Lords of Salem

The Lords of Salem (2013)

Dir. Rob Zombie

Starring Sherri Moon Zombie (God, I never thought I’d have to type THAT phrase) Bruce Davison, Dee Wallace, Ken Foree

Man, KISS really let themselves go.

I wanted to write about this one when I first saw it, but never had the time. Then later, I remembered that I actually did write pretty much everything I wanted to say over at www.outlawvern.com, so I figured I’d just edit it and bring it over here to run up my numbers and for posterity. I saw this in theaters almost by mistake. I don’t think I ever saw a trailer for it or anything, I just noticed one day it was at my local cinema. The theater had three other people in it; an elderly black guy sitting in the third row by himself, and two (I think) homeless women sitting in the middle having a nonsensical conversation about Jesus at normal conversational volume right next to the exit, surrounded by bags and blankets and so forth. At first I was afraid that their constant talking would bring me out of it; then, I realized it was the exact correct way to watch this particular movie. All three people bailed by last 30 minutes.

I sort of loved this movie. If BARTON FINK and THE SHINING had a baby who was a Sammy Hagar fan, it would be LORDS OF SALEM. It’s dumb as rocks, but man, does it want to take you there. Only Zombie would have the hubris to want to make his own version of THE SHINING except someone smokes meth halfway through. I loved every insane but entirely necessary touch, including but not limited to the inexplicable bigfoot, the TRIP TO THE MOON imagery, the evil baboon statue*, the masturbating baghead bishops, the bleeding pop art, the turnkey-basted midget with the EDWARD PENISHAND tentacles. Full-frontal naked old withered witches. Name another contemporary director who would dare.

Happy Thanksgiving, Charlie Brown!

I can’t defend the end, though, which is pretty heartbreaking in how bad it wants to blow your mind and how ill-equipped it is for the job. You can almost see Zombie’s frustration with his limited imagination for deep horror manifested on the screen. He knows what he wants, but he just can’t quite create it himself. He’s trying to create something surreal and psychological and bizarre, trying to make his own version of a Ken Russel or Cronenberg or Jodorowsky movie. But the problem is, he’s not Russel or Cronenberg or Jodorowsky; he’s Rob Zombie. And Rob Zombie likes images but he doesn’t understand symbols or subtext, let alone psychology. So he can’t quite take it there, and you can just feel his frustration mount. He just keeps throwing ending after ending at you, hoping the cumulative effect will be enough to get you there. But ironically, it might have actually gotten there if he’d held back a little instead of doubting himself and saturating you with lame imagery. Take the final 15 minutes and cull 3 minutes of genuinely disturbing dreamscapes from it, THEN you’ll have the classic you’re after. It’ll still be dumb as a rock, but at least it will have focus enough to get the job done.

Being dumb as a rock AND failing to find any real symbolism or meaning does pose one weird problem, though: for all the Christian symbolism Zombie profanes with penises or nude old women, his film makes a weird case for the Christian witch-hunters actually being right. I don’t think this is Zombie’s intention, I just think he didn’t really think this one through very well. I mean, you’ve got the standard horror movie depiction of depraved, sadistic Michael-Berryman-looking witch-hunters (a rare case of a Michael-Berryman-looking fucker actually played by Michael Berryman) horrifically murdering young women at the stake. But it turns out, they were right to do it, these women actually are witches, and if anything the problem is they didn’t kill them hard enough.

Man, it sure was smokey in the past.

Seems like Zombie wants to have it both ways: brutal, unpleasant Inquisition-like Puritan witch-hunters, but also genuine evil witches. So we know that the witch-burners are right, witches are a real danger that must be dealt with brutally, but he doesn’t exactly make their persecutors sympathetic either... I mean, the three Puritans were supposed to be played by Richard Lynch**, Michael Berryman, and Sid Haig. Not the actors you really get if you’re trying to evoke heroes. On the other hand, the movie is also overtly repulsed by the witches’ perverseness (particularly the old-lady nudity) and isn’t the least bit sympathetic to them and the fact that they were murdered by a lynch mob (in this case, a mob which was supposed to be literally organized by Richard Lynch). I take this as further evidence that Zombie didn’t really think through the message of his film, and just kind of filled in the blanks with horror tropes he remembered from other movies. But it makes for an uncomfortable message which is especially hard to ignore given that it’s actually set in Salem, the site of genuine witch-hunts which the movie’s plot paints itself into actually condoning.

The other thing that doesn’t really work here is the entire anti-narrative regarding Heidi (Sheri Moon Zombie) gradually having her brain taken over by witches. The scenes are cool, but unfortunately Ms. Zombie never has any idea what’s happening to her and no tools whatsoever to stop it, making her one of the most passive protagonists in living memory. Seems like all she ever does is sleep! Bruce Davison (fantastic in the role, of course) is much more active in the plot, but he’s a minor character who gets (SPOILER) Hallorann’ed a bit before the big climax. So we’re just left to watch a bunch of stuff happen to Zombie’s character without there being any tension about if she can stop it or not. Lots of good images, but narratively pretty inert.

One of these days, Alice...bang, zoom. A trip to the moon. Also maybe witches will take over your mind.

I thought this was the end of the discussion, but someone pointed out that there’s an odd subplot about Heidi’s coworkers (Ken Foree, bearded dude #1) worrying that she’s being drawn back into a meth addiction she had apparently overcome prior to the events in the movie. And indeed, just as things start to turn bad for her, she does indeed retreat to a meth-fueled antipathy for the remaining runtime. As such, there has been a suggestion in some quarters that the movie has a subtext about the paralyzing effects of addiction, and that Heidi’s narrative loss of agency is actually an addict’s withdrawal from control of her own future. Maybe so, but even if that’s true it’s too underveloped to really add much here, and Heidi (though actually played with surprising care by Ms. Zombie) is too underwritten a character for us to really gain much insight into, making the whole thing kind of a mildly interesting wash. That, and I still don’t think Zombie actually understands what subtext is.

I can’t defend this as a great movie, but I gotta appreciate Zombie’s obvious desire to make something classic. His ambition is all over this thing, and there are innumerable small and wonderful details which mark it as a labor of love. It doesn’t really work; in fact, he’s so close that unfortunately you can also see how heartbreaking far away he still is. But god damn, how often are you gonna get to see something this fuckin’ WEIRD in cinemas? Even if logic dictates we must regard it as an interesting failure, I gotta say that I love it unreservedly, exactly as it is. As Zombie so eloquently says with his visuals: fuck logic, now look at this bigfoot standing in front of a neon cross.

Now that I think about it, this is probably the second best movie ever to have Bigfoot in it, after ABOMINABLE.

Several ladies-only conversations,

PS: Wikipedia says that Clint Howard is in here somewhere, along with Udo Kier and Richard Lynch, I guess in the fictional Frankenstien movie someone is watching on TV. I have no memory of this whatsoever, but if that’s true, awesome.

*Editor’s note: as of September the same year I have no memory of this, but it sounds awesome.

**Lynch died before he could complete the role and they had to re-shoot with Andrew Prine

The Exorcist II: The Heretic

The Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
Dir. John Boorman
Written by William Goodhard (with John Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg, uncredited)
Starring Linda Blair, Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher, with Max Von Sydow, James Earl Jones, Ned Beatty and Paul Henried

I should mention, I'm not really sure who the titular Heretic is. I guess Buron's Lamont character gets taken off the case and has to turn in his gun and his crucifix at one point but pursues the case anyway, so maybe it's him? Or maybe it's the demon himself? But if that's true, wouldn't all demons be heretics just by virtue of existing? I guess it could also be Louise Fletcher's psychologist character, since she's a woman of science. Obviously there are many possibilities in this rich tapestry of nuttiness.

Jesus fucking Christ. What the hell happened here? You got the great John Borrman (DELIVERANCE, EXCALIBUR, POINT BLANK) directed a sequel to THE EXORCIST, one of the greatest horror films of all time. You got Ennio Morricone doing the score, you got a crazy cast of great character actors, you got a fantastic production design which genuinely looks like nothing else I’ve ever seen. How could it possibly be this bad?

Who knows, but wow, it definitely is exactly as bad as everyone always said. The cast and crew are so strong I just sort of naturally assumed that this was one of those movies which everyone was wrong about, something which made people confused and angry by giving them something different and not just rehashing the plot of the original. But no. It’s horrible. Different, but horrible. Still though, you gotta admit that it’s not every day you get to see this level of money and talent put into something as fucking crazy as EXORCIST II. As a failure, it’s a colossal, towering failure which is endlessly fascinating in how utterly wrongheaded and incomprehensible it is at every turn. As far as I know, it’s the only movie ever to be pulled out of theaters TWICE for re-editing, that STILL went on to utterly fail to connect with audiences. Out of theaters. Twice. Well, if you’re going to fail, it might as well be a spectacular failure. More memorable that way.

They have this kind of cool effect where they superimpose the end sequence from the original over new footage in an effort to visually depict how much they completely fail to understand what was good about the original.

Boorman, later, seems to have convinced himself that my original idea was correct: that even though he made an interesting and worthwhile film people rejected it because it wasn’t as horror-focused as the original. He’s partially correct; one of its major drawbacks is that it’s a horror movie which simply contains no horror scenes whatsoever. But it has much bigger problems in that it completely fails to tell a comprehensible story, or manage a single scene which really works at communicating any element of theme or plot, on any level, at any time. Boorman laments that, “...it all comes down to audience expectations. The film that I made, I saw as a kind of riposte to the ugliness and darkness of The Exorcist – I wanted a film about journeys that was positive, about good, essentially.” Which is such a profoundly insane thing to attempt in a sequel to THE EXORCIST that I almost admire it. But the problem isn’t just that he made a film about “about good, essentially,” it’s that if that is, in fact, what he was going for, it still doesn’t come across in the film. It never seems like a film about anything. It just seems like a long string of barely-connected bizarre setpieces, obtuse metaphors, wandering storylines, and distracting flashbacks which simultaneously obsessively reference the original EXORCIST and have nothing to do with it.

The story itself seems to be about Regan (Linda Blair, again playing the role of a character named Regan who lives in Washington DC and is possessed by the devil, but still a few years too early for anyone to appreciate the irony) coming to terms with the reason for her possession, which, in complete defiance of everything that made THE EXORCIST terrifying, apparently was not just the arbitrary cruelty of evil's desire to corrupt innocence, but was in fact a crafty strategic move by the forces of darkness to destroy a Chosen One. Regan, it seems, is some kind of prototype human, an evolutionary leap forward blessed with the power to psychically heal people. And I guess one particular obscure ancient Assyrian demigod has a problem with that. So all you people who had nightmares about the original movie, I guess you needn't worry unless you are a psychic mutant destined to elevate the human race to a higher evolutionary plane.

Unaware of all this, Regan is currently under the care of nurse Ratched* herself, Lousie Fletcher, a psychologist who takes the novel view that the only way the emotional trauma of her possession can be healed is by never talking about her experiences or dealing with it in any way. Because of this brilliant fucking approach to mental health, she gets mad when Father Lamont (Richard Burton, looking confused as to what the fuck he’s doing here) enters the picture and starts asking Regan what the deal was with this whole exorcism thing. One thing fails to lead to another, but before long Lamont is in Africa looking for a similarly psychic boy named Kokumo (James Earl Jones, sporting an awe-inspiring giant locust headdress with antenna and everything. I really hope he got to keep that prop) for reasons which are not entirely clear. It does lead to a sequence which cross-cuts between Linda Blair tap-dancing and father Lamont getting stoned by Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia, which is definitely the kind of thing which ought to have become a staple of the series. To repeat: here's a phrase you don’t expect to encounter in a review of the sequel to one of the most iconic horror movies of all time: “Tap-dance sequence.”

The hat alone made it entirely worth making this movie.

[Spoilers from here on, though I’m not sure I’m 100% correct in my interpretation] I think Lamont gets possessed or something or falls in love with the demon, who turns out to be an Assyrian demigod with the unfortunately hilarious-sounding name of Pazuzu, “lord of evil spirits of the sky,” (a title the movie subtly drives home with approximately 40,000 funny POV shots of locusts flying around. Turns out Pazuzu is a real part of Assyrian mythology, but in English that name sounds like the kind of thing a 3-year-old would name his imaginary puppy, so it stands to reason that they insist on saying it constantly.) Anyway, who the fuck knows what's going on between Lamont and Pazuzu, or what the deal was with any of that.THE EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC defies your puny human ability to comprehend cinematic narrative. The only subsequent event I can describe with any confidence is the big climax, which kicks into high gear upon Lamont's return from Africa (hilariously visually signified by the colorful African “I went to Africa!” shirt he now wears under his priestly jacket). Once he's stateside again, the recently possessed Lamont (I think?) gets re-possessed by Father Merrin’s ghost, (?) picks up Regan, and flies to DC, where they go back to the house from the original for some reason (is the problem with the house, somehow?) and destroy it in a cheap special effects battle with Pazuzu (now taking the form of a separate identical but non-makeup’ed Linda Blair). They win because the possessed Lamont starts making out with Pazuzu (?!) but then has a change of heart, and then literally changes the demon’s heart by ripping it out. And that takes care of that, I guess. (Wikipedia claims, "In the end, Regan banishes the locusts [and Pazuzu] by enacting the same ritual attempted by Kokumo to get rid of locusts in Africa [although he failed and was himself possessed]." I don't know about any of that, but fine.) Also Louise Fletcher and the babysitter from Part I (?) also rush down to DC to join our dubious heroes, and for some reason the babysitter freaks out and lights herself on fire, but it has no discernible effect on the plot and no one seems too concerned about it.** The end. [End of possible spoilers]

Boorman apparently hated the original EXORCIST (and of course, who better to direct a sequel to one of the most iconic and popular movies of all time than someone who hated it?), so part of the problem with the film is its torturous relationship with the original material. It needs the original to have any reason to exist at all, but stubbornly refuses to incorporate or even pay attention to literally anything that made it interesting. Instead, it self-consciously tries to circuitously rope as many characters as possible from the original into this new scenario while completely removing everything that made them worth remembering from the original. For example, remember Sharon, the babysitter from the beginning of the first film played by Kitty Winn (PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK)? I hope so, because EXORCIST PART II is intermittently about what happened to her following the events of the original. This storyline is so ludicrously unnecessary that I have to assume it was originally meant to be about Regan's mother (arguably the protagonist of the original) but was changed to the babysitter after Ellen Burstyn flatly refused to participate. This is the kind of thinking that went into the film, that they thought they could change a storyline about the mother of the possessed girl to a storyline about her babysitter and it would still make sense. 

Von Sydow, hoping that if he hides behind this cool set we won't notice him.

And what about poor Max Von Sydow? He gets third billing here to return as Father Merrin, only to, for some reason, appear in awkward re-stagings of the possession scenes from the original. One of Linda Blair’s conditions for returning was that she didn’t have to wear the scary makeup again, meaning that you’ve got Von Sydow (looking embarrassed) reenacting some of the most classic scenes of his career with a body double and worse camerawork. Why, you ask, would you not just use footage from the original? Well, because those scenes also include Jason Miller’s father Damien Karras, who, for reasons known only to the makers of EXORCIST II, is retroactively written out of the original (talk about your exorcist!). So to fit the new continuity, we gotta poorly reshoot the best parts of the original in order to excise the main character. That make a lot of sense to anyone else?

Of course, there are some good things here. Chief amongst these is the production design, which is the one genuinely impressive thing anywhere in sight. There are some stunningly weird and surreal sets, particularly a wind-swept temple high on a cliff in Africa which requires pilgrims to climb up a long rope from the ground (it’s so cool they keep coming back here for more scenes even after it becomes obvious it is completely irrelevant to the plot). Even some less exotic locations are subject to a little production boost: the psychologists’ office has a weird beehive ceiling and all glass walls, a possibly metaphorical locust-focused lab in Africa seems to shift in and out of a kind of surrealism, a pointless scene of Lamont walking around asking random Africans in English if they know a guy named Kukomo takes place in a stunning, meticulously detailed mud city. If I understand it correctly, the central idea that human evolution is progressing to a new level and the demon is attempting to impede it (based on the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the real-life Jesuit/archaeologist that Father Merrin was modeled after) is kind of interesting, if entirely unexplored or even clearly articulated. And Ennio Morricone’s theme --a fucking insane mix of tribal chanting, frenzied wailing, and gothic liturgical grandiosity-- is among the most interesting and complex things he’s ever attempted. And hey, Ned Beatty appears in one scene which seems to exist so he can introduce his character and then never appear again. Always good to see him, and hey, that's Paul Henreid as the Cardinal!

Oh yeah, I forgot, there's this machine with blinking lights that causes people to be able to read each other's minds. I think it's a metaphor because it keeps showing up over and over even though it doesn't really contribute anything to the plot, but it's worth mentioning because no one seems to realize the implication of Fletcher's character having invented a mind-reading device. When Lamont exclaims that the existence of this device scientifically proves the reality of the human soul, Fletcher's character brushes it off, saying its just a tool for analysis. No one mentions or seems interested in any talk that such a device would have other, potentially lucrative and world-changing potential.

But all is ultimately for nothing, because the movie simply doesn’t work. No, actually, that's not even true; not working would imply a clear goal and a failure to realize that goal. THE EXORCIST PART II never even finds an objective to fail at. Boorman and co-ghostwriter Pallenberg were supposedly re-writing the script day-by-day on the set, which would make sense because the whole thing has a distinct feeling of a story being made up as it goes along. None of the scenes or storylines seems to meaningfully connect to each other, none of the labored metaphors seem to be supported by the events, none of the characters seem to even be aware of each other. There are scenes in this movie where Fletcher and Burton seem to be sort of talking past each other, only vaguely aware of each other’s presence and completely baffled as to what they're personally saying, let alone what in God’s name the other person is talking about. If I didn’t know better, I would assume that one of them was a CG character added in later. If you think Liam Neeson looking towards Jar Jar but not really at him in EPISODE I was bad, you should see Burton trying vainly to focus his eyes on Fletcher or Blair in this one. And these are genuinely good actors who are actually in the same shot together. That’s what Boorman’s script and direction have reduced them to.

As much as I admire Boorman and like his films, I think he probably deserves the blame here. I mean, no one much disputes that it was his vision guiding this thing, and in the end I think he mostly ended up with the film he intended to make. And he’s right, in a way, there are lots of interesting things happening here, but for whatever reason the final product is simply unable to convert a single one of its many strengths on paper into an actual satisfactory cinematic experience. There’s literally not a single thing that works properly anywhere on screen, ever. And, I feel like I need to point this out one more time: tap dance sequence. Boorman can’t be faulted for his bold take on the material, but I don’t know if there even exists a punishment suitable for bungling decent material this badly, although I guess maybe being recognized as the director of EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC for all eternity might fit the crime. Not only did he ruin this sequel to one of the greatest horror films ever, he put the whole series on the sad course of disappointments, reshoots, and studio interference that would dog it for the rest of its bedraggled life. Now what could have possessed him to do that?

* The insanity of casting Fletcher as a good psychiatric doctor just two years after the most iconic role of her career playing a despicable one is a microcosm of the movie's brazen defiance of any human logic.

**Their journey is funny, though, because for reasons known only to the writers of EXORCIST II they keep getting interrupted by car accidents where Fletcher has to get out and help. Then, when they finally get to their destination, their own car crashes but no one seems interested in helping the black cab driver. What the fuck are we supposed to make of that?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2012 CHECKLIST!

LOVECRAFT ADAPTATION: No.
BOOBIES: Yeah, there's a long irrelevant scene where some dude shows off this African woman's titties to father Lamont.
> or = HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS LEVEL GORE: A guy falling off a rock is about the best I can do for ya.
SEQUEL: And what a sequel.
OBSCURITY LEVEL: Infamous, but I suspect rarely seen.
MONSTERS: Demon, though we only see him in locust and Linda Blair form. 
SATANISTS: No, Pazuzu seems to do his own dirty work.
ZOMBIES: Don't think so.
VAMPIRES: Nope.
SLASHERS: Nah.
CURSES: I'd say Regan is kind of cursed.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: She claims yes. I'm not so sure. But I have to admit that when pressed, she described the plot significantly more coherently than I imagine Boorman could. So I'm gonna say yes. 

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.