Trance aka The Eternal Kiss of the Mummy, aka The Eternal (1998)
Dir. Michael Almereyda
Starring Alison Elliot, Jared Harris,
Christopher Walken, cameo by Jason Miller
During the late 90’s and Early 2000s,
I had the great honor and privilege of serving with distinction in
that most noble of all professions, clerk at an independent video
store. That job may have been more independently instructive to my
future than any other single incident in my life, and of course
dramatically helped shape the breadth and depth of my film knowledge.
It was a fantastic time to be in the business, because screeners –
free copies of films which had not yet been made available to the
public – were still common (before video piracy threatened the very
foundation of a free society etc, etc.). We’d get between 5 and 15
free copies of movies per week to review and see if we wanted to
purchase them. Some of these were big studio films which we, by all
rights, ought to have made a decision on already, but that was all
well and good. The real excitement, thought, was the onslaught of
weird indie fare put out by smaller studios. This was the last days
of Cannon video; Orion video; United Artists; Triton; Lion’s Gate.
They were all trying to capitalize on the lucrative video market with
cheapie genre titles. Heady times.
It’s funny to think about, but until
Tarantino made RESOVOIR DOGS and Kevin Smith made CLERKS, there
weren’t a lot of dorky amateurs making hip genre-friendly indie
films. Studios kept their B-movie factories cranking, and that was
were most genre fare emerged. But with the advent of those two films
it suddenly seemed possible to more or less bypass the studio system
altogether and make your own films. Throw some cash together from
private sources, hire your friends as actors, put on a show. Out of
this rich stew of new talent came a flood of aggressively amateurish
dream projects which might have had a very minor theatrical or
festival release somewhere but mostly went straight to video. And I
watched ‘em
These bold pioneers quickly proved that
studio films did not have a monopoly on sucking. The new wave of
indie films were shot for cheap, they were generally ugly, confusing,
poorly acted, and rife with pretensions of daring but deficient in
skill to back it up. You know what I mean. Shit like THE MINER
MASSACRE, MURDER 101, TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES NM, THINGS TO DO IN
DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DEAD. Many painfully attempted to imitate the
hip patois of Tarantino and Smith’s films. Many failed
disastrously. Most are at best fitfully interesting, and at worst
unwatchable.
But. They were also kind of labors of
love. Young people trying to do something daring and unique that they
couldn’t sell in the studio system. Interesting ideas by people not
talented enough to pull them off. In other words, genre buff catnip.
You know somewhere deep inside that you’re going to have to grind
through dozens, maybe hundreds, to find one which even qualifies as
frustrating. But something compels you to try anyway. Maybe because
you’re a stoned teenager without a girlfriend, who knows, just
guessing.
Anyway, TRANCE AKA THE ETERNAL AKA THE
ETERNAL KISS OF THE MUMMY (renamed several times for video release in
the hopes of tricking innocent civilians into thinking it was
something they’d be even remotely interested in) fits that category
pretty well in most places. From the late 90s (1998) released by a
tiny studio called “Cinema Club” (which, let’s be honest,
sounds like a mob front), awkwardly paced, amateurishly shot and lit,
and replete with the kind of stunning bad judgment which undoubtedly
seemed daring to young artists free from the watchful eye of studio
suits who might know better.
TRANCE AKA THE ETERNAL AKA THE ETERNAL
KISS OF THE MUMMY is slightly different from others in that field
because the guy making it should also have known better. Michael
Almereyda already had a good bit of experience under his belt,
writing unused scripts for David Lynch and TOTAL RECALL and directing
the excellent low-budget vampire softcore nightmare NADJA. This film
represents a significant step back in terms of quality, but it does
have some goofy charms.
The plot concerns New York socialites
Nora and Jim (Allison Elliot and Jared Harris) who are obviously
doing well for themselves despite the fact that they’re stunningly
low-functioning drunks. They head to Ireland in order to dry out when
Nora falls and hits her head (also they’re parents of a young kid,
but no one seems too concerned about that).
They head out to the big scary Irish
house owned by Nora’s Great- Aunt, and populated by a creepy
11-year-old servant girl and a robe-wearing Christopher Walken,
Nora's uncle. Well, they don’t really dry out too well; they’re
mostly in varying states of drunkenness the whole movie (which seems
to have been sponsored by Jameson’s Irish Whiskey. Not only are
they constantly drinking it and commenting on how good it is, it
turns out their Great Aunt has like 100 cases of it in her basement,
which, I shit you not, they will eventually use to try and get the
evil reincarnated “mummy” drunk. More on that later). In a movie
which was either worse or better, the alcoholic angle would probably
have something to do with something. Here, it just kind of happens
without comment or impact on the plot.
This is exactly the kind of thing which
gives it that distinct 90s-indie-film vibe. It’s the sort of thing
you could never put in a studio movie, and for reasons which I hope
are fairly obvious. But its easy to imagine the filmmakers going, “We
should make them just terrible, drunken parents and never have it go
anywhere at all! Wouldn’t that be great?” and somewhere
along the line “tee hee, wouldn’t that be great??”
turned into the actual film, where it just sort of sits there, making
everyone feel awkward like the only drunk guy at the wedding (he’s
drunk on Jameson, I bet).
Speaking of weddings, this is the only
movie I’m aware of which has an occasionally Irish Christopher
Walken in love with the desiccated corpse of a ancient immortal pagan
tribal leader which he keeps in a bathtub in his basement, is one
thing I noticed. Walken is on weirdo autopilot here, letting his
nifty pentagonal octogonal rose-colored glasses do most of the acting, but he’s
still the most interesting thing anywhere in sight. Every fifth line
or so he’ll even throw in a couple of words in an Irish accent in
what I'm assuming is an homage to Peter Cushing's German in SHOCK
WAVES. His wandering Walken cadence is in such strong effect here
that he can actually be a little hard to understand. He has a long
bit of exposition which is boldly unbound by the usual rules of
American English tonal inflections, and after a while it looses so
much focus that you forget about the exposition and just get lost in
the oddly soothing waves of abstract, formless quasi-Irish
Walkenisms.
Like most of this film’s ilk, it’s
painfully clear they could only afford their one actual star for a
day or so and hence he’s pretty much just awkwardly shoehorned in
there as a minor side character. Notice how I keep coming back to
awkwardly?
Yeah, the whole thing is pretty
awkward. There’s a scene near the climax where a charming Irishman
tries to seduce our heroine to the sultry tones of… Stiff Little
Finger’s cover of Marley’s immortal “Johnny Was.” Admittedly a
great song (and on vinyl, too!), but it would be difficult to find
anything less sexy outside of a Captain Beefheart album. If it were
possible to seduce women with the dulcet tones of the 70’s Irish
punk rock, I wouldn’t have time to write this blog. So it just sits
there, self-consciously hip but totally failing to work on any actual
artistic level. Which pretty much sums up the preponderance of films
of this sort.
I do fundamentally like the idea behind
this one, though. It’s a unique idea for a monster movie. There’s
no trance, no mummy, and while there is a kiss it’s pretty
brief. But I guess SORT OF POSSESSED : BRIEF KISS OF THE DRUNKEN
IRISH MOM didn’t market test as well. Basically, the villain here
is an ancient immortal druid priestess who died temporarily and got
tossed in a bog (preserving her body, sort of like a mummy, I’ll
give them that). Not too many mummified druid movies, so it’s
always nice to have another.
The body’s respectably icky, but we
only see it in the bathtub – the rest of the time, its just our
drunken heroine being halfway possessed. There’s your typical
struggle over who gets control over the body, but it’s made a
little less interesting because the mom’s such an irritating
character anyway and the priestess actually seems like kind of an
improvement. She does kill a few people (including one with the
shattered pieces of a vinyl record, awesome, although done better in
that episode of the X-Files Stephen King wrote) but mostly she just
kind of wanders around trying to get her bearings. Not especially
cinematic. More interesting is the weird little servant (slave?) girl
they have in the house who seems to be supernaturally aware of where
people are and what they need. So of course it goes without saying
that nothing comes of it. It does get enjoyably ludicrous towards the
end. My memory is a bit fuzzy but Jared Harris definitely tries to
trick the mummy thing into getting drunk on Jameson and sexy dancing
as a means of distracting it, and then bonks her over the head with
the bottle, which in my opinion is not a very gentlemanly thing to
do.
If this seems like a disjointed review
which randomly picks at various unrelated things and didn’t even
get to the plot until 1,271 words in, I can’t really argue
otherwise. But I would like to point out that its reflective of this
style of movie. If I had an editor and a paying public, I could never
get away with writing about obscure and much-derided indie DTV horror
films from the 90s, and even if I did I would have to focus and write
something concise and penetrating. Since I don’t, I can indulge
myself and write semi-coherent rambles which are mostly for my own
benefit and my own interest in exploring weird ideas that don’t
have much traction with anyone else. All well and good, but it makes
you remember that there’s often a good reason that artists have
editors and write with their readers in mind.
Artists complain
about the suits ruining their vision, and no doubt that's often the
case. But to pull off something as complex as a full-length feature
on just one person’s vision – well, you gotta have a lot more
vision than most people do to make it work. You gotta be able to take
that vision and hone it, focus it.You and the people working with you
need to have mastery of the tools it takes to visually and
narratively communicate that vision. You have to get it out of your
own head and into the head of the person watching. I'm convinced
director Almereyda had something cool in his head – its a shame he
wasn't able to communicate it to me. But for a film about a bunch of
stumbling, irresponsible drunks trying to keep control of their
bodies from being possessed by a far more powerful, amoral entity I
guess it may work as a suitable metaphor for the film culture of it's
time. If the young indie film community could get through its awkward
teenagers years and go on to make the kind of excellent work we
frequently see today, maybe there's hope for these drunken possessed
neglectful parents and their goofy ginger kid as well.
This review is dedicated to Patrick
McConnell, who loaned me his VHS copy of this film which he
apparently paid real US currency for at some point in his younger,
wilder days.
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