The Runestone

The Runestone (1991)

Dir. and Written by Willard Carroll, based on the novel by Mark E. Rogers

Starring Peter Riegert, Joan Severance, William Hickey, Alexander Godunov

There are other 80’s movies about people getting cursed by ancient occult objects. There are other 80’s movies featuring funny-looking monsters given to awkwardly tossing people around with their big rubber hands. There are probably even other 80’s movies which take a few moments to inexplicably lampoon the fancy-pants New York City art scene, though I admit I can’t think of any off-hand. But you know what there damn well aren’t enough of? 80’s horror movies featuring goddam Karl from DIE HARD, that’s what. THE RUNESTONE, though in the most trivially technical chronological sense hailing from 1991, does its damndest to correct this deficiency, and for that we owe it a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.

Before we get to Karl, though, let’s set the stage: our “in” to the world of The Runestone is Martin Almquist (Mitchell Laurence, THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE), a real renaissance man who is a museum curator, art historian, and an archeologist prominent enough that when some Pennsylvania coal miner unearth a mysterious stone covered in ancient runes (you never know where these things will turn up!), they know to bring it to him, so he can place it upright in the middle of his huge New York City museum art loft (?) and stare broodingly at it. Martin should be happy, but he’s still mooning over a breakup with his ex, Marla (Joan Severance, the BLACK SCORPION movies!), and when he calls her about the runestone it really seems like there’s still some sparks there, and in fact when she shows up for onstensibly rune-related reasons it seems like they can barely keep from fucking right there and then, despite the mildly uncomfortable presence of Marla’s new husband Sam (Tim Ryan, much TV, director of My Dinner With Andre The Giant). This would seem somewhat rude, except that Sam is appallingly, intolerably milquetoast, and we are already on Martin’s side because although he is not exactly a raging inferno of manly charisma himself, he’s got a snarky sense of humor and looks kind of like Steve Guttenberg. Unfortunately whatever emotional investment we have in this sordid little romantic drama will have to be put on the back burner for now, because just as soon as we’re done falling in love with him, Martin mysteriously vanishes in what is likely a runestone-related incident. And shortly thereafter, an angry bipedal wolf monster shows up on the streets of NYC to visit violent death upon anyone who doesn’t like being laboriously tossed around by giant rubber wolf hands. Looks like we’ve got a real humdinger of a mystery on our hands, and one which will be vaguely based in Norse mythology, at that.

This is obviously bad for tourism, etc, and so Marla and that dipshit Sam have to get to the bottom of the matter, and for that they’ll need to contact an expert in ancient Viking rune-reading, even though everyone agrees he’s a raving lunatic (William Hickey, NATIONAL LAMPOON’S CHRISTMAS VACATION, PUPPERMASTER). And they’ll also have the help of a foul-mouthed, hard-nosed detective (Peter Riegert, ANIMAL HOUSE) with a fondness for Pez and a Chief who’s had it up to here with his rogue ways (Lawrence Tierney (!) FROMA WHISPER TO A SCREAM, SILVER BULLET, RESOVOIR DOGS). And also, there’s a teenager (Chris Young, Max Headroom, TV’s Falcon Crest) who seems to live with his Grandfather (Donald Hotton, THE HEARSE) in a baroque movie theater, and he’s plagued by mysterious dreams that Grandpa has been hinting are more than just dreams, but then the old man slips into a coma before he can explain more, and the teen refuses to believe his crazy uncle who happens to be the same crazy rune guy our heroes look to for help, so there’s that. And oh yeah, did I mention that during all this we keep cutting to a mysterious blonde guy who is sitting in a room entirely covered by ticking clocks and also there’s a very stylishly dressed little kid in there, too? And especially, did I mention that guy is played by motherfucking Karl from DIE HARD (Alexander Godunov*, WITNESS)?

So yeah, that’s, like, way too many characters, and I didn’t even mention any of Martin’s NYC art world sophisticate friends or any of the various other characters credited as “Angela,” “Lester” and “Stoddard.” And you know what that means: this was adapted, perhaps a little overfaithfully, from a novel, in this case one by Mark E. Rogers, apparently a minor fantasy author and illustrator most famous for his Samurai Cat series of graphic novels chronicling the adventures of a time-travelling feline samurai who appears in “bizarre parodies of some historical or pop culture event” in the eloquent words of his Wikipedia page. I had my doubts that any such thing existed, but whaddayaknow, not only is this series real, you can actually buy it on Amazon, along with several of Rogers’ other swords-n’-sorcery-meets-Christian-allegory novels (yes, seriously). One thing you won’t find on Amazon? Any book by Mark E. Rogers entitled The Runestone. That, apparently, is because he wrote it in high school and it was never published “except” as his uncited Wikipedia page** hastens to mention, “as a numbered, signed limited edition chapbook published by Burning Bush Press in 1979.”

Why in God’s name would writer/director William Carroll so strenuously adapt all the convolutions and characters from a novel which will literally never be read by anyone (except those lucky owners of the numbered, signed limited edition ‘chapbooks’)? For that matter, why adapt such a thing at all? Surely you can just make up your own random reason for a guy in a giant wolf costume to smack around a bunch of colorful New Yorkers, right? I did a little research on Carroll to try to shed some light on this mystery, but what I found just added to the confusion. Carroll was apparently the co-founder of Hyperion Pictures (with Thomas L. Wilhite, “a former Disney executive who greenlighted RETURN TO OZ” as his Wikipedia page ominously puts it), a small production company infamous for unleashing upon the world the notoriously emotionally wrenching “kids” cartoon THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER (Carroll himself wrote the sequels!) as well as the cleverly-titled Rodney-Dangerfield-plays-a-dog-who-is-a-lot-like-Rodney-Dangerfield opus ROVER DANGERFIELD and a 1999 adaptation of THE SISSY DUCKLING. They also co-produced TV adaptations of kids’ horror franchises Goosebumps and Bone Chillers.

But other than THE RUNESTONE, those series are the only traces of horror I can kind in Carroll’s filmography. He personally directed only four films, of which only this one is even remotely horror-themed, and I genuinely wondered just what on Earth brought him to this strange debut, until I realized that his entire filmography was just a mercenary endeavor to feed his real love: collecting memorabilia from Frank L. Baum’s Land Of Oz series. Apparently he is “recognized as having the largest privately held collection of Oz memorabilia in the world, and several books… have been published displaying parts of his collection, which includes the Wicked Witch of the West's hourglass from the 1939 MGM film.”**** No wonder he would willingly go into business with “a former Disney executive who greenlighted RETURN TO OZ”! (Besides, between RETURN TO OZ and THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER, they also obviously share a predilection for traumatizing small children with grueling, miserabilist cinema).

Anyway, if there’s a point to all this, it’s that Carroll is not really a horror guy, having spent most of his career oscillating between children’s fantasy and erudite adult drama. You wouldn’t necessarily know that from the look or feel of THE RUNESTONE, which has all the comforting back-lit steam and shadowy monster attacks you’d want out of a late 80’s/early 90’s creature feature. But the script itself is a bit more witty and satirical than you’d expect from something so lowbrow. It’s not exactly a comedy, but it’s much more interested in eccentric characters and quasi-campy ticks than any of its obvious peers that come to mind. It's the kind of movie which will pause during a "definitely necessary" sequence where wealthy art patrons are sledgehammering a huge abstract mural to the tune of "The Teddy Bear's Picnic" (long story -- oh wait, I guess it's actually not, since they don't really explain except to say it's a museum fundraiser) to listen in on a conversation where an extra muses, "why, if the opposite of 'dishonest' is 'honest,' is the opposite of 'disgruntled' not 'gruntled?'" OK, not exactly Groucho Marx, but a little more droll than anything you'll hear in CELLAR DWELLER. It's nothing so overt as to become parody, but it definitely wants to be quirky. Which means that although it's built of the absolute most standard pieces imaginable for this kind of hokum, it's got little more character than you might expect. During an otherwise earnestly romantic sex scene, for example, it’s revealed (though never commented on) that the guy is wearing rather striking cue-ball boxers. And a sign behind them on the wall says “close your eyes and think of England.” 

That same sex scene is intricately intercut with the other threads of the movie, including the police investigation, the clock guy sitting in a room somewhere, and a wolf attack. Yeah, I know, nice job Sergei Eisenstein, quel artiste! But would Eisenstein have the balls to bring it all together and end the montage like this:

It ain’t exactly art, and it ain’t exactly comedy, but it has a certain kind of arch distinctness to it. I don’t know that anyone but the Italians would try something like that, and they wouldn’t know it was funny.

Unfortunately, due to all the characters and the convoluted nature of the languid non-mystery, it's never quite as nimble as a movie this silly ought to be. It'd probably be tighter and more effective if it ditched about three characters and 15 minutes. But it's colorful enough to remain consistently watchable, which was by no means certain for its ilk (see: THE BEING, THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR, et al). It has the right ambiance, plenty of creature suit attacks, a slightly livelier cast than you might expect, and a suitably ridiculous (if unfortunately ungainly) finale. It may not be more terrifying than RETURN TO OZ, and whoever it is that holds the largest private collection of RUNESTONE paraphernalia probably isn’t going to have any books written about them. But for a end-of-the-80s creature feature, it’s got lots of personality, enough genre goods to get by, and, let’s face it, it has Karl from DIE HARD in it. So I think you’ll like it.

That's right. Karl. From DIE HARD.

*Holy shit, did you ever look up his crazy-ass life story? Somebody needs to make that shit a movie. 

**You might be skeptical about such a claim, but come on, who’s going to vandalize the page of some obscure fantasy writer with one sentence of unverifiable but meaningless trivia? When you see something like that turn up on Wikipedia, I always assume it was added either by the article subject themselves or someone who knows them personally.

*** The other three were an ensemble romance (PLAYING BY HEART, a talky comedy-drama with a cast you’d have to see to believe) a family fantasy (TOM’S MIDNIGHT GARDEN) and a “Bollywood Pastiche” (MARIGOLD).

**** Again, this claim is unsourced, but who’s gonna make that up? OK, OK, fine, you distrustful grouch, I’ll check it out for you… yep, he’s listed as co-author of All Things Oz And Wonderful which specifically cites “The Willard Carroll Collection, a world-renowned archive of more than 30,000 Wizard of Oz items” in its blurb text. Here’s a feature piece from the Illinois Dispatch-Argus about him and his collection. 

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	Some Legends Must Be Destroyed.
TITLE ACCURACY	One Runestone, check.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Of sorts, from an unpublished novel by Mark E. Rogers
SEQUEL?	None, although the finale sets one up if somebody wants to take up that challenge
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Creature Feature, Mythological horror
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Lawrence Tierney?
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	None; though there’s a sex scene, its pretty tame.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Protagonist is briefly assaulted by some street tuffs who vaguely threaten her sexually. But the predators become the prey before anything gets out of hand.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Yes, although a dog also ends up a victim of his bipedal asshole of a cousin.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Nah
POSSESSION?	Yes
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Yes
VOYEURISM?	None, as far as I can recall, which is weird because you would have to assume this would be one of those movies where they constantly do “monster-vision”
MORAL OF THE STORY	Those stuck-up New York City art world sophisticates could really stand to be taken down a notch via the medium of a pissed-off-bipedal wolfman from Norse mythology.

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.