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.

The Movie Critic Defender

There is a common misperception that film critics enjoy bashing movies–salivating at the chance to collectively jump on the next blockbuster and declare it trash while we judge it from our ivory towers.  The idea that I might enjoy watching, analyzing, and writing about a bad movie strikes me as incredibly asinine.  Even if I once thought there might be a kernel of truth to this assertion that the critical community waits for the next Michael Bay film with figurative knives and forks in hand, I only need to look at my viewing habits since the end of The Parallax Review to see how wrong that belief is.

During the brief but distinguished run we had at The Parallax Review, I watched a ton of movies I never would have bothered seeing.  From Grown Ups to Powder to Sommersby and many more, there were films that I had not one bit of interest in watching, but I manned up, opened my mind, and did my damnedest to write a thoughtful, informative review.  While I was doing this, I never stopped to consider the effects of watching one mediocre movie after another.  The main reason I put on blinders when it came to my movie consumption is that the site was a labor of love for me.  I wanted so badly for the site to succeed that I threw every moment of my free time into it, never allowing myself to question my commitment.

When it became apparent that the site was not going to succeed in the way that I wanted, I had a moment where I was able to take a look at my life and decide which way I wanted it to go.  I could either continue on with being a “traditional” movie critic, watching every new release and reviewing it, no matter if it deserved a review or not, or I could do what I’m doing with this blog and only watch and write about films and filmmakers that interest me.

While it was a difficult decision to walk away from The Parallax Review, I feel it was the right one because I had reached the point where watching certain films had become a chore.  This was a discovery that shocked me since I’ve always loved movies.  Obviously, it was always a fun experience to watch a good movie, but I was even able to find something worthwhile about even the worst movies I’d watched over the years that I could apply to my own screenplays.  But I never intentionally watched a bad movie until I started writing film criticism on a full time basis.  Before the site, if I saw a bad movie, it was because I was let down by a film that I believed to have potential.  I can’t say that was the case with some of the films I watched for The Parallax Review.

This constant submitting of my time to watch mediocre and just plain bad movies led me to actually burn out on films.  Once the site had ended, I found myself being extremely selective about what I watched.  I no longer was willing to take a chance on a suspect looking film just because I admired an actor, writer, or director associated with it.  If I was watching a film at home and it didn’t show signs of improving after twenty minutes, I turned it off.  And I was brutally selective about what I watched in theaters.  Since the end of The Parallax Review, I have watched exactly four films (Super, Hanna, 13 Assassins, and Source Code) in current release.  Four films!  In three months!  A year ago, such a thing would have been unthinkable.

To shorten a post that has the potential to run on to infinity, seriously thinking about bad movies has taken its toll on me.  At the time that I wrote every bad review that I posted over the last year, I didn’t enjoy the experience one iota.  As a movie fan, I want every film I watch to be amazing.  As a critic, I wanted that to be true even more.  I only wanted to write positive reviews because then I wouldn’t feel as though I had just wasted hours of my life.  The fact that I was only able to last less than a year at such a pace before burning out deepens my admiration for critics like Nathan Rabin, Roger Ebert, and A.O. Scott.  These guys have endured one bad movie after another for years, but they soldier on.  They must have a stronger constitution than I do for the dreck that Hollywood continues to foist on the movie going public, but that doesn’t mean that they enjoy watching crap and writing bad reviews any more than I do.

Sorry, I just had to get this off my chest.

The Cohen Case Files: Scandalous (1984)

Story by Larry Cohen

The rules of the WGA can be rather arbitrary when assigning credit for a film that was worked on by multiple writers.  This can lead to a writer who contributed heavily to what wound up on screen not receiving any credit on the finished product.  More often, a writer who did work that never made it into the finished film will find themselves bewildered by receiving a screen credit.  I have no idea if this was the case with Scandalous, an insignificant early ‘80s comedy that features a story credit for Larry Cohen, but judging by the film I just watched, I’d be surprised if any of Cohen’s work found its way into the final cut.

Frank Swedlin (Robert Hays) is an investigative reporter stuck doing human interest stories for the news conglomerate owned by Simon (M. Emmet Walsh), who just happens to be his father-in-law.  Trapped in an unhappy marriage to Francine (Conover Kennard), his job threatened by Simon, and stuck in London when he wants to be covering “real” stories in New York, Frank is pretty miserable.  When he witnesses Fiona (Pamela Stephenson), a beautiful woman on his flight, apparently buying industrial secrets from a man in a creepy, fake Asian disguise, he pounces on the potential story.

It turns out that Fiona is a con artist in cahoots with Willie (a slumming John Gielgud), to make it appear that Frank is having an affair so they can blackmail him.  But Fiona and Willie have underestimated Frank because he is able to see right through their plans and he has his own plan to expose them for the con artists they are on his weekly news show.

At this point in the plot, I was reasonably entertained.  I enjoyed how the filmmakers had set up the dueling con games that Fiona and Frank were playing on each other and I assumed this would be the plot of the entire film.  But this plot was abruptly wrapped up at the end of the first act and the film quickly changed gears with Frank discovering Francine murdered in their home and all signs pointing to him as the murderer.

Turning the film into a “wrongly accused man seeks to clear his name” flick reeks of desperation and an attempt to play it safe.  Not only does the story come with plenty of clichéd baggage, but the plot doesn’t fit with the screwball tone that director Rob Cohen insists on using.  I’ll admit, I was pretty surprised when Frank discovered Francine’s body, but this surprise was immediately replaced by a certain horror about the way Frank is supposed to go from vigorously defending himself against police accusations to trading stale one-liners with Fiona.

This confusion of tones only causes the flaws in the script and direction to become more evident.  While it was a clever move to cast Hays as the smarter-than-he seems Frank (at that point, Hays was best known for stoically spewing silly dialogue from the Airplane movies–come to think of it, those are still the only movies he’s known for), after the sudden plot shifts, Cohen sells out the character of Frank and forces Hays to act like the world’s biggest cartoon idiot.  Hays makes gulping noises, contorts his face, and acts as spastic as Jim Carrey on crystal meth.  It’s a bizarre performance from a man who probably knew better than what he was being asked to do.

The supporting cast fares no better.  Stephenson hardly has the comic chops to pull off all the personas Fiona adopts in service of her cons.  Walsh seems to be acting in a completely different film where he’s still as menacing as his character from Blood Simple.  Even Gielgud is unable to avoid the embarrassment, spending much of the film in one disguise after another (in one memorably awful scene, he’s dressed up as a punk rocker at a Bow Wow Wow concert–seriously).

Francine’s murder investigation becomes more convoluted than it needs to be with the introduction of a ridiculous Scotland Yard investigator (Jim Dale) and a resolution that barely makes sense.  Trapped in all this nonsense is a halfhearted attempt at cynical satire with Frank’s former friends in the media convicting him in the public arena while his producer does her best to steal his on-air job.  Despite its busy plot, the story is never interesting enough to hold attention even while it strains credibility and the satire is as toothless as a one-hundred-year-old sugar addict.

Normally I look at these films through the context of Cohen’s contributions.  There’s no point with Scandalous.  It’s a mess of a film no matter who was behind the script or the camera.  Even worse, it’s not an entertaining mess, just a desperate attempt at screwball comedy that misses every target it aims at.  Avoid it at all costs.