Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves

 

Robin Hood: Prince In Tights Of Thieves

Dir. Kevin Reynolds

Written by Pen Densham, John Watson

Starring Kevin Coster, Morgan Freeman, Mary Elizabeth Mastantonio, Alan Rickman

 

ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THEIVES (or, RH:PoT, as the hip online kids of today call it) begins in a Jerusalem torture chamber. The first faces we see close-up are the filthy, sadistic (but helpfully English-speaking!) visages of the dungeon's torture/amputation division, as they ply their trade on the miserable Christian captives of the failed Third Crusades. In fact, even after we get a look at the hapless Englishmen, we may not realize that one of the men we are looking at is our protagonist, because he's dressed in soiled rags and sports a beard and mane that would make ZZ Top jealous. These are most assuredly not merry men. Short of starting with the slug line "The Dawn of Man," there isn't much more a film could do to convey to us in no uncertain terms that this aint yo' pappy's ROBIN HOOD. Unless you were born after 1991, in which case, it actually IS your pappy's ROBIN HOOD, canonized with a Mel Brooks parody, no less. 

In fact, I got the idea to watch this one when I reviewed ROBIN HOOD, MEN IN TIGHTS and dismissively suggested it might be funnier if you were familiar with PRINCE OF THIEVES, which I described as "a movie that no one on Earth has watched in nearly a half a century." Well, as you can imagine, it didn't even take a full minute after typing that sentence before I was overwhelmed with desire to remedy that situation. Which was an unexpected sensation for me, given that I had never previously regretted passing on this movie when it first came out and everyone agreed it was a drag. Indeed, the movie was roundly criticized at the time for being too dark and serious. Ebert called it "murky, unfocused, violent and depressing," and went on to describe it as "gloomy" and Costner as "tortured." Vincent Canby called it "joyless" and slammed it for, um, "coming out firmly for civil rights, feminism, religious freedom, and economic opportunity for all" (apparently SJWs have been ruining all culture with their divisive politics since 1991 at least).

It was, in fact, arguably the origin --patient zero-- of the trend towards dark and gritty reboots which would become basically a full-blown cultural movement by the turn of the millennium. There were earlier cinematic* stirrings of this trend; John Boorman’s trippy, violent EXCALIBUR (1981) might be an example, and Tim Burton’s BATMAN from two years earlier comes even closer (especially in terms of how it was perceived at the time), but RH:PoT is much more beholden to some kind of faux-realistic affectation than either of those movies even pretended to be. People considered those films (and the following year’s BATMAN RETURNS), to be dark, but they’re certainly not “gritty,” which turns out to be a vital –although perhaps not quite as foundational as it might appear-- element of what would become the formula. “Gritty and realistic” remakes were not, of course, wholly unknown in 1991; Outlawvern commenter Pacman 2.0 noted the 1984 ‘this ain’t your daddy’s Tarzan’ adventure/drama GREYSTOKE, which definitely feels like it shares at least some DNA with PRINCE OF THEIVES in its self-conscious foregrounding of “gritty realism” within a pulpy premise. But it differs in that it represents an effort to return to the original (somewhat darker and more intellectual**) source material. PRINCE OF THEIVES has no definitive source material (the conception of “Robin Hood” and the related characters evolved slowly over centuries of poems, ballads and plays, all of which clearly arise from older folk traditions which predate the 15^th-century records which survive today), and so can’t claim fidelity to authoritative origins. Or to any kind of established history, for that matter, which perhaps explains why it feints towards “realism” only in a few highly selective ways, more as a signifier that it ought to be taken seriously than as an honest attempt to grapple with this subject in any kind of real world context (there’s a magical witch and a Bryan Adams song, among other distinctly fantastical elements).

The “realism,” then, is mostly a facade, though it would prove to be of defining aesthetic significance in the films that later adopted the same technique. Fundamentally, though, PRINCE OF THEIVES, like EXCALIBUR, Burton’s BATMAN films or the later Nolan/Snyder superhero films, is banking not on authenticity, but on surprise: its ability to shock a complacent audience by intentionally undermining expectations about a universally known icon which has grown so familiar as to feel “safe.” It is, like many of the “dark and gritty” reboots that would follow it, a movie that is deliberately confrontational towards an audiences’ presumed expectations about the subject matter. The entire raison d’etre is to say “hey kids, this isn’t the old, boring Robin Hood your parents like! This is the real Robin Hood, brash, uncompromised, uncowed, the one your square history teachers don’t want you to know about! He shares your dangerous, rebellious disaffection, scares your parents, and just might be too hot for polite society to handle!” (it’s worth noting that the production company, Morgan Creek, had previously enjoyed some in-retrospect-utterly-inexplicable success with its similarly irreverent semi-revisionist Western YOUNG GUNS).

It is this pugnacious attitude, based on shaking the comforting perceptions of nostalgic figures (many associated with childhood) that I think critics were responding to back then; it’s not that these films are necessarily “dark” compared to, say, other 1991 alumni like PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS or SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (or even TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY, which is indisputably more violent and intense). It’s that the film’s entire modus operandi has to do with subverting our expectations about deep-rooted cultural icons which have persevered so long as to feel centering and stable and perhaps somehow “pure,” untouched by the messy world of adulthood –but also static, abstract and unthreatening. Challenging that can be uncomfortable in some ways, which is, I think, what makes it potentially productive in others: I don’t know how culturally valuable it is to perpetually reimagine the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles so they stay fresh and vibrant for future generations, but one can at least dimly imagine some value in taking the tale of Robin Hood –with its fundamental fury at wealth inequality and wholehearted endorsement of revolutionary resistance—and shaking off the cobwebs a little, rescuing the tale from being a harmless fairy story rendered toothless by rote repetition and restoring its subversive bite. And locating it within a cinematic “reality” featuring distinctive signifiers that point to contemporary relevance –such as the “dark and gritty” aesthetic which, at least in 1991, was a cue to interpret the material as serious and hard-hitting, as opposed to the idealized, theatrical affectations most of the kids in 1991 would have associated with the corny old Robin Hood movies of the past—feels like a legitimate strategy to that end. But it is, ultimately, a strategy, not an end in itself. So while the critics –including myself!—often find it convenient to describe this and similar films as “dark and gritty,” they are really doing something rather different just underneath the surface. It’s just that to do so, something like ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THEIVES combines both the calculated “darkening” of material popularly perceived as frothy matinee stuff for kiddies (like we see in EXCALIBUR and the BATMANs) with the “realistic” “grittiness” of GREYSTOKE (or the next year’s revisionist UNFORGIVEN) to add some visceral weight and punch to a basic premise which had perhaps been dulled and diluted through rote repetition.

This would, of course, prove hugely influential as a technique, in many ways becoming a defining feature of the way studios thought about revitalizing old properties in the subsequent years (though the effect was not immediate – by 1995’s BATMAN FOREVER, the studio was deliberately trying to lighten things up, and it wasn’t until the ignominious failure of the glibly comic BATMAN & ROBIN in 1997 that the tide really started to turn. And even then, you had the cartoonish GODZILLA remake in 1998 and the old-fashioned corniness of THE MUMMY reboot in 1999). It obviously it struck some kind of chord at the time, though; the movie was a huge hit. But in1991, it sounded like a bunch of pretentious self-serious garbage to me, and I never bothered with it.

Imagine my surprise, then, to finally watch the movie and discover thirty years later that it is in fact a completely different kind of garbage! All that fretting about the gloomy, intellectual new Robin Hood was bunk, probably a response to the studio PR machine more than the movie itself. Far from being a broody, intellectual bore, RH:PoT turns out, in fact, to be a movie which is almost maniacal in its desire to entertain. You can almost hear the producers screaming "There should be witty banter in EVERY scene! And constant swashbuckling action! And raw sex appeal! And sweeping, expensive spectacle! But also relatable aw-shucks human drama! And for God's sake, can we get some sweeping, triumphant music in here?" Apparently this is what "dark and gritty" was like in 1991. It was a time of innocence.

But just because it’s not actually dark and gritty at all doesn’t mean it’s not a labored mess, it’s just a labored mess in a different way. A better way, I should stipulate; its earnest effort to create constantly entertaining big-screen spectacle is appreciated in this age of lazy, jokey 200-million dollar superhero sitcoms. Whatever it is, RH:PoT is absolutely never lazy. It was a fairly expensive production for its time,*** and man, every penny of that budget ended up on the screen. The movie is jam-packed with incident, setpieces characters, elaborate sets and costumes. Unfortunately therein lies the problem; it's so damned fanatical about constantly ingratiating itself in the moment that it loses track of the big picture. It's a movie where fun stuff is constantly happening (fight scenes, evil monologues, Kevin Coster swimming in the buff, bonding, fighting, comedy, pathos) but the story never seems to build any momentum.

Or, perhaps, it spends far too much time trying to build momentum. Like many of its “dark and gritty” descendants (striking so, in fact, another way in which the movie proves shockingly prescient, even prophetic, about the shape of Hollywood franchises to come), it is cripplingly obsessed with the hero’s origins (a disastrous trend for narrative film, which would be kicked into overdrive with the STARS WARS prequel trilogy in 1999, but—crucially-- is all-but-absent from BATMAN). Hence, the torture-chamber opening; where previous Robin Hood films simply presented the familiar character fully-formed, PRINCE OF THEIVES wants to meticulously chart the course of how the character came by all his iconic trappings, from the bow to the Merry Men to the name. This takes quite a bit of time and exposition to accomplish, and even if much of it is solidly entertaining it seriously challenges the point of making a movie about Robin Hood, if for much of the runtime our hero is not yet recognizable as that character. “Robin of Locksley” doesn't become "Robin Hood" proper until well past the halfway point, and “Becoming Robin Hood” and “Doing Robin Hood Stuff” are two different story arcs which feel noticeably separate, related but not comfortably contiguous. The movie is burdened with so much backstory that once the pieces are finally in place, everything feels weirdly rushed, with the whole Hood-Nottingham conflict crammed into two huge setpieces in the movie’s back half and never given the chance to breath. When the big climax turns up (nearly 2 hours into a merciless 143 minutes**** -- apparently egregiously bloated runtimes for blockbusters are not wholly an artifact of 21st-century Hollywood) it still feels narratively too soon, like they already did a whole movie and then tried to cram its sequel into 50 minutes at the end. 

Still, credit where it's due: fun stuff is constantly happening. Even aside from the impressive action and production, it’s a hugely entertaining cast. Alan Rickman, as the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham (no Prince John here, which probably saves us a good 40 extra minutes of screentime, though at something of a cost to the story's central conflict), goes absolutely all-out mega-acting, to richly entertaining effect, and most of the rest of the cast is able to meet him at least halfway, leaning into the larger-than-life broadness of their characters. Costner makes for a notable exception; his decision to play the title character as a humble, intellectual man of action was the subject of bitter criticism when the movie premiered (with many critics comparing him unfavorably to Errol Flynn's breezy, swashbuckling take, which they apparently considered definitive). But today it seems like the obvious right choice, leaning into the actor's folksy everyman charm and allowing him to operate as the solid hub of a rather unwieldly and eccentric wheel. It's a little silly that he doesn't even take a swing at a British accent, (even Christian Slater at least tries. Or at least, I think that's what he's doing) but hell, it's a silly movie. Robin seems to become a hero because he has a nearly inhuman ability to find things to swing from in virtually any situation, like a 12th-century Spider-Man. If you can enjoy that, I don't think we really need to worry too much about the accent.

And I hope you do enjoy that, because swinging on things is very much the movie's idea of excitement. Which makes it kind of amazing that this friendly, silly, eager-to-please mainstream blockbuster was taken so seriously at the time. Despite its foundational role in the creation of the gritty, serious, realistic reboot… when you come down to it, it's hardly any of those things at all! There's, like, three nut-shots in the first half-hour. Costner and Freeman banter like Riggs and Murtaugh! Friar Tuck breaks the fourth wall! There's an out-of-the-blue cameo in the last 30 seconds! There's a huge fiery explosion that Coster has to strut away from without looking back, for Christ's sake! And I mean, it's cool enough when guys do that in modern movies where shit is exploding all the time; when the fuck is this dude in the 12th century ever gonna see anything that cool again? So double badass, there. 

Basically, I think the movie is a bit misunderstood. It's not so much an attempt to make things more realistic as it is an attempt to add a different texture to a familiar story, teasing a few new threads of meaning out of it, but mostly just having fun doodling in the margins with whatever the filmmakers thought might be cool. 

Obviously I'm in favor of that, and would like to correct the record on 1991's behalf. But if the movie is misunderstood or misremembered, I also can't necessarily say it's underrated. Like anyone trying too hard, it's not all that consistent, and a little exhausting to put up with. But it’s interesting that this fact is not what history has held against it – for better or worse, the movie, if it is remembered at all, is remembered for its pioneering, boundary-pushing “dark and gritty” approach. The fact that it self-evidently isn't either didn't matter, apparently; that was what people remembered about it anyway. Of Ebert’s complaints that the movie is "murky, unfocused, violent and depressing," the only one which is even a little true is “unfocused.” But in the movie world, perception is reality, and obviously even the timid gestures the movie makes in that direction felt significant enough to the contemporary audience to be hugely impactful – not just on the way they viewed the film, but as a potential lens to view any proposed remake or reboot. It is, I think, no coincidence at all that in 2010, we got another Robin Hood movie (this one directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russel Crowe) which leaned even harder in the direction of a “dark and gritty” origin story. After all, by that point, RH:PoT very much was your pappy’s Robin Hood – and the problem with its basic strategy is that it is by definition it loses its zest as it ceases to be surprising. And of course, you can only get so dark and gritty before the whole approach loses its impact. The next ROBIN HOOD, in 2018, took a wholly different approach, trying to mimic a very different set of aesthetic signifiers: those of the modern comic book blockbuster. All of which leaves poor PRINCE OF THEIVES as an orphaned relic of a bygone era, which blazed bright for a brief moment, and perhaps had a significant influence on the direction pop culture took in the subsequent years, but has as an independent work of art sunk into relative obscurity, even suffering the indignity of being eclipsed in the popular consciousness by its own parody, which is today almost certainly more frequently watched and better remembered.

But at least I respect its hustle. If more movies had tried to imitate that, rather than its alleged gritty realness, blockbuster history might have been shaped for the better. But oh well, at least we'll always have the merchandise. 

And, I'm sorry to remind you, a truly dire Bryan Adams song. 

 

 

* Comic books had been going in this direction for some time, since at least Frank Miller’s 1986 sweaty, fascistic grimdark The Dark Knight Returns. By the 1990’s, gritty anti-heroes like Venom and Spawn would be the rule, rather than the exception. But movies were slower to follow, flirting with the florid nihilism of comic books throughout the 90s but struggling with how –or if—to translate that energy to the big screen.

** Or so I’m told. It’s Edgar Rice Burroughs, so I feel like there’s probably a limit on how “dark and intellectual” it could be, but the consensus seems to be that GREYSTOKE is, in both tone and substance, much more faithful to the source material than previous adaptations had been. I’ll have to take their word for it since there’s no way in hell I’m reading 1912’s Tarzan of the Apes. Right? I mean, of all the things in the world to read, why would I read that? I mean, I guess, it probably would be interesting as a cultural artifact. And it’s probably pretty short. Oh shit, should I read 1912’s Tarzan of the Apes? It does sound like the kind of thing I would do, now that I see it in written out in black and white.

*** Though at $48 million, hardly record-breaking; 1989’s BATMAN had cost only a little less, and TERMINTATOR 2 cost twice as much. Only a scant four years later, Costner’s own WATERWORLD would cost $172 million.

**** And there’s also a 155-minute “extended edition,” which apparently contains even more exposition about whatever supernatural conspiracy the Sheriff of Nottingham is on about.

 

Widows

Widows (2018)

Dir.  Steve McQueen

Written by Steve McQueen and Gillian Flynn

Starring Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya

I doubt anyone would have expected director Steve McQueen to follow up his 2013 Best Picture-winning 12 YEARS A SLAVE with an adaptation of a 1983 British crime-drama TV series, transplanting its plot to 2018 Chicago. And I most sincerely doubt that even someone who managed to guess all that would have predicted that the screenplay would bear the unlikely credit of “written by Steve McQueen and Gillian Flynn.” And yet, in just a few moments of screentime, it all makes perfect sense. The obvious explanation is that McQueen intends to use the contemporary setting and diverse cast as a means to examine social, racial, and political structures. The less obvious explanation is that he also intends to make a tight, tense, procedural crime thriller, and considers this not only to be an equally important goal, but a necessarily symbiotic one.

This is certainly not something I would ever have guessed he would be interested in, but here we are, and it’s certainly a better world for it. Frankly put, WIDOWS is a goddamn masterpiece of carefully-crafted crime fiction with the added bonus of doubling as a closely observed survey of modern American socio-political stratification and dysfunction. And even with all that ambition, it’s resolutely unpretentious and completely unafraid of trashy genre conventions, never pandering but equally never failing to entertain. Freed of the weighty responsibility he had in making one of only a handful of American movies to ever directly address slavery (and based on the real-life memoirs of its protagonist, no less!) McQueen feels more unpredictable and eclectic here, more willing to follow his artistic muse as it wanders freely amidst the cultural detritus of modern American* culture, from the profound to the pulpy. And wander it does, through quite a lot of plot; the titular widows are Veronica, Linda, and Alice (Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, and Elizabeth Debicki) who are forced to turn to crime after their criminal husbands (Liam Neeson, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Jon Bernthal, respectively) get themselves killed in a botched heist, leaving their spouses in serious trouble with another local gangster (Brian Tyree Henry) who wants two million dollars from them to fund his campaign for alderman of a South Side Chicago ward, a race he’s running against a reluctant legacy candidate (Colin Ferrell) with problems of his own. And if that’s not enough characters for you, Cynthia Erivo, Daniel Kaluuya, Garret Dillahunt, Carrie Coon, Jacki Weaver, Robert Duvall, Lukas Haas, Matt Walsh and Kevin J. O'Connor are in there too.  

That huge cast of characters is, of course, the result of its origins as a mini-series, and as an adaptation thereof (the second adaptation, in point of fact; there was already an American version in 2002!) it does have the slight sense of something more sprawling and episodic which has been edited down to its bare bones. But McQueen dances between diversions so confidently that it simply feels epic, rather than disjointed. If it’s all over the place, it’s because it’s trying to tell the story of a whole city, with a million separate moving parts, all of which are important and all of which are an intrinsic part of the whole. In fact, if anything, the movie’s biggest problem is that its 130 minutes are so tightly packed with rich detail and curious digressions that it’s full of things we wish we had more time to explore. Michelle Rodriguez’s character, for example, doesn’t end up with quite enough screen time specifically devoted to her to entirely emerge as a fully-defined character. And you could probably edit her out of the movie, or combine her with Cynthia Erivo’s character to create a sleeker screenplay. But then, you’d miss out on the fascinating scene where she shows up at the house of a frumpy, middle-aged mark who she needs to surreptitiously pump for information, only to discover they’ve both recently experienced a tragic loss, and then fumble her way into a spontaneous and ill-advised makeout session! This is a wild, live-wire little bit of plotting which could easily descend into campy overkill in the hands of a lesser director, and throwing it in without any particular narrative necessity or specific denouement would be recklessly playing with fire for any director.

But McQueen is not just any director; in his hands, this scene becomes a perfectly fascinating little zen koan, a short story all of its own, equal parts illustrative and mysterious. Does Rodriguez do this cynically and strategically, as a ploy to try and put this guy off-guard? Does she do it defensively, as a disruption that affords her an escape? Or does she do it impulsively, as these two characters from completely different walks of life suddenly find themselves powerfully, magnetically intimate due to their shared grief? Is it none of these things, all of them, does she even know why she does what she does? The movie isn’t telling, but just this one scene is rich enough to inspire hours of thoughtful reflection.

In that same vein, please find also the most singularly and surprisingly compelling on-screen relationship of the year, in the tenuous, unexpected bit of vulnerability which develops between Viola Davis and Elizabeth Debicki. The two women could hardly be more different; Davis is a flinty, self-assured over-50 African-American career woman, and though we can see from the opening that she is clearly still a powerfully sexual being, she is certainly nobody’s idea of a sex object. Debicki, on the other hand, at first seems to be defined entirely by her appeal as a sex object; she’s impossibly, almost parodically tall and slim, with her exaggerated figure, pale skin, blonde hair and huge eyes giving her the appearance of a lab-grown Barbie doll. And a doll is apparently all she’s ever been, having spent her whole life relying on the largesse of criminal (and often violent) boyfriends. These two women seem to have nothing in common; really, their sole shared characteristic seems to be how little either seems interested in making friends. And yet, quietly, around the margins, something develops between them which doesn’t materialize between the other women, who seem to have a strictly business –and sometimes out-and-out antagonistic—relationship. Friendship doesn’t seem to quite describe the situation, but there appears between these two committed survivors an unexpected little note of intimacy, a tiny crack in their mutual armors of ruthless, unsentimental pragmatism. Perhaps it is their very dissimilarity which makes them feel comfortable enough with each other to let the mask slip, even if only a tiny bit; I am reminded of how Werner Herzog managed to break past the natural cultural defenses of his Southeast-Texas interview subjects in INTO THE ABYSS specifically because he was such a complete outsider. Sometimes we can be more comfortable sharing things about ourselves with people who don’t come from the same backgrounds –and therefore with whom we have, perhaps, less to lose—than with people who might otherwise seem to have a more innate understanding of our lives.  

This relationship, in all its complexity and nuance, happens on the margins of the film; tiny moments here or there, adding up slowly and almost subliminally, but it’s a perfect example of how the movie densely packs meaning into its runtime, and masterfully communicates itself without resorting to lecturing. And only a talent as securely confident as McQueen would handle something so lightly which it is absolutely at the heart of the movie (SPOILER: the film even ends with a beautiful grace note centered on the ambiguity of their further friendship – are these women irresolvably creatures of two different worlds, and bound only by the memory of this single shared experience, or are they capable of bridging that gap and recognizing that they have more in common than it might at first seem?) and as such is a crucial facet of the movie’s most intriguing fascination: the ways in which a rigidly divided 21st century America (by class, by race, by gender, by age, by politics, by geography) intersects in unexpected ways. It’s a thesis which is best exemplified in the movie’s most bravura moment, my easy pick for the single most perfect shot of the entire year: a long, unbroken tracking shot of a wealthy politician’s car driving the three minutes it takes to get from the overgrown, low-income apartment complexes where he’s been campaigning to a neighborhood of posh mansions where he lives. It’s the perfect visual and thematic metaphor for the way in which these disparate peoples are both irreconcilably separated and intrinsically connected. What could be better than a movie with that kind of effortlessly virtuosic, immensely thoughtful craftsmanship that’s still a crackin’ good time? If you didn’t catch it in theaters this year, you really blew it, but fortunately you still have a chance to set things right. Before you spend one more dollar on some dull Marvel sequel or godforsaken “live action” Disney remake, you owe it to the culture and to yourself to see this. Relentlessly entertaining while never dumbing itself down, this is the perfect exemplar of what popular cinema ought to aspire to.

*And British culture, as both the original mini-series and McQueen himself hail from across the pond.

THE BEST OF 2018, AS SEEN FROM 2019: THE SERIES

ALSO, WHY NOT FOLLOW ME ON LETTERBOXD FOR EVEN MORE OPINIONS ON THINGS?

The Barn (2018)

The Barn (2019)

Dir. Matt Beurois

Writers: Auregan, Matt Beurois

Starring Ken Samuels, Guillaume Faure, Piper Lincoln, Auregan

The Amazon Prime summary of THE BARN reads, "A serial killer strikes Sugar Grove, Virginia. As the number of victims increases, a journalist is send [sic] to cover the story. Her investigation will shake the local comm..."  [it cuts off there, as though the writer was suddenly struck down in mid-sentence by the very serial killer he or she was summarizing]

Now, two things about that blurb caught my notice.

First, I want to draw your attention to the fucking balls it takes for one of the world's largest corporations to give so little of a shit about their streaming service that they would include a typo in the two-and-a-half sentence plot summary. It’s only 29 words, for fuck’s sake, can we just do one fucking readthrough before we click “publish”? Second, I noticed the prominence of Sugar Grove, VA in the synopsis, which made me laugh because I've lived in or around Virginia for something like 30 years now and had never heard of such a place, making one wonder why the blurb-writer thought it was such a huge selling point. I assumed that it was either a patronizing name some Hollywood dirtbag made up for a dimly imagined Real America, or, hopefully, it was a real place and this movie was one of those small-town regional horror movies made by some amateur first-time filmmaker who got the whole town to participate. "Let's look it up," said I, capriciously. "If it turn out it's a real place, we'll watch this piece of shit."

Well, turns out Sugar Grove is a census-designated place (CDP) in Smyth County, Virginia, United States. The population was 758 at the 2010 census. We watched the movie.

Unfortunately THE BARN does not turn out to be a passion project of the residents of Sugar Grove, Virginia. Instead, two very unexpected things become clear almost immediately. First, it’s actually a French production, meaning the residents of “Sugar Grove, Virginia” will be played entirely by French actors, each with their own unique idea of what they imagine an American accent (let alone a Sugar Grove, Virginia accent) might sound like. Definitely was not expecting that. Second, it’s actually a zombie movie at least as much (and probably more) than it is a serial killer movie (and in fact, it’s not really either, but first things first).

            We’ll actually get to the zombies long before we get to the serial killer. Although the trailers barely hint at zombies and the plot summary ignores them completely, the film opens in the traditional Zombie Movie style. By which I mean, an opening montage of fictional news reports to bring us up to speed, which starts with real footage of the World Trade Center exploding (!) and then tells us that “one year after 9/11” a zombie outbreak started affecting the world’s children. They have a quick clip of Obama saying the phrase “CDC” (so looks like he still got elected, even in the midst of a zombie nightmare!) and then they tell us that the infected kids have been isolated in camps somewhere in Texas, and that the contagion has been contained, although it darkly implies that many people may not have been happy to have their zombie children snatched and quarantined by the army. And just in case opening with footage from fucking 9/11 wasn’t on-the-nose enough, it then cuts directly to a full-screen shot of a large American flag, hung over the door of a sinister THE BARN. So yeah, I’m thinking this might be some kind of political metaphor.

            But wait, so this is, what, a serial killer movie set in a world where a zombie outbreak has happened, but is now over? Don’t worry, I’ll explain. You see, this particular THE BARN is owned by local Sugar Grove resident Gil Perry (Ken Samuels, who had a bit part in DOUBLE TEAM and appears to be attempting something approximating the Cajun accent Seagal used to do on Steven Seagal: Lawman), and despite its ramshackle appearance this building is important to the plot in that it is currently housing small flock of zombie youngsters, who Gil has been hiding from the authorities and training not to be so bitey (including co-writer and French singer-songwriter Auregan). Gil's mute brother Earl (Yannik Mazzilli, OPIUM, whose American accent must have been too untenable even for this movie), lives there too, but seems to hate the zombies for reasons which are never explained, and likes to throw stones at the barn when Gil’s not looking. He also has a penchant for standing around in the background of scenes menacingly holding a chainsaw. Did I mention there’s a serial killer on the loose?

        But wait, what about the serial killer? I was just getting to that. Turns out that somebody has been murdering the local women of Sugar Grove, VA, (I think they say there have been something like 15 murders!) which has been causing local sheriff Benjamin Clarkson (Guillaume Faure, “reluctant surgeon” in DR. STRANGE, sporting a Pepé Le Pew accent so outrageous that one of the characters is forced to comment on it, a fact made even more absurd when the dialogue makes it clear he grew up in Sugar Grove!) to crouch next to the bodies, staring thoughtfully into the middle distance. Which, if I have learned anything from movie cops, is like 60% of what detectives do during any given day.

The murders have also brought a nosey reporter from Richmond, VA (Piper Lincoln, daughter of Lar Park-Lincoln of FRIDAY THE 13th PART VII fame, but perhaps less an actress than “an American exchange student who happened to be staying near the French filming location”), who keeps trying for an interview with the sheriff or Gil or somebody, bless her little heart. Richmond is well in excess of 4 hours away from Sugar Grove (approximately the same amount of time it’d take to drive from Paris to Cologne, to put it in terms that the filmmakers could relate to), so you gotta give credit to this local news station for making the effort. Especially since poor Sheriff “Clarkson” seems to be the only law enforcement anywhere in sight, despite the fact that 15 murders is almost 2% of the total population of Sugar Grove!* But I guess the feds are busy with the zombie camps and all that.

            Anyway, all this happens by the 10 minute mark. Which raises the eternal question: “What the fuck is this movie actually about?”

This is a question which you could fairly put to a critic like me, because it is part and parcel to this noble profession that we should learn the answer by watching the movie, and then report it back to you, the loyal reader. But every now and again, a movie --say, a movie pretending to be an American movie about a serial killer which is actually a French movie about a zombie farmer-- comes along and really makes that process a far more onerous one than it has any right to be. By which I mean, I watched this thing, and I still couldn’t really tell you what it’s actually about. IMDB claims the tagline is “Some search for the serial killer. Some protect the zombies” ** which is… I guess kinda correct. Certainly, those are the only really noteworthy things that can be said to happen during the runtime, but the movie also seem weirdly disinterested in both its possible plotlines. What actually happens, mostly, is character get together in groups of no more than two and have quiet elliptical non-conversations in grammatically correct but awkwardly phrased English. And then Gil will walk around his surprisingly tastefully decorated --...farmhouse doesn’t sound quite right, French villa seems like a closer fit-- and have a glass of wine while staring apprehensively into the middle distance (there is a lot of wine drinking in this movie, which I choose to interpret as the French filmmakers’ hearty salute to the Virginia Wine Renaissance). Things happen, people die, but the film never seems to really be about any of it; it’s almost breathtakingly lacking in tension or momentum, with event after event stubbornly refusing to add up to any kind of plot. The music and camerawork seem to think it’s some kind of anxious, slow-burn thriller, but at no point does it suggest what it is, exactly, that is supposed to be thrilling us.

            There is a serial killer on the loose, but at no point does the movie treat this as a murder investigation with clues and whatnot (there are only three male characters anyway, so odds are it’s one of them). And there are a couple docile zombies in THE BARN, but they’re apparently domesticated and don’t really pose a threat to anyone. At some point, the young reporter from Richmond seems dangerously close to discovering Gil’s zombie herd and it briefly seems like the movie might be establishing some sort of stakes. “Can Gil keep a prying Big City middle-sized-city reporter away from his not-very-well-hidden secret tame zombie barn” would be a very weird focus of conflict in a movie which has both a serial killer and zombies, but at least it would be a conflict. But then she never finds them and nothing much comes of it, and her plotline abruptly ends. So whatever the movie is about, it’s definitely not about that. (SPOILERS) Near the end, Gil does figure out who the killer is, and it seems like maybe he’ll sic the zombies on him and that would at least explain why there are zombies in this movie. But then he doesn’t and nothing much happens, he just shoots the guy and that’s the end of it. (END SPOILERS)

There seems to be some implication that the original zombie outbreak started in this town, and the locals are touchy about the army because of it, but I’m sure I don’t know what to make of any of that, and the movie sure doesn’t seem eager to make any suggestions about it. Also it’s mentioned that Gil’s dad killed his mom 42 years ago, but as far as I can tell that never really ends up mattering either. It’s possible that the characters understand how these things are meaningfully related, but since they never mention it and just circuitously talk around the point, there’s really no way for the audience to know what the fuck any of this is supposed to mean. Virtually the entire cast manages to die, and yet the movie remains imperturbably low-key and absent of any clear point, or narrative, or hook, or even genre. How is that even possible?

            Heck, even the metaphor is completely obscure to me. I guess the zombies are terrorists locked up at Guantanamo? But what’s with the zombie whisperer who can make them harmless, and what does any of that have to do with an unrelated non-zombie serial killer? I can only assume that the entire population of France would immediately understand this, and that, despite the language barrier, this movie is targeted exclusively towards them.

            But maybe it’d play in Sugar Grove, too, I dunno. Never been. Doesn’t look like the Richmond Post-Dispatch has done a lot of reporting there, either, but they did visit for at least one story that I can find (warning: depressing). That’s probably not the episode Sugar Grove would prefer to to be known for in Richmond, so maybe the whole zombie farm angle isn’t such a bad thing have on the tourism brochure after all. I’d like to offer something better, but an excruciating lengthy online investigation revealed virtually no substantial information about the place.*** Still, I have to believe they deserve better than this.

* For comparison: if a serial killer got 2% of the population of Chicago, there would be roughly 54,000 dead.

** The poster, for the record, just has the generic “Fear What’s Inside” which still isn’t really accurate.

*** There’s an “Au-Some Mini Carnaval” at Oak Point Elementary school tomorrow, but that’s in neighboring Marion, VA. Also a “1st annual Kentucky Derby Party” at a bar called “27 Lions,” which seems like an oddly specific number of lions and I’d love to know the story there. Their website claims to have 27 taps and it’s a pretty good beer list, but come on guys, you’re burying the lede here, what’s up with the lions?

TRANCE aka THE ETERNAL KISS OF THE MUMMY

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

Dir. Michael Almereyda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From a Whisper to a Scream

From a Whisper to a Scream (aka Offspring, 1987).

Dir Jeff Burr

Starring Vincent Price, Clu Gulager, Terry Kiser, Harry Ceaser

 Yeah, this isn't in the movie

                                                    

Don't you hate it when you're in the mood for a certain kind of movie, you find something that looks perfect, and then it's completely different than what you thought? That was my experience with 1987's Vincent Price horror anthology FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM. I was looking for a little horror film to ease my transition from into the October horror marathon. I was feeling entirely worn out and exhausted, and figured I needed something with a nice Halloween vibe but nothing too overwhelming. Something kind of crappy that I could zone out to but still whet my appetite for the season (the first of October is like the start of football season to the horror geek). I settled on this minor-looking cheapie horror anthology for three excellent reasons.

1: It stars Vincent Price. Price alone all but guarantees a certain unique vibe of macabre but usually overwrought (if not outright campy) horror film.

2: It's a horror anthology. Horror probably has a greater per capita ratio of anthologies to full-length films than any other genre, but most of them are not really all that, you know, good. Even most of the classic entries into that genre are not good. Does anyone actually like anything other than the last segment of TRILOGY OF TERROR? Of course they don't.

3: 1987. That's the same year as ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING. Not a great time for horror films, and even those legitimately great ones like EVIL DEAD II tend towards goofy, fun times rather than disturbing nightmares.

So I figured I had WHISPER pegged. I settled back, cracked open a MD 20/20, and let my eyes glaze over. The film begins promisingly enough with a lady who looks like she was built from the spare parts of 1985 who's being executed in soft focus via lethal injection. A reporter at the scene leaves and heads straight for Vincent Price's house –a sort of museum/library/gothic Southern Mansion, or at least a painting of one-- to ask him what he thinks caused his niece (the executee) to snap and become a sociopathic murderess a la MONSTER but uglier and 80sier. Price is looking very, very old and very, very tired, and halfway attempting a sort of Tennessee accent every fifth line or so in the grand tradition of Peter Cushing's SHOCK WAVES German cadence. The library he lives in looks like it could have been built and lit by Roger Corman himself. Price pontificates grandiosely (albeit in a way which suggest he was too tired to complain about one more take) about how the town itself is to blame for the murders. He tells four stories of residents of the town who have come to bad ends, bookending everything (unnecessarily, he appears in-between the stories as well to rehash exactly what he said before the last one.) Yes sir, this thing was looking like just what I had in mind.

But then something entirely unexpected happened. The movie got good. Not watchable, not better than expected; good good. The first story stars RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD'S Clu Gulager (absolutely unrecognizable) as a tightly wound grocery story manager who pines for a gorgeous but aloof female employee even as his devotion to his invalid sister holds him back. This story has about every ick scenario ever put in a horror movie, including but not limited to rape, incest, necrophilia, murder, cannibalism and terrible songwriting. No problem, except that it's executed to the hilt with a kind of sweaty, atmospheric mix of gritty realism and nightmarish Southern Gothic surrealism. Here's how good it is: when a tiny anamatronic monster zombie appears, you will only laugh a little. And you'll be genuinely unnerved as soon as you see the expression on Gulager's face. It's an upsetting little tale which treats its subjects dead serious and indulges in a pitch-black sense of humor only to heighten the horror, rather than relieve it.

This poster has even less to do with the film than the first one.

                        

The second tale, featuring a fantastic Terry Kiser and an even better Harry Ceaser focuses on a low-life scuzzball who is rescued, near death, by a swamp-dwelling recluse with an unspeakable secret. It's has a low-key sinister crawl building to another genuinely shocking moment, but its real strength is a superb sense of time and place, intelligently milking both evocative beauty and alien menace from its swamp setting.

The third story, the inevitable “weakest of the segments,” is about a carnival glass eater and his would-be girlfriend and their doomed attempt to leave against the wishes of the carnival's witchy owner. It also has plenty of atmosphere and great performances, but it's narratively a bit weaker than the first two, failing to get the most out of its gore hound ending.

The fourth story is not the best, but it may be the most interesting. It finds a group of despicable Union soldiers (who are introduced murdering surrendering Confederate troops without realizing that the war has ended) at the brink of their discovery of a mysterious farm, abandoned except for a curiously well-organized society of war orphans. It's a little BEYOND THUNDERDOME and a little CHILDREN OF THE CORN, and it admirably builds a creepy scenario while cultivating (but not overplaying) its central metaphor about what happens to a society born out of violence which loses track of the context of that violence. Unfortunately, its also the only story which feel a bit rushed as an anthology segment. We can guess where this is going, but the story zips along to the big conclusion without the pleasure of milking the menace for awhile. The other three segments make great, self-contained short stories, but this one probably deserved a novella.

I mention literary equivalents because one of the most intriguing and successful aspects of this film is that it truly captures the feeling of an effective short story. Most anthologies superficially mimic the abbreviated form of storytelling, but few capture the profoundly mysterious quality of the best short fiction, which often isn't so much interested in telling a story as it is at hinting at a story and letting your mind fill in the gaps. The best short fiction suggests rather than tells; few short film anthologies seem to really understand that. This one, for whatever reason, has that lyrical, amorphous quality of cultivating mood and mystery with a few simple strokes and letting the viewer do the work of exploring the dark corners it only hints at. Which is not to say that its some sort of arty narrative-free tone poem; each segment tells a complete story. But what lingers is the shapeless darkness which pervades each story, ties them together, and brings forth something a little more menacing than the straightforward horror show that exists on the surface.

The director here is Jeff Burr, who impressed Vincent Price enough to sign onto one of his last film roles. This was his first big film, but he would on to be a prolific director of shitty sequels to horror films like TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III, and sequels to PUMPKINHEAD, PUPPET MASTER, STEPFATHER, and others. Too bad, because here he shows serious promise. This one is intriguing and unique and deserves a place in any horror anthology buff's heart.