Prison

Prison (1988)

Dir. Renny Harlin

Written by Irwin Yablans, C. Courtney Joyner

Starring Viggo Mortensen, Chelsea Fields, Lane Smith, Lincoln Kilpatrick, Ivan Kane, Tommy “Tiny” Lister

Well, can’t blame me for trying. Renny Harlin, one year before he directed the delightful NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4, directing Viggo Mortensen (in his first starring role!) in a haunted prison movie? Sign me the fuck up. In fact, forget the whole “can’t blame me for trying” thing; shame, shame on me for allowing even a day's time when I was aware of this movie but hadn’t yet watched it. And hey, can’t blame Renny for trying, either; he’s obviously working hard here, filling his first American movie* with nice lighting, a good cast, a couple funny bits. There’s stuff to like. But not much, not enough. And obviously not as much as there should be, based on the parts assembled here.

There’s definitely a distinct whiff of effort. The opening sequence of a guy getting executed is pretty intense, mostly thanks to Harlin’s exaggerated camerawork and a nicely evil set design. One guy later tries to escape, only to find the prison’s pipe system turns against him and brutally perforates his body before dumping the bloody mess into, appropriately, I guess, the mess hall. There’s voodoo, lots of implied prison rape (though no shower scenes, weirdly), fancy lighting shots, a guy climbs up a barbed wire rope with his bare hands, and it does have one phenomenally inspired kill which involves a chair, barbed wire, a shotgun, electricity, and two separate prison floors. And Kane Hodder shows up in the finale with that delightful cheesy 80’s animated lighting every movie made between 1979 and 1994 had. But unfortunately nothing here is able to overcome the anemic storyline, which wanders around a number of pointless tangents which lead to nothing interesting before finally settling down for the most rote possible outcome, unpredictable only in that it bafflingly has nothing whatsoever to do with any of the ostensible main characters.

Viggo and Lasagna, contemplating the different directions their careers will go.

Seriously, it’s weird, because Viggo is playing this new prisoner who looks and sounds exactly like a notorious killer who was executed in this very prison under dubious circumstances years ago (and in fact, Viggo plays that role too). You got to assume he’s a reincarnation or a son or something, and it seems like his presence must be the catalyst for all this weird stuff happening. But nope, I guess not, the fact that he looks exactly like this other dude is never addressed. In fact, he has fuck all to do in the entire movie, he just sort of stands around glowering most of the time and contributes exactly nothing to the plot (of course, he shouldn’t complain. Chelsea Fields has even less to do, she’s not even on premise for most of the movie, although at one point her home computer blows up for no reason, so that’s fun). The two people who actually have anything to do with the narrative are both old guys, a prison inmate and the asshole warden (surprise!) but the movie really wants to be about everyone else, from the Stallone-worshiping Travolta-wannabe Italian guy (I swear to you I’m serious, his name is “Lasagna.” Look it up if you don’t believe me.) to the rapey bearded guy (“Rhino,” as far as I can tell not related to the Spider-Man character recently played by Paul Giamatti) to the mild-mannered giant (“Tiny,” played by Tommy Lister**). None of these people have any relevance to the meager plot, nor are they even used as cannon fodder, nor, honestly, does anything interesting or dramatic come of them. They’re just there, taking up time. OK, Lister does have a pretty good death scene, although weirdly it’s not related to the whole haunted prison thing.

Still a less horrifying prison movie than INTO THE ABYSS.

Harlin’s infectious enthusiasm for chaos and spectacle means that this one isn’t a total wash; at least he knew to throw in an exploding computer for no reason. But a lot of this one wants to be some kind of atmospheric suspense ghost story, which isn’t really Harlin’s strong suit and anyway is a lost cause from the start because the story is so dull. At 102 minutes, the whammies are far too scant to keep any energy going, and gradually the whole thing sort of peters out.  Little surprise that it got only a limited release and promptly vanished from the face of the Earth. Weird, since writers Irwin Yablans (producer of HALOWEEN and TOURIST TRAP) and C. Courtney Joyner (writer of FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM) surely knew their way around a decent horror movie, and of course Harlin would go on to make some damn entertaining ones (including another one that same year, and as recently as last year). But I guess this just shows you can’t simply assemble a bunch of fun elements and expect to have a movie. You also got to figure out how to make it work.

On the other hand, there’s a moment when some asshole steals Viggo’s football, so he goes up to him and grabs his nuts and says “You let go of my ball, and I’ll let go of yours.” Now that’s a whammy. The movie as a whole needed a couple more of those, but at least they’ll be able to put that scene in Viggo’s Hollywood retrospective someday.

*And only second film overall, after his appropriately named Finnish debut BORN AMERICAN.

**What the fuck, I’m looking at his filmography right now, and he’s gonna be in HUMAN CENTIPEDE PART III?! With his DARK KNIGHT co-star Eric Roberts? And it’s a prison movie? What is happening to the world?

In Soviet Russia, Lighting Rides You!

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2014 CHECKLIST!

The Hunt For Dread October

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Someday Renny's gonna make that adaptation of Ulysses that he's always dreamed of, but that day was not today.
• SEQUEL: None, I guess Viggo got too expensive after TEXAS CHAINSAW 3
• REMAKE: None
• FOREIGNER: Nope, despite the fact that Harlin could barely speak English at this point in his career, this is pure Hollywood.
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No.
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: Viggo, in his first starring role.
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: None. Well, I guess Viggo was in this, TEXAS CHAINSAW 3 and THE PROPHECY, maybe he counts?
• BOOBIES: No.
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: Lots of implied non-consensual prison sex, but nothing explicit.
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Plenty of blood, but no limb loss I don't think.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: Haunted Prison, but sure.
• MONSTER: Nah.
• THE UNDEAD: Vengeful spirit of a wrongly-executed prisoner.
• POSSESSION: No, this ghost just wants to kill you.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): Nah.
• EVIL CULT: None.
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None.
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: No
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: High. Limited release only, out of print for years.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Don't conspire to execute innocent men in the electric chair, because they come back with ironically electric-themed vengeance. Unbelievably, this will be the theme for the next movie as well.
• TITLE ACCURACY: There is a Prison. Product was as described.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: Nope.

The Possession

The Possession (2012)

Dir. Ole Bornedal

Written by Juliet Snowden, Stiles White

Starring Natasha Callis, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Kyra Sedgwick, Matisyahu

One of the handsomer shameless ripoffs of THE EXORCIST that I’ve seen recently, and with one minor but fun twist: the power of Christ can’t compel anyone here. This is a strictly Jewish affair.

Yes, this unofficial sequel to A SERIOUS MAN finds Jeffrey Dean Morgan battling a dybbuk (Yiddish for “totally different from the Exorcist!”) over their disagreements as to who should be in charge of his adorable daughter’s mind. Morgan says her, or at the very least him; dybbuk thinks otherwise. Suddenly wondering if this is actually a subtle political metaphor.

Morgan  --luxuriating in his Robert-Downey-Jr-by-way-of-Seth-Rogan schlubbily handsome charm-- stars as a nice guy going through a civil but painful divorce with Kyra Sedgwick (talk about your closer!) and trying to keep his two daughters from thinking he’s a total asshole. Completely at random and for no reason at all, one day his younger daughter buys a creepy wooden box with a bunch of Hebrew written on it. It’s kind of like the HELLRAISER puzzlebox, it even has a secret unlocking mechanism that she figures out.

Well, if anything good ever comes from obviously evil ancient puzzleboxes being opened, I have yet to see the movie that proves it. This one is no different. Suddenly the cute little girl is acting all dybbuk-y and Morgan has to seek assistance from everyone’s favorite only-famous-person-with-a-payot, Matisyahu.

This looks like something a child would definitely want.

To the film’s credit, director Ole Bornedal does an excellent job getting the details right. I very much liked the obscure but unnerving contents of of the box (a bunch of tins that house obviously symbolic objects, notably a mechanical bug and a swath of cotton), I like the ballsiness of actually depicting the dybbuk literally by the film’s end. The film is striking shot, with some genuinely impressive cinematography that recalls (intentionally) Kubrick’s unsettling use of symmetry, space and minimalist design. All the performances are quite good, particularly the possessed daughter who does an amazing job for a 12-year old at being both a normal kid and a possessed monster. And it’s always nice to introduce a touch of a different culture into the horror genre, which can be so heavily dominated by wealthy white people and barely-concealed Christian imagery and themes.

Unfortunately, the movie as a whole is depressingly short on original ideas and imagery. Despite it’s classy production, the story is never able to rise above its derivative mix of possession-movie cliches and establish it’s own classic iconography and sequences. Director Bornedal says he aspired to the subtly of horror in THE SHINING and THE EXORCIST, but the problem is that those movies could afford to be subtle because of the strength of their imagination and their boundary-pushing boldness. They were free to hint, because their hints suggested a kind of unbalanced nightmarishness that made us deeply uneasy. They courted our angst with both shocking images and evocative --but never completely overt-- symbolism that wormed it’s way past logic and into the primal brain. If you’re going to suggest, the symbolic images you use need to be strong enough that they allude to something truly upsetting going on beneath the superficially placid surface. EXORCIST has tons of these. Not so much so, here. The moths are a good touch (at first I thought they were locusts as a tribute to EXORCIST II) but other than that Bornedal never seems to really find a definitive image or concept to make his own. The result is that the movie ends up a collection of very pretty versions of scenes you’ve watched a million times.

The original butterfly effect

And honestly, I’m not totally convinced that Bornedal has watched THE EXORCIST very recently. That movie has its moments of subtlety, it’s true, but it’s also a frighteningly aggressive movie in other ways. THE POSSESSION isn’t. Nothing feels shocking or threatening here; there’s nothing perverse or any sense that the movie is genuinely going to get too rough with it’s characters. It’s too polite for it’s own good, and ultimately it ends up being a little unmemorable for it.  

Still, I like Bornedal’s ambition, and I think he genuinely has the talent to make his own classic someday.* This one just doesn’t have the imagination to back him up. When you can’t even think of a better title for this movie about a possession than “THE POSSESSION,” it may be time to go back and take another swing at adding something more memorable.

*He already made original NIGHTWATCH, which I hear is excellent, but unfortunately also the American remake of NIGHTWATCH, which I can confirm is horrible. I figure this brings him back to neutral.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2013 CHECKLIST!

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No, "based on a true story," that story being that Jewish dybbuk folklore exists.
• SEQUEL: No.
• REMAKE: Basically.
• HAMMER STUDIOS: No.
• SPAGHETTI NOCTURNE: No.
• MORE (PETER) CUSHING FOR THE PUSHING? No.
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: Jeffery Dean Morgan, Kyra Sedgewick
• BOOBIES: Naw
• DECAPITATIONS OR DE-LIMBING: No, PG-13
• ENTRAILS? Nope
• CULTISTS: None.
• ZOMBIES: No
• VAMPIRES: No
• SLASHERS: No
• CURSES: No
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Low. Theater film a few years back.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A

I had to think about this one a good bit, because it's so well made but also kind of dull. It's probably only 3 hooks in terms of entertainment, but it felt a little wrong to give it the same grade as SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES which is far more ugly and dumb. Ole Bornedal, don't ever say I never did nothin' for ya.

Murders in the Rue Morgue

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971)

Dir. Gordon Hessler

Starring Jason Robards, Herbert Lom, Michael Dunn, Christine Kaufman

People have been adapting Poe stories since the very beginning of cinema, and it’s easy to understand why: Poe stories are filled with irresistible imagery, articulated by a true master storyteller with a uniquely nightmarish imagination (which also incidentally, tended to imagine impressive set pieces which can be created on a budget. It’s not like we’re talking H.P. Lovecraft giant monsters and universes of unimaginable horror). According to the Olde Farmer’s Wikipedia, the earliest known Poe film was made in 1909, and they’ve been cranking ‘em out ever since then, perhaps reaching a high water mark with the many Corman-produced adaptations in the 50s and 60s.

Unfortunately, despite a full century of efforts, I don’t think there’s a single film out there which really quite qualifies as a direct adaptation. The reason Poe was such an indelible master of horror fiction was that his voice was so unique, and his command of language was so stunning. Visualizing Poe’s mind tends to lead to something less than the poetry of his words, and has resulted in some morose but uninspired films which pick pieces of his work but fail to capture the essential character of Poe’s prose. That, and a lot of his stories are not particularly eventful. Take the words out of THE RAVEN and you’re left with a guy sitting in a room where a bird flies through the window. The greatness is in Poe’s bruising psychological violence and his profound ability to evoke dread comes through his peerless command of his medium of the written word. There’s plenty of room for someone with an equal mastery of cinema to capture that same haunting poetry – but it would take someone with a mastery of cinema equal to Poe’s mastery of the written word.

Which is a roundabout way of saying Gordon Hessler ain’t that guy. No offense to him intended; I don’t know who would be. David Lynch, maybe? Francis Coppola, in his heyday? Suggestions are welcome. We’ll see James McTiegue take a crack at it next year, but, uh, I don’t know that I’m holding my breath for him to be Poe’s artistic equal.* That being said, I’m excited as shit for that movie. Why? Simple. Just because you’re not going to create an enduring and transformative piece of art which will forever become part of the world’s great expressions of humanity doesn’t mean you’re not going to make something fun.

So I’m down with taking a visual or narrative cue from Poe and running with it, just so long as you throw me a murderous gorilla or two somewhere down the line. Bait the line with Jason Robards and Herbert Lom, and I’ll bite.

Director Hessler, in his somewhat surprisingly candid interview, is refreshingly honest about his inability to measure up to Poe, or even the long history of adaptations that came before his. In an effort to find some new ground to explore, he brings a meta approach to Poe, setting a series of unrelated killings in the context of a theater troupe which is mounting a production of Murders in the Rue Morgue. Postmodernism, of course, is the last refuge of a scoundrel, but to his credit Hessler doesn’t milk it as a gimmick; it’s more just a colorful poetic backdrop against which he sets a mostly unrelated story.

Said unrelated story finds Jason Robards (looking and dressing exactly like Vincent Price, who was originally up for this role) as the leader of an acting troupe which is shocked when one of their own is murdered during the performance. Sadistically, the murderer dons the dead actor’s costume (he’s playing the gorilla) and performs the rest of the show without anyone being the wiser! Now, many of Robard’s oldest friends an colleagues are getting murdered, but surely this doesn’t have anything to do with a former actor played by the obviously sinister Herbert Lom who went crazy and is definitely, for sure dead now, seriously, why even bother checking, has to be someone else. And it even more definitely doesn’t have anything to do with the events that occurred when Robard’s young wife (Christine Kaufman) was a child and Robards nursed an unrequited love for her mother, who by a complete coincidence was married to Lom’s character.

So it’s a pretty silly story, but there are a couple of effective bits to it. For one, Kaufman keeps blacking out and having a recurring dream about a weird abandoned house, a falling actor, and a sinister guy in a mask wielding an axe. For much of the film, the cinematography tends to be pretty standard and occasionally even a tad amateurish, but the dream sequences are sumptuously photographed and intriguingly staged. They have a dark and evocative poetry to them which actually does recall Poe’s carefully suggestive style. They hit on that subconscious level that I’m always going on about. You know how I get when I’ve been drinking. I never said I wasn’t predicable.

So the dream sequences are great, and the rest of the film has some nice atmospheric moments and a great Poe-y set in a dilapidated mansion and its accompanying crypt. But the whole thing is mostly crippled by its lack of a compelling central character arc. Robards --an actor I love—seems completely directionless here, wandering throughout the whole film without finding a clear anchor for his character. The interview with Hessler sheds some light here, as he remembers that two weeks into filming Robards was regretting not taking Lom’s role, which he correctly identified as more interesting. Unfortunately, Lom is a dead fish in his role, too – he seems barely awake in a part which calls from extreme intensity. Kaufman’s character is the only one the narrative follows all the way through, but she’s a wimpy victim throughout the whole thing, passing out at every opportunity and relying on the men around her to further any plot point. The one person here who walks away with a solid win is pioneering dwarf actor Michael Dunn, a charisma monster who somehow makes his thankless sidekick role the focal point of the whole film.

In his interview, director Hessler is admirably straightforward about the whole thing (even speculating that this film is what precipitated Robards’ career downgrade from leading man to character actor) and pretty honest about what life was like for a journeyman genre director in the 70s. He says that you had to do what you were assigned and didn’t always have a lot of control over the material, and that all you could hope to do was try to elevate whatever studio project came your way. I’d say that he can probably walk away feeling that he accomplished that, but despite a generally classy production and a few inspired sequences, the thing is an unwieldy bore.

Oddly, even though I think it's probably safe to say that Robards is a better actor than Vincent Price, getting Price in the central role here might have been enough to make it something a touch more memorable. Even on his worst day, Price has an irresistible magnetism to him which would have made the slippery character at this film’s center a more compelling force and perhaps would have given the whole enterprise a bit more focus. Price is a performer; he’s compelling to watch no matter what he’s doing. Robards is an actor, stranded without motivation and direction. Part of taking iffy material and elevating it is applying to the elements of human psychology that go beyond a single individual’s personality and motivation. Price knows how to tap into that bottomless, profound subconscious state that hits on a level which is more profound than logic, even if it is perhaps less personal. Poe did too. Maybe that combination makes more sense than most folks give it credit for.

*Edit from 2012: That turned out to be a fairly astute assumption.

Dead Birds

Dead Birds (2004)

Dir. Alex Turner

Starring Henry Thomas, Nicki Aycox, Patrick Fugit, Michael Shannon, Isaiah Washington

                                             I know, I know. Terrible poster.

DEAD BIRDS is one of those unfortunate films which is actually better than it ought to be but not as good as it needs to be. Honestly, those are always much more frustrating than the ones that never had a chance. CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD is what it is, and it's OK with that. DEAD BIRDS wants to be great. And it is good, but to really work it would have needed to be great.

Here's the pitch: sometime during the civil war, a ragtag team of confederate renegades (renegades even by confederate standards) steal a bunch of gold from a bunch of other confederates, and decide to hide out in a creepy abandoned farmhouse until the heat is off. They’re surprisingly unconcerned when the first thing they encounter is a hideous naked mole rat dog with a human face. But all they have to do is spend one night with five criminals and a bag of gold inside a creepy abandoned Southern plantation house. What could go wrong?

I'll give the film credit. It's as standard a haunted house tale as they make, but the historical setting gives it a bit of flavor. Period horror is one of the last great untapped natural resources of American horror. There have been a few attempts, but they range from similarly frustrating (RAVENOUS) to the baffling (THE KEEP) to the merely unnecessary (TREMORS 3). This one doesn't do a whole lot with the period setting, but at least it’s a good excuse to have scenes mostly lit by unconvincing lamplight. Anyway, after so many films of vacationing teenagers, it’s nice to have a group of characters coming from a different background.

The film also boldly courts atmosphere and tension with a leisurely pace that doesn't feel the need to shout “Boo!” every few minutes. It would work better if the cinematography and music were a bit stronger, however. For all its ambitions at creating an eerie mood, the shots are unimaginatively constructed, the editing is pedestrian, and the lighting amateurish. But give 'em credit for trying; although it never quite works as well as it needs to, its slow but deliberate pace and slowly ratcheting tension does manage to conjure some real – if mild – dread. But yeah, mild doesn't quite cut it.

The problem this turkey has is that its not quite imaginative enough to know what to do with its interesting scenario, so despite the advantage of having a new era to play with, the vast majority of the film just coasts on the oldest haunted house clichés in the book – yes, they have the scene where there's a crying girl in the corner with her face down and a guy walks up and puts his hand on her shoulder. Ghost, ghost, scary face, ghost, ghost, hands grab you from an unexpected place, cute kid gets possessed, ghost, ghost, disemboweling, avid-fart flashback to explain everything, awkward twist ending, bada bing, and we're out. It's that by-the-numbers.

                                     Not even as scary as it looks, I'm afraid.


That could be OK if the filmmaking was a little better (see: THE OTHERS), but there's hardly a shot in the whole thing that doesn't look mediocre and cheap, so not only have you seen all this before, you've seen it done much, much better. Frustratingly, there's sort of an interesting idea in the backstory, where we learn that Muse Watson (so unexpectedly good in DUSK TIL DAWN 2, remember?) was a plantation owner who started sacrificing his slaves in an effort to bring back his dead wife. That's a little unusual AND ties nicely into the period AND even has some possible metaphorical readings about slavery and race relations in America. So it goes without saying that that whole story is crammed into a 45-second frenetic pile of expository flashback.

Instead, they figure we're more interested in watching a bunch of stereotypes running around dealing with the resulting generic ghosts making scary faces at them every now and again. Not so much. Make that prequel, then we'll talk.

The cast is all over the place, but they do a bit to sell the weightiness. Michael Shannon and Mark Boone Junior play one-dimensional stereotypes, but Patrick Fugit and Isaiah Washington commit to their quiet, underwritten characters with an intensity which occasionally brings the film to a fitful sort of life. So that brings the total to 50/50. Unfortunately, Henry Thomas tragically plays the confederates’ leader (and our nominal main character) as a cross between Freddie Prinz Jr. and David Schwimmer. Putting a beard on some pretty boy is not the same thing as making him tough, guys. This guy couldn’t take ET in a fight, let alone command the respect of a bunch of thieving murderous racist good old boys. The script keeps insisting he’s a charismatic leader type, but he’s consistently defeated in the intensity department by Patrick Fugit. Speaking of the Fuge, he surprised the heck out of me in this role, adding layers of depth to this character far beyond his scripted role. He’s rewarded with a great possession scene which he sells with a conviction probably unworthy of this thing.

Watching the accompanying making of doc, it’s clear that director Alex Turner (in his first full-length film) was trying to make something special here, and you gotta admire that ambition. I’m not convinced that he has the instincts to back up his moxie at this point in his career, however; the surprisingly candid doc catches him locking the writer in a hotel room and telling him not to come out til he has an “acceptable” script. At issue is the writer’s assertion that Isaiah Washington’s character should kill himself towards the script’s finale as a way to impart to the viewer the hopelessness of his situation. Turner argues this is an old cliché --which is perhaps a fair concern-- but I’m not convinced that the solution he did go with (Washington is startled by a demon and disappears in a puff of smoke) is really much better. That kind of sums up the way the whole thing plays: the intention of achieving greatness without having quite the imagination to create great substance.