhere in Castle Rock, Maine, or the Argento-esque blue-lit hallways where Stark kills a guy. But this story might have worked better being depicted as the nightmare it surely is. After all, there’s no explanation or clear logic to the world of the film, so why stick so stubbornly to reality most of the time? 

Still, it’s a well-constructed film. For a George Romero adaptation of a Stephen King novel, it doesn’t seem particularly concerned about being a horror film. It takes its time setting up the world and the characters in it, and seems perfectly content letting the horror of the premise speak for itself without throwing a bunch of “boo!(s)” and lame scary faces at us. Long stretches pass where it seems like basically a drama, and the fact that you’re involved enough in the story to be OK with that speaks highly of the film’s strong storytelling fundamentals. Hutton is good both as Beaumont and as Strark, resisting making either part seem showy. The specific connection between the two characters is a little tenuous, but Hutton makes the film’s final act (where the two meet) work very nicely. Impressively, you never get caught up in thinking about the technical achievement of the two Huttons interacting, nor does the duplicate actor draw you out of the film. It works nicely, and manages to capitalize pretty well off the building tension of the film’s themes (also: a great death-by-sparrows finale). 

So overall, a win for the world. The film does reveal some of both artists’ flaws. For Romero: overly literal staging, capable but indifferent cinematography. For King, wandering plotlines and overreliance on handy plot devices. But this particular collaboration ends up generally getting the goods out of the story and creating something unique and memorable. As much as I might have enjoyed, say, a nightmarish David Lynch adaptation of King’s work, I have to say that Romero’s guileless directness brings out the underlying nightmarishness about the work which exists beyond the well-staged murder scenes and effective but standard thriller plot. It could have been a great surreal horror film, but as it is it’s something a little more interesting: a film which makes you ask, uncomfortably, how much of the horror is inside you after all. All the scary images we can put on screen will never quite match that odd feeling of holding up a mirror and asking if that’s George Stark looking back.

*Come to think of it, that actually sounds like an entirely fitting metaphor for this world where the force of the government so utterly suits the whims of the amoral wealthy class. I say it’s high time to make some zombie movies using the traditional definition. That would be cool. Less racism this time though, OK fellahs? Everyone’s fine with Bela Legosi having zombie slaves, but suddenly when its a white zombie he’s gone too far? 

**Who I wrongly thought played George W. Bush in that insipid 9/11 Showtime puff piece that Brian Trenchard-Smith directed. Turns out that was Timothy Bottoms. While obviously Hutton should have seen that mistake coming and changed his name to avoid confusion, I would like to apologize for whatever small part I had in this unfortunate misunderstanding. 

***I know, there’s no such thing as too drunk to check movie trivia, just stick with me for this hypothetical example.