New On DVD/Blu-ray: Drive (2011)

The common perception of a dramatic story is one that surprises or shocks the audience with unexpected twists.  I think a better case can be made for the opposite approach.  I don’t refer to mundane, by-the-numbers storytelling.  I mean the power of inevitability.  The ability of a filmmaker to draw from the audience the recognition of a character’s flaws and strengths and understand where those qualities will take him or her.  Will they lead them to be a hero or a tragic figure?  Will they rise to the occasion or will they cower in fear and only make things worse?  With Drive, director Nicolas Winding Refn presents a protagonist who is an enigma–he doesn’t even have a name, people just refer to him as “Kid” or “The Driver”–but from the first moment he appears on screen, it’s clear where his actions will take him.  The beauty and simplicity of Drive is in taking the impressive journey to its inevitable conclusion.

Ryan Gosling plays the unnamed protagonist.  A mechanic at a garage and part-time stunt driver for the movies, he moonlights as a getaway driver for criminals.  They buy five minutes of his time–not one minute more–and he uses his high-speed driving skills and knowledge of Los Angeles streets to all but guarantee a safe escape from the police.  Lacking connections with anyone beyond Shannon (Bryan Cranston), his boss at the garage and de facto agent when it comes to stunt driving, he exists purely to come alive only when behind the wheel of a car.

The Driver sees himself as the hero of his own movie.  Constantly chewing on a toothpick in an aloof manner, sporting a satin jacket with an embroidered scorpion on the back, and never allowing himself to become personally involved with anyone, he has cast himself as the modern equivalent of the mysterious gunslinger from Sergio Leone’s westerns.  All he needs is an antagonist and someone to save.  The former comes in the form of Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) and his business partner, Nino (Ron Perlman).  The latter is supplied by his pretty new neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan).

Eager to break out of his low-rent existence, Shannon hatches a plan to buy a stock car and start a racing team with The Driver behind the wheel.  Needing money, He turns to Bernie, whom he used to supply with cars and driving stunts for cheap action movies in the ‘80s.  Unfortunately, Bernie also has connections to the mob, most notably in Nino, who happens to have an unsavory history with Shannon.

Meanwhile, Standard (Oscar Isaac), Irene’s husband, is released from prison.  Seemingly determined to live on the straight and narrow, he is both grateful to and jealous of The Driver for looking after Irene and their son while he was locked up.  But Standard’s old criminal partners don’t want to let him leave behind his outlaw life.  To force him to take part in a robbery, they beat him senseless before threatening the lives of Irene and their son.  When The Driver finds out about this, he agrees to drive the getaway car for the robbery–not to protect Standard, but to save Irene and her son.  Of course, it’s no surprise that the robbery goes horribly wrong and The Driver is left to untangle himself from the messy aftermath that threatens to consume not just him, but also Irene, Shannon, Bernie, and Nino.

It would be easy to look at Drive as a companion piece to Michael Mann’s similarly moody crime films.  Like Heat and Thief, Drive explores the inability of criminals to maintain a stable personal life while going about their business.  But Refn is more interested in examining how a man living and working on the fringes of the movie business might start to buy into the myths being sold by the industry and fashion himself as a hero in his life.

While there is a slight deconstructionist angle to this idea, Refn never really pursues that structure.  Instead, he delivers a minimalist character study with punctuations of graphic violence and visual stylization made all the more effective by their selective use.  Anyone who goes into Drive expecting a slick action movie will be disappointed.  There is some action, but much of it is filmed and cut together in abstract ways designed to highlight the way The Driver views his life.  In one striking sequence, he kisses Irene in an elevator as the lighting changes to turn the drab setting into an artificially romantic scene.  But as soon as the kiss is over, the lighting returns to normal and The Driver engages in a brutally violent fight with a hit man in the elevator.  That Refn devotes more time to The Driver’s fantasy world in this sequence than to the usual beats of the action genre is a credit to his skills as a visual stylist and a director unafraid to defy expectations.

While Refn’s stylish direction and occasional uses of nonlinear storytelling might sound flashy, the film is surprisingly minimalist.  From the sparse dialogue to the clean, crisp editing, the film takes the story and the “criminal life” genre down to its most basic elements.  There is not a wasted frame of film in this movie.  Every shot conveys a small piece of plot or character information.  While some bits of the info may require the audience to pay closer attention to pick up everything they need to know, I applaud Refn for refusing to hold the viewer’s hand.  Drive may have been marketed as an action film, but it’s not the type of movie that can be passively watched.  It demands attention from the audience and rewards that attention with beautiful, surprising moments.  Watch not only for the elevator sequence, but also the scenes of The Driver stalking one of the antagonists in a latex mask made for a movie stunt and the perfectly constructed car chase in the aftermath of the botched robbery.  All of these sequences are set up by small bits of information that Refn casually drops into the dialogue or visual cues that defy the spoon-feeding mentality of most mainstream films.

Much has been made of Albert Brooks’s stunning performance in the film.  I don’t want to repeat too much of what has already been said, but the acclaim is justly deserved.  There has always been an element of cranky, old man to Brooks’s comedic persona–even when he was a young man–and he uses that to make Bernie a truly frightening villain.  But Brooks’s Bernie is far from being just another heavy.  While there are elements of psychopathic behavior to his penchant for extreme violence, those tendencies are tempered by an odd logic.  Bernie may or may not enjoy killing people, but he only does so when he’s forced to take action to clean up the messes of others.  There’s a pragmatism to Bernie’s actions that make him almost sympathetic.  It’s that near-sympathy that makes him even scarier when he starts tying up loose ends in his own bloody way.

While Brooks gives the breakout performance in the film, Cranston, Perlman, and Isaac all deliver with impressive turns, providing humanity–both positive and negative–to their largely underwritten roles.  Mulligan, given a similarly underwritten character, is unable to do anything beyond look lovely or sad, depending on what situation fate is dealing her at that moment.  But because The Driver views Irene as simply a damsel-in-distress, her performance feels of a piece with the film, even if she is unable to bring much shading to the role.

While I’ve gone out of my way to praise most of the supporting cast, I have consciously avoided mentioning Gosling’s performance.  I honestly don’t feel that I fully understand what he was trying to accomplish in the role.  I have the suspicion that he calculated his performance to be as inscrutable as his character.  The Driver is certainly an unknowable protagonist.  There are hints to a darker, more violent criminal past in his knowledge of the way Bernie and Nino will most likely come after him.  This possibility seems to be backed up by how skillfully he handles himself in the numerous brutal fights that make up most of the third act.  But if he were really such an expert criminal, would he naïvely believe that the thugs menacing Standard and Irene would really leave them alone if he helped them successfully pull off the robbery?  For every action or scrap of dialogue that points to one direction for The Driver’s past and motivations, there’s another that points in the opposite direction.  Gosling plays the uncertainty of his character either with a knowing half-smirk or a dour seriousness, depending on the tone of the moment.  In a way, his performance feels like he’s playing it safe–simply refusing to commit to a character trait beyond cool detachment–but it does take guts for an actor to take on an unknowable protagonist and fight the urge to make him relatable.

Drive may lack for surprises in its story, but it more than makes up for it with Refn’s stylish direction and a revelatory turn by Brooks.  It’s a film that sneaks up on you and packs a wallop, even if you see the ending coming from the first scene.

The Cohen Case Files: Q [aka Q: The Winged Serpent] (1982)

Written, Produced, and Directed by Larry Cohen

Q (aka Q: The Winged Serpent) hit theaters in 1982.  But for me the film came along circa 1984-85.  You see, that’s when the film was in heavy rotation on cable.  I was a terribly impressionable ten year old, watching in shock and disgust by peeping through the fingers I used to cover my eyes at what seemed the most frightening movie I’d ever seen.  As a child, I was a complete wimp when it came to horror films.  It wasn’t until I grew up and started taking the study of film seriously that I grew to appreciate the extreme gamut the horror film can run from pure cheese to intentionally funny to downright unsettling.  No other genre of film offers such an extensive emotional playground for filmmakers to run rampant through.  I’ve since seen hundreds of horror films better than Q, but I don’t think I have as much of a nostalgic connection to a film in any genre as I do to Larry Cohen’s silly little monster movie.

NYPD Detectives Shepard (David Carradine) and Powell (Richard Roundtree) have two very baffling cases on their hands.  In the first case, a window washer working high up on the Empire State Building, loses his head.  Literally.  The problem is, no one can find it.  In the second case, a professor travels thousands of miles to New York City, checks into a hotel, visits a museum about the ancient Aztec civilization, and is later found in his hotel room, dead from being skinned from head to toe.  After doing a little digging, Shepard starts to wonder if the two cases are connected while Powell wonders if Shepard has lost his mind.

Meanwhile, low rent criminal Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty) gets caught up in a jewelry heist gone wrong.  To escape from the police and his partners in the heist, Jimmy hides out at the top of the Chrysler Building.  This turns out to be a great hiding place since the building is undergoing renovations to its iconic pyramid top.  While finding the usual construction mess that comes with such a large renovation project, Jimmy also finds a gigantic nest containing an egg the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.  When he also finds a human skeleton, stripped of its flesh, it doesn’t take Jimmy long to realize that whatever laid the egg, is probably also responsible for the skeleton.

And just what laid that egg?  It turns out it’s a giant flying lizard that somehow manages to swoop through the skies above busy Manhattan streets without being seen by anyone.  How is this possible?  At some point in the movie, Shepard theorizes something about the creature flying in line with the sun.  This is obviously a half-assed explanation if ever there was one.  In fact, there’s no point in even trying to answer that question, because the honest answer is that it doesn’t matter.  The question that does matter, once the creature is finally spotted when it snatches a man from a swimming pool becomes: Is the creature just a monster, or is it the reincarnated Aztec god Quetzlcoatl?  Because as Shepard muses, if it’s just a monster, you should be able to kill it, but if it’s a god?  Well, who knows?

Who, indeed?  The only character who does know something is Jimmy.  He’s willing to share that knowledge–namely, where the creature’s nest is located–for what he sees as the very reasonable fee of one million dollars and immunity from any crimes that he may have committed.

Like most of Cohen’s films, Q, introduces an outlandish premise and then uses that as a launching pad to explore a male protagonist who’s infinitely more interesting than the silly plot.  From my plot description, you would think that protagonist was Shepard, but Cohen makes the very wise decision to focus on the self-pitying loser, Jimmy.

In a more mainstream film with a conventional leading man, Jimmy would be a criminal with a heart of gold.  In a Larry Cohen film, Jimmy is a pathetic schlub who is unable to do anything right.  Whiny, self-pitying, and only occasionally redeemed by his affection for his girlfriend (Candy Clark) and a love of playing jazz piano, Jimmy is a hard character to care about, but Moriarty pulls off the difficult role with aplomb.

In my look at The Stuff, I talked about the “kind of special magic when Moriarty gets together with Cohen.”  The magic is on display here, as well.  As played by Moriarty, Jimmy is constantly covered in flop-sweat, nervously talking a mile a minute in his distinctive mush-mouthed way.  He goes from being a loser that everyone takes advantage of to a loser who tries to take advantage of an entire city.  It’s not exactly a redemptive arc and to the credit of Moriarty and Cohen, they never attempt to make Jimmy a hero.  If anything, Jimmy is made out to be almost as bad as the serpent flying around eating people; the serpent is only doing what comes with its nature while Jimmy is attempting to profit from the deaths of innocent people.

Cohen has been very open that the only reason Q came into being is because he was fired from his job as director of I, the Jury.  Angered by this slight, he hastily wrote the script for Q and began second uint photography within a week of being fired.  By the time he scraped together the funding and finished casting, the film was already well into production.  Despite this, the film is a fairly polished piece of work.  The acting is impressive, the cinematography crisp, and the editing sharp.  The only moments when the feature shows its lack of production values come about with some grainy stock footage recycled from God Told Me To and with some cheaply done effects.  But even the stop motion animation used to bring the crudely sculpted serpent to life and the matte paintings used for backgrounds seem less inept and more like a charming throwback to effects work of years gone by.

Perhaps because he had just lost his job on I, the Jury, Q feels slightly angrier and less thoughtful than Cohen’s other low budget creature features.  This leads to the cynical uses of some excess gore and nudity that Cohen rarely indulged in with previous films.  And while Carradine seems to be enjoying himself as he hams up his straight-man role, there’s something slightly sinister about the way he keeps urging scores of nameless police officers to their deaths with a smile on his face during the film’s action-packed climax.

I’m sure I’m not the only one out there who has an affection for this film that outweighs what it deserves.  Anyone who watched too much HBO in the early ‘80s probably has some kind of nostalgic memory of this film playing on a seemingly daily basis.  It’s not the best film ever made (if I’m being really honest, it only falls somewhere in the middle of Cohen’s filmography in terms of quality), but it’s certainly fun.  If I’m indulging in nostalgia by recommending the film, at least it’s entertaining nostalgia.

James Dixon Sighting: As one of the NYPD detectives investigating the mutilation murders.

Beware a spoiler for the death of one of the main characters in this trailer:

Kurt Vonnegut vs. Wesley Scroggins

Let’s take a brief break from talking about movies.  This has been in the news lately and it really struck a chord for me for several reasons.

On Monday, July 25, the Republic (MO) school board voted to remove two books from the high school library.  The first book, Sarah Ockler’s Twenty Boy Summer, is a young adult novel about a teenage girl having a summer fling in an attempt to get over her boyfriend who died the previous year.  The second book was Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.  If you need me to explain the premise of that novel, you need to stop reading this blog and get your ass to a bookstore pronto.  Not only was Slaughterhouse Five in the library, it was also being used as part of the curriculum for an advanced English class at the school.

At this point, I ask you, dear reader, to take a moment and check out the article about the removal of the two books from the library.  This link will take you to the Springfield (MO) News-Leader website.  Okay, done reading?  Good.

I need to make some disclosures before I dive into this situation.  I grew up in Southern Missouri only seventy miles from Republic.  For ten years after high school, I lived in Springfield, MO, a mere eight miles from Republic.  My nephew graduated from Republic high school.  I am very familiar with the attitudes and cultural state of the area, and while it’s far from the most progressive region in the nation, it’s also not the most closed-minded.  At least, it wasn’t when I lived there.

But apparently things are changing.

If you read the News-Leader article, you understand this mess started with a complaint issued by a Republic resident (and business professor at nearby Missouri State University) named Wesley Scroggins.  You can read an editorial he wrote last September 17 for the News-Leader here.

I feel the need to highlight two passages from Mr. Scroggins’s editorial.

The first passage:

In English, children are also required to read a book called “Slaughterhouse Five.” This is a book that contains so much profane language, it would make a sailor blush with shame. The “f word” is plastered on almost every other page.

I’ve read Slaughterhouse Five twice and while I will admit that there is a healthy amount of profanity in the novel, it’s hardly enough to make a sailor blush (which makes me wonder just how many sailors Mr. Scroggins has met).  As for his assertion that “the f word” (or “fuck”, as reasonably functional adults like to call it) “is plastered on almost every other page”, well, this is just more ammunition for my argument that the favorite tool of nutjobs is hyperbole.

The second passage:

I confronted the school board with these issues at the June school board meeting. As far as I know, nothing has been done to address these issues to date. This is unacceptable, considering that most of the school board members and administrators claim to be Christian. How can Christian men and women expose children to such immorality? Parents, it is time you get involved!

And here’s where Mr. Wesley Scroggins of Republic, MO gets on my nerves.  When it comes to any taxpayer funded institution, I don’t ever want to hear any religious arguments (and before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, I mean any religion–Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Scientology, I don’t care what you believe in) about what is proper.  You see, we are supposed to have a little thing in this country granting the people separation of Church and State.  Of course, this belief is not shared by people like Mr. Scroggins who seek to force their beliefs and set of morals on others.

But in the end, the blame for these books being removed actually belongs to the Republic school board and school superintendent Vern Minor.  Mr. Minor, in particular, sticks his foot in his mouth in the News-Leader article.  First he makes this claim:

We very clearly stayed out of discussion about moral issues. Our discussions from the get-go were age-appropriateness.

A few paragraphs later in the article is this passage:

Minor said feedback for “Twenty Boy Summer,” available in the library, focused on “sensationalizing sexual promiscuity.” He said questionable language, drunkenness, lying to parents and a lack of remorse by the characters led to the recommendation.

“I just don’t think it’s a good book. I don’t think it’s consistent with these standards and the kind of message that we want to send,” he said. “…If the book had ended on a different note, I might have thought differently.”

Now, unless I’m a moron who is completely misreading Mr. Minor’s comments, it certainly sounds as though he’s making a moral judgment on Twenty Boy Summer.

NOTE: I have not read Twenty Boy Summer and cannot comment on its content.  You can read Sarah Ockler’s stellar response (where she also catches Mr. Minor’s moral doublespeak) to the controversy here.

This moralizing is continued by Republic school board member Ken Knierim, who told the UPI (United Press International):

We just felt that of the three books, the two we have pulled aren’t age-appropriate and send the wrong message.

Once again, I cannot speak to the message of Twenty Boy Summer, but Slaughterhouse Five–a scathing satire of the military, warfare, and, ironically enough, the lack of morality that leads to and results from war–seems like an important book to get into the hands of teens just a few months away from being able to sign up for the military.  Yes, it’s profane and absurd and takes glee in going after the sacred cows of American machismo, but that’s precisely what makes it a perfect book for high school kids who have been raised in a pop-culture landscape that revels in irreverent entertainment.

Perhaps my favorite quote of this whole mess belongs to Melissa DuVall, another Republic school board member, from the same News-Leader article:

What we have to be proud of is we took a complaint, we took is seriously and we gave it due diligence.

The key word in that quote is “a”.  They took “a” complaint, meaning one person complained about the presence of these books.  That one person was Mr. Wesley Scroggins.  Now here’s the kicker.  Are you ready for it?

Mr. Scroggins does not have any children who attend Republic schools.  His children are home-schooled.  This, of course, begs not only the question of why he cares what books are available at the Republic high school library, but also why did Mr. Minor and the school board take him so seriously?

I don’t have any answers for those questions because I’m a rational person and cannot understand the mindset of people who would make such decisions.

Let’s just go ahead and cut through the bullshit of what is and isn’t age appropriate for teenagers.  As I said in my frustrated rant about muting profanity so The King’s Speech could get a PG-13 rating:

Does the MPAA really think teenagers don’t hear and (in most cases) use the word “fuck” on a daily basis?

In this case, the question would be altered to:

Does the Republic school board really think teenagers don’t hear and (in most cases) use the word “fuck” on a daily basis?

Of course, Slaughterhouse Five has been banned from schools many times in the past.  The circumstances here (one man complaining who doesn’t even have children in the school) just seem a little more odd than in the past.  I’m sure that if he were alive today, Vonnegut’s reaction would be little more than a chuckle or a simple shrug of the shoulders, recognizing the absurdity of the situation with an acceptance that you can’t change the minds of zealots.

For me, personally, I initially was angered by the situation, but that feeling has mellowed into amusement and sadness.  Amusement that the tiny town of Republic is getting so much unwanted international attention.  Sadness for a region where I was raised but have not called home for several years because stupid shit like this makes me feel that people like myself are unwelcome.

A True Classic

I really have no reason to post this other than the fact that I just finished watching Death Comes to Town, the very funny murder mystery mini-series by The Kids in the Hall.

Like most people my age, I have a special place in my heart for the absurdist, cross-dressing humor of the troupe and of course I loved Mark McKinney’s Chicken Lady character.  I was thrilled to see her make a cameo in the mini-series and her appearance reminded me of probably my favorite skit from the original series.  Enjoy.

The Cohen Case Files: I Deal in Danger (1966)

Screenplay by Larry Cohen

Before he was a prolific spec screenwriter, he was a prolific independent filmmaker, and before he was a prolific independent filmmaker, Larry Cohen was a prolific television writer.  In the ‘60s alone, he created four series and wrote episodes of thirteen other series, including such popular programs as The Defenders and The Fugitive.  Needless to say, this is a man who doesn’t take a lot of time off.  But even the busiest of film and television scribes can pad their number of credits (not to mention their wallets) by repackaging old projects into something sort of new.  Such is the case with I Deal in Danger.

A theatrical release in 1966, I Deal in Danger was actually just a few episodes of Blue Light, a Cohen-created World War II espionage series reedited into a ninety minute film.  As the product of industry recycling, it lacks the production values or sweep of a cinematic production, but it still manages to work as modest, pleasantly old-fashioned entertainment.

David March (Robert Goulet) is an American spy working undercover in Nazi Germany during World War II.  Having convinced the Nazis that he doesn’t believe the Allies will win the war, he apparently switches sides.  But March is actually working for a secret organization of Allied spies code-named “Blue Light”.  David’s job is to gain the trust of the Nazi superiors who are using him as a propaganda tool so he can sabotage a secret weapons project that the Nazi’s plan to use against the Allies during the D-Day invasion (never mind the fact that the apparent intimate knowledge of the D-Day plans several months in advance of the invasion ought to be enough of a Nazi advantage to turn back the surge–historical accuracy and logical military planning take a back seat to melodramatic plot twists and espionage suspense in the world of I Deal in Danger).

To aid him in his efforts, March is joined by another apparent traitor in the lovely form of Suzanne Duchard (Christine Carère), the daughter of a shamed French aristocrat who was executed by the French Resistance for collaborating with the Nazis.  Using her supposed anger at the French Resistance as a cover, she is trusted almost completely by the Nazis.  It’s this trust that leads them to assign her to keep tabs on March, who they fail to fully trust.  If the filmmakers or the characters recognize this obvious irony, they fail to acknowledge it.

Oddly enough, for a plot that finds the hero always just one piece of bad information away from being killed, I Deal in Danger at times feels an awful lot like an episode of Hogan’s Heroes (which was on the air at the same time as Blue Light).  The main reason for this is that the Nazi characters are nothing more than a a bunch of easily duped caricatures–vain, full of the righteous belief that Germany will prevail, they are easily blinded by David and Suzanne’s schemes.  Unfortunately, the relative ease with which the Nazis are fooled removes a lot of their maliciousness, which only serves to deflate any tension the film occasionally builds up.

At the same time that the film turns highly trained SS officers into the Keystone Kops, Cohen and director Walter Grauman go out of their way to avoid mentioning anything that could even be an oblique reference to the Holocaust.  I suppose I’m thankful for that choice.  After all, exploiting such a tragedy for a piece of escapist entertainment such as this film, would have been in very poor taste.  But the fact remains, the filmmakers fail to ever clarify what makes the Nazis so sinister.  Yes, they’re trying to take over the world, but the film portrays them as so clueless and inept, the only reason I was able to believe them as a threat to David or the rest of the world, was to think of them in terms of how real world history played out.  In that regard, I suppose the film manages to have the best of both worlds–it never has to deal with the sticky ethical issue of how to approach the Holocaust without seeming crass, yet it’s able to capitalize on the immediate negative and hateful thoughts that spring to the mind of most people when Nazis are trotted out as the villains.

The film is largely buoyed by the presence of Goulet in the lead role.  While his late-career work turned him into a kitschy punchline, Goulet provides just the right mix of humor, gravitas, and swashbuckling attitude to keep the events entertaining.  Without his impressive turn, I more than likely would have focused on the television rhythms of the editing, the cheap sets, and the silly plot.  But Goulet’s performance allowed me to process those problems as merely adding to the charm of a misguided attempt to create an American “James Bond-type” for weekly television.

If I Deal in Danger does nothing else, it highlights Cohen as a show business survivor.  Very few writers are lucky enough to have one script produced during their career.  Here is a man who has worked steadily in the industry for fifty years, did what he wanted, and has made a good living at it.  I Deal in Danger may not be a good movie–technically, it’s barely even a movie–but it is fun in a nostalgic sort of way.  It’s also a good reminder of why, as a writer, I respect and admire Larry Cohen so much.

The Movie Defender: Death to Smoochy (2002)

Only enormously talented people could have made Death to Smoochy. Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience. To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and confidence, and dream big dreams. -- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

There are a few laughs, but I’m not sure that a comedy is supposed to make you recoil, which is what Smoochy does. — Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times

You can feel desperation buzzing around Danny DeVito’s Death to Smoochy like flies around a corpse, and there are few things less funny than desperate comedy. — Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com

I first came up with the idea for The Movie Defender at some point in late 2008 or early 2009–I can’t remember which.  I sat on the idea for quite a while, kicking around thoughts of starting up either a blog or a web site dedicated only to this one column.  But I’m lazy and the column never really progressed beyond the idea stage until D.B. started to develop what would become The Parallax Review.  At one point, while discussing the philosophy behind the site, D.B. casually mentioned to me that it could be a home for The Movie Defender, if I wanted.  I jumped at the chance and the rest is very short-lived–but noble–history.

I tell you this because when I first thought of The Movie Defender, I had three movies at the front of my mind: I Know Who Killed Me, Doomsday, and Death to Smoochy.

All three films flopped financially and were savaged by critics, but I felt they were all unjustly maligned.  I Know Who Killed Me became the inaugural subject of the column because it was the most infamous and had a pseudo-relevance due to Lindsay Lohan’s ongoing legal troubles.  After a few months, I got around to writing up a defense of Neil Marshall’s Doomsday after D.B. viciously attacked Marshall’s Centurion, a film I eventually saw, enjoyed, and–in a rare moment of contention–argued forcefully in favor of during an episode of The Parallax Podcast.  But I never got around to writing up Death to Smoochy because I feared that it wasn’t as good as I remembered it being.

This was a real fear for every Movie Defender subject that I took on.  Occasionally, I would watch a film that didn’t live up to my memories of it and I’d have to scrap plans to write it up, but that was a rarity.  But for some reason, I had the nagging fear that Death to Smoochy, which I had not seen in nearly ten years, was actually the awful train-wreck that everyone accused it of being.  When I decided to resurrect The Movie Defender, I felt it was time to finally take another look at the film.  I’m glad I did.

Robin Williams plays Rainbow Randolph, a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, cynical son-of-a-bitch.  He also happens to be the host of the number one daytime children’s program in the country.  When he gets busted for taking bribes from undercover agents posing as parents to get their child on his show, he loses his job, his money, and his reason for living.

Desperate to find a squeaky clean replacement for Rainbow Randolph, network executives Stokes (Jon Stewart, sporting a ridiculously bad haircut) and Nora (Catherine Keener) turn to Sheldon Mopes (Edward Norton).

Sheldon is a politically correct do-gooder of the highest order.  He’s a vegan who eats tofu hotdogs on gluten-free buns.  He volunteers at a methadone clinic, singing songs about the evils of drugs to near-catatonic heroin addicts.  He is also unfailingly polite to everyone he comes into contact with, never swears, drinks alcohol, or raises his voice in anger.  In short, he is the perfect replacement for Rainbow Randolph and an instant headache for Nora who has to school him in the cutthroat ways of network television.

Sheldon has created a character named Smoochy the Rhino to base his show around.  Smoochy is a hideous, purple monstrosity that still allows Sheldon’s goofy, grinning face to show through to the audience.  As Smoochy, Sheldon performs songs like “My Stepdad’s Not Mean, He’s Just Adjusting” and encourages kids to avoid sugary treats in favor of organic fruits and vegetables.

Much to the shock of everyone at the network, Smoochy is a hit.  But with ratings success comes trouble for Sheldon.  He takes on a shady agent (Danny DeVito) who negotiates a lucrative deal for Sheldon that gives him control of all Smoochy merchandising.  When Sheldon refuses to play ball with the network and create sugary Smoochy cereals and cheap plastic Smoochy toys, he finds his stock falling with Stokes while Nora slowly comes to respect his sincerity.  But Sheldon’s biggest problems come in the form of a Mafia outfit that makes money off the ice shows that Rainbow Randolph used to put on.  The head of the Mafia (Harvey Fierstein) expects Sheldon to go along with the racket and promises unpleasant violence if he doesn’t come around.

And then there’s Rainbow Randolph.  Randolph has been forced to live in the streets, shamed for what he’s done and blaming Sheldon for his problems.  As he grows more deluded and angry, Randolph begins plotting ways to disgrace Sheldon and get his old life back.

This is a hell of a lot of plot for a first act and that’s without even getting into the Irish Mafia outfit that takes a special interest in Sheldon’s continued success and well-being.  Admittedly, the film teeters on the edge of a cliff, ready to fall into the abyss of satirical overkill before something unexpected happens: Sheldon grows from a one-note hippie joke into a character worth rooting for.  In the midst of the aggressive cynicism and heavy-handed satirical jokes, Sheldon becomes a likable, somewhat too earnest protagonist whose quest to improve the world goes from being mocked to encouraged, a surprising turn for a movie directed by the ever-subversive Danny DeVito.

The fact that Sheldon turns out to be such a sweet, gullible character gives Death to Smoochy the moral center needed to ground DeVito’s bleak view of network television politics and merchandising aimed at children.  Sheldon also stands as the rebuttal to many critical complaints that the film is strictly an ugly exercise in cynicism without a heart or connection to recognizable humanity.  He may be a little too over-the-top at points (his fallback phrase of “How do you like that?” becomes annoying by the hour mark), but Sheldon is the perfect straight man for some acerbic one-liners delivered with perfect timing by DeVito, Keener, and Williams.

The film also works as a reminder of Norton’s talent and Williams’s nimble ways with profanity.

Norton takes a character in Sheldon who could have been beyond annoying and gives him a childlike enthusiasm that is genuine and infectious.  Seemingly doing his best Woody Harrelson impression from Cheers, he makes naïveté an endearing trait and never once breaks his nerdy persona to engage in vain leading man posturing.  It’s a forgotten great performance by one of the best screen actors of the last fifteen years.

Much was made in reviews of Williams paying penance for family friendly schmaltz like Flubber and Patch Adams by taking on the supporting role of Rainbow Randolph.  Maybe this is true because the Robin Williams on display in Death to Smoochy is a desperate man–funny and profane–but also hanging on by a thread; a self-loathing loser incapable of carrying out revenge or getting on with his life.

I never particularly cared for Williams’s manic brand of stand up and many of his comedic film roles unfortunately played off that persona, but occasionally he was able to put his decent acting chops to use in bizarre dark comedies that have been all but forgotten (The Survivors, Cadillac Man, The Best of Times).  Death to Smoochy seems to fall in line with those films in that it barely registers on his filmography.  But the film might be the best example of Williams being able to modulate his usual manic persona into the cry of desperation it actually is.  Rainbow Randolph is a man who is scared to death of being ignored and forgotten.  Considering his omnipresence in television and film for the past thirty years, no matter how awful the project (Old Dogs, anyone?), I think Williams has the same fear, making him perfectly cast here.  He also has the world’s best delivery of profanity, something easily forgotten through his years as a family friendly entertainer.

Death to Smoochy was written by Adam Resnick.  Resnick is a writer with a very schizophrenic output.  On the positive side, he did stellar work on Late Night with David Letterman, The Larry Sanders Show, and the short-lived Chris Elliot sitcom Get a Life.  On the negative end of the spectrum, he wrote for the God-awful 1994-95 season of Saturday Night Live, the miscalculated John Travolta comedy Lucky Numbers, and the brilliant or idiotic–depending on your point of view–Cabin Boy.

Death to Smoochy embraces the off-kilter tone and sense of humor that run through all of those projects.  Fortunately, the solid work by the cast and DeVito’s stylish and energetic direction are enough to bring the film down on the positive side of Resnick’s filmography.

Admittedly, the satirical elements of the film are obvious.  The insider’s jaded and misanthropic view of children’s programming has been effectively skewered by The Simpsons through Krusty the Clown for over twenty years but Matt Groening and company were always restrained by network censors.  It’s doubtful they could have ever pulled off something as raunchy (but still funny) as Death to Smoochy’’s cookie scene or introduce an even more debauched former children’s show host (Vincent Schiavelli) who is strung out on heroin and apologizes for smelling like urine.  Perhaps DeVito and Resnick take these jokes too far, but I appreciated their willingness to cross that line in pursuit of a laugh.

In an era of homogenized studio films that all look and sound alike, Death to Smoochy is jarring, obnoxious, dirty minded, and yes, funny.  In spite of the obvious jokes and the too-busy first act, I laughed a lot during the film.  That’s a reaction I can’t ignore, no matter how many respected critics say otherwise.

Here’s an awful trailer that turns Rainbow Randolph into the protagonist.  Once again, terrible marketing helps sink a good movie.

The Cohen Case Files: It’s Alive [Remake] (2008)

Based on the 1974 film written and directed by Larry Cohen, Screenplay co-written by Larry Cohen

When I started this blog, I made a promise in the first post:

I know for certain that two recurring items will make appearances: First, I plan to watch and write about all the films of the immensely talented and underrated Larry Cohen.

After watching the DTV remake of Cohen’s brilliant It’s Alive, I seriously regret that promise.  I regret wasting eighty minutes of my life on such useless trash.  I regret that I am about to waste another hour or so writing and posting a piece about said useless trash.  I suppose I could just write something along the lines of, “What a horrendous piece of shit.  Avoid this tasteless cash in like the plague.”  But despite the fact I am no longer a professional film critic (yes, I realize that most people consider The Parallax Review to have been an amateur operation, but we ran that sucker professionally, holding ourselves to the highest possible standards, so pipe down with your comments), I still feel the need to fully explain why I hate this film so much.

Despite sharing a title and basic premise with Larry Cohen’s masterpiece, the 2008 version of the film deviates greatly with its story and characters.

Lenore (Bijou Phillips) is a grad student who is six months pregnant.  As the film opens, she is leaving school to live with her architect boyfriend, Frank (James Murray), who is eagerly anticipating the birth of their child.  Frank looks after his paralyzed younger brother, Chris (Raphaël Coleman), since their parents were killed in a car accident (don’t worry about the fact that Murray looks twenty years older than Coleman–the filmmakers obviously didn’t).  When Lenore goes into labor the same night she moves in with Frank, he calmly drives her to the hospital, walks–doesn’t run–into the emergency room and with a big smile on his face, tries to make a video recording of the birth.  This, it goes without saying, is not the rational response of a man whose girlfriend just went into labor three months prematurely.  It’s not the final lapse in logic the film has in store, so strap in for a quick descent into the ugly world of DTV hack filmmaking.

Lenore’s doctor discovers that the fetus has doubled in size since her last ultrasound, something that should be everyone’s first clue that all is not right with the pregnancy.  But these characters never understand they’re in a horror film, so they move right ahead with performing a caesarian section on Lenore while Frank grins goofily in the waiting room.  The baby is delivered as Lenore drifts in and out of an anesthetic haze.  At first, despite the baby’s size, all seems fine.  When the doctor cuts the umbilical cord, we are only one smash cut away from an orderly discovering the bloody, dismembered bodies of the doctors and nurses in the delivery room.  In the midst of this mess, unharmed, lay Lenore and her baby.

Naturally, the police would like to know who casually walked into a delivery room, brutally murdered four people, and then disappeared like a ghost.  They mention checking security footage of the operating room, but apparently never do, because the rest of the film wouldn’t be able to happen.  Instead, Perkins (Owen Teale), the cop on the case, decides the obvious course of action is to press Lenore–who was practically unconscious–about what happened in the delivery room.  She is unable to tell him anything useful and he forces her to speak with a police psychologist (Jack Ellis) who is unable to get anything out of her.

That the film goes to such extreme lengths to draw out a false mystery about the identity of the killer is odd.  The original film was a massive hit, spawning two sequels.  The DVD cover for this film features a creepy looking baby crying a single bloody teardrop.  It’s not as though the marketing department went out of their way to cover up the central premise of the film, so why did director Josef Rusnak go to such lengths to maintain a mystery no one is interested in?

It’s Alive is one of the worst remakes I have ever seen.  It takes everything that made the original fresh and emotionally involving and twists it until it’s generic and forgettable (save for a third act revelation that pushes the whole affair into truly icky territory–more on that later).

The original film worked because it focused less on a killer, mutant baby and more on the damage such a situation would do to the parents.  It was an incisive look at the changing role of male masculinity in the mid-seventies and an impressive horror tale.  It made points about the dangers of living in a world where the air is choked with smog and chemicals are sprayed on everything we eat and touch.  Hell, it even functioned as a moving redemption story that draws tears at its climax through the career best performance of John P. Ryan.

The remake immediately tries to throw some curveballs to those who know the original film.  This would actually be a welcome thing, if any of the changes they made to the story didn’t gut the premise of its inherent power.  By having the baby appear normal, the filmmakers probably assumed they could tease out a little more mystery from the story.  Instead, that idea is rendered moot by stupid little touches such as a closeup of the baby’s hand that reveals something that looks more like an animal’s claw.  If the baby is supposed to appear normal, why don’t any of the characters ever acknowledge the fact that the baby has hands that look like they belong on a werewolf?

Focusing on Lenore as she quickly discovers her baby is a killing machine should have been a good idea.  Questions about the limits of just how far a mother will go to protect her child could be raised.  Instead, Lenore quickly goes from proud new mother to eye-rolling psycho in the blink of an eye.  The idea of using the situation as a metaphor for postpartum depression is very briefly touched on and just as quickly abandoned.  It simply becomes ludicrous that Lenore would dispose of the numerous bodies that pile up without giving the matter a second thought.  The character isn’t helped any by the performance from Phillips.  There is a touch of high camp to her hysterics, but she’s impossible to sympathize with–a quality needed for the film to have a chance at working.

But the biggest problem is the change in the baby’s motivation.  In the original film, the baby had mutated to exist in a hostile world where even the environment is a threat to survival.  It only attacked and killed people when it was scared or felt threatened.  This kept the infant sympathetic and cut a lot of the inherent tastelessness of the killer baby premise.  The filmmakers behind the remake don’t seem to understand such complexities.

In the remake, the baby is just an evil little shit.  It sees something living and–in a whir of cheap CGI–kills it.  Rats, cats, rabbits, birds, humans, it doesn’t matter.  If it has a pulse and gets close enough, it’s going to die.  And it’s going to die in a flood of gushing blood and gore.  That’s right, in place of the compelling characters and nuanced motives from the original film, the remake just offers up frenetic gore.

Even worse than the idea that a child could come into the world as a purely evil presence is the third act explanation for why the baby behaves the way it does.

It seems that when she first found out she was pregnant, Lenore bought some herbal supplements that were supposed to bring about a “natural miscarriage”.  She gulped down several with a glass of wine and became horribly sick.  Frightened, she immediately regretted taking the pills and prayed for her baby to be okay.  Obviously, the pills didn’t work, but the filmmakers point to this event as the catalyst for the baby to have its strange physical developments and to be such an evil killer.  But even this idea doesn’t hold up to the most basic of logic.  The baby is revealed to be intelligent, only killing when no one is around and never threatening the family that it needs to survive.  If the baby is so smart and wants to kill because it was nearly killed in the womb, why doesn’t it go after Lenore for her attempt at a home abortion?  Why does it only go after innocent bystanders?

Even without those logical questions, the message behind the film still feels horribly sleazy.  Not only are the filmmakers exploiting unplanned pregnancies and attempted abortions, they’re making a pretty aggressive statement: If you’re an unwed college student and you try to abort your pregnancy, you will be the cause of numerous violent deaths.  No matter your politics, that comes across as pretty sordid.

Beyond the changes from the original film that cheapen the story and the dubious moral at its center, the film is just shoddily put together:  Subplots are brought up and suddenly dropped; the threadbare budget is obvious at every turn; the acting (featuring the finest U.K. and Bulgarian thespians a DTV budget can buy), is functional at best, the special effects are crudely done, and the somber tone is so all-encompassing it becomes the film’s only source of amusement.

Larry Cohen has two credits on the film.  The first states the film is based on the 1974 film written and directed by him.  More puzzlingly, he also receives a co-screenplay credit.  Outside of the basic premise and the character names, there’s not a lot of his film visible in the remake.  He doesn’t have a producer credit on the film, which would assume at least an endorsement of the remake on his part, so I’m willing to bet his name only wound up on the screenplay of the film because of a fluke ruling by the impossible to predict WGA.  I certainly hope so, because it would really be depressing if he had a creative hand in this slop.

Restrepo/War (2010)

I first watched Restrepo about seven months ago.  The acclaimed documentary had just come out on DVD and I found it to be a stunning piece of work.  That week, I talked about it on the podcast I was co-hosting for The Parallax Review.  Unfortunately, D.B. had not seen the film, so it was just me rambling on for seven plus minutes about how intense the combat footage was and how, despite the lack of politics on display in the film, it seemed to me to be the ultimate argument against continuing the war in Afghanistan.  My near-incoherent ramblings failed to make for interesting listening, so I doubt many of our listeners took my suggestion that they immediately watch the film.

I really never expected to revisit the film in a critical capacity, but two things changed in the past couple of months.  The first thing, tragically, was the death of Restrepo co-director and producer Tim Hetherington.  A respected photojournalist who had covered wars all over the world, he was naturally drawn to Libya to cover the rebellion currently being all but ignored by the mainstream American media.  Unfortunately, he became a casualty of that conflict.  The second thing that brought me back to the film was finally reading Restrepo co-director and producer Sebastian Junger’s book, War.

War covers the same year with the same platoon in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley as Restrepo.  But instead of being a retread of the film, it is actually a terrific supplement, making a great film much better.

Restrepo existed to capture the schizophrenic nature of war.  It alternated scenes of intense combat, a harrowing moment of grief over a fallen soldier, and moments of ultimate banality as the soldiers sit around for days, almost praying for a firefight to break up the boredom.  Through interviews with the soldiers, filmed after they left the Korengal Valley, Junger and Hetherington did some explorations of the psychological effects of heavy combat on young men barely out of their teens.  But these moments felt slightly superficial–as though the filmmakers knew audiences expected these scenes and they felt obligated to deliver them.

Even if the film didn’t succeed as a look into the damaged psyche of the combat soldier, it remained an invaluable look at the day to day grind of extended combat and the folly of trying to win over the people of Afghanistan.

In the podcast, I described the attempts by Kearney, the captain of the platoon, to persuade the village elders to work with the Americans as “the world’s worst customer service job.”  While many of my comments during the podcast were incomprehensible at best, this statement made a lot of sense and was backed up when I watched the film again, last night.  In a sick way, these scenes almost play as satire.

After reading War, I was struck by how different Junger’s descriptions were from what was shown in the film.  Where Restrepo was more concerned with taking a fly on the wall approach, War finds Junger becoming a character in the story.  In one of the more unexpected developments, he admits there is no way he can be objective about the men or their mission.  He exposes that idea of objectivity in reporting as a myth and explains that he could not help but bond with the men he was spending so much time with.  While not fighting, he was in camp with the soldiers, on patrol with them, and ducking the same bullets and explosions that they did.  Since so much of the book is given over to explaining how much every man in the platoon relied on the other and bonded as a group, it was inevitable that Junger would come to feel a kinship with the men who were keeping him safe.

Even more surprising than this admission of a lack of objectivity is Junger’s assertion, at certain points, that he would, if the need arose, pick up a gun and fight the Taliban.  After miraculously walking away, uninjured, from a vehicle that was destroyed by an improvised explosive device, Junger writes:

It’s tempting to view killing as a political act because that’s where the repercussions play out, but that misses the point: a man behind a rock touched two wires to a battery and tried to kill me–to kill us.  There are other ways to understand what he did, but none of them overrides the raw fact that this man wanted to negate everything I’d ever done in my life or might ever do.  It felt malicious and personal in a way that combat didn’t.  Combat theoretically gives you the chance to react well and survive; bombs don’t allow for anything…The bomber built a campfire to keep himself warm that night while waiting for us.  We could see his footprints in the sand.  The relationship between him and me couldn’t be clearer, and if I’d somehow had a chance to kill him before he touched the wires together I’m sure I would have.  As a civilian, that’s not a pretty thought to have in your head.  That’s not a thought that just sits there quietly and reassures you about things.

I suppose there’s nothing extremely surprising about a journalist admitting feeling angry or threatened enough that they would kill in a war zone.  What is interesting is that people might take Junger to task for making this admission.  To me, it’s proof that he is that much closer to understanding the men of the platoon.  He makes it clear that he’s angry that the bomber tried to kill not only him, but also the men who were with him in the vehicle.  He never carried a gun and he was not a member of the military, but at that moment, he felt more of a kinship with those men than a reporter who was only there for a few days to get some quotes for a quick news piece ever could.  That makes his descriptions of what the men went through and what they felt to be more honest than if he had tried to pretend to some nonexistent pretense of objectivity.

Beyond introducing Junger as a presence in the story, War also does a great service to the audience of the film by filling in the gaps of who several of these soldiers are.  In the film, there was no context to understand them.  We knew a name, a rank, and occasionally what their job was in the platoon.  Beyond that, the only personal details about the men came from something they would mention briefly during their deployment or in the follow-up interviews.

In the book, Junger uses O’Byrne, a soldier with the uncanny ability to articulate the difficult feelings about what was happening not only to himself, but to the platoon as a unit, almost as a personification of the platoon.  He’s barely in Restrepo, but his tragic backstory is fascinating and his cynically funny observations bring across the kind of personality it takes to be a good combat soldier (which is different from a good soldier in peacetime, as the book makes abundantly clear).  An entire book could have been written on O’Byrne alone, but he’s just one man in an astoundingly rich narrative that shows time and again how soldiers at war don’t fight for a grand political plan; they fight to keep each other alive.

If you haven’t seen the film or read the book, I recommend checking them out the same way I did.  Watch Restrepo to get a feel for the chaos and horror, read War to more fully appreciate the men in the film, then watch the film again with your newfound perspective.  Separately, they’re very good works, but together they form a brilliant whole.

The Cohen Case Files: It’s Alive (1974)

Written, Produced, and Directed by Larry Cohen

Larry Cohen has the ability to take himself seriously at times.  For most filmmakers who traffic in genre pictures and satire, this can be a recipe for disaster.  In Cohen’s case, this led to arguably his two best films: God Told Me To and It’s Alive.  Where God Told Me To was a chance for Cohen to delve into the destructive effects of religious fundamentalism, It’s Alive allows him to take a traditional monster movie and turn it into a claustrophobic domestic drama anchored by one of the best examples of movie acting I’ve ever seen, courtesy of John P. Ryan.

Frank Davis (Ryan) is a successful public relations man living in Los Angeles.  He has a nice home and car.  His beautiful wife Lenore (Sharon Farrell) is pregnant with their second child and Chris (Daniel Holzman), their first son, is so precocious and well-mannered, he might as well have stepped out of an episode of Leave it to Beaver.  In short, Frank is pretty happy with his life and has every reason to believe it will get better with the birth of his second child.

As usually happens in horror films, it’s when things look the best for the characters that the worst usually happens.  In Frank’s case, this moment occurs when Lenore gives birth to their child.  The baby turns out to be a mutant.  Unlike latter-day movie mutants, it doesn’t have superpowers and self-esteem issues about being different, it has sharp claws, fangs, and an overwhelming survival instinct that finds it lashing out when afraid.  Unfortunately, the baby is often afraid.  After slaughtering the doctor and nurses in the delivery room (but leaving Lenore unharmed), the baby escapes from the hospital.

In a lesser film what would follow is a massive manhunt as the police try to track down the baby as it kills its way across Los Angeles.  That element is only present as a small subplot.  Instead, Cohen turns the genre on its head by focusing on Frank as he reacts badly to the news that he is the father of a killer mutant baby.  Becoming distant toward an increasingly bipolar Lenore, Frank professes his desire to the police for the baby to be killed on sight.  So disgusted and ashamed is he that his genes could have produced something so monstrous, Frank eventually deteriorates to the point where he wants to be the one to pull the trigger on his own child to prove some misguided idea of machismo to the public and to himself.

Needless to say, this is a very daring direction to take what was supposed to be a cheap exploitation film, but Cohen pulls it off thanks to Ryan’s terrific performance and a sensitive understanding of the changing dynamics of men in American society in the mid ‘70s.

At the start of the film, Frank is straddling the line between the traditional “tough guy” American male and the contemporary “sensitive” man.  He holds a white collar job, he’s unafraid to show affection to his wife and son, and the impending birth of his second child nearly brings him to tears.  At the same time, he adopts the cocky swagger of a tough guy, trying hard to always appear cool under pressure and maintain control of his family and his emotions.  But the situation with the baby does not allow him to be both of those men any longer.  Frank is forced to choose between being a tough guy who hunts down his own killer spawn or being a loving family man who takes on the delicate task of putting his shattered family back together.  For most of the film, it’s never completely clear in which direction Frank will go.  Much of this dynamic comes through in Ryan’s haunted performance.

A talented character actor who specialized in bad guys throughout his career, It’s Alive gave Ryan one of his few leading man roles.  Like most of the male protagonists in Cohen’s films, the role was incredibly layered–a dream come true for an actor willing to commit to the absurdities Cohen’s plots usually provided.  Like Tony Lo Bianco in God Told Me To, Ryan grasps the human drama behind the genre trappings and attacks his role with a fearless intensity that grabs the audience and dares them to look away.

As played by Ryan, Frank goes through a slow motion mental breakdown.  As his career, his family, and his dignity is taken away from him, Frank becomes a shell of a man, unable to regain control of his life until he takes decisive action about his baby.  It’s not a glamorous role and Ryan plays it with a refreshing lack of vanity or concern over holding audience sympathy.  It’s an amazing performance for an actor who deserved better than the career he ended up with.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a Larry Cohen film without heavy-handed references to the hot topics of the day.  There are conversations about public health concerns regarding chemicals in the air and drinking water, the impact of legalized abortions, the influence of pharmaceutical companies on doctors, the damaging effects of overmedication, and the intrusion of the press into private lives.  For the most part, Cohen is able to weave these ideas into the story in natural ways, adding to the texture of an already scarily dense story.

The film is also one of Cohen’s best as a director.  Instead of falling back on just pointing the camera in the general direction of the action and letting the actors and script do the heavy lifting, Cohen adds some much needed atmosphere to the film, lending some actual scares to the horror sequences.  Using a distorting wide-angle lens, cinematographer Fenton Hamilton gives the film the look of a familiar place turned into an alien landscape.  Hospital rooms and hallways look far too large and shadows always creep into the edges of the frame.  Between Hamilton’s stylish photography, the nightmarish score by Bernard Herrmann, and the performances by Farrell and Ryan, the bloody aftermath of the delivery room massacre raises genuine goosebumps.  Cohen may be more interested in the human story, but he’s not afraid to let the audience remember that this is also a horror film.

Despite the unpleasant subject matter, It’s Alive turned out to be Cohen’s biggest hit.  Some of the effects and editing techniques may be dated, but the story and acting hold up very well.  This is a film that could have aged badly into cheesy camp, but it is just as effective today as the day it was released.  If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor and check it out.  It’s a true gem.

James Dixon Sighting: As the police detective in charge of tracking down the baby.

Note: I chose not to include a trailer for the film since each one I found spoiled the ending.  If you seek one out on your own, please make sure you’ve watched the movie first.

The Cohen Case Files: The Stuff (1985)

Executive Produced, Written, and Directed by Larry Cohen

Sometimes Larry Cohen’s penchant for genre films mixed with social satire leads him into situations where those elements fail to gel.  Such is the case with The Stuff.  But despite the fact that the film doesn’t fully work as a satisfying whole, it’s still very entertaining and well worth a look for Cohen’s fans and anyone who enjoys a good laugh at the expense of corporations, health food fanatics, right-wing conspiracy nuts, or cheesy ‘50s horror and sci-fi flicks.

A strange concoction is found bubbling up out of the ground by a two men.  The substance has a consistency somewhere between yogurt and ice cream and it tastes delicious.  The men get the idea to start selling the substance to the public.

The film then jumps ahead to a later date as the substance–named and marketed as “The Stuff”–has become all the rage, with people lining up outside of shops selling it at two in the morning.  Naturally, the ice cream industry feels threatened.  The heads of the ice cream companies come together to hire corporate saboteur Mo Rutherford (Michael Moriarty) to gather information they can use against the company behind ”The Stuff”.  Mo is a former FBI agent who plays the fool, but in reality is the smartest guy in the room.

At the same time, Jason (Scott Bloom), an adolescent boy living on Long Island, sees “The Stuff” move on its own, making him believe that it’s some sort of creature aware with devious motives.  Frantic, he destroys several cases of the substance at a local grocery store.  While he does this, his family begins eating it exclusively, leading them to take on a hive-like behavior as they try to force Jason to eat “The Stuff”.

With the help of Nicole (Andrea Marcovicci), the commercial director who headed up the marketing campaign for “The Stuff” and Chocolate Chip Charlie (Garrett Morris), a cookie manufacturer who was put out of business by the company behind the substance, Mo starts his investigation.  What he finds is a bizarre conspiracy to enslave the human race using the substance as a mind-control agent that has the unfortunate side effect of eventually dissolving its host until they are nothing more than a puddle of fleshy goo.

Eventually, Mo teams up with Jason and an insane right-wing militia leader (Paul Sorvino) to declare war on the company selling “The Stuff” in a series of goofy scenes that barely cobble together the coverage to wrap up the loose ends.

There isn’t a serious moment to be found in The Stuff.  Sure, Cohen lobs some strong accusations at the secretive testing and approval process of the FDA, the dangers of allowing corporate conglomerates to become too large, and the empty promises of advertising, but he does so with his tongue firmly in-cheek.  After all, how serious of a satire can you make about a white blob that looks like marshmallow fluff as it goes about its diabolical plans to take over the human race?

The silliness of the execution isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Considering the typically slapdash feel of Cohen’s screenplay and choppy editing by frequent Cohen collaborator Armond Lebowitz, any attempts to tell a serious horror or dramatic tale would have forced the film into the realm of high camp.  While there are elements of the film that come across as campy–namely the charmingly dated special effects–Cohen mostly avoids the taint of campiness by letting his cast in on the joke.  Marcovicci, Sorvino, and Morris attack their roles with impressive comedic chops, never bothering to hide how much fun they’re having.

And, of course, there’s always a kind of special magic when Moriarty gets together with Cohen.

Moriarty is best known for playing a district attorney on the early seasons of Law & Order, but before taking on that role, he appeared in four (Q, The Stuff, It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive, and A Return to Salem’s Lot) of Cohen’s films in the ‘80s.  Each one of his performances in these films contains bizarre choices in accents, speech patterns, tics, and physical appearance.  Just check out his introductory scene in The Stuff:

Nicolas Cage would be hard-pressed to top that bit of overacting.  What’s most impressive is the fact that Moriarty is able to continue using that ridiculous accent and smirking manner through the entire film and it starts to come across as normal.  He sells this behavior as the way his character would really behave.  It’s an amazing performance in its own skewed way.

While the targets of the film remain popular topics for satirists, The Stuff is dated with its use of pop-culture references (Clara Peller, better known as the “Where’s the beef?” lady from the Wendy’s commercials, appears in a commercial for “The Stuff”) and other mid ‘80s touchstones (TCBY franchises, Famous Amos cookies) to score easy gags.  This is unusual for Cohen.  In the best of his films (Bone, It’s Alive, God Told Me To), there is a certain timelessness to his handling of such sticky topics as racism, overmedication, and religious fanaticism.  But Cohen gave those films a seriousness that would have felt out of place with The Stuff.  Unfortunately, his overly light touch with the material only highlights the relative shallowness of the satirical elements this time around.

Despite my misgivings, The Stuff is still a fun watch.  Moriarty chews the scenery with aplomb and old school effects–miniatures, stop motion animation, and rear projection–are the order of the day.  It may not be Cohen’s best film, but after watching Guilty as Sin and Scandalous, it is a needed reminder that he’s far better at directing his material than anyone else.

Fun Cameo: Look for Brad Rijn and Eric Bogosian from Special Effects as employees at the grocery store that Jason trashes.

James Dixon Sighting: As the Stuff addicted postal employee in the small town where Mo meets Chocolate Chip Charlie.  Dixon sports a southern accent that might be more over-the-top than Moriarty’s.

Fair warning, while this trailer is hilarious in its attempts to sell the film as a straight horror picture, it does contain a spoiler about the fate of one of the main characters.