The Dark (1993)

The Dark (1993)

Dir. Craig Pryce

Written by Robert C. Cooper

Starring Steven McHattie, Cynthia Belliveau, Jaimz Woolvett, Dennis O’Connor, Brion James

            THE DARK (1993, as opposed to the underrated 2003 John Fawcett film of the same name, or the 2018 German horror film which also has the same name) is a fun, silly little monster movie with a big heart and an absolutely unforgivably generic title. I mean, seriously, THE DARK? Some of the movie takes place at night, and some of it in dimly-lit underground tunnels, that is the extent to which this movie has anything to do with darkness of any kind. What it does have to do with is a giant man-eating super-rat, and it absolutely screams for a title like TUNNEL OF UN-LOVE or TY-RAT-OSAURUS REX, or BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS or something like that. Or KING RAT. Something colorful. Something with some personality. Something that would let you know you’re in for a good time if you’re the sort of person who would enjoy a movie with a giant man-eating super-rat. I do not feel THE DARK adequately conveys that point.

It begins by introducing us to Gary “Hunter” Henderson (Stephen McHattie, PONTYPOOL, MOTHER!), a normal guy who happens to be a witness to some kind of subterranean monster attack while moodily drinking whisky in the rain at his wife’s gravesite. This gets him on the bad side of fanatical FBI agent Buckner (prolific 80’s character actor Brion James, BLADE RUNNER) who is super pissed at this mysterious TREMORS wannabe for killing his partner. He threatens Henderson if he ever talks about what he saw, and takes the additional and possibly unwarranted step of also beating him up right there in the FBI interrogation room, just in case.

Of course, he didn’t count on the fact that this incident would transform “Hunter” into a leather-jacket wearing, whisky-swigging-in-the-rain motorcycle-riding rugged individualist outlaw scientist who devotes his life to hunting the monster. So two years later, he’s back in town with a James Dean wardrobe and a duffle bag of monster-hunting tools like fucking Van Helsing. He suspects the town graveyard where he first glimpsed the beast is the key to discovering its identity. Why it took him and everyone else two years to figure out that this subterranean critter lives in the same spot they last observed it I don’t know, but anyway he spent the two years becoming a badass with that very particular set of skills it’s gonna take to bring this errant man-eater to justice.

This has been his sole, all-consuming obsession for exactly 712 days, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be distracted by a quick side quest to forcibly eject a rowdy biker harassing the waitress at a local diner, and then get his ass kicked by the tuff’s two friends who were apparently just sitting outside while opponent #1 had a leisurely coffee at the bar(?). Fortunately, it turns out the waitress --whose name is Tracy, (Cynthia Belliveau, BLUE MONKEY)-- always wanted to abandon her life and live on the road with a devil-may-care monster-hunting badass obsessive, so she grabs a shotgun, saves him, hops on his bike behind him to make a big escape, and, just to put a period at the end of the sentence, she shoots the bikers’ parked hogs, causing a huge fiery explosion and the tuffs to look really bummed out while despondently muttering, “that bitch!”

            Obviously this kind of exciting day calls for a night of hot sex, which the two quickly accomplish. But don’t forget that he’s a loner, Dottie, a rebel.

“You think you can just save my life, have sex with me, and then leave?” She asks, scandalized.*

“This is something I have to do alone,” he grunts. But of course, she’s gonna tag alone.

            McHattie is always good, and he seems to be having a lot of fun playing the stoic badass cliche here. He has a bunch of sarcastic one-liners (“I hope I’m the only one here who’s hungry,” he later quips, while infiltrating a giant monster tunnel) which he wisely reads with uniformly straight-faced seriousness. This is absolutely the right move, because it makes him seem less like a lame teenager who thinks he’s funny, and more like some kind of slightly deranged zen master prone to sharing little nuggets of philosophy. It’s a performance that gets the goods out of the ol’ outlaw hero chestnut while still being just a little bit loopy, which is a good description of the movie as a whole.

 It’s no surprise McHattie is great, but, amazingly, I think I actually like Belliveau even better as the up-for-anything Tracy. She plays the role with a really endearing dorkiness, full of earnestly goofy line readings that somehow make it make perfect sense that this is the kind of lady who would discover Hunter’s scrapbook of moody giant primordial rat sketches, and rather than getting weirded out that he’s an obsessive monster-hunting nutcase, instead frets that he might be married. When the asshole biker guy calls her “bitch,” she responds with, “Are you too stupid to read?” and then when he looks blank and confused, she points to her nametag and says, “‘bitch’ is not my name,” with an attitude that she honestly can’t imagine how this guy could be stupid enough to think her name is “bitch,” I mean honestly, who would be named ‘bitch,’ anyway, that’s just ridiculous on its face. She’s completely adorable and frankly I would watch a dozen more movies this terrible or slightly worse starring this pair.

            Anyway, while all this is going on, we’re also introduced to the pair of gravedigging grunts at the local cemetery where this is all going to be going down. Like MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE, one of them is rich guy’s son Ed (Jaimz Woolvett, J.A.G.), who has been sent to do some blue collar work (digging graves?) to build some character. Unusually and enjoyably, he’s not some stuck-up prick, and his his scruffy blue-collar boss Jake (Dennis O’Connor, IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS) is not a judgemental asshole. They have an agreeably easy-going relationship. I like that Ed can joke about how this job sucks in a good-natured way, and Jake doesn’t take offense, in fact he cheerfully agrees. The fact that Ed will one day leave and be a rich guy while Jake will still be stuck digging graves is obvious to both of them, but it doesn’t stop them from enjoying a certain friendly camaraderie while they’re both here.

It’s a friendly town overall, apparently, give or take a trio of homicidal bikers. The kind of place where some kind of stoic renegade monster hunter actually named “Hunter” can show up at your place of work, hold everyone at gunpoint, and deliver a long speech about how they must sacrifice whatever it takes to catch an undiscovered giant carnivorous mammal for science, and nobody seems to find this behavior especially alarming. Everybody’s almost immediately on board after his big pep talk, and seem to intuitively grasp that he’s the good guy, and they should do what he says.

“I should check in with the department” says a local cop, who’s just had her partner ripped to shreds in front of her eyes and is being held at gunpoint by this wanted criminal who just shot up a diner earlier today (Neve Campbell, WILD THINGS!).

“Don’t give us away. Not yet.” he cautions.

“OK,” she says, cheerfully.

            Of course, that asshole Brion James is lurking around, so we know this lighthearted jaunt to catch a man-eating prehistoric rodent is gonna get complicated. But most of the movie is about our little crew of makeshift heroes getting together and cooking up as foolproof a monster-hunting plan as possible given that only one person present was even aware of this little monster-rat situation prior to this afternoon. This plan will mostly boil down to one or two of them leisurely wandering around the subway-sized honeycomb of tunnels which apparently crisscross this particular graveyard and, one would assume from their size, an area approximately the size of New Hampshire. But fortunately, it turns out the architect happens to be nearby.

They really built a full-sized giant rat-horse creature, which is exactly the kind of hustle that I am incapable of not being charmed by. They could have just cranked out a shitty hand puppet and shot around it in the dark, but they didn’t settle for less, they went the distance did the lord’s work. The head looks really cool and menacing, even if the body is clearly two guys in a puppet suit, shuffling their feet in a manner which very much recalls Snuffleupagus. But it’s a unique design, recalling some kind of weird critter that might turn up in THE DARK CRYSTAL. It looks good, and you eventually get to see a good bit of it. It has a lot of personality, fierce and threatening while still very clearly being just a weird living creature acting on instinct. It might eat some people, but it’s not its fault, it doesn’t know better.

The monster suit is pretty nifty, but there’s not, in all honesty, an overwhelming volume of whammy here; there’s a few teases early on, but the rat doesn’t show up much til the very end, and even then the action is pretty small-scale. The movie has a friendly, low-stakes slacker vibe, a lot of people wandering around having conversations about what they should do. That could easily spell death for a horror flick, but it’s a surprisingly big-hearted movie, which clearly has a lot of affection for its silly characters. This is endearing enough to compensate for the fact that it also means there’s a ridiculously low bodycount, and the few deaths we do get are actually taken seriously enough that they’re not that fun. Which is to say, the movie actually banks on us liking these characters and caring about what happens to them, and generally affords them enough personality to manage that. (SPOILER) Jake the gravedigger, upon his death, says, “Just tell Ed to cremate me. It’ll save him some trouble.” It’s a funny line, actually, but he says it very sincerely. He knows it’s a joke, but he’s also trying to convey his affection for the young guy. I like it.

Its big-heartedness even extends to the monster, which both the hero and the villain want to catch, but the hero is adamant about leaving alive. This is where the problems start to become a little more pronounced than the charm, because a monster movie where you’re afraid for rather than of the central critter is a horror movie which is functionally broken. Brion James is a greasy asshole, but he’s no substitute as a villain for a 7-foot-tall rat monster. You want some personality in a low-budget creature feature, and THE DARK has more than most of its peers, but you also need to remember why we’re all here, guys. Having a nastier, more ill-tempered critter and some solid gore would go a long way towards making this a good movie, instead of just a mildly worthwhile curiosity.

And yet, while “good movie” may exceed its grasp, “mildly worthwhile curiosity” it certainly is. All its parts are pristine genre cliches, and yet they never quite escape the feeling of being off-kilter and alien, simmering with a lively weirdness which is never blatant but is also completely inescapable. Director Craig Pryce would go on to episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark and Goosebumps, which feels right for the movie’s childlike, unironic soft-hearted love of monsters and corny tough guys. Writer Robert Cooper would go on to the endless Stargate TV universe, which is harder to square with this material, except in the sense that this was definitely written by a man utterly unafraid of cliche. I suppose it’s not exactly a great loss for mankind that neither of them ever did anything like this again, but for a bottom-shelf creature feature cheapie with a completely generic name, just being amiable enough to be watchable was already much more than I could have reasonably hoped for going in.

Alternate opinion: “the creature itself is very poorly designed.it is evident in more than one scene that it is simply just someone in a big ape-like suit.the monster is not an ape,but this is close of a description as i can come up with.” [sic] IMDB user “disdressed12,” who has apparently never heard of rodents, October 30, 2006.

*I’m guessing she hasn’t seen too many James Bond movies. And actually, strictly speaking, she saved his life. All he did was rough up some guy who was being rude to her and then start a fight which wrecked her place of business and got him stabbed. But it’s hard to deny his leather jacket and badass hog make a pretty good case for him being the hero, so I understand her confusion.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	It Will Consume You.
TITLE ACCURACY	It is slightly darker underground, but they have flashlights and stuff, and it seems kinda like burying the lede when there’s a whole universe of killer rat names available.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None, though there are several other movies with the same title, and even a movie called THE DARKNESS from the very same year!
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Canada (which possibly explains the unexpected friendliness)
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Creature Feature
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Neve Campbell would briefly go on to be an A-lister, so it’s no surprise that she’s far and away the worst actor here.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Stephen McHattie
NUDITY?	Brief sex scene which features some demure boobs but quite an unexpected amount of Stephen McHattie’s well-toned toned ass.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Giant Rat attack!
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None.
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Brion James is stalking our heroes and noting their movements
MORAL OF THE STORY	You’re going to need to plan for more than a scant two years if you’re going to try and force the employees of a graveyard to catch a giant man-eating rodent at gunpoint and expect everything to work out neatly.

Absentia

Absentia (2011)
Dir. Mike Flanagan
Written by: Mike Flanagan
Starring Katie Parker, Courtney Bell, Dave Levine, with Doug Jones

Wow, this one really blew me away. On a micro-budget (principal photography was financed through kickstarter, if you can believe it) writer/director Flanagan creates something truly unusual and scary which far surpasses nearly every other film I’ve seen this month. The story concerns early-30s Tricia, whose husband Daniel vanished without a trace seven years ago. She’s visited by her recently-gone-clean-and-found-Jesus fuckup druggie younger sister, who is trying to help her move on and restart her life. And there’s a creepy tunnel just outside her generic apartment building* that little sis likes to jog through. What follows has elements of classic monster movies and the vibe of a particularly dark OUTER LIMITS episode, but goes beyond those tropes by successfully parlaying Tricia’s tense social situation into a rich vein of emotional horror.

ABSENTIA’s tiny budget does hold it back in small ways -- the more conventional horror imagery is generally kept hidden and very successfully creeps you out through the suggestion of what’s lurking in the shadows, but at least on one occasion probably shows you a little too much for it to get away with. And although the acting (by a cast of complete unknowns, but including a cameo by Ape Sapian himself, Doug Jones) is uniformly quite good, there are a few moments when the film’s nightmare-realism visual style doesn’t quite work with the more typical movie dialogue (particularly true when younger sis comes up with a typically unsupported crazy movie theory and tries to convince everyone else of it). 

But really, those are minor quibbles in a movie this good. ABSENTIA has a steadfastly serious tone, a genuinely depraved imagination that never resorts to cheap shock tactics, and an unusually deft sense of the importance of human emotions and relationships in evoking truly deep horror. It’s almost Lovecraftian in it’s conjuring of ancient, unknowable forces working against humans for incomprehensible, terrible purposes -- but it’s the human moments which anchor it and marry the deep psychological dread with an all-too-familiar human despair and fragility. Next time this guy Flanagan has a kickstarter campaign, I’ve got my cash ready to go. Unless it’s a project to build a bunch of creepy tunnels, in which case, fuck that. No tunnels for me for awhile.


*A minor thing, but one which I really liked, is the shitty, generic apartment complex Tricia lives in. We've all lived in one of those at one point, right down to those vertical slatted plastic blinds over the sliding door -- but how often do you see on in the movies? It's a good visual reminder that this movie takes place in the same mundane shitty world that most of us inhabit, which makes its nightmare turn all the more disturbing. Plus I'm betting it was cheap to shoot there.

Yes, this is the image they went with for the DVD. Good idea, guys, hide anything interesting or original about in, you'll definitely sell a lot more copies to people who are going to hate it and tell their friends to stay away.

 CHAINSAWNUKAH 2012 CHECKLIST!

LOVECRAFT ADAPTATION: No, but seems a little Lovecrafty-influenced
BOOBIES: Nah.
> or = HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS LEVEL GORE: No gore.
SEQUEL: Nope.
OBSCURITY LEVEL: High. DTV and privately funded.
MONSTERS: Oh yeah.
SATANISTS: None.
ZOMBIES: None.
VAMPIRES: None.
SLASHERS: Nope.
CURSES: Don't think so.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.

PS: Of course you won't have the full story until you check out Dan P's alternate take.

Transformers 3

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (2011)
Dir. don't make me do this
Starring Shia LaBeouf, John Turturro, Frances McDormand, various others, Leonard Nimoy, Peter Cullen, Alan Tudyk, and we're all just going to agree to forget John Malkovich was in this, OK?

Elephants --lets face it-- look cool. They're big, they got those huge tusks and the prehensile trunk, they sometimes get into a crazed sex frenzy and tear shit up. They're cute when they're little. They look impressive when they travel in herds, traversing gorgeous terrain. They're fairly rare if you don't live in areas where they naturally occur, and when given the opportunity to see one I'm usually fairly excited.

But, at the end of three two-and-a-half hour films, you just find yourself asking, “So, is this all there is? Just shots of elephants?”

Yes, I gave in to my darkest impulses, the most shameful and disheartening side of myself, and went and watched TRANSFORMERS 3. Don't worry, I paid for CARS 2 and snuck in (in what I hope will be a down payment towards Pixar making a film I want to see a little more than CARS 2) but still, I willingly opened my eyes and invited the devil inside. The human eye is composed of 33 distinct parts, and for most people is their primary sensory organ. It is so complex that some people argue that its stunning perfection proves the existence of the divine. And I put Michael Bay in mine.

Michael Bay believes an elephant and an explosion make a movie. I'm simply not convinced that he's correct. Eventually, I'm going to want the elephant to do something, or mean something, or feel something. I want the explosion to threaten something, or change something.

There's plenty of obvious things Michael Bay does poorly which don't really need exploration here. Obviously the script, the acting, the --shudder-- “humor”, anything having anything at all to do with human beings, the awkward politics, the awful soundtracks, the cheeseball mawkishness. I don't really believe in this idea that we need to settle for less in these big expensive movies, but by this time Bay has a pretty consistent track record and you can't really claim to be surprised. But he's supposed to make up for that by blowing shit up real good. I'd like to try and make the case that even here, in the dubious best of the series, he doesn't quite deliver the spectacle that you want. There are two basic reasons why, which I feel are so far under-examined, and a worthwhile way to ask the question of why some action movies succeed where these fail.

The first is the fact that while all elephants are cool to look at, your ability to watch them for an extended period greatly increases if they're doing different things. Surprisingly, the same is true for giant computer animated toys. You want your robots to fight, of course, but jeez, it's been three movies now and all they do is fight. And their fighting is not particularly interesting, except that its done by robots. It turns out that after you've seen giant metal dudes ponderously slugging each other for a few minutes, the novelty wears off a little. Here, in the service of 3-D, Bay finally pulls his camera back a little, dials down the ADD editing, and lets us actually see what's happening, which is at least an improvement on the last two. But it turns out that once you get to see it, its only moderately interesting and certainly not worth building a two-and-a-half hour film around. Elephants rutting is pretty cool, a nifty display of the raw power and dramatic focus in these huge beasts. But by the time you've gotten to the fifth or so scene of it, you're kinda hoping something a little memorable is gonna happen with it.

Yeeeahh, if we could just make everything shitty, that would be great.

That's the problem, as I see it. Technology has reached a point where any conceivable scenario can be realistically portrayed, and Michael Bay has the money to make it happen. He's limited only by his imagination. But it turns out that's a pretty severe limitation. There's hardly a single interesting concept, gimmick, or set piece in this entire trilogy, and so it ends up being about as memorable as any given punch in a rock-em-sock-em robots game (I'm sure I'm not the first person to make that comparison, but I actually played the game yesterday in preparation for this review so I feel I have a certain legitimacy in saying that). With nothing unique and thrilling to get us excited, the action all runs together into a gray, monotone mess of whirring gears.

Which brings me to my other problem: Structure. Bay has no sense of it. His films have no rhythm, no build. They don't go anywhere, they don't crescendo. Of course there's no storyline, but even the action scenes don't climax. The final fight isn't longer or more intense than any other fight, there's not particularly more at stake, and it seems like it could have fit equally well anywhere in the film. It's all turned up to 11, but it just means that none of it has much impact. All Bay knows how to do is shout, and after awhile it just doesn't have any impact anymore. It's kind of a slog, truth be told.

So despite the millions of dollars which clearly ended up on screen, there just isn't much here. It's the equivalent of watching stock footage of car crashes. You can watch a little and find it exciting and visually arresting, but by the time you've watched it a dozen context-free times, the rewards considerably diminish.

I mean, there are a few nice things to be said about it. The script somewhat resembles some kind of basic narrative this time, if you don't stop and think about it for even a second. It's a little more serious and there seems like a little more at stake, which helps rope you into the fights a little more than before. There's a few genuinely nifty sequences – the bit where a human gets tossed out of a transforming car into the air, only to be caught by the robot again and reincorporated into the car (all done in 3-D digital slow motion) is a pretty cool shot which I don't think I've seen anywhere else. There's a kind of tunneling worm robot or vehicle or something which seems to be associated with this one cyclops transformer, I don't know, maybe not, but its pretty cool to watch. The bit with it tunneling into an ever-slanting office building with some humans inside is probably the one sequence in the film which comes close to original, although needless to say it has nothing to do with anything. The wingsuit sequence is also a great idea, someone should put that in a real movie someday. The destruction of Chicago is admittedly pretty epic, the production work on the effects and sets is top notch and it has a nice apocalyptic feel. The cinematography is sometimes quite pretty in that sleazy, car-commercial Michael Bay kind of way.

Some of the cast ends up limping away with dignity intact. Frances McDormand of all people, despite being saddled with some painfully embarrassing dialogue, sells it like a champ and mostly manages to avoid humiliating herself. John Turturro somehow manages to make his Jar Jar Binks character feel a little more fun this time around, I hope he can begin looking people in the eye again after this. He gets some welcome help from Alan Tudyk as his sidekick, who against all odds creates the only endearing character in the entire series. Leonard Nimoy manages to add enough gravitas to his poorly written role that he at least seems like a suitable opponent for Peter Cullen's voice. And poor Buzz Aldrin manages to escape with the majority of his and our national dignity intact, despite being patronizingly told by a giant cartoon toy that it's an honor to meet him.

Less successful are Hugo Weaving (again given nothing at all to do as the film's apparent villain) Tyrese and that generic white guy as unnecessary soldiers, some other white guy as a villain, the eye candy girlfriend, and Bill O'Reilly.

Disastrous, unfortunately, goes to John Malkovich this time around, who apparently didn't learn from John Turturro the first one that acting as if what you're doing is funny does not, in fact, make it funny. Even more embarrassing is Ken Jeong, of whom the less is said the better. LaBeouf is this time around inexplicably saddled with a truly unpleasant character; an unholy cocktail of entitlement, insecurity, and sad sack whining which he tries fruitlessly to make tolerable.

Also apparently James Remar plays the voice of a character named Sideswipe (jeez, did he spend all that Dexter money already?), Frank Welker plays two (?) characters named Shockwave and Soundwave (I think Shockwave was the cyclops, because people kept pointing to him and saying his name as if it meant something, but its odd because I don't remember him talking at all) and John DiMaggio reprises his role as Bender (nah, that would have actually been funny and hence has no place in this film. He plays a character named Leadfoot.)

I dunno, man. The thing isn't as stunningly bad as its predecessors, but in a way that just makes it bad in a more mundane, boring way. The fundamental flaws in the last two were kind of obscured by the aggressive, insane and borderline surreal layers of flaws which actually made them (the second, especially) sort of memorable. This one's closer to a real movie, but it's still so far away from a good movie that it's almost a step back. The one thing that made them interesting was how unapologetically awful they were, and this one is professional enough to reveal how completely empty is is of anything interesting. If you truly believe simply seeing giant robots punch each other on screen is enough to sustain your interest for nearly three hours, the film does deliver that. Me, I think I'm gonna break out my PLANET EARTH DVDs. Now those guys know how to make me care about an elephant.