Batman Returns

Batman Returns (1992)
Dir. Tim Burton
Written by Sam Hamm, Daniel Waters, Wesley Stick
Starring Michael Keaton, Michelle Pfeiffer, Danny DeVito, Christopher Walken, Michael Gough

 

Originally published on Letterboxd, where the majority of my reviews now go. Included here for posterity.

 

In a way, it's kind of comforting to see that the Achilles’ heel of modern huge-budget franchise IP movies --too many overbearing egos pulling them in too many directions and winding up with scripts rewritten into chaotic incoherence-- was vividly present even here, at the very inception of the concept of a big-budget comic book movie franchise.* BATMAN RETURNS (to cinemas, presumably, since there's no suggestion the character has been anything but a continuous presence in Gotham City) isn't just haphazardly plotted, it barely has anything which could even be called a plot, and its few absent-minded gestures in that direction (most of which materialize only well past the halfway point, and still peter out before the arbitrary "climax") certainly have nothing whatsoever to with each other --or any character named "Batman," for that matter. This makes for a movie which is fundamentally and unavoidably broken, a movie which we can parse for any meaning only in the manner of archaeology, by interpreting and extrapolating from tantalizing artifacts which survived the presumed dozens of re-writes, and offer hints at what actual intent might have once flourished before being buried in a mountain of arbitrary wheel-spinning. And of course, because it's me, that's exactly what we're going to do. What, you have better ways to spend your time?

In this case, we don't have to dig very deep before we find that others have pondered the film before us, and come to a pretty consistent conclusion. The consensus as to what was being attempted here --which emerged concurrently with the movie and has only solidified since-- is that director Tim Burton believed himself to be making a movie about the experience of social misfits, or at least decided that whatever the suits eventually decided about the script, he would make a movie about freaks and misfits and just sort of ignore anything --plot, for example-- which might get in the way of that goal.

There's some evidence for this interpretation which survives even in the script; the famous exchange where Penguin contemptuously tells Batman ”You're just jealous because I'm a genuine freak and you have to wear a mask!” to which Batman sadly assents; Alfred pointedly asking Bruce "Must you be the only lonely man-beast in town?”; Selina Kyle's lament that "It's the so-called 'normal' guys who always let you down. Sickos never scare me. Least they're committed." But that's honestly about it for textual evidence; most of the rest of the dialogue is devoted to weirdly sexual quipping or "plot" mechanics. It’s weird, in a way, that a movie could get a point across so strongly despite the fact that it occurs almost nowhere in the script or story. But the sentiment comes through loud and clear in the direction, particularly its almost fetishis --did I say "almost"?-- its blatantly fetishistic interest in its deviant, not-all-there protagonists, namely Penguin and Catwoman. And lest you wonder if I mistakenly left somebody out, I want to point out that in the original Daniel Waters script, the word "Penguin" appears 465 times, as opposed to a mere 342 for "Batman," including the title.**

 

 

So it is our villains, then, who will be the focus of the movie, to the point that it's dubious to even call them villains at all. Despite how overwhelmingly repellent he is, the movie is weirdly sympathetic towards Penguin, an outcast from his very birth --where the movie begins, as perhaps the only film in history to begin with the birth of its apparent antagonist-- who longs, it seems, in equal measure, for both acceptance by a society which shunned him and for violent revenge against them. And it's even more sympathetic to Catwoman, a put-upon wallflower*** who finally just snaps and starts lashing out at the world, which the movie clearly posits as an empowerment fantasy. Whether or not the movie validates their behavior, it at least understands, and is much more interested in understanding than judging. Whatever the script may say about them (and it’s too all-over-the-place to really say anything specific), Burton as director hones in on their pain and their feelings of persecution and rejection in a way that feels deeply personal. The 90's was the decade for wallowing in self-pity and feeling like an unfairly ignored misfit, and certainly no director seems to have more fully embraced that zeitgeist than Burton, who was at the time--and it's hard to remember this now that he’s spent the better part of the last two decades becoming a garish parody of himself—considered a genuinely subversive and eccentric auteur, the cinematic patron saint of macabre weirdos. EDWARD SCISSOR-HANDS is more concentrated in its fixation on outsider-dom at the hands of suffocating bourgeois normalcy, and ED WOOD is a better parable of a misunderstood artist, but BATMAN RETURNS is, without question, the pinnacle of Burton's fixation on --and, of course, fetishization of-- social deviance as empowerment.

Burton is even less interested in punching than he is in Batman, so that empowerment is not manifested in grandiose action, but in sexual capital. The movie is overtly, startlingly sexual; not just surprising for a PG-13 movie about a comic book character, but for a Burton movie in general. Burton is almost categorically an unsexy director. I don’t think I can even name another director anywhere near his level of success and ubiquity who has left behind such a thoroughly sexless body of work; even the fetish-y Ed Wood or the heaving bosoms in SLEEPY HOLLOW or PLANET OF THE APES**** play out with an almost naïve, childlike lack of kink. But here, the movie's erotic fixation on Catwoman is almost uncomfortable in its intensity. I'm not sure Penguin says a single thing to her that isn't overtly sexual, and while Batman/Bruce Wayne's interest in her is (a little) more refined, the entirety of their relationship is about their desire for each other. Curiously, the costumed thing comes between them, rather than bringing them together, and I think I know why: Catwoman is, like Penguin, a "genuine freak" (she may, in fact, be some kind of zombie?), uninhibited both in and out of costume. But Batman is still in the closet; he's not ready to give up on being respectable, dorky Bruce Wayne and admit that he's a full-fledged freak. For all his money and cool cars and stuff, his hesitation to commit to either lifestyle is isolating him; his relationship with last movie’s love interest, we are told, couldn't survive his being Batman, and now his relationship with kooky dominatrix Catwoman can't survive his being tethered to Bruce Wayne. He's not a normie, but he's not quite a fully committed freak, either. He lacks the courage to embrace who he really is, and consequently is never 100% present in his own story. No wonder Burton so openly doesn't care about him. 

 

 

 

Of course, this sort of defeats the purpose of making a movie ostensibly about, you know, Batman. Batman is fundamentally a juvenile macho power fantasy –just look at the fevered testosterone-driven nightmare by Frank Miller from which BATMAN RETURNS almost certainly derives its name--, and if you don’t find Batman’s butch fascism appealing, or find Bruce Wayne very interesting, there’s simply just not much for the character to do. I hear this has more action than the 1989 BATMAN, which is frankly kind of mind-boggling; there are maybe a handful of halfhearted action beats in here, but Batman barely has anything to do because there isn’t really much to do. Penguin is sort of the villain, but his evil plan is barely hinted at until the last 20 minutes of the movie, and Batman foils it with some weird abstract anti-cinematic computer program that mostly happens off-screen. Catwoman doesn’t have any kind of arc at all, and in fact her storyline barely even involves Batman and gets resolved without even a glancing intervention on his part. There’s barely any conflict here, and most of the movie finds its characters idling around (in one case, literally; it’s pretty funny to see the Batmobile just cruising around the city under the speed limit) without any clear long-term objective or any reason to get involved in each others’ lives. In fact, a huge chunk of the movie, probably pound for pound the most screentime of any of its six or seven plots, is spent on the political machinations of Penguin and greedy capitalist Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), a very, very weird and self-defeating decision for a movie which claims to be about an action hero, but an equally self-defeating one for a movie which stubbornly insists on itself as a fairy tale (more on that later). 

This weird diversion into politics, and really the character of Shreck himself, is the apotheosis of the film’s wildly divergent, contradictory impulses. Shreck’s role here is obvious; he’s the one character who’s not a freak, and consequently the one Burton feels most comfortable identifying as a clear villain. He is venal and debased in strictly normal, aggressively mundane ways (his evil plan, barely even mentioned, is, I guess, to secure city permission to build some kind of energy-stealing power plant?). He represents the oppressive, stagnant forces of straight society, comfortably asserting himself around mayors and rich, well-connected socialites in a way that Penguin and Catwoman could never dream of, and Bruce Wayne has little interest in. Unfortunately, this means that he must serve as antagonist for all three of our freaks, making him the only person in the movie who seems in any way active or meaningfully consequential to conflict of any kind. He’s the character who’s designed to be a dull foil for our colorful heroes, and yet he’s the one who motivates virtually every single bit of action. 

 And this is made even worse because he’s played by Christopher Walken, by far the most “genuine freak” anywhere around, who undermines the character’s bourgeois venality by playing him as a total fucking weirdo (kudos to Andrew Bryniarski, who plays his son Chip with a committed and pretty hilarious Walken impersonation). As with most of the movie, including its inexplicable political interlude, there are good ideas here; framing the movie as outcasts vs establishment is a solid idea, and putting Christopher Walken in there is always a good bet to make things more entertaining. Unfortunately, these are two ideas which not only don’t work together, they actively cancel each other out. Either Shreck is a despicable stuffed shirt or an entertaining weirdo; he cannot be both, and the movie posits that he must be for it to work. It does not work.

 

 

 

Much of the movie, then, cancels itself out; it's an action premise without almost any significant action, it’s a movie about fetishy outcasts which never actually gets around to examining what that might mean, it’s a Batman movie which is mostly uninterested in Batman, it’s unbearably plotty without ever actually establishing a plot. That leaves the content almost a complete wash.

Fortunately, in swoops the style to save the day! While Burton was neglecting the plot, it seems, he was not idle; instead, he was constructing gigantic art deco dreamscapes full of towering statuary, neon kitsch, and gothic menace, a world so potently evocative that, especially when draped in Danny Elfman’s iconic, career-defining score, it actually manages to conjure meaning and purpose to a movie which otherwise has none. It’s pure alchemy, but it’s there. The script may disagree, the title might disagree, but the style informs us decisively and with a focused confidence otherwise completely absent from the movie: this is a macabre fairy tale, a tragedy in the original sense of the word, about people The Fates have plucked from obscurity for an arbitrary, cruel odyssey through life. From the film’s mythic opening to its melancholy final shot, Burton tells us through pure cinema what he cannot through narrative cinema: it’s lonely out there for a freak. That is the pervading sense one gets from BATMAN RETURNS; one of timeless, lugubrious hopelessness, of disconnection and desperation and frustration, about sad people groping out –or lashing out—to find each other, and failing. Even if Batman foils the Penguin’s evil plot, this is a movie about failure, about not getting the girl, about not getting the job, about being too broken to transcend your pain, about searching for a place that doesn’t exist in a society that doesn’t want you, only to find yourself right back where you started after the dust settles.

It is a strange thing to find at the heart of a movie with BATMAN in its title, but it’s equally indisputable and unmissable; it is the movie; everything else is just window dressing. I cannot in good conscience call BATMAN RETURNS a good movie, but I also can’t deny that if all that window dressing is messy and incoherent, the movie’s heart and soul are as vivid and affecting as any movie ever made. It’s a masterpiece hidden inside a corporate junkheap, its greatness nearly always obscured, but always palpably near, a diffuse warm glow behind a frost-covered window pane. I’ve never been sure how much of a “genuine freak” Burton actually is, but there’s a howl of lonesome despair in BATMAN RETURNS which is as genuine as anything as you’ll find in mainstream cinema. It’s an inarticulate howl, but it echos back to us throughout the entire film, giving definition to the dark spaces in-between the silly plot where our eyes can’t quite reach. It allows us to plunge on into that darkness with this reverberating echo as a guide.

Like a bat.

Speaking of which, what’s up with casting Michael Keaton as Batman, it really doesn’t make any you know what, this review is running kinda long actually let’s just end it there.

*Strictly speaking, The 1978 SUPERMAN and its three sequels and one spinoff probably ought to be considered the genesis of the modern comic book franchise, but for reasons we could reasonably debate, the consensus seems to be against that reading.

** Including "Bruce Wayne" pushes the character to a narrow lead, but still.

*** Read: "That unbelievably gorgeous supermodel has glasses"

**** Estella Warren, not the Apes.

APPENDIX A: Various Batmans or Batmen

BATMAN (1989)

BATMAN RETURNS (1992)

BATMAN FOREVER (1995)

BATMAN & ROBIN (1998)

BATMAN BEGINS (2005)

THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012)

BATMAN VS SUPERMAN (2016)

JUSTICE LEAGUE (2017 / 2021)

THE BATMAN (2022)

The Dogs of War

The Dogs of War (1980)

Dir John Irvin

Written by Gary DeVore, George Malko

Starring Christopher Walken, Tom Berenger

You know how most of these 70's and early 80's painted posters have an awesome image which never even remotely happens in the movie? Not this one. 

What we got here is an interesting oddity from 1980, a kind of weird blend of mercenary action movie and war drama, but coming from a perspective which makes it a bit unique. It has all the trappings of any number of genre mercenary movies: a team of cynical, hardass character actors, a fictional African country with a sunglass-favoring dictator, a whole bunch of guns, and enough explosions to easily send a commercial tanker ship carrying nothing but cinder blocks to the moon and back a few dozen times. But unlike the sort of movie you’re immediately imagining, this one scales back on the giant muscles and outrageous stunts in favor of a focus on the planning and execution of a mercenary’s work. There’s a few big explosions at the very beginning, and then no action whatsoever until the film’s finale. In between, we get to watch as veteran merc and victim of a double girl name Jamie Shannon (Christopher Walken) goes on a recon mission, considers leaving the trade, gets contracts, and puts together a crack team to smuggle weapons, infiltrate enemy territory, and then (finally) blow up absolutely every goddamn thing in sight. Once the guns finally do come out we get a pretty spectacular light show, but the emphasis of the runtime is on the non-shooting parts of the mercenary’s life, from the loneliness of the downtime to the haggling over gun prices to the clever methods of skirting customs officers. It’s almost a mercenary procedural!

Signing 8x12 glossies for fans.

Part of the oddness of the film comes from the unusual casting. This is the sort of movie you’d expect to star Tom Berenger or somebody (which is good, because he’s in here too) but instead the lead is Walken, fresh off THE DEER HUNTER and HEAVEN’S GATE and not looking at all like your typical Hollywood image of a mercenary tough guy. He’s thin --almost emaciated-- and with his pale skin, red lips and blue eyes casts a decidedly feminine image (it also looks like he’s wearing enough makeup to qualify for a side gig as a geisha, not sure if that’s part of the character or what). We see that he’s pretty hardcore from the movie’s opening where he drives a jeep through an exploding airfield and hijacks an airplane, but the character skews realistic rather than towards the usual exaggerated ubermench trope; Walken’s Shannon is well-prepared and well-trained, but three guys attacking him at once quickly reduce him to the fetal position. He never says one-liners or looks like he’s enjoying himself very much, and in fact by the movie’s end it’s pretty obvious (without being overtly stated) that this line of work has not been good for his psyche.

Likewise, his teammates are a long way from Jesse Ventura and Carl Weathers; they’re mostly dumpy middle-aged guys, their scalps fighting a stalemate battle between greying and receding hairlines. One looks kind of like Denholm Elliott, another sort of like a nerdy Michael Ironside, a third looks like Ed O’Neill because it is him. Interestingly, you got Tom Berenger in there too, playing exactly the kind of macho tough guy you would expect Tom Berenger to play in a merc movie like this. But he’s a minor character and seems like the odd one here, maybe a guy who has watched too many of these movies himself and has a warped idea of how he should be reacting. Nobody else seems very amused by his cowboy antics, but they just seem to accept that this is how he rolls. Even though it’s the same character that is common to more outlandish versions of this same story, the context makes him seem kind of believable here, sort of a nod to real life macho assholes who might do this sort of thing for kicks. In this line of work, it’s actually realistic to have a few larger-than-life, exaggerated personalities. Just don’t expect things to work out for them as neatly as they do in the movies.

Riding dirty.

There’s an odd instinct toward realism here, which sits maybe a bit uncomfortably with the movie’s premise but also makes it kind of unique. Turns out director John Irvin might just have a leg up in the realism department over most directors, having been a cameraman in combats zones ranging from Vietnam to Algeria during the 60s. That probably explain a lot of the unusual structure of the movie and it’s interest in the minutiae of the operation, particularly since Irvin got in touch with some of his old mercenary contacts from that era to discuss the film. Moreover, writer Frederick Forsyth (author of the novel the film is based on) actually went undercover and posed as a venture capitalist attempting to finance a coup in Equatorial Guinea, allowing him to meet various mercenaries and underworld figures and ask them how this kind of thing could be done (a few years later, someone actually tried it for real). So as crazy as it sounds, I suspect this movie is not as far from reality as we might like to imagine. There are real guys out there who are probably completely capable of pulling something like this off. What’s the ratio of fact to fantasy? Well, Irvin would go on to direct HAMBURGER HILL (which an ex-Vietnam vet with a fake leg and only one eye would once tell me was the most realistic movie ever made about the Vietnam war) and the BBC TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY with Alec Guinness, another model of subtlety and realism. Of course, he also made Schwarzenneger’s RAW DEAL so there’s that side of him too.

One obvious fantasy which remains is the uncomfortable neocolonialist subtext. The U.S. action film industry was using this period to go back and win the Vietnam war (RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II, THE GOOD GUYS WEAR BLACK) but Irvin, an Englishman, has a different cultural scab to pick at, so what we got here is a bunch of Europeans getting to go back and re-fight the colonial wars of independence. The new democratically elected dictator of the fictional African “republic of Zangaro” is specifically juxtaposed against the more moderate, losing candidate (a nice guy who winds up in jail for his efforts) who we’re told suggestively “wanted to maintain ties with the mother country.” A number of characters suggest, mostly subtly, that the people of Zangaro were not ready for democracy yet, and that Europe needs to step in and set things right. That sentiment might have been forgivable in the less enlightened time of AFRICA ADDIO (1966), but it’s a little less so in fucking 1980.

I guess this big grenade launcher type gun was a selling point for this movie, but I'm honestly more in love with Walken's original Grumpy Cat face.

Fortunately, the film only pushes this logic so far; it’s clear that the Europeans pushing for the coup are rapacious capitalists who are only interested in securing the mining rights from the new government, so at least they’re not pretending to be heroes. Still, it’s a pretty uncomfortable fantasy to set up a scenario where the white heroes have to re-conquer a former colony in order to secure justice. It doesn’t really help much that virtually every African we meet in the film is openly villainous, and the ones who aren’t are treated with open scorn over the their collaboration with the dictatorship.* Interestingly, though, race doesn’t seem to factor into it as much as Europe’s sensitivity to being told it isn’t needed.** The Europeans even get a fun comeuppance when they take on a troupe of African Mercenaries, who Berenger scoffs are “bush league,” but who quickly shut him up with a demonstration of their skill. Walken even gets an African potential love interest, who the film treats as intelligent and glamorous. So it’s not necessarily about black and white, it’s just about the abiding notion that everyone should stop worrying and admit that they love Europe. It’s a weird kind of subtext, I don’t think I know any other movie with one like it.

So, in some ways it’s a bit ungainly and morally suspect (although perhaps not any more so than your average mercenary action movie). But still gotta give this one credit for trying something a little different. And hey, you can’t get too mad at a movie that has the good instincts to spend it’s first 10 seconds doing this:

Short of adding the implied exclamation point, I don’t know what else they could do to announce their intention of badassery. Except maybe cast future Oscar winner Jim Broadbent as a non-speaking extra. Sorry Jim, no time for your shenanigans here. Instead, we got an simple, straightforward focus on watching a bunch of hard, amoral pros do what they do best. No time for feelings; If you’re gonna cry, cry havoc! That’s how these dogs do it. Less bark, more bite.***   

*I suppose there’s another way to read this, especially since Walken is an American: Africans= Europeans, dictator= Hitler, Mercs = Americans.

** By the way, Ghanaian actor and future STAR WARS EPISODE I THE PHANTOM MENACE side player Hugh Quarshie is an unnamed extra in this. His IMDB page says he refuses to play Othello because he finds it racist, so the fact that he appears in this must mean he thinks it’s at least less racist than Othello. And I guess he’s got no beef with Shakespeare quotes, either.   

*** In fairness, I should admit that there is a brief section near the middle which involves Walken and his ex-wife, a weird performance by JoBeth Williams. They make a big deal about her crippled father, who apparently forced her to divorce Walken's character so she could care for him. Wha? That's not a thing, is it? Not sure what they were going for with this (except maybe to emphasize Walken's increasingly precarious psychological state?) but fortunately Walken fucks her, GTFO's, and then she's never mentioned again.

TRANCE aka THE ETERNAL KISS OF THE MUMMY

 
Trance aka The Eternal Kiss of the Mummy, aka The Eternal (1998) 

Dir. Michael Almereyda

Starring Alison Elliot, Jared Harris, Christopher Walken, cameo by Jason Miller

During the late 90’s and Early 2000s, I had the great honor and privilege of serving with distinction in that most noble of all professions, clerk at an independent video store. That job may have been more independently instructive to my future than any other single incident in my life, and of course dramatically helped shape the breadth and depth of my film knowledge. It was a fantastic time to be in the business, because screeners – free copies of films which had not yet been made available to the public – were still common (before video piracy threatened the very foundation of a free society etc, etc.). We’d get between 5 and 15 free copies of movies per week to review and see if we wanted to purchase them. Some of these were big studio films which we, by all rights, ought to have made a decision on already, but that was all well and good. The real excitement, thought, was the onslaught of weird indie fare put out by smaller studios. This was the last days of Cannon video; Orion video; United Artists; Triton; Lion’s Gate. They were all trying to capitalize on the lucrative video market with cheapie genre titles. Heady times.

It’s funny to think about, but until Tarantino made RESOVOIR DOGS and Kevin Smith made CLERKS, there weren’t a lot of dorky amateurs making hip genre-friendly indie films. Studios kept their B-movie factories cranking, and that was were most genre fare emerged. But with the advent of those two films it suddenly seemed possible to more or less bypass the studio system altogether and make your own films. Throw some cash together from private sources, hire your friends as actors, put on a show. Out of this rich stew of new talent came a flood of aggressively amateurish dream projects which might have had a very minor theatrical or festival release somewhere but mostly went straight to video. And I watched ‘em

These bold pioneers quickly proved that studio films did not have a monopoly on sucking. The new wave of indie films were shot for cheap, they were generally ugly, confusing, poorly acted, and rife with pretensions of daring but deficient in skill to back it up. You know what I mean. Shit like THE MINER MASSACRE, MURDER 101, TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES NM, THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DEAD. Many painfully attempted to imitate the hip patois of Tarantino and Smith’s films. Many failed disastrously. Most are at best fitfully interesting, and at worst unwatchable.

But. They were also kind of labors of love. Young people trying to do something daring and unique that they couldn’t sell in the studio system. Interesting ideas by people not talented enough to pull them off. In other words, genre buff catnip. You know somewhere deep inside that you’re going to have to grind through dozens, maybe hundreds, to find one which even qualifies as frustrating. But something compels you to try anyway. Maybe because you’re a stoned teenager without a girlfriend, who knows, just guessing.

Anyway, TRANCE AKA THE ETERNAL AKA THE ETERNAL KISS OF THE MUMMY (renamed several times for video release in the hopes of tricking innocent civilians into thinking it was something they’d be even remotely interested in) fits that category pretty well in most places. From the late 90s (1998) released by a tiny studio called “Cinema Club” (which, let’s be honest, sounds like a mob front), awkwardly paced, amateurishly shot and lit, and replete with the kind of stunning bad judgment which undoubtedly seemed daring to young artists free from the watchful eye of studio suits who might know better.

TRANCE AKA THE ETERNAL AKA THE ETERNAL KISS OF THE MUMMY is slightly different from others in that field because the guy making it should also have known better. Michael Almereyda already had a good bit of experience under his belt, writing unused scripts for David Lynch and TOTAL RECALL and directing the excellent low-budget vampire softcore nightmare NADJA. This film represents a significant step back in terms of quality, but it does have some goofy charms.

The plot concerns New York socialites Nora and Jim (Allison Elliot and Jared Harris) who are obviously doing well for themselves despite the fact that they’re stunningly low-functioning drunks. They head to Ireland in order to dry out when Nora falls and hits her head (also they’re parents of a young kid, but no one seems too concerned about that).

They head out to the big scary Irish house owned by Nora’s Great- Aunt, and populated by a creepy 11-year-old servant girl and a robe-wearing Christopher Walken, Nora's uncle. Well, they don’t really dry out too well; they’re mostly in varying states of drunkenness the whole movie (which seems to have been sponsored by Jameson’s Irish Whiskey. Not only are they constantly drinking it and commenting on how good it is, it turns out their Great Aunt has like 100 cases of it in her basement, which, I shit you not, they will eventually use to try and get the evil reincarnated “mummy” drunk. More on that later). In a movie which was either worse or better, the alcoholic angle would probably have something to do with something. Here, it just kind of happens without comment or impact on the plot.

This is exactly the kind of thing which gives it that distinct 90s-indie-film vibe. It’s the sort of thing you could never put in a studio movie, and for reasons which I hope are fairly obvious. But its easy to imagine the filmmakers going, “We should make them just terrible, drunken parents and never have it go anywhere at all! Wouldn’t that be great?” and somewhere along the line “tee hee, wouldn’t that be great??” turned into the actual film, where it just sort of sits there, making everyone feel awkward like the only drunk guy at the wedding (he’s drunk on Jameson, I bet).

Speaking of weddings, this is the only movie I’m aware of which has an occasionally Irish Christopher Walken in love with the desiccated corpse of a ancient immortal pagan tribal leader which he keeps in a bathtub in his basement, is one thing I noticed. Walken is on weirdo autopilot here, letting his nifty pentagonal octogonal rose-colored glasses do most of the acting, but he’s still the most interesting thing anywhere in sight. Every fifth line or so he’ll even throw in a couple of words in an Irish accent in what I'm assuming is an homage to Peter Cushing's German in SHOCK WAVES. His wandering Walken cadence is in such strong effect here that he can actually be a little hard to understand. He has a long bit of exposition which is boldly unbound by the usual rules of American English tonal inflections, and after a while it looses so much focus that you forget about the exposition and just get lost in the oddly soothing waves of abstract, formless quasi-Irish Walkenisms.

Like most of this film’s ilk, it’s painfully clear they could only afford their one actual star for a day or so and hence he’s pretty much just awkwardly shoehorned in there as a minor side character. Notice how I keep coming back to awkwardly?

Yeah, the whole thing is pretty awkward. There’s a scene near the climax where a charming Irishman tries to seduce our heroine to the sultry tones of… Stiff Little Finger’s cover of Marley’s immortal “Johnny Was.” Admittedly a great song (and on vinyl, too!), but it would be difficult to find anything less sexy outside of a Captain Beefheart album. If it were possible to seduce women with the dulcet tones of the 70’s Irish punk rock, I wouldn’t have time to write this blog. So it just sits there, self-consciously hip but totally failing to work on any actual artistic level. Which pretty much sums up the preponderance of films of this sort.

I do fundamentally like the idea behind this one, though. It’s a unique idea for a monster movie. There’s no trance, no mummy, and while there is a kiss it’s pretty brief. But I guess SORT OF POSSESSED : BRIEF KISS OF THE DRUNKEN IRISH MOM didn’t market test as well. Basically, the villain here is an ancient immortal druid priestess who died temporarily and got tossed in a bog (preserving her body, sort of like a mummy, I’ll give them that). Not too many mummified druid movies, so it’s always nice to have another.

The body’s respectably icky, but we only see it in the bathtub – the rest of the time, its just our drunken heroine being halfway possessed. There’s your typical struggle over who gets control over the body, but it’s made a little less interesting because the mom’s such an irritating character anyway and the priestess actually seems like kind of an improvement. She does kill a few people (including one with the shattered pieces of a vinyl record, awesome, although done better in that episode of the X-Files Stephen King wrote) but mostly she just kind of wanders around trying to get her bearings. Not especially cinematic. More interesting is the weird little servant (slave?) girl they have in the house who seems to be supernaturally aware of where people are and what they need. So of course it goes without saying that nothing comes of it. It does get enjoyably ludicrous towards the end. My memory is a bit fuzzy but Jared Harris definitely tries to trick the mummy thing into getting drunk on Jameson and sexy dancing as a means of distracting it, and then bonks her over the head with the bottle, which in my opinion is not a very gentlemanly thing to do.

If this seems like a disjointed review which randomly picks at various unrelated things and didn’t even get to the plot until 1,271 words in, I can’t really argue otherwise. But I would like to point out that its reflective of this style of movie. If I had an editor and a paying public, I could never get away with writing about obscure and much-derided indie DTV horror films from the 90s, and even if I did I would have to focus and write something concise and penetrating. Since I don’t, I can indulge myself and write semi-coherent rambles which are mostly for my own benefit and my own interest in exploring weird ideas that don’t have much traction with anyone else. All well and good, but it makes you remember that there’s often a good reason that artists have editors and write with their readers in mind.

Artists complain about the suits ruining their vision, and no doubt that's often the case. But to pull off something as complex as a full-length feature on just one person’s vision – well, you gotta have a lot more vision than most people do to make it work. You gotta be able to take that vision and hone it, focus it.You and the people working with you need to have mastery of the tools it takes to visually and narratively communicate that vision. You have to get it out of your own head and into the head of the person watching. I'm convinced director Almereyda had something cool in his head – its a shame he wasn't able to communicate it to me. But for a film about a bunch of stumbling, irresponsible drunks trying to keep control of their bodies from being possessed by a far more powerful, amoral entity I guess it may work as a suitable metaphor for the film culture of it's time. If the young indie film community could get through its awkward teenagers years and go on to make the kind of excellent work we frequently see today, maybe there's hope for these drunken possessed neglectful parents and their goofy ginger kid as well.

This review is dedicated to Patrick McConnell, who loaned me his VHS copy of this film which he apparently paid real US currency for at some point in his younger, wilder days.

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