Taste The Blood Of Dracula

 

Taste The Blood Of Dracula (1970)

Dir. Peter Sasdy

Written by Anthony Hinds (under the named “John Elder” and theoretically based on one character created by Bram Stoker

Starring Christopher Lee, Linda Hayden, Geoffrey Keen, John Carson, Pater Sallis

There are only so many vintage Hammer Studios movies, and since I've now seen the vast majority of them, I've been trying to parcel out the DRACULAs once a year to make them last. In this way, I hope to gradually, over many years, convince myself that Hammer movies were actually never that good to begin with and it's no big deal that there aren't any more new ones, because the thing the series is perhaps most known for is perfectly charting the arc of Hammer’s rise and fall, from the bold highs in the late 50’s to the dismal, misguided wretchedness of its final years before it closed its doors for good* following its final film production in 1979.

We're not there yet, though. TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA is definitely well past the point of diminishing returns for the franchise, but not a complete waste yet. That point is on the horizon, though. You can feel them getting a little desperate already. For starters, this one (technically the fifth Hammer DRACULA film, but who's counting?) feels decidedly more contemporary than its predecessors, with some handheld camera, a little hip camera experimentation (there's a "heartbeat" effect where the camera zooms in and out), and some swinging youth culture stuff (a blue-hair punk chick who dances with a snake in a exotic boudoir run by a mincing gay guy). It's not ruinously bad yet, but you can certainly see the hopeless attempt to chase the youth market into whatever the head honchos at Hammer believed to be the latest trend was at the moment. And you can certainly see it already not working. That has an immediate deleterious effect, if only a small one in this case: the hipper it's attempting to be, the less gothic and atmospheric it is, and the result is a film quite a bit blander-looking than the previous entries, and little able to, or interested in, conjuring any real striking images.

A lack of luxurious gothic atmosphere isn’t necessarily a death blow, but if you were counting on a finely-honed unshakably gripping plot to save it, well, I appreciate your optimism this late in the game, but at some point optimism becomes denial. So it is no surprise that the story again feels pretty blatantly slapdash. It takes way too long to get going (Dracula doesn't appear until 45 minutes in, absent the recycled footage from the end of DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE that opens the thing) and if you want to actually see Dracula DO stuff, ho ho, yeah, by this point Lee wasn't going to do anything more strenuous than stand there looking haughty and vaguely annoyed. But at least there's a fresh hook this time: three venal businessmen (Goeffrey Keen [Bond's boss 1977-1987], Pater Sallis [The voice of Wallace in Wallace and Gromit[!!]], John Carson [PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES]), sold on a HELLRAISER-type come-on that reviving Dracula is the ultimate rush, do in fact revive him only to discover that not only do they not have raging hard-ons as promised, but now there's a killer vampire (Dracula) after them (this is the kind of thing we used to have to deal with all the time before Viagra). So then they have to cover their tracks, unaware that Drac is stalking them and recruiting their teenage daughters (most notably Linda Hayden, BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW, THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL) to use against them.

This premise at least has the spice of being vaguely sleazy and disreputable (there's a whorehouse visit early on which was probably pretty scandalous for the time, particularly the blue-haired snake-dancer and the openly gay-coded "madam," though today it just looks rather cheap and desperate) but the problem is that the three businessmen never really emerge as interesting characters. Sure, their motive is clear enough: when the simple, old-fashioned transgressive pleasure of hanging out in an opulent cathouse become stale, they turn for advice to instigator Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates, LUST FOR A VAMPIRE), a man even more more debauched than themselves. They're ready for headier fare, and think he might be able to suggest some (his immediate go-to is "let's revive Dracula!' and they immediately see the wisdom in this). Fair enough, but these dudes just never seem perverse enough to get so easily sold on this plan. They go from sitting around (fully clothed) with half-nude women to wanting to drink human blood and sell their soul to Satan within the course of a supper, and I just don’t quite buy it. Particularly since Bates is not exactly an irresistibly seductive salesman; more like the smuggest, richest D&D nerd you've ever met. Apparently the original plan was to let poor whiny Christopher Lee off the hook for this one, and just have Bates turn into a vampire and continue the series. This would make a lot more sense narratively, since as it stands it’s rather odd that Courtley shows up to initiate this boondoogle and then vanishes from the plot and then for some reason Dracula shows up to get revenge for him, even though they’ve never met. But Bates is simply grating and foppish – a character you definitely hate, but not in a fun way—so I, for one, am glad they chickened out and dragged Lee back for yet another miserable outing (and, presumably, yet another addition on his house).  

Anyway, the central premise with the three business pervs just never quite adds up. We either needed to understand the utter depths of these men's corruption, or we needed to see some kind of folly which pushes them further than they'd ordinarily be willing to go -- them egging each other on or something. Having them be just regular gross old dudes who are definitely assholes but probably not really villains feels like a missed opportunity to leverage some actual drama out of this scenario; they feel purely like a plot device, rather than actual characters who behave in a way we understand and which has its own internally compelling drama. They (SPOILERS) don't even die in a dramatically meaningful order -- the guy we start with, who seems like the ringleader, dies first, leaving us with his far-less-developed companions, who then also die without really developing in any way. It's a workable setup, but it never quite gets around to working, because we never really get a good sense of who these dumbasses are. They could be filthy villains who get what’s coming to them, or they could be sympathetic, flawed old fools who must pay a steep price for their moral transgressions; either one would work, but the movie doesn’t settle on either course, and consequently just leaves any sense of narrative drama sitting there on the table, untouched.

Which is a problem, because they're as close as we're going to get to any kind of main characters, leaving a big hole where the film’s conflict should be. Lee is in maybe 15 minutes of footage total, and the standard-issue Hammer Pretty White Boys don't even know what's going on until the very end (even though the lead HPWB, Paul,** played by Anthony Corlan, is certainly less bland and more pretty than most. Woah, he plays one of the Nazis in RAIDERS!), so although they're on hand to save the day (since Hammer was certainly not going to let the women save themselves) they're basically nonentities. The young ladies fare better (and Hayden is at least a little spunky and distinct-looking, with her sad eyes and soft features); getting recruited to do most of Dracula's dirty work like a satanic Charlie's Angels looks like a fun gig, but of course they don't exactly have an arc either. I do kind of like the tragic dimension of their desire to please an openly disinterested "Master," which plays into the climax at least a little and definitely illustrates just what a dick Dracula is. But it's pretty half-formed, another idea -- like the pervert business guys-- which feels like it could have made for an interesting dramatic core had the script decided to delve into it a little rather than haul it out strictly as a plot device.

That all leaves TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA altogether too shapeless and unfocused to hit like it ought to, though by the end it gets vicious and nihilistic enough (SPOILERS - nearly everyone dies; no redemption for these pervy business dudes I guess!) that it works up a little bit of spunk. But just when it seems like it’s kicking in, it suffers another disappointing anti-climax, which really seems to be a theme with this series, perhaps in an attempt to be faithful to the weird anticlimax of the original Dracula novel.*** (SPOILERS AHEAD) Sure, they probably weren't going to top the Count’s impalement-by-cross from the last movie, but the way he dies THIS time (imagines a church, passes out and dies all by himself, without anyone doing anything) is probably his second-lamest death, after that time he just slipped on the ice and drowned. This is, like, the fourth time he's died like a chump seemingly within hours of being laboriously revived. Just how bad can he really be?

Oh yeah, I guess we saw with that lame Lord Courtley character just how lame the villains in this universe are capable of being, so maybe we should count our blessings that at least it’s still Christopher Lee taking the fall. TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (which, I should say, is a surprisingly accurate title; that’s how they revive the bastard!) isn’t nearly the bottom of the barrel, although it may well be the tipping point where the bad starts to outweigh the good. See you next year when we discover how much worse we can get!

RIPPER REPORT: Michael Ripper plays a pretty funny police inspector who does not seem particularly motivated to, you know, inspect anything, despite his condescending demeanor. Good stuff!

*Although I enjoy seeing the name on-screen again, the 2010’s Hammer revival is obviously not the same thing, though it produced at least a few worthy horror flicks.

 

** Weird that this is the second DRACULA in a row to feature a Hammer Pretty White Boy named Paul. Is this supposed to be the same character? I see no evidence that this is the case, but I also don’t see how writer Anthony Hinds (as “John Elder”) could have missed the fact that he gave the protagonist in both films –just two years apart!—the same name! Strange stuff.

 

*** Though the fact that Hammer improves upon that climax immeasurably in HORROR OF DRACULA makes it clear they’re capable of doing better when they bother to try.

HAMMER’S DRACULA SERIES:

1: THE HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)

2: THE BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960)

3: DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1966)

4: DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968)

5: TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1970)

6: SCARS OF DRACULA (1970)

7: DRACULA A.D. 1972 (1972)

8: THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1973)

9: THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES (1974)

(see also: Hammer’s FRANKENSTEIN series)

Dracula Has Risen From the Grave

Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968)

Dir. Freddie Francis

Written by Anthony Hinds, using the name "John Elder"

Starring Chirstopher Lee, Rupert Davies, Veronica Carlson, Barbara Ewing

 

The bad news first: DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE --Hammer's third sequel to their studio-defining 1958 DRACULA (aka HORROR OF DRACULA), second with Christopher Lee, and second which Lee openly did not want to be a part of-- is broadly more interested in the character drama than the horror. That is a highly questionable decision for a movie called DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE to make, and probably reason enough for most folks to just ignore it entirely and focus on genre movies that would actually like to, you know, do genre movie stuff.

 

The good news, though, is that for those who stick around, that character drama is surprisingly tolerable. Which is not to say that it’s an overwhelming good story; or even much of a story at all: this time Dracula gets revived after a uptight Monsignor (Rupert Davies, WITCHFINDER GENERAL, CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTER, winner or the inaugural Pipe Smoker Of The Year Award [yes, really]) decides that even though Dracula is already dead (having drowned like a chump at the end of DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS) he should not leave well enough alone and instead should march up to Dracula's Castle and exorcise it. In the process, a dorky local priest (Ewan Hooper, KINKY BOOTS) manages to fall down and hit his head and the blood flows into a nearby body of water (implied in the last movie to be far from Dracula's Castle, but no good ever came of trying to parse the continuity between these movies) which happens to be the very short-term resting place of our titular character, so of course that brings Drac right back, to get up to his old tricks. And if those old tricks (i.e., visiting the bedrooms of virginal maidens to gradually vampirize them) happen to coincide with getting revenge on the Monsignor who exorcised his castle (even if he did revive the Count in the process) because the victim is the old codger's niece, well, so much the better. 

The odd thing is, although that is the plot you'd have to summarize if you were, say, trying to write a review of DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM HIS GRAVE, it doesn't really accurately describe the movie. All that business with Dracula and the Monsignor and the nocturnal visits and all that makes up a relatively small portion of the runtime. Mostly, the movie chronicles the lives of various denizens of a local inn, one of whom (a fellow named Paul, played by Barry Andrews, BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW) happens to be the boyfriend of said virginal Monsignor's niece. They all notice some strange goings-on, and eventually begin to fall prey to Dracula's depredations, but a lot of the time is simply spent hanging out at the workplace, or dealing with the tension caused by the uptight Monsignor's extreme displeasure at the prospect of having his niece date anyone, least of all a --gasp-- hunky atheist like our handsome generic white boy™ Paul. 

As I mentioned above, you'd have every right to doubt that this focus would prove as fruitful as doing something crazy like centering your movie with DRACULA in the title around, you know, Dracula. But it turns out to be a surprisingly charming time. In fact, basically every major role is more interesting and better played than you’d have any right to expect. The script, by Anthony Hinds (alias: John Elder, THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF, THE REPTILE, and the next two DRACULA films, replacing previous series scribe Jimmy Sangster, whose script had so displeased Lee last time around) contributes to this by making each character and their corresponding web of relationships more complex and multi-dimensional than they need to be, and the actors across the board respond by giving spirited, lively performances. OK, so the main victim girl (Veronica Carlson, far better in FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED) is pretty boring, another naive, virginal damsel, so innocent she sleeps with a doll. But that’s to be expected; when was the last time Hammer had a young male lead who seems as vivacious as Andrews makes Paul, or who looked kind of like Roger Daltrey? Rarely if ever. And he's surrounded by a whole crew of able character actors who do their part to make these stock types feel distinct. I'm particularly taken with Zena (Barbara Ewing, TORTURE GARDEN, MUTE, EYE OF THE NEEDLE), Paul's fellow bar-worker, a bawdy, worldly lady with her own unrequited affection for the young man, who brings a world-weary melancholy to her poor doomed role. But honestly everyone is doing good work; even the stodgy old Monsignor --who has a complex, not-quite-romantic relationship with his widowed sister-in-law-- proves to be a little more interesting and worth spending time with than you'd suppose.      

In fact, the only person who doesn’t seem to be trying very hard is Christopher Lee, who is not really bothering to hide how much he doesn’t care by this point. He speaks again, after his controversial mute turn in the previous film... but it’s probably only four or five unimportant lines, and he’d be better off staying quiet. They also have this dumb effect where they make his eyes all bloodshot, which just makes him look high and distracts from Lee’s naturally cold, imperious gaze. It's hard to say if the script gives him short shrift, or if Lee was being such a baby about returning to the role that they just tried to write a movie around him doing as little as possible, but the end result is that he is almost comically inactive here. He simply doesn’t do that much, and the stuff he does is just recycled from the last couple films (basically, just menacingly visit an innocent virgin in her bedroom a few times). But at least director Freddie Francis (TALES FROM THE CRYPT, TROG) knows how to shoot him so he looks cool and imposing; even a totally coasting Lee can hardly look otherwise, but having the movie shoot him like a total boss certainly helps make the case that Dracula is in some way important to this Dracula movie. And he does get a real hum-dinger of a death, almost certainly the best he's ever going to get, and a real significant upgrade from the lame watery demise he met last time. And again, Francis (who had won an Oscar for best Cinematography back in 1960 for SONS AND LOVERS, and would win another for GLORY in 1989, though he's working as director in this case with Arthur Grant [QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED] behind the camera) gives it the epic framing it deserves.In fact, it’s one of the nicest-looking Hammer pictures, full of cool sets and some of the most intense abstract lighting I’ve ever seen in a British movie, coming within shooting distance of what Bava was up to in Italy around the time he was making KILL BABY KILL and THE WHIP AND THE BODY. Francis and Grant also use some kind of odd prismatic lens which creates an iris effect, with the edges of the screen glowing red and orange. It’s a cool effect which might benefit from a little more restraint than is shown here, but when it works it’s pretty baller. 

The ultimate result is a movie which is more amiable than terrifying, and more handsome than consequential, but that's still enough to qualify as a pleasant surprise, given that this is the third sequel to a movie which arguably didn't need any sequels. It does not make one particularly confident that this series should continue for another five more entries, but for those who appreciate that special Hammer vibe, it's a tolerable, if very inessential, way to spend 90 minutes. I mean, Michael Ripper plays a drunken innkeeper, for heaven's sake. And who could resist that poster?

HAMMER’S DRACULA SERIES:

1: THE HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)

2: THE BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960)

3: DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1966)

4: DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968)

5: TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1970)

6: SCARS OF DRACULA (1970)

7: DRACULA A.D. 1972 (1972)

8: THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1973)

9: THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES (1974)

(see also: Hammer’s FRANKENSTEIN series)

1922

1922 (2017)

Dir. Zak Hilditch

Written by Zak Hilditch, based on the novella by Stephen King

Starring Thomas Janes, Dylan Schmid, Molly Parker, Neal McDonough

 

If you’ve been hearing a series of rattling thrums growing in intensity over the last few days, I have good news for you: it was just the sound of me revving up the ol’ CHAINSAWNUKAH to carve into another year of horror movies (we’ll return to our Oliver Stone retrospective in due time)! As you perhaps noticed over the course of the last year, my output of long-form reviews has dwindled significantly from the old days when I could count on cranking out a good 50 or 60 reviews over the course of October and November (and usually into December and maybe even the new year). But that doesn’t mean I’m not watching these turkeys, it just means that I no longer force myself to try and drag 1500 words out of some turd zombie flick that even its original makers didn’t think about that hard. Instead, I’ll write up a significantly shorter –but no less witty and incisive!—capsule review for the ol’ letterboxd account. If you don’t follow me on letterboxd, well… why the heck not? Same great content, more digestible portions. Everyone wins! It’s like a SAW movie except instead of a convoluted death trap with a specious moral lesson, you’re just given the choice of trudging on with your dull, empty existence OR being privy to my enlightening opinions on, say, BACKDRAFT 2 (yes, they made a Backdraft 2. Yes, William Baldwin’s back!). And because they’re shorter than these long rambles on the blog, I can crank ‘em out like Stephen King!

 

Speaking of which, we begin our long-form journey today with one of the many, many, many things King has cranked out. To give you a sense of just how god damn many movies have been adapted from (let alone ripped off) his even more voluminous bibliography: seven days into the month, I’ve already watched three without even trying. And 1922 THE MOVIE (based on his 2010 novella of the same name, which appears in his collection Full Dark, No Stars) is among the more rarified company of movies adapted faithfully from King’s work. That means there’s lots of Stephen King-y-ness in this one, for better or for worse –and while that’s not by any means a categorically advantageous feature, I think in this particular case it’s for the better. Part of its advantage here is that you can count on Stephen King to embrace simplicity. Where modern media has increasingly become the exclusive province of high-concept, hyperactively overplotted, narrative-driven genre fare, King retains a zen-like ability to focus on the details of a simple premise. Like GERALD’S GAME or THE NIGHT FLIER, 1922 THE MOVIE doesn’t have a lot of story, and in fact this can’t even boast an outré premise like those two; basically, a farmer murders his wife and then gradually starts to feel haunted by what he's done, and that's it. But the meat of the thing is in the feel of it. It's simply a closely-observed but not necessarily realism-driven portrait of this particular guy, eager to get us inside his head and simply let us sit there as King and script-writer/director Zak Hilditch (RATTLESNAKE) run him through the ringer to see what will happen.

Now, about that farmer: I think it's probably necessary to preface this by noting that Thomas Jane (BOOGIE NIGHTS), in portraying this character, goes all in on a country accent just this side of Foghorn Leghorn, very much playing with the fire of unintentional comedy. I think he's trying to sound like Tim Blake Nelson (who they probably should have just gotten for this role) but he lands dangerously in the neighborhood of SLING BLADE. The accent is not, like, imaginary; I mean, it's not like Ewan McGregor or somebody just making up an accent which has never before come out of a human. And he’s at least consistent with it. But it's a lot of accent, and it's pretty jarring to hear it coming out of Thomas Jane, especially if you have ever heard him talk before. There are certainly some people who are not going to be able to make it past that basic fact, especially since he's narrating and therefore talking through almost the entire runtime. But although your results may vary, I eventually got on board with it.

The accent is maybe even appropriate in this case, because Jane's performance very much rests on a kind of faux-folksiness which is at the core of a lot of King's stuff, and is the key to understanding how to read him. King is not a journalist, and doesn’t seem to draw heavily on his own observed experience. He isn’t interested in interviewing farmers and spend six months working on a rural farm to get the details right. He’s interested in a simulacrum of simple rural America which has little to do with lived reality, but everything to do with a strand of romantic American storytelling that he and his work are steeped in. It’s not realism, but it’s certainly not frivolous imagination either; the storybook-simplicity of the protagonist (complete with broad, nonspecific “country” accent and omnipresent overalls) allows King to slip past reality altogether and tap into the fundamental tropes that underlie our cultural stories, and, grounded in fact or not, inform who we are. This gives his work a kind of mythic quality, and turns 1922 THE MOVIE away from the gritty contemporary docu-realism which is so much in vogue in the age of the digital camera --with its unflinching crispness and ability to capture real-world lighting, potentially evoking the world of youtube—and towards something quite different, a dark folk tale which uses its hacky artifice to draw turbulent and troubled emotions to the surface from the deep world of the collective unconscious. Farmer Wilfred* James doesn't strike me as someone you could encounter in the real world (even in 1922, which is when the story takes place, and I suppose as good a title as any) but he definitely strikes me as the very quintessence of the small-time farmer in American fiction. He is mythic, archetypal; the simulacrum of a certain subset of real Americans as filtered through a couple hundred years of American cultural soup.

Which makes this a portrait not so much of a person as of a certain strand of brittle Americana. Farmer Wilfred seems at first to embody a kind of paradigmatic American ideal. He's hardworking, humble, practical, quiet, skeptical of pretension and scornful of faddish frippery. The 'Simple Kind Of Man' that Lynyrd Skynyrd sang about, or, more ominously, the "forgotten American" that Trump idealized. But the unpretentious country farmer is only admirable until up to a point; when his wife (Molly Parker, THE WICKER MAN 2006) brazenly challenges the small authority he does possess, something rather vicious and aggrieved rises to the surface --rather easily, in fact-- and before long he's convinced himself that murder is his only option. And crucially, he lets us know that the convinced himself is doing a lot of work here; this isn’t the story of a good man who makes a foolish mistake when backed into a corner. This is the story of a man who uses the false pretense of being backed into a corner to give himself license to unleash the violent retribution he’s been nursing all along. Who is able to tell himself a story about his own victimhood which is convincing enough to validate his seething anger and justify lashing out. Even with the accent, Jane locates the bitterness and impotent rage in this quiet agrarian, lets us see how his admirable qualities subtly transmogrify into monstrous ones in ways that even he --heck, maybe especially he-- doesn't understand. And indeed, it is his very inability to unpack his feelings that is at the root of this transformation.

I’m not sure what, if anything, was going on in King’s world in 2010 that made its way into this story, but in 2017, and especially 2021, one can hardly help but read this as a commentary on the roiling cultural tension of modern America. There’s a reason I felt compelled to name-check Trump back there; Wilfred James reflects a rigidly conservative strain of American thought. He is solitary, traditional, fiercely resistant to change (he doesn’t even have indoor plumbing) and contemptuous towards outsiders, especially the despised ‘city folk.’ The whole inciting incident, in fact, arises from his wife’s desire to sell their land and move to Omaha, Nebraska, a place he is convinced (with no discernable first-hand evidence) is a land of the debased and fallen. He, on the other hand, is dead-set on passing the farm down to their son (Dylan Schmid, HORNS), who is mostly ambivalent about carrying on his father’s lifestyle but is sufficiently besotted with the neighbor’s daughter to allow himself to be manipulated into becoming an accomplice. It’s telling that the son is only tangentially interested in staying on the farm; despite Wilfred’s empty assertions that he’s acting on behalf of his kid, we know it’s empty posturing. It’s not about misguided paternal concern, it’s about standing athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’ He simply wants things to stay the same forever, even after he’s gone, and he’s willing –eager, even-- to kill anyone who pushes back on that idea. It’s about control, about feeling powerless in the world and consequently pathologically defensive about his dominance among the few people he can control. But that just means he’s going to lose his soul first, and then lose everything anyway.

 

But I hasten to add, although the film is very much about this, it’s in no way an overtly political or didactic film. It’s simply a dark character piece, and a pretty exaggerated one at that. But that doesn’t mean it can’t still get at something interesting and valuable about the real world. I don’t want to overstate all this, but it just seems to me so intrinsic to, and yet so often ignored about, the reason we tell stories in the first place. The movie, unlike so much unbearable art from the last decade or so, has no interest in demonizing this guy or scoring cheap culture war points. It has no moral desire to condemn farmer Wilfred, who is, after all, a fictional character, and indeed, by adopting his perspective it even provides us reason to understand him, even sympathize with him. His wife’s snide imperiousness, layered with a subtle layer of condensation, is pretty abrasive, and it’s easy to understand why she is so loathsome to him, just as Parker’s excellent performance gives us all the evidence we’d need to re-imagine this story from her perspective. Of course she’s a little vindictive towards this stifling, selfish hayseed – but this is his story, not hers, and we need to understand his perspective to understand why he responds in the way he does. By simply placing us in the perspective of this particular character, we learn something about him, and, by extension, others who idealize the things he represents, and, to a certain extent, ourselves, since there’s certainly a part of us who can understand him. This is, I suppose, what people mean with the phrase ‘everything is political,’ in the sense that politics is just the expression of the way we want to organize the world, and the values that we believe should guide that organizing. But to my mind, this is a far, far better method to get at these underlying socio-cultural issues through art than the recent spate of genre movies which seem so eager to simply state the moral aloud and sit back and wait for the congratulations to pour in.

Which is good, because some thoughtful character work is all you really get here. There's a little sprinkling of gross corpses and ghosts and stuff (which may or may not be real, and it's such a small part of the film that it doesn't really matter which), but the horror is really more psychological. It's not a film about guilt, exactly, it's a film about decay, about everything --physically and spiritually-- in our protagonist's life falling apart the harder he tries to hold on, mostly because he's trying to hold on, whether or not he realizes that last detail. It wants us to go on this journey and simply experience it all, rather than drag the story this way or that in service of perceived genre goods. Which does not in itself sound like something that would make me happy; over the last few years, horror, or at least any horror with real ambition, has gradually just become drama with spooky music, not necessarily to the benefit of either genre. And you could very reasonably level the same criticism against 1922, which offers very little genre content you could point to; there’s probably less ghost content than Hamlet, which I doubt anyone would want to defend as a horror story. But again, the film’s willingness to go broader and more archetypal serves to its advantage; as horror has become drama, drama has increasingly become undramatic, focusing on intimate details of small stories, shrinking up into an actor’s exercise in minimalist realism. Something like 1922, with its baroque gothic affectations, neatly avoids that trap and simply delivers big, operatic, unreserved emotions. Not histrionics or camp, and not without nuance, but still far more extreme and outrageous than any self-respecting drama today would attempt, and it’s away to get away with it (assuming you think it does) by virtue of its willingness to announce itself as a horror story rather than a drama, freeing it up from the dull confines of naturalism to churn up some tumultuous human emotions into a larger-than-life frenzy which is more interested in the overwhelming way things feel than the mundane way they are.       

 

And in its unhurried way, it's pretty good at getting those emotions rolling; the performances are uniformly quite fine (as long as you can get on board with the accents), broad, certainly, but textured enough to feel specific and meaty, and the atmosphere is bolstered by some surprisingly nice cinematography by Ben Richardson (BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, WIND RIVER), who clearly knows what he's doing in using the digital photography to get a lightly high-contrast, unobtrusively oversaturated effect which feels highly appropriate for the story's vaguely mythic affectation (making this a rare Netflix film which doesn't look implacably chintzy). The music, which I regret did not take much note of at the time, is apparently by Faith No More frontman Mike Patton, who, wow, I now see scored THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES also, which is weird. 

 

One might reasonably wish for a film this low-concept and generally lackadaisical about incident to get a little more aggressive with the style than Hilditch seems willing to do, but the drama is sturdy enough to make it consistently compelling, and sometimes it's maybe kinda nice to have a small-scale dark drama which has faith enough in King's keen eye for little details and complications which add character that it doesn't need to overthink things. I can definitely imagine this material feeling unendurably thin if you catch it in the wrong mood, but it mostly worked for me. Farmer Wilfred, you may be a murderous, conniving, unbalanced regressive, but I enjoyed spending this time in your head. Next time, though, maybe let’s do some kind of gimmick killer thing, huh?

* Everybody calls him "Wilf," which is weird; is it normal for people named "Wildred" to go by "Wilf"? "Wilf" sounds like the noise a dog makes when it smells something it doesn't like.

Salvador

 

Salvador (1986)

Dir. Oliver Stone

Written by Oliver Stone, Richard Boyle

Starring James Woods, Jim Belushi, Michael Murphy, John Savage, Elpidia Carillo

 

Holy moly, how in the fuck did Oliver Stone make this and PLATOON in the same fucking year? If there was ever enough cocaine in the world, there certainly isn't anymore.

Even more astonishingly, how did he make PLATOON after SALVADOR? Because even though we started our little retrospective with PLATOON, SALVADOR was finished first and beat it to theaters by a whole nine months. And SALVADOR is not just some kind of gentle warm-up that one might use as a step towards something more ambitious. It’s a war movie, a buddy comedy, an adventure film, a biography of a living person – co-screenwriter Richard Boyle, in fact—and a searing indictment of US  cold war meddling in Latin American governance, clocking in at a meaty and dense 123 minutes, and was nominated for two Academy Awards. Just watching it is an exhausting experience – imagine making it! Supposedly, James Woods was offered a role in PLATOON too, but turned it down because he "couldn't face going into another jungle with [Oliver Stone]." The fact that Stone himself had the stamina to pack up his camera and move on to the next project after something so massive is hard to wrap one’s head around. 

Anyway, there’s a reason to start with PLATOON: SALVADOR is unmistakably the weaker of the two films. But it packs quite a punch on its own. It documents the exploits of one Richard Boyle (James Woods, COP), a real-life veteran photojournalist (who also co-wrote the script with Stone) with a penchant for gravitating to the world’s most dangerous conflicts – Vietnam during the war, Cambodia during the revolution, “The Troubles” in Ireland—and a personal life so chaotic and irresponsible that his wife has just left him and taken their baby with her. Broke, drunk, and without any immediate prospects, he recruits his ne’er-do-well buddy Doctor Rock –his real legal name, as far as I can tell-- (Jim Belushi, acting somewhat conspicuously as the Dr. Gonzo to Boyle’s Hunter Thompson) and simply drives South, hypothesizing that he can scrounge up some freelance work in Latin America. When he reaches El Salvador, however, it quickly becomes clear that the country is reaching the boiling point, and that the US is secretly propping up ultra-right-wing nationalists who are on the precipice of a violent purge. Which is bad news for them, but great news for the masochistic Boyle, who quickly falls back in with his other wife and child –not the one who just left him, his alternate backup family back in El Salvador who he did not come here specifically to see but is happy enough to hang out with since he’s in town—and the equally insane but somewhat more functional war photographer John Cassady (John Savage, THE DEER HUNTER). At first, this is sort of a freewheeling ugly American travelogue, but gradually things take a darker turn as Boyle starts to get a little more personally invested in the situation and begins to realize just how dark things are about to get. And they do get quite dark. Especially as the stakes ratchet up and chaos descends in the second half of the picture, there's no mistaking the brain-melting intensity which Stone also captures so well in PLATOON and will only build on for next decade or so.

The difference comes down to focus; while PLATOON quickly finds its natural rhythm as a kind of heightened, operatic slice-of-life, SALVADOR is a little more all over the place, fiddling about for a while with some lead-footed buddy comedy thing that Stone has no aptitude for, sluggishly postponing any decision as to where its dramatic focus lies for far too long, and saddled with a much greater need for exposition as it shoots to define the entire local and geopolitical situation in El Salvador in 1979. Credit where it's due, the last of these three is pulled off with more deftness than you'd have any right to expect, as Stone communicates a great deal about the situation and how it got this way without a lot of clunky didacticism, but it still requires quite a bit of effort and screen time (SALVADOR is only three minutes longer than PLATOON, but it feels like a full mini-series worth of material has been covered).

And in the middle of it all, you've got James Woods doing perhaps his James-Woodsiest performance ever, which is, on one hand, a lot of sleazy, weasely, dirty fun to watch, but on the other hand, a lot to add on top of a movie which is already somewhat uncomfortably overstuffed. Thank God Jim Belushi is playing it pretty low-key (and disappears for long enough stretches to make one wonder why he's here at all). 

In an Oliver Stone movie, the way-too-muchness is usually more of a feature than a bug, but between the loud performances, larger-than-life central character, meandering narrative, large cast and angry politics, SALVADOR find his tendency towards overkill at its most ungainly. But ungainly is not the same as ineffective; inefficient, perhaps, but it packs enough raw power that a lack of focus doesn't doom it. It's the kind of film which is incapable of not having a ridiculously unnecessary three codas... but also the kind of film where they're all really great, even if it makes the pacing a little herky-jerky. And the fact that this huge, operatic, overstuffed epic was somehow produced on a dinky four million dollar budget is absolutely fucking mindblowing. Even if it has been Stone's only movie in 1986, it would still have been an obvious announcement of a real powerhouse auteur in the making.

Appendix A: Oliver Stone Studies
+PLATOON (1986)
+SALVADOR (1986)
+8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE (1986)
+WALL STREET (1987)
+TALK RADIO (1988)
+BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY(1989)
+THE DOORS(1991)
+JFK (1991)
+ HEAVEN & EARTH (1993)