Unholy in Toledo: The Skin I Live In

Let’s be clear about something: the title of Pedro Almodóvar’s 1987 film Law of Desire is both emblematic and entirely cheeky with regards to this filmmaker’s singular body of work. There are no laws where Almodóvar’s characters’ desires are concerned—at least none that can’t be broken in the spirit of audacity, subversion, showing off, or compulsive plot-twisting—just an immaculately crafted blur of reptile-brain urge and wild ambition, a confusion of longing, desperation, memory and gender.

His latest film, an adaptation of Thierry Jonquet’s 1995 novel Tarantula, plunges into some as yet uncharted (by Almodóvar at least) and especially unsettling territory, with the innovative, fabulously resourceful and seriously messed up plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas, back with the writer/director who made his name for the first time in two decades) plumbing the unexplored depths of posthuman sciences in his efforts to restore order to his shattered family. There’s a beautiful young woman sequestered and constantly monitored in his rural Toledo home and laboratory. She’s both a captive, stolen away from a whole other life, and something invented. The mad doctor is, in a sense, building himself a new wife. He is attempting to recover a dead life. Most interestingly, his endeavour is driven by the conviction that all that makes us who we are is infinitely malleable once we start to tinker with the outside. The external, he believes, determines the external. And to be sure, in Almodóvar, surfaces really do matter.

Given such a premise, The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) is often extremely creepy. It’s also perhaps a little too cool and clean and clinical, too bogglingly plotty and over-calculated to truly love, but the highly composed grand design has things to ponder, revisit and re-admire. (Like Hitchcock, Almodóvar makes movies that even when flawed are tough to truly exhaust.) The source material aside, the obvious model for this macabre tale of obsession, isolation and transformation is the great 1960 French horror film Eyes Without a Face, directed by Georges Franju, who also made a movie about an abattoir that has to be seen to be believed, or has to be seen to know how much you probably wish you didn’t see it. Most Almodóvar has very clear roots in earlier, beloved, canonical films, but this one doesn’t accentuate homage with much warmth, and there are only a few fits of his characteristic humour. (One highly memorable and totally appalling example of this includes an uneasy reunion between Redgard’s assistant and some guy in a tiger costume.)

I feel like I keep wanting to warn you all about what The Skin I Live In lacks, but the truth is that despite all that I was still totally engaged with it, and some months after first seeing it, I’m easily lured into thinking about it, drawn into conversations about it. It’s fleshy, prompts goosebumps, and gets under the skin.

To fuse and refuse: The Fly at 25

Seth Brundle, the tragic genius at the core of The Fly (1986), is motivated to crack the secrets of teleportation not only because such innovation will challenge established concepts of time and space, but also because he suffers from motion sickness—teleportation means never having to set foot in a propelled vehicle again. This bit of character eccentricity is one of the many ingenious details that have allowed The Fly to endure these last 25 years, not only as what may be the defining synthesis of every major theme in David Cronenberg’s filmography, but as the modern big-budget genre film that synthesized an intelligent query into the most vital and troubling issues faced by contemporary philosophers, scientists and policy-makers with an absolutely primal and inspired display of body horror theatrics. There is no other movie at once so smart and so disgusting. Indeed, The Fly features what remains the most astonishing vomit scene—wait, make that scenes—in cinema history. (A word of warning to the uninitiated: do not watch this movie while eating yogurt.)

Rooted in the 1957 short story by George Langelaan and, of course, the Vincent Price film of the same title (1958), The Fly is several things: a chamber love triangle between Brundle, a journalist (Geena Davis) trying to file and article for a magazine named Particle, and her editor (John Getz); a science fiction about a man who accidentally gets into a machine with an insect and pays the abysmal consequences; and a shock-meditation on aging, death, and what it means to be human. “Am I dying?” Brundle wonders after his successful self-teleportation with insect co-pilot begins to exact its gooey toll on his flesh. (“His” flesh? Or something else? Teleportation obliterates form in order to recreate it elsewhere.) This being a Cronenberg film, whatever existential terror or grief Brundle feels en route to becoming Brundle-fly is eclipsed by unquenchable fascination. Other versions of Langelaan’s ‘Fly’ had its protagonist lose his ability to speak relatively early in the story; Cronenberg insisted that his Brundle keep his tongue nimble as long as possible—he wanted Brundle to articulate what was happening to him until the very end, at which point a single, unbearably sad gesture is all that’s needed for the experiment to reach its dire conclusion.

Much credit has to be given to Goldblum, whose toothy, lanky charisma, dry humour and quiet showmanship rendered him one of Cronenberg’s perfect alter egos: a smart man of action; a geek with sex appeal; a guy who can endow the word "cheeseburger" with seductive magic. And Davis, Goldblum’s girlfriend at the time, is every bit his match, both intrigued and repulsed, in-love and loving and fiercely self-protective: her alarmed response to the possibility that she’s pregnant with Son of Brundle-fly is deeply affecting. Its fantastic narrative being awkwardly yet necessarily compressed, The Fly is not without its little flaws—a bit of boilerplate dialogue here, some garish lighting there; way too much showy pathos from Getz’s emasculated ex—but the immense power of its unnerving ideas, the complex dynamics of its tautly told story, and the nuanced performances of its two leads earn its status as some very peculiar sort of masterpiece.

Are we not men?: Listening for answers in Island of Lost Souls and Kuroneko

From its opening apparition of a derelict ship emerging from a fog to its magnificent climactic images of beast-men rising up to exact revenge on their self-proclaimed creator, Island of Lost Souls (1932), photographed by Karl Struss—who won the first Oscar for his enduringly haunting work on F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1929)—is a feast of spectacle that veers between the seductive and the grotesque. Beautifully wrought visions of land, sea and laboratory intermingle with close-ups of fire-lit faces and feline hands both delicate and claw-like, desperate to feel the warmth of a very confused castaway whose sexual desire is unknowingly drawing him closer to bestiality.

But the image that lingers with me most after watching the film, late on a chilly October night, is modest in comparison: that of a single, very hairy, pointed ear. What makes this image so memorable for me is that not only is it the first sign that something terribly strange is transpiring—a foreshadowing elegantly echoed more than 50 years later in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986)—but it is also a sort of mute instruction for all of us watching: listen. Among the shrewder choices made by director Erle C. Kenton and/or his collaborators in post-production was that of using Arthur Johnston and Sigmund Krumgold’s musical score, wonderful as it is, very sparingly. The film’s celebrated atmospherics are perfected by the absence of music to soften the agonized cries of those titular souls subjected to ongoing torture in the bluntly dubbed “House of Pain.” Those cries help make Island of Lost Souls a genuinely horrific horror movie. It was those cries I kept hearing as I tried to fall asleep.

The story, for those who don’t know, comes from H.G. Wells’ 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, adapted here by Philip Wylie and Waldemar Young. It follows the ship-wrecked Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) as he’s rescued and then abandoned by a drunken sea captain on an island without a name, where mad scientist Moreau (the gloriously go-for-broke Charles Laughton) has been vivisecting his way through the animal kingdom in search of the genes that he believes urges all animals to ascend to the traits of man. Moreau lives surrounded by mutants—one played by Bela Lugosi—mostly very hairy humanoids who wear pants and rally round campfires nightly to chant out the dictates of their patriarchal, neo-colonialist master. But there is also one Lota (Kathleen Burke), the “Panther Woman,” whom Moreau, presumably unable to mate with her himself, hopes to pimp out and toss into his muddying gene pool with Parker.

It’s unlikely Island of Lost Souls would have been made just a couple of years later when the Production Code was more strictly enforced, though the film’s explicit exploration of evolutionary mayhem and trans-species lust still managed to get it banned in the UK for 25 years. These days torture has somehow been domesticated as screen “entertainment,” but Moreau’s distinctive shadow still looms over the imagination. Wells’ Moreau had to move his experiments off the grid and away from prying eyes; today he’d more likely be enjoying a brilliant career in bio-mechanics, a visionary helping to shape our post-human future. The real horror has, it seems, already started to come true.

Criterion’s exceptionally well-compiled release features their freakiest menu since Videodrome (1983); interviews with the guys from Devo, who incorporated Island into the band’s conceptual framework and helped immortalize the line, “Are we not men?”; an interview with David J. Skal regarding Wells in Hollywood; yet another excellent, bouncy, info-crammed audio commentary from Golden Age horror historian Gregory Mank; and, perhaps most fascinating, an interview with Richard Stanley, co-scenarist and original director of the infamous 1996 Island adaptation with Marlon Brando.


Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (1968), which Criterion released last week, is set during the Sengoku period, a time of seemingly endless war. The film begins with a horde of starved samurai entering a very modest abode inhabited by two women, the mother (Nobuko Otowa) and wife (Kei Sato) of a young man (Kichiemon Nakamura) who was conscripted into the army of a local warlord. The samurai consume all available food, rape the women and set their home on fire before disappearing into the grove from which they emerged.

The brutality of this sequence—not unlike many sequences in Island of Lost Souls—is intensified greatly by what is absent from the soundtrack. There is no dialogue whatsoever for the first ten minutes of Kuroneko, but the glances exchanged by the women and the invaders prompt you to steel yourself, and the image, manifesting only moments later, of the women’s bodies as they lay in the ashes of what was once their home—their cadavers soon approached by some rather curious cats—is both chilling and possessive of a spectral beauty that will return throughout the course of this elegant, unsettling ghost story riddled with vicious revenge and perverse reversals.

Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) scared the bejesus out of me when I saw Criterion’s release of it some years back, and Kuroneko wields a similar primal power, much of it deriving from carefully crafted details: a house that seems like a theatre of mist designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; the kimono who’s outer diaphanous layer resembles the wings of a fly; the peculiar use of slow-motion or the breath that hangs in the frigid air. The script was founded on a Japanese folktale, yet it holds extra resonance due to Shindo’s class-conscious subtext. The film’s influence can be found everywhere in more recent Japanese horror films, though it received a negligent release in North America in its day. Metro Cinema screened it back in August and Criterion’s deluxe treatment should secure it the much wider audience it deserves. See it when it’s dark out. But listen carefully, too.

Rolling sunder: Rubber on DVD

What reason does a tire need to quiver to life in the middle of the Mojave Desert and undertake a killing spree? What reason do a dozen spectators need to gather in that same desert with binoculars and sleeping bags and comment on the tire’s actions as though they were (like us) watching a movie? What reason does a pantless man need to share a cheap motel room with a wild turkey? Before we even have a chance to posit such queries to Rubber, one of its central characters, a Lieutenant Chad (Stephen Spinella), addresses the camera (and us) with questions of his own. “In the Steven Spielberg movie E.T., why is the alien brown?” Chad asks. “In The Pianist, by Polanski, how come this guy has to hide, and live like a bum, when he plays the piano so well?” The answer: “No reason.” (Unless of course you consider something like systematic Nazi antiSemitism to be a reason.) Every movie, Chad assures us, has an integral element of “no reason.” Which is perhaps another way of saying that the movie is the reason. So what’s the reason to see the movie—this movie? It certainly isn’t to ask more useless questions.

Rubber, out on DVD tomorrow from Mongrel Media (or on the 14th from Magnolia in the US), seems like a playful essay on artifice. (The audience-chorus, who at one point collectively launch into a feeding frenzy right out of a Living Dead movie, is reminiscent of devices seized by the American avant-garde theatre of the 1960s.) Thing is, there’s not much thesis (beyond, say, the notion that the things we discard will rise up from our collective anxiety and slaughter us in our ironic bewilderment), but there is a whole lot of playfulness. Recalling both Scanners (1981) and numerous Stephen King narratives, Rubber is a meta-horror about a telekinetic tire named Robert. His first victim is a plastic bottle, quickly followed by a scorpion, before moving on to larger and messier mammals. The tire’s got something on its mind, it seems. It’s got feelings. It’s infatuated with a lone traveler played by the pretty older sister from Fat Girl (2001). It even has memories: there is an allusion to some smoky tire genocide.

Quentin Dupieux, aka Mr. Oizo

Rubber is the second feature from French writer/director Quentin Dupieux, aka: Mr. Oizo, recording artist for Ed Banger Records, following the little seen Steak (2007). There’s much to recommend Rubber on a bit-by-bit basis, though it runs out of fuel long before the end of the road. Regardless, its audacity, resourcefulness and propulsive silliness convey an appealingly distinctive sensibility. You’re left with the impression that there’s plenty of tread left on Dupieux’s goofball imagination.

I scream, you scream, we're all screamed out: Scream 4

The cinema’s most annoying crank caller returns in this latest installment of Wes Craven’s franchise, as does original scripter Kevin Williamson, several original castmembers and that stupid ghost-face mask. After a decade spent licking her wounds, working on her martial arts technique and writing a memoir which apparently consists of nothing but self-help platitudes, final girl Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) finds herself back in old Woodsboro, overwhelmingly white and middle-class, with tastefully-tended gardens lining the boulevards, that blander-than-life, fantasy American no-place where killing’s just too much fun to keep those rascally, movie-obsessed kids away from.

Donning the old mask and wielding the old knife, the mayhem is rebooted and mostly shamelessly rehashed: to say that Scream 4 is more amusing than most youth-oriented contemporary horror is not much of a compliment. At once unlikely in its winky po-mo conceit and half-assed in its execution, the film’s immaculately cleansed and powdered zitless nubile babes discussing strategies for genre renovation reduces forward-thinking horror to nothing but infinite variations on “boo” moments, utterly removed from thornier challenges such as the consideration of what lies behind fear, anxiety, dangerous thrills, perverse humour or morbid curiosity. To note the film’s inherent preposterousness seems redundant, though the truth is that nothing in Scream 4 seems more improbable than a teenager who can’t remember where she left her mobile phone.

This time out there’s a geek who wears a camera on his ear so he can stream his POV on the internet, adding an ostensible layer to the film’s overall hall of mirrors thematic, which includes a sequels-within-sequels prelude. David Arquette drives around frowning as Sheriff Chipmunk while Courtney Cox’s journalist-mannequin tries to take the serial killer investigation into her own hands, invoking Sarah Palin in her declaration that she’s “going rogue.” Supposedly, these two are married. Campbell meanwhile seems at a complete loss, unable to do much besides wince angrily when confronted by yet another attack, yet another strangely listless scene of murder that at best recalls lesser bits of Roadrunner cartoons without the laughs. At least Marley Shelton is genuinely cute as a dutiful deputy, and the ending-ending, which is to say the ending that follows the predictably false false ending, is so loopy it’s actually rather winning.

Insidious: sneaky demons lead family "Further"

If “it’s not the house that’s haunted,” as the tagline promises, then why does director James Wan spend the listless opening credit sequence for Insidious doling out one conventionally creepy haunted house image after another (and solemnly fading to black after each and every one)? Perhaps under the persuasion of co-producer Oren Peli (creator of the mega-smash new-old school chiller Paranormal Activity), Wan’s affectionate deployment of tried-and-true creaky horror tropes is, in theory at least, more than welcome in the era of torture and mutilation as entertainment (an era Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell helped cultivate with their Saw franchise). The problem is that these tropes feel almost arbitrary in their placement. But then so many items in Insidious feel arbitrary.

The first member of the Lambert family we meet is Renai (Rose Byrne), the second Dalton (Ty Simpkins). Mother and son both rise early and wear matching pajamas. They seem to share a quiet curiosity and a connection distinct from those shared by the other members of the family. Renai, a struggling songwriter, is diminutive in figure and seems especially vulnerable. Unsurprisingly, she’ll be the character most tormented by apparitions and inexplicable sounds (the haunted baby monitor makes its token entrance early on) that accumulate in the film’s slow burning first act. But it’s her husband Josh (Patrick Wilson, as always, looking like he’s hiding something) that intrigues. Hints are dropped rather heavily that there’s something untrustworthy about him. He doesn’t like to be photographed. He’s a schoolteacher but seems awkward with kids. He stays late at work when he knows Renai is stuck at home, deeply upset by the weird disturbances, minding three kids, and single-handedly nesting. Josh also snores loudly, and rubs some dandyish cream under his eyes before bed.

Soon Dalton has an accident in the attic and winds up in a coma that the doctors can’t make sense of. That his coma seems directly connected to the by now unambiguously paranormal activity (a premise that could almost resemble something out of a Haruki Murakami novel) is the thing that got me especially interested in Insidious. But a major switch in tone and tack occurs at the film’s mid-point. The Lamberts move house but the shadowy figures keep a-comin’. What was previously only suggested, sometimes rather effectively so, suddenly becomes all too visible and really, really dumb looking. Steam punk heavies, a red-faced boogeyman and many kooky, pancake make-up wearing, formally dressed phantoms turn up, looking like rejects from Carnival of Souls. A spiritualist is consulted, accompanied by a pair of bumbling ghost busters (one of whom is played by Whannell), and a whole over-complicated mythology begins to establish itself surrounding a normally invisible parallel realm called “the Further.” The aforementioned connection between Renai and Dalton turns out to have no consequence. Barbara Hershey arrives on the scene, conjuring horrorphile memories of The Entity, but ultimately for no special reason. Much of what’s set up during the first act gets shelved. Josh eventually is induced into an out-of-body experience and travels to the Further where he gets into an astral fistfight with a demon and wins, whatever that means. Insidious can’t quite decide what it wants to be, though the real problem is that what it promised to be might have been so much more satisfying.

Elimination dance: Black Swan

There’s a moment when ballet impresario Thomas (Vincent Cassel), having taken a risk in casting the exceedingly demure Nina (Natalie Portman) as the schizophrenic dual lead in his new production of Swan Lake, explains that Nina will succeed so long as she lets go of her fear. “The only person standing in your way,” Thomas tells her, “is you.” But these words intended as reassurance, spoken fairly late in Black Swan, couldn’t sound more ominous. Nina’s capacity for confusing her internal ambivalence with some external, independent, diabolical force has by now been demonstrated in myriad scenes marked by vivid hallucination. We’ve come to presume that Nina’s only path to artistic transcendence is one that requires a morbid, perilously complete identification with her role.

Black Swan makes a fascinating companion piece to director Darren Aronofsky’s previous film The Wrestler. Both closely follow their protagonists through a crisis resulting at least in part from ambitions of athletic perfection. It’s possible that Nina would have arrived at the same crisis point without the pressures of ballet, but the film seems drawn to persuading us of a hypothesis concerning the psychological cost of zero body fat and immersion in a milieu that consumes and virtually cloisters those devoted to its craft. Aronofsky revels in the amplified cracking of sore toes, in close-ups of wounds, in the eeriness of rehearsal hall mirrors, invoking the funhouse and foreshadowing the proliferation of doppelgängers to come.

Then there’s Nina’s home life, that frilly pink bedroom where her attempt at the masturbation, as prescribed by the sleazy but shrewd Thomas, is overseen by a menagerie of plush toys—not to mention Erica (Barbara Hershey), Nina’s mom, a failed ballerina herself who’s life now consists largely of suffocating her daughter with hysterical maternal concern. It’s interesting to note that in The Entity Hershey played a woman repeatedly sexually assaulted by an invisible demon, but almost no one believes her—everyone thinks that she’s crazy. By contrast, you might say that Nina’s tragedy emerges from the fact that no one acknowledges that she’s crazy, even though she exhibits kleptomaniac and masochistic tendencies. But the film that comes to mind once we get a sense of Nina’s fraught domestic life is Carrie, with its oppressive, infantilizing mom and naïve daughter whose ascendance to queenly status seems doomed. Like both Carrie and The Entity, Black Swan is a horror film. Like Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, it’s a horror film that derives its particular effects through rigorous subjectivity.

Working from a script by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John J. McLaughlin, Aronofsky keeps things moving at a remarkably clipped pace. Even on a second viewing I marveled at the way the film gallops through a lot of story without slackening. I think the problems with Black Swan become prominent when all that story seems to evaporate ahead of schedule. We start to feel this when Thomas repeats the exact same, maddeningly vague critique of Nina’s work—that’s she won’t “let go”—for the umpteenth time. Despite Portman’s radical transformation during the final act, the film never gives us any sense of what makes dance either dynamic or staid, sensual or frigid, because Aronofsky doesn’t appear to be the slightest bit interested in dance. Aronofsky is much more engaged in the deployment of his Goyaesque bestiary, perhaps echoing Ingmar Bergman’s somewhat similarly themed Hour of the Wolf, but a significant difference between Bergman’s film and Aronofsky’s is that the more obviously hallucinatory Black Swan’s hallucinations become, the cornier and more shallow the film’s entire notion of psychological frailty feels. Aronofsky deftly gets us worked up as the film builds toward its climax, but the entire last act finally feels silly, those escalating spasms of psychic unease that make a lot of fuss without taking us anywhere new, other than offering further attempts at shock with diminishing returns. Still, I heartily recommend taking Black Swan’s mostly riveting journey to the end of Nina’s psychic tether. I just don’t want to lead you to believe that there’s any place to fall once that tether slips out of her grasp.

Beware of cat power: Criterion unleashes Obayashi's Hausu on DVD and Blu-ray

When Japanese movie studio Toho asked Obayashi Nobuhiko to give them something like Jaws (1975), Obayashi asked his 10-year-old daughter Chigumi for advice. She thought all Japanese movies were boring, so her dad urged her to offer a remedy. The ball got rolling with Chigumi’s assertion that it would be pretty freaky if her reflection in the mirror attacked her. “I always discuss important matters with the children,” Obayashi claims, and Hausu (77), the product of this collaboration, indeed represents an exceedingly rare marriage of cross-generational sensibilities. It’s a fantasy film as seen from the perspective of a child, yet it’s imbued with the larger mythological-psychotronic-experimentalist scope of an adult with a background in advertising. It’s aggressively playful, enamored with optical tricks and with soundscapes and repeated musical themes that seem culled from Godard and blaxploitation. It’s oblivious to generic orientation—okay, it’s oblivious to many forms of orientation, yet it also has a perfectly coherent narrative through-line with roots in the Western Gothic tradition, Japanese ghost stories, and Hansel and Gretel. You could call it a cautionary tale, but then you’d just have to look out for everything. Especially cats. And watermelons.

Hausu is the Japanese appropriation of the English word House. The former sounds vaguely more menacing to me, maybe because of that extra syllable, maybe because of the pleasing weirdness of hearing a familiar word mispronounced, but Criterion has emblazoned their terrific new DVD and Blu-ray packages with the latter term, perhaps in the hope that potential viewers will intuit that, as David Lynch once said, there’s just something inherently scary about a house. Whatever you want to call it, Obayashi’s fevered debut feature follows seven teenage girls with seven smurfy names as they travel to the countryside for their summer vacation and wind up at the house of a wheelchair-bound spinster. Before they arrive, the sky is always glowing warm and soft like some hazy dream you can’t pull away from, perhaps built on crude memories of Technicolor musicals. Once they’re installed in the titular dwelling, the world turns crepuscular and shadowy, and malice becomes boundless. Futons and pianos eat people. Cats’ eyes shimmer as though sending cryptic signals from the abyss. Heads emerge from wells and bite asses. Everything is deadly, yet these girls just wanna have fun. Dismemberment is scary, but who said death can’t be like ice cream? The realm of Hausu is one of relentless colour and geometrical flourish, the screen always being divided by walls, doors, corners, irises, and literal fissures in the filmic image that remind you of how very dry and adult Peter Greenaway’s formal noodling can be. It’s a realm of trapdoors and illusion, of cornball effects executed with verve, of preposterous panty-clad derring-do, of music and morbid delight, a realm where every childish suspicion about adults is wholly confirmed and then some. Western audiences may struggle to interpret this perverse, seemingly contradictory mash-up of fear and frolicking as something terribly exotic and coded in the Japanese culture, but you could also just think of it as a far more imaginative version of this thing we call Halloween.

Generously included in Criterion’s package and equally worth checking out is Emotion (66) Obayashi’s 40-minute piece about a girl from the seaside who travels far from home, makes a friend, and enters a secret world of sadomasochistic romance. A love triangle emerges, and parents are again not to be trusted. There’s no synch-sound, so the great American-born Japanese film scholar Donald Richie provides the English narration, which often seems slightly different in meaning from the Japanese narration, for which we’re given subtitles. Never one to use a stylistic trope once if he can use it 50 times, Obayashi is crazy for flash-cuts here, and is surely even more deeply under the spell of Godard in this use of on-screen text and his determination to push continuity to its outer limits while maintaining the minimum requirements for a forward-moving story. And there’s dancing! The images are often beautiful, and yes, fraught with dizzy emotion. At one point a title card appears that reads: NOW THE STORY DESCENDS INTO A RUINOUS ABYSS WITH VIOLENT MUSIC, which doesn’t exactly signal a radical shift in tone. There’s also a dream sequence that’s only marginally more bizarre than the rest of the movie. Like Hausu, it’s all kind of exhausting, but this sort of blind and wild adventure is bound to wear anyone out, so think of it as a work-out, and watch it before bed. Your brain will rest better afterwards.

Do you believe in Magic?

When Corky first takes the stage for Amateur Night he totally bombs. Once this hits home his habitual timidity suddenly falls away and he berates the audience for failing to appreciate his card tricks. Corky relates this story to his bedridden mentor and revises it as he goes. We see select flashbacks that could verify or contradict his narrative depending how you figure it, and so right from the start Magic (1978) is already playing with misdirection, albeit conservatively so—you get to feeling the movie can’t bear to let Corky be truly humiliated. Next time we see Corky perform he’s got Fats in tow, and all that rage Corky couldn’t keep in check has now been channeled into Fats. This miniature version of Corky redistributes Corky’s repression, cursing and insulting everyone in the room and having them roaring with laughter. With Fats’ help Corky now gets paid for his tantrums. Fats even helps Corky win the affections of that beauty he loved from afar in high school. You might even say Fats can get away with murder. Or try, anyway. Magic is a little like Dead Ringers (88) except instead of two Jeremy Ironses you’ve got Anthony Hopkins and a dummy.

Okay, so Magic isn’t nearly as fascinatingly perverse, chillingly sexy, or generally psychologically juicy as the Cronenberg, but it’s still pretty nifty, if a tad overlong. Adapted by William Goldman from his own novel, directed by Richard Attenborough before Gandhi (82), and starring Hopkins long before Hannibal Lecter, there’s a sense that this modest horror picture with the high-grade talent probably caught most audiences off guard. It left a number of critics sniffy and dismissive, but it’s developed something of a cult following and is available on DVD and now Blu-ray from Dark Sky.

The dummy really is creepy, but this has much to do with Hopkins’ uncanny ability to convey the clot of pettiness nurtured by the damaged child locked inside the beefy adult, something that comes across like lightning every time his face goes from slack to smiling. Hopkins is very good with the ventriloquism—a practice once suspected of being in league with the devil, and one, we should note, usually mastered before puberty—but the movie is almost better when you can see him move his lips. Burgess Meredith has a terrific supporting role as Corky’s manager, bald on top, with glasses and foot-long cigars that make him look like a Vegas Hunter S. Thompson. Eschewing camp, he’s somehow just about Magic’s most sympathetic character, yet his affection for Corky, who he’s convinced with be the next Rich Little, is perhaps best not thought about too carefully. Corky’s clearly got a screw loose long before Fats starts to nag him like Norman Bates’ mother.

Victor Kemper’s cinematography is lovely and effective, evoking the movie’s pervading sadness through diffused light, and often playfully doubling Corky with ostentatious shadows. Breaking away from the epic for a change, Attenborough’s strengths here lie with his attention to actors and their business. Besides creating the right space for Hopkins to give his very polished but nonetheless remarkable performance, Attenborough also gets terrific work out of even the minor players, such as the cab driver who gives Corky a tour of his home town and looks like Keith Ritchie from the A-Team. But I think Magic’s most wonderful surprise is Ann-Margaret—that’s right, Anthony Hopkins gets to make out with Ann-Margaret. She’s great because she seems to understand that the teenage hottie once desired by every boy in town might grow up to be lonely, lost, and a little loopy herself. Her spastic glee upon seeing old Corky do his thing with Fats feels just a little off—most gorgeous women I’ve known don’t usually get so excited about nerds with talking dolls. Of course, we can always fantasize.

My dearest fiend: on finally reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Richard Rothwell's portrait of Mary Shelley

There’s that moment which occurs near the halfway point in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when Victor Frankenstein is finally reunited with the monster. Frankenstein has entered university, dazzled his mentors and, in secret, created his artificial man through some unholy marriage of archaic magic and scientific method. He’s fallen ill following the completion of his creation, like a mother weakened by the physical torments of birth. He’s utterly neglected to determine the monster’s whereabouts, and has gradually discovered its capacity for murder. He’s wracked with guilt over having breathed life into the monster’s piecemeal flesh, yet, foreshadowing all that follows, assumes no responsibility for the crimes the monster commits, crimes which Frankenstein, one of the worst parents in Western literature, could arguably have prevented.

The monster’s return is illuminated by a flash of lightning—the same phenomenon at which the 15-year-old Frankenstein marveled so fatefully. It approaches and, to the great shock of those familiar with Boris Karloff’s famously inarticulate manifestation, it begins to speak. “Do your duty towards me,” the monster beseeches his maker, “and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you in peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends… Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed… I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

Theodor von Holst's frontispiece to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

The monster asks Frankenstein to hear his story, and so begins this landmark novel’s most astonishing and moving section, the testament of this eight-foot wretch, who begins his biography by trying to describe the memory of coming into this world fully formed, cognizant and sensitive to basic needs, yet mystified by every new occurrence, and from the start orphaned. He takes to the wilderness, eventually learns to observe and imitate humans, is stirred by music, beauty, and familial love, comprehends the importance of interdependence and the inevitability of disappointment in others, and even educates himself into literacy with the help of volumes of Milton and Goethe. By the time the monster is able to converse with Frankenstein he’s become as eloquent as any character in the novel. This might seem unlikely, even more unlikely than the fact of the monster’s creation, given what we now appear capable of producing nearly 200 years later. But eloquence of any sort can seem unlikely when weighed against the savagery that mankind continues to prove capable of. This novel itself seems unlikely, a succinct, surprising, and imminently durable masterpiece, whose ostensible flaws obey the logic of dream on which the whole is founded, whose epistolary structure of stories within stories within stories reads as so completely modern, and whose magnificence was brought into the world by someone all of 18 years of age.

The draft of Frankenstein

I’m a lot older than 18 and have only now finally gotten round to reading Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in a handsome hardbound edition (Everyman’s Library, $21), so you’ll have to forgive my rapture. Obviously, I was perfectly aware of Frankenstein’s immeasurable influence, but I somehow failed to anticipate just how fascinating and strange its structure is, how evocative and often poetic its language, and how rich and diverse its themes or motifs, which constitute the region in which Shelley conveyed her highest level of sophistication.

Walton, the Englishman who is ultimately the novel’s only (perhaps unreliable) narrator, seeks adventure and glory in the Arctic, and his letters to his sister speak repeatedly about the preciousness and rarity of friendship—a concern mirrored exactly in the confessions of Victor Frankenstein, whom he encounters during his arduous travels and whose tale he records. Walton longs for the companionship of his sister, and this longing too is mirrored, with more explicit creepiness, in Frankenstein’s story, which iterates again and again Frankenstein’s abiding love for his adoptive sister, to whom he’s inescapably betrothed. And in the story of the monster too these same themes dominate: loneliness, and the desire for a lady companion born of the same fault-laden parentage. (I had no idea that right here in Shelley’s Frankenstein lie the seeds for Hollywood’s Bride of Frankenstein.)

The Bride of Frankenstein

So Frankenstein is a story of absent mothers, ineffectual fathers, men without women. But where this gets really interesting is in Frankenstein’s own participation in his undoing. The monster is the product of Frankenstein’s own hubris, yet it could also be interpreted as a whopper of an excuse for Frankenstein’s perpetuating a fearful avoidance of consummation. If Frankenstein fails to fulfill the not entirely unreasonable requests of the monster—to my eyes the novel’s most sympathetic character—to produce for him a female counterpart, the monster promises to return to ruin Frankenstein’s life precisely on the night of his wedding. What better way to prolong bachelorhood! Frankenstein’s anxiety surrounding marriage is subverted by an act of masculine immaculate conception and the brutal and terrifying incidents that accumulate as a result. There are multiple morals to be gained from Shelley’s tale, and I wonder if among them is something about the immense power of sheer procrastination, which in the hands of the wrong genius can itself prove monstrous.

The damned revisited: Angel Heart

As a kid, though no one in my family really pushed religion on me, I’d somehow managed to suffer overwhelming dread over the threat of eternal damnation. Maybe this explains the special chill I got while watching Angel Heart, a chill I must have been fascinated by since over a few short years I’d managed to wear out my VHS copy of the movie.


Watching Angel Heart again for the first time in at least a dozen, maybe 15 years, I found that I remembered the movie remarkably well, every plume of steam, flight of stairs, and rattling fan, every goofy smile that crosses Mickey Rourke’s moist, pale face, so often implying Bogart’s internal shrug, his every utterance of “I’m from Brooklyn,” as though that explains everything about him. The chill the movie triggers in my older self isn’t quite the same, of course. But is it me, or does Angel Heart still work as few of those Alan Parker movies we loved as teenagers do, this neo-noir with an icy touch of old-fashioned horror, leading to a not-unpleasurable overwrought finale?


Rourke’s detective Harry Angel is hired by a wealthy, weirdly bearded client played by Robert De Niro who likes to punish his eggs a little before eating them and employs the same manicurist as Dracula. Harry goes down to New Orleans to locate the elusive crooner Johnny Favorite, a reported womanizer and all-round bastard. Harry will find him, eventually, but along the way there’s a guy in Coney Island with a box full of nose guards—which makes Harry look like one of those chickens he’s “got a thing about”—there’s a drug-addled doctor, a fortune teller elegantly played by Charlotte Rampling, a terrific chair fight in a church, a forbidding cauldron of gumbo, and of course that nubile sorceress, an unnervingly sexy Lisa Bonet all too fresh from The Cosby Show. The word Santería is never mentioned. It’s 1955, but there’s still talk of how a lot of guys got fucked up during the war, which casts a long shadow over Angel Heart and it’s mood-drunk mise en scène.


But as it descends toward its final destination, the movie, based on William Hjortsberg’s 1978 novel Falling Angel, gradually loosens itself from the dictates of historical, sociological or generic contexts, or even geographical, if we consider this to be a rather expressionist portrait of Louisiana. Metaphysical ambiguities aside, what fuels the story, what makes it chilling still, in its way, is this provocation: you don’t know who you are. Rourke’s repeated protests to the contrary constitute the only sequence where he could be said to push a little too hard, his voice strangled with despair and confusion and injustice. Yet, to be fair, how can he usher us toward the given conclusion otherwise?


1987 was a hell of a year for Rourke, who also made slobbery weirdly seductive in Barfly, and Johnny Handsome was still ahead of him. It would be another couple of years before some sort of madness, maybe related to celebrity, maybe not, took hold of Rourke and sent him reeling, punch-drunk, toward humiliations I won’t list here and a long string of uninspired, sometimes grotesque work. It seems to me now that Rourke’s subsequent story adds an extra layer of pathos to his hapless gasps of “I know who I am.” Perhaps The Wrestler was his own belated retort.

Piranha 3-D: Beach blanket bloodbath, barf-bags may be required

Alexandre Aja’s third horror remake kicks off with Richard Dreyfuss getting sucked into an astonishingly lame-looking computer-generated whirlpool before being gobbled by two-million year-old killer guppies. Dreyfuss’ cameo is meant to remind the amnesiacs in the audience of Jaws, though wouldn’t it have been more in keeping with the monumental crassness of Aja’s Piranha to somehow digitally resurrect Roy Scheider and shove him into this innovative new product for inducing vomit? That’s not hyperbole, incidentally—there are at least two acts of vomiting in the movie itself, and only one is performed by a piranha.

Wasn’t the first third of Saving Private Ryan supposed to be a comedy? Apparently that’s the sort of “high-concept” that gets green-lit these days, resulting in this brazenly cynical, simultaneously tedious and upsetting beach blanket bloodbath, quite possibly the only summer fare that includes both Academy Award-winning actors and porn stars in its cast, not to mention the chubby kid from Stand By Me. Funny thing is, I’m not sure which camp gives the worst performances. At least valiant Elizabeth Shue looks like she’s trying, and Christopher Lloyd is nearly amusing in the Sam Jaffe expository scientist bit, though he doesn’t have to work as hard as Sperm Overload 3’s Gianna Michaels, playing a topless parasailing appetizer.

Scripted by Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger, the story’s at once risibly sentimental and utterly heartless, winkily aware of its own irritatingly idiocy yet idiotic nonetheless. It concerns Sheriff Shue trying to evacuate an Arizona resort upon discovering swarms of hungry cannibal piranhas released from captivity while some mannequin who’s supposed to be her teenage son absconds from babysitting duties to hang on a boat with Jerry O’Connell’s insufferable moron with a movie camera, who’s supposedly making pornography. Of course Shue can’t get those pesky spring breakers to exit the water, and soon enough all those dozens of young women Aja worked so hard to get out of their bikinis are ripped to shreds, not only by piranha teeth but also the outboard motor of some scumbag foolishly trying to escape the massacre. After seeing Piranha you may want to undertake hypnosis to get its images out of your head.

It strikes me that O’Connell’s would-be director is actually a pretty obvious stand-in for Aja. While he’s clearly no match for Aja in the sadistic misogyny department, all O’Connell wants for the first half of Piranha is to shoot naked tits, yet his most vivid expression of amazement occurs when he sees one of his honeys consumed by piranhas, who possess the showmanship to penetrate her from below and exit through her mouth. Soon after O’Connell’s back on his boat, half-mutilated, paraphrasing Eric Roberts in The Pope of Greenwich Village. “They took my penis,” he gasps, as though he wasn’t impotent to begin with. But he’s impotent in 3-D! Feeling entertained yet?