The Awakening

The Awakening (1980)

Dir. Mike Newell

Written by Clive Exton, Chris Bryant, Allan Scott. Based on novel by Bram Stoker

Starring Charlton Heston, Susannah York, Jill Townsend, Stephanie Zimbalist, Ian McDiarmid

So here we got no less than muthafuckin’ Charlton Heston (WAYNE’S WORLD 2) starring in an adaptation of a Bram Stoker Novel (You know, Bram Stoker, from BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA) directed by Mike Newell (HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE, DONNIE BRASCO) lensed by famed cinematographer Jack Cardiff (THE AFRICAN QUEEN, THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA) and edited by the venerable Terry Rawling (ALIEN, CHARIOTS OF FIRE). And yet you’ve never heard of it. Wonder why that is?

The answer would be that this a mostly dull, curiously unfocused tale of a mummy’s revenge. Honestly it would be almost completely pointless except for a fun way-over-the-top performance by Heston (in a British accent, sometimes?) and some nicely lensed images from Newell (in his sophomore film) and Cardiff. Basically, it revolved around (British?) Egyptologist Matthew Corbeck, a guy so fucking obsessed with Egyptology that while he’s in Egypt on the verge of one of the most major archeological discoveries of all time he chooses to actually be on site doing work rather than staying home with his pregnant wife (Jill Townsend, THE SEVEN-PERCENT SOLUTION). The movie and the wife seem to regard this decision as roughly equivalent to genocide, and not just of some little wimpy native tribe or something, I’m talkin’ genocide of attractive wealthy white people with little blonde girls. Maybe 1980 was just a different time --I guess they did have that sitcom A Different World so that might explain it-- but I have a hard time getting mad at this poor motherfucker for the apparent crime of being an Egyptologist. I mean, what the fuck did the wife think was going to happen when she agreed to go with him to Egypt? Why would he bother to go to another fucking continent if it was just to sit in a hotel room with his whiny pregnant wife? Women are just the worst, amiright fellas? #Gamergate.

The most interesting Egyptologist in the world.

Anyway, wifey’s not currying much favor with me by standing in the way of a great scientific discovery just cuz she gets bored sitting in desert tents, but I gotta admit it turns out she was right, conducting archeological studies on Egyptian tombs is a bad idea. As soon as they open the damn thing people start dying right and left. Well, mainly right, not so much left since it happens pretty infrequently over the course of many years, but still. As the years pass, this guy Corbeck can’t seem to learn his lesson and stop being interested in archeology, which again, what a fucking tragic character flaw. But curiously, his now-18-year-old daughter Margaret (Stephanie Zimbalist, Remington Steele) who was born the same day as he opened that fateful tomb not that that has anything to do with the plot, I don’t even know why I would mention it, is almost as into Egyptology as he is, and in fact is starting to get a little pushy about wanting to try some ancient Egyptian ritual rigamarole.

The big problem here is that the film spends way too long getting to this point, and once it finally gets there doesn’t seem to have a clear plan for where to go next. It can’t seem to resolve around a central character; Margaret has probably as much screen time as Chuck, but not really any kind of character arc. Heston, ostensibly the protagonist (or at least the only one with a conflict) gives a weirdly opaque (British?) performance so despite his enojyable overacting (do Egyptologists really shout and grimace so much all the time?), you can never quite tell what his deal is. I guess he gets possessed, too? Or something? The whole affair has a very LORDS OF SALEM problem with protagonists who are passive victims. Nobody really seems to have any idea what is happening to them, nor does there really seem to be much they could do about it even if they wanted to. So we’re left with a lot of listless scenes of people acting vaguely weird while Heston sweats in the toasty Egyptian sun (and man, motherfucker sweats a LOT; I’m not sure if he’s acting weird because he’s possessed or just woozy from dehydration) not really having much to do.  

People with beards that prodigious would be wise to avoid open flames.

There movie runs a tad too long at 101 minutes, and a lot too uneventfully most of the time. But while the kills are way too infrequent, I gotta admit that when they kill, they kill hard. If the movie has a saving grace, it’s the sheer overkill it lays down on its rare victims; anyone getting killed here suffers a minimum of two or three times the death that would be visited on the bodycount of a normal slasher. Several times here the victim will seem decisively and definitively dead, and then the movie decides to go the extra mile to double-tap them just to be sure. One soldier falls about a thousand feet off a cliff, breaks every bone in his body bouncing off the jagged cliff walls, and THEN gets tangled up in a rope and hung before he hits the ground. A lady falls off a roof into a glass greenhouse, breaks every bone in her body, THEN there’s a hanging shard of glass to cut her head off. A minor character gets stabbed by spring-loaded statue with sword, which admittedly is only one death but it’s a good one. And it’s not enough that this poor guy gets impaled on a syringe, he’s gonna get stabbed about 20 times before he finally kicks it. Oh, also the guy in question is Ian McDiarmid (The Emperor), so overkilling him is probably worth a few extra points. It’s cool to see him in here, seems like he doesn’t do a lot of movies, plus he has a huge red fro and looks a little like a laid-back Phil Spector. Gotta like that, right?

The ancient Egyptians had rockin' metal faces.

So this one has some high points, and of course it’s enjoyable to watch a real titan of acting like Heston hamming it up in a straight faced killer Mummy movie.* I might be a little more forgiving if it had a little more mummy action, though. What the fuck is the deal with these mummy movies, like this one or the 1932 Karloff THE MUMMY or the terrible 1999 TRANCE: THE ETERNAL KISS OF THE MUMMY, that think what we want is a mummy movie which just has some guy get possessed and skulk around? Look at the fucking poster for this movie you assholes, what the fuck do you see? Some possessed guy? No, it’s a goddam creepy glowing-eyed MUMMY. Where is the mummy in these mummy movies, I ask? Let’s get some guy wrapped up in bandages stumbling around eating some mutherfuckers, OK? Next year I’ve got Hammer’s MUMMY series on the list, so hopefully they can avoid this apparently tempting pitfall and make a series of mummy movies that actually has a mummy in it. In the meantime, this one ain’t a disaster, but it should probably be a lot better than it is.

OH, also as a side note you can’t just fucking throw a kinky incestual kiss in there out of the blue in the middle of your movie and then act like its no big deal and never mention it again. Jesus guys. What the fuck.

Still gotta like seeing Chuck in something like this, though. Hey, it’s better than his other big archeologist role in Van Damme’s THE ORDER. Plus he’s (sometimes) doing a (British?) accent! If that doesn’t sell you on this one, it’s seriously time to re-examine your priorities in life.

*He would return to the subject of Egyptology for the controversial 1993 documentary MYSTERY OF THE SPHINX, in which Heston’s narration makes it sound extremely convincing that the Sphinx’s water erosion is evidence that it’s thousands of years older than “mainstream” Egyptologists believe. The geologist who makes the claims is now a regular on Ancient Aliens, so maybe it’s a tad harder to endorse this line of reasoning today than it was in 1993. But shit, if they got Heston to narrate Ancient Aliens I got a feeling I’d take those claims a lot more seriously, too. Anyway I don’t know if Heston got the idea while shooting THE AWAKENING or not; as a scientist, I’m merely reporting what I see.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2014 CHECKLIST!

The Hunt For Dread October

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Yes, of Bram Stoker's other, other famous horror novel The Jewel of Seven Stars.
• SEQUEL: None
• REMAKE: None, although there's a couple other movies with the same name.
• FOREIGNER: No
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: Charlton Heston, possibly at the time Academy-Award nominated actress Susannah York as well.
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: None
• BOOBIES: ....I honestly do not recall.
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: None
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Embalmed organs in jars, head sliced off
• HAUNTED HOUSE: Nah
• MONSTER: No
• THE UNDEAD: Mummy!
• POSSESSION: Yes, it's more a possession movie than a mummy one.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: Nah
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): No
• EVIL CULT: I can't recall if the awakened Mummy was the result of an evil cult or just normal mainstream ancient Egyptian religion.
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: Nah
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Nah
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: High, especially considering the cast and talent
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Just as BLOOD BEAST TERROR taught us to beware entomologists and WEREWOLF OF LONDON taught us to hate and fear botanists, now we learn that Egyptologists are also an untrustworthy and dangerous lot.
• TITLE ACCURACY: The mummy kinda awakens, I guess. I'll allow it.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: Good god, no.

The Order (2001) (ORDER VS. ORDER DOUBLE FEATURE PART 1!)

The Order vs The Order

Preamble:

Institutions always want to put conflicts in terms of order and chaos. Control is easier to maintain and to justify if you define life that way, drawing a clear divide between the benevolent forces of order and the insidious agents of chaos. This sort of binary conflict is rife throughout the language that defines our world. Dungeons and Dragons, for example. I’m sure there are others. But it seems to me that more often than not, it is systems of order which bring chaos, by coming into conflict with each other. Order seeks to impose control by its very definition, and different systems of control are inevitably and resolutely in competition with each other. History has given us plenty of examples of such clashes; the rigid dogmatism of the Catholic Church against the structured pragmatism of the scientific method. The systematic economic mechanics of Capitalism against the humanist redistribution of Socialism. The machiavellian machinations of big business against the pugnacious discipline of organized labor. The goofy crappiness of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s THE ORDER (2001) against the gloomy crappiness of Heath Ledger’s THE ORDER (2003).

Let’s pick one of those conflicts at random to explore a little further.

The Order (2001)

Dir. Sheldon Lettich

Written by Jean-Claude Van Damme, Les Weldon

Starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Charlton Heston (!?!), Sophia Milos, Brian Thompson, Ben Cross

First of all, I know what you’re thinking. “Wouldn’t it have been great if Van Damme had been in this and then also in Coline Serreau’s CHAOS that same year?!” I know, I know, maybe he’d have been a little out of place in a movie Stephen Holden called a, "gripping feminist fable with a savage comic edge." But at least he could have gotten on-board with 2005’s Statham/Snipes debacle CHAOS. Or 2005’s other CHAOS, the notorious LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT ripoff from “Demon” Dave DeFalco. Or I guess even the Japanese Hideo Nakata CHAOS from 2000. Or the 2008 Herman Yau Hong Kong CHAOS. Or if he wanted to get creative, he could have Timecop’d himself back to 1984 and starred in the Donatello-award winning Italian drama KAOS. I guess he was already in BREAKIN’ in ‘84, and who can forget his memorable turn as “Gay Karate Man” in MONACO FOREVER that same year, so I dunno, might not want to mess with the space time continuum there, might not be worth it to lose those. But still.

Anyway, there’s obviously plenty of movies about chaos, he should get on one. That’s my point. But in 2001, Van Damme’s mind was on Order, so he starred in this movie THE ORDER.

In this THE ORDER, Van Damme plays Rudy "Can't Fail" Cafmeyer, one of those suave high-class historical artifact heisters that you always hear about in movies but never in real life for some reason. In the first scene, he liberates a Faberge egg from some kind of private museum with lasers and repelling and so on. It all seemed kinda familiar for some reason, until I realized that they use the same footage for a similar art heist scene at the start of Seagal’s TODAY YOU DIE. That ninja-clad stunt double got to play both Van Damme and Seagal in the same scene!

Problem is, his swashbuckling ninja-impersonating artifact-thieving ways are leading to a rift with his studious academic father Ozzie, who gets himself kidnapped by a mysterious Israeli religious sect after he discovers their sacred document.

Oh right, I should probably also mention this one begins hundred of years ago during the Crusades, when a guru-bearded Crusader (also Van Damme) decides to become the Messiah of a new religion and write up some sacred scrolls, only one of which will be important here. The movie considers this an extremely honorable goal, and feels the world writ large is poorer for not having the scrolls around anymore. See, right before his death, that notorious prankster Messiah Van Damme buried the most important scroll in the desert somewhere, and since then his followers have only had the other, less important scrolls to follow, compromising his true goal of a religion which doesn’t suck. It’s like how the studio fired Richard Stanley right at the start of THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, and then no one knew what to do and they just made it up as they went along and somewhere along the way it turned into this bizarre and disheartening clusterfuck of people trying to throw their weight around, the true meaning of what they were originally trying to do lost in a churning sea of egotism and bad blood. Or like Christianity. You know, one of those things that would have totally been great, if only dot dot dot.

No Van Damme, don't make a joke about the Holy Land now! ... it's right behind you!

The point is, Messiah Van Damme’s religion gets corrupted because he buried the one god damn important scroll, so that asshole Brian Thompson (Alien Bounty Hunter from X-Files, Night Slasher from COBRA, tough-looking mutha from everything else) takes over and turns the religion into some kind of violent car-bombing conspiracy-having nuclear-bomb-threatening cult. For some reason he wants to destroy the Holy Land, and it’s up to Van Damme (modern day, non-Messiah version) to stop him.

OK, got all that? Flash back to modern times. Van Damme’s gotta go to the Holy land to save his father from the kidnappers, who want to utilize the power of the important scroll for [an important reason, I’m sure]. Who’s there to meet him at the airport but, oh my god, how can this be happening, why it’s Hollywood’s own Charleton Heston (Dying Chimpanzee, PLANET OF THE APES 2001). Chuck repeats what he already told us in the opening narration, carries Van Damme’s luggage, and then dies. It would be the third-to-last time he would appear on the silver screen, and the second was BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE, not exactly his finest work in my opinion. Oh well, at least he never had to voice a Transformer.  

Listen sonny, I was in WAYNE'S WORLD II so I don't want to hear any of your lip.

With Heston out of the way, Van Damme is free to get involved in a convoluted conspiracy plot, outwit some corrupt local police officers (plus get freaky with a sexy one), run afoul of a bunch of Serbians, almost get into a fight with this big ass dude but then for some reason never actually go through with it, have a couple low-impact car chases, and, most memorably, get involved in an extended Jerusalem foot chase while dressed as a Rabbi (payot and all!).

To its credit, this movie is less serious and more fun than you might imagine a movie about a murderous sect in the Holy Land which features Van Damme as the Messiah might be. It’s one of the lighter Van Damme characters I’ve seen, he’s constantly quipping and joking around and seeming to enjoy himself. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is exactly as chintzy as you would expect from a 2001 DTV production. Despite the exotic location work, most of the camerawork looks like crap, there’s some dodgy CGI, sitcom lighting, crappy acting, and of course it goes without saying on this kind of thing that the plot leaves a few notable questions lingering, one of which being, “what the hell?” I guess that’s OK, but man, remember when Van Damme used to be in movies that looked like, you know, real movies? I mean, NOWHERE TO RUN isn’t exactly a masterpiece, but at least it had decent lighting and told a complete story. THE ORDER has some smiles in it, but you would never confuse it for a movie that was shown in theaters.

This is totally how FOOTNOTE should have ended.

Fortunately, Van Damme has seemingly picked himself up from his early millennial low point, getting involved in some better and more ambitious pictures like JVCD and the two DTV UNIVERSAL SOLDIER sequels directed by John Hyams. That’s good, because while THE ORDER isn’t a complete wasteland of entertainment, it’s not nearly competent enough to really be worth your time, particularly in the absence of him also doing a sequel called THE CHAOS. I was banking on the entertainment value of seeing ol’ Chuck Heston in a Van Damme DTV LAST CRUSADE knockoff* but that’s kinda a wash, he’s not really around long enough to leave an impression. I’m more amenable to the Rabbi disguise, which is a funny idea and also coincides with the movie’s only decent action sequence. It’s probably the only part that merits the attention of anyone but the most die-hard Van Damme fans, although in fairness if you make it to the end you’ll get to see Van Damme in a sword fight, something of a rarity.

Product was as described, would The Order again.

One minor aspect I appreciate: despite the Jerusalem setting and religious cults and mystical scrolls, there’s no indication of anything genuinely supernatural anywhere in the movie. In fact, the lost scroll doesn’t have some kind of magic incantation in it; instead, it advises Messiah Van Damme’s followers to be a little nicer to people. I think we can all stand to learn a little something about that, be it from an ancient scroll or a JCVDDTV flick.

* No, not that KNOCKOFF with the exploding jeans.

ON TO PART II! CAN HEATH LEDGER COMPETE WITH RABBI VAN DAMME?! FIND OUT IN THE THRILLING FINAL INSTALLMENT!