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.

The Exorcist III

 

The Exorcist III

Dir. William Peter Blatty

Written by William Peter Blatty

Starring George C. Scott, Jason Miller, Brad Dourif

 

THE EXORCIST was an enormous, unqualified success when it premiered in late 1973. A critical and popular darling, it grossed $441 million worldwide on a modest $12 million budget, became a cultural phenomenon, was the first horror film ever nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, and remains a high-water mark for 70's genre cinema, and cinema at large. So of course the two people the studio sought out to direct the sequels were the only two people who were on record hating the original. I mean, that just makes sound creative and financial sense, frankly it would have been irresponsible to do anything else.

The first of those was John Boorman, who perpetrated THE EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (1977) on the world, and for that unforgivable act is forever damned. William Friedkin (who directed THE EXORCIST but was not initially interested in coming back for a sequel) was not coy about his feelings regarding that little misstep: “It's just a stupid mess made by a dumb guy – John Boorman by name, somebody who should be nameless, but in this case should be named. Scurrilous. A horrible picture." And Boorman probably didn’t feel any kinder to Friedkin’s movie: he had turned down the opportunity to direct THE EXORCIST, which he found "rather repulsive" and almost turned down the sequel too, saying, “‘I don't want to make a film about torturing a child’, which is how I saw the original film" before ultimately taking the job in order to create "a kind of riposte to the ugliness and darkness of The Exorcist – I wanted a film about journeys that was positive, about good, essentially." So yes, obviously you simply must hire the guy who hated the original and wanted the sequel to be a direct repudiation of one of the most popular and iconic movies of all time. It went about as well as you might expect. No wait, scratch that, I actually don’t think it would even be possible to expect anything to go as badly as it did. Humans, even the most pessimistic among us, simply don’t have the imaginative capacity to conceive of something as profoundly, insanely misguided as THE EXORCIST II until it arrives in front of us.

Suffice to say, with EXORCIST II a complete and unmitigated critical, popular, and commercial disaster, nobody was begging Boorman to come back again. So the studio cast about for the second-biggest EXORCIST hater they could locate, and found William Peter Blatty. Blatty, having written the bestselling novel that served as the basis for the original film, and having written the script and produced the film himself (with a great deal of creative input, including about casting), was about as deeply involved as anyone in the making of THE EXORCIST, and consequently wasn't entirely bearish on the finished film. But he nevertheless felt dissatisfied with the final result, especially after Friedkin trimmed 20 minutes for the final (122 minute) cut at the behest of the studio, after which, according to Friedkin, “Bill [Blatty] was vitriolic. He was harsh. He would denounce the picture." But not long after EXORCIST II, everyone’s temper seemed to have mellowed a bit, and Friedkin and Blatty were actively working on a sequel.

I’m honestly a little unclear on when exactly this began. Blatty (who, I gather from various interviews I’ve read for this review, has a tendency to tell different stories at different times) claims in this interview that “It took me that long to think of a follow up to the original story. That's why I didn't do [Exorcist II],” which means that at least as late as 1977, he hadn’t planned on writing a sequel at all. By the late 70’s, he was presumably working on his directorial debut, THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (which was based on his 1966 novel with the magnificent title of Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane) which premiered in 1980. So I suspect it wouldn’t be until the early 80’s that he began working in earnest on an EXORCIST follow-up, first pitching the idea to Friedkin as a film, and then, after the project languished for awhile in Development Hell, publishing it as the novel Legion in 1983. But sources differ on the exact timing of all this; In this interview Blatty says that he considers The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration and Legion to be a trilogy of sorts – and the fact that he places them in that order (despite The Ninth Configuration being based on a novel that precedes all of them) suggests to me that he’s referring to the film version rather than the book, and that therefor Legion came into being sometimes after 1980. On the other hand, this Bloodydisgusting article claims that Blatty “originally wrote the screenplay for a film that was called Legion right after the release of THE EXORCIST,” but that Friedkin passed and the job went to Boorman. This strikes me as unlikely – if the studio already had a finished script, or even a story outline, from the original author, why would they hire some other guy (first playwright William Goodhart, then Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg) to write a whole new concept from scratch? This article from TheSpool claims that Blatty’s pitch to Friedkin happened “at the same time” that EXORCIST II was being loathed at the box office but still making enough of a profit that future sequels seemed feasible.

So I don’t know. But at any rate, all sources seem to agree that sometime after the original EXORCIST, and probably after the misery of EXORCIST II, Blatty wrote a script for an EXORCIST follow-up called LEGION, and that he took it first to Friedkin, who was initially enthusiastic about the concept but later left the project over creative differences. Frustrated by the lack of progress, Blatty eventually turned his screenplay into a novel, which he published as Legion in 1983, and which did well enough to get Hollywood interested in an adaptation. Tantalizingly, most sources also mention one further detail: that after re-adapting his novel into a screenplay, Blatty approached John Carpenter to direct, and that Carpenter was interested before he eventually bowed out after concluding that Blatty was going to be a complete control freak about this and should really just direct it himself. Knowing that John Carpenter almost directed an EXORCIST sequel and then did MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN (1992) instead might incline one to dwell on what we missed out on.* But actually Blatty, directing for the second and final time (a decade after THE NINTH CONFIGURATION) proves himself a surprisingly strong director, giving it a distinct tone and some impressively well-staged sequences. Like Clive Barker directing HELLRAISER, it just seems like Blatty intuitively understood --right off the bat-- what he wanted and how to bring his distinct literary voice to the big screen.

The distinct voice is what jumps out first. The movie is moody and uneasy, but flecked with little notes of offbeat comedy. There's an early sequence featuring the supernatural desecration of a church which mirrors a similar sequence in THE EXORCIST, except this time we get a series of comic "reaction shots" of a statue of Jesus, who changes his expression to shock and displeasure. It is at this point that one might recall that Blatty began his screenwriting career as writer of farce (he co-wrote A SHOT IN THE DARK, among other comedies, often for Blake Edwards). But there's nothing else quite so silly as that in the film; mostly, the streak of comedy manifests itself in the idiosyncratic protagonist Lt. Kinderman (played by a very game George C. Scott, taking over the role from THE EXORCIST's much more sedate Lee J. Cobb, who had died in 1976**). Kinderman is a curious and intriguing character. I don't know if I've ever seen another quite like him. He's a hard-boiled cop, but has a tendency to fly off the handle and rant about unexpected topics. In what is certainly the best scene in the film, and perhaps any scene in any film, Scott, at his absolute George C. Scottiest, delivers an impassioned monologue about a carp that's currently living in his bathtub on the way to a dinner plate. He seems downright unhinged, but Scott also has a merry twinkle in his eye as if he's reveling in the discomfort he's eliciting. The net result is that we're never quite sure how much of his apparent instability is genuine and how much is a private comedy show for a very old fart who enjoys causing a scene.

Nevertheless, while Blatty is obviously doing something tonally different from Friedkin’s icy, bleak take on the original, it is still a horror film, and in many ways a damn good one. It follows Kinderman (a fairly minor character in the original movie), who, since the days of the Regan MacNeil's exorcism, has gotten involved with the case of a serial killer called “The Gemini”*** (Brad Dourif, CHILD’S PLAY) and is troubled immensely when victims demonstrating his exact MO begin to reappear. Bad enough that the killer’s back, after all, but even worse because the killer is supposed to be dead, and the crime scenes all have different fingerprints on them, despite the lockstep similarity in method. And even worse than that when it starts to become clear that the victims all have a (pretty tangential) link to The Regan MacNeil case. Plus, there’s a guy in the mental institution at the hospital who happens to look exactly like the long-deceased Father Karras (Jason Miller, THE NINTH CONFIGURATION). You know, this actually seems like the kind of situation which would be better suited for an THE EXORCIST than a hard-boiled cop. Fortunately, Kinderman, though not exactly a religiously religious man, is spiritually open-minded enough that he doesn’t shrink from more exotic explanations for these crimes, and before long he’s interviewing the mystery man known as “Patient X” (in the novel, the much cheerier “Tommy Sunshine”!) and probably wondering how in the hell you prosecute a case where (SPOILERS) the killers are possessed by a guy who’s possessed by a serial killer who’s possessed by a demon. Kinda a possession turducken situation. I guess, like, start with a conspiracy charge and go from there?

Scott’s willingness to be constantly one second away from some sort of furious freak-out fits the material well: as you might have deduced from the previous paragraph, it’s slightly exaggerated, sometimes to the point of comedy (as with a heavenly dream where Scott sees an Angelic Fabio and Patrick Ewing [!]), sometimes to the point of disturbing grotesqueness (as with an uncomfortably spot-on Spider-Man impression from a cackling old lady). And the other actors are on board with the off-kilter plot and tone Blatty seems to be shooting for. You’ll be glad to know that Brad Dourif is not about to be out-freakout’d by George C. Scott, and that Jason Miller (who sat out EXORCIST II to the point that they do a soft retcon to remove him from the flashback exorcism scenes!) is a welcome presence and does a lot to tie this third sequel to the original EXORCIST by the mere fact of his being there (the links are otherwise pretty tangential). It all works pretty well, maintaining a distinct tone, telling an odd but comprehensible story, spicing things up with the occasional bit of horror whammy.

It is, in fact, exactly those moments of horror whammy which elevate this from “surprising not shitty considering the circumstances” to “wait, this is actually great, maybe?” Though Blatty cannot hope to recapture the soul-deep horror crucible of the original EXORCIST, he manages to stage a handful of truly exceptional horror beats which ensure that there’s some genuine menace lurking even through the most offbeat scenes here. I do not consider it hyperbole to suggest that the famous late-night nurse sequence (you know the one I mean) is up there with the absolute best-executed coil-and-release shock scares in all horror, and although nothing else in the movie comes close to that, having even one scene that delivers such a wallop makes for a movie that can't be lightly dismissed. It does stumble slightly when it finally arrives at the inevitable exorcism finale, which can't help but invite unflattering comparisons to the greatest-of-all-time original. But even here it's far from an embarrassment. The climax doesn't quite come together, but it's still a ferocious and estimable example of the form.

Which is especially impressive, considering it was not the original ending, and was forced on Blatty at the last minute by the studio, after the movie had already been shot. Legion the novel, as well as the original script, had no final exorcism scene, and no Exorcist character. And in fact, if Blatty had his way, it wouldn’t have been titled THE EXORCIST III; he still considered LEGION to be the correct title. But a franchise is a franchise, and despite the well-poisoning that EXORCIST II had done, the suits insisted on the title, and once that happened (according to Blatty) the secretary of producer James Robinson convinced him that they couldn’t have an EXORCIST movie which contained no exorcism. Which is, you know, not an entirely absurd point, but probably something you want to work out at a point before the film has been completely shot. This being Hollywood, of course, that’s exactly when the suits intervened and demanded a new ending, as well as more narrative links to the original EXORCIST. Blatty balked, stalled, but ultimately decided that if he didn’t do it himself, they’d just fire him and hire some other hack to do their dirty work, so he dutifully went back and shot new material which radically altered the film to fit a new studio-mandated exorcism-delivering climax.

Some of that material includes a not-especially-well-integrated subplot about a character named “Father Morning” (Nicol Williamson, who had previously worked with John Boorman, of all people, on EXCALIBUR), a priest who never meets Lt. Kinderman or any of the other characters until the climax, but who we occasionally observe sitting around silently, obviously waiting for his chance to do some hardcore exorcizing. Not ideal from a storytelling perspective, but fortunately the movie is hazy and strange enough that these scenes don’t feel disastrously out of place; we’ve trusted Blatty for a lot of weird stuff throughout the movie, and we trust that this seemingly unrelated character is important in some way, which he indeed turns out to be (in fact, he makes for a respectable red herring while we wait, a character strange and nebulous enough to make a suitable alternative suspect to “Patient X”). Against all odds, the new material manages to sit alongside the original storyline –if not neatly—at least comfortably.

But that is nothing compared to the biggest change imposed by the studio: in an effort to further link this movie to THE EXORCIST, they demanded Blatty bring Jason Miller back as Father Karras. Yes! Amazingly, Miller was not going to be in the movie at all until the last-minute reshoots, despite the fact that Brad Dourif is supposed to be playing a guy who looks just like and may be some kind of reincarnation or resurrection of Damien Karras. Why did Blatty not just approach Miller from the beginning? I can find no official first-hand explanation, although I read that in the DVD commentary Dourif explains that Miller’s alcoholism (of which I can also find no other documented evidence) had left him unable to do the kind of wordy monologuing that Blatty had in mind. At any rate, Dourif had already finished his performance by the time Miller came on board, and rather than entirely replace him, Blatty had the insane/brilliant idea of keeping both performances. So sometimes we see Miller, sometimes we see Dourif – which makes sense in a possession movie! In fact, it’s sort of maybe really great; Miller makes no effort whatsoever to mimic Dourif’s go-for-broke mega-acting, and it creates a real live-wire, multi-layer explosiveness to the character. Sometimes we see Miller, sitting placidly with just a shadow of a malicious smirk on his face, and then in a blink of an eye we’ll switch to a bug-eyed, shrieking and spitting Dourif, and then back, never quite sure which part of this, if any, is “real.” And with apologies to Blatty, the suits were right that having Miller back links the thing much more robustly to the original EXORCIST, which was perhaps not strictly necessary, but it helps lend this dubious third sequel some credibility and tactile connection to its forbearer. A good example of how maybe the suits were not entirely wrong, or if they were entirely wrong at least Blatty was nimble enough to make their absurd demands nestle comfortably into his world, if not quite his vision.

I’d obviously be interested in seeing Blatty’s original cut, and now it’s possible –there’s a semi-complete “director’s cut” on the 2016 Shout! Factory Blu-ray release (albeit with much of the footage taken from low-quality sources, and some never recovered). But frankly I’m pretty enamored with the theatrical version already. Even the studio-mandated exorcism scene is packed full of shocking imagery and provocative theology, and I think I’d miss it if it was gone altogether. The movie feels a little overcooked in places, but between Scott's eccentric and frisky performance, the offbeat tone, and some solid and occasionally bravura horror beats, it also feels dense and surprising and rewarding. All in all, a startlingly strong showing which I feel has been unfairly pilloried with all the other misbegotten EXORCIST sequels. Not bad for a screenwriter and novelist making only his second (and, sadly, final!) film. And considering the dismal reputation and equally tormented production of every other EXORCIST sequel, I’d say it’s damn close to a miracle that this came out so well. Blatty claimed that EXORCIST III is about the “problem of evil” – ie, why a kind, loving, omnipotent god permits evil to exist. I’m not sure the movie exactly answers that question, but I can relate – I have similar questions about the proliferation of miserable franchise sequels. Every once in awhile, though, good does triumph over evil, and a genuinely good horror sequel sneaks its way past all the perils that beset such projects and ends up on-screen. I’m not sure that proves the existence of a kind, loving God, but it sure doesn’t hurt the case.

Appendix A: Cameos from people you probably do not expect to be in THE EXORCIST III, ranked in ascending order of improbability:

1.      Pre-fame Kevin Corrigan

2.      Pre-fame Samuel L. Jackson (one line, dubbed by someone else)

3.      “young” Larry King

4.      NBA great Patrick Ewing

5.      Fabio

6.      Former US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

Appendix B: Dialogue used in metal songs: I gather that some Gemini Killer dialogue is used as the introduction to the Children of Bodom songs "Follow the Reaper" and "Taste of My Scythe". The Cryptopsy song "Crown of Horns" also “employs a roar and dialogue heard in Cell 11.” So that’s legit.



* But never fear, David Gordon Green, who got to be the New John Carpenter with his HALLOWEEN sequel trilogy, is also signed to direct an EXORCIST sequel trilogy, so in a way it'll be a chance to see what a Carpenter EXORCIST would have been like, except nothing like that.

 

** It would be the first of two times that Scott would take over a role originated by Cobb: the second would be in 1997, when he played Juror #3 in a remake of TWELVE ANGRY MEN (Cobb played the role in the 1957 version) directed by, of all people, William Friedkin.

 

*** The “Zodiac killer” made reference to THE EXORCIST in a letter, which he called “the best saterical comidy [sic] that I have ever seen.” Since Blatty leaned a little heavier on comedy in his subsequent horror movies, I’m going to go ahead and assume that naming his fictional serial killer “The Gemini” is an affectionate tribute to the guy who gave him the idea. Later, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer would express his own appreciation for THE EXORCIST III. From Wikipedia: “The film became a focal point of the trial of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Detectives testified that Dahmer claimed to identify with the Gemini Killer and would play the film for some of his victims before killing them. Dahmer's final attempted victim, Tracy Edwards, testified that Dahmer would rock back and forth while chanting at various times and that he especially enjoyed a sequence with a possessed Karras. Dahmer went so far as to purchase yellow contact lenses to more resemble Miller, as well as to emulate another film character he admired, Emperor Palpatine from Return of the Jedi.” Proving that above all other things, serial killers are giant fucking dorks.

 

Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves

 

Robin Hood: Prince In Tights Of Thieves

Dir. Kevin Reynolds

Written by Pen Densham, John Watson

Starring Kevin Coster, Morgan Freeman, Mary Elizabeth Mastantonio, Alan Rickman

 

ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THEIVES (or, RH:PoT, as the hip online kids of today call it) begins in a Jerusalem torture chamber. The first faces we see close-up are the filthy, sadistic (but helpfully English-speaking!) visages of the dungeon's torture/amputation division, as they ply their trade on the miserable Christian captives of the failed Third Crusades. In fact, even after we get a look at the hapless Englishmen, we may not realize that one of the men we are looking at is our protagonist, because he's dressed in soiled rags and sports a beard and mane that would make ZZ Top jealous. These are most assuredly not merry men. Short of starting with the slug line "The Dawn of Man," there isn't much more a film could do to convey to us in no uncertain terms that this aint yo' pappy's ROBIN HOOD. Unless you were born after 1991, in which case, it actually IS your pappy's ROBIN HOOD, canonized with a Mel Brooks parody, no less. 

In fact, I got the idea to watch this one when I reviewed ROBIN HOOD, MEN IN TIGHTS and dismissively suggested it might be funnier if you were familiar with PRINCE OF THIEVES, which I described as "a movie that no one on Earth has watched in nearly a half a century." Well, as you can imagine, it didn't even take a full minute after typing that sentence before I was overwhelmed with desire to remedy that situation. Which was an unexpected sensation for me, given that I had never previously regretted passing on this movie when it first came out and everyone agreed it was a drag. Indeed, the movie was roundly criticized at the time for being too dark and serious. Ebert called it "murky, unfocused, violent and depressing," and went on to describe it as "gloomy" and Costner as "tortured." Vincent Canby called it "joyless" and slammed it for, um, "coming out firmly for civil rights, feminism, religious freedom, and economic opportunity for all" (apparently SJWs have been ruining all culture with their divisive politics since 1991 at least).

It was, in fact, arguably the origin --patient zero-- of the trend towards dark and gritty reboots which would become basically a full-blown cultural movement by the turn of the millennium. There were earlier cinematic* stirrings of this trend; John Boorman’s trippy, violent EXCALIBUR (1981) might be an example, and Tim Burton’s BATMAN from two years earlier comes even closer (especially in terms of how it was perceived at the time), but RH:PoT is much more beholden to some kind of faux-realistic affectation than either of those movies even pretended to be. People considered those films (and the following year’s BATMAN RETURNS), to be dark, but they’re certainly not “gritty,” which turns out to be a vital –although perhaps not quite as foundational as it might appear-- element of what would become the formula. “Gritty and realistic” remakes were not, of course, wholly unknown in 1991; Outlawvern commenter Pacman 2.0 noted the 1984 ‘this ain’t your daddy’s Tarzan’ adventure/drama GREYSTOKE, which definitely feels like it shares at least some DNA with PRINCE OF THEIVES in its self-conscious foregrounding of “gritty realism” within a pulpy premise. But it differs in that it represents an effort to return to the original (somewhat darker and more intellectual**) source material. PRINCE OF THEIVES has no definitive source material (the conception of “Robin Hood” and the related characters evolved slowly over centuries of poems, ballads and plays, all of which clearly arise from older folk traditions which predate the 15^th-century records which survive today), and so can’t claim fidelity to authoritative origins. Or to any kind of established history, for that matter, which perhaps explains why it feints towards “realism” only in a few highly selective ways, more as a signifier that it ought to be taken seriously than as an honest attempt to grapple with this subject in any kind of real world context (there’s a magical witch and a Bryan Adams song, among other distinctly fantastical elements).

The “realism,” then, is mostly a facade, though it would prove to be of defining aesthetic significance in the films that later adopted the same technique. Fundamentally, though, PRINCE OF THEIVES, like EXCALIBUR, Burton’s BATMAN films or the later Nolan/Snyder superhero films, is banking not on authenticity, but on surprise: its ability to shock a complacent audience by intentionally undermining expectations about a universally known icon which has grown so familiar as to feel “safe.” It is, like many of the “dark and gritty” reboots that would follow it, a movie that is deliberately confrontational towards an audiences’ presumed expectations about the subject matter. The entire raison d’etre is to say “hey kids, this isn’t the old, boring Robin Hood your parents like! This is the real Robin Hood, brash, uncompromised, uncowed, the one your square history teachers don’t want you to know about! He shares your dangerous, rebellious disaffection, scares your parents, and just might be too hot for polite society to handle!” (it’s worth noting that the production company, Morgan Creek, had previously enjoyed some in-retrospect-utterly-inexplicable success with its similarly irreverent semi-revisionist Western YOUNG GUNS).

It is this pugnacious attitude, based on shaking the comforting perceptions of nostalgic figures (many associated with childhood) that I think critics were responding to back then; it’s not that these films are necessarily “dark” compared to, say, other 1991 alumni like PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS or SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (or even TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY, which is indisputably more violent and intense). It’s that the film’s entire modus operandi has to do with subverting our expectations about deep-rooted cultural icons which have persevered so long as to feel centering and stable and perhaps somehow “pure,” untouched by the messy world of adulthood –but also static, abstract and unthreatening. Challenging that can be uncomfortable in some ways, which is, I think, what makes it potentially productive in others: I don’t know how culturally valuable it is to perpetually reimagine the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles so they stay fresh and vibrant for future generations, but one can at least dimly imagine some value in taking the tale of Robin Hood –with its fundamental fury at wealth inequality and wholehearted endorsement of revolutionary resistance—and shaking off the cobwebs a little, rescuing the tale from being a harmless fairy story rendered toothless by rote repetition and restoring its subversive bite. And locating it within a cinematic “reality” featuring distinctive signifiers that point to contemporary relevance –such as the “dark and gritty” aesthetic which, at least in 1991, was a cue to interpret the material as serious and hard-hitting, as opposed to the idealized, theatrical affectations most of the kids in 1991 would have associated with the corny old Robin Hood movies of the past—feels like a legitimate strategy to that end. But it is, ultimately, a strategy, not an end in itself. So while the critics –including myself!—often find it convenient to describe this and similar films as “dark and gritty,” they are really doing something rather different just underneath the surface. It’s just that to do so, something like ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THEIVES combines both the calculated “darkening” of material popularly perceived as frothy matinee stuff for kiddies (like we see in EXCALIBUR and the BATMANs) with the “realistic” “grittiness” of GREYSTOKE (or the next year’s revisionist UNFORGIVEN) to add some visceral weight and punch to a basic premise which had perhaps been dulled and diluted through rote repetition.

This would, of course, prove hugely influential as a technique, in many ways becoming a defining feature of the way studios thought about revitalizing old properties in the subsequent years (though the effect was not immediate – by 1995’s BATMAN FOREVER, the studio was deliberately trying to lighten things up, and it wasn’t until the ignominious failure of the glibly comic BATMAN & ROBIN in 1997 that the tide really started to turn. And even then, you had the cartoonish GODZILLA remake in 1998 and the old-fashioned corniness of THE MUMMY reboot in 1999). It obviously it struck some kind of chord at the time, though; the movie was a huge hit. But in1991, it sounded like a bunch of pretentious self-serious garbage to me, and I never bothered with it.

Imagine my surprise, then, to finally watch the movie and discover thirty years later that it is in fact a completely different kind of garbage! All that fretting about the gloomy, intellectual new Robin Hood was bunk, probably a response to the studio PR machine more than the movie itself. Far from being a broody, intellectual bore, RH:PoT turns out, in fact, to be a movie which is almost maniacal in its desire to entertain. You can almost hear the producers screaming "There should be witty banter in EVERY scene! And constant swashbuckling action! And raw sex appeal! And sweeping, expensive spectacle! But also relatable aw-shucks human drama! And for God's sake, can we get some sweeping, triumphant music in here?" Apparently this is what "dark and gritty" was like in 1991. It was a time of innocence.

But just because it’s not actually dark and gritty at all doesn’t mean it’s not a labored mess, it’s just a labored mess in a different way. A better way, I should stipulate; its earnest effort to create constantly entertaining big-screen spectacle is appreciated in this age of lazy, jokey 200-million dollar superhero sitcoms. Whatever it is, RH:PoT is absolutely never lazy. It was a fairly expensive production for its time,*** and man, every penny of that budget ended up on the screen. The movie is jam-packed with incident, setpieces characters, elaborate sets and costumes. Unfortunately therein lies the problem; it's so damned fanatical about constantly ingratiating itself in the moment that it loses track of the big picture. It's a movie where fun stuff is constantly happening (fight scenes, evil monologues, Kevin Coster swimming in the buff, bonding, fighting, comedy, pathos) but the story never seems to build any momentum.

Or, perhaps, it spends far too much time trying to build momentum. Like many of its “dark and gritty” descendants (striking so, in fact, another way in which the movie proves shockingly prescient, even prophetic, about the shape of Hollywood franchises to come), it is cripplingly obsessed with the hero’s origins (a disastrous trend for narrative film, which would be kicked into overdrive with the STARS WARS prequel trilogy in 1999, but—crucially-- is all-but-absent from BATMAN). Hence, the torture-chamber opening; where previous Robin Hood films simply presented the familiar character fully-formed, PRINCE OF THEIVES wants to meticulously chart the course of how the character came by all his iconic trappings, from the bow to the Merry Men to the name. This takes quite a bit of time and exposition to accomplish, and even if much of it is solidly entertaining it seriously challenges the point of making a movie about Robin Hood, if for much of the runtime our hero is not yet recognizable as that character. “Robin of Locksley” doesn't become "Robin Hood" proper until well past the halfway point, and “Becoming Robin Hood” and “Doing Robin Hood Stuff” are two different story arcs which feel noticeably separate, related but not comfortably contiguous. The movie is burdened with so much backstory that once the pieces are finally in place, everything feels weirdly rushed, with the whole Hood-Nottingham conflict crammed into two huge setpieces in the movie’s back half and never given the chance to breath. When the big climax turns up (nearly 2 hours into a merciless 143 minutes**** -- apparently egregiously bloated runtimes for blockbusters are not wholly an artifact of 21st-century Hollywood) it still feels narratively too soon, like they already did a whole movie and then tried to cram its sequel into 50 minutes at the end. 

Still, credit where it's due: fun stuff is constantly happening. Even aside from the impressive action and production, it’s a hugely entertaining cast. Alan Rickman, as the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham (no Prince John here, which probably saves us a good 40 extra minutes of screentime, though at something of a cost to the story's central conflict), goes absolutely all-out mega-acting, to richly entertaining effect, and most of the rest of the cast is able to meet him at least halfway, leaning into the larger-than-life broadness of their characters. Costner makes for a notable exception; his decision to play the title character as a humble, intellectual man of action was the subject of bitter criticism when the movie premiered (with many critics comparing him unfavorably to Errol Flynn's breezy, swashbuckling take, which they apparently considered definitive). But today it seems like the obvious right choice, leaning into the actor's folksy everyman charm and allowing him to operate as the solid hub of a rather unwieldly and eccentric wheel. It's a little silly that he doesn't even take a swing at a British accent, (even Christian Slater at least tries. Or at least, I think that's what he's doing) but hell, it's a silly movie. Robin seems to become a hero because he has a nearly inhuman ability to find things to swing from in virtually any situation, like a 12th-century Spider-Man. If you can enjoy that, I don't think we really need to worry too much about the accent.

And I hope you do enjoy that, because swinging on things is very much the movie's idea of excitement. Which makes it kind of amazing that this friendly, silly, eager-to-please mainstream blockbuster was taken so seriously at the time. Despite its foundational role in the creation of the gritty, serious, realistic reboot… when you come down to it, it's hardly any of those things at all! There's, like, three nut-shots in the first half-hour. Costner and Freeman banter like Riggs and Murtaugh! Friar Tuck breaks the fourth wall! There's an out-of-the-blue cameo in the last 30 seconds! There's a huge fiery explosion that Coster has to strut away from without looking back, for Christ's sake! And I mean, it's cool enough when guys do that in modern movies where shit is exploding all the time; when the fuck is this dude in the 12th century ever gonna see anything that cool again? So double badass, there. 

Basically, I think the movie is a bit misunderstood. It's not so much an attempt to make things more realistic as it is an attempt to add a different texture to a familiar story, teasing a few new threads of meaning out of it, but mostly just having fun doodling in the margins with whatever the filmmakers thought might be cool. 

Obviously I'm in favor of that, and would like to correct the record on 1991's behalf. But if the movie is misunderstood or misremembered, I also can't necessarily say it's underrated. Like anyone trying too hard, it's not all that consistent, and a little exhausting to put up with. But it’s interesting that this fact is not what history has held against it – for better or worse, the movie, if it is remembered at all, is remembered for its pioneering, boundary-pushing “dark and gritty” approach. The fact that it self-evidently isn't either didn't matter, apparently; that was what people remembered about it anyway. Of Ebert’s complaints that the movie is "murky, unfocused, violent and depressing," the only one which is even a little true is “unfocused.” But in the movie world, perception is reality, and obviously even the timid gestures the movie makes in that direction felt significant enough to the contemporary audience to be hugely impactful – not just on the way they viewed the film, but as a potential lens to view any proposed remake or reboot. It is, I think, no coincidence at all that in 2010, we got another Robin Hood movie (this one directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russel Crowe) which leaned even harder in the direction of a “dark and gritty” origin story. After all, by that point, RH:PoT very much was your pappy’s Robin Hood – and the problem with its basic strategy is that it is by definition it loses its zest as it ceases to be surprising. And of course, you can only get so dark and gritty before the whole approach loses its impact. The next ROBIN HOOD, in 2018, took a wholly different approach, trying to mimic a very different set of aesthetic signifiers: those of the modern comic book blockbuster. All of which leaves poor PRINCE OF THEIVES as an orphaned relic of a bygone era, which blazed bright for a brief moment, and perhaps had a significant influence on the direction pop culture took in the subsequent years, but has as an independent work of art sunk into relative obscurity, even suffering the indignity of being eclipsed in the popular consciousness by its own parody, which is today almost certainly more frequently watched and better remembered.

But at least I respect its hustle. If more movies had tried to imitate that, rather than its alleged gritty realness, blockbuster history might have been shaped for the better. But oh well, at least we'll always have the merchandise. 

And, I'm sorry to remind you, a truly dire Bryan Adams song. 

 

 

* Comic books had been going in this direction for some time, since at least Frank Miller’s 1986 sweaty, fascistic grimdark The Dark Knight Returns. By the 1990’s, gritty anti-heroes like Venom and Spawn would be the rule, rather than the exception. But movies were slower to follow, flirting with the florid nihilism of comic books throughout the 90s but struggling with how –or if—to translate that energy to the big screen.

** Or so I’m told. It’s Edgar Rice Burroughs, so I feel like there’s probably a limit on how “dark and intellectual” it could be, but the consensus seems to be that GREYSTOKE is, in both tone and substance, much more faithful to the source material than previous adaptations had been. I’ll have to take their word for it since there’s no way in hell I’m reading 1912’s Tarzan of the Apes. Right? I mean, of all the things in the world to read, why would I read that? I mean, I guess, it probably would be interesting as a cultural artifact. And it’s probably pretty short. Oh shit, should I read 1912’s Tarzan of the Apes? It does sound like the kind of thing I would do, now that I see it in written out in black and white.

*** Though at $48 million, hardly record-breaking; 1989’s BATMAN had cost only a little less, and TERMINTATOR 2 cost twice as much. Only a scant four years later, Costner’s own WATERWORLD would cost $172 million.

**** And there’s also a 155-minute “extended edition,” which apparently contains even more exposition about whatever supernatural conspiracy the Sheriff of Nottingham is on about.