Color Out Of Space

Color Out Of Space (2019)

Dr. Richard Stanley

Written by Richard Stanley, Scarlett Amaris, based on "The Colour Out of Space" by H. P. Lovecraft

Starring Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Brendan Meyer

I was dreading this one just as much as I was looking forward to it, which is always the way I approach a career resurgence by an artist like director Richard Stanley, i.e. an ambitious wunderkind who produced two good-bordering-on-great early works and then dramatically vanished from the scene. That’s about as surefire a recipe to end up over rated as has yet been conceived by man. Nothing drives up an artist’s stock like unavailability; it’s how Jeff Buckley went from being a guy who made a decent folk album to a legendary romantic genius, or how LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT went from a critically panned matinee flick to the holy grail of lost cinema. Rarely does such a sudden and lengthy departure from the artistic scene reverse itself,* but that is precisely what Stanley has managed, by seizing on his unexpected reemergence in the cultural zeitgeist (brought about by the 2014 release of the documentary LOST SOUL, which depicts Stanley’s disastrous attempt to make THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU back in 1996) to mount a comeback. And so it is that Richard Stanley returns from the elite ranks of artists whose legendary status was largely built on unrealized potential, to the more Earthy realm of artists who have to justify their hype by, you know, actually making art.

That’s a dangerous thing for an artist who has quietly built a rather enviable reputation largely around the promise of unrealized projects, which will always remain perfect and pristine, safely locked away in our imaginations. There are any number of ways this can disappoint you. You can discover that, after all this time, the promising young artist was just that – promising, not fully formed, all hype and no delivery. You can discover that the promising young artist really did have something once, but lost it somewhere along the way – lost the fire of youth, lost the touch, just lost interest. Or, even worse, you can discover that the promise was legitimate and the talent is still there, but the time has passed, and something that would have seemed boundary-pushing and exciting in the artist’s heyday now feels dated and played-out. I must admit that I absolutely assumed Stanley’s return to directing** was more likely to fall into one of those many pitfalls than it was to represent a triumphant return to a long-denied cinematic wunderkind.

 Actually neither turns out to be the case, but I'm surprised and happy to report that it's closer to the latter than the former. COLOR OUT OF SPACE*** is not a great movie, but it is quite a good one, demonstrating some real moxie and craftsmanship which mark it as the undeniable work of someone with some real talent, even if a few missteps are made along the way. And frankly that shocked the hell out of me. I was all but certain that three decades in the cold would have left Stanley diminished and rusty if not out-and-out broken, and that’s even that takes for granted his two early-90s successes weren’t a fluke to begin with. I was expecting a latter-day Argento-style disappointment, but COLOR OUT OF SPACE reveals a director as ambitious and gifted as he's ever been. Which is not to say it's a work of untouchable genius or anything, but his two 90's movies were the work of a genre director with real promise. Thirty years later, he's still promising. That's better than I thought I could reasonably hope for.

As the 500 word of preamble make obvious, then, this movie comes with some baggage by virtue of its director, and that's before we even add the extra weight of its star (one-time Oscar winner and beloved internet meme Nic Cage, deep in his direct-to-video rampage) and its source material (H.P. “The Sauce” Lovecraft's genre-defining classic short story of the same title). It buckles under all that weight, of course –it’s hard to imagine any movie that wouldn’t-- but manages to keep from ever completely collapsing, and that in itself is kind of an accomplishment. As a Stanley comeback, it proves he was worthy of our interest, if not our hyperbole. As a Lovecraft adaptation, it's astonishingly good, although in a large part by virtue of the miserable company that descriptor places it in. As a Nic Cage movie... well, that's a little more up for debate, but at least he’s always gonna give you your money’s worth.

Before we get to that, though, we might as well talk about the actual plot. Amazingly, though the story is updated to the present day, this turns out to be a broadly faithful riff on the original Lovecraft story, which recounts the tale of the rural Gardner family, whose lives are thrown into escalating madness by the arrival of a meteor which brings with it an “unknown color” that gradually subverts and distorts the environment, and the bodies and minds of the people in it. You know Stanley really gets Lovecraft because he mimics the author’s characteristic style of writing a story-within-a-story (the original is actually a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, the gripping saga of a guy who interviews another guy about a third guy, but Stanley is content with merely one framing device). The details vary, especially as the movie progresses and gradually pivots towards Cronenbergian body horror, but the essence of the original story is clearly still here, along with most of the major incidents. It is, I would hesitate to say, one of the most faithful Lovecraft adaptations I’ve ever seen, not that it has a great deal of competition in that regard.

Of course, Lovecraft adaptations, even generally faithful ones, are practically preordained to be garbage. But COLOR OUT OF SPACE draws its unusual strength from its atmosphere, cultivated with great care by Stanley, DOP Steve Annis (a music video guy til 2019's I AM MOTHER), production designer Katie Byron (BOOKSMART, FINAL GIRLS) and composer Colin Stetson (HEREDITARY). It adds up to a look and feel which neatly captures Lovecraft's sense of creeping, insinuating wrongness. This is absolutely essential to any prayer of meaningful adapting Lovecraft, and it’s the one thing that virtually every other film version of his work fumbles miserably (including the previous adaptations of this very short story, a 1965 Boris-Karloff-starring AIP production under the dubious title DIE MONSTER DIE and the 1987 Wil Wheaton movie THE CURSE). Even RE-ANIMATOR, arguably the only legitimately good Lovecraft movie ever made, can’t claim that; it doubles down on goopy effects and campy humor instead. Capturing the classic Lovecraftian sense of cosmic, incomprehensible unease is a tough thing to do, but Stanley and company manage it beautifully here, and without even a trace of the pretentious self-consciousness that has defined a lot of modern "post-horror" movies with similar ambitions. In a world of THE VVITCHes and HEREDITARYs, I’d almost forgotten that “heavy on atmospheric dread” does not have to mean “gloomy” and “glacial,” but Stanley keeps things colorful and spritely while managing to work up quite a head of anxiety. It’s Lovecraft distilled through the mind of a distinctly oddball auteur**** (I doubt ol’ H.P. would have thought to introduce our protagonist in the middle of a white magic ceremony as a cute little character detail, or clarify that the hippie holy fool who squats on their property as a cat named “G-Spot”) but it is still very recognizably Lovecraft, a virtue which, despite the virtual cottage industry his work has inspired, almost nothing else can boast.

The movie is also helped quite a bit by a surprisingly fine cast, who vividly portray the family’s gradual slide into dreamy madness while still crafting sharply-defined, likeable --and often quite funny!-- characters. In the Q & A that followed the screening, Stanley mentions that he worked with the actors on their characters’ backstories, which makes sense; even though we get only tiny glimpses into what their lives were like before the events of the film, they feel unusually fully-formed. Even as things get weird, the family dynamic feels complex and lived-in; they seem unusually genuine for a genre movie, convincingly reading as an existing family unit rather than a bunch of body count whose existence is entirely defined by the circumstances of the plot. Madeline Arthur (BIG EYES) as the Gardner family’s teenage daughter and our protagonist, is especially great, managing a character who feels very lively and specific in a way which the movie absolutely does not require, but definitely benefits from. Brendan Meyer (THE GUEST) and Joely Richardson (EVENT HORIZON) do equally nuanced, likeable character work with the older brother and anxiety-fraught mother, respectively.

And of course, you’ve also got the father, one Nicolas Cage. He’s, um, a real character, possibly a little unhinged, given to doing a verbal impersonation of his own father, who all visual and audio evidence suggests was born in, like 1885, despite the movie taking place in modern times. IMDB trivia claims that “Richard Stanley's favorite Cage Movie is Vampire's Kiss (1988), [and] he asked Nicolas to use the same style of performance,” a claim I was initially rather dubious of, until I discovered that Stanely mentions VAMPIRE’S KISS by name in at least two distinct interviews. The finished film mostly doesn’t pitch Cage at quite that level, but it’s definitely a weird performance. And not entirely to the movie’s benefit, in my estimation; he matches, in some ways, the charming eccentricities of the rest of the family, but Cage's now-expected eagerness for full-on mega-acting turns out to be sort of an unhelpful distraction here. It's not a bad performance (it was made worse by my audience, a bunch of hipster douchebags who appear to consider any line that Cage speaks in any movie, regardless of context, inherently hilarious) but it's noticeably a bit broader and more cartoony than the rest of the cast, who are not exactly going for underplayed minimalism either, but who keep their escalating madness a little more grounded and wind up equally impactful but more emotionally effective.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Cage, and you hire him for his mega-acting superpower, obviously. But I think Stanley should have kept a tighter leash on him in this case. It feels like Cage is trying to go over the top, rather than just responding naturally to the insane situation the movie puts him in. It’s an entertaining performance, and Cage is terrific with the script’s dark --but slightly goofy-- humor, but I worry he’s turning into a bit of a parody by this point in his career. Those dipshits laughing at every single thing he said are definitely morons, but I feel like he’s been encouraging them. Of course, this is also his first film in a long time which is actually good enough on its own merits that it becomes a problem when he tries to hijack it with his manic weirdness, rather than a saving grace. So I get where he’s coming from. Still, given how well Stanley does pushing the other actors to equally extreme but less excessive and silly psychological states, he might have been better off finding a normal actor and pushing them out of their comfort zone to go a little mega, as opposed to Cage, who by this point seems like he’s barely able to hold his craziness in check even before the plot starts to take a turn towards the weird.

Anyway, Cage’s performance is an illustrative example of where the movie starts to go a little wrong. Stanely, like Cage, seems maybe a little bit too eager to please for his own good, and towards the back half starts to overplay things a bit. It’s nothing derailing, just a few miscalculations: an eerie scene where the “color” affects a family member is diminished by adding an aggressive lightning strike where a subtle implication would have had more impact, for example. Or a surreal, otherworldly tableau is blown into a gaudy light show, pushing the movie’s special effects a little past their budget for no real advantage. It wouldn’t really be that big a deal –in fact, I’d usually commend a low-budget film like this overextending itself a little in the name of whammy—but the frustrating thing is that, for once, the movie doesn’t need it. It does such a fine job with its eerie insinuations and little glimpses that the more standard effects movie razzle-dazzle actually lessens the impact. The more concrete things get, the smaller the movie feels.

Still, all things considered it's kind of a miracle the movie works as well as it does. The hardest part –the inevitable visualization of Lovecraft's famously unseeable color-- is handled with a nifty effect, a kind of shifting, shimmering pink that looks suitably unnatural. The short story described the titular color as “shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum,” a pretty tall order for any primarily visual medium (even one with Yog-Sothoth rooting for it), but the flickering, ever-shifting character of the effect suggests, if not a never-before seen color, at least some kind of inexplicable visual phenomenon which is only partially perceptible to the human senses. What we see crucially suggests that there is much more we don’t see, which is a legitimately clever way to tackle this difficult problem with the adaptation, and is, overall, the guiding philosophy behind the whole movie’s strengths, and indeed, of the original story’s strengths, too. Of the dozens of Lovecraft adaptations I’ve seen, this is perhaps the only one that seems to really understand that, and that’s reason enough to be pleasantly surprised.

 It takes ambition to commit to capturing that kind of tone, and that ambition permeates the whole film. Stanley, who is surely more aware than almost any living director that whatever film he’s currently making might easily be his last, isn’t playing safe for a single second here. Not everything pays off (as I’ve said, at times the film might actually benefit from more restraint), but it’s kind of incredible how many dangerously unexpected choices --the stunt-casting of Tommy Chong, the weird pivot to body horror, the flirtation with psychedelia, filming in sunny, semi-tropical Portugal rather than the expected austere New England-- all somehow manage not just to keep from derailing the movie, but to actually strengthen it. All these disparate strengths don’t necessarily cohere into a unified, architecturally strong framework, though many of them do (the film’s pervasive oddball humor, for example, makes for an unexpectedly effective compliment to its lurking anxiety, rather than setting up the tonal clash one might expect), but strengths are strengths, and COLOR OUT OF SPACE has plenty of unexpected ones. Ol’ Richard Stanley might or might not be the great lost genre auteur his legendary rep has made him out to be, but on the strength of this movie, I’d say the possibility is still on the table. And that alone seemed about as impossible as non-Euclidian geometry and unknown colors a few weeks ago. Sometimes raising the elder gods turns out to be a better idea than you might think.

 *One obvious example would be that of Terrance Mallik, who was hailed as one of cinema’s untouchable geniuses during the 20-30 year hiatus between DAYS OF HEAVEN and his resumption of regular releases in the mid-2000s, only to find an increasingly skeptical critical establishment as his body of work grew.

** To be fair, he did do a short segment in the 2011 anthology film THE THEATRE BIZARRE, but it’s so brief (one of six segments in only 114 minutes) that it was hard to tell much from it. He’d also done two well-regarded documentaries –THE SECRET GLORY and THE WHITE DARKNESS in 2001 and and 2002—and gotten a couple screenplay credits in the intervening years. But still.

***

****IMDB trivia: “Director Richard Stanley and Swedish filmmaker Henrik Möller apparently performed a ritual to the Lovecraftian god Yog-Sothoth while in the Pyrénées to get the film made.” Probably not gonna find that one on Spielberg’s page.

Pay The Ghost

Pay The Ghost (2016)

Dir. Uli Edel

Written by Dan Kay (based on a novella by Tim Lebbon)

Starring Nicholas Cage, Sarah Wayne Callies, Veronica Ferres

So what we got here is a surprisingly competent spin on mainstream “Adult Contemporary Horror” which starts off very respectably, like these things are supposed to, with a slick, Hollywood look making a boring mystery even less interesting, and a bunch of overqualified professional acting wasted on uninteresting characters doing the standard “obsession-over-missing-kid” bit. You know, like THE FORGOTTEN, FLIGHT PLAN, GODSEND, that sort of thing, where responsible adults feel they have to make a staid, sensible horror movie for grown ups about grown up emotions, and hire real actors and stuff to do it. But gradually, this one drifts away into more unabashedly schlocky territory, much to its improvement. You’ve got to wait awhile, but eventually Nic Cage can and will get into a fist fight with a floating zombie. So I ended up enjoying it.

Nic Cage (VALLEY GIRL, THE FROZEN GROUND) plays put-upon English professor Mike Lawford of an unnamed NYC university with a suspiciously sprawling, sleepy mid-town location. He’s a cool teacher who dramatically reads passages to his spellbound audience and drops references to Lovecraft and 18th-century German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who, completely coincidentally, turns out to be the author of a poem called Der Erlkönig which, --get this!-- is about a child assailed by supernatural beings, which as luck would have it is about to become a major theme in Mike’s real life. Ain’t life just too funny sometimes?). The kids love him. I’m amazed they don’t feel the need to restage the in-retrospect-exceedingly-uncomfortable scene from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK where the lovestruck student in Indy’s class has written “love you” on her eyelids. But because he’s such a fucking boss professor, he’s under pressure at work and never has time for his adorable son Charlie (Jack Fulton, episodes of Orphan Black and 12 Monkeys) and his wife (Sarah Wayne Callies, apparently she was Lori on Walking Dead) is getting annoyed with him. To make up for his general state of paternal neglect (and having completely blown off trick-or-treating with his kid, despite an irresponsible earlier promise), he brings Charlie to a huge outdoor Halloween street party, which is frankly pretty fucking awesome and definitely worth a few years of childhood therapy. Unfortunately, Charlie has recently been seeing a mysterious cloaked figure hovering outside his bedroom window,* so it’s no surprise to us that when Mike turns his back on the kid for a split second, he’s suddenly vanished. But not before mysteriously asking if they can “Pay The Ghost,” which I suspect is probably the origin of the movie’s title, not to be too bold about offering a slice of personal opinion.

Cage is playing it pretty low-key mostly, but I bet this costume was his idea.

Well, flash forward a year, and Mike is estranged from his wife and down on his luck and spends all day creating those elaborate conspiracy string maps on a pinboard and browbeating the overworked detective (Lyriq Bent, SAW II-IV) assigned to the case. And then he starts to have visions of Charlie appearing randomly around the parts of New York City which resemble Toronto most closely, which he correctly interprets as a sign that Charlie’s disappearance is part of an ancient supernatural conspiracy, not that he needs to move on with his life. He runs around for awhile encountering ambiguous supernatural rigamarole and not being believed by authority figures even when patently crazy ghost shit starts to go down, and then he finally meets a helpful middle school teacher at a historical reenactment who happens to know exactly what’s going on and explains it all in one cheerful exposition dump, all while helpfully qualifying “but it’s just a myth!” (it turns out not to be, though, spoiler). And then Nic Cage goes to a magic underground homeless encampment and a blind man (Stephen McHattie, EXIT HUMANITY, HAUNTER, PONTYPOOL, always nice to see him turn up) speaks in riddles and then he crosses a mythical boundary between the living and dead which happens to be down there, etc, etc, you know how these things go, and eventually he ends up punching, rather than paying, a ghost.

So yes, this is a stupid movie. I mean, you had to be expecting that; if anything, your legitimate fear would be that it wouldn’t be stupid enough, and for awhile such fears seem justified. Fortunately, by the finale it’s so unabashed about its schlocky horror elements that it actually sort of won me over. Director Uli Edel (a German import with an erratic filmography that ranges from Madonna’s BODY OF EVIDENCE to Jonathan Lipnicki’s THE LITTLE VAMPIRE to the Academy-Award nominated THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX) actually seems like he might enjoy horror films unironically, and without the need to comment on them or cleverly reshape their standard conventions or anything. Imagine that. A lot of times when you get these Adult Contemporary Horror movies, you get successful directors of well-received dramas who clearly think this genre is beneath them and that any hack can make a horror film, and it takes a real director to make lugubrious weepy chamber dramas about feelings. And inevitably, the end result proves exactly the opposite: horror is perhaps the most inherently cinematic of all genres, and it takes an entirely different skillset to effectively cultivate unease and terror than it does to light a room sufficiently to watch Julianne Moore cry about something. Directors from John Huston (PHOBIA) to Jim Sheridan (DREAM HOUSE) to Richard Marquand (THE LEGACY) have all deigned to dabble in the horror genre, with predictably anemic results. Edel --probably no one’s idea of a great director, but a seasoned reliable pro-- actually strikes me as a rare mainstream director who at least understands the essentials of horror imagery and framing; this is by no means a good movie or a scary one, but at least its intentions as a horror movie feel honorable and earned. It’s bad and mostly dispiriting generic -- I mean, you pick any horror cliche at random, you can bet it's in here-- but at least it’s legit.

Most of the movie is still pretty dry, but I think the big elaborate festival sequence where Charlie disappears, and a later sequence where Cage encounters a rather large room full of ghost children, are genuinely pretty great, which is not a word I ever expected to use while describing any aspect of this movie. Those two standout sequences, plus Stephen McHattie in a small, weird role as an underground homeless shaman (he gives Cage a flashlight even though he’s blind, hahah, wut?), a wild vulture attack, and a surreal underground gateway between death and life are sufficient bounty to make this an overall positive experience, even if it’s pretty slow going early on. Plus, a lot of it honestly looks quite handsome, well-utilizing real locations but adding plenty of surreal horror movie menace. Is it corny and ridiculous? Oh hell yeah, but it’s also competently assembled, and while it doesn’t give Cage too many opportunities to indulge in his trademark mega-acting, his “holy shit, I can’t believe ghosts are real!” face is still pretty entertaining and his presence obviously elevates things, even when he’s playing it pretty low-key like he mostly is here.

It’s generally a little too staid to be as ridiculous as you probably want it to be. There’s a sprinkling of amusingly ridiculous crap in there; for example, the scene when Cage et al confront some poor schoolteacher on her off night and pump her for information on how to save their kid from ghost jail is pretty funny. Boy, that is one helpful lady, who not only knows exactly what they have to do (because, folklore!), but doesn’t seem at all weirded out that sweaty, panicked parents are telling her they need to use folklore to save their missing son. NYC, ammiright? Mostly, though, it’s a little less outrageous than that, which is a bit disappointing. But everytime you think it’s gonna settle down and be boring, it’ll suddenly throw something pleasingly lowbrow at you, so all is not lost. Surprisingly strong production design and photography throughout go a long way towards adding spice to a not-especially spicy tale, but there’s also something old-fashioned about how unironic it is. In some ways it feels like a modern-day DEVONSVILLE TERROR or something, a solid, middle-of-the-road genre movie which knows it’s not going to be for everyone but is OK with what it is, and professional enough to mostly pull it off (if not quite swing for the fences.) Which is not exactly high praise, but hopefully does convey a certain kind of grudging affection. This sort of thing has a feeling of being horror for the normals, not for us, but as far as it goes, this is one of the more enjoyable of that ilk. It’s probably a bit too timid for anyone deep enough into the weeds to get excited about a DTV Nic Cage ghost movie, but it’s watchable enough for a lazy Sunday afternoon in October.

And Jesus Christ, it’s certainly workable enough that it could have been released in theaters with minimal shame. You’re telling me THE GALLOWS was good enough to get a wide theatrical release with commercials and everything, and poor Nic Cage can’t even get this perfectly fine, medium-budget ghost movies onto the big screen? Fuck. That’s the scariest thing here, by far.

*And I don’t need to tell you that at some point Cage is going to look at a stack of children’s drawings and notice they’re all-black-crayon apocalyptic visions of death.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	Evil Walks Among Us although I can’t help but notice it usually hovers
TITLE ACCURACY	I guess you have to pay the ghost? Not 100% sure what that ever means, but they say it a couple times.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, from Tim Lebbon’s novella of the same name. Lebbon is most famous for writing 30 Days of Night. No, not the comic it was based on, the novelization of the movie that came out after. But he seems like a legit horror author in his own right, although I’ve never heard of any of his other stuff.
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Vanished Kid/ Ghost / Haunting
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Nic Cage, I guess.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None.
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Vultures are always menacing everyone, they’re clearly in cahoots with the ghost and one eventually crashes their cab by flying into a windshield (so I guess they’re not ghost vultures or anything, they’re solid)
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Ghosts galore, and arguably a haunted building
POSSESSION?	Yup, Cage’s wife goes all possess-y and cuts a clue into her arm.
CREEPY DOLLS?	No, which is weird, because this would be the perfect movie for them. I guess there’s a festival where people are throwing dolls into a fire ritualistically, but you don’t get a good look at them and they don’t seem creepy.
EVIL CULT?	Nah
MADNESS?	Looks like Cage is cracking up a little, he’s made one of those insanity crime boards, and he’s seeing his lost son everywhere. But he’s later proven correct.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	There’s supposedly a ghost watching through the windows, though we don’t really get to see it much (only the kid does)
MORAL OF THE STORY	You should definitely pay the ghost, it would really simplify things for everyone.

The Frozen Ground

The Frozen Ground (2013)

Dir. and written by Scott Walker (no, not that Scott Walker. No, not that one either.)

Starring Nicholas Cage, John Cusack, Vanessa Hudgens, Radha Mitchell, 50 Cent

Oh, poor John Cusack. He wants to make a good crime film so badly. I mean, let’s look, he’s done THE ICE HARVEST (2005), THE CONTRACT (2006), WAR INC (2008), THE FACTORY (2011), THE RAVEN (2012), this one in 2013, GRAND PIANO (also 2013), THE BAG MAN (2014), the hilariously named DRIVE HARD (2014), and THE PRINCE (2014). That's almost one attempt per year every year since 2005, and what does he have to show for it? A couple interesting failures, a lot of dismal failures, and two decent movies (ICE HARVEST and GRAND PIANO almost a decade apart). I’m not sure what it is about the poor guy, he always seems to be trying so hard (at least as hard as his driving, I bet), but for whatever reason he can’t seem to star in a decent crime film to save his life. I bet he and Gabriel Byrne hang out and commiserate. And they’ll have to drink to this one too, because alas, despite the promising cast this one has to be filed solidly in the “dismal failure” pile.

It brings me no joy to say that, because I’m always rooting for these things to be good. I’m exactly the kind of person who would enjoy this sort of debacle. But Jesus, John, you gotta give me something to work with. By which I mean, you gotta start picking a few projects that give you something to work with. Just like THE FACTORY, this one isn’t outright incompetent enough to be amusing, it’s just dour and dull, focusing on every single one of the least interesting aspects of the story and barely even remembering that it’s supposed to be a serial killer flick most of the time. Instead it’s kind of an unfocused Alaskan misery-porn about one of the killer’s ex-victims and the standard-issue over-the-line detective trying to solve the case.

Now you’d think casting Nicholas Cage as an over-the-line detective would automatically be great. But seriously, is there really any more greatness to be wrung out of this particular lemon, even if you squeeze as hard as Cage can? Obviously, there is no cliche in the book older than the over-the-line detective, and just to make certain we’re never less than 100% aware of that fact, they must have made sure to literally check off a list of all possible cliches. He’s an over-the-line detective, check. His bosses are mad at him, check. He’s two weeks away from retirement, check. He has a bitchy wife (poor Radha Mitchell) who doesn’t understand why he’s so awesome and constantly complains that he works too hard for justice and why can’t he just spend more time at home and not worry so much about catching this serial killing rapist, check. He makes a big bulletin board with photos of victims and thread connecting them, check. He has a troubled past and a tragically killed family member’s photograph in his wallet, check. Despite his gruff ways, he has to protect a wayward child who eventually wins him over, check. He’s paired with a mismatched wacky ethnic partner (George Lopez) who drives him crazy but the two eventually bond and solve a mystery, check. OK maybe not that last one, but I guarantee they considered it.

Movie detectives spend a lot of time doing this.

Nic Cage is still Nic Cage, so it’s always fun to watch him, but he’s pretty dialed back here. My memory of this movie is already fading fast, but IIRC he never punches a woman while wearing a bear costume, for example, which is really something that could have spiced this up a bit. I think that should be his signature thing from now on, like Arnold’s “I’ll be back.” Alas, no such luck here. He gives a perfectly fine performance, unfortunately the script simply doesn’t give him any opportunities to do anything interesting whatsoever. I mean, like Cusack’s extraneous detective character in THE FACTORY, all Cage does here is piece together things the audience already knows, and the process by which he pieces it together is so dishearteningly rote that there’s just no narrative arc at all. In fact, he correctly figures out who the villain is within the first 15 minutes, and the rest of the movie is mostly him talking to various tangentially related characters trying to find a little more physical evidence to use against the guy, and in the end (SPOILER) it turns out that A) he doesn’t really find anything incriminating and B) it doesn’t matter anyway (SPOILER).

Police procedurals are actually a pretty tough thing to get right, I think. Seems like it should be a great way to structure a gripping story, right? There’s a built-in mystery, a clear objective, an obvious protagonist and villain and a lot at stake. But actual investigations aren’t really clear-cut stories. They’re messy, they involve a lot of dead ends, false starts, and more than anything else, they involve a lot of meticulous, mostly unhelpful detail work. You can show that in a movie, but unless you’re a real master it’s just not all that cinematic. There’s a lot of reading involved, which is always death for a movie. It’s the kind of thing that can be interesting with the right details but man, you’re really gonna have to come up with some good details. And FROZEN GROUND unambiguously does not. How does he figure out who the culprit is? Someone tells him, right at the start. There’s not much cat-and-mouse here, not a lot of discovery. It’s pretty obvious what’s going on, so the only thing the movie has left to show us is how Detective John Frozen* figures out what the killer (Cusack as Det. Billy Ground**) is up to. Except that he never really learns anything relevant anyway, and we already know because we’ve been watching it happen since frame one. Come on Det. Frozen, catch up with us here, we’ve moved on. I mean, what’s the fun in watching someone else try to put together a puzzle you’ve already solved?

Deleted scene from COFFEE AND CIGARETTES.

I suppose they might have been able to milk some tension out of the agonizing process of sifting through mundane clues even though we already know the outcome, if there was some kind of ticking-timebomb scenario. Balance the tension of slow progress against the compelling need for immediate action. But as it is, just like THE FACTORY this one inexplicably avoids making it a race against time. If there’s not enough evidence to arrest the killer today, tomorrow will be fine, too. Someday in the vague future he’ll probably kill again, unless he doesn’t, but we know that as of right now he doesn’t seem to have any particular concrete plans to harm anyone. So there’s no particular reason to rush on this. Maybe Cage’s whiny wife has a point about working too hard.

That just leaves the whole thing totally narratively slack. There’s no mystery, no immediate peril and no particular interpersonal drama, so a curious lack of urgency pervades the whole thing. This seems like the least interesting part of a story which is otherwise pretty crazy, right? I mean, without any of that stuff, what exactly are we even watching here? The only answer the movie can come up with is that we’re watching one of the killer’s former victims (who he raped but failed to murder) sort of drift around, look for a job, talk about her fucked up family, smoke meth, strip, and hang out with a bunch of junkies and pimps. What is this, a sequel to BAD LIEUTENANT? I guess maybe there could have been a way to squeeze some human drama out of this situation, with this poor teenage girl who’s been fucked over so badly by life given a chance to help Det. Frozen catch one of the many guys who has treated her poorly throughout her short life. But first of all, she doesn’t really have much to contribute to the investigation, secondly, she doesn’t really do anything but kind of drift around listlessly getting into one depressing but mundane shitty situation after another, and third… well, I’ll try to be delicate here but there’s really no nice way of saying this… she’s played by Vanessa Hudgens.

I’m sure Hudgy Bear means well, and she sure tries hard here, crying, swearing, smoking, stripping, etc. But man, if there is an actress who could convincingly play this emotionally damaged, chain-smoking meth-addled teenage runaway hooker from the wrong side of the tracks, Hudgy ain’t her. I’m sorry, but putting some Green Day mascara on a HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL star does not translate to “dark and edgy” as well as the filmmakers here appear to believe it does. There’s exactly zero that rings true about this performance, which obviously isn’t really assisted by the cheeseball tough girl dialogue, either. If writer/director Scott Walker has spent any time with teenage hookers recently, he obviously hasn’t been listening very carefully to how they (or any actual humans) talk. He does, however, feel it necessary to indulge in an extremely uncomfortable leering striptease scene, so you’ve got a real sexy music video of this drugged up teenage runaway rape victim to look forward to. Classy move, FROZEN GROUND.

Writer Scott Walker struggled for weeks with the script, it just wasn't working. Then suddenly, a thought occurred. "Of Course!" he shouted, leaping from his chair. "Strip scene! How could I be so blind!?"

The movie does seem to draw the line at showing this prostitute, you know, work as a prostitute, so it seems a little weird that she’s hanging around her pimp so much. Fortunately, that would be FROZEN GROUND producer/video game character 50 “Curtis Jackson” Cent, so all is not lost. Mr. Cent rewards your attention by intriguingly portraying what may be the wussiest pimp ever committed to celluloid; he dresses pretty fly, and has Superfly’s slicked-back straightened hair, but he’s just a total weiner who’s constantly getting pushed around by everyone. It’s actually kind of a good, natural performance, and he seems a lot more like a real person than most of the main characters, believably pathetic for a small-town loser. But it’s also a totally uncharismatic and therefore uninteresting role and since he’s the producer he also gets a meandering and totally unnecessary expository subplot, so no net gain there, either.

You may think that's a pretty pimpin' coat, but remember, it's Alaska. Everyone has one. Purely practical.

If there is any reason at all to watch this (and there isn’t really) it’s gotta be Cusack himself, finally actually cast as the killer as I specifically requested in my FACTORY review. Looks like I was right, he’s a natural at this, playing a low-key but scary killer with a terrific internal intensity. He’s totally believable as a monster with a normal guy’s face; he seems off-putting and a little creepy, but not so much that you’d suspect him of his real hobby. See, turns out our man Billy Ground is a hunter, and his prey is the most dangerous game of all: scared, abused hookers who he flies out to the wilderness in his private plane so he can have them limp like 20 feet into the woods and then shoot them. What an asshole. Total Dick Cheney move, there. If that sounds like a ridiculous, perhaps even insipid, gimmick for a serial killer movie... guess what: that’s actually a genuine true part of this questionable true story. This fucking world, amiright?

So that’s pretty shocking, but in a movie this full of artifice it seems so completely outrageous as to inspire some unintentional humor. The movie, apparently realizing this, seems to include it almost apologetically, playing it way, way down and acting as if it’s not that big a deal. Unfortunately it’s the only interesting, unique thing that happens in the whole runtime, and as such is pretty much the only reason to make this movie in the first place. So they probably ought to have just gone ahead and made it into a crazy setpiece, at least got something entertaining out of it. What’s that you say, it would be sleazy and despicable to turn the real-life torture and death of these poor women into crazy, over-the-top fun for our amusement? I agree, but come on bud, that’s the whole point of making these true-life crime thrillers in the first place. I mean, the only reason this story is even remotely worth telling is that we’re morbidly interested in the mentality of serial killers. If you think that’s macabre or reprehensibly glorifying the killer, well, you might not be wrong about that, but how about you don’t make a serial killer movie, then? What, if we act all depressing and grim, it makes it OK to crank out a movie about this lowlife murderer filled with big hollywood stars? If it’s dull enough, we can pretend this isn’t a naked attempt at a cash grab using real-life headlines like a superhero franchise property?

Yes, he rapes and murders women for sport, but his pro-second Amendment attitude towards open carry still makes him an attractive candidate for the Alaska Tea Party. Look, politics is all about compromise.

Fie on that, I say. I’ll accept sleaze in exchange for entertainment. What I can’t really accept is dull, grim anti-narratives which still exploit people’s suffering but self-consciously try not to entertain you to make up for it. There’s certainly a way to make a good true-life crime thriller, ie ZODIAC or my personal favorite, CITIZEN X. But basically, they’d have to either be a lot more interesting or a lot more crazy than this one. And it’s a shame, because at the very end, finally, finally, when Cage and Cusack actually meet, things start to heat up a little, people start spiraling towards mega-acting, things start to look up for the movie… and then it just abruptly ends with a goofy duex ex machina so cliched you almost can’t believe it. Seriously, when it happened I kept waiting for a twist or something, thinking there’s no way they’d actually go for something so lazy and they were just trying to trick us into thinking things were resolved. But nope. At least THE FACTORY had a suitably laughable twist; this one just sort of stumbles to a halt, right as it was starting to get good. Shame, that.

So alas, at the end of the day THE FROZEN GROUND is an absolutely disposable paint-by-numbers with a much better cast than it deserves but absolutely nothing to offer in terms of a story or even any parts which are particularly memorable or unique or compelling or interesting, or anything you would ever watch and then remember at a point later in linear time. The movie’s discomfort with exploiting the real murders or glorifying the killer ensures that instead, it sulkily avoids anything interesting about its premise and resolutely refuses to be entertaining or involving. So all we’re left with is its unremitting grimness, which, absent anything else to sustain our interest, merely leaves it a superficial drag. Well, I’m not gonna let the same thing happen to me. If I’m ever horrifically murdered by some unstable psycho*** and 50 Cent wants to produce a movie about it, tell him to go whole hog, EVIL DEAD over-the-top on it. If I’m going to be remembered for the tragic circumstances of my death, I’ll be damned if I’ll let them be a bunch of wet blankets about it. Give me some splatter! Some crazy fish eye lenses! A weird surreal trip into the killer’s subconscious. Maybe a psychic detective or two. Oooh, and John Cusack as the killer, no wait! Cusack as both the killer and the victim! And Nicholas Cage as his imaginary accomplice, who eggs him into it like that Dog played by John Turturro in SUMMER OF SAM! OR, even better, Cage as the voice of his beloved hamster “Rex,” who plays on his insecurities, emotionally manipulates him into killing (Tracy Morgan as the voice of the wacky comic relief hamster). Yeah, I like that. Hell, it would almost be worth getting offed by some greasy muttering psycho if I was sure my death would inspire that kind of greatness.

Just leave Hudgy Bear out of it, OK? Nobody deserves that.

I think we learned who the real monster is here. That's right: Peer Pressure.

*OK, OK, it’s actually “Jack Halcombe,” go ahead, spoil my fun. Halcombe is based on real-life detective Glenn Flothe, surely a nice man who solved the real-life case but unfortunately had a name which doesn’t sound like what Hollywood detectives are named, so fuck him.

** OK OK, not really, but how great would that have been? Had Stallone made this movie in the 80’s, he’d at least have tried, you know that in your heart. Actually the name is Robert Hansen, apparently no relation to the equally notorious FBI double agent Russian spy Robert Hanssen. But seriously parents, let’s not name kids that anymore, OK?

*** From wikipedia: ”In 1977, he was imprisoned for theft of a chainsaw, diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium to control his mood swings. He was never officially ordered to take the medication, however” [emphasis mine]. I’m no trained psychologist, but that sounds red flag-ish.