Identity

November 18, 2018November 17, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Identity (2003)

Dir. James Mangold

Written by: Michael Cooney

Starring: John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet, John Hawkes

Identity has been quietly resting on my shelf for a decade, unwatched. It’s a disc that got mixed into my collection from a previous roommate at some point, and I have never had the urge to watch it. I saw Identity in the theater, with this same eventual roommate, no less, and I can remember both of us being wholly unimpressed with the movie, and with its prominent plot twist. In the years following up the success of The Sixth Sense and M. Night Shyamalan’s subsequent couple of movies, it seemed like the game-changing plot twist was the flavor of the month for Hollywood studio thrillers, and I think that some fatigue from the overwhelmingness of the trend led to my total dismissal of Identity. I largely forgot about the movie until discovering it in a box of DVDs when I moved into the house that I’ve been living in for the last six years, and in the time between then and my decision to start this project, I only thought of Identity, cursorily, as a real-life version of “The Three,” Donald Kaufman’s asinine screenplay from Adaptation. in which all three principal characters are revealed to be the same person. Since starting this project, however, Identity has loomed large in the back of my mind as a movie that I was both anticipating and dreading screening and writing about. I fully anticipated Identity to be, at best, a generic and predictable thriller not worthy of the collected talent that it assembles, and, at worst, a derivative and implausible B-movie driven by a third act plot twist it doesn’t earn. Maybe it was the low bar that I had going in, but I was pleasantly surprised by Identity, and I found most of my remembrances of it from 15 years ago to be incorrect.

Identity begins by introducing Malcolm Rivers (Pruitt Taylor Vince), an inmate set to be executed for several brutal murders. Rivers’s legal team and psychologist, Dr. Malick (Alfred Molina), file a midnight appeal for a stay of execution, arguing a legal defense of insanity citing new evidence that has come to light in the form of a diary. The midnight hearing is assembled during a tremendous storm, and begins without Malick, who is being transported from prison. At the same time, a group of ten strangers become stranded at a roadside motel, forced to bed down for the night due to the storm. They include a former cop, Ed (Cusack), who is now working as a limousine driver, a Nevada state trooper, Rhodes (Liotta), who is transporting a convicted murderer, a prostitute on her way to a new life in Florida, Paris (Peet), and the hotel’s manager, Larry (Hawkes). The group have come together in spectacularly coincidental fashion, which is shown in a flashback, involving a family getting a flat tire from striking a loose high heel that flew out of one of Paris’s suitcases. The mother, Alice (Leila Kenzle), is struck by Ed’s limousine when he is distracted by his passenger, the actress Caroline Suzanne (Rebecca de Mornay). Ed brings the injured woman to the motel in search of a working phone, and while he is trying to get help for her, the rest of the group assembles at the motel. As they realize they are stranded for the night and begin to bed down, a killer starts to pick them off one by one, leaving motel keys with the bodies, counting down from 10 to 1. The group begins a paranoid hunt for the killer, and the bodies continue to pile up in rapid fashion, while at the same time the survivors begin to discover more inexplicable coincidences, such as the fact that they all share a birthday. Meanwhile, as the competency hearing continues, and Rivers arrives, the extent of his multiple personality disorder is revealed, and it becomes apparent that the events at the motel are the representation of the psychic trauma of Rivers’s multiple identities being dragged to the surface and vying for primacy in his mind. Dr. Malick makes contact with the Ed personality and urges him to save Rivers’s life by eliminating the personality that drove him to commit the murders, and the action returns to the motel for the film’s climax.

While Identity certainly owes a massive artistic debt to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, even going so far as to obliquely reference one of the novel’s many film adaptations, it still managed to feel relatively fresh to me. While the film’s revelation that all of the characters at the motel only exist inside of Rivers’s mind is a little bit predictable, Identity still managed to largely keep me interested and on my toes. The movie brings in the twist a little too early, but it leads up to it with a series of McGuffins and red herrings that I actually found to be pretty satisfying. It’s a movie that strives towards prestige, and though it doesn’t quite achieve the level of a top thriller, it’s a workmanlike effort that I found to be much more enjoyable than I ever would have imagined. Mangold turns the desert motel into a disorienting funhouse maze, utilizing canted angles, tight shot framings around corners and down narrow hallways between the buildings, and the persistent rain and gloom, to disrupt the audience’s sense of visual continuity of space. While the mystery isn’t particularly compelling after it’s revealed that the characters are all psychic projections, up to that point, the film’s visual style and a few well-timed surprise killings had me heavily invested in discovering the killer’s identity. I had the knowledge that Ed, Rhodes, Paris, and the others are all just manifestations of Rivers’s psyche tucked away in the back of my mind, but the taut editing and brisk storytelling of the first segment at the motel all but made me forget that the reveal was coming.

The film’s cast, which is surprisingly stacked for a movie of this sort, also does a lot of heavy lifting in making Identity a more successful film than it otherwise might have been. I don’t think that either Cusack or Liotta, who are the leads of this deep ensemble, are particularly inspired in their performances. Both of them are as solid as they typically are, but neither really brings much new to the table, either. The supporting cast, however, comes on strongly, with Peet doing a nice job of maximizing her role as the film’s third lead. She’s steely and resilient, managing to give some depth to a character that is probably a bit underwritten. We don’t get many specific details about Paris’s back story, but Peet’s performance gives hints towards the type of life that she’s running from. John Hawkes, who I had completely forgotten was in the movie, is the real gem in the supporting cast, though. While his character seems at first to be relegated to a comic relief role, his story is fleshed out and given a surprisingly dark makeover halfway through the film, and the shift in how the audience perceives his character from that point is a testament to Hawks’s versatility as an actor. He goes from being agitated and put-upon to eluding a quiet menace after it’s revealed that he isn’t actually the hotel manager, but that he found the manager dead one day and assumed his responsibilities while hiding his body in the freezer. All the while, though, he imbues Larry with the sympathy-evoking beaten dog qualities that are so common in Hawkes’s characters. The strong assemblage of veteran character actors that round out the cast, and the A-list stars in the film, help lift it above genre material and convincingly sell a movie that might otherwise have collapsed under the weight of a less-than-novel structure and narrative contrivance.

I was actually really satisfied that I found myself to be a bigger fan of Identity that I had expected. I’ve written before that I don’t particularly enjoy writing about movies that I don’t like and that I find it difficult to produce quality writing about films that I don’t think are of a very high quality. I was totally psyched up to write about how much I hated Identity, but, luckily, I was able to avoid that and instead write about what a pleasant surprise it was that this movie wasn’t total trash. Of course the movie has its faults. It really is fairly predictable, with its major twist being telegraphed from the beginning, but it packs in enough genuine surprises along the way that it makes up for the larger lack of mystery surrounding its central narrative. I don’t see myself returning to Identity anytime soon, and I wouldn’t really recommend that anyone go out of their way to see it, because it really is a pretty paint-by-numbers example of a thriller, but it’s a decent enough diversion. It’s the sort of movie that if I caught it on basic cable in another decade I would probably have forgotten about all over again, but I guess that could make the rediscovery that much more satisfying. There’s not anything being offered here that hasn’t been done before, and probably done better, as well, but the cast is solid and the atmospherics are actually quite well done. Identity isn’t the sort of twist movie that requires a lot of active thinking or reflection on the part of its audience, but it’s an entertaining enough ride if you want to turn your brain off for a while.

High Plains Drifter

October 28, 2018October 22, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

High Plains Drifter (1973)

Dir. Clint Eastwood

Written by: Ernest Tidyman

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Billy Curtis, Geoffrey Lewis

I was introduced to High Plains Drifter when it was described to me by a professor in film school as “the movie in which Clint Eastwood paints a town red and calls it Hell.” While this curt description leaves out some of the nuance of the plot, it is, at its essence, what the film is about. Though we didn’t screen High Plains Drifter in the Film Westerns class during which it was first mentioned to me, the attitude of that particular professor did a great deal to help form my own viewpoints on movies, and watching this particular film always reminds me of him. Prof. Best was as likely to recommend a Kaiju movie as he was Kurosawa, and was more interested in comics than he was in literary classics. His open-minded approach to movies and to art helped to open up my own thinking on what could or should be considered valid as a subject of academic study. If Prof. Best could champion Star Trek, Godzilla, and anime, then why shouldn’t I seek to explore the artistry in whatever text I might see fit. Breaking out of the ivory tower mentality of academia was freeing, but it was also a development that likely pushed me away from continuing to pursue my education beyond my undergraduate studies. When I entered into a graduate program at Pitt, I found that the canonization and attention to classical theory completely turned me off, and I longed for the freedom that I had found studying under Prof. Best. I’m always reminded of him when I watch High Plains Drifter, not just because he was the person who first introduced me to it, but also because it is typical of the type of B-movie that he would have found artistically valid and criminally under-considered.

High Plains Drifter opens with a lone stranger (Eastwood) riding into the mining town of Lago. Upon his arrival, The Stranger is warned by the town’s saloon keeper that range types such as himself don’t often stop in Lago, finding the town to move too quickly for them. He insinuates that The Stranger ought to keep moving, and a trio of rough types in the saloon follow him across the street to the town barber shop, where they menace The Stranger. He takes the three by surprise, spinning out of the barber’s chair with his pistol drawn, and quickly dispatches of the trio. After having witnessed his lethal capacity, the town’s sheriff offers The Stranger the job previously held by the three roughriders that he killed, defending Lago from Stacy Bridges (Lewis) and his gang of outlaws who previously menaced the town and who are soon set to be released from prison. The Stranger learns that the town’s previous marshal was whipped to death in the street by the Bridges gang, and he is plagued by dreams of the marshal’s torture. The Stranger reluctantly accepts the job of defending the town, with the caveat that if he protects the town that the townsfolk must give him anything he wants. He takes full advantage, buying rounds for the whole bar at the saloon, loading up on supplies at the town store, and appointing Mordecai (Curtis), a dwarf, to the position of sheriff and mayor of Lago. The Stranger begins to devise a plan and instruct the townsfolk on how to defend themselves from Bridges’s gang. The Stranger’s plan involves painting the town red and staging a welcoming party for the gang, during which the townsfolk will ambush them. However, when Bridges and his outlaws are about to arrive in Lago, The Stranger rides off, leaving the townsfolk to fend for themselves, and the gang overruns the town and begins to burn it down. The Stranger returns to the town, emerging from the flames, to stalk and murder the Bridges gang. The next day, The Stranger rides out of town as Mordecai is engraving the previously unmarked grave of the murdered marshal.

That plot summary of High Plains Drifter is a bit more involved than the one-sentence summary that had first piqued my curiosity about the movie, but its essence can really be boiled down into the fact that it is a movie in which Clint Eastwood paints a town red and calls it “Hell.” When I eventually got around to seeing the movie sometime in my early 20s, I found the pervasive strangeness and otherworldly tone of that abstract but powerfully evocative summary informed the film completely. High Plains Drifter seems equally influenced by Eastwood’s directorial mentors Don Siegel and Sergio Leone, and by Italian horror masters Dario Argento and Mario Bava. The film initially seems to hew close to the blueprint that Leone and Eastwood had established in the “Dollars” trilogy, but it quickly adopts a rather unsettling tone and it contains supernatural elements that are rare in the Western genre. It contains a level of violence, gore, and nihilism that would have been thought unseemly for the All-American film genre just five years prior. This is a revisionist Western, through and through, and it establishes Eastwood as a director who would continue to be interested in exploring and shifting the boundaries of the Western genre. Though it’s a bit of an uneven effort, High Plains Drifter is only Eastwood’s second feature in the director’s chair, and it deserves special commendation as a wholly unique vision of the West and of the Western film.

High Plains Drifter isn’t a great movie; in fact, I think many people would say that it isn’t even a very good movie. It doesn’t really feature any standout performances, as Eastwood is essentially reprising his Man With No Name role, and the rest of the cast suffers from sorely lacking character development. These are stock Western characters, meant more to stand in for types than to differentiate themselves from one another. The movie’s production value is also fairly low, although its sets are decently impressive, featuring full buildings rather than false fronts, which gives the town of Lago some sense of depth. Rewatching High Plains Drifter, I was struck by the sense that some of the scenes weren’t finished, featuring abrupt endings, seeming extraneous to the plot, or just not quite matching up with the tone of the rest of the film. However, I still find this to be an incredibly enjoyable viewing experience. While it isn’t perfect, High Plains Drifter nails the right balance of pulp, action, and horror, even peppering in moments of levity. It’s schlocky and campy, but I’ve always found something intriguing about Eastwood’s injection of the supernatural into a Western revenge story. It’s a fresh take on the Western and one that I’m pretty happy to explore whenever the mood strikes me. For a movie that was introduced to me in such an inauspicious way, it’s one that has become a go-to Western, despite its obvious flaws.

I don’t know if High Plains Drifter is underseen, or if I just don’t know that many people who like Westerns, generally, but I think that it’s a really fun movie that deserves a little more attention. It isn’t as iconic or groundbreaking as Eastwood’s work with Leone in the 1960s, or as paradigm shifting as something like The Wild Bunch, but it continues the revisionist ideas of the West that those films started to explore. It’s a refutation of the idyllic vision of American society in the Old West, and despite its supernatural overtones, it’s a position that rings true to me as a viewer. Watching this movie and High Noon in succession for this project, I was struck by the honesty that the townsfolk of Lago who would stand by and watch their Marshal whipped to death in the street are a natural extension of the cowardly townsfolk of Hadleyville who abandoned Marshal Kane, leaving him to face his fate alone. The major difference is that in a classic Western such as High Noon, the basic decency and virtue of the hero is assumed, whereas in Eastwood’s savage vision of the West, decency has been stripped away in favor of vengeance. I think it’s also interesting that both of these films drew the ire of none other than John Wayne, who posited that they both misrepresented the good, honest people of the Old West. I don’t bring that up to paint Eastwood as some sort of progressive in contrast to the virulent, reactionary Wayne. I think that Eastwood is presenting the same sort of paranoid, cut-throat world view that was on display in Dirty Harry, but something about the transposition to the Western setting makes it easier for me to stomach as a viewer in 2018. There are a couple of other Eastwood films that I’ll be writing about for this project, and I’m sure that my relationship and consideration of him as an actor, star persona, and director won’t get any less complicated, but I think that High Plains Drifter is a movie of his that I can pretty wholeheartedly endorse. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s a really fun Western that inverts many conventions and traditions of the genre, and it offers enough stylistic variance to please fans of other genres, as well.

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

July 29, 2018July 4, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning (1985)

Dir. Danny Steinmann

Written by: Martin Kitrosser, David Cohen, and Danny Steinmann

Starring: John Shepherd, Melanie Kinnaman, Shavar Ross, Tom Morga

I’ve reached the end of my month of watching and writing about Friday the 13^th, and this month is wrapping up with the sequel that’s probably the reason why I didn’t continue collecting more of this franchise. Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning is a follow up to the inaccurately named The Final Chapter, and it attempts to move the franchise in new directions hinted at in that film by continuing the story of Tommy Jarvis. Unfortunately, where that film was able to make subtle innovations to a tired formula, A New Beginning chooses to attempt to change things too drastically, while retaining some of the worst aspects of the earlier sequels. It’s a confusing mess of a film, and one that feels wholly unnecessary with regards to the rest of the series. It’s the middle film in an ill-advised trilogy that used Tommy Jarvis as its central character, but it fails to develop his role in the series, or even in one individual film, in any meaningful way. Featuring one of the series’ highest body counts, this entry might please viewers only looking for some gory fun, but for anyone with any higher expectations, A New Beginning totally fails to deliver.

The film opens with young Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman) sneaking through the woods near his home to find Jason Vorhees’s fresh grave. As he spies on the grave, a couple of grave robbers arrive on the scene hoping to get a view of the legendary monster, Jason (Morga). When they unearth the coffin and remove its lid, Jason quickly and miraculously comes back to life, stabbing both of the grave robbers with his trademark machete. Jason rises from the grave, shaking off dirt and worms, and turns his attention to Tommy, who is still cowering behind a bush. He slowly strides over to the boy who killed him, and raises his machete high over his head, preparing to deliver a killing blow. As the blade descends, adult Tommy Jarvis (Shepherd) awakens, startled, in the back seat of a transport van from the mental institution where he has spent all of his teens. Tommy is being transported to a rural halfway house, in an attempt to ease his transition back into society. At the halfway house, Tommy first meets Pam (Kinnaman), the director of the facility, and Reggie (Ross), a young boy whose grandfather is the cook. He also meets the other patients, including Joey (Dominick Brascia) and Victor (Mark Venturini), two patients who have a dispute shortly after Tommy’s arrival that leads to Victor brutally murdering Joey with an axe in front of the rest of the residents. Joey’s is just the first in a string of murders, as several of the residents and townsfolk in the surrounding area go missing, and Tommy is left wondering if Jason Vorhees could truly be back.

It’s understandable that the series’ creators and the filmmakers behind A New Beginning would want to shift the focus of the series moving forward. Despite the successes of The Final Chapter, no one could deny that most of the life had been wrung out of the existing formula, and using Tommy Jarvis as the character to bridge the gap between the first few movies and the next batch of sequels makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, the execution of those changes is terribly botched in A New Beginning, with new director Danny Steinmann trying to change too much, too soon, and ending up creating a confusing mess of a movie. Though it stands firmly in the slasher genre, Steinmann attempts to integrate elements of mystery, and even psychological thriller, into the mix, and it just doesn’t work. The film wants to tease throughout that Tommy may in fact be behind the murders, but its narrative is too flimsily constructed to carry this conceit through. Instead, what is presented is a series of kill scenes, many of which feature characters who are introduced into the film for the sole purpose of being murdered later in their first scene, strung together by the sketches of a mystery that also feels largely irrelevant to the film’s outcome. The film features a couple of twists in its third act, with the killer being revealed to be Joey’s estranged father, who works as a paramedic, and who snapped after seeing his bastard son’s mutilated corpse, and with a final shot which features Tommy putting on Jason’s hockey mask and stalking up behind final girl, Pam, with a knife. These sorts of twists revealing the killer’s identity, or hinting at the inevitable sequel, should be familiar to fans of the series by now, but in A New Beginning, neither of the surprises feel narratively warranted or satisfying.

One of the reasons for this lack of satisfaction is likely that the film doesn’t do anything to make the audience care one bit about any of the characters. Even the trio that ostensibly makes up the core of the cast – Tommy, Pam, and Reggie – are completely underdeveloped. Clearly the idea here was to include a cute kid to replicate the success of casting Feldman as the young Tommy Jarvis, but Reggie’s character is never developed beyond being an excitable, rambunctious little boy. Pam’s character is given maybe a dozen lines in the entire movie, and Tommy is equally mute, with Shepherd attempting to translate his mental scars through a brooding, vacant performance. Ancillary characters fare even worse, with the residents of the halfway house being as typically undifferentiated as the counselors of the first few installments in the series. As I mentioned, several characters are literally introduced just to be killed off, and as a result, the film feels disjointed and incomplete. The film jumps from locale to locale with little logic, and characters pop into the story abruptly, with little narrative import, and are dispatched from the story summarily, with even less. More than any other entry in the series, besides perhaps Part III, A New Beginning feels like its narrative was constructed with the sole purpose of guiding the audience from one kill to the next, with little attempt made to promote satisfying, or even coherent, storytelling. The fact that its creators clearly had a higher opinion of its quality, and had ambitions to introduce new elements into the series, makes it a bigger disappointment than Part III, because at least that movie contained its ambitions to being a campy gorefest.

I haven’t seen the films that make up the second half of the Friday the 13^th series since sometime in the 1990s, so I’d have trouble maintaining that A New Beginning is positively the worst movie in the series, but it can’t be far off. I’m sure it’s a movie that has its champions among fans of the series, but it’s hard for me to look at this movie as anything but a failure, particularly after the relative successes of The Final Chapter in reinvigorating the series. Its plot is a flimsy pretense, its acting is as laughably bad as its dialogue, and it doesn’t even have the good sense to actually feature Jason Vorhees as its masked killer. I suppose that it does feature a few good kill scenes, but if that’s all you’re looking for as a viewer, there are superior watching experiences within the Friday the 13^th series, and certainly across the slasher genre. A New Beginning tries to do too much with the franchise, and its attempts to move it forward end up being two steps back. The less said about this bad movie, the better.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

July 22, 2018July 4, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter (1984)

Dir. Joseph Vito

Written by: Barney Cohen

Starring: Kimberley Beck, Corey Feldman, E. Erich Anderson, Ted White

The Friday the 13^th series bounces back admirably from its two lackluster sequels in what was initially intended to be its final installment. The Final Chapter attempts to make changes to the stale formula of its predecessors, and actually features a few performances that are worth watching, as well as upping some of the suspense factor, providing actual scares rather than the gruesome shocks of the first few films. The subtle attempts to change the patterns of the series make The Final Chapter feel somewhat fresh, and make it a highlight in the series. This might be faint praise, but it’s certainly the best of the five that I own, and from my memories of the other movies in the series that I’ve seen, it’s likely the best in the series, overall. Its higher production values give it a boost above the original, and its lack of adherence to the established Friday the 13^th formula make it unique enough to stand head and shoulders over the other, highly derivative sequels.

The Final Chapter picks up immediately after the events of Part III, with Jason’s body being taken to the morgue. Presumably, his fight with Chris put Jason (White) down for the count, but you can’t keep a good unstoppable psycho killer down, and, as such, Jason miraculously revives in the morgue. After killing the orderlies on duty there, Jason is back on the loose and headed towards Crystal Lake, where a new family has moved in. Trish (Beck) and Tommy (Feldman) Jarvis, and their mother (Joan Freeman), have moved to the country in search of a quieter life, but the group of teens who have rented the house next door might have other plans. Those teens lead Jason right back to the lake, and he quickly gets back to his old tricks, rampaging through the woods, picking off his victims one by one, in gruesome and shocking fashion. While Jason is stalking his victims, however, there is someone stalking him. Trish meets a young man named Rob (Anderson), whose sister was one of Jason’s victims in an earlier massacre, and Rob has sworn to get revenge on the masked killer. As such, he shows up at the end of the film to help protect Trish and Tommy from Jason. However, Rob proves to be no match for Jason and the two siblings are left as the last pair standing, forced to confront the monstrous Jason in a fight for their lives.

The introduction of the Jarvis family was a conscious decision on the part of the film’s creators to create protagonists who would be seen as more than just disposable fodder for Jason’s murderous rampage, and that decision pays dividends. The earlier films in the series feature a host of interchangeable murder victims, and, as such, don’t invite any sort of audience identification, but The Final Chapter actually gives us a few characters who are sympathetic and fleshed out enough to make them worth rooting for. Focusing on a family gives the film a feeling of higher stakes than previous entries in the series, and Tommy, in particular, is a notable addition to Friday the 13^th lore. More than any other character in the series, Tommy gets actual character traits and a personality that makes him endearing to the audience. Casting an up-and-comer in Corey Feldman also helps this cause. He doesn’t have to do much acting in the film besides being an excitable, cute kid, but his performance stands out as one of the best in a film franchise that doesn’t put much weight in the dramatic chops of its actors. Beck doesn’t fare quite as well, largely falling into the familiar role of the final girl, but she is still very good. She has a bigger screen presence than any of the actresses who preceded her in that role, and she brings a wholesomeness to her portrayal that was largely absent from any of the first three films. Her performance ranges from nurturing and kind to savage and fearsome during her final showdown with Jason, and she shows more depth and range than any actress in the franchise previously or since.

While much of its plot does, in fact, play out like a paint-by-numbers Friday the 13^th sequel, the little differences that I’ve already mentioned in The Final Chapter’s casting and attempts to flesh out its characters do wonders to freshen up the formula. Also, new director Joseph Vito brings a new storytelling sensibility to the franchise. Jason’s assault on the house that the teens have rented feels more purposeful than any of his previous rampages, with Vito blocking the kill scenes out with efficiency and something resembling narrative continuity. The kills are still a random string of gory cut scenes, but Jason moves through the house with something resembling forethought, as if he’s actually on a mission with an achievable end goal in this film. Vito also dispenses with the silly tone taken in Part III, delivering a grimmer, more serious entry into the series. Like any good horror film, there are moments of levity to contrast the terror, but overall this is a darker movie. The stakes also feel heightened in this entry with the decision to introduce a character who already has an understanding of what Jason is capable of, and who has made it his stated mission to kill the monster. Though it doesn’t turn out to be Rob who kills Jason in the end, his foreknowledge seems to even the playing field, even if that advantage does prove to be futile. The Final Chapter takes itself seriously, which could have been disastrous, leading the audience to point out the obvious silliness of this movie and its ilk, but instead the darker tone and attempts at audience identification make for a movie that stands out in a crowded field of B-slashers.

Vito is also to be credited for creating one of the series’ most iconic final chases. Each movie in the Friday the 13^th series invariably ends with its final, usually female, protagonist desperately racing through the woods or some other locale, with Jason and his machete close on her heels. The Final Chapter delivers one of the best chases, with Trish narrowly escaping Jason time and time again as he lays waste to her home, all while she is trying to distract him and protect her brother, Tommy. This final fight scene might represent the most awesome depiction of Jason’s superhuman abilities of any sequence in the series, at least in the films that comprise the first half, with which I’m more familiar. It packs genuine suspense, from the moment that Trish and Rob arrive at the teens’ rental home to find their mangled corpses, until the very last moment that Jason is bearing down on Trish in her own home, after having chased her through the woods in between. It also packs in great jump scares, with Jason casually tossing bodies through picture windows, and crashing through doors and walls like a homicidal Kool-Aid Man. No matter where Trish hides, Jason is right behind her, bursting into frame abruptly and violently. It’s a great sequence, and it’s capped off with a memorable ending worthy of the original’s reveal of Mrs. Vorhees. Tommy arrives just in the nick of time, disguised as a young Jason, and is able to distract and confuse the killer long enough for his sister to get the drop on Jason and knock his mask off, before Tommy jumps on him, hacking away with a machete at Jason’s prone, seemingly lifeless body. It’s a thrilling ending to the series’ most exciting sequel.

I think it likely goes without saying that The Final Chapter is my favorite of the Friday the 13^th sequels. I think I probably even prefer it to the original. It can stand alone as a horror movie, without resting on the laurels of its franchise affiliation. It takes the tried and true formula of the rest of the series, and genre overall, and fleshes it out with slightly more interesting characters and a bit more depth than most of the rest of its ilk. Besides featuring Corey Feldman in a pre-fame role, the film also features a young Crispin Glover in a supporting role, and those casting choices make it obvious that there was some attempt made to make this a higher quality of movie than should probably be expected of a third sequel to a slasher rip off. It all works pretty well, however, and the end result is a totally enjoyable, mildly rewatchable horror movie. The series may have been better off truly letting this be the final chapter, but there were many, many subpar sequels to come. As a result, the Friday the 13^th brand has probably become somewhat watered down, but The Final Chapter is well worth another look for its attempts to give the series a much-needed breath of fresh air, while still remaining true to the core dynamics of the franchise. It and the original are likely the only ones that I can recommend someone who isn’t already a fan of the series taking the time to check out today.

Friday the 13th Part III

July 15, 2018July 4, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Friday the 13^th Part III (1982)

Dir. Steve Miner

Written by: Martin Kitrosser & Carol Watson

Starring: Dana Kimmell, Larry Zerner, Richard Brooker

The second sequel to Friday the 13^th is quite possibly the worst of the five films in the series that I own, and it is likely in the running for one of the worst entries in the franchise, in general. Friday the 13^th Part III is another tired rehash of the territory trod in the first two films, with another group of relatively anonymous young people arriving at Crystal Lake to serve as quarry for a rampaging Jason. Though director Steve Miner attempted to modernize and reinvigorate the series with his second stint as director, particularly through the use of new 3D film technology, Part III simply hasn’t aged well and it doesn’t hold up favorably to the rest of the early films in the series. It is notable for a couple of additions to the series’ canon, and for being the first ever 3D film to receive a wide theatrical release, but aside from that, it’s a largely forgettable movie.

Part III is a direct sequel to Part 2, beginning with a wounded Jason Vorhees (Brooker) arriving at a rural convenience store in search of clothing and shelter. Jason quickly kills off the couple who owns the store and seeks refuge in a nearby abandoned house on Crystal Lake. At the same time, Chris (Kimmell) and her friends are on their way to a weekend getaway at the lake. Unbeknownst to the group of friends, however, they are in for a less than relaxing time on their vacation. Chris’s family lake house just happens to be the same one that Jason has chosen as his new home, and when the friends arrive there, he starts to his usual business of dismembering young people. Along the way, two of Chris’s friends, Shelly (Zerner) and Vera (Catherine Parks), run afoul of some bikers, who initially seem to be a bigger threat to their wellbeing than the homicidal maniac hiding in the barn, but Jason quickly proves himself to be the apex predator in this ecosystem. The movie unfolds predictably until only Chris is left to confront Jason. She manages to get the best of Jason, hanging him from a beam in the barn, before burying an ax in his forehead, but like Alice and Ginny before her, Chris is left deeply traumatized by her ordeal.

While Miner goes to great lengths in Part III to change the series’ tone and visual aesthetic, the narrative and plot structure of the film remain largely unchanged from the first two entries in the series. The embrace of 3D technology is an admirable attempt to revolutionize the style of the slasher genre, and I have to imagine that it likely made some of the film’s many kill scenes that much more intense and satisfying for audiences at the time, but while watching the movie on home video over thirty years after its initial release the 3D doesn’t have the same sort of effect. Rather than adding vitality to the horror, the effects simply look dated and cheesy. The filmmakers’ insistence on including 3D in such a prevalent role, but also introducing the effects in largely hamfisted ways, leads to an overall watering down effect, and, for modern viewers, draws attention to the effects in a negative way. The bad effects do add a camp factor to the film, however, and they pair nicely with one of its only silver linings: Miner’s decision to introduce a lighter, more humorous tone to this sequel. It seems likely that he knows that even with the addition of the 3D gimmick, audiences couldn’t take another paint-by-numbers Friday the 13^th sequel seriously so he decided to try to include elements of camp and humor to the film, to mixed effect.

One of the biggest problems with trying to add an element of silliness to the proceedings in Part III is that the cast is simply not talented enough to pull off even the most broad comedy. Zerner is ostensibly supposed to be the funny guy, but most of his jokes simply revolve around the idea that he’s ugly and a loser. He’s a practical joker, sure, but these attempts at humor make the character more annoying rather than really funny. Ditto for Chuck (David Katims) and Chili (Rachel Howard), Chris’s two stoner friends, who never rise above a C-level Cheech and Chong impression before they’re summarily dispatched by Jason. Even though the attempts at humor largely fall flat, I have to commend Miner and the screenwriters for trying to change the tone of this film from the first two in the franchise, because had they tried to play it straight and really attempt some scares, the end result would have been an even bigger disaster. One of the only things making the film watchable for me is the fact that it seems like all of the cast and crew know that they’re making a terrible movie and they decide to have a bit of fun with it.

I can’t really endorse watching Friday the 13^th Part III today, but I do wonder what it would be like to watch the movie in a movie theater in 1982. It still would have been a pretty objectively terrible movie, I’m sure, but would some of its campy charm have taken hold seeing the effects as they were meant to be seen? If so, I could probably see myself viewing this as a superior sequel to Part 2, simply because it doesn’t require the narrative gymnastics that that film requires in relation to its predecessor, and because both films feature fairly uninspired performances, predictable plots, and a plethora of gory kills. They’re essentially the same movie, but Part III aims to broaden its appeal by introducing actual attempts at humor, and seen in the proper context, I’m sure that its effects were decently impressive for their time. Plus Part III has the added bonus of being the film in which Jason receives his trademark hockey mask, a souvenir taken from a freshly killed Shelly. That moment alone gives it a bit more cred with fans of the series, but still I can only judge Part III based on the copy of it that I own and am most familiar with, and without the added benefit of being presented in its proper 3D format, the movie isn’t a success for me.

Friday the 13th Pt. 2

July 8, 2018July 4, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Friday the 13^th Part 2 (1981)

Dir. Steve Miner

Written by: Ron Kurz (based on characters created by Victor Miller)

Starring: Amy Steel, John Furey, Warrington Gillette/Steve Dash

The first sequel in the Friday the 13^th series marks a decision on the part of the series’ creators to eschew their original plans of making an anthology horror film series and to double down on tales of psycho killer Jason Vorhees hunting lustful teens in the remote woods of New Jersey. Predating the eventual sequels to earlier slashers Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as well as the entire run of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13^th Part 2 marks the first movie, that I know of, to introduce the trope of the immortal or invulnerable slasher. The ending of Halloween hints at Michael Meyers’s indestructability, but this sequel is the first that brings us a killer who was, ostensibly, killed off in the first film, in this case as a child, no less. Other than that minor innovation, the film otherwise sticks to the basic slasher template, and provides a handful of satisfying kills, but few real scares. It hews closely to the plot and pacing of the original, and though it’s the first film in the series to feature an adult Jason, it fails to really break any new ground or push the series forward in a meaningful way.

The sequel begins shortly after the original Friday the 13^th left off, with that film’s heroine, Alice (Adrienne King), still haunted by nightmares of her ordeal at Camp Crystal Lake and of the undead boy, Jason, who she dreamt emerged from the lake at the film’s end to drag her to her death. It turns out that her fears are warranted, as a fully-grown Jason (Gillette/Dash) has stalked her to her home and the film’s first scene culminates with him avenging his mother’s death at the hands of Alice in Friday the 13^th. From there, the film flashes forward five years and the audience is introduced to a new group of camp counselors who are attending a counselor training program led by Paul (Furey) at a camp adjacent to Camp Crystal Lake. These counselors are young, horny, and stupid, with few distinguishing character traits, much like the group of counselors in the original. As such, it isn’t particularly shocking or emotionally devastating when Jason descends upon the camp, skewering and slashing counselors right and left. Eventually, Paul’s girlfriend Ginny (Steel) emerges as a final girl, ready to do battle with Jason. She discovers a hut in the woods where Jason has apparently been hiding out for years, building a shrine to his dead mother with her severed head and articles of her clothing. Ginny uses these to imitate Mrs. Vorhees, tricking Jason into letting his guard down so that she can attack him, wounding him enough to make her escape. Ultimately, Ginny makes it out alive, but, like Alice, she is robbed of her sanity and sense of security.

Aside from the first appearance of a mature Jason as the film’s killer, Friday the 13^th Part 2 doesn’t offer much variation from the template established by the original film. This sequel exists solely as a cash-in on the popularity of the original film, and it isn’t surprising that most of the creative team behind the original opted not to participate in the series moving forward. Some of the movie’s kills stand out, and the body count is escalated, but there is little innovation or evolution in this entry in the series. In fact, Part 2’s narrative so severely retcons the original’s narrative to facilitate its own existence that it has been widely lampooned by both fans and creatives involved in the series’ initial creation. If, as this sequel posits, Jason had been alive the entire time, hiding out in a hut by Crystal Lake, why didn’t he simply reunite with his mother at some point? And, short of that, how did he survive alone in the woods for nearly three decades without being spotted by some camper, hunter, or other person? I don’t always look for strong narrative continuity in slasher films, particularly in hastily thrown together sequels, but this level of narrative implausibility is really hard to look past. Not only does it not further the Friday the 13^th canon, it severely disrupts it, opening up the rest of the series to an escalating chain of narrative disruptions and flimsy excuses to return the infamous Crystal Lake killer from the dead. The film gains points for being the first to introduce Jason, an iconic horror figure who has become larger that the franchise itself, but it’s hard for me not to wonder what the creative brain trust behind the original film could have done together if the series had moved in the originally intended direction and abandoned the Crystal Lake setting altogether in favor of a new tale of terror. As it stands, however, Part 2 moved the film in a direction that would see it largely recreating the same scenario over and over again with slight variations on the setting.

There isn’t much else to say about the film. Its cast of characters is largely indistinguishable, even more so than in the original, serving only as fodder for Jason’s homicidal rampage. Characters stand out for a few physical traits, perhaps, such as one counselor who is confined to a wheelchair, and another who is obviously cast as the camp clown, but they’re otherwise simply bowling pins set up to be knocked down in, admittedly, entertaining and clever ways by Jason and his array of sharp and pointy objects. The dialogue and performances in the film are laughable, as should be expected for a slasher of its type. Overall, this sequel has the feeling of being scraped together quickly to cash in on the success of its predecessor and to establish the long term viability of a franchise centered on the character of Jason Vorhees. In those respects, it’s a film that is successful. It pays some fealty to the original with its extra-long precredit sequence involving Jason returning to murder the heroine from the first film, and then splits off on a new, if nonsensical, parallel track from which the ensuing sequels would spring. For better or for worse, Friday the 13^th Part 2 established the now familiar paradigm in slasher franchises that the killer can be brought back from the dead for any reason or no reason at all, as long as audiences seem willing to plunk down their hard-earned cash at the cinema box office. It certainly isn’t the worst film in the franchise, but it doesn’t hold up favorably to the original for me, simply because it hews so closely to the structure and plot of that film. It gains a few points for introducing Jason, albeit without his iconic hockey mask, but it’s largely too redundant of a movie for me to want to give it much time or attention. The original packs a similar amount of scares and has an air of novelty about it, and Jason would be given better films to terrorize later in the series, so despite its importance in changing the direction of the franchise, Part 2 feels largely extraneous to me.

Friday the 13th

July 1, 2018June 29, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Friday the 13^th (1980)

Dir. Sean S. Cunningham

Written by: Victor Miller

Starring: Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby III

During the month of July, I will be writing exclusively about the Friday the 13^th movie franchise. The series is a classic of the slasher genre, and during my teens, I harbored a pretty healthy obsession with all things horror, so naturally I started collecting DVDs from the series. I currently own the first five movies in the franchise, and, fortuitously, July has five Sundays, so this will be the official Friday the 13^th month on my site. Some of these posts might be a little shorter than my normal review because, to be honest, these movies can get a bit repetitive as the series goes on, but I’ll try to keep it interesting and look into what makes each of these movies work (or not, as the case may be) both as a film and within the confines of their own micro-genre. There’s no better place to start than at the very beginning with the first visit to Camp Crystal Lake, and the movie that launched the most financially successful horror franchise of all time.

The original Friday the 13^th begins with the re-opening of Camp Crystal Lake, in New Jersey, after some twenty years of dormancy. The camp was shuttered after some negligent camp counselors let a young camper, Jason, drown in the lake. However, a new group of counselors arrives at the campground, ready to fix it up and reopen the camp for the summer, despite the warnings of the townsfolk about the campground, which they refer to as “Camp Blood,” being cursed. In the midst of a terrible storm, the counselors are separated as a killer stalks through the woods. In predictable fashion, the unheeded warnings prove to be warranted, and counselors start disappearing one after another as it becomes apparent that the group is not alone at Crystal Lake.

Though it was clearly inspired by earlier slashers like Halloween, Friday the 13^th is largely responsible for setting the genre template for the modern slasher film. It upped the ante on blood and gore, and moved the setting from the suburbs to a remote, rural campground, heightening the sense of fear and isolation in the movie. Though all of its generic tropes have become rote by now, they must have seemed fresh and shocking when the film was released in 1980, causing audiences to flock to the movie which became a run-away box office success. The film’s popularity might be largely due to the fact that it alters the established slasher template enough to seem novel at the time, replacing the creeping dread of Last House on the Left with a more episodic, start and stop type of horror, with kills popping up at random and causing a roller coaster type of thrill effect on the audience. The film also eschews some of the more disturbing aspects of hardcore horror films that preceded it like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, making for a more accessible and easier to digest horror movie experience. While it’s certainly gruesome, Friday the 13^th feels more like escapism than a broadcast from a doomed and sickening society, which early Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper films certainly resemble. Cunningham is more intent on causing jump scares than creating a world that’s skin-crawlingly disturbing, and the end result is a horror film that feels lighter, though no less vital or important, than its contemporaries.

Friday the 13^th is an altogether predictable movie. From the outset, the audience knows that the warnings from the townsfolk ought to be heeded by the counselors, and they also know that the entire film is predicated on the counselors not heeding those warnings and continuing to be typical sex-crazed teens. Like most slashers, Friday the 13^th equates sex and death, in most cases quite explicitly, with the counselors being murdered either during, or right after performing, a sex act. I think this inherent conservatism in slashers is something that’s always interested me, the thinking that young people should be punished (with death) for being sexually explorative. I’m not sure why, as I strongly believe that people have an inherent right to freedom of sexual expression provided that they’re acting responsibly and consensually, but I’ve always been curious about the equivalence of sex and murder in horror movies. Often, the killers in these films as viewed as someone whose sexual deviance or impropriety has driven them to kill, or they’re shown as being so psychosexually repressed that they are driven to seek out victims who they feel are acting out urges that they are unwilling to claim and act upon, so they choose to pass lethal judgment on these victims. Friday the 13^th carries on this tradition, established in earlier horror films, and helps it to cement its place as a hardwired genre trope.

The one thing that is relatively untraditional about the original Friday the 13^th is that it features a female killer. The killer is never seen throughout the early parts of the film, instead her presence is implied through point-of-view shots and the film’s now iconic score. When the killer is finally revealed, it’s not the familiar hockey mask-sporting Jason, but instead his mother, played by Betsy Palmer. Mrs. Vorhees was a cook at Camp Crystal Lake, and, as she explains to Alice (King), the last surviving counselor, her son, Jason, was the young boy who drowned in the lake, prompting the camp to close. It dawns on Alice that she is in the presence of the person who murdered her friends, and she takes off, providing one final, thrilling chase scene. The usage of a female killer, though not entirely novel at the time, certainly provides for an unexpected twist at the film’s end. Up to this point, all signs had pointed to some sort of supernatural explanation for the return of the drowned Jason, but Mrs. Vorhees’s is an earthbound entity with a practical reason to want to seek her revenge. I can remember finally getting to see the original movie in the franchise and being shocked that there was no Jason. I had only seen a handful of the later sequels on television, and I just assumed that the killer would show up in his familiar hockey mask, wielding a machete, and so I was rather taken aback when there was little mention of Jason at all. This genuine surprise gives the film a bit of depth that many of its sequels lack and ups its rewatchability quotient.

The original Friday the 13^th isn’t the high water mark of quality for the series, nor is it the highest grossing entry in the franchise, but it was unique and successful enough to spawn its incredible lineage. The franchise was originally conceived of as a series of anthology films, but the original’s epilogue, in which an exhausted Alice falls asleep in a canoe drifting out to middle of Camp Crystal Lake after decapitating Mrs. Vorhees, only to be roused by a pale, bloated young Jason emerging from the depths of the lake to try and drag her to her death, practically demanded that a sequel centering on the undead Jason be released. These sequels would vary wildly in quality, as I’ll discuss in the weeks to come, but they all managed to be relatively safe box-office bets until the series began to run out of steam in the early 1990s. For a while, though, Friday the 13^th was a reliable and bankable commodity at the box office, and that all started with the original slasher back in 1980.

The Evil Dead

April 15, 2018April 15, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

The Evil Dead (1981)

Dir. Sam Raimi

Written by: Sam Raimi

Starring: Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Betsy Baker

From the age of 15 until I was about 20, I was totally obsessed with horror movies. I collected all of the modern classics, from Nightmare on Elm Street to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Dawn of the Dead, I loved all kinds of different varieties of horror from the 1970s and 1980s. I started to get out of the genre during the early 2000s when theaters started filling up with half-boiled remakes of classic horror films and ham-fisted adaptations of Japanese ghost stories. Eventually, I even parted ways with many of the horror discs in my collection, losing them or allowing them to get mixed in with the collections of various different roommates in college. I just wasn’t watching scary movies much anymore, and even though I still liked to see the occasional horror movie, there were very few that I felt were worth regular revisits. Of course, there are a handful of horror movies that I haven’t ever been able to let go of, and The Evil Dead ranks highly on that list. It’s an influential classic in the genre and it played an important role in my youthful desire to be a filmmaker, with its low budget, DIY aesthetic encouraging me to try my hand at making my own movies.

The Evil Dead finds Ash (Campbell), and his group of college friends setting off for a camping weekend at a secluded cabin in rural Tennessee. Their journey to the cabin is beset by portentous omens of the danger that they are walking into, but the real terror occurs when they arrive at the cabin and discover a curious book and a recording left by the cabin’s previous occupant, an archaeologist. The book, which is bound in human flesh, is revealed to be the Sumerian Book of the Dead, containing incantations and funeral rites, some of which have been recorded to the tape. When Ash and his friends play the tape, the recited incantations awaken an ancient evil in the forest. Though they are all disturbed by the tapes, the group tries to settle down for the night, but their restfulness is interrupted when Ash’s sister, Cheryl (Sandweiss), is possessed by a demonic entity from the woods, forcing the rest of the group to lock her up in the cellar. One by one, the rest of Ash’s friends begin to turn, and he is forced to fight them off, dismembering and disemboweling them in an increasingly gruesome fashion. Ash is finally able to destroy the Book of the Dead, which causes Cheryl and his friend Scott (Hal Delrich), both under the influence of the demons, to spontaneously decompose into piles of gore and viscera, but as Ash finds out when he limps out of the cabin to greet the rising Sun, the supernatural danger is far from over.

It would be tough to overestimate the impact seeing a movie like The Evil Dead had on me as a young teen. It was more raw, grittier than most of the horror movies I was used to seeing, even the slasher movies that I really liked. The low budget style and the tiny cast started gears turning in my head in the same way that they did when I first saw Clerks. It dawned on me that this was a popular movie, a classic even, and it had been made by a group of amateurs. I knew Bruce Campbell already, and though I didn’t know it at the time, I had already been introduced to Sam Raimi, as he had since graduated to bigger, more mainstream projects, including Spiderman, but seeing their origins as filmmakers was really inspiring to me. While Clerks taught me that movies don’t have to be big and flashy to make an impact, watching The Evil Dead taught me that you can make a truly effective horror movie on a shoestring budget with just a dedicated crew, a little ingenuity, and a lot of Karo syrup and food coloring to make fake blood. The effects in the movie certainly look dated now, but for a young person whose mind was already open to the possibilities of independent cinema, they were ingenious. Though I rarely ever put any of the knowledge into practice, I started reading up on DIY practical effects while I was in high school, hoping to have the opportunity to use them on my own feature film debut one day. Obviously, that day never came, but just because I didn’t follow through on my dreams of becoming an independent filmmaker doesn’t lessen the influence that several of the touchstones of independent cinema of the 1980s and 1990s have had on my taste in art, and on my outlook on life, as a whole.

One of the things that I found most refreshing about The Evil Dead when compared to studio slasher films like Friday the 13^th is that the fact that the filming process was not only a labor of love, but a grueling endurance test, is palpable in every frame of the movie. It’s clear that the cast members, who often doubled as erstwhile crew members, care about getting this film made despite the arduous circumstances they often found themselves in. I’ve since read about the difficult shoot that found the cast and crew subjected to freezing temperatures, physical injury, and a grueling shooting schedule, and I think that knowing the difficulty that went into creating this piece of art makes it even more special to me. Even though its premise is obviously absurd, as are most horror movies’, The Evil Dead feels more real than a lot of the slicker, more highly polished gore fests of the period. It shares this grittiness with one of my favorite horror movies of all time, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, another film in which the scares are made all the more effective by the clear duress that the actors had to endure.

Even today, in spite of all of the technological advances that have been made since its release, The Evil Dead retains its power to shock and horrify. I almost never find supernatural horror of this type to be truly scary, but The Evil Dead is a brutal and effective movie. The ramshackle cabin and its remote setting are scary enough without the threat of demonic possession, but Raimi further sets the mood with long, snaking, point-of-view tracking shots that alert the audience to an otherworldly presence living in the woods. He takes his time in the early parts of the film, creating tension in the audience. He allows for a few cheap scares to lighten the mood early on, but continues to use the location and his arsenal of cinematic tricks to set an ominous and eerie mood before the film erupts into full on horror. When it does take its sharp turn, after the demons in the woods have been released by Scott and Ash playing the archeologist’s recording, Raimi doesn’t relent until the film’s end, presenting the audience with classic scene after classic scene of terror, violence, and extreme gore. The Evil Dead doesn’t pull any punches, featuring graphic scenes of decapitation, dismemberment, and torture which result in buckets and buckets of fake blood that coats the actors, the sets, and even the camera lens. This extreme violence not only serves to escalate the film’s horror quotient, it also helped the film gain a great deal of notoriety as it was famously given an NC-17 rating upon its initial release, and was banned in several countries for its graphic, disturbing content.

Though it likely seems tame by the standards of today’s brutal horror franchises like Hostel and Saw, there’s no denying the impact that The Evil Dead must have had upon its arrival on screens in 1981. The found footage aesthetic that the film brushes up against was used by other notorious films of the period such as Cannibal Holocaust, and likely influenced the new swath of found footage horror films that has been popular recently, although I haven’t seen many of them to verify that influence. The film was popular and influential enough to spark Raimi’s ascent as a filmmaker, and to lead to a media franchise revolving around Ash and his battles against the forces of evil. It’s also a testament to the impact that a dedicated, visionary filmmaker and crew can make with their art in spite of technical or financial limitations. Some people prefer the slightly more polished sequel, which is something of a rehash of the original film with a bit more humor, but I have to stick with my preference for the original. The Evil Dead sets the blueprint for the campy, low budget, ultraviolent, schlocky horror film of the 1980s. It’s a genre classic and a must-see for any fans of horror movies.

Eraserhead

March 25, 2018March 25, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Eraserhead (1977)

Dir. David Lynch

Written by: David Lynch

Starring: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart

Finally getting to write about Eraserhead, something that I’ve avoided ever doing despite enjoying the film for the last 15-odd years, should be a liberating experience, but it feels very daunting at the same time. It’s a film that I know well, having watched it over a dozen times since first experiencing it in my late teens via a little red Netflix envelope, but it’s a film that still vexes me in many ways. It’s the auspicious debut of my favorite filmmaker, and a dark indicator of the themes and content that would make up his ensuing output. Lynch’s filmography is celebrated, but also troubling, with his films asking audiences to bear witness to dark urges that exist buried deep within themselves. His films are designed to trigger deep-seeded anxieties and fears that rest at the core of the human experience. Eraserhead begins this trend with its look at the anxieties surrounding bringing new life into a flawed, disturbing world. Though it’s presented in an exceedingly strange package, at its core, Eraserhead is a look at the struggles of an everyman trying to get by in a world that is designed to sap him of his energy and his will to live. It took me a long time, and many, many repeated viewings to come to some sort of understanding of this film, but it was a process that was richly rewarding, and one which helped to open up my mind to new analyses of the films of my favorite director.

I wasn’t really ready for Eraserhead when I was 19 and I first saw the movie. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, because I did enjoy the movie, and I thought that it was delightfully weird and esoteric, but I didn’t have any sort of framework with which to really understand it. I had seen visually experimental, non-narrative films in college, but those didn’t seem to apply here. Eraserhead was using some of the tools of experimental cinema in a symbolic and narrative way that I had trouble reconciling. Even in reference to the other David Lynch films that I had seen, Eraserhead was something totally foreign and new. In Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr., I recognized the world that Lynch was depicting as somewhat similar to my own; even if I did find Mulholland Dr. narratively inscrutable, I still felt that I had some foothold into its world. Eraserhead, on the other hand, felt hermetically sealed, existing in a separate and decidedly interiorly-focused cinematic space, one that I could observe but not enter into in any meaningful way. The film’s bleak industrial-noir setting felt at first familiar, but it gave way to the unfamiliarity of tiny, misshapen chickens that ooze black inky liquid, hellish factories that turn men’s heads into pencil erasers, and, of course, one monstrous and insatiable infant. This was uncharted cinematic territory. Trying to cobble together meaning out of the film’s disparate and confusing imagery seemed impossible, but I was still drawn to the film. By the end of my first viewing of Eraserhead, I wasn’t sure exactly what I had watched, but I knew that I wanted more of it.

I’ve encountered countless films in my life that I’ve held up as seminal or formative in some way, and I encountered many of those for the first time in my late teens and early twenties, as my cinematic world was rapidly being expanded, and my understanding of the medium was growing by the day. Eraserhead found itself firmly in that group of highly meaningful films. Though I didn’t screen Eraserhead again for two years, it lingered around the periphery of my consciousness, its iconic images popping up from time to time. I expanded my viewership of Lynch’s films, but I still wasn’t able to find a direct line into the heart of Eraserhead through an auterist critical approach, which was often my preferred critical approach to films at the time. Even within this singularly weird filmography, Eraserhead stood as an outlier, defiantly experimental, refusing codification by my young brain. I read critical analyses of the film, which attempted to parse out its dense symbolism and orient it within the larger context of Lynch’s body of work, but still Eraserhead remained a mystery. Eventually, I just chalked up my lack of ability to come to complete grasps with the film to the mark of Lynch’s true artistic genius, and my own woeful shortcomings in that department.

While I’m certainly still not a genius on the level of any of the filmmakers I’ve been writing about for this project, much less on the level of a visionary like Lynch, I do think that I’ve come to a much more comfortable place of understanding with regards to Eraserhead. Clearly, Lynch is using the film to help work out some of his anxieties about his newfound status as a father, but it’s also obvious to Lynch fans that Eraserhead sets the table for all of the films and media projects that would come later. The film’s chaotic, densely-layered soundtrack points forward to Lynch’s continued sonic experimentation. He is known as a master of film sound, and that use of sound as a mood setting and narrative device is very much on display in Eraserhead. The film’s soundtrack swells with an omnipresent whooshing, intermittently interrupted by industrial banging and cranking. The way Lynch records the plaintive cries of Henry’s monstrous baby results in an unnerving caterwaul that stops far short of invoking sympathy in the audience.

Thematically, Eraserhead finds Lynch already mining the source material for his later films. Paranoia, anxiety, and voyeurism all factor heavily into Eraserhead, and Lynch will return to these ideas more explicitly in films like Blue Velvet and Lost Highway. Eraserhead is also one of Lynch’s most complete explorations of a dream space, as much of the film could be interpreted as an extended dream triggered by Henry’s fear of his impending fatherhood. Even if you eschew that reading, the film contains several notable scenes that explore Henry’s interior fantasies, including his obsession with the tiny woman who lives in the radiator, and the nightmare that gives the film its title, in which Henry’s head is stolen and sold to a factory where it is ground down to make pencil erasers. Dreams are privileged sources of symbolism and truth in Lynch’s work, and he often attempts to explore the liminal space between dreaming and the waking world, in which that truth is most accessible. We see dreamlike sequences in all of Lynch’s media, but Eraserhead is a bold film that spends nearly all of its time locked into its protagonist’s interiority.

I’ve neglected the plot synopsis that I typically write for each film because Eraserhead’s narrative can be summed up in just a sentence or two. Henry (Nance) is informed by Mary (Stewart) that she has given birth to his child, though she isn’t sure that their offspring is a child at all. The couple marry and take the baby back to Henry’s one room apartment, where it is revealed to be a monstrous lizard creature, without arms or legs, that cries incessantly. Mary can’t handle the crying and she leaves Henry alone, to go insane as he tries to care for a creature that he can’t understand or relate to. The film is narratively straight forward and simple, though its surface weirdness might obfuscate this, but it is incredibly symbolically dense. Henry is trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare and the only logic that can prevail is the logic of the dream, therefore we are presented with a stream of imagery that makes no narrative sense, but carries deep symbolic truth. Henry’s responses when faced with the responsibility of caring for his child are all in some way attempts to infantilize himself. He dreams of the lady in the radiator, which represents a womblike space, and when he finally connects with his beautiful neighbor (Judith Roberts), they have sex in, and eventually submerge themselves in, a pool of milk. Henry’s apartment is strangely symbolic itself, with mounds of dirt on his furniture, many of which are sprouting small trees or shrubs. The apartment should seem like a productive, organic, space, but instead these strange dirt piles give the room a fetid and decaying feeling. Of course the most obvious symbolic element in Eraserhead is the baby itself, which both Henry and Mary view as a monstrous Other. The baby is an unwanted imposition in their lives, and, as such, they view it in a way that allows them to disassociate themselves with their offspring. This disassociation leads to Mary’s abandonment of the child and Henry’s ultimate infanticide/mercy killing. These are just a few of the more obvious symbolic signifiers in Eraserhead, but the film is rich with impressionistic dream sequences, non-sequitur dialogue, and other-worldly imagery, which allow for a richness of unique interpretations of the film.

This fluidity of meaning is one of the things that I think initially drew me to Eraserhead, and that has kept me coming back to the film as frequently as I do. Although I’ve settled on my own interpretation of the film, I still find myself challenged by it with each subsequent screening, and I often find myself considering it in a new context, based on my own changing life experiences or on my changing relationship to the film and to related media. Watching Eraserhead in 2018 with the viewing experience of Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return fresh in my mind was a totally different experience than any other time I’ve seen the film. For me, the newest season of Twin Peaks functions as Lynch’s magnum opus. It contains throughlines and references to Lynch’s earlier films and serves to bring all of his disparate thematic and aesthetic concerns together in one dense, strange viewing experience. I felt several affinities between Lynch’s first feature and what I believe will be his final visual media project, and my recent screening of Eraserhead only strengthened those connections for me.

I found a thematic kinship between Henry’s abandonment by Mary and subsequent retreat from adult responsibility and Audrey Horne’s (Sherilyn Fenn) curious appearances in The Return. Though the narrative circumstances in each case are quite different, something about the dreaminess and illogical, circular dialogue used in both Eraserhead and in Audrey’s scenes with her husband Charlie felt very similar. Both characters are being neglected and emotionally abused by people close to them, though Audrey’s victimhood seems more obviously apparent, while Henry seems to be in a more mutually dysfunctional relationship where he, too, adds to Mary’s mental anguish. Both characters are infantilized, with Charlie’s gaslighting of Audrey keeping her in a subservient and dependent role, and Henry’s chosen retreat away from responsibility and into the safety of a childlike interior fantasy world. In the end, both characters are also last seen in a blindingly white space. Eraserhead has a superficially happy ending, with Henry finally uniting with the Lady in the Radiator (Laurel Near), whose earlier song reminded the audience that “in Heaven, everything is fine,” indicating that Henry has killed himself after killing the baby. This marks the furthest expression of Henry’s retreat, as his suicide can be read as a rejection of all of life’s responsibilities.

In The Return, Lynch reverses this dynamic to some extent with Audrey’s final scene, in which she reprises her iconic dance from Twin Peaks. Audrey’s dance is interrupted by a fight breaking out and she rushes towards Charlie, who is sitting at the bar, imploring him to get her out of there. There is a brief crackle of electricity, and Audrey appears in a starkly white room, staring at her face, sans makeup, in a vanity mirror. She, and the audience, are stricken by this jarring change of scenery, and it throws into question the handful of scenes in which Audrey has appeared thus far in The Return. This being Twin Peaks, the most operative reading of the scene is that there are two Audrey’s, and we are discovering that the “real” Audrey has been trapped in a Lodge all along. However, there is some indication to support a reading that Audrey’s interactions with Charlie may have been a dream or a vision that she had, before waking up, confused, in the white room, which appears not dissimilar to a mental hospital. Though there is very little of the white space around Audrey shown, she appears to be wearing a white hospital gown, and the sheer blankness of the space indicates a sterile, clinical setting. This reading, when coupled with the ending of Eraserhead, provides for a very bleak vision, indeed. Audrey dreams of a sad and dysfunctional life, from which she is ripped during her one moment of ecstasy performing her dance, while living a reality that may be even more maddening. Henry’s narrative begins with an unhappy reality from which he retreats into a dream that is by turns menacing and seductive, ultimately succumbing to the temptation to live in the dream by taking his own life and murdering his child. For these characters there isn’t any easy way out, and the few reveries they get to experience are symbolically and explicitly linked to madness and death.

Eraserhead is a landmark film, a bench mark and a step forward for modern surrealist filmmaking. While Bunuel and Jodorowsky were making films that set their aims on societal structures such as religion and class through an experimental and surrealist viewpoint, Lynch sought to examine the more personal territory of the human mind and emotion. He had trouble getting financing for the film and it took over five years to complete, as the production was plagued with complications. When Eraserhead finally arrived, it was a film that was seen as a visionary work by some and a confounding mess by many, although its stature in film history has certainly appreciated over time to the point that it is almost universally regarded as a classic. I have come to love the film for what it represents as the true foundational text in my favorite filmmaker’s body of work, as well as for the singular viewing experience that Eraserhead provides. There’s not a film that I can think of that is quite like it, and it is a film that two people can walk away from with markedly different opinions about and experiences of, and I really like that. More than many of the movies that I’ve written about, Eraserhead isn’t for everyone, but for the initiated it’s a rewarding treasure of a cinematic experience, with iconic visual imagery, rich symbolic nuance, and a terrifyingly original vision.

The Devil’s Backbone

December 10, 2017December 10, 2017 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

The Devil’s Backbone (2001)

Dir. Guillermo del Toro

Written by: Guillermo del Toro, Antonio Trashorras, David Muñoz

Starring: Fernando Tielve, Federico Luppi, Eduardo Noriega, Marisa Paredes, Iñigo Garcés

I spent a long, long time thinking about The Devil’s Backbone after the first time I saw it when I was in college. That was probably 2006, shortly after director Guillermo del Toro had really broken through to the mainstream with the release of the acclaimed fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth. I was taken with that picture, and its fantastical, allegorical approach to presenting the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, and I was eager to seek out other work from del Toro. I had already seen Hellboy (although I didn’t realize until years later that it had been directed by del Toro), but The Devil’s Backbone was the first Spanish language film of his that I discovered. I was instantly taken by this sad ghost story, and instantly recognized it as a companion film to the later Pan’s Labyrinth. The film takes a similar approach to exploring the Spanish Civil War, utilizing elements of fantasy and horror to allegorically depict the horrors of life under the threat of Fascism for both children and adults, alike. The film’s beautiful images and sorrowful story stuck with me for years, until I finally decided to purchase it in 2013 during a half price Criterion Collection sale at Barnes & Noble. It isn’t a film that I watch often, but it’s one that I’m very glad to have decided to add to my collection.

Set in the dying days of the Spanish Civil War, with Franco’s forces on the verge of defeating the left-wing Republican forces, The Devil’s Backbone begins with young Carlos (Tielve), a war orphan, being delivered to a secluded orphanage run by Carmen (Paredes) and Dr. Casares (Luppi), who are sympathetic to the Republican cause. Carmen and Casares are hiding a cache of gold, which they are using to help fund the Republican war effort, and, as such, they have gained the attention of the Fascist forces, with the orphanage becoming a target for bombings. An undetonated bomb stands upright in the middle of the orphanage’s courtyard, a stark reminder of the everyday reality of war within which these children are coming of age. Upon his arrival at the orphanage, Carlos is bullied, particularly by Jaime (Garcés), and he is told rumors by the other children of a ghost that haunts the orphanage, whom they call “the one who sighs.” When Carlos proves his bravery by venturing out of the communal sleeping quarters at night, he gains the acceptance of the other boys, but he also witnesses firsthand the existence of the ghost, and the attempts of the orphanage’s groundskeeper, Jacinta (Noriega), to break into a safe and steal the gold cache. Carlos, Jaime, and the other boys realize that the threat to their home is not from the ghost or from the war raging outside their doors, but from the ruthless Jacinta who will stop at nothing to steal the gold, even if it means destroying the orphanage and killing the wards who live there.

Del Toro has publically professed to The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth being his favorites among the films that he has directed. Although I haven’t seen all of his output, I would have to agree. Both films are rich visually and symbolically, weaving thoughtful allegories that feature excellent performances from young actors and established stars alike. While Pan’s Labyrinth may get more attention, as it truly served as del Toro’s breakout, and is widely regarded as one of the best films of the early 21^st century, I think I may prefer its sparser, more haunting predecessor. There is just something about the austere, remote setting of the miserable orphanage and its wards, both living and dead, that stays with me for days and weeks after seeing the film. The film sets its tone immediately. It’s both claustrophobic, as much of the action takes place within the walls of the orphanage, and liberatingly imaginative, as the fantasies of the young boys who live within are allowed to play out in the face of their dire surroundings. The Devil’s Backbone walks this balance between darkness and light throughout, leaving its audience to try to piece together which of the characters are good and which are evil. Initial assumptions about character motivations are often undermined by new information presented later in the film, and several characters are not what they seem. By the film’s final act, when the horrors of violence and death finally invade the orphanage fully in the personage of Jacinta, clear lines are drawn between good and evil, and the true nature of all of the characters is revealed. In a powerful final scene, del Toro presents a symbolically dense critique of evil, in the forms of greed, lust for power, and cruelty, that doubles as a critique on the savagery of war and the brutality of Fascism. Just as in Pan’s Labyrinth, in The Devil’s Backbone it is the human characters who are revealed to be the true monsters, and the human impulses to kill and destroy that are the true evil unleashed on the world.

The Devil’s Backbone is a ghost story, and it’s certainly a horror film, but it is rarely scary. Instead, the film is deeply unsettling and haunting. Del Toro resists the urge to present his ghost, Santi, as a menacing figure, even when he is first introduced. Santi is an orphan who disappeared the night that the bomb fell at the orphanage, and who the adults in the film believe simply ran off, frightened by the bomb. The children all seem to believe that Santi is “the one who sighs,” and though they are frightened of the ghost, he is almost never presented as a true threat. Santi can be seen from the earliest scenes in the film, sadly haunting corners of the frame, watching his former friends at play. He does stalk Carlos, who may be the only boy to actually see the ghost, but he’s hoping to make a connection and reveal the truth of his death. Santi is presented throughout the film as a pitiable figure, in need of help from the film’s living characters to truly be at rest, but there is another ghost that is present within The Devil’s Backbone that is more insidious.

The film’s opening voiceover, spoken by Dr. Casares references ghosts: “What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps? Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time, like a blurred photograph, like an insect trapped in amber.” This quote can be applied to all of the film’s ghosts, including Santi who is condemned to haunt the place of his death, reliving his tragedy and having his trauma frozen in time forever like an insect in amber. But I think that the quote most directly applies to a ghost that exists in the film only textually. The traumatic history of the Spanish Civil War is a ghost that is haunting The Devil’s Backbone, a film which sees del Toro resorting to fantasy to explore and interpret a real historical event. In the film, del Toro is commenting on the Spanish Civil War explicitly, but he is indicting all wars. He depicts the traumatic experience of life during wartime as a ghost which haunts the wards of the orphanage. One young boy has gained the nickname Owl (Javier González Sánchez) because he has become so traumatized he never speaks, only staring with his wide, haunted eyes. The undetonated bomb in the courtyard serves as a ghostly reminder of the war raging outside, but del Toro’s symbolic representations of war throughout the film are more powerful. War is the tragedy that society has doomed itself to repeat time and again. It’s an instant of pain, compounded one million times, and spread throughout the world like a vapor. Those affected by its ravages become ghosts themselves, set adrift in the world, their lifelike appearances belying the death they carry with them.

Political subtext aside, The Devil’s Backbone is a masterful film in all respects. It’s visually stunning, with a vibrant color palette of reds and oranges. The camerawork is subtly complex, with complicated but unassuming tracking shots giving the impression that the camera is following behind and spying on its subjects, always ready to duck behind the nearest corner. I love it when a film manages to mesh form and content so seamlessly. The film’s narrative progresses at a perfect pace, allowing scenes to breathe just before ratcheting up the tension, and the script is complex and twisty without being cliché. Though The Devil’s Backbone does turn on a significant plot twist in its final act, the reveal feels earned. Like the best twists, this one leave the viewer wanting to go back and rewatch, looking for clues, and repeat viewers will certainly be rewarded, as the film is deep with foreshadowing and callbacks. The film’s ending, while not elliptical, is just open enough that a crack of mystery remains. It’s a wonderful puzzle of a film, and it begs to be watched closely and intimately.

The film’s performances are all top notch, which is commendable with so much of the cast being comprised of young, inexperienced actors. Tielve delivers a soulful performance as the young Carlos. His wide eyes speak volumes to the sensitivity that he has to the world around him, but they also mask the determination that he brings to the role in the later scenes in which Carlos has to act decisively to save his friends. Garcés plays Jaime as a typical bully early in the film, pushing Carlos around and trying to maintain a façade of toughness, but by the film’s end he softens his performance to reveal the true Jaime as a frightened young boy burdened with carrying an unspeakable secret. The film’s adult actors all match the caliber of their young costars. Paredes plays Carmen as a steely, determined matriarch. She is the backbone behind Luppi’s softer, gentler patriarch, Casares. The two form a parental binary to the children, both nurturing and disciplinarian, but behind closed doors they enact private passions and acute anxieties. Their characters forge an unsteady partnership throughout the film, but their dedication to the cause of Republicanism and to their charges is unwavering. The two veteran actors imbue their characters with life through gestures and slight expressions, never needing to overact. Across the board, the actors employ a simplistic, naturalistic approach to their roles, and the realism that it brings to a work of fantasy is grounding and makes the film that much more significant.

The more I’ve thought about The Devil’s Backbone over the past few days, the more I’ve come to admire about the film. It’s one that always manages to penetrate and stick with me for a while after a viewing. It’s powerful to see a film that can deftly wrap a political statement inside such a sensitive and truly effective dramatic narrative, and del Toro manages that easily with this film. He uses the film’s sad narrative to evoke emotions as disparate as joy, dread, and empathy, while encouraging his audience to read the film on a cerebral level, as well. It’s a beautiful film brought to life by spirited performances from its cast. The film’s visual storytelling and subtle allusions make for a richly rewarding and deep cinematic experience. If I were to rank the 50 or so films that I’ve written about thus far for this project, The Devil’s Backbone would almost certainly have a place within the top 10. It’s a film that many might overlook in favor of del Toro’s later, more celebrated films, but it is a classic in its own right, and not to be missed.

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12 Monkeys to Zodiac

Horror