Bruiser

Bruiser (2000)
Dir. George A. Romero
Starring Jason Flemyng, Peter Stormare, Leslie Hope, Tom Atkins

    Let’s start things off on a negative note. BRUISER isn’t really a very good film at all, and it’s a significant step backwards from Romero’s previous film, the enjoyable DARK HALF. It looks cheap, much of it is poorly staged, the acting is mostly pretty bad, its central themes are muddled, and it features some embarrassingly bad creative decisions which undermine most of what it’s trying to do. But, it’s worth looking at because aside from its myriad of obvious and embarrassing flaws, it has two major strengths. First, it continues to explore the basic theme of controlling our antisocial impulses which Romero had previously examined in MONKEY SHINES: AN EXPERIMENT IN GOD DAMN FEAR, and THE DARK HALF. Second, it has a really great horror premise which it fails to completely ruin, despite the pretty thorough bungling that it goes through.


    Let’s look at where Romero's career stood at this point. MONKEY SHINES (1988) looked like a turning point for him, getting his big studio break after nearly two decades of challenging independent filmmaking made him a recognizable name. But it was a big flop, the studio basically recut it against his will, failed to promote it properly, and then ceased to exist shortly after its debut. Then, his Dario Argento collaboration TWO EVIL EYES also failed at the box office (debuting in 17th place with a final take reported as $349,000. Yes, thousand.) Finally, with THE DARK HALF, he had what looked like a sure win, with an Academy Award Winner starring in a Stephen King adaptation. Most people agreed it was pretty good, and it even made a little money! And what comes of it? It's seven years before he can get another film made, and even then he has to go and find Canal+ producers in France to get it actually funded and distributed. So he’s done exactly what you’re supposed to do, played the game, did his best, and now it’s 2000 and he’s exactly back where he fucking started, making cheapie independent movies with foreign capital.

So perhaps it’s little coincidence that this is exactly the predicament BRUISER’s protagonist finds himself in. Henry Creedlow (Jason Flemyng) is a shy, unassuming guy who follows the rules, doesn’t make a fuss, and quietly does his job. And what does he get for his efforts? He’s living in a permanently unfinished house in the creepy suburban sprawl which he can’t afford with his bored, bitchy wife, while failing to get any credit from his outrageous, coke snorting-model-molesting-party-animal boss (Peter Stormare) who also happens to be fucking Henry’s real love, the equally unfulfilled Rosemary (Leslie Hope). Oh, and he has a douchey “best friend” who manages his finances and tells him not to worry about the details when he muses that it seems like his money should be going further. So he gets nothing but abuse at home, nothing but frustration at work, his best friend is obviously stealing from him, and finally, when compelled to go to Peter Stormare’s party, he gets to find out his wife is also having an affair with his boss. So both the ladies in his life are getting into this guy. This might have something to do with the fact that he has the awesome name Milo Styles and is Peter Stormare in full-on wild and crazy guy mode, which makes his universal attraction somewhat understandable. But you still got to feel for this poor bastard Henry. 

 Also at the party: Rosemary (Miles’ nominal wife) has the guests mold creepy expressionless plaster masks and then decorate them to symbolize the person who created them. Great party, lady. I mean, we all remember the classic creepy mask-making scene from ANIMAL HOUSE, right? Just as much fun here. Anyway, Henry is too shy to do it, but he’s fascinated by the masks (in fact, he has more reaction to them than to his wife blowing his boss not five feet away).

    The next day, Henry awakens to discover he’s wearing the mask. Well, not wearing it, exactly. It’s attached to his face, or has replaced his face. Looking into the mirror, he sees only this expressionless plaster facade. And once he realizes that this is his new face, it doesn’t even take an hour before he’s committed his first murder.

    So it’s a great horror premise, especially for Romero, because it makes literal the upsetting psychological truth that de-individualizing allows people to do things they would never do if they had to look at themselves or knew other people could look at them. It’s why the Klan wears those hoods. It’s why executioners used to wear shrouds. It’s why internet message boards are filled with horrifying debasements of humanity. Why people are so rude on the telephone. Why Cobra Commander is such a dick. This has been scientifically studied at some length, and it’s a phenomenon which is measurable and repeatable. Several truly upsetting studies were done back in the 50s, when you could do these sort of things in the name of science. 

    So not only does Flemyng now look creepy as all get out, he’s free to act without an identity. You can argue that the mask frees him of his individuality and his humanity, or you can argue that he was such a blank already that the mask merely externalized the emptiness which already consumed him (I think the film leans more to the latter) but either way it’s an exciting metaphor that should have been an easy home run. I mean, so far we’ve seen Romero depict men who were horrified to find out their darker desires were being acted out against their will. Now we have the added wrinkle that this protagonist is actually doing it himself -- he’s taken his loss of identity as free reign to act out all his most antisocial fantasies and get revenge against pretty much the whole world. He IS the Dark Half. He’s his own helper monkey. Rather than resisting his urges to lash out at the world, he leaps for them at the first opportunity. All it takes is giving up his face and his soul.

I mean, what a great horror premise, right? And especially great for Romero, who (as we’ve seen) loves these highly literalized metaphors. Freed of the need to justify his actions to a human being, the first thing he does is savagely murder the cleaning lady who was bitching about the occupants of the house in Spanish. Where Romero used to seem to think most people would resist their violent urges, here we see just how quickly Henry’s savagery comes out and consumes him once he’s given an opportunity, and how fast any kind of empathy or moderation recedes. The minute he stops holding back, his violence just explodes outwards and he becomes, basically, Jason -- a masked psycho indiscriminately chopping up anyone he feels wronged him in some way. It fits right in with DARK HALF and MONKEY SHINES’ overwhelming paranoia of letting bad thoughts slip into the real world.

Except that Romero doesn’t play it quite like that. He takes what is clearly a horror concept of a guy becoming a monster and shoots it like it’s some kind of empowerment experience*. Suddenly Henry is able to stand up for himself, to right the wrongs that were done to him by everyone in his life. Henry’s enemies are such awful assholes themselves that it basically becomes a revenge fantasy, where you get to cheer for Henry blowing away the cheating wife, the thieving best friend, etc. Romero even has a Greedo-shot-first moment where Bestie goes for his gun, to make it all nice and legal. Stand your ground, faceless rage machine-- no moral ambiguity to get in the way of our fun.

But any enjoyment you might be able to get from a well-executed revenge fantasy is completely demolished by the fact that this is all Henry’s fault anyway. Yes, people have been taking advantage of him, treating him like shit, whatever. But I don’t buy his whiny victim routine. He could have left his bitch wife any time, could have told his friend to let him see his finances, could have told his boss he wants a raise. But he never did. Instead he said nothing, sat there day after day in the middle of the miserable, empty life he built for himself, and decided it was everyone else’s fault. And now we’re supposed to root for him to murder everyone who ever hurt his feelings? You’ve got only yourself to blame, you putty-faced prick. 

All this climaxes in his least satisfying but admittedly most colorful murder, where he attends a giant costumed warehouse rave / Misfits show (where he blends in because he’s wearing a mask) and uses one of the lasers from their laser light show to shoot a hole in the skull of Peter Stormare, who is at the time suspended over the crowd in some sort of drug-fueled sex harness. It’s not quite as cool as it sounds, because it’s kind of poorly staged, but it’s still a winningly ridiculous setup. Problem is, he’s already killed wifey and best friend, and now he’s going after his boss, who doesn’t really have any personal problem with Henry. You’re saving this guy for last? All he did was ignore him at work, I don’t think he personally cares enough about Henry to even be mean to him. I mean, he may be a coke-snorting-model-banging-wife-swapping-misogynist-nutball-Russian-porno-kingpin, but that actually makes him at least 6 adjectives more interesting than silent, resentful Henry. Who are you gonna root for, the hilarious and outrageous asshole, or the guy who’s going on a murder rampage because his feelings got hurt? It’s like if Jim hacked Stifler to death with a at the end of AMERICAN PIE and we were supposed to find it satisfying and cathartic. And Jim is about a hundred times more likable than Henry.     

Part of the problem is Flemyng, who is an actor I usually love but who was terribly wrong for this part. Flemyng’s superpower is the sly, witty, underdog charm which is always simmering just below the surface, spilling out his eyes and lingering on the clipped end of his jangling British cadence. Here, unfortunately, he’s playing a consummately unwitty, awkward blank slate, eyes hidden behind an expressionless mask, and with a somewhat labored American accent to boot. Romero was smart to cast an great underdog, but then we never get to see anything redeeming or interesting about Henry before his big murderous conversion. Which in my opinion makes him not so much an underdog as a boring loser. We’re not gonna root for the guy just because his life sucks. You’ve gotta have something going for you that we like. Self-actualizing doesn’t just mean lashing out at things that upset you; it means actually cultivating the things that are worth standing up for. Romero doesn’t seem to quite get that. 

It’s not too hard to imagine why. Romero had to be in such a frustrating place at this point in his career that maybe just the very act of lashing out seemed empowering. He’d been an underdog from the start, working diligently, staying positive, imagining it would pay off. And it never quite did, or at least not in the way he might have hoped, where he’d have more financial freedom and more opportunity to direct. After all that time, how are you going to convince yourself to keep up the optimism? It’s natural to feel some resentment. You spend too much time --like the protagonists from MONKEY SHINES of THE DARK HALF-- carefully controlling your thoughts and worrying about what might happen if you gave in to your darker impulses, and eventually you’re gonna go nuts and simply explode. So even though BRUISER explores the same theme, it’s almost a repudiation of the self-denial subtext those films put forward. But unless you just spent 30 years making serious, imaginative horror films only to find yourself right back where you started, you’re not gonna identify with this creep Henry very much. It might feel liberating to Romero to finally show a guy snapping and just going with it, but from an objective perspective there’s just no way to side with this asshole. Romero should have starred in it himself and had his faceless avatar hack up a bunch of movie studio execs -- that, I might have been able to cheer for. 

Since BRUISER (which, by the way, refers to the name of the Maxim-esque mens’ magazine Henry and Milo work for) Romero hasn’t exactly slacked off, but he hasn’t returned to this curious theme of self-control which runs through his work from 1988 to 2000. He did the pretty respectable LAND OF THE DEAD, which revisits the political and social allegories from the earlier DEAD films, but DIARY and SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD are even sloppier and less coherent than BRUISER. So in some ways, this one feels like the end of the line for Romero, and his admission that he, like Henry, has pretty much given up trying to make it work. In one of the few scenes in the film which feel like something approximating humanity, Henry tells his long-time unrequited love that it’s too late for him, but she should break her own miserable cycle and live a happy life. Maybe in a way that’s Romero telling future indie filmmakers to not try the frustrating path he went down, but instead to follow their own dreams to a more rewarding future. If this cycle of films at all represents Romero’s own inner struggle for peace, I sincerely hope he found it. He’s a unique guy and, flaws and all, no one else could have made the particular movies he did. I’ll always hold out hope that he’ll make one more great one,** but even if he doesn’t I hope he doesn’t feel like Henry, living unnoticed in his half-finished dream house. 

You’re a good man, George Romero. Even when you’re not of the living dead.

*IMDB confirms this was his intention: According to George A. Romero and his wife Christine Forest on the DVD commentary on DAWN OF THE DEAD, the distributors of Bruiser (2000) sold it as a Romero horror film (example of that is the poster with the gashes on the white face). Both Romero and Forest felt that it wasn't just a horror film but more of a story of a man who is going through difficulties in his life. The fate of selling [sic] this movie as a horror film was this movie ended up going to video instead of theaters. 

**Also to be inducted into the “I hope they’ll make one more great one!” hall of fame: John Carpenter, Wes Craven, John McTiernan, Walter Hill, Dario Argento, Kevin Smith.

Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Fear

Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Fear (1988)
Dir. George Romero
Starring Jason Beghe, Joyce Van Patten, John Pankow, Stanley Tucci, Stephen Root, Frank Welker

Continuing our “Not of the Living Dead” expedition into George Romero’s less shambling/lurching/intestines-eating cinematic exploits, we find ourselves at MONKEY SHINES, which wikipedia says is “sometimes” subtitled “AN EXPERIMENT IN FEAR,” but obviously should be all the time and will be every time I speak of it and anytime anyone wishes to speak of it to me without fear or immediate and severe recrimination. If it is indeed an experiment in fear, I would say that if our hypothesis was that the film would inspire fear, the hypothesis was not supported by the evidence gathered. The problem is, the experiment is invalid anyway, because it’s impossible to repeat and hence has no predictive power. But it’s an interesting experiment to watch, because it represents a turning point in young George Romero’s career and it involves monkeys.

    
     Romero is now a venerable well-respected grayhair, fighting a never-ending battle with Martin Scorsese over who can successfully wear the thickest possible eyeglasses without falling over. But there was a time when he was a young indie upstart. In fact, he spent the first two decades of his career, since his 1968 debut, making cheapie independent films including the classic trilogy of NIGHT, DAWN, and DAY (he never got around to TEATIME OF THE DEAD). So when a guy finally gets his big studio break after 9 films and 20 years, it’s kind of a big deal.
  

He responded with MONKEY SHINES, an odd film by any metric you want to use. For one thing, it’s odd to see a Romero film that looks this good. They obviously spared no expense in pursuing the vision of this already-legendary director they’d hired, providing decent actors, decent lighting, nice camera equipment, a few location shots, real monkeys, the whole deal. You can practically smell the catered buffet. But it’s funny, because other than maybe buying the rights to the novel this is based on* there’s not really any reason Romero couldn’t have made this as an independent film. It’s mostly one location, no big actors, few special effects. I would say that Romero builds the film like a guy who isn’t used to having a decent budget at his disposal, but come to think of it that never seemed to stop him in the past. The big biker attack in DAWN looks like it cost as much as this whole film just by itself. So for whatever reason, his big studio debut is a small-scale affair, inward focused and claustrophobic rather than extroverted and explosive. Maybe the monkey had a really great agent and walked away with half the budget, who knows?

Anyway, the result here is that we have a kind of reverse REAR WINDOW. Which I guess would be FRONT WINDOW, or maybe FRONT WALL. Alan (Jason Beghe) is a star athlete and law student who becomes a quadriplegic after a freak car accident. Increasingly embittered and isolated, he gets a second chance at life when his Herbert West-esque best friend Geoff gives him a helper monkey named Ella who (unbeknownst to anyone else) is also a subject in an intelligence-building experiment. Ella and Alan bond immediately, and everything seems fine until suddenly Alan’s enemies begin turning up dead. Is it a coincidence, or is Ella somehow acting out Alan’s subconscious anger? Here's a hint. The movie is called MONKEY SHINES.

So, in contrast to REAR WINDOW’s voyeuristic interest in whether someone else is a murderer, Alan is even more disabled and has to solve the mystery of whether he is somehow complicit in murder. Even though he doesn’t know how he’s directly responsible, Alan is wracked with guilt that his unspoken anger is being acted out -- commendably, given that the people getting snuffed are inarguably a bunch of irredeemable assholes and at least one is played my Stanley Tucci. This strikes me as especially interesting given its odd thematic similarity to my last Romero film, THE DARK HALF. That one is about a man who finds his fictional alter ego has come to life and if lashing out at people he loves. Here, our protagonist finds himself in the awkward position of feeling guilty over the death of people he hates. In both cases, we have heroes who find themselves responsible for darker aspects of themselves which they never actually acted on. Both have darker qualities --which are not necessarily unusual or unjustified-- and find that for reason beyond their control, outside forces are acting based on these qualities. I mean, Alan has perfectly good reasons to be angry, particularly at the people who end up getting killed (the doctor who botched his surgery and crippled him ends up running off with his bitch fiance. I’d argue that’s about as good a reason to be grumpy as has ever existed). But both movies have a deep horror of the parts of ourselves we are least proud of somehow manifesting their desires against our will.

A quick bit of biographical research on Romero finds nothing in his history which would seem relevant to this odd bit of metaphysical paranoia. By all accounts, he seems like a nice guy. For fucks sake, it was a bit of film he did for MR. RODGERS that inspired him to go into indie filmmaking.** But then again, Alan and Thad Beaumont (from THE DARK HALF) seem pretty nice, too. So do I, I hope. Maybe that’s what makes it so scary. We’re all people who try as hard as possible to do the right thing, to ignore the devil (or monkey) on our shoulder, but in acknowledging that we’re trying to do the right thing we have to admit that there’s some small aspect of ourselves that might choose the wrong thing if not properly controlled. The price of controlling our darker impulses is that we’re always living in fear that they might, somehow, slip past our defenses and out into the real world. And I imagine most human beings know the horror of losing control and giving in to our demons at one time or another. Neither DARK HALF nor MONKEY SHINES has a lot of explicitly scary scenes, but they both understand how fundamentally terrifying it would be to watch helplessly as you completely lose control of that part of yourself and find it acting against your wishes. And the inherent fear that it’s more of you than you’d like to admit.

MONKEY SHINES ups the ante a bit by making Alan’s murderous avatar more than just a murderous evil twin, like DARK HALF does. In this case, the killer is Alan’s helper monkey Ella, played to the adorable hilt by renowned monkey actor Boo***. Ella is shown to be highly intelligent and loyal, and in fact is a godsend for poor paralyzed Alan, who bonds with her immediately. But as they start to ‘shine’ with each other**** she begins to bring out the less inhibited, more reactionary animal side of Alan. It’s hard to argue that she’s exactly a villain, though; she’s intelligent enough to kill, but it never seems like she has a human understanding of right and wrong, good and evil. So really, the fact that she becomes a killer is more the fault of humans who are acting on her -- through Alan’s monkey mind-meld and Geoff’s crazy experiments on her brain. Monkeys can’t be expected to rise above their animal nature, but humans are (perhaps unfairly and even unrealistically) supposed to exercise control, even of their very thoughts. The fact that Alan doesn’t do so dooms poor Ella as well, an innocent victim of her own genes. Just one more thing to feel guilty about.

MONKEY SHINES isn’t much of a horror movie on the surface (even once the monkey goes apeshit, it’s not too terrifying because it’s a damn monkey) but as a really bleak drama it works pretty well. Again, a big part of that comes from Romero’s steadfast determination to make a very literal, non-subjective film. He simply shows us what is happening, and lets the underlying horror of losing control carry it. As ridiculous as the premise is, Romero’s lack of stylistic trappings and the committed performance of the actors means it never feels like a joke. In particular, watching Alan’s simmering frustration at his newfound helplessness (both as a physically and mentally functional adult) works brilliantly to help you feel his plight in a way which never has to go for DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY-esque filmatic gimmicks. (And of course, if you feel his frustration and anger too, it makes you a little more complicit in the carnage that eventually comes from it.) There’s something about the straightforward approach that Romero uses which completely defuses heckling, and even the rare sex scene between a woman and a quadriplegic feels genuine. The monkey rampage at the end may not exactly be the stuff of nightmares, but it does feel convincingly desperate, and you care enough about the characters that you at least don’t want them to be taken down by a vengeance-minded monkey helper.

So, another interesting entry into the “Not of the Living Dead” cannon, which plays with a surprising amount of the same themes. We’ll look at a further elaboration on one man’s ability to control his darker impulses next in BRUISER, where we’ll find out what happens when you become your own evil avatar. For one thing, someone is definitely going to be shot with a laser while hanging suspended from a sex harness at a huge costumed rave while the Misfits perform. Which is something MONKEY SHINES ought to have had too, now that I think about it. They at least needed to get some mileage out of the creepy cymbal-crashing monkey on the poster (who isn’t in the movie, unfortunately; we’d have to wait until TOY STORY 3 before someone really milked some evil out of that little bastard). As an experiment in fear, this one leaves some unanswered questions.

*NOT by Stephen King, amazingly. Sure structured like one of his. Or maybe its just his evil twin pen name?


**Says wikipedia. But even if that’s bullshit, it’s so great that I’m going to repeat it to everyone I know until it becomes true.


***Again, not written by Stephen King.


****Ella is also voiced by Frank Welker, aka Megatron, Nibbler, and every cartoon animal not voiced by Don Messick.

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.