Project: Metalbeast

Project: Metalbeast aka Project: Metalbeast: DNA Overload (1995)

Dir: Alessandro De Gaetano

Written by Alessandro De Gaetano, Timothy E. Sabo, Roger Steinmann

Starring Kim Delaney, Barry Bostwick, John Marzilli, and Kane Hodder

Considering the movie is called... (checks notes) PROJECT: METALBEAST?!  oh dear god I've wasted my life! I could die tomorrow and they’d say at my funeral that I spent my last night on earth watching a movie called fucking PROJECT: METALBEST, sometimes officially subtitled PROJECT: METALBEAST: DNA OVERLOAD though I thank merciful Zeus that wasn’t the on-screen title of the version I saw, but still, Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with me, civilization is collapsing around us and my response is I intentionally select and watch the entirety of PROJECT: METALBEAST!? I live in an age of unprecedented access to the entire pantheon of human achievement! I have every word ever published by Shakespeare and Tolstoy, Hemingway and Hugo, Austen and Joyce at my beck and call! I could delve into the works of Confucius or Kant! I have access to depth and breadth of knowledge undreamt of by monarchs and conquerors a century before my birth! And what do I fucking do with my miserable life, ending, inexorably, second by irreplaceable second? PROJECT: fucking METABLEAST. [Spirals downward into existential despair]

Anyway, as I was saying, for a movie called PROJECT: METALBEAST, this starts off encouragingly, immediately introducing us to two tough-looking guys obviously on some kind of tough guy mission in the wilderness. For context, it provides the following on-screen text in that universally recognized “military typewriter font” which appears in movies and nowhere else in history:

·         Project: Operation Lycanthropus
·         Agency: US Military Intelligence
·         Destination: Carpathian Mountains, Hungary
·         Objective: Sample werewolf blood

That would be enough just by itself to let us know everything we need, but it goes on to add the extraneous:

·         Purpose: Create superior combat agent

As if "Sample werewolf blood" wasn't a sufficient purpose all on its own.

One of the two toughs is Butler (intense-looking enjoyable overactor John Marzilli [The Secret World Of Alex Mack, a 1984 episode of Cheers]) and the other we needn’t worry ourselves with, because he ain’t gonna be around for long. If the text is correct –and we will quickly find out that at least the werewolf part definitely is—they are in the Carpathian Mountains, where they speedily make their way to an obviously werewolf-infested structure and encounter an impressively swole werewolf (Kane Hodder!) who is summarily dispatched with silver bullets and has his blood sampled. So far so good, all according to plan! Oh, those bean-counters back in Washington might have rolled their eyes at spending millions of taxpayer dollars on Operation Lycanthropus. They might have said it was unwise, perhaps even asinine, to travel to the Carpathian Mountains, Hungary, to sample werewolf blood for the purpose of creating a superior combat agent! But who’s laughing now, you pencil-necked Liberal bureaucrats?!

All this is supposed to take place in 1975, by the way. Hard to believe Gerald Ford thought this was a good idea, but maybe it was one of those Nixon-approved schemes which took a few years to get off the ground.

Anyway, we got another PROMETHEUS situation here: nobody says holy shit, werewolves are real, this could revolutionize our entire understanding of biology, not to mention philosophy, the human soul, and mankind’s place in the universe. Instead, they’re just mad they can’t get their werewolf-juiced super-soldier, like, today. Butler, in particular, seems to think if they can’t have a lycanthropic Captain America up and running by brunch tomorrow, America is almost certainly going to be defeated by the forces of communist homosexual decadence. And so when the scientists tell him it’s going to take a day or two to run tests on the mysterious blood (which they don’t know is from a werewolf, a fact which might have hurried them along) Butler goes ballistic and injects himself with the remaining blood. This immediately results in him turning into a werewolf and going on a rampage. Which, of course it does, what the fuck did you think was going to happen, Butler? I mean, you personally took this blood from an actual, living breathing jacked-up ‘roided-out Carpathian werewolf! Always think, man, before you inject yourself with supernatural blood! Real rookie error in my opinion.

Fortunately Butler’s boss, the shifty Colonel who I briefly thought was named “Millie” but turns out to be named Miller (Barry Bostwick –yes, the Barry Bostwick! Beloved star of stage and screen Barry Bostwick from Spin City and what have you*), knows what’s up and quickly puts a couple silver bullets in Butler. I guess he must have seen this coming, or at least had some silver bullets handy for some other reason.

That’s a movie’s worth of werewolf plot right there, but it’s actually only 21 minutes and 30 second of screen time, kinda a complete little mini-movie to set the tone, like the opening of the 2009 FRIDAY THE 13th. We then skip ahead 20 years to the present (1995), where we learn that Miller has secretly stashed Butler’s nude silver-bullet-riddled corpse in a hidden lab, which --yes ladies-- means the villain from The Secret World Of Alex Mack goes full frontal, a nice little bonus for you. You see, Miller learned a valuable lesson from Operation Lycanthropus. Not, of course, that injecting psychotic Nixon-era special ops commandos with werewolf blood is an impractical idea. No, no, the theory is sound, obviously. The problem is that the resulting homicidal werewolf doesn’t have skin as hard as steel. That’s the real snag here. But wouldn’t you know it, in 1995 there’s a lab full of another group of government scientists who are looking for cadavers to practice skin grafts on. Only problem is, the process so far has resulted in all the grafts turning as hard as steel. Well that’s serendipitous! And so, Project: Metalbeast, as the new project is presumably unofficially known exclusively in the head of Colonel Miller, is born!

Unfortunately, as the movie re-starts with a new cast, the break-neck momentum of the first 20 minutes comes to a screeching halt, and we’re left to get introduced to a new generation of scientists led by Dr. Anna de Carlo (Kim Delaney – yeah, the NYPD Blue lady! Also she was in Brian de Palma’s MISSION TO MARS apparently, just five years after this?). Dr. de Carlo is going to be our new protagonist, but unfortunately will serve as something closer to the audience’s antagonist, because she is the one frustratingly factor standing between us and our promised METALBEAST. You see, she doesn’t trust Colonel Miller and doesn’t like that the handy cadaver he has provided for her project has incomplete paperwork. Now, she’s right, of course; the paperwork is bogus, and this guy is sketchy as hell, and in point of fact is trying to unleash a homicidal, vengeance-minded steel-skinned unkillable METALBEAST on them. But which would you rather watch, a movie about a homicidal, vengeance-minded steel-skinned unkillable METALBEAST wreaking havoc, or a movie about a low-level deep-state bureaucrat dragging their feet on a series of biology experiments through an intra-office dispute over incomplete paperwork? Because the movie bets it all on the latter. Not wisely, in my estimation.

See people, this is why everyone hates Liberals. Sure, they might be right, but crazy old uncle Trump, oops, I mean Miller, says we’re allowed to have fun and stay up late and eat all the candy we want and if we want to unleash a homicidal unkillable METALBEAST on the unsuspecting world, that’s our RIGHT as Americans goddamit. And hey, if some people end up dead, there’s always a tax cut to sooth the pain.

Anyway, this argument over proper paperwork for scientific specimens is just blatant anti-entertainment, made even worse by the movie’s general ability to be competent enough that it’s boring. The acting is fine, the production value is passable, the cinematography (by Thomas Callaway, FEAST and an impressive number of direct-to-video sequels including SLC PUNK 2,  CRUEL INTENTION 3 and CRITTERS 4) is adequate and even stylish on occasion.** The sound mix on the version I saw is absolute dogshit, thanks Amazon, but that’s more of an annoyance than a charming foible. So there’s not even anything to enjoy ironically as we slowly, inevitably drag ourselves through nearly 40 minutes before we get a METALBEAST up and running. The only thing that kept me going is the unspoken but unmissable sexual tension between Dr. de Carlo and Female Scientist #2 (Musetta Vander, wow, O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU?, WILD WILD WEST, and MANSQUITO?! Plus music videos for Alice Cooper, Elton John, Rod Stewart, Chris Isaac and Tina Turner?!). Oh sure, de Carlo has a supposed love interest who looks like Michael Dudikoff but isn’t (Dean Scofield, a regular voice in the Metal Gear Solid games plus Don Coscarellli’s SURVIVAL QUEST and supporting the real Michael Dudikoff in BLACK THUNDER) but watch these women together. The little gestures, the lingering eye contact, the brief but significant touching. At one point, de Carlo kisses her co-worker lightly on the head after she comes up with some petty exposition. Don’t try and tell me that’s just being a friendly office mate, even in an office so close that you’d feel comfortable going into the meat locker and sadly caressing the corpse of a co-worker who has been hideously mauled by some kind of beast, possibly a METALBEAST, which also happens. This is chemistry. That guy who looks like Michael Dudikoff has no idea what he's in the middle of. None of this turns out to be important or interesting or even stated aloud, obviously, but it does provide a little color during a 40-minute stretch which really struggles to get much drama going.

See what I mean?

Also, I don't know where else to address this, but there's a minor subplot about how the wacky Latino chef (Mario Burgos, no other credits) in their surprisingly elaborate government kitchen (?) is going on strike until they sprinkle the place with holy water (??). There's even a line about how they tried to fool him by using regular water, but he caught on (???). This is never really a relevant plot point, but it comes up a couple times and I feel it must be vital to understanding the rich thematic tapestry that PROJECT: METALBEAST is weaving. 

Anyway, eventually we do get our METALBEAST, and it’s pretty rad, although I have to admit it doesn't quite turn out to be what I had in mind. I was imagining kind of a cyborg werewolf thing, and that’s not exactly what we get; remember, this is just a normal everyday run-of-the-mill werewolf covered in transplanted skin that for some totally valid scientific reason turns as hard as steel, so he’s not a robot or anything, just sort of a weird shiny werewolf who now has glowing red eyes (not sure how that happened) and bristly spines that make him look sort of like a were-porcupine (not sure how that happened, either). He doesn't look exactly like he's made of metal, though he does make metal sound effects when he walks, so there's that. But he looks pretty cool, and you get to see him a good bit. Perhaps recognizing his big namesake movie is really starting to sag, he immediately picks up where he left off back in 1975 and gets right down to the business of murdering everyone in sight. But there are apparently only four or five people who work here so it’s not exactly the wall-to-wall bloodbath that it would have to be to make it worth sitting through 40 minutes of departmental meetings about proper bureaucratic procedural protocol. Still, a METALBEAST was promised, a METALBEAST was delivered, and in fairness to them they have a pretty good plan to dispose of it: silver bullets aren’t going to make it through its MIGHTY METAL SKIN, so they melt down their boss’s antique silver coin collection which he keeps in the office (?) and mold themselves some silver-tipped bazooka rounds. That oughtta do it. With style.

A movie called PROJECT: METALBEAST could probably use a little more cheerful extravagance like that, but there’s enough here to make for a reasonably painless watch. At the very least, the movie is a timely warning about the dangers of injecting American soldiers with werewolf blood to create supersoliders, and then when they go berserk and murder everybody, freezing them nude in a secret lab for twenty years until the technology is developed to give them invulnerable metal skin. Frankly I’m a little peeved that my tax money went to pay for all that. Thankfully there are responsible, thoughtful citizens willing to speak out against this kind of shenanigan. And yes, I’m talking about the deep state: professional, honest civil servants who ensure that these kinds of excesses are kept in check the only way a huge organization is capable of controlling excess: through transparent, consistent protocol.

Yes sir, if we’re ever going to get saved, it’s not going to be by werewolf supersoldiers; it’s gonna be by honest technocrats making sure the paperwork is done right. And this review is a salute to them.

But that doesn’t mean I want to watch them work. If I’m going to throw precious hours of my life away watching low-budget Canadian garbage, I’d at least like to get more METALBEAST than tales of sensible governance, please.

PS: Also, for fucks sake, shouldn't there be a little metal on this soundtrack? I know the beast is literally metal, or at least as hard as metal and I get that PROJECT: THE BEAST WITH REALLY HARD SKIN doesn't have the same ring to it, but come on, you know what I expected with a title like that. Be a pal and throw some Dokken or something in there next time, guys.

*Also ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, but equally also WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S II, HANNAH MONTANA: THE MOVIE, IN THE HEAT OF PASSION II: UNFAITHFUL, THE SCORPION KING IV: QUEST FOR POWER, plus he had a voice role in the American dub of FANTASTIC PLANET and had guest roles on literally every American and Canadian TV series 1979-present.

** The score feels genuinely professional, boldly stating aloud that this is all much more exciting than it actually is, and occasionally almost able to convince you. Turns out it’s by a guy who would at least go on to be a genuine professional, one Conrad Pope, who did scores for PAVILION OF WOMEN, MY WEEK WITH MARILYN, and TIM’S VERMEER, among with schlock like Billy Zane’s THE SET UP and the Alessandro De Gaetano-scripted NEOWOLF. But he’s better known as an orchestrator, a job he held on everything from THE CARE BEARS MOVIE to SCHINDLER’S LIST, the STAR WARS prequels, and most of the HARRY POTTER movies! Even VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS! Wow! What a meteoric rise!

Thor

Thor (2011)
Dir. Kenneth Branagh
Written Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stenz, Don Payne
Starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Stellan Skarsgard, Kat Dennings, Idris Elba, Colm Feore, Ray Stevenson

I don’t know if this one really deserves a full 3,000 word review like SAVAGES got, but I gotta say it impressed me enough that I thought it was worth telling the world. Directed by Shakespearean actor and one-time Hogwarts Defense-Against-The-Dark-Arts instructor Kenneth Branagh, this one continues the current run of Marvel adaptations which seem to have finally found their footing somewhere between the glowering grimness of Bryan Singer’s X-MEN films and the Saturday-morning cartoon frothiness of the FANTASTIC FOUR. For that, you gotta give some credit to Jon Favreau, who with his flawed but great IRON MAN movie managed to rediscover the art of entertaining through drama and character instead of spectacle.

And of course, once you realize how well that works you can’t believe you never noticed it before. Comic books are actually not at all the action-packed spectacle machines that movie producers first took them for. They’re mostly soap operas with more outlandish characters inhabiting an ever-widening, ever more densely layered universe of absurdity. Their charm is in the characters themselves, and the appealing good nature they bring to story arcs that are absurd on their face. Tone, it turns out, is key to capturing that amiable earnestness that makes comic books the prevailing mythology of our time. And THOR continues the trend of finding the right tone to make that mythology appealing and engrossing.

   
    Which is particularly necessary in this case, because of course Thor is more than just a part of the vast Marvel Comics mythology, he’s actually a character from a real mythology. Having  --in my younger wilder days-- studied Norse mythology at some length, its fun to see it run through the prism of a comic adaptation, a movie adaptation of that adaptation, and then a movie production of that adaptation, and still come out more or less intact. THOR fiddles with the details here and there, but honestly it probably keeps more of the original tale and characters intact than, say, BEOWULF did a few years back. It’s completely ludicrous, of course, but there’s a pleasing flavor of ludicrous that comes from the hundreds of years that these stories were honed into their most efficient mythological forms.* The fundamental relationship between Odin, Thor, and Loki, and their relationship with the other realms of their mythology, works on a level beyond anything a Hollywood script writer** could really dream up -- it works on a mythological level. People believed this shit, it was their religion. And it strikes an emotional chord because it’s laboriously built out of story elements which instantly get a psychological reaction out of you. Ask Joseph Campbell about it. Or George Lucas prior to 1999. 

And it was the best white rap video ever

    Anyway, Branagh gives the mythology a big budget Hollywood treatment, but keeps the mystical silliness in there without any cheap postmodern pot-shots. In Valhalla, everyone treats their problems with frost giants as though they’re in King Lear. Which makes it all the more fun when Thor ends up stuck in Midgard (that’s the human realm, kids) and somewhat out of touch with the locals. So it goes from its big CG fantasy battles at the start to being a 150 million dollar fish-out-of-water comedy, as Thor befuddles the likes of Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgard, and agent Coulson.

    Again, it’s silly, but it works because Branagh gets the change of tone right and keeps his actors working perfectly with the material. Whoever this kid Chris Hemsworth is, he’s beyond perfect for the role -- not only is he physically imposing, but he perfectly transitions Thor’s broad, epic personality traits between the worlds in a way which feels complete, consistent, and entertaining. The worlds of the film, like in mythology, are very different places where the rules and tone change dramatically. But Hemsworth, like Thor himself, connects them beautifully. He’s a god for the people.

    Nothing particularly dramatic ends up happening, and the stakes stay pretty small throughout. But that doesn’t stop Branagh from making each sequence as entertaining as possible. When it’s dramatic, it’s gonna be high drama. When it’s comedy, it’s gonna be broad comedy. When it’s action, it’s gonna be ridiculous spectacle (except the hand-to-hand fights, which are disappointingly shot in that post-action shakeycam style). It’s as silly as you could imagine, but Branagh trusts his cast and the fundamentals of the story to keep our attention, and it ends up paying off beautifully.

    Most of the cast works beautifully, particularly Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston, who’s so excellent as Loki that you can’t help but sort of root for him. One thing that does not work is Natalie Portman, who after turning in a magnificent performance in BLACK SWAN returns to her day job of being really embarrassing in movies like this. She’s playing a scientist who may well give those PROMETHEUS jokers a run for their money at being the worst scientist ever. She sees a mysterious cloud formation, and later sees a blurry picture of a dark slightly human-looking shape in that cloud, and immediately decides the only logical course of action is to find the guy who obviously fell out of the sky and ask him what all that was about. Which is not very good science if my grade school education was at all accurate. She then spends the rest of the movie giggling like a schoolgirl every time Thor appears, and at the end I guess they fell in love at some point. You almost believe it because of Hemsworth’s charm, but it’s one of the few points where the idiotic writing feels like bad writing instead of comic book writing.

Blatant false advertising.

Still, its appealing comic book sensibilities win out in the end. It’s a movie which understands that comics are the new mythology of our age precisely because they’re broad and preposterous. We don’t need to see gritty, R-rated reimaginings set in the real world. We did that in the comics when postmodernism hit in the 90’s, and we did it in cinema with the deluge of deconstructionist mumbo-jumbo which followed WATCHMEN and Chris Nolan’s self-consciously grown up BATMAN films. OK dude, we get it, Batman is a psychologically rich concept. But you know what, it’s still psychologically rich if we have fun with it. You don’t have to be so stodgy and literal about everything for us to get the stuff that makes it good. THOR gets that. It doesn’t care if you think it’s edgy and cool. It just wants you to think it’s fun. And it has the goods to deliver on that desire. Thanks, pre-Christian Germanic tribes of Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and the Faroe islands.   

*Unless you believe, like the guys from ANCIENT ALIENS or the writers of this movie, that Norse mythology actually represents accurate historical accounts of early alien encounters which humans, which as the authoritative-sounding narrator of that program assures us is entirely possible and supported by many unnamed experts.  

**in this case, the two artists behind AGENT CODY BANKS and one of the two guys it took to write the episode of the Simpsons where Krusty finds out he has a daughter.

Prometheus

Prometheus (2012)
Dir. Ridley Scott
Written: John Spaihts, Damon Lindelof
Starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Sean Harris, and, briefly and inexplicably, Guy Pearce.

PROMETHEUS takes its name from the ship upon which our intrepid crew journeys towards an alien world from whence came the creators of the human race. But of course, it really takes its name from the Greek myth about the Titan of that name who both created the human race and gave them the power of the gods (in the form of fire). Which I think is what the movie would like to be about. They’re definitely pleased enough with that allegory that they shoehorn it into a conversation just to make sure you didn’t miss how clever they were being. But maybe Ridley Scott and co. should have been thinking about another recent spaceship ironically named after a Greek myth: Icarus. Because in trying to scale up their ALIEN mythology into a big philosophical hard sci-fi movie, these guys forget that if you make your narrative wings out of wax, you’d be wise not to fly too close to the sun. Which in this metaphor represents unearned pretensions of depth. Because that fucker is gonna melt through the bullshit real quick and you’re gonna make a big splash in the sea of overreaching.

It’s not that it’s not a cool movie. It is. It’s huge and ballsy and filled with the craziest crap you’ve ever seen. But at the end of the day, it’s a movie that is so obsessed with being huge and important and blowing your mind that it forgets to go through the actual steps that would be necessary to do that.

It’s a movie that has one big question, and that question is “what is the relationship between the creator and the created?” Which is a pretty ballsy question to hang a movie on.

Whenever you bring an ax to meet your creator, I think it's fair to say things are probably not going as well as you'd hoped.

It then sets out to ask that question in various ways and various configurations for the next two hours. Ingeniously, it connects the ALIEN mythology --and its multilayered creation and motherhood iconography-- with that concept, juxtaposing multiple levels of creators and their creations with each other. Humans with the Androids they created, Humans with the human children they created, Humans with their unwanted Alien spawn, and Aliens with their own unwanted Alien spawn in the form of humans (no clones this time, though). No one seems to get along all that well, but they all damn sure want something or another from each other. There’s a good amount of disappointment on all sides, it’s safe to say.

So I give them a lot of credit for taking that aspect of the ALIEN mythos and putting it front and center this time. Problem is, that paragraph above is the exact extent to which any of this is explored in the movie. It just keeps repeating the same question over and over in different forms. I’m OK with ambiguity, and I understand that the question is always going to be more intriguing than the answer, but if you’re not gonna go anywhere with this concept, you gotta at least go somewhere else. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie work this hard to simply tread water. It’s like Scott thinks if they just ask the question harder and harder with bigger and bigger setpieces, it will somehow succeed in blowing your mind through sheer force. Sorry, man. You can get stoned with some dudes in a dorm room and ask “Woah man, what if we met God and he was an asshole?” or you could spend $130 million asking the same question. My mind’s gonna be blown about equally either way. Or actually you could also watch STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER or FIGHT CLUB, where they also ask that question. While stoned.

None of this would be such a disappointment to me if the movie itself were better. But Scott is so fucking fixated on this big crazy mind-blowing question he has that he treats the story and characters as pretext and props, instead of, well, as story and characters. Despite a tremendously talented cast, the characters are embarrassingly ill-defined, and their conflicts are indifferently sketched out or neglected all together. Scott and writers Spaihts and Lindelof seem to make their one and only goal to take the characters and twist them, by whatever means necessary, into one iteration after another of the same damn question. So someone is definitely going to have father issues, someone is definitely going to be unable to conceive, someone is definitely going to turn against their own creation, and so forth. Exactly how that happens and what it means to the characters seems to be completely irrelevant to Scott, just so long as it happens and matches up with his main theme. It’s a classic example of laboriously building a story around a subtext, instead of just telling an interesting story which has a natural subtext to it. It’s trying to think of something big to say without actually having something interesting to say, like a nerd at a Bruce Campbell book signing.

If you can't think of something interesting to say, try exploding!

So you’ve just got a great cast floundering around doing things seemingly at random so that the story can progress. I’m no stranger to bad logic in horror movies, but these are seriously the absolute worst scientists I’ve ever seen, ever. They’re supposed to be here making the single greatest discovery mankind has ever achieved, and their reactions are either annoyance or boredom. Half of the people are angry that God is not there to answer their immediate questions right this second, the other half seem irritated that they’re being asked to walk around looking at stunning alien artifacts in the first place. They even take off the helmets -- who does that?! One of them, upon seeing a creepy cobra-worm-plant hybrid, takes off his helmet and attempts to cuddle with it. That this seems hard to accept is not a failure on my part to suspend disbelief, it’s a failure of the writers to write actions with are even borderline consistent with real human beings. I simply cannot accept that a human being would do that in the same way that I wouldn’t accept it if Noomi Rapace suddenly turned into a cartoon turtle with no explanation. No rational human being --let alone a scientist-- would ever do these things or talk this way -- ever. Maybe some people will be able to look past that fact and enjoy the action scenes, but for me it was so egregious that there seemed to be no ignoring it, and hence I was constantly dragged out of the experience. That kind of disconnect is just ultimately, um, alienating.

The acting is generally good, but can also be weirdly inconsistent. Rapace and Michael Fassbender lend quite a bit of dramatic weight to their roles, while Idris Elba, Sean Harris, and newcomer Logan Marshall-Green seem to think they’re in THE AVENGERS. Who the fuck knows what Charlize Theron and Guy Pearce think they’re doing, but it’s definitely not the same thing as anyone else. And the diction of the script seems to be constantly in flux, too -- sometimes we get some quippy faux-Whedon one-liners, sometimes we get naturalistic drama (like the original ALIEN), sometimes we get high-drama epic speeches with metaphors and monologues and whatnot. Sometimes, one character will do all three. None of the performances are bad, per se, but they are all bafflingly incongruous with each other. The characters, then, completely fail to impact on each other and the result is one big, listless dramatic shrug. And you’re just left with some pretty pictures to keep you interested for two hours.

The best reason to see this in IMAX 3D. Not the hologram stuff. Michael Fassbender's face.

This being a Ridley Scott production, you can at least be assured that the production itself is gorgeous. They’ve created some pretty cool iconography to expand the universe --including that nifty giant head that’s on the posters-- and a couple rather striking additions to the basic elements therein. Unfortunately, the new stuff is side by side with the old stuff, which wasn’t just great but one of the most memorable and visually overwhelming production designs of all time. No offense to the new guys, but you’ll never in your sickest fever dreams be able to match the utterly nightmarish depravity of H.R. Gieger’s original visions of dessicated exoskeletons and perverse sexual suggestion. They’re self conscious about not wanting to rehash that stuff, so they come up with slightly different versions of essentially the same thing, which are cool but also indisputably nowhere near as cool as the original. And in an even more depressing twist, they actually demystify Geiger’s bizarre elephant-faced “space jockey” by showing us that it’s just a suit, there’s actually a big boring white guy under there. Let me ask you a question, are you really happier having seen that under that dapper mask/helmet combo, Darth Vader is actually a puffy old white guy? Of course you’re not. Same thing here. I understand that for narratives reasons, they have to look like humans and that this limits the potential for creative alien designs. But you know what, I would actually probably prefer they write a slightly different narrative and then actually show me something awesome. 

The cinematic equivalent of Miley Cyrus covering "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

Really, though, even when the film is trying to be awesome, it’s only intermittently successful. Only one scene in the whole thing even approaches the pure, visceral terror which made the original ALIEN one of the greatest horror films of all time. You’ve seen it already so you know the one I mean. That sequence, at least, belongs in the top tier of moments from this franchise. But even so, its impact is diminished slightly because it seems confoundingly shoehorned into at least two other plotlines which rush in and take over immediately before and after. After Rapace leaves her newborn squid and staggers away, everyone acts like they’ve forgotten the whole episode and no one seems at all surprised that suddenly there’s a bloody chick in her underwear wandering around. They’re like, “hey, we’re going back to the ship, wanna come along?” and she’s like “OK sure.” Same deal with the return of a minor character who seemed dead but then returns, (quipped fellow Vern-er “Jimblo”) as some kind of  yoga monster. Fucking scary, out-of-the-blue shocker, but then all he does is punch people and throw them into things, which is about as scary as any given scene from a Seagal film. It’s the Pumpkinhead curse all over again! And just like the squid baby scene, no one seems bothered by this or even mentions it again. I guess they see a lot more murderous yoga zombies than I do, and this shit is just routine for them?

That's the problem with threesomes, someone is always gonna feel left out.

So, the movie is just chock full of wasted potential and bungled execution. But I will say, there’s something uniquely strange about it. It’s mix of ambition, intermittently gorgeous design, occasional great performances (particularly Fassbender as ambiguously motivated, amoral android David) combined with completely arbitrary plotting and intentionally frustrating non-answers creates a weird cocktail which is not completely without its charms. As terrible as many aspects of it are, the film it evokes most for me is not some faux intellectual failed horror movie, but rather Spielberg’s most interesting disaster, 2001’s A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. Just like that one, it’s full of irresistibly compelling and completely unique touches, and yet falls apart in a disorganized mess of loosely defined relationships, unwieldy tonal shifts, and inexplicable oddness. The movie absolutely doesn’t work, but it’s sort of enthralling all the same. You’ve never seen anything quite like it. At its worst, it seems to be trying to pander to horror aficionados and fans of the series* with poorly-thought-out regurgitations of the same tired themes and tropes. But at its best, it’s almost deliberately antagonizing in its commitment to tantalize you with intriguing minutia which steadfastly refuses to resolve into any kind of clear picture. Hey. Sometimes an alien squid is going to mouth-rape a gigantic white bald dude while a Swedish lady with a belly full of staples and a talking severed head drive an alien spaceship to find God. You gotta admit, that’s something you ain’t seen before. Icarus might fly too close to the sun, but it’s a pretty wild view on the way down.

Barely, which is odd because there are at least three major women in the crew here. The only scene that saves it, though, is the scene where they do an autopsy on a alien head and discuss it. The head actually appears to be male, but we'll give them a pass on that one since the alien genders are ambiguous.

*The movie’s worst moment is the very end, which chickens out from the film’s frustrating but awesome ambiguous ending and finally delivers a familiar face that supposedly audiences are paying to see. But it irritatingly makes it seem as though the whole thing is about explaining where the titular alien came from, which, if it is indeed the point, is the lamest reason to make a movie since Lucas thought we’d enjoy seeing Darth Vader as a mop-headed 6-year-old who wuvs his mommy. Dude, the origin of the alien is the least possible interesting thing to explore, particularly when it turns out it originated the exact same way all the other aliens in every other movie did. It’s a completely anti-climatic moment which makes me question if I actually thought too hard about the rest of the thing.

Creature from the Black Lagoon

Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954)

Dir. Jack Arnold

Starring Richard Carlson, Julie Adams, Richard Denning, Antonio Moreno.

Would you believe I'd never seen this one?  I never really made an effort to watch all the classic Universal Monster films, but they tend to be the sort of things you just encounter. Watch DRACULA in a double feature with FREAKS, see WOLF MAN in a film class, check out FRANKENSTEIN on TV while sick from school as a kid, you know. Films with this level of clout just find you. You need to go out of your way a little to see HORROR EXPRESS. THE MUMMY (1932) just comes to you. In my case, I watched it standing in a long line to enter a haunted house one Halloween with my mom. That's what happened to you, too. You never decided it was time to watch it, but at some point you just did. It found you. These films find you, somehow.

Except for some reason, this one didn't. And as of 11:43 PM on Tuesday, May 10 2011, I was done politely waiting for the Gill-Man to make its way to me. I took the fight to it. Just like Gill-Man would do.

Well, I'm glad to have seen it, but this one is definitely in the lower tiers of the loose Universal Monsters series. Filmed in 1954 in 3-D, (apparently only the second Universal film to be released in 3-D) it is also among the last of the series (most of the biggies, such as MUMMY, DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, and THE INVISIBLE MAN were released nearly two decades earlier). It has plenty of the cornball qualities you probably expect from this era, but unfortunately lacks a lot of the artistry which pushed most of those films to classic status.

For one thing, it lacks a strong central performance which helped anchor most of the great monsters. Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Lon Chaney Jr. and their ilk were not just beneficiaries of great monster makeup; they were magnetic personalities with classic takes on these characters which redefined them for subsequent generations. They were the charismatic lynchpins upon which the whole film rested. By this time, the formula is well-established and director Arnold clearly understands that the creature is the star. But Gill-Man, despite his cool design, is a bit of a cold fish. Ahem. He's a cipher without much to relate to, character-wise. He's cool and menacing, but he unfortunately doesn't provide much pathos or drama, and without that you're forced to rely on the human characters for some sort of story arc, and you can imagine about how well that works. The characters and their stories are so perfunctory that it honestly isn't even worth explaining the plot and who's involved. They're a couple scientists who end up in the Black Lagoon, and that's the only relevant thing. But since they can't really hang any drama on the creature, we have to endure quite a bit of time with placeholder characters that barely even make an effort.

He's coming right at us!

But the way they prattle on about this and that, you sort of get the idea that the film might just be about something. That the creature has endured this long, and in the lofty company he is associated with, can only be testament to the fact that something about this concept connects with people on a slightly deeper level. The reason these classic movie monsters persist is that they don't merely represent bodily harm. The monsters themselves represent something more psychological deep-rooted fears about our world, and often fears about ourselves. Vampires, of course, represent human sexuality and desire - so much so that they've gradually lost most of what made them monstrous as our society finds itself a little less terrified of human desire (for the record: I'm pro-desire, but if we have to trade Bela Lugosi for TWILIGHT to get a less judgmental society I say it may be time to bring back those stylish scarlet letters). Werewolves represent the frightening and painful bodily and emotional changes undergone in puberty. Zombies (a la their Romero reinvention) represent our insatiable consumer culture. Frankenstein represents our fear of loss of identity and meaning. And so on. Most of the classic monsters could (and do) have whole books written about their symbolic meaning and the way that meaning has become part of our representational culture.

What, then, is our pal Gill-Man telling us about ourselves? I feel that it doesn't read as clearly as the other monsters I mentioned, which is probably a big part of the reason this film feels less effective than some of its predecessors. It doesn't quite go for our subconscious fears with timeless, classic symbolism in the same way. There are no creaking castles or foggy moors in here; it’s a thoroughly modern (1954) movie populated by bold, effective white scientists and simple, colorful locals, and shot mostly in the daytime. I wonder, though, if that isn't sort of the point. These scientists (an ichthyologist, a geologist, a business-scientist and a girlfriend-scientist) are way into talking about the Devonian era, the geologic period during which legs first began to develop and ocean creatures began to venture onto land. Well, you can hardly say "Devonian era!" with a blank face suggesting an unsettling fear that there might be other eras to remember the names of before you start talking about evolution, which is exactly what these scientists do.

Remember, this is 1954, where evolution is not the dry, noncontroversial academic issue which every schoolchild clearly understands that it is today. They don’t talk much about the philosophical implications, but shit, the Scopes trial was in living memory of every one of these characters. And here they are in a black lagoon in the middle of the most unconquered land left in the world, with this weirdly human fish thing which has a suspicious interest in their women. We diverged from this thing as far back as the Devonian era, and yet we have more in common with it than anyone in the film wants to admit (or even monologue about). I suspect that the Creature, if anything, is there to represent the discomfort audiences of the time still felt with the concept that human animals were not quite as different and special as we might like to believe, and that the scary, alien things we see in nature are a far greater part of us and our history than we’re comfortable examining.

Well, like I said, since then we’ve all become completely accustomed to this concept and there’s no debate or discomfort about it at all by anyone anywhere, so the movie doesn’t really work on this level any more. It does, though, perhaps work on a slightly deeper level that the evolution thing only plays at. By being like us without being us, the Gill-Man does indeed represent the things we share with our animal ancestors and our own animal instincts. But unlike the Wolf Man, who also represents our animal urges and desires, Gill-Man represents a different part of our animal brain – the reptilian part, the cold, incomprehensible, instinctual part of us. Gill-Man isn’t warm and furry; he’s alien and unknowable, yet has too much in common with us to dismiss as unrelated to our lives. He’s the nonrational self which we don’t understand and can’t control, too alien to understand but too familiar to ignore. He’s the fear of the unknown self, the part of us deep in the primal psyche (our unconscious black lagoon of primal muck) which is alien to our mammalian emotional and social instincts.

We understand our antisocial impulses; anger, lust, jealousy, hate. We may fear them about ourselves, but at least we can understand them and control them. That’s Wolf-Man Territory. Ahem. Gill-Man is the part of ourselves that’s so ancient and primal we don’t have words for it. He couldn’t tell you what the fuck his deal is, why he keeps killing minor characters and trying to kidnap white women. I mean, what’s he gonna do with her, fuck her? Not unless she lays her eggs first so he can swim over and fertilize them. If he’s angry he doesn’t show it; if he’s horny he doesn’t act like it. And yet, there he is, moving beneath the surface of the water creating powerful drives to action. It appeals to our disgust and repulsion at parts of ourselves, and even our own bodies. There’s nothing sexy about slime and scales (except to an extremely specific demographic of which we won’t speak for fear of attracting spam-bots), or anything that happens behind those weird, unblinking eyes. Nature itself is gross and ugly here; the Amazon is all murky mud and rotting vines, its inhabitants violent and random and covered in spines and slime. And yet, every new connection these scientists draw seems to bring us more and more uncomfortably close to the natural world which so repulses us. It’s in our brains, it’s in our genes, it’s in our souls. That’s the film’s trick, to show ourselves looking back at us from behind the eyes of something we don’t want to recognize.  

On the other hand, the monster is --of course-- the star here, and the film barely tries to conceal its empathy for the poor misunderstood guy. Our nominal hero (the forgettable handsome, modernist-manly Richard Carlson) spends most of the film convincing his colleagues not to kill it, and berating them when they try (he shouldn’t have worried; the thing takes quite a beating and will be back for sequels long after the names of the main characters here have been forgotten). This sense of a frustrated creature driven by unarticulated feeling and desires but rebuffed by society also, whether intentionally or not, speaks to the kind of people who were watching this stuff then and now: nerds.

Like nerds, the creature lives in an isolated, lonely area where he is uniquely suited. Interestingly, the creature is portrayed by two people: Ricou Browning in the water and Ben Chapman on land. This otherwise inexplicable use of different actors (which continues to each sequel as well, although different actors would take over on land) means there’s a stark difference between the graceful, natural swimming and his awkward, alien attempts at moving on land. Like many awkward loners before him, he has felt moved by feelings he cannot quite put into words to venture out of his comfort zone and try to interact with the handsome, athletic scientists of the world and their girlfriends who he doesn’t quite know what to do with but obviously wants something from. And just like every time this happens, a few people end up getting murdered, everyone misunderstands, spear guns enter the picture, escape is prevented, and everyone flees back to their underwater caves.

It's not easy being green. Or gray.

I find it hard to believe this was completely unintentional. With almost two decades to learn from the success of the previous monster franchises, I suspect the producers of the film understood that there was a certain demographic which would appreciate and empathize with the monster’s isolation, his inability to make sense of his world and his place in it. Hell, the makers of KING KONG (which features a virtually identical story, without the third act back in ‘civilization’ or anything else which makes Kong’s narrative mildly unique and interesting) understood that as far back as 1933. Here, Arnold and writer William Alland even try to milk that same Beauty and the Beast angle, which works considerably less well here because Gill-Man is much less expressive and charismatic than the id-centric Kong.

That it works at all is a testament to the one thing the film really gets right: the creature itself. First and most importantly, it’s a fantastic design which somehow got made into a truly extraordinary costume. The thing looks great, moves extremely naturally (with the slight exception of the clawed hands which look a little like gloves) and holds up immensely well. They wisely reveal the creature early and nearly all the pleasurable moments in the film come from marveling at how cool he looks.

The second thing that works is the way they shoot him. The movie is generally artlessly made (maybe it looked better in 3-D?) and generally devoid of any effective atmosphere, let alone visual poetry. It does have one single trick up its sleeve, however, which elegantly ties up everything creepy and cool about the concept and execution of the film in one shot. Girlfriend-scientist swims along the surface of the water, bathed in sunlight. Underneath, the creature parallels her swimming in his own wriggly style, watching her from below. It’s probably the one legitimately classic thing about the film, and still packs a punch, both poetically and as great horror staging.

The underwater photography is, in general, cooler than anything that happens on the surface, with the camera taking advantage of the greater underwater mobility to get some effective stalking and even action angles. The suit looks even better under water and actor/swimmer Ricou Browning gives our man Gill a unique, twisting swimming style which looks both unique and very natural – sort of the way a human swims, but not quite (probably most like the way a human swims in a bulky rubber suit, but the effect is good).

All things considered, I’m glad to have seen this one as part of my general cultural edification, but it’s not a film I’m likely to revisit all that often. It doesn’t connect on a gut level the way those older, more evocative monster films do, and despite the striking design of the creature the whole thing, even with its lightly implied subtext, feels sleight and padded. Still, I’m curious about the sequels – the first sounds like a rehash but since its Clint Eastwood’s first film (he plays an uncredited lab technician who has a conversation with a cat, apparently) I may have to check it out. The third one sounds a little more interesting, however – THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US finds the creature captured and taken to civilization, where an accident causes him to lose his gills and submit to human clothing and study by more scientists and their girlfriends. That one sounds just crazy enough to be interesting, and also sounds like a logical extension of the subtext from the original, which could open some interesting doors. And with a long-promised remake on the horizon (the writers say they’re re-imagining Gill-Man as a product of Man’s poor treatment of the rainforest, an amusingly ill-conceived take considering that it undermines literally everything about the subtext of the original) it looks like this Gill-Man’s got some life in him yet, even if it looks a little awkward and unfocused to us Lung-Men.

Soon.