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Friday, October 24, 2008The Dunwich Horror Release Year: 1970Country: United States Starring: Sandra Dee, Dean Stockwell, Ed Begley, Lloyd Bochner, Sam Jaffe, Joanne Moore Jordan, Donna Baccala, Talia Shire, Michael Fox, Jason Wingreen, Barboura Morris, Beach Dickerson, Michael Haynes, Toby Russ, Jack Pierce Writers: Curtis Hanson, Henry Rosenbaum, Ronald Silkosky Director: Daniel Haller Cinematographer: Richard C. Glouner Music: Les Baxter Producers: Roger Corman, Jack Bohrer H.P. Lovecraft may not be one of the best writers in the world, but he's certainly one of the most fun to read -- not to mention imitate. For this reason, I got it in my head that it would be a great idea to read The Dunwich Horror aloud to my wife. She not only loves to be scared, but is so committed to the endeavor that she's even on occasion been willing to meet Hollywood remakes of Japanese horror movies halfway. That's a perfect attitude to bring to Lovecraft, in my opinion, because he's an author you really need to be willing to work with. In cracking open one of his stories, you're making an implicit agreement to be scared; otherwise it's just not going to work. Of course, Lovecraft does his part to help you along in that regard, always letting you know exactly how afraid you're supposed to be, even when the object of that fear remains somewhat sketchily defined, and also modeling the desired behavior by populating his stories with characters who launch into paroxysms of terror at the faintest fetid odor. With the combination of my wife's gameness, Lovecraft's semaphore-like emotional cues, and the fact that the mildewed pages of the 1970s paperback edition of Dunwich I'd found gave off a scent that, with a little imagination, could be interpreted as being primordial, we were, as far as I was concerned, all set. However, after five solid pages describing the blighted landscape of Dunwich town, my wife made clear that she wasn't having it, saying something to the effect of, "What is this shit?" All of which is not to discourage you from reading Lovecraft to your own spouse or significant other; but it's certainly important to make sure you've done the proper amount of prep work.     By the way, the old Jove paperback of The Dunwich Horror that I purchased features a cover illustration that is a very literal depiction, based on Lovecraft's description in the story, of Wilbur Whateley in his true form, which looks like the upper half of Golem from Lord of the Rings grafted onto something that looks like a cross between the lower half of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a pineapple, and one of those cat-shaped wall clocks whose eyes move from side to side with the second hand. I imagine that Lovecraft's tendency to devote more words to telling his reader how scared he or she should be than to describing the thing to be feared posed a problem to those filmmakers initially assigned the task of bringing his work to the screen. After all, until the advent of modern J-Horror -- whose sensibility is pretty much right in line with Lovecraft's -- the common wisdom would have been that you were supposed to scare your audience by showing them something scary, rather than by just showing them a bunch of people being scared, or, even worse, showing a bunch of people talking about how potentially scary some vaguely defined thing might be if it it actually existed. Furthermore, such filmmakers might understandably conclude that a film whose every character was in a constant state of near-wordless cowering for no clear reason might quickly forfeit audience interest.     It is this last conviction that might explain the casting choices made in connection with director Daniel Haller's first Lovecraft adaptation for AIP, Die, Monster, Die!. A veteran art director, Haller had also worked in that capacity on AIP's initial Lovecraft outing, The Haunted Palace, directed by Roger Corman. While by no means a close adaptation of its source material, Die, Monster, Die! did an admirable job of achieving Lovecraft's patented mood of mounting dread and creeping, formless horror. The only departure from that -- and it's a radical one -- was the placement of American actor Nick Adams at its center, probably the most un-Lovecraftian protagonist imaginable, who would be much more likely to call the great Cthulu a "jerk" and punch him in the nose than to simply be driven mad by the impossibility of his existence. When it came time for Haller to make his second Lovecraft adaptation, 1970s The Dunwich Horror, he and screenwriter Curtis Hanson chose to add another very un-Lovecraftian element to their quintessentially Lovecraftian tale with the introduction into the mix of a sweaty dose of eroticism. Lovecraft's stories, with all their references to tentacles and other undulating protuberances coming out of things at all angles, were certainly sexual -- if in a repressed/hysterical way -- but they were far from sexy. In fact, judging from the man's writings alone, I'd imagine that any attempt by him to describe any normal type of human sexual congress would be one of the most excruciatingly awkward, squirm-inducing things you could possibly read. If there does not exist somewhere a porn parody written in Lovecraftian prose, or myriad examples of erotic Lovecraft fanfic, then the internet truly has no right to exist. It's not for me to put the effort into finding out, though. Of course, the concept seems less strange when you consider that it was no doubt partly a result of AIP fulfilling their early Seventies mandate to serve up at least some explotational content with every offering. But the whole enterprise rockets back into the realm of the unnamable when you consider that the actors they chose to place at the center of all this heat and steam were Sandra Dee and Dean Stockwell.     The Dunwich Horror was something of a landmark for Sandra Dee, in that the Gidget star was required by its action to spend much of her screen-time writhing and moaning orgasmically on a sacrificial altar while in a state of near undress, and even to treat the audience to a brief flash of her -- possibly body-doubled -- breasts. Of course, Dee was at an unavoidable crossroads in her career by this time. The wholesome, girl-next-door image that had propelled her to stardom in the early sixties was now not only hopelessly out of sync with the times, but also impossible to maintain now that she had undergone a very public divorce from her husband Bobby Darin. Given these factors, that she would slam her knockers out in an AIP picture was probably as inevitable as it was surprising. On the other hand, Dean Stockwell's transition from sweet-faced to unsavory had been accomplished long before he arrived on the Dunwich set, with any memories of the adorable child star he used to be forever tainted by roles such as that of the effeminate child murderer in 1959's Compulsion. To say that Stockwell comes off as a "little" creepy in The Dunwich Horror would be the Mona Lisa of understatement. From the nervous sidelong glances, to the unwavering hushed monotone, the speech riddled with odd pregnant pauses, and the intent, wild-eyed staring, his performance is, in fact, the whole creepiness package, without one unsettling tick left behind. Of course, given he was charged with portraying a character who, in the original story, was depicted as being a goat-like, preternaturally intelligent, prepubescent eight foot giant who conceals beneath his garments a body that is part T. Rex , part pineapple and part cat clock, you could forgive him for over-compensating.     By the way, my writing this review gave me the opportunity to allay a misconception about Dean Stockwell that I've been entertaining for quite some time. I've long had this vague notion, which I had the nagging feeling wasn't true, that he had some kind of strong Walt Disney affiliation. This turns out to be due to me confusing him with that star of countless, animal-themed, live action Disney movies from the sixties, Dean Jones, a man who is creepy in his own right, though in a quite different, more Disney-like way than Dean Stockwell. Now, thanks to Teleport City's stringent research standards, I can tell you with utmost certainty that Dean Stockwell absolutely, positively did not star in That Darned Cat!, The Ugly Dachshund, Monkeys, Go Home! or The Million Dollar Duck. In fact, during this period in Dean Jones's career, Dean Stockwell was playing roles like that of an acid-tripping Haight-Ashbury hippy in Psych-Out. So, how wrong can you be, really? Aside from being the movie that tried to generate sexual heat between Sandra Dee and Dean Stockwell, The Dunwich Horror is notable for being one of the AIP Lovecraft adaptations that -- like The Haunted Palace, but unlike Die, Monster, Die! -- directly addresses the author's much vaunted Cthulhu Mythos. Granted, it may not do so with enough authenticity to satisfy fans of the author, but much lip service is indeed given to such touchstone concepts as "Yog-Sothoth", "The Old Ones" and the "The Necronomicon". However, as alluded to above, both the Old Ones -- that ancient race of unimaginable non-human creatures who, according to Lovecraft, once ruled the Earth and are itching to return -- and their followers are portrayed as being much hornier than in any of Lovecraft's tales. Their most fully-formed emissary in the human world, the unnamed "thing" locked up in a mysterious upstairs room in the Whateley house, seems to be most concerned with first ripping off all of its victim's clothes when it encounters its first human prey. Similarly, the rituals that Wilbur (Stockwell) must perform in order to summon the Old Ones back into our dimension seem to mostly involve him feeling up a drugged and prostrate Sandra Dee and reading incantations while standing between her splayed legs.     There is a familiar feel of that smarmy, late-to-the-party seventies version of hippie free love to all this, though, of course, in a much more overtly sinister form. It's a tone that's driven home even by Les Baxter's main theme, a narcotically swooning swinger's revelry with a decadent European sensibility that could just as easily have come from the mind of Serge Gainsbourg or Michel Legrand. Mind you, I don't think this quality detracts from The Dunwich Horror. I think that an adaptation of Lovecraft's work for a more permissive age would have no choice but to address the creepy sexuality that underlies it, and Haller's take here is indeed suitably creepy. That this imperative was put in the hands of a studio like AIP, who was more than happy to deliver on the required nudity and implied sexual shenanigans, just represents a fortuitous dovetailing of interests. The potent sex magic that Dean Stockwell wields in The Dunwich Horror -- at least as it applies to Sandra Dee -- is shown to be pretty much in full effect from the very opening moments of the film. It is at this point that we meet Dee's character, Nancy Wagner, a student at venerable old Miskatonic University. Her professor, Dr. Armitage, has entrusted her with the between classes errand of returning his surprisingly crisp looking copy of the ancient book of forbidden knowledge, The Necronomicon, to the school's library. The mention of the book's name attracts the twitchy attentions of the proximately lurking Wilbur Whateley (Stockwell), a visitor to the university from the nearby town of Dunwich whose consummate creepiness is matched only by his single-mindedness. Wilbur follows Nancy to the library and asks her to let him see the book before she replaces it in its case. She resists at first, but it is only a matter of Wilbur making whammy eyes at her for a few seconds before she relents, despite the objections of her obviously unaffected friend Elizabeth (Donna Baccala). Wilbur makes off to hungrily devour the tome's contents, only to be intercepted by Dr. Armitage, who rents it from his grasp with a stern rebuke. This bit of awkwardness does not preclude the four of them from going out for a drink at the pub later, at which time Wilbur engages Dr. Armitage in a conversation that goes more or less like this: Wilbur: Can I see the book? Armitage: No. Wilbur: Can I see the book? Armitage: No. Wilbur: Oh, Okay, but... can I see the book? Armitage: No.     Dr. Armitage, by the way, is portrayed by the veteran character actor Ed Begley, a man who played supporting roles in almost as many classic film noirs as Elisha Cook Jr. He's a great, if unusual, choice for the role, because, while he's appropriately gray and distinguished, his history of playing tough guy roles gives him a two-fisted air decidedly at odds with the tremulous demeanor of the typical Lovecraftian academic. That may not make his character authentic to the text, but it certainly makes him a more credible opponent to the forces he's up against, and when he and Wilbur face off to shout incantations at one another at the movie's conclusion, you get the sense that you're seeing a dramatic showdown between more or less equally matched adversaries -- a markedly more satisfying and movie-like conclusion than if the makers had stuck with the finale as presented in the book, in which a bunch of frightened old men cower in the rain while shouting spells and praying that Yog-Sothoth doesn't kill them. Wilbur eventually manipulates circumstances so that Nancy has to give him a ride back to his creepy old house in Dunwich, and, once there, sabotages her car so that she has no choice but to spend the night. Nancy is already falling increasingly under Wilbur's sway by this point, so she raises little objection to this turn of events, but Wilbur still drugs her drink just to be on the safe side -- possibly because, in her chemically-induced stupor, she will be less likely to notice the ominous gurgling sounds coming out of the locked room at the top of the stairs. That night, as she slumbers, Nancy dreams that she is being groped and chased by a bunch of hippie mud people who caper around and mug at the camera as if they were auditioning for the Broadway production of Yog-Sothoth: Superstar. This experience seems only to increase Wilbur's hold over her, and the one night's stay extends to a series of days, as, all the while, it becomes clearer that Wilbur is grooming her for a very specific purpose, a purpose that is more than hinted at when Wilbur shows Nancy the ancient sacrificial altar perched atop a desolate hilltop near his home.     Once Wilbur has finally gotten his mitts on the Necronomicon and set in motion the rituals necessary to bringing the Old Ones back into the world of men, The Dunwich Horror, like the story it's based upon, sees out its final act as a pretty sweet little monster on the loose story. The film is helped greatly in this regard by the fact that Lovecraft described the unnamable thing locked up in the Whateley house, once freed, as being mostly invisible to human eyes. This enables the filmmakers to represent it through some pretty effective shots of trees being rent about by unseen forces, an interesting use of negative effects, and reaction shots of the monster's horrified victims (one of whom is played by a very young Talia Shire). All in all, it's a satisfyingly apocalyptic payoff to the slow-burn piling on of unease that makes up the film's first hour, and even survives the fact that, once we do catch a fleeting glimpse of the beast, it appears to be Dean Stockwell wearing a mask made out of plastic snakes. While the sleazy, swinger's leer that The Dunwich Horror affects certainly dates the picture -- and may go some way toward undermining its scare factor for modern audiences -- the film in most respects still holds to the high standard set by AIP's earlier gothic horrors drawn from the works of Poe and Lovecraft. As with those films, the modest budget is compensated for by both a handsome production design and a studious attention to the creation of a pervasive atmosphere of dread and foreboding. Bolstering that is a range of reliable, if somewhat over-the-top, performances by a cast made up of stolid old troopers, among them Sam Jaffe as Wilbur's grandfather and Lloyd Bochner as Armitage's ally, Dr. Cory. Only Sandra Dee, out of all the performers, seems to be holding back, but the fact that she comes off as a bit narcotized is actually in keeping with her character's situation. Still, it's a bit odd that Dee, who had not all that long before been a fairly major star, agreed to take a part in a film in which she really ends up being more of a prop than a character.     And pondering that image of Sandra Dee, lying prone and half-conscious while being the subject of all kinds of uninvited groping, I might be inspired to reconsider my previous statement about what might constitute The Dunwich Horror's true source of horror for modern audiences. After all, isn't the thought of being groped by a leering, permed and mustachioed Dean Stockwell really the definition of horror at its most profound and unnamable? More courageous souls than I have doubtless been prompted to tear off and eat their own faces at the mere thought. In fact, if that's the only way to purge that image from one's mind, I recommend that we all do that right now. See you on the other side of madness!  Labels: Horror: HP Lovecraft, Studio: AIP, Year: 1970 posted by Todd at 9:55 AM | 16 Comments Sunday, October 19, 2008Haunted Palace Release Year: 1963Country: United States Starring: Vincent Price, Debra Paget, Lon Chaney Jr., Frank Maxwell, Leo Gordon, Elisha Cook, John Dierkes, Milton Parsons, Jabez Hutchinson, Cathie Merchant, Guy Wilkerson. Writer: Charles Beaumont and Francis Ford Coppola Director: Roger Corman Cinematographer: Floyd Crosby Music: Ronald Stein Producer: Roger Corman Availability: Buy it from Amazon  In 1960, AIP's go-to director for cheap, quickly produced science fiction and horror double bills convinced the powers that be to gamble on letting him make a stand-alone film, in color, with double the production time and more money. Granted that, compared to other studios, this still meant an incredibly lean budget and an incredibly short production schedule. The result was Roger Corman's Fall of the House of Usher, a landmark film in the history of American horror and one of the best Gothic horror films from any country. Although more sedate and slower paced, finally the United States had an answer to the wild, Technicolor horror films from England's Hammer Studio. With the runaway success of House of Usher, Corman found himself free to direct a rapid succession of follow-up films that all relied on the same basic formula. They would be based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, directed by Corman, starring Vincent Price, and scripted by Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont, with a score by either Ronald Stein or Les Baxter. For the most part, AIP and Corman stuck to this well-tested formula, with Premature Burial being the only departure from the plan (because of a bizarre chain of events, Price was unavailable to star and so was replaced by a game but less memorable Ray Milland). In 1963, however, flush with success and probably more than entitled to do so, Corman asked if he could do something just a little bit different.
Most of the key elements would be in place. Corman would direct. The film would be widescreen and in vivid color. And, naturally, it would star Vincent Price. But this time, rather than relying on Poe once again, which was becoming increasingly challenging as the studio quickly gobbled up and used his longer stories, Corman wanted to adapt something by another American horror author, H.P. Lovecraft. Writing a full history of Lovecraft and the effect he had and continues to have on fantastic and horrific literature, cinema, and even music, is somewhat beyond the scope of what we have time for here, though I will do my best to summarize. Lovecraft was a pulp writer in the early 20th century, a contemporary and frequent penpal of Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, Solomon Kane, and a host of other memorable pulp fiction characters. Lovecraft's stock in trade was a somewhat bizarre mix of horror and science fiction, and the majority of Lovecraft's story take place more or less int he same universe and revolve around the same pantheon of fictional creatures, the poster child for which was Cthulhu. Many of you are probably already familiar with Lovecract and far more acquainted with his body of work than I am. In fact, when preparing to reviewing a number of films based upon the works of Lovecraft, I realized that I was not so much experienced with Lovecraft as I was in the general vicinity of people vaguely knowledgeable about the fact that the guy existed and created his own bizarre mythology revolving around an elder race from the very beginning of time and the various ways in which they cause trouble for the people of New England and other locations. When I was in fourth grade, I got a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories through those Troll book order things that were so awesome back then. Man, nothing was better than the day those Troll book orders show up. You'd be sitting in class, and all of a sudden a guy would show up and drop off a big ol' box, and you knew it was full of the books you ordered a month ago. You'd have to sit through the rest of the lesson, usually, but it was worth it. Getting the books, back then, was actually even better than when kids had their birthday and had to bring in cupcakes for the class. Queue long digression...
In fact, other than my mom encouraging me to watch old horror movies when I was little, those elementary school book order things are probably the single biggest influence that steered my down the cinematic path that finds me, today, fervently defending the likes of Jess Franco and Alfonso Brescia. My friends and I used to order all sorts of monster books from that thing. They had this one series of paperbacks with black covers, featuring a photo of a famous monster of filmland. Each book, of course, was focused on a particular type of monster, so there was a book for vampires, one for werewolves, one for Frankenstein monsters, one for mummies, and one for space aliens. The things I remember most vividly about them was that the vampire one had a scary picture of venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee on the cover, the Frankenstein one had a picture inside of venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee as Frankenstein which really scared and enthralled me, and that in the space alien one there was a promotional still from The Mysterians that showed a massive and largely out of perspective battle between the Mysterians, the Japanese military, and a huge army of Mogeras. Needless to say, when I finally saw The Mysterians, I was disappointed to find out that there was no army of Mogeras anywhere in it, and no battle like the one in the book. I have since made my peace with The Mysterians, though, and like it despite the absence of such a conflict. Anyway, I wonder if they even let kids order books like that anymore. Or are they too threatening and controversial for today's sensitive children? I mean, I was in second grade and marveling at gory photos (in black and white, admittedly) of vampires with stakes in their hearts and that famous wood cutting of Vlad the Impaler (oh, you know the one). I wonder sometimes if mine is the last generation to have such an affection for the classic monsters. I currently work in a university, and not one of the students with whom I interact knows who Frankenstein is. Some of them know Dracula, and no one knows the Mummy other than through the more recent mummy movies -- which they aren't aware grew from a series of old black and white films. My friends and I were obsessed with the famous monsters. We loved them. They scared us the first time around but then quickly became like old friends. One of my favorite comedy bits of all time was listening to Bill Cosby talk about walking home at night after trying to watch an old monster movie, or how some kids stole a life-size statue of Frankenstein and used it to scare Fat Albert. But I think we were a transitional generation. Every kid knew the classic monsters, but not everyone had seen the movies. The population of classic horror film fans dwindled. Now that my generation has had their children and many of us are old enough to have kids that would be near the end of their high school careers, the number of kids who know the old monsters is even lower. Not only have they not seen the movies; they don't even know the monsters. Even the kid in my office who liked giallo and modern horror only vaguely recognized the iconic Karloff monster. Of course, I accept that this sort of thing happens. Outside of a core group of fans, the classics and near-classics of the past tend to be forgotten. So it goes, and we who appreciate the old things become curators of a sort. Still, it's weird for me to think that there's a whole crop of kids who go to Wal-Mart during the Halloween season, see all those Frankenstein cut-outs, and just see some random, generic monster with no connection to anything from the past.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, I bought a book of H.P. Lovecraft stories from Troll Book Club in the fourth grade. And I'm pretty sure I read some of them. At least The Dunwich Horror. But if I read much more, I don't really remember it, and the only thing I remembered about The Dunwich Horror was some professors climbing a hill and reading a book during a windstorm or something. In the ensuing years, though, I was around so many references to Lovecraft that I fooled myself into thinking that I was knowledgeable on the subject just because I knew there was a big squid monster thing called Cthulhu and the stories were full of horrors described as being so horrifying that to merely glimpse them was enough to warp a man's mind beyond all repair. In the mid-eighties, there was a revival in Lovecraft's popularity among horror fans when Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna released The Re-Animator, based very loosely on what is considered by most to be one of Lovecraft's lesser stories. I think I'll table the discussion of Yuzna and Gordon until a later review. Suffice it to say that, even though I got more interested in Lovecraft than ever, I still didn't get interested enough to actually read any of the stories, and continued to cruise along on nothing more than Lovecraft hearsay. And so things remained for a good, long while, until a few months ago, actually. When I decided that I wanted to spent at least half of October, 2008 reviewing the oft-problematic film adaptations of Lovecraft stories, I had to admit to myself that I didn't know a thing about the man's writing other than what I had picked up second-hand. It was time to dust off the accursed tomes and acquaint myself with the stories personally. And while I haven't gotten through everything yet, I've gotten through a lot, including The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the story upon which this movie is based. Now here's the thing, at least for me, about reading Lovecraft. You have to willingly give yourself over to the idea. His stories are full of academics and gaunt men who are struck dumb with fear beyond the capacity for human comprehension after reading a book of occult secrets. Everyone is always scared of everything, and rarely does a guy show up who isn't terrified beyond belief and, instead, just grabs a shotgun and a six pack and says to people, "Well, if you assholes are so scared of those goddamned crab monsters from outer space, I'll go take care of 'em myself. Buncha Miskatonic University eggheads. Go University of Alabama!" You have to willingly surrender yourself to the world he creates and the people who inhabit it. A healthy fear of gambrel rooftops doesn't hurt.
Now for those of us who buy into Lovecraft's style, the rewards are considerable and often chilling. Although far from his best-known work, I found The Case of Charles Dexter Ward -- a tale about a colonial era necromancer and the descendant who becomes obsessed with or possibly possessed by the man -- thoroughly engrossing. Like most of Lovecraft's longer tales, it is stuffed to the gills with detailed descriptions of the surroundings and creates a wonderful sense of an aged place in which long forgotten horrors are once again being stirred to life. When Roger Corman and screenwriter Charles Beaumont (who did the screenplay for Premature Burial and would go on to script one of the absolute best of Corman's Poe adaptations, The Masque of the Red Death) set about the task of adapting Lovecraft for the screen, they did basically what they did with Poe: graft the fundamentals of the story onto something of their own creation, designed to look as much as possible like something Lovecraft would have come up with. Much is made about the inherent unfilmable nature of most of Lovecraft's stories, though I think to some degree this is overstated. The number one stumbling block is always the question of how you depict nightmares so foul that they become incomprehensible, or how you create a color that does not exist in our universe, or a structure with geometry that does not adhere to the laws of physics as define our space. I think a deft filmmaker can work around those things, more or less, though how much the end result would appeal to a modern, mainstream audience is probably a more questionable gamble. Can you get away with not showing a monster? Can you design a monster scary enough to capture the basic idea of a creature too terrifying to behold? Tackling these obstacles has always made Lovecraft, for most filmmakers, not worth the effort. But still, several have tried, with varying degrees of success. I think Haunted Palace is one of the successes, largely because it uses Lovecraft as a springboard and does its best to work around the aforementioned issues. What we end up with, in essence, is one of Corman's Poe films with considerably more menace. The basic plot structure is similar to both The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum. Vincent Price is a nice guy who moves with his lovely wife to the inherited home of an accursed distant relative. Almost immediately, the house begins to exert an eerie hold over him, as the long dead necromancer Joseph Curwen vies for control of noble Charles Dexter Ward's mind. There's about a 99.9% chance that Vincent Price will be the spitting image of his infamous ancestor, and an equal chance that the whole thing will end with the home catching on fire and people darting about the flames as it all burns to the ground. But while it follows the Corman Poe formula to a T, something is still just a little bit different.
For starters, in the previous Poe films, it is never made fully clear whether the malevolence assaulting our protagonists truly exists, or whether it is simply the symptom of an unhinged mind. In the case of Haunted Palace, there's very little doubt that Curwen is indeed returned from the grave and attempting to possess his ancestor's mind. And the secrets he possesses are far more sinister than anything that may have haunted Price's other characters. Although the Cthulhu mythos isn't invoked as often as it is in the stories, there is plenty of talk about creatures born of nightmares from before the dawn of man (the movie throws in bits and pieces from various other Lovecraft stories to fill in various gaps). There is plenty of talk about The Necronomicon, the Elder Gods, and Yog-Sothoth. Steeping the film in the arcana of the occult rather than in mere psychological madness and possible haunting makes Haunted Palace less the peer of Fall of the House of Usher and something more along the lines of later occult films like The Devil Rides Out. In the end, the true danger doesn't end up being within the mind of a tortured protagonist; it ends up being a big-ass monster in a pit in the basement. Obviously, there is much in the original story that does not make it into the running time of a low-budget 90 minute movie. Much of the narrative of Lovecraft's tale revolves around the ghoulish life of Joseph Curwen in the 1700s and the bizarre experiments he seemed to conduct. Although this in and of itself would make a fine movie, there simply isn't enough space in a movie of this nature for it, and so Curwen's life is summarized in a brief prologue that sees his home stormed by angry, fearful villagers and Curwen himself burned alive while yelling out a curse in classic witchy/warlock fashion. After that, however, the film switches to the present day, or however present day the early 20th century may be. Although the history of Curwen is recounted via the exposition of which these films are so fond, it's considerably less detailed than what you get in the story. But such things are necessary when one is making a commercial film, especially one for AIP. What is present, while still not a strict recreation of the Lovecraft tale, is powerfully good stuff. Vincent Price is at the top of his game here, convincing both as the loving and kind Charles Ward and as the evil Curwen. The changes are subtle at first, and Price needn't overplay the transformation. He already had practice with it in The Pit and the Pendulum, where he plays another good man grappling with an evil ancestor for control of his own mind, but that movie lent itself a little more to playing the transformation over the top. In that case, he was supposed to be insane. In The Haunted Palace, Curwen is merely phenomenally evil. For my money, it's one of Price's best performances. He really gets you to root for Ward to prevail in this supernatural battle of wills.
Assisting the diabolical old necromancer is Lon Chaney, Jr., in the middle of a rather small but welcome career renaissance that saw him star in a few exceptional horror films (which, in addition to this, include the wonderful Witchcraft). Chaney, Jr., is a guy I've always rooted for, struggling as he did for most of his career to either emerge from the shadow of his famous and respected father or ride the coattails of the family name (something he actively tried to avoid for a long time, even fighting to use something other than the Chaney family name). After a strong start with The Wolfman, however, Chaney's career faltered, and he soon found himself working in films that were cheap and shoddy even when compared to cheap, shoddy films. He rarely hurt for work -- cheap b-movies and television appearances were more than enough to keep him employed in between the occasional appearance in a higher profile project -- but it wasn't exactly the career he had hoped for. In addition, drinking problems had dogged him for quite some time, culminating most infamously in a 1952 live television series in which Chaney, as Frankenstein's monster, was noticeably drunk and screwed everything up. When you're too far gone to play a monster who stumbled and grunts, that's a bad sign. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say The Haunted Palace was a chance for redemption, but it was certainly a chance for him to prove that he still had it, and I think he succeeded. As the keeper of the Curwen/Ward manor, he exudes considerable creepiness and, for one of the first times, seems like a genuinely threatening presence. Chaney was a big guy, but one rarely got a sense of just how big he was. His imposing presence would be put to even better use the following year in Witchcraft, a film that truly made me believe that at any moment I might open a door and find Chaney standing there like a raging bear, ready to beat me into a gory mess. It's great to see him energetic and in action alongside Price in such a classy affair. Well, as classy as a movie can be when it contains a gang of shambling, deformed mutants menacing people on mist-shrouded streets, or a scene in which poor Debra Paget gets strung up over a pit to another dimension that contains a beast presumably intending to rape her. Which brings us to the lovely Ms. Paget. This movie must have been quite a trip for her. She already logged some time in one of AIP's Poe films, the previous year's Tales of Terror, but other than that, she was not well acquainted with appearing in horror films. I don't think anything in that film could have quite prepared her for the bizarre nature of The Haunted Palace, especially the gruesome finale. Tying John Kerr to the pit and pendulum device pales in comparison to stringing up a beautiful, innocent young woman in hopes that she will be raped by a demon beyond the limits of human comprehension in order to create some wretched new race of abominations that will devour the world. The heroines in these AIP films are surprisingly engrossing most of the time, and I say "surprising" because the Hammer films upon which these films were modeled rarely featured female characters of any real note beyond the size of their heaving bosoms. Many of the Hammer actresses were accomplished, but they were better actresses than they were characters, if you understand. In each of Corman's Poe films, on the other hand, the women were far more involved with the action of the film. Debra Paget is no exception, and while she can't quite stand up to Myrna Fahey getting to run around absolutely batshit insane as Madeline Usher, Paget still makes you feel for Ann Ward.
Corman's direction here is much the same as it was on the Poe movies. Lovecraft's writing lends itself to a grim, subdued color palate, so full is it of crumbling houses and sinister old cobblestone streets and windswept New England farmland. But color was still a luxury at AIP, so there was no way Corman was going to wash out his entire picture. Instead, he strikes a keen balance between darkness and color. Much of the film is far more somber in its color palette than previous Poe films, and it's certainly more subdued than the vividly candy-colored The Masque of the Red Death. Not everything is dark and shadowy, though, and when the color does show up, it's a welcome splash in an oppressively menacing atmosphere. Corman also opens up the film a bit with several scenes taking place on village streets crawling with mutants (remnants, some say, of Curwen's mad experiments or of his dying curse), in addition to his typically deft widescreen handling of lavishly appointed interiors. The dungeon beneath the Curwen estate rivals the similar chamber in The Pit and the Pendulum, and while it always looks like a set more than an actual underground cavern, it's still stylish and spooky. Stylistically, this film is a comfortable addition to Corman's Poe cycle, even if it's not based on a Poe story or poem. Or isn't it? Here's where things get silly. After agreeing to let Corman direct a Lovecraft film -- possibly the first one explicitly based on the writings of Lovecraft -- AIP apparently had second thoughts about the marketability of such a film. Did anyone other than a few pulp fiction freaks even remember who H.P. Lovecraft was? Such was their thinking, and so without input from Corman, AIP decided that H.P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward was going to become Edgar Allen Poe's The Haunted Palace. Poe's short poem was a dubious work to which to connect the film, but AIP was certain that making the connection to Corman's previous Poe films completely clear was the way to go in order to secure distribution. So at the last second, and in the final frame of the film, they had Price read a couple lines from the poem, which have very little to do with anything we'd just watched. And that was that. So was born, amid protests from Roger Corman, another Poe film. Years later, once Corman had moved on and AIP had started a second cycle of Poe films, they would do the same thing, changing The Witchfinder General into The Conqueror Worm, and having Price read a few lines from the poem that had nothing at all to do with the movie. But final minute queasiness over lashing themselves to Lovecraft's name doesn't change the fact that The Haunted Palace is an exceptionally good horror film. Price is magnificent, backed by a strong supporting cast and a script that knows when to adhere to Lovecraft and when to make a few things up on its own. It's easy to say that the reveal of the monster in the pit is a bit of a letdown, but it's hardly enough of a letdown to spoil the film. In fact, I don't even think it is a letdown. I think it looks pretty good, all things considered, and if it doesn't at first glance seem horrifying to the point of driving you mad, Debra Paget certainly sells you on it and makes you believe. But this is, as is so often the case, Price's film, and his performance is without a doubt one of his very best. He makes Charles Ward a believably nice and sympathetic guy in one scene, and then with a few tweaks and without going hammy, can turn into Joseph Curwen, oozing spite, menace, genius, and darkness. The film also shows marked progression in terms of scale. The Fall of the House of Usher had only four characters and a single location (albeit a rather sprawling one). The Pit and the Pendulum added a couple characters, but still stuck to one location. With The Haunted Palace, Corman follows the path he began with Premature Burial. There is an entire town here, a few different locations, and much more variety. This progression would continue until, by the time we reach The Tomb Of Ligeia, Corman has left the studio set and is shooting in actual locations. Of all Corman's "Poe" films, I like this one the best (though I don't dislike any of them). Its unique air of menace, its slight tweaking of the Poe world to turn it into Lovecraft, and a genuine sense of spookiness all come together perfectly.
And it's not as if forcing Poe into the mix was entirely out of the realm of acceptability. Obviously, both authors share a common sense of the macabre, although Lovecraft seems much more terrified of his own creations than Poe ever was. And heck, Lovecraft's At the Mountain of Madness draws directly from Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. There are, naturally, sundry stylistic and thematic differences (Poe, for example, seemed terrified of nothing so much as he was being buried alive). I think Corman creates a satisfying hybrid. Though one can sit and nitpick the divergence from the source material with relative ease, this movie still remains one of the most faithful adaptations of a Lovecraft story and one of the most successful applications of that overpowering sense of dread upon which Lovecraft so relied. AIP must not have stayed entirely terrified of Lovecraft. Hot on the heels of the success of this film, they adapted The Color out of Space into Die, Monster, Die (in which star Nick Adams undermines the lurking fear of Lovecraft's style by being more like one of those guys I talked about earlier, less likely to be terrified by the unknown ancient evil and more likely to just haul off and punch it in the face). Not too long after that, they tackled one of Lovecraft's best-known stories, The Dunwich Horror. This time, they didn't change the name, try to make you think it was a Poe film, or anything else. And while I like Die, Monster, Die and absolutely adore The Dunwich Horror, I don't think either of them are as successful as The Haunted Palace. Corman really outdid himself, and the extra layer of the macabre he achieved in this film would carry over into subsequent films in the Poe cycle, including The Masque of the Red Death, which is very nearly as brilliant as The Haunted Palace. Once AIP flung open the doors and let lose those ancient, lurking atrocities, there were plenty of other filmmakers ready to produce their own Lovecraft adaptations. Most of them stink. A few of them are good. Many have nothing to do with Lovecraft as the source material but depend on a similar "cosmic terror" to achieve their mood (for example, Event Horizon). Lovecraft may have been too obscure a name for AIP to bank on in 1963, but since then his name has only become better and better known. While he's not exactly mainstream (everyone knows Poe, but you still get plenty of puzzled looks when you name drop Lovecraft), within the realm of pop culture and horror fans, he's probably as well known today -- perhaps even better -- as he has been at any point in history. "Lovecraftian" is a common adjective among people discussing flavors of fear, and so pervasive is his influence that I spent most of my life thinking I'd read everything he'd ever written when, in fact, I hadn't read anything. Were it not for The Haunted Palace, I probably never would have gotten around to reading it, either. Of course, now that I have, I can do nothing but curl up in the corner of a padded cell, yelling obscene revelations about the darkest subjects as some trembling academic listens with a growing sense of uncontrollable terror to the facts I have uncovered. And yet, as we shall soon see, there was so much more yet to learn. Yog Sothoth, y'all!  Labels: Director: Roger Corman, Horror: HP Lovecraft, Horror: Poe, Stars: Vincent Price, Studio: AIP, Year: 1963 posted by Keith at 3:56 PM | 8 Comments Friday, April 18, 2008Event Horizon Release Year: 1997Country: United States Starring: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill. Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson, Richard T. Jones, Jack Noseworthy, Jason Isaacs, Sean Pertwee. Writer: Phil Eisner Director: Paul W.S. Anderson Cinematographer: Adrian Biddle Music: Michael Kamen Producer: Jeremy Bolt, Lawrence Gordon, Lloyd Levin Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us Event Horizon is another one of those movies that I wouldn't review if I wasn't committed to writing about everything I get from Netflix until such time as I see fit to end this third in the series of Netflix Diaries. It's not that Event Horizon isn't the kind of movie I would write about. Haunted spaceships and Sam Neill ripping out his own eyeballs is right up my alley. No, the reason isn't the content, but rather, that fact that this is one of those movies that already has a lot of words spent on it from a variety of sources both in the mainstream and in the realm of cult film fandom. Under such circumstances, it's hard to imagine what i might have to add that is new. In some cases, I can come up with something -- some tiny, meaningless tidbit that is a throwaway line in a movie that then allows me to write endlessly on some idiotic and obscure point. But upon watching Event Horizon, I was left with a distinct lack of ideas when it came to thinking about how I might approach writing about this film with some degree of originality. And now that I've finished the first paragraph, I still have no idea, so with any luck, something will pop up as I stumble along. I didn't see Event Horizon when it was released. I'm not sure why. I mean, it's a gory film about a spooky spaceship. I think, however, in 1997, I saw maybe three film the entire year, and that was when I went out on dates with a lovely Southern belle. Somehow we ended up at a screening of Mortal Kombat II: Annihilation. So shamed was I that I just packed up and left North Carolina for New York, hoping to lose myself in the throng and hide my shameful secret. But the Netflix Diaries experiments have, in a way, become a curious place for dragging my own horrible secrets into the light for all to see, and on the scale of shameful secrets, "took a date to see Mortal Kombat II: Annihilation" is much worse than "burning passion for Catalina Larranaga" or even "took a date to see Wicked City." It's probably not worse than, "invited a girl over, cooked her a crappy dinner, then made her watch Black Devil Doll from Hell," but it's pretty close.
I was also pretty much broke in 1997. Hell, I was pretty much broke in 2007, but I'd learned to stretch a dollar in those ten years. Whatever the reason, I didn't see many movies that year, and Event Horizon was among the ones I didn't see. Heck, I don't think I knew a thing about it back then, because I didn't even have a TV at the time where I could see important commercials informing of the virtues of films like Event Horizon, B*A*P*S, Kull the Conqueror, or any of the other fine films released that year. In the many years that followed, Event Horizon was off my radar and forgotten about, even though from time to time someone would tell me I should see it. That almost always encourages me not to see a film, as very few people seem to understand the complexities of my taste, and so they assume that I will want to be watching Troma films or other intentionally and ironically crappy movies. People just can't grasp my earnestness. But lately, I've been going back and catching up on a lot of the science fiction I missed in the past ten years or so, and after Screamers, Event Horizon was the next film on the list -- though calling it science fiction is sort of like calling Halloween a "coming of age drama." Despite the starships, hibernation chambers, spacesuits, and other superficial trappings of science fiction, Event Horizon is most definitely a horror film through and through, hewing closely to the classic set-up of a group of people in an isolated location, being preyed upon by a mysterious and murderous force. It just so happens that outer space is a slightly more isolated location than usual. In this regard, Event Horizon draws upon a history of science fiction horror that includes films like Alien and Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires and can be traced back even further to the era of pulp fiction and writers like H.P. Lovecraft. In fact, it's Lovecraft's name that is most often invoked when people attempt to describe this film, even though at no point does Sam Neill yell "Yog Sothoth!" Unfortunately for a lot of people, Lovecraft and horror films were not invoked by the advertising for the film when it was released, which marketed it for the most part as a space adventure with some minor overtones of spookiness. People who went in expecting sci-fi space adventure found themselves confronted by hallucinatory images of demon rape, maggots, people being flayed alive, other people vomiting up their own innards or possibly someone else's arm -- at times, the atrocity exhibition is hard to decipher, but the fact remains that it was not what the average sci-fi fan was expecting. I've never quite understood this type of bait and switch marketing, as it only makes people mad. But I suspect that it has less to do with some sinister attempt to trick sci-fi fans into seeing a horror film and more to do with an ad agency that never bothered to watch the movie they were marketing and just assumed that, since it featured a spaceship, it was a science fiction film.
By the time I saw this movie, of course, the cat was out of the bag, so I knew exactly what I was getting into. Even if I hadn't, it would not have mattered much, since I can roll with horror just as easily as I can science fiction. So that's not what bugs me about this movie. What bugs me is that Event Horizon is this close to being a great movie, and that it comes so close but ultimately fails is, fair or not, much worse than if it had just been a crummy movie from beginning to end. At least then, I could have abandoned any care and gone along with things. That's what gets me through The Chronicles of Riddick, Aeon Flux, and the many other two-star science fiction films for which I seem to have an incredible weakness. But Event Horizon was almost so much more, and while I ultimately like the movie quite a lot, I do so well aware of the bitter taste left by great ideas left poorly explored and a resolution that sees the movie collapse in on itself -- which I guess is fitting in a way for a movie that features the a black hole propulsion system. The set-up is not unlike that of a couple other "investigating the mysterious ship" movies. I'm thinking specifically of The Black Hole and 2010. In the year 2047, a group of search and rescue astronauts lead by Lawrence Fishburne when he was allowed to show emotion instead of being an emotionless monotonal Matrix guy, are en route to a secret location known only to aerospace scientist Sam Neill. It is soon revealed that they are on their way to rendezvous with the space ship Event Horizon, an experimental craft with the ability to use a black hole generator to warp space and travel massive distances in the blink of an eye. But the ship went missing seven years ago, and there's been no successful contact with the crew since it suddenly re-appeared near the planet Neptune. Captain Miller (Fishburne), Dr. Weir (Neill), and the crew of the rescue ship Lewis and Clark are to make contact with the crew of the Event Horizon and see what the heck is going on. A rough approach through the stormy space surrounding Neptune results in damage to the Lewis and Clark, meaning that whatever happens on board the Event Horizon, they're going to have to stick around a spell to fix their own ship.
Things are hardly soothing on the nerves once the team boards the massive experimental space ship. The crew is gone, and the only trace of them is a garbled transmission full of screaming -- though eventually Miller and company also discover some hideously mutilated remains splayed across the walls. Although the ship's black hole drive is presumably shut down, it still finds time to activate itself and suck a member of Miller's crew into its vortex, returning him in a coma that is only broken long enough for him to babble hysterically about "the darkness inside him" and the nightmarish things he saw on the other side. On top of that, the rest of Miller's crew starts seeing things -- specifically, hallucinations of their dead loved ones. And because horror on top of horror isn't enough, scans of the Event Horizon begin returning reports of widespread bio signals, inferring that something else is on the ship with them. When one of Miller's officers decodes the Event Horizon log, they are met with perverse images of the crew being ripped apart, raped by hideous beasts (or possibly by other members of the crew), and suffering untold and unspeakable horrors. Miller decides that the ship can go to hell, and they're leaving it behind. But Weir seems to feel that the ship has already been to hell, and that somewhere along it's universe-warping journey, the Event Horizon passed into another dimension, one of absolute chaos and evil, and in doing so became a sentient and highly malevolent living organism. The scans are picking up life forms; they're picking up the ship itself, and the hallucinations and other problems are a result of the ship's immune system defending itself from invading organisms. Or the ship could just be a big ol' hunk of Hell-infused evil. Whatever the case, Miller is as keen on leaving as Weir is on keeping everybody there. As a concept, I think Event Horizon is tremendous. The idea of a ship's experimental drive warping space tot he point where it rips the fabric of the universe and winds up in another dimension humans could best comprehend as Hell is wonderful, and that sort of "horror among the stars" is right out of the old pulp writings of H.P. Lovecraft, who often tinged his horror with elements of science fiction. The universe into which the Event Horizon passed is glimpsed, but only in tiny, tiny portions, and the film relies again on the old Lovecraft trope of a place so completely evil, so thoroughly perverse and malign, that to merely gaze upon it would drive a man insane. Further, the idea that the ship, once returning in some way or another from that universe, would have become a sentient creature as evil as the universe through which it passed is a concept rife with potential. It's also a set of ideas so vast, so complex, that attempting to tackle them in two hours in a sci-fi horror film is almost certainly doomed to failure.
And that's what happens to poor Event Horizon; it is filled with too many good ideas that are too complex, and there's no hope of the film ever being able to satisfactorily unravel it's science, meta-science, philosophy, and religion. In a way, this isn't a bad thing. To present human characters with a situation far beyond their comprehension and thus leave many questions necessarily half-answered or completely unresolved is fine. There is a way to do that. I just don't think Event Horizon hits the mark. It aims. It makes a valiant effort. But int he end, it just can't get it's head around its own central concepts, and the whole thing devolves into an ending that lets the film down. But make no mistake about it -- I like this movie. I like it a lot. I think the things it does right make it more than worth the time it takes to watch. My frustration stems purely from the fact that it was well within the grasp of this film to be even better, and it didn't quite make it. It's like one of those break-aways in basketball where one guy has the ball,sprints the length of the court alone, has everyone cheering and going nuts, but then when he goes up for the slam dunk, he somehow screws it up and misses. You know, if he'd just dribbled down and missed a jumper, no worries. But because there was tremendous emotion and pageantry around the idea of a breakaway and dunk, when the guy blows the dunk, it makes the missed basket way more painful -- especially if it comes near the very end and costs them the game. Event Horizon spends most of its running time building up the freak-out and scares (sometimes with cheap jump scares, but usually through the use of genuine atmosphere), but as Roger Ebert said of the movie, "it's all foreboding and never gets to the actual boding." But let's detach ourselves from disappointment and spend some time talking about what this movie does right. First and foremost is the atmosphere. Although the science fiction setting misled a lot of viewers, it works wonderfully for this type of film. It's basically a slightly more fantastic version of the "old dark house," the remote cabin, or any of the many other locations horror films use to isolate their cast from the outside world -- only more so. Millions of miles from home, on a tiny man-made island, surrounded by an environment that will kill you almost instantly if you set foot outside. That's even more claustrophobic and nerve-wracking than being at some rich weirdo's country manor. And Event Horizon never lets you forget how vulnerable these people are. Their air is running out. One guy ends up outside the ship without a spacesuit. You never lose sight of how fragile humans are in this setting -- something I think could only be replicated by setting your movie in the middle of the ocean. Much of Event Horizon has to do with the concept of tampering in domains man was not meant to see, but while the specific domain may be the Hell Universe, in general it's obvious that even save travel through space in incredibly dangerous, and a tiny mistake or bit of damage can have colossally negative repercussions.
Adding to the ominous air is the Event Horizon itself, which was apparently designed by someone who thought H.R. Giger's stuff was just too cuddly. I'm not sure how practical it is to have a spaceship with such features as a rotating tunnel of spikes and a room full of crawlspaces that are accessed through thorn-covered black panels, but I suspect that few aerospace engineers, even in Russia, are looking to design anything quite this terrifying. Remember when the interiors of spaceships were all white and well-lit? I wonder when the point will come that we decide to move away from that color scheme, and away from various pads and cushions covering stuff, and finally embrace the style that calls for dim, flickering lighting, exposed ductwork and wires, and lots and lots of razor blades and thorns. Practicality issues aside, though, and taken purely as art design, the Event Horizon is magnificent. Production designer Joseph Bennett and visual effects supervisor Richard Yuricich bring an immense amount of experience to the game. Yurichich cut his teeth on films like 2001: A Space Odyssey before moving on to supervise visual effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, and of course, Ghost Dad. Bennett did design for the cyberpunk cult hit Hardware, and one can see the evidence of all their past work (as well as the ever-present influence of old German expressionism and Giger's work on Alien) in the design of Event Horizon. This isn't a terribly big-budget film, but they do a lot with what they have, giving the entire movie the feel of some twisted, horrific opera. Another feather in the cap of this film is the cast. None of them inhabit especially well-developed characters. They operate on the level of recognizable stock -- Fishburne is the tough but fair captain; Neill is the scientist consumed by his obsessions; Richard Jones is the wise-cracking black guy. But even when the characters are thin, the performers still give it their all. You feel like they believe what's happening around them, and while they sometimes make dumb decisions, they rarely make decisions that aren't understandable given the circumstances. The exception, perhaps, would be that after Miller spends a long time explaining that the ship will pick you brain and create hallucinations of suffering loved ones, and after everyone in the crew understands this is what the ship is doing, Kathleen Quinlan's Peters still falls for the trick. I've mentioned it in other reviews, but it always annoys me enough that I feel like mentioning it again anytime it happens (and it happens a lot). The hoary old "evil entity transforms into a loved one" shtick grates on my nerves. I mean, you're in outer space, for crying out loud. Obviously, when you've been told that the evil spaceship ghoul thing will make you see visions of your loved ones and use them to lure you to your doom, and then all of a sudden your son appears out of nowhere in a location he absolutely could not be in, well why the hell would you fall for that? Why would your son be running around on a haunted space ship that just returned from Dante's Inferno? I guess you could dismiss it as some sort of hypnotic effect, or the result of mental breakdown making a character unable to reason, but mostly it just always strikes me as lazy writing.
Still, no one turns in a bad performance, even though they're sometimes given very little to do. The bulk of the good stuff goes to Sam Neill, since he gets to play the characters who goes completely bonkers. If anyone had seen Neill in In the Mouth of Madness, they wouldn't have followed him into space, because they would know that spooky H.P. Lovecraft entities tend to follow him around and drive people mad. If Event Horizon succeeds with any one character, it's Neill's Dr. Weir, who starts off sympathetic enough before he is consumed by the horrible mysteries contained within the walls of the Event Horizon. However, one gets the feeling that his character never becomes omniscient, never actually knows what these mysteries are despite his enthusiasm about them. No matter the speeches he may give about boundless evil, other dimensions, and forbidden knowledge, his Faust of a doctor is ultimately as clueless about what's going on and what's going to happen as everyone else's. Although this is likely the product of the screenwriter not knowing himself exactly what was going to happen, the end result is effective. Neill becomes the acolyte of an unseen "holy man," one who speaks only in riddles and fools his followers into thinking they possess some profound understanding or insight when, in fact, they have been fed nothing but meaningless phrases and garbled imagery. There's a tragedy surrounding Dr. Weir, who far from becoming one with the ship and grasping the universe from which it has returned, instead becomes nothing more than a pitiable dupe. Whether or not screenwriter Phil Eisner meant that to be the case, he should take it. Because the rest of his script is where the concept of Event Horizon starts to unravel. Poking fun at the science is ultimately meaningless -- this is hardly the sort of film you go to for hard facts, and such an exercise would be as futile as poking holes in the space science of Star Wars. Still, it's kind of fun, so why not, provided we remember that stressing fiction over science never kills a movie for me. Heck, one of my favorite science fiction films is Adieu, Galaxy Express 999, and that's about a steam locomotive traveling through the galaxy while a little kid hangs his head out the window. The science of Event Horizon plays out as if it was conceived by someone who was told about Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time by someone else who hadn't actually read the book, but had been around other people discussing it. A Brief History of Time was, of course, one of those great books that everyone bought and no one read, putting it in the rarefied air occupied by other such books: that gigantic Bill Clinton memoir, the 9/11 Commission Report, Ulysses by James Joyce, and The Bible.
Part of what Hawking's book dealt with in its attempt to bring high physics down to a populist level was the topic of black holes. Now I actually read the book, because I'm a nerd like that, and because I had to as part of one of the classes I was taking. It was one of those science classes set up specifically for people who aren't very good with equations, which meant it was mostly full of journalism students and members of the University of Florida football team who would groan anytime the professor tried to relate a fundamental understanding of physics to the act of making a solid pass. Yeah, sure, physics is involved, but it was highly suspect to suggest that Danny Wuerffel spent his time in the huddle scrawling geometry and physics equations into the dirt to figure out how best to get the ball into the hands of wide receiver Reidel Anthony. Anyway, I think that class gave me about as sound an understanding as would be needed to be the guy that Eisner's friend talked to about black holes. Meaning that I could remember that Hawking made allusions to Dante's Inferno when speaking of the event horizon of a black hole -- that gravitational point of no return from which light itself cannot escape. "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," Hawking said, paraphrasing Dante and the sign that hung outside the gates of Hell. He meant, of course, that the pull of a black hole is so great, that if you cross the event horizon, you're not coming back, so you best make peace with the fact that you're dead meat. Now pass that sentiment through me passing it on to someone else, who then tells Phil Eisner that he was drunk at a party the other night, talking about some deep shit like black holes. All of a sudden, that simple quote applied to explain how hopeless it is to escape the pull of a black hole is twisted to mean that a black hole actually could be the gateway to Hell. And poof! Event Horizon's concept is born. It's really not a bad concept, regardless of how misconstrued it may be. Black holes are weird, after all, and the idea that they lead somewhere other than to a horrible death in which you are crushed down to microscopic size by the unbelievable gravitational pressure is hardly new to Event Horizon. And even the best minds are still feeble when up against cosmic phenomena of this scale. So why not? And anyway, the use of the term "event horizon" works in a couple different ways, and it refers as much to a black hole as it does to the Event Horizon itself, which proves to be a flashpoint which, once entered, will not allow the humans to escape. What's more important to the quality of the screenplay is what Eisner does with the concept, and while he starts off strong, he seems to get lost, allowing the movie at times to devolve into a blood and guts horror film (not bad) and a pastiche of other other movies (slightly less forgivable). I've already mentioned some of the films from which Event Horizon draws, but there are plenty of others. In fact, it lifts wholesale the scene of a river of blood gushing forth from an elevator from The Shining. In fact, you could really view this movie as little more than The Shining meets The Black Hole. Sam Neill's character bears a close resemblance to Jack Nicholson's character from The Shining, and the concept of a haunted house (or spaceship) that causes hallucinations and may itself be alive is an idea shared by both films. Many other elements are lifted from the Russian sci-fi film Solaris, yet another "man battles hallucinations" sci-fi tale. One could also invoke the specter of the old Roger Corman Poe films, especially The Fall of the House of Usher, as it too is about a house infused with evil to the point of becoming a malignant being itself, ending in a fiery collapse much the same as we see at the end of Event Horizon. And the idea of the black hole as a portal to Hell was explored -- with equal awkwardness -- by The Black Hole, a film which sends one of its robotic villains through a black hole and lands him standing on a pillar surrounded by a lake of fire and the souls of the damned. n fact, Event Horizon reflects The Black Hole in many ways -- an exploratory crew finds a long lost ship; that ship' screw has vanished or mostly vanished; things are spooky; and then it all falls apart at the end when the movies both realize that they have ten minutes to explain things that the top scientific minds of the word have been grappling with for decades.
In the case of Event Horizon, all the talk of physics versus metaphysics, of a ship powered by pure evil, of a rip in the fabric of space that leads to a Hellraiser universe, lead to an anti-climatic and predictable fist fight between Miller and Weir. Though it is similar to The Fall of the House of Usher, and though it's a suitably horrific and downbeat ending for the decent guy Miller, it seems ultimately to be a resolution that fails the film's attempts at something more complex. I don't need the questions to be answered. In fact, I prefer that they try and fail, discovering that comprehension of what awaits them is simply beyond the boundaries of the human brain. But a fist fight and an explosion seemed somehow to be less than what should have been delivered. It may not be entirely Eisner's fault, though. Apparently some forty minutes was cut from the movie in order to achieve a manageable running time (1997 was a few years too early for genre films to run three hours or more and still get a wide release) and an R-rating (the 90s represented MPAA judges in a reactionary phase as an answer to the gore and nudity soaked anarchy of the 70s and 80s). Fans hoped that the footage would be restored at some point, and that such restoration would smooth out many of the wrinkles that prevent Event Horizon from achieving its ambitions, but so far such wishes have gone unsatisfied. Even when released to DVD, the film was still the theatrical cut. Whether or not it will ever be fully restored is up in the air, but given that we live in an era when almost everything, no matter how obscure or trashy, is getting lovingly reconstructed by some madman, there's still the possibility that a more complete version will emerge and we can re-assess the film based on that. Until then, though, we have to work with what we get to watch, and as presented, Event Horizon is an almost great movie that loses its way and relies on too many scenes from other movies and too many cheap jolts. I do wish horror films would retire that bit where someone is scared, and then someone come sup behind them and grabs them on the shoulder, refusing to speak until the other person and the audience have gotten a cheap scare. Really -- have you ever approached a person in complete silence, from behind, and grabbed them by the shoulder? Yes, you have, but that's because you were intentionally trying to scare that person. In all other instances, no one does this, and yet horror films feature it like every other scene. What makes it frustrating here is that Event Horizon doesn't need to rely on these weak scares. It has plenty of legitimate scares and an over-arching feeling of doom and eeriness. Falling back on juvenile tactics like the shoulder grab is just gratuitous and sloppy. At least they didn't have a scene where a cat jumped out of a box or something.
And really, perhaps I am being like this movie: searching for something that isn't attained, being more serious than I should. Taken as nothing more than a horror film with sci-fi dressing, I really think Event Horizon is a success. It definitely has the feel of an old pulp -- right down to losing track of itself over the course of its running time. Director Paul W.S. Anderson is no stranger to fans of pulpy movies, having directed Mortal Kombat before this (but not Mortal Kombat II), and Resident Evil after, among other things. I have a curious love-hate relationship with Anderson's films in that I love some, hate others, but rarely find myself somewhere in between. Flaws aside, I love Event Horizon. And even more flaws aside, I love the Resident Evil movies, and Mortal Kombat, even (though not Mortal Kombat II). I guess I'm lukewarm on Soldier, so there's one middle ground movie. But I hate with a passion the Alien vs. Predator films, even more than I hate Mortal Kombat II. Still that's a lot of hits any only one real miss for me (granted, I'm not a discriminating viewer), so I guess I like Anderson as a director, and I think Event Horizon is probably the best film he's made and will likely make. At its worst, it is grade-A horror hokum, full of mumbo jumbo and ideas that don't really pan out. And I can deal with that just fine. Heck, like I said, I probably would have preferred if the film was that way from beginning to end instead of flirting with brilliance in spots, only to fold at the last second. But regardless, this is good, gruesome pulp fiction, full of the creeping unknown and vague talk about dimensions of madness and torture that only Cthulhu, Pinhead, and the makers of the Ilsa films can imagine. Anderson's direction is sure-handed, and he and cinematographer Adrian Biddle make wonderful use of the warped madhouse the production team has created for them. So, huh. I guess I did have a lot to say about Event Horizon. Funny the things you learn about yourself when faced with writing about a movie where Sam Neill digs out his own eyeballs. I was pleasantly surprised by it. I didn't expect it to be as good as it was, and even though it's a shame it wasn't as good as it could have been, at the end of the day, I'm happy enough. I'm also happy I didn't see it in 1997, because even though I would have liked it then, perhaps even more than I do now, the fact of the matter is that Southern belle was actually willing to still enter into a relationship with me even after I made her see things like Mortal Kombat II: Annihilation, City of Darkness, and Alien 4. I don't know if that tenuous, early romance could have survived Event Horizon as well, especially considering the fact that she never made me go see Titanic, like every other girlfriend did in 1997. I guess I could have sold Event Horizon with no more or less deception than the original marketing team if I positioned it as "kind of like Titanic, in that it is about people on a doomed ship." Labels: Horror: HP Lovecraft, Horror: Satan, Netflix Diary, Science Fiction, Year: 1997 posted by Keith at 2:43 PM | 5 Comments Saturday, September 02, 2006Dagon
2001, United States. Starring Ezra Godden, Francisco Rabal, Raquel Merono, Macarena Gomez, Brendan Price, Birgit Bofarull, Uxia Blanco, Ferran Lahoz, Joan Minguell, Alfredo Villa. Written by Dennis Paoli. Directed by Stuart Gordon.
Generally speaking, Lovecraft hasn't been adapted to film very well. Most films based on his stories--rife with dense prose, antiquarian ramblings, and a strange combination of subtlety and the absolute antithesis of subtlety--fall short. In truth, they tend to suck. Whether it's in film or in literature, many people who attempt to do something "Lovecraftian" take something iconic like, say, a plasmodic squid-headed demigod/priest, and run with it, having little regard for the sense of untold aeons, strange conspiracies, bizarre alternative histories, and cosmic and extradimensional musings which actually ever coaxed anyone into taking the squid demigod halfway seriously to begin with. Or they'll pull a Daniel Haller and have some curly-haired guy stand in front of the camera with his fists against his ears and his thumbs pointed straight out from his skull reciting "Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth! YOG-SOTHOTH!" ...which, to be fair, does at least suggest insanity on someone's part. It's even worse if you hear "Lovecraftian" or "inspired by H.P. Lovecraft," because nine times out of ten it's just generic horror crap loaded with all of the cliches that are less reminiscent of Lovecraft than, well, other generic horror crap. Sometimes they'll even conflate Lovecraft's strange interstellar "demons" with Satan and Christian demons, and although I'm sure there's a talent great enough to pull that together brilliantly instead of just looking like they understand neither cosmology, that person has never attempted it. Well, unless we want to count Jaume Balaguero's Darkness, which is Lovecraftian in spirit but (thankfully) not unnecessarily so in content. Stuart Gordon is generally credited with the best Lovecraft adaptations out there. He's generally famous for his Lovecraft and Poe adaptations, though he also directed a few original horror films and contributed, oddly enough, to Honey I Shrunk the Kids. His adaptation of Re-Animator is a very enjoyable movie based off of one of Lovecraft's weaker stories, and I do remember liking Castle Freak years ago when I saw it, though his From Beyond--again, one of Lovecraft's weaker stories--is... not good. Part of why he chose some of the less-impressive stories by Lovecraft, I'm sure, is that bringing them to the screen could be realized with less of a budget-based compromise of the original vision. Working with a budget about five times larger than he did with Re-Animator, and presumably trying to return to his success in the Lovecraftian field after some time away from it, Gordon created a script which is sort of a pastiche of several Lovecraft stories, including "Dagon," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," and possibly "The Horror of Red Hook" and others. Paul Marsh and his wife/fiancee/girlfriend Barbara are in a boat off the coast of Spain. We gather that somehow, Paul got rich by playing the stock market; but Barbara's tired of him never leaving his laptop because he neurotically wants to keep checking stock prices, so she takes it and throws it overboard. Then we see that there's a sunbathing older couple on deck who make wry, rich-person-sounding comments in wry, rich-person-sounding accents. Why do so many horror movies always seem to be filled with people who are completely, or at least generally, unlikable? When the boat crashes in a storm, Paul and Barbara go ashore to find out that the villagers are weird, pale freaks who all congregate in the town's bizarre church. When the priest promises to help them, they find that he has webbed fingers. Then the same priest convinces them to split up on the lame pretense that "someone has to stay to report to the police"... Whatever. Paul leaves to find out that his friends have disappeared and left blood behind, and then returns to find out what Barbara has already discovered--these freaks are dangerous and weird fanatics. What follows is familiar to anyone who's familiar with Lovecraft's writing. Admirably, Gordon even stays true to Lovecraft's xenophobia without himself being xenophobic--the film is shot in both English and Gallego, a Portuguese-like language spoken only in the northwest corner of Spain. The villagers, who were once peaceful fishermen, are corrupted by a man who's a stranger in his own right, and so although their language is a baffling concoction similar to, yet not identical with, Spanish and Portuguese, the people are treated as both humble and exotic, regular joes and yet also bizarre creatures which are not quite human. In fact, since it appears that Dagon premiered in Spain, the Galician language was chosen intelligently, as it is quite possible (though my Spanish and knowledge of Spain isn't good enough to say this with any certainty) that the dialogue stands on that unnerving edge that separates the familiar from the incomprehensible for the Spanish-speaker. Certainly, at least, that's how it was for marginally-Spanish-comprehending me--I'd constantly find myself thinking, "I almost understood that... but what the hell did he say?" The film is also pleasingly reminiscent of the video game Resident Evil 4, in which homocidal Spanish peasants chase down the protagonist with farm implements and occasionally rifles and other more lethal weapons (but then, anything that might remind one of such things tends to be pleasing, really). Beyond that, there's something genuinely creepy about the weird, winding streets and "queer houses" of Imboca ("boca" means "mouth" in Spanish, mirroring Lovecraft's invented New England town of Innsmouth), and some of the CGI creations are conceptually Lovecraftian and visually interesting, even if the CGI itself suffers from feeling unnatural in the wrong sorts of ways for even a Lovecraftian venture. I won't tell you that the film is perfect. It's not. I hated most of the characters, and I thought the action scenes were sometimes energetic in all the wrong ways--i.e. sort of less like what I'd be doing if I felt like my life were endangered, and more like what the Three Stooges might do. Overall, I couldn't call Dagon a good film. But the point is, it's a generally fun time and well worth watching, as long as you're not bothering yourself with identifying with characters. I can't call Gordon the best director of all time, but he deserves his title as the best director of Lovecraftian movies. Labels: Director: Stuart Gordon, Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: HP Lovecraft, Year: 2001 posted by Ryan at 7:21 PM | 2 Comments |
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