Wednesday, November 9, 2022

Grave Encounters

 


Grave Encounters (2011)

Dir. and written by "The Vicious Brothers"

Starring Sean Rogerson, Ashleigh Gryzko, Merwin Mondesir, Juan Riedinger, Mackenzie Gray

 


The evidence is encouraging that the high-water mark of the found-footage wave is now safely behind us, or has at least receded enough to allow us to take stock of the damage it did when it was fully upon us. Though it never entirely went away after the huge success of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (not the first found footage film,* but unambiguously the genesis of the modern movement, even if it took a few years after its release to really catch fire), my sense is that the conceit make the leap from "gimmick" to "subgenre" somewhere around 2007/2008, which together logged 20 entries I can easily identify, including the first films of the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, REC, and CLOVERFIELD series (by contrast, wikipedia lists only 26 prior found-footage film total, many of them vanishingly obscure). And it wasn't done growing; I count 19 films in 2013 and a peak 22 in 2014, after which things gradually slowed down without ever completely stopping (wikipedia lists 6 found footage films from 2021, and five so far this year).

 

GRAVE ENCOUNTERS, our subject today, hails from the thick of it, a time when there was still some excitement about the idea that the format might be used to do new things, although I personally was already a little sick of the whole thing. I never bothered with it at the time, but even though the conceit has lost a little of its vigor in the last few years, it's been a part of every Chainsawnukah since I watched the original V/H/S in theaters during the first one, and one tinkers with tradition at a high spiritual cost. So what the hell, once more into the breach, dear friends.

 

GRAVE ENCOUNTERS is a very stupid name that does not inspire much confidence, but I'm pleased to say it doesn't quite live up to the worthlessness the name implies. The premise is a simple one: a team of TV hucksters making one of those insipid "Ghost Hunters" type shows locks themselves in for a night in a supposedly haunted ex-asylum, only to find that getting out is not as simple as they might have assumed. Oh, and it's haunted.

 


The haunting part is the movie's weakest trait; while it's certainly more eventful than the ridiculously whammy-free PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (four years old by this point!) the events themselves are pretty basic haunted house hokum, occasionally good for a jump scare but mostly a bit threadbare (there's a person standing in the corner! Oh no, they turned around and have a scary face!) or just outright silly (there are... uh, a bunch of arms awkwardly reaching out of the ceiling? A lady disappears in a puff of smoke?). Can’t argue with the sturdy efficacy of a black-eyed, bloody-mouthed goon appearing suddenly on the ceiling and chasing you, but it’s not nearly enough return-on-investment to be worth sitting though eons of agonizing improvised circular arguments between the film’s green-faced non-characters. It’s also not something that takes any real advantage of the found-footage format, though by the year 2022 I’ve more or less given up any reasonable expectation that a found-footage film will use the format in any innovative ways.  

 

Fortunately, it turns out the “getting out is not as simple” part is rather more interesting than the hauntings. See, when you’re in a haunted asylum, the obvious thing to do is just to… leave. And in fact, that’s exactly what our gang tries to do. Only they find that they can’t. Every hallway just leads to more hallways. Every stairwell leads to more stairs. When they finally get to the atrium where they’re sure they entered, the door just leads to more hallways. At one point, we’re told they spent an entire day walking in one direction without getting anywhere. Or at least, one day according to their watches; somehow, the sun never comes up. Days pass. They sleep, they wake, they wander. They’re supposed to be let out the following morning, but morning never comes, and no one ever comes for them. That is kind of scary; the deep wrongness of the never-ending night, of the never-ending hallways, the feeling of being utterly trapped in a cage that has no exit, where basic rules of reality have dissolved until you lack any tools at all to fight back against your captors… that is horror on a very different level. Hell, since I already used the words No Exit, I might as well just say it: it’s existential horror. You can run from a scary ghost. You can’t run from reality itself. If true horror is, to a degree, about making you feel powerless, this is one of the most oppressive scenarios I can imagine, one wherein the rules have been rigged so that no amount of strength or speed or cleverness can save you.

 

It's a dark vibe, so it’s both a shame and maybe just as well the movie mostly tilts towards headier scares after a while; there’s only so much oppression you can take before things get more depressing than a movie this silly can handle. Still, there’s something here, and it gives the standard-issue BOO! moments a little more punch than they’d otherwise have, at least for a while. Still not enough to really make it worth enduring 95 minutes of annoying people shouting the same thing at each other endlessly in night-vision green (which does add to the oppressiveness of it all, but also to the monotony), and especially not to get to such a silly nothing of an ending. But I’ve seen worse, and was expecting less. When you’re expecting nothing and get a little, one tends to be grateful. Still, a film that’s making fun of Ghost Hunter type shows, even one which is at least moderately more eventful, would do well to remember that at least those shows are only, like, an hour long, and that includes commercials.

 

 

* That honor appears to go to Shirley Clarke's THE CONNECTION way back in 1961, with the first found footage horror film apparently CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST in 1980.

 

 


Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Chainsawnukah 2022

 


Hello loyal blog-reader! Since I've received a few messages from fans worried that they're reading the calendar incorrectly, I'm happy to confirm that yes, it IS that most magical of months, Chainsawnukah! Life has been a bit crazy as a of late, and I still haven't had time to do any real long-form reviews, but for now you can follow my ongoing horror marathon in the form of short(er), (vampire)-bite-sized reviews on letterboxd! I'm not as prolific with the longer stuff as I used to be, but I'm sure there will be at least something in the mix this year that inspires me to loquaciousness, so keep checking here and I bet we'll get at least a few examples of my prattling, endlessly digressive masterworks. Because it just wouldn't be Chainsawnukah without it! 

In the meantime, click on Chainsawnta Claus below and follow my continuing adventures in the endless land of terrible, unwatchable horror crap! HAPPY CHAINSAWNUKAH ALL! 



Wednesday, July 6, 2022

No Time To Die

 


No Time To Die (2021)
Dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga
Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Cary Joji Fukunaga, Phoebe Waller-Bridge (!)
Starring Daniel Craig, Léa Seydoux, Rami Malek
 
Frankly, I'm not at all sorry to see this misbegotten Daniel Craig era of Bond film come to a close. That's no slight against Craig, who has been game enough, and plenty able to cast himself as the suavely misanthropic super-spy with the right blend of macho traditionalism and actorly specificity. But the very idea --pushed hard throughout this pentalogy-- of a grittier, darker tone with a bent towards probing Bond's broken psychology always felt absolutely asinine, the kind of dumbass 90’s defensively self-serious posturing that was already passé by 2006. Why would we want a dour, realistic version of something so inherently unrealistic? Who cares that Bond's life of traveling to fancy places, bedding every beautiful woman he sees, and killing thousands of villainous goons with no consequences scars his soul and leaves him sad and emotionally damaged, when no one has or will ever do any of that?  It’s so ridiculously far removed from anything remotely resembling reality that moralizing about it is a completely meaningless exercise in utter abstraction. What's next, a depressing, realistic origin story for The Joker? That would be stupid, obviously. This is a fun, empty-headed anachronistic antisocial fantasy with absolutely nothing to teach us about the real world. Just let it be its itself.*

This has been my feeling from the very start, and Craig's subsequent run of movies has done little to disabuse me of that initial reaction. CASINO ROYALE has a few fun beats and a magnificent villain in Mads Mikkelsen, but it's also a structural mess which, predictably, has no idea what to do with its self-conscious "darker" tone other than scowl more. And when it became clear that QUANTUMN OF SOLACE would do the same thing and would be larded up with a bunch of tedious continuity porn, I almost stormed out of the theater (and I wouldn't have missed much if I had). SKYFALL was something of a welcome course correction, with much more shameless huge-scale silliness, a worthy theme song and Roger Deakins making everything look lush and purty, but it takes a weird turn into mawkish melodrama in its last act and makes the horrible mistake of centering the story around Bond personally. And finally even though SPECTRE is the most recent one, I remembered almost nothing about it except that it has a good opening, a hot Monica Bellucci, and it turns out Blofeld is Bond's brother like in (spoilers for AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER) AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER. Also it has not just the worst Bond theme song ever, but a real serious contender for the title of worst theme songs in any movie in the history of cinema. And the blandest title in the entire Bond canon, which is particularly galling.** I hope it's obvious to everyone here that Bond movies, like gialli, need baroque, decadent titles. NEVER DIE AGAIN TOMORROW, NOTHING NEW UNDER THE GUN, ON GOLDEN POND, THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS. Stuff like that. This might seem like unduly sour nitpicking, but Bond films, even more than other rigidly formulaic franchises, are defined by such a particular and iconic set of distinct signifiers that yes, it's a big problem if you bungle your tile and theme song game. And the fact that the Craig era seems to have been defined by a creative team slightly embarrassed about those signifiers and eager to marginalize them or at least furtively recontextualize them strikes me as folly of the highest order.  
So in fact, I would argue with the title of this movie and insist that it is in fact very much time to die. And the fact that the movie begins with Bond and Léa Seydoux (CRIMES OF THE FUTURE) together, as though I have any idea who she is or any memory of her being in the last movie, put me in a sour mood right off the bat. And then from there we immediately dive back into continuity porn with Blofeld and Eva Green and shit. Goddamit, this is why I swore off the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movies, and this isn't even going to have that level of stuntwork.



But I warmed to it a bit. The movie bustled along, doing its standard James Bond thing, and doing it pretty well, pretty honestly. Noticeably less anxious, self-conscious fretting about gritty realism, not a lot of drab overthinking but not entirely braindead, either. Still too much annoying continuity clutter and moony melodrama about Bond himself, but at least enough of the desired formula, executed handsomely, that I was willing to provisionally get on board with the film. 
But then something unexpected happened. Like Saul Tenser in CRIMES OF THE FUTURE,*** something alien and unexpected but maybe kind of beautiful started to grow inside it. Something, in fact, that feels almost like a whole different film, a parallel work of art, not wholly disconnected from the standard globetrotting Bond fare but also not particularly dependent on it: an odd, melancholy drama about endings, about regret for the roads not taken, the things left undone, the future that we won't see.

Or maybe it’s not even a drama, since you can’t really call it a story, per se, and Craig is the only character (technically, much of it centers around Bond’s relationship with Seydoux, who the movie frames as his true love. But she’s nearly 20 years younger than him, their chemistry is middling at best, and she’s transparently more plot device than character, important to Bond only because the movie needs it to be so, and even then only by virtue of being the last Bond girl still sitting at the end of a 60-year-long game of musical chairs). So it’s not getting anywhere on the strength of its narrative. But it's more than a tone. It's like, you've got a normal Bond movie, where he wears a tuxedo and orders a Martini and drives a souped up sports car and what have you, but maybe every fourth scene or so just lingers a little longer than you expect, sometimes just holds a second longer on Craig's face than it needs to, lets him register this look he's perfected of aching, resigned regret immediately masked by a reflexive, protective retreat to macho cynicism. It may be just a look, it may not even be anything more than that -- it's not really in the screenplay, except in the sense that the screenplay is confident enough to place Bond in emotionally fraught situations and then mostly just shut up and just let Craig tell us what we need to know entirely through his eyes. 

But it's a powerful look, and not because I've finally come around to the drab idea that this is a penetrating insight into why being a suave, indestructible superspy-lothario is emotionally crippling. Rather, the thing that gives this surprising emotional heft is that it actually has nothing to do with being a superspy. It's about being an emotionally wounded old man, with too much accumulated hurt to be able to entirely trust anyone --to be open and vulnerable the way that love requires-- and experiencing that inevitable moment when you realize you've spent your youth pushing people away instead of letting them love you, and you find yourself alone and empty, with only your regrets and your haunting questions about how it might have all gone differently to occupy your time. And then the old excuses start to ring hollow -- was it really that I am an international superspy and couldn't risk a romantic partner who might betray me to the massive clandestine criminal network run by my estranged stepbrother that wants to kill me? Or was I just afraid of being happy? The specifics emerge naturally from what we understand about the essence of James Bond, but the feelings are richer and more universal. This could be the story of a super-spy, or a gangster, or a high-end chef, and though the specifics of the story would change, that haunted expression would mean the same thing. Combined with Linus Sandgren's (LA LA LAND, FIRST MAN) lush, painterly cinematography,**** and the unrushed editing of Elliot Graham (MILK, X2) and Tom Cross (WHIPLASH, LA LA LAND, HOSTILES), it feels weirdly, unexpectedly evocative, and gives the whole enterprise a curious vibe indeed, a mostly straight-faced silly action romp which is threaded with an implacable but genuine sadness. And the two impulses don't contradict each other, somehow; they balance each other, with the scuzzy fun of Bond fighting it out with a cyborg-eyed motorcycle henchman keeping the middle-aged ennui from sliding into gloomy mawkishness, and the gently insistent emotions giving the action a little insulation from the featureless, plastic churn of some of the more mercenary Bond films.




None of which is to say it's a good movie, exactly. The action is adequate, but mostly lacking in any real showstopper "oh shit!" moments, the design is nice-looking but a little bland, the acting is mostly a moot point outside of Craig himself (Rami Malek is going for something with his bizarre, affectless villain performance, but he's such an uninteresting character the result is pretty dull). The dialogue, scene by scene, is actually rather witty (I’m going to credit a final script-polish by Phoebe Waller-Bridge for that), but the story as a whole is a complete mess, an awkward thing which spends almost half its runtime lurching around trying to tie up unnecessary loose ends from the rest of the series in a way so tossed-off and arbitrary that it makes me angry all over again that this series leaned so hard into its manifestly useless continuity, before finally settling down and pivoting to whatever silly bullshit this movie is about, which it then doesn't seem to quite have time to develop, or even coherently explain (the villainous "Lyutsifer Safin" --yes, that's a real name-- has like three different motives and backstories which are all laboriously spelled out, but they don't seem to meaningfully fit together; as near as I can tell, it's a complete coincidence that he happens to kidnap Bond's girlfriend, --not because she's Bond's true love, but because he happens to already knows her from an unrelated series of events during her childhood and was already obsessed with her?-- on the same day Bond was already planning to fight him because of his evil plan to destroy the world, which was in fact originally SPECTRE's [the organization, not the movie] evil plan but then he stops them because he also hates SPECTRE***** for unrelated personal reasons, but then does the exact same thing they were planning to do? And to understand any of this, the movie relies on you remembering whatever the fuck the deal was with Seydoux's character's father in the previous movies, which seems like a pretty long shot. And it's all made weirder by the fact that everything in the scenario insistently points to "Safin" being an older Japanese man, while Rami Malek is very noticeably not that). Like the Billie-Eilish-sung title track, the plot gets the essential elements right, but can't seem to build like it needs to.

And yet, for all that, there really is something here. Between Craig, director Cary Joji Fukunaga (SIN NOMBRE), and the ace production team given a limitless budget to fuss around with, a genuine mood is evoked, one which is hard to quantify but impossible to ignore. James Bond will return, of course –even the credits tell us as much—but this is the first and only Bond film which really feels like a goodbye, a bittersweet farewell to maybe not just the Daniel Craig Bond, maybe not even the Daniel Craig era, but maybe to the whole baggage-laden 60-year 25-movie whirlwind itself. There’s something percolating here, not necessarily stated but certainly felt, which is very distinctly aware that Bond as a character has become unsupportably anachronistic. This is not necessarily a new revelation --GOLDENEYE begins with Bond getting dressed down as a "dinosaur," and that was nine movies ago-- but if Bond was an old-fashioned throwback in 1995, today's he's an outright relic of a dead civilization, and utterly alien artifact, functionally incomprehensible and incompatible with the modern world. There’s very little left in the basic concept which doesn’t read as something of an ugly holdover from a specifically mid-20th-century Imperialist fantasy that isn’t very relatable these days – the poisonous misogyny, the flippant violence against endless expendable hordes of foreigners, the inescapable, curdled nationalism of spies violently reshaping the world to fit their own political ends. Even the character's personal idiosyncrasies have aged into obsolescence -- do cool kids fantasize about donning a immaculately starched tuxedo to sip fussily prepared Martinis anymore? 


It's not so ancient as to be outside living memory; us old guys remember a world where it was easy enough to slip into the concept of Bond. The world that produced him was present enough, or at least a recent enough memory, that whether or not we could personally identify with it, we understood it, it read as a comprehensible worldview that you could immerse yourself in for the purposes of this particular brand of silly fiction. But it’s increasingly hard to do that today; indeed, the whole pivot towards moody introspection that the Craig era embodied seems obviously (though blunderingly) calculated towards re-orienting Bond to something vaguely closer to a recognizable modern outlook. But is there anything left of this concept after we’ve stripped away the dated anachronisms and problematic undertones? NO TIME TO DIE provocatively posits that Bond, having resigned from MI6, has been replaced as 007 by a young Black woman little inclined to respect her antediluvian predecessor (Lashana Lynch, CAPTAIN MARVEL). She seems like a cool character in her own right -- one can easily imagine further movies chronicling her adventures. But James Bond is an archetype, and she has her own separate archetype -- if any young British superspy with their own style and outlook can be called "James Bond," the designation means very little. 

And yet, the classic archetype, which has proved surprisingly durable over the course of six very eventful decades --malleable enough in its manifestation to successfully evolve even as the fundamental core remained remarkably rigid-- has finally and obviously ground to a halt, with no clear way forward. If Bond is to be resurrected, he’ll have to be born anew as something completely different, and I, for one, can’t imagine that being particularly practical or even desirable. But that’s OK; the old dies so the new can be born. I’m nearly 40. The world moves on, and I understand it less and less, spend more and more time looking back at the comforting past which may have been horrible, but was at least familiar. I don’t feel any inclination to defend that past, but I also can’t deny that it made me what I am, defined my outlook on life, even if it defined that outlook through revulsion as much as acceptance. And so with the passing of Bond, so too I acknowledge the passing into irrelevance of a part of myself which grew up in a world where he made sense. It wasn’t a world I would want to go back to, but it was home, with all the contradictory comforts that provides, and it feels oddly meaningful, in some way, for NO TIME TO DIE to offer us old folks an opportunity to acknowledge and eulogize the end of that particular, strange, corny, impish, appalling, extravagant, crass, bloated, misguided, ever-evolving and never-changing antisocial macho power fantasy.

Goodbye then, James. We hereby bid you farewell with the same lingering mix of melancholy and relief that we leave you with in your last moments on-screen here. With the bittersweetness we might associate with a high school romance or childhood celebrity crush, say. We wouldn’t want to go back there, wouldn't want to live through it all again, but as a nostalgia-tinged memory safely in the distant past, we’ll remember you fondly and allow ourselves a certain sense of grief at our parting. And a part of you will always be with us, even if it’s just as a reminder of the road we’re glad we didn’t take.

You know, I guess it actually was Time To Die, after all.






* In saying that, I make a strong distinction between the film series, which almost immediately degenerated into a sequence of increasingly absurd, gaudy, Saturday-morning-cartoon action extravaganzas, and the relatively more staid (but still not very realistic) series of novels by Ian Fleming, which seemed to provide some vague inspiration but little else for the film series. I have never read any of them, though, so I can't be more specific than that. But I have seen every single James Bond film, most multiple times, so when I say get me more of that, please you can be quite sure I know what it is I'm asking for.

**  I was once grousing about that title and someone said something like 'well, they were probably just excited to get the rights to the name "S.P.E.C.T.R.E" back, and wanted to celebrate.' I mean, who among us could be coldhearted enough to stand in the way of a huge corporation's overwhelming expression of joy at re-acquiring a trademarked brand name? It was around this point that I began to wonder if I was an amnesic alien abandoned on Earth as a social experiment. 

*** Hey, I guess he probably wouldn't do it, but how great would Viggo be as a Bond villain? Oh man. 

**** With its serene palette of moody pastels and curiously propensity for unusually wide shots that feel wistful and beautiful but also make Bond himself a curiously small figure in the frame, this is almost without any doubt the most visually lovely Bond movie, and the first to feel like it has a genuinely distinct visual style, give or take the hideous digital BOURNE-chasing of QUANTUM OF SOLACE or the luxurious Roger Deakins work in SKYFALL.

***** Also, --SPOILERS-- I can't even begin to describe how asinine it is that "Safin" is running the third multinational super-secret criminal syndicate to be grandiosely introduced and then unceremoniously disposed of in this five-movie cycle, each one lavished with oceans of tedious exposition despite being functionally identical. This is the curse of continuity; if you haven't planned ahead, you just leave the next guy the task of laboriously sweeping aside all the previous clutter in order to do their own thing, and it's powerfully tedious stuff by this point.

Wednesday, June 29, 2022

Crimes Of The Future

 



Crimes of the Future (2022)

Dir. and written by David Cronenberg

Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart

 

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE has been billed as a return to form for director David Cronenberg (JASON X), his first relapse to his "Baron of Blood" body-horror roots since  back before the turn of the millennium. And I mean, there’s definitely some truth in that; this is unmissably, unmistakably a return to the aesthetic of slimy, gnarled bio-mechanical mutation that he has been toying with, on and off, since at least 1970's um, CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (despite having identical titles, the films are apparently unrelated). And I mean, it’s got all the classic Cronenberg moves. It's almost a Greatest Hits album! There's goopy bodily transmogrification à la THE FLY, bio-mechanical synthesis evoking eXistenZ, the squirmy surgical invasion of VIDEODROME, the perverse, subterranean sexual fetishization of deformation from SHIVERS, RABID, DEAD RINGERS and CRASH, the lurking sense of subversive, clandestine conspiracy from SCANNERS and NAKED LUNCH. And to that list of influences, it adds… not a whole lot. Indeed, to a longtime Cronenberg fan this might actually seem a little quaint, more a Crime Of The Past than the future, pushing the boundaries of 30 years ago but more comfortingly familiar than disturbingly transgressive when viewed from the year 2022.

Which is why it matters a great deal that although the method is a familiar --even nostalgic-- one for Cronenberg, the motive is entirely different. What was once the province of grubby, perverse little mindfuck thrillers has itself mutated into something far stranger and less classifiable, retaining something vaguely recognizable as a thriller structure flitting around the margins somewhere, but letting itself drift into far less familiar waters tonally. It is at its core, I think, something like a romantic comedy --though such a ridiculously dry and bleak one that this could hardly be called obvious or indisputable-- which is more interested in examining (and sometimes satirizing) the transformative nature of art than it is in playing its central premise for anything remotely resembling thrills.



Still, there’s something like a genre structure knocking about. It’s unambiguously a Sci-Fi film, for starters, set in an unspecified shambolic, run-down future. The first image of the film shows us a child playing on the beach next to a giant overturned cargo ship, which tells us all we really need to know about what kind of world this is: one in which some major civilizational collapse has occurred, but either long enough ago or slowly enough that the humans grifting along in the aftermath have come to take it entirely for granted. The ubiquitous decay found everywhere in the movie’s design (and especially in the sets) evokes a familiar post-apocalyptic aesthetic… except that one doesn’t get the sense here that there has been a specific, identifiable apocalypse; more like people just gave up on maintaining their world, and it gradually rotted away around them while they retreated into a catatonic haze of amnesic detachment, the crashed cargo ship not the result of a sudden nuclear conflagration so much as its crew simply abandoning any attempt to steer it and wandering off. It is a portrait of a society not so much dying as already dead, grinding on only out of simple, mechanical inertia. The empty shell of civilization putters on --there are government bureaucracies, cops, corporations—but a sense of purposeless entropy pervades everything, casting these pursuits as meaningless rituals which persist only out of the complacency of those involved, too checked-out to bother resisting the accumulated momentum of the past, which is gradually winding down of its own accord in any case. A phrase from THE DARK CRYSTAL comes to mind, there referring to the marginalized race of Mystics, but just as applicable to the humans of CRIMES OF THE FUTUE: a dying race, numbly rehearsing the ancient ways in a blur of forgetfulness. The inhabitants of this future feel utterly alienated from the world, their futile play-acting lacking even an emotional connection to the bygone past they’re half-heartedly acting out. That latter fact feels particularly significant here – despite the evidence all around them of a catastrophic decline, no one in the film seems to harbor any belief that it would be possible to reverse. The hubristic glories of the past are as omnipresent but remote as the gods themselves, and the conflict here is entirely between the forces that seek to chart a path to an entirely new future, and those who will savagery fight to defend the miserable status quo.

Our protagonist, as it turns out, fits neatly into neither category, though he may embody both. He is Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen, PRISON), a “Performance Artist” who, along with his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux, THE FRENCH DISPATCH) has a wildly popular act. To explain what that act is requires a little more backstory. One other thing about this strange future, you see, is that the human body itself is changing. Most humans no longer feel physical pain –Saul is a rare exception—and are no longer susceptible to disease, both facts which would seem ideal, utopian even, but here just serve to further alienate people from their lives and bodies. But humans are changing in other ways, too – many people are experiencing strange and seemingly random mutations. The government is extremely suspicious of those with “accelerated evolution syndrome,” and many reactionary citizens are zealously hostile; in the opening scene, we witness a disgusted mother murder her son when she catches him using a newly-evolved digestive system to consume plastic. But of course, anything that gets The Man this riled up is going to intrigue the counterculture crowd. And so we return to our “Performance Artists’” act: Saul is constantly growing new organs (if I understand correctly, these were originally duplicate organs, but have recently begun to manifest as unique and never-before-seen organic structures, and maybe even whole organ systems). His act is that Caprice carefully tattoos these organs as a means of categorization, and then removes them during live surgeries for awed crowds. The official line is that their act is a sober warning about the horror of genetic mutants. But of course, this being a David Cronenberg film, not-so-secretly everyone is super turned on by it, it’s the most exciting thing going on in this horrible, dead world. “Surgery is the new sex,” mousy bureaucrat/fangirl Timlin (César Award winner Kristin Stewart) whispers to Saul at an afterparty. But their countercultural success comes with a note of danger: they’ve attracted the attention of an underground group fronted by Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman, “The discount Bradley Cooper”), father of the plastic-eating boy we saw murdered. He has a proposition for a new act, which might have explosive revolutionary potential.



This sounds like thriller territory, and there are a few other spoiler-y wrinkles I haven’t mentioned which might support that impression. But the movie doesn’t pursue any of this with the least bit of vigor. It’s always rattling around in the background, but the pace is so glacial and the mood so elegiac that it never even flirts with excitement. At most, there’s a tendril of that ol’ Cronenberg icy paranoia hanging in the air, but the things the movie seems most interested in are strange little meetings with the various inhabitants of this world, mostly in small groups, having quiet but often rather funny offbeat conversations about what exactly it means to be this kind of “performance artist,” much of which reads pretty easily as Cronenberg directly addressing his own career as a seemingly normal, dignified guy who grows weird, mutant things inside himself and then, with help, removes and displays them for our –what, enjoyment? Edification? Titillation? All of the above, none of it? Is it a courageous act, or perverse folly, or just a meaningless geek show? Is art itself a method of evolution, or is it a purging of our malignant growths so that we can be more fully human? Despite the outré nature of the visuals, this is where the movie wants to go, for better or worse. It’s more LA BELLE NOISEUSE than HELLRAISER (which is not to say there’s no HELLRAISER in there; it does still want to get a rise out of you). 

This is a choice which is not going to please everyone, obviously. Fans of the “Baron Of Blood” lured in by the promise of a return to perverted body horror may find themselves baffled to get exactly that, but in the context of a bunch of semi-comic vignettes and small, intimate emotions which the actors allow to just barely peek out of their meditative stoicism. And the movie is hardly lazer-focused even on that; it’s mainly interested in creating a peculiar sort of mood, letting the somnambulistic editing of Christopher Donaldson (Penny Dreadful, The Handmaid's tale, American Gods) combine with the moody, classical camerawork of Douglas Koch (THE SEXIEST ANIMAL [documentary], Perverts Anonymous: Episodes 1-3) and then drenching the whole thing in the austere, anxious score by MVP Howard Shore (a longtime Cronenberg collaborator going back to THE BROOD, and yet it's still kind of a shock to see him on a tiny-budget movie like this after having done the LORD OF THE RINGS movie and such*). Which is no small thing! Combined with the ragged, post-apocalyptic setting and, of course, the movie's pathological fetishization of grotesque physical disfigurement, and it adds up to a powerfully oppressive, disquieting atmosphere. But not a lot of action.  

And yet, for my money it may just be the most powerful thing Cronenberg's ever done. And it manages that in part by turning our (or at least my -- I don't want to speak for you!) expectations about a Cronenberg movie on its head. Because ultimately, I think this story of fetishistic underground surgery cults and escalating body dysmorphia is actually surprisingly sweet, even optimistic. In fact, it turns the logic of Cronenberg's other bio-horror films entirely around. Whereas SHIVERS, THE BROOD, or THE FLY invite us to view the disintegration and displacement of the human organism with horror, CRIMES OF THE FUTURE sees it as perhaps the only glimmer of hope in a world which has become so horrifically intolerable that the only way forward is to cease being human and become something else entirely. That something else might seem disturbing and shocking to those of us who are stuck in the past, but the past is unquestionably dead here; its decaying corpse is visible all around. Still, there is a future --or can be one-- if we are simply willing to change, to become something completely new. Not that there aren't still forces, even in a society rotted practically to the bone, that won't work hard to make sure that we die rather than change.



If one wants to find a straightforward metaphor in this –and there’s no particular need to do so, but the film certainly leaves itself open to it—it isn’t hard to come up with one. Or many, depending on what (or who) you think the new organs represent, and the degree to which you want to assume this scenario is or isn’t essentially autobiographical for Cronenberg. Like all movies with a vague revolutionary metaphor at their center, it’s easy to project whatever you want on it. If you see “accelerated evolution syndrome” as a metaphor for burgeoning gender fluidity, for example, it’s not hard to make the plot hew pretty snugly to that interpretation, making it a paean to a bold new world which might be scary and disturbing to those stuck in their old ways, but will ultimately allow for a more functional world where people can be true to themselves. Of course, if you want to imagine the movie’s underground revolutionaries as patriotic and persecuted Q Anon believers, it wouldn’t be hard to do that, either. In my formative years (perhaps not coincidentally, when this script was originally written) the social left felt so disenfranchised that we saw basically any revolutionary concept as intrinsically “our” story. Since then we’ve managed to stake out enough ground in the middle that it seems like the hub of revolutionary fervor has shifted to the reactionary right. I was well on my way to middle age before I ever even considered that neo-Nazis and anti-government Militia types and so on might see their own grievances in the anodyne revolutionary narratives of THEY LIVE, or THE MATRIX.

So does it all mean nothing? Not at all! Whatever you want to place as the central metaphor here, and even if you want to resist that urge entirely, there’s one thing beyond dispute: the movie is a soul-wrenching howl against a world that simply doesn’t work. And that resonates deeply – whatever your politics, don’t we all feel it? Don’t we all feel like Saul Tenser, contorted and uncomfortable, body constantly in revolt, trying vainly to scratch out some kind of feeble existence in a world which never seems the right fit for humans, even as we transmogrify it more and more until it’s hardly fit for anything? For all its offbeat humor and light meta commentary, there’s a crushing and deeply poignant sense here of the of generalized wrongness of every second spent in this fictional world, which feels so uncomfortably close to our own even if it doesn’t much resemble it.

And that, I think, is what makes it such a powerful experience. With the exception of FIRST REFORMED back in 2019, I don't know that I have seen another movie in the last decade that so exactly captured my own experience of this rapidly metastasizing culture  -- so perfectly captures the disquieting brokenness of the world right now, the feeling of utter, irreversible entropy all around on ever side, and both the resigned near-catatonia it triggers, and also the curious feeling of seeing a glimmer of hope in the strange things the young people are into, the things I will never entirely understand or be capable of wholly becoming part of, except that somehow there's something in me that begs to change and grow and find something, anything that works, that doesn't feel fundamentally at odds with the basic facts of existence. Something that doesn’t rely on phony optimism or reactionary nostalgia – a way forward, whatever that may look like. And David Cronenberg, of all fool people, is here with a parable about that very feeling. Once upon a time we told stories about heroes saving the world. Now, faced with a world beyond any meaningful hope of saving, that our very bodies are rejecting, the only thing to do is adapt and survive, and find beauty in that. In a world of plastic, learn to eat plastic. In an inhuman world, stop worrying about trying to be human.

I love that Viggo's the only one who dresses like a Ninja Monk, and everyone is totally cool with it. You know how these "Performance Artists" are.


It's not going to be an easy transition. There are powerful forces who are very comfortable with the miserable status quo and will push back savagely against any attempt to change it. And even if we win, even if we persist, there’s no knowing how this turns out. We don’t know if we’re going to be able to eat the plastic candy bar or not. Some of us won’t make it. And even those of us who do will have to come to terms with a new world that in many ways feels strange, even grotesque, a world where our old aspirations and values and very sense of self are mutated and adulterated and twisted into something unimaginable and new. It is not necessarily a “better” future, by any kind of metric we currently possess – it is, in a way, an admission of defeat, a concession that our hopes and dreams for the kind of world we wanted are really and truly dead, along with the world that spawned them, and that the only hope is to adjust ourselves to the strange and terrible world we have made for ourselves by becoming strange and terrible ourselves. But as bleak a hope as it is, at least it is a hope, a real one – and it’s been a long time since I saw another piece of fiction which offered even that. At some point the Crimes Of The Future cease to be crimes, and simply become the existence of the present, and the young people wonder what we used to be so hung up about, and get down to the business of making their own hubristical assumptions about the finality of their own sense of the world, and condemning their own crimes of the future. And so it goes. The name of this blog is We Are Cursed To Live In Interesting Times. Well, maybe we always have. But rarely have I experienced a movie which felt so achingly close to this particular present.

 

 

PS: Also, what’s up with the voice Viggo is doing here? Is he intentionally trying to do a George C. Scott impression or what?

 

 

Saturday, May 28, 2022

The First Power and the Perplexing Enigma of Action-Horror

 



The First Power (1990)

Dir. and written by David Resnikoff

Starring Lou Diamond Phillips, Tracy Griffith, Jeff Kober

 

Ah, here we have a rare thing, an entry into the action-horror canon. That small body of films that attempt the unlikely feat of melding together two great but very different genre film traditions: action, with its badass protagonists, gun battles, car chases and explosions, and horror, with its ghoulies, ghosties, Chuckys, Amityvilles, and things that go “bump” in the night. In theory, of course, there is at least some crossover here; the visceral threat of bodily destruction, a shared bent towards simmering, adrenaline-pumping tension, perhaps a shared sense of a brittle, bipartite moral universe built around a struggle between good and evil. But while there might be some superficial similarities, I think the preponderance of the experimental evidence suggests that there are some fundamental differences between the mechanics of these two genres, which more often than not render any attempt to combine them a confused and self-defeating affair. It will probably not surprise you terribly to learn that 1990’s THE FIRST POWER does not buck that trend, though it has its charms nonetheless. Still, it will serve nicely as an entrée by which to consider the ways that these two venerable genres interact, and to try and parse why they have more often glanced off each other than successfully melded.

Specifically, I think the way that both genres tend to revolve around power makes them fundamentally incompatible. For the most part, Action movies offer a power fantasy; at their most archetypal, they’re about a rivalry between a lone man –much more rarely a woman—and another party (usually a rival man or group of men), pitted against each other in a battle for control. Whether a scrappy underdog like Bruce in DIE HARD, or an unstoppable Ubermensch like Seagal in OUT FOR JUSTICE (and all his other movies), the fundamental structure is the same: to invite the audience to indulge in the fantasy of being just too God Damn Tough to push around. Exactly what is being contested is mostly unimportant; though our hero may use the language of morality and justice, it’s the challenge itself that powers the story. Most of us spend most of our lives, starting as children, getting pushed around and frustrated by factors beyond our control – bosses, petty bullies, the government, the economy, what have you—so it’s little wonder that this kind of empowerment fantasy is appealing. What if you just didn’t have to take their shit? Man, wouldn’t it be great to be so badass you could just strut around, live by your own rules, teach the bullies of the world a lesson they won’t soon forget?

Horror, on the other hand, inverts the power dynamic. Fear is about a loss of control – about being up against unstoppable, perhaps incomprehensible forces that threaten, pollute, transmogrify the safe and familiar into something threatening and alien. Though the protagonist of a horror movie might –might—get the upper hand in the end, they’re still going to spend most of the runtime in dire peril, often barely able to understand, let alone effectively oppose, the danger facing them. In perhaps the most elemental horror setup, the only thing to do may be to run – to acknowledge that your only hope is to try to escape a force too powerful to even attempt to defend against. Even when a “final girl” prevails over a Jason or a Freddy in the end --in effect regaining the control and personal autonomy that has been denied during her travails-- there’s likely to be a final stinger (Jason suddenly leaping out of the water, say) which snatches back that hard-earned empowerment and suggests that her restored sense of control is only temporary and illusory, a delusional vanity in the face of a chaotic universe which can arbitrarily crush you at any moment.



Consequently, the basic storytelling formulas which define these two genres seem mutually incompatible. A movie can’t be simultaneously a power fantasy and about loss of control, and so maybe it shouldn’t be exactly shocking that there are so few illustrative examples for us to consider. Or, anyway, few examples which are genuinely both. It’s not incredibly unusual to have an action movie with some horror elements in it – the BLADE or UNDERWORLD movies, for example, are clearly structured as action movies but feature strong horror elements. Likewise the RESIDENT EVIL movies, GHOSTS OF MARS, COBRA, THE MUMMY (2017), PRIEST, that sort of thing. You could call those “horror movies” because they have zombies or vampires or what have you, but they’re all clearly build on an action framework, they simply have villains who are slightly more outré than your typical bad guys.

 Conversely, I’d argue there are some horror movies --or at least borderline horror movies— which don’t utilize traditional horror conceits, and lean towards horror entirely through tone and structure; THE RAID, for example, which despite being basically nothing but wall-to-wall fighting, works up such a sense of hopeless, faceless persecution, and is so unremittingly bleak in its presentation, that at least referencing horror seems essential to properly describing the experience. Likewise ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, or GREEN ROOM. All feature purely human antagonists and setups which could reasonably be construed as action movies – is GREEN ROOM really all that different a scenario than DIE HARD?—but crucially, the impetus is on the protagonists’ lack of control of the situation; even if they prevail in the end, there’s no sense of conquering triumph; they limp away, exhausted, broken, just glad to somehow be alive. Their journeys are harrowing rather than exciting; the word “victory” does not suggest itself so much as “survival,” augmented by a pronounced emphasis on the grotesque, gruesome nature of the violence.

Though both genres feature violence, they use it differently, trying to provoke different reactions. One prompts you to cover your eyes, the other to pump your fist – even though the violence itself may be virtually identical. And violence is not the only shared content. Horror movies are not above the louche pleasures of a huge fiery explosion, or a leering, horny sex scene for that matter, but the context is going to be entirely different than in an action film. The sex scene in a horror movie is not evidence of our hero’s awesome virality (as it would be in an action film), but of the profound physical vulnerability we expose ourselves to when we’re naked and unaware.

The difference, I suppose, is one of framing – the way the story encourages us to interpret and emotionally invest in the many genre elements which could be (and often are) common to both genres. And power –or control, if you prefer-- is, I think, at the center of those contrasting framings: whether the lead is ultimately empowered or disempowered for most of the story. There is an explicitly gendered reading of this; it’s no coincidence that Action films tend towards male protagonists, while Horror features a preponderance of women. Tough guys, final girls. Rightly or wrongly, there is the assumption that audiences will perceive women as more inherently vulnerable, and less able to control a situation than a man -- a potentially disruptive problem for an action movie, but an obvious advantage for horror. The Italian Gialli and Poliziotteschi genres (one universally regarded as Horror, the other leaning heavily towards Action), for instance, often have a tremendous overlap in terms of content and in pedigree; the defining difference is located in the nature of the protagonist, which in the case of a Giallo is very likely to be female, and in particular a woman with very little inherent control over her situation, a vulnerable, youthful outsider who doesn’t fully grasp the nuances and mechanics of the world she’s entering. By contrast, the protagonist of a Poliziottesco is nearly always male, and almost by definition a powerful male of some stripe, usually a square-jawed cop or a canny tough guy – someone confident, used to being in-control; indeed, I think one may say without lapsing into arbitrary Freudianism that this protagonist may implicitly consider the actions of the antagonist a direct challenge to his assertive masculinity. There are, needless to say, plentiful exceptions to these trends, but the trends themselves –and their underlying narrative logic—seem to me both inescapable and nakedly revealing about the underlying mechanics behind the two respective genres.*

Poliziottescho vs Giallo


The two approaches are, in a word, incompatible. With all that in mind, then, let us consider the strange and disruptive subset of films which directly mash together key elements of each genre in ways which might be provocative… or merely wrong-headed. A key strand of such films (including our subject for today, THE FIRST POWER) breaks a usually hard-and-fast barrier between action and horror films by inserting a tough guy protagonist into a story which would typically feature a more vulnerable lead. Specimens of this particular sub-subgenre are not abundant, but they do exist. An illustrative example would be 10 TO MIDNIGHT, which features the imperturbably tough Charles Bronson going up against some smarmy, perverted serial killer. You could argue it’s more Crime flick than Action or Horror, but serial killers are a staple of horror, and the strangeness of the central matchup paints a clear picture of the unusual mechanics at work here: the sleazy nudist killer is no match for Bronson’s laconic masculinity; he’s soft, weak, boyish, sexually frustrated. Sending Charles Fucking Bronson after this pathetic narcissist seems almost like a waste, the two combatants are so wildly incommensurate. But the killer is clever enough to hide behind the power of the law, effectively making it impossible for Bronson to stop him, and turning what would typically be a mano a mano fight for supremacy into a grueling exercise in frustration. It sort of works, fueled entirely by our simmering rage at this despicable sadist, but I think it’s noteworthy that is does so in spite of generally undercutting both the strength of the tough guy hero and the unknowable, anxious menace typical of the serial killer genre.

And other, similar movies have tended to fare much worse; Seagal’s two bouts with serial killers in THE GLIMMER MAN and KILL SWITCH waste the juggernaut-like wrath of his on-screen persona on drab, barely-articulated clichés that don’t benefit from the kind of overkill he provides (plus everything else terrible about those two movies); the synopsis for Stallone’s COBRA reads like a horror movie, with its conspiracy of satanic serial killers, but it cranks them (and everything else) up so much they might as well be comic book supervillains, more or less losing all but the most vestigial bits of Horror in the process. SILENT RAGE, which in theory pits Chuck Norris against an undead slasher, seems more aware of the potential incompatibility of these two competing forces, but resolves the dilemma simply by dodging it: Norris and the undead killer meet up only in the film’s climax, and otherwise their two subplots are connected in only the most tangential way.


Perhaps the most interesting attempt to unnaturally graft tough guy cinema onto a horror structure would be PREDATOR. It has, in fact, something like a PSYCHO-style bit of brazen misdirection to it: though the first thing we see is a mysterious spaceship, the movie pretends for a surprisingly long time that it’s some kind of men-on-a-mission jungle action tale, even indulging in a huge gun battle setpiece before gradually teasing out the truth: it is actually a FRIDAY THE 13th-style slasher, where our cast is going to be picked off one by one by a mysterious, unstoppable killer. But in this case, that killer is a superpowered alien, and the horny teens are 'roided-up supersoldiers. This is, at least, a provocative substitution: the movie operates by the standard slasher playbook, but ups the ante by stacking the cast with testosterone-addled musclemen who we don't expect to see so vulnerable and powerless against their tormenter. An interesting idea, maybe, but not one which ends up being very productive in practice, at least as a genre experiment. The characters are so cartoonish and one-dimensional that shifting them to this unfamiliar context doesn't really bring anything interesting out in them; mostly, they just respond to being threatened by becoming even more macho, which sort of undercuts the sense of menace the movie seems to be trying to build. All that outrageously hyper-concentrated machismo is simply more potent than the horror trappings, tilting the balance so decisively that I doubt almost anyone thinks of PREDATOR as a horror film, despite the many specific elements of horror in its structure and execution that you might be able to identify. For proof of that, just look at the sequels; with the arguable exception of PREDATOR 2, they all lean hard on action cliches, adopting the structure of tough guy movies, not single-location slashers.

The problem that all these movies encounter, essentially, is that the fantasy of the tough guy has to do with his effectiveness. An action hero may face setbacks, but ultimately it’s about winning, about individual skill, gumption, and pure raw power overcoming seemingly impossible odds. By definition, the hero needs to be able to take action, to consistently strike back at his antagonists. And of course, the structure of a typical horror film demands exactly the opposite: a protagonist who is outmatched, out of control, oppressed, without any obvious recourse. A hero who can effectively contest his plight, even if facing very long odds, has at least the comfort of purpose, with its accompanying sense of autonomy. It’s when we are directionless, utterly out of control, that we begin to feel fear. It’s why ALIEN is a horror movie, and ALIENS is an action movie. The threat is the same, but once the humans have shown they are capable of fighting back (even with very long odds), the entire dynamic changes.



Except when it doesn’t. Which brings us, at long last, to THE FIRST POWER, a very strange and possibly completely unique movie which simply rams a tough guy cop flick into a supernatural killer flick and refuses to notice that they are working at cross-purposes.

Before we talk about that, though, let’s pause and set the stage. THE FIRST POWER presents us with Lou "The Rough" Diamond Phillips (his Wikipedia page claims he has an uncredited cameo in DEMON WIND?!) as tough guy cop Russ Logan, squaring off against a supernatural serial killer who just won't stay dead. In that sense, a lot like SILENT RAGE, except the gimmick here is that the killer (reliable character actor Jeff Kober, dripping smarmy menace), having been liberated from his body by the overzealous LDP early in the proceedings, is now some kind of evil spirit capable of possessing others to continue his murderous rampage, more like THE FALLEN.

He can do this because he has, you see, "The First Power." What the heck does that mean? I'll let Conspiracy Nun Sister Marguerite (Elizabeth Arlen**, NATIONAL LAMPOON'S EUROPEAN VACATION) explain:

 

SISTER MARGEURITE: There are three powers that can be bestowed by God or Satan. The Third Power is the ability to take over another person's body. Your friend [Tracy Griffith, SLEEPAWAY CAP III: TEENAGE WASTELAND] is a psychic, she has the Second Power: the gift of knowing the future. The First Power is resurrection. Immortality.

 

DETECTIVE RUSS LOGAN: Look sister, I don't understand these things.

 

SISTER MARGEURITE: There's just one way [to defeat the killer]... Through the only soul in history who had all three powers!***

 

[holds out a crucifix, to LDP's obvious disappointment. Then she pulls a knife out of it!] Woah! ‘Brother Maynard, bring out the holy shank of Antioch!’ I’m honestly not sure if this knife was built specifically for killin’ First-Power-havin’ sumnabitches, or she just assumes because of the crucifix it’ll have a little extra kick, but I appreciate this nun’s moxie. Also based on her description it seems like this movie would be more accurately titled THE FIRST AND THIRD POWER AND ANOTHER LADY WITH THE SECOND POWER, but admittedly I guess there would be no problem if this particular guy didn’t have the First one.

(I never heard any of this in Catholic school, by the way, but to be fair Sister Marguerite claims that "the church doesn't allow us to discuss [the First Power]" so I guess you have to be hip to some religious secrets? In fact, the whole thing actually opens with a bunch of old Church Authority types [including David Gale from RE-ANIMATOR!] fretting, “Sister, this is the 20th century… so one mustn’t mention Satan in polite company.” I guess they must not have considered my first-grade Catholic School religion class to be “polite company,” because I recollect they did mention Satan quite a bit, exactly in 1990. My memory is that they also very much do allow, and in fact encourage and even require quite a bit of discission of resurrection, but I guess I'm gonna have to trust THE FIRST POWER to have done its research.)

 



Anyway, the movie has a long way to go before it gets into the dense theological weeds of crucifixes which double as knives, BBQ tongs, beveling hammers, etc. In fact, it’s a very long time before our protagonist is even willing to admit that more exotic methods may be required, although he is, I feel, much slower on the uptake than you or I would be. It turns out that the problem with being a tough-guy detective who is absolutely capable of smoking a cigarette while wearing a trench coat and aviators is that while you may be great at catching criminals (and in fact, it seems like he is; we hear via a news report that “this is the third time in less than five years that Logan has been responsible for the death or capture of a serial killer.” This shit’s getting pretty routine for him!) that does not necessarily make you the right person to fight a disembodied supernatural entity who rocks both the First and Third Power. Russ Logan is great at chases where he leaps over obstacles, his cool-guy black trench coat billowing in the wind behind him like a cape. But what do you do when the perp just laughs off bullets and can easily leap 10 stories to the street and run off? Not a whole lot. But he keeps trying. At one point he pulls out a box of grenades -- “buddy on the bomb squad gave me this stuff for a rainy day” he explains, which in my opinion raises a lot more questions than it answers—and has to be gently reminded again that this is basically an immortal spirit and explosions aren’t going to work any better than gunfire.

This makes for a kind of amusingly frustrating cop movie. Everything that makes him a good super-cop is kind of useless in this scenario, but it’s all he’s got, and also it’s the only story template that the movie can think of, so he just has to keep doing standard super-cop stuff and it just keeps not working. He still goes about the basic super-cop routine, getting a sexy sidekick, shaking down suspects, chasing the killer in a variety of exciting variations. Normal cop movie basics, except that they already know who the killer is and he’s a superpowered ghost, so there isn’t much to investigate, and every time he chases him down the guy just laughs and flies away or something. In retrospect, it kind of explains why SILENT RAGE had to keep Chuck Norris unaware of the killer’s existence for pretty much the entire runtime. When Chuck puts you down, you stay down. A Chuck Norris movie where Chuck keeps catching the killer, but then he just vanishes with an evil laugh and goes about his business while Chuck stands there in impotent disbelief is drifting pretty far off-brand. (Speaking of which, Brian Libby, who played the killer in SILENT RAGE, gets a little cameo here as an undercover cop who notes, “Even a psycho fucking killer is smart enough to stay out of the rain.” A nice touch! There’s also a Bill Mosely cameo in case you had any doubt this was definitely, officially, a horror movie.)

Love that he wears this mask, even though they know who he is and, in fact, he can look like anyone.


This would be a lot more interesting if the movie leaned into it a little more, unfortunately. I would count myself as a Lou Diamond Phillips fan, but he’s the wrong fit for material this nutty and potentially subversive. The movie is at its best when it embraces its eccentric, twitchy energy, and neither Lou nor co-star Tracey Griffiths is able to meet it there. Both are offering pretty bland cop movie cliches when the material probably needed more of a Nic Cage freakout vibe, especially since Kober is cheerfully hamming it up as the smugly taunting killer. Lou, in particular, is frustratingly unrattled by all this, budging not one inch from his cynical, smart-mouthed cool guy routine during the entire runtime, even as he’s easily thwarted again and again. Which makes him seem less like a confident tough guy and more like a brittle phony who can’t acknowledge that this situation has gotten way out of his control.

Fortunately, the situation does get pretty far out of control. Though the script is pretty bedrock-standard for this kind of thing in its totality, it’s full of the kind of little quirky bits that impart it a lot of personality. The killer pulls out a ceiling fan --which keeps spinning somehow-- to menace our heroes, and uses it to deflect bullets (a nice touch, especially since he doesn’t even care if he gets shot). A cop gets murdered by an evil horse-and-buggy, driven by a ghost wearing a sombrero. And they have an exciting (?) car-vs-horse-and-buggy chase right after! There’s a crazy bag lady who gets possessed and gleefully flies around and practically goes full EVIL DEAD. They use a bed to block a door that still has a sleeping guy in it! There’s a huge car stunt where they launch this thing what must be fifty feet in the air and crash it. They commandeer a civilian car, only to find that the driver is almost too enthusiastic to assist, scootching to the middle seat instead of getting out and shouting “No! Look, I’m not one of those anti-cop types!” and effusively offering his assistance “if you need help with some creep!” After a lengthy demolition derby where Lou smashes up his car trying to shake a supernatural masked killer clinging to the roof, he may come to regret this hardline pro-cop stance.



There’s a bit of a fun, “try-anything” vibe here, and movie doesn’t seem particularly interested in establishing rules. I understand the First Power well enough, but I’m not really sure how the Third Power part –the possession one, which gets a good bit more play—works, exactly. The killer is a spirit, and sometimes he does stuff like impossibly move around a room so wherever you turn he’s there. But then he’ll leap through a window and smash it as though he’s solid? It’s explicitly mentioned that he can’t directly affect anything unless he possesses a human body, but when he does he’s still able to do all kinds of blatantly supernatural shit like fly and shake off multiple bullet wounds? To compound matters, while he’s possessing people he still looks like himself to Logan, except that also sometimes he doesn’t? Presumably, he must be possessing a body every time he physically interacts with our protagonists, which means Logan kills a lot of innocent people who just happen to be temporarily possessed, but he sure doesn’t seem too broken up about it, or, in fact, to notice or consider this fact at all. Well, except once: At one point, the killer (still looking like Jeff Kober) is temporarily defeated by hurling him off the railing of an abandoned industrial tower. But then they get down to the bottom, and suddenly they see the mutilated corpse, impaled on some scaffolding after falling hundreds of feet, and it turns out to be… Logan’s asshole boss (Dennis Lipscomb, UNDER SEIGE). Oops. This prompts his other boss to angrily say “All right, yeah, yeah, he was a drunk and a total prick… but he was also a lieutenant in the LAPD and I do NOT BELIEVE… [pauses, collects himself] and I do not believe that he suddenly went FUCKING insane, or was secretly a member of some FUCKING cult.” Which is a pretty reasonable reaction, except that Lou just blithely says, “You gotta give me some more time, Al.” And he does! He just sighs and says “All right.” Man, I feel like if I’d impaled my boss, who I had a well-established fractious relationship with, after flinging him off the top of a huge industrial tower, they’d at least bring me down to the station and get a statement. This guy doesn’t even get a “your gun and your badge” moment! Makes you think this isn’t the first time he’s done this.

All this is laudable, and makes this a much more entertaining watch than you’d have any reason to expect. Unfortunately it’s also kind of badly structured, taking nearly 40 minutes to finally get the main scenario with the disembodied killer going in earnest, and struggling to generate much narrative momentum after that since, you know, there’s not really a whole lot that Detective Russel Logan can do about this situation except have an action scene, which is quickly established to be a very ineffective response. There’s a lot of wheel-spinning, and even if that wheel-spinning is sometimes pretty entertaining in its own right, it makes for slower going than a movie this daffy needs. And the non-action detective parts are pretty unbearable, since it’s not like there’s really a big mystery here.****  


Still, not too often you end up with something which is both of great academic interest and has two or three banger car stunts even though it’s arguably a horror movie. As far as movies which are most notable for their unique kind of brokenness go, this at least offers a generous helping of the goods. Though these two flavors of genre spectacle might not taste great together, the portions of both are ample enough to make for a fulfilling, if not exactly satisfying, meal. It’s a shame that making a solid genre-bending horror-action hybrid is not one of the three powers that can be bestowed on man by God or Satan, but as long as genre fans remain undiscriminating, I imagine someone or other will keep trying.



 



* In fact, though you needn’t look far to find exceptions to the usual genre setups, they’re rather more likely to be explained by the general blundering incompetence of the people making the films than they are to be cases of well-developed narrative plotting exploring different dynamics. Sure, plenty of horror movies have male protagonists, but is that, like on purpose to curate a different power dynamic, or is the writer just a hack who hasn’t really thought through the genre mechanics at work here? Female action heroes do strike one as more purposeful, though more in the sense that the filmmakers often seem to consider them a eccentric gimmick rather than a mode worth seriously exploring.

 

** If you wish to experience peak cringe, I encourage you to read the book-length, obviously-written-by-her IMDB Bio, which describes her in the very first paragraph as: "An ageless beauty with the face and figure of a woman decades younger, on-screen and off, it doesn't take long to find yourself under her spell. She possesses an intensity, sharp wit, a penchant for bucking traditional gender roles, and a wild spark of passion for life that's evident in her every action. An empathetic, self-aware woman with a compelling personality and a strong voice; Arlen is all this, and more." Lady, this is IMDB, not Tinder.

 

*** I missed the part of the Bible where Jesus went around taking over people's bodies, but I guess just because he could doesn't mean he wanted to.

 

**** The one big bombshell they reveal is that the killer was either molested as a kid or had to watch his mother get molested by his grandfather (I’m a little unclear if it was both or just the latter), which is a fact I’d just as soon not know, actually, if it’s all the same to you. It’s not like the killer has a single redeeming quality, so making us consider his miserable, abusive childhood does not seem like a productive direction to take this material in. Plus it doesn’t exactly help them any, except that they use it to taunt the killer in the climax, which is actually pretty fucked up IMHO.