The Croods

2013 // USA // Kirk De Micco and Chris Sanders // March 19, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20 Cine)

It’s probably unavoidable that any discussion of Dreamworks Animation’s The Croods will reference Hanna Barbera Productions’ seminal Boomer Era television series The Flintstones. Both are built around a nearly identical high concept: a pointedly anachronistic depiction of a Paleolithic nuclear family. Still, aside from this superficial similarity—and an affection for creaky jokes about a oafish husband’s loathing for his irascible mother-in-law—the two works share little in common. How the The Flintstones ever came to be regarded as a iconic children’s show is still a bit of mystery: It was, at bottom, a retrograde domestic sitcom, and seems to have left an impression on the pop cultural consciousness primarily due to its lame geological puns and dinosaur-appliance sight gags. The Croods, meanwhile, is a fairly straightforward middlebrow comedy adventure feature. As with Dreamworks’ previous theatrical film, The Rise of the Guardians, its visual design is undeniably wondrous, but The Croods is ultimately undermined by a bland and muddled story.

That story concerns Eep Crood (Emma Stone), a wily adolescent cavegirl who scurries across the prehistoric landscape like a bubbly, unstoppable bobcat. Eep dwells in a cave with her overprotective father Grug (Nicholas Cage), doting mother Ugga (Catherine Keener), dimwitted younger brother Thunk (Clarke Duke), baby sister Sandy (Randy Thom), and salty old Gran (Cloris Leachman). As Eep explains in a animated cave-painting prologue, her clan has outlived their less fortunate Stone Age neighbors by following Grug’s fearful rules to the letter. Those rules entail pummeling potential food sources with rocks, fleeing in terror from anything unusual, and cowering in fear in their hidey-hole after dark. Naturally, Eep chafes under her father’s watchful eye, longing for something more meaningful than mere scrabbling survival.

During an illicit nocturnal foray from the family den, Eep runs headlong into nerdy-yet-hunky solitary caveboy Guy (Ryan Reynolds), who is quite advanced compared to the Croods, what with his “shoes” and “fire”. The anxious Guy claims that the known world is on the brink of a cataclysm, and before long he is alternately following and leading the family towards the fabled land of Tomorrow, which will allegedly offer sanctuary from the looming apocalypse. This, of course, does not sit well with the prideful and reactionary Grug, who until now has managed to keep his little tribe safe from the Paleolithic’s myriad terrors by staying put and doing exactly same thing every day.

Inasmuch as The Croods has a fundamental conflict, it is the tug-of-war between Eep’s yearning for fresh experiences on the one hand, and Grug’s paternal compulsion to keep his family out of harm’s way on the other. It’s not exactly an original hook for a story, and the fuzziness of Eep’s longing just draws attention to how much her character resembles a generic sketch of every Disney protagonist ever. Compared to the emotional elegance and complexity of the parent-child relationship depicted in last year’s Brave, the Eep-Grug antagonism is crude, sitcom-level stuff. There is even a wincingly unfunny scene in which Grug haplessly attempts to ape Guy’s cerebral ways, in a variation on a hackneyed “Dad tries to be cool” sequence.

Still, there’s something appealingly geeky about the way that The Croods frames the generation gap within a cartoon prehistory context. In the same way that Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon can be viewed as a myth about the domestication of animals, The Croods is a cockeyed, allegorical take on the triumph of Homo sapiens sapiens in a hostile world. It’s utterly ahistorical and not developed with any seriousness, but the theme of emergence from benighted, animalistic terror into the realm of language, culture, and creativity is always close at hand, even when the film is otherwise preoccupied with wacky critters and slapstick hijinks.

Despite such glimmers of intriguing potential, the screenplay by co-directors Kirk De Micco and Chris Sanders is arguably the film’s most glaring weakness. The Croods simply can’t figure out whether Eep or Grug is the Real Hero of the story. Eep is the narrator, and initially the film provides every indication that is a well-worn tale of adolescent rebellion, wherein the plucky teen discovers her potential while also learning that Family Is What Matters. But wait! Somewhere around the 65-minute mark, the film’s primary viewpoint unaccountably and indisputably shifts to Grug, and thereafter the The Croods spends most of its remaining running time establishing the depth of his paternal affection and self-sacrifice. Dual perspectives and storylines aren’t a defeating quality, of course, but The Croods doesn’t resemble a feature that aims to equitably depict the psychological journeys of both father and daughter. It just feels like a film that forgot what the hell it was doing and decided to do something else.

As with most of the more action-oriented Dreamworks films since Kung Fu Panda, the artistry of The Croods’ design is undeniable. The film refrains from doltishly scrambling the paleo-history of Earth—no dinosaurs and cavemen coexisting here—and instead leaps enthusiastically into out-and-out fantasy. The Stone Age landscape that Eep and her family inhabit is not a cartoon version of the past, but rather a wondrous, almost Seuss-like fictional world of twisted terrain and freakish life-forms. Despite the film’s flaws story-wise, it’s damn amazing to look at. The filmmakers pile on bizarre creature, landforms, and natural phenomena with the gusto of veterans who truly appreciate the potential of their digital canvas. The film features some eye-popping use of deep focus, and the anamorphic widescreen has never felt more essential to the studio’s creations than it does here.

Unfortunately, the character designs aren’t as easy on the eyes as they are in Panda, Dragon, or Guardians, and they occasionally veer into outright ugliness or uninspired rejiggering. The feline antagonist that bedevils Eep’s family in the first act draws a bit too strongly from Tarzan’s Sabor—although it has a nifty resemblance to a great horned owl from certain angles. (Similarly, Sandy looks like an exact cross between Pebbles Flintstone and The Incredibles’ Jack-Jack Parr.) It’s Eep that invites a truly conflicted reaction in the viewer. Her triangular silhouette—topped by scarlet Roseanne Roseannadanna hair—is truly arresting, and there’s something quite cool about a teen heroine who boasts a rugby’s player’s body. In certain shots, however, Eep’s features look downright unpleasant, more of a squashed caricature than a character. Then, ten seconds later, she looks for all the world like an adorable Raiders of the Lost Ark-era Karen Allen. It’s terribly disorienting.

The Croods is first and foremost a cartoon action comedy aimed at kids, and it’s packed with all that one expects of that genre in 2013: zany, hyperkinetic set pieces; animals that mug shamelessly for the camera; and copious gags involving characters being brutally smacked around to no lasting injury. It’s effective and inoffensive in this respect, but fairly forgettable. Nimble and modestly fun, certainly, but by the dizzying standards set by The Adventures of Tintin and Dreamworks’ own Panda films, it’s tame, disposable stuff.

The most distracting element to the whole package is Alan Silvestri’s music, which isn’t bad so much as it is schizophrenic. The opening hunt sequence is scored to a strange but attention-grabbing track that’s part half-time march and part Isaac Hayes funk—evoking, of all things, the anonymously groovy action soundtrack of a Quinn Martin television movie circa 1972. Unfortunately, the score tends to switch gears jarringly: first to classical bombast, and then again to saccharine sweep, and then yet again to the manic energy of a Technicolor musical. The score’s sheer unwillingness to settle on a tone—combined with the unfulfilled promise of that early eccentricity—leaves an unfortunately disjointed sensation.

Jack the Giant Slayer

2013 // USA // Bryan Singer // February 23, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Des Peres Cine 14)

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Jack the Giant Slayer poses the eternal question of mediocre cinema: Is it preferable for a film to be uniformly bland yet serviceable, or to be teeth-gratingly bad with the occasional bright spot? Big-budget genre films in the post-Lord of the Rings era—or the post-X2 era, depending on one’s tastes—seem to be ground zero for this conundrum. Filmmakers appear to have drawn all the wrong lessons from Peter Jackson’s epic trilogy, littering their sorcerous and superheroic features with extravagant design and frenetic battle sequences, as though these components were a substitute for characterization or plot. The results have either been middling or outright terrible.

In the latter category of awful but fleetingly impressive films is last year’s Snow White and the Huntsman. Between its nonsensical story, desultory tone, and stale Grimm conventions, Rupert Sander’s debut feature is a straight-up mess. Granted, it does have Charlize Theron vamping about in some dazzling costumes, and a handful of striking bits: Snow’s acid-trip flight into the Dark Forest; an army of menacing obsidian automata; a butterfly swarm assuming the form of a stately stag. None of these elements even remotely redeem the film’s offenses, but they at least provide some ephemeral pleasures in a feature that is otherwise a wall-to-wall endurance test.

In contrast, Jack the Giant Slayer is at least nominally successful at the bare-bones task of presenting a digital effects-packed update to a classic fairy tale. Director Bryan Singer’s PG-13 retelling of the English story “Jack and the Beanstalk”—mashed up with the Cornish legend “Jack the Giant Killer”—is an inoffensive work, mildly entertaining yet thoroughly conservative from a formal and cultural standpoint. It will probably be forgotten in a year, but the bar has been set so dispiritingly low for live-action fantasy lately, it somehow feels like a success that Jack is not a complete train wreck. That's damning with faint praise, perhaps, but such is the state of cinema in 2013.

In an aggressively ugly computer-animated prelude, the film lays out its mythology. In ancient times, an order of monks created a strain of enchanted beans, which in turn spawned a colossal vine that stretched into the clouds. The monks had hoped to use this beanstalk to access Heaven, but instead established a link to the sky-kingdom of Gantua, home to a race of cruel and savage giants. The creatures descended the stalk and marauded across the earthly kingdom of Cloister, terrorizing the populace and devouring their livestock. Eventually, Cloister’s king fashioned a magic crown that enabled him to dominate the giants. Once he had ordered the brutes to return to Gantua, the beanstalk was chopped down in order to sever the giants’ access to Earth. (It bears repeating that this prelude is a singularly hideous sequence, not only by the high standards of animated flashbacks in other recent fantasy films—Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, Kung Fu Panda 2, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 1—but by the standards of 1996 video game cinematics.)

The rest of the film is essentially just a live-action retread of this tale, only louder, longer, and less unsightly. The same events occur with minor variations: the beans are rediscovered, Gantua and Earth are rejoined, the giants rampage through Cloister, and the power of the enchanted crown eventually wins the day. Nearly every jot of the story is a fantasy cliche, but the film is neither exuberant nor arch enough to qualify as a spiritual successor to the gee-whiz fantasy films of the mid-twentieth century, such as The Thief of Baghdad and Jason and the Argonauts. It just goes through the motions, occasionally with verve and wit, but more typically with the uninspired dutifulness of a production that has $195 million to burn through on extras, sets, costumes, and visual effects.

The noble-hearted hero of this tale is Jack (Nicholas Hoult), a peasant heartthrob who devoured legends of the Gantuan giants as a child and still longs for adventure. The film’s obligatory plucky princess is Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson), who yearns to wriggle from King Brahmwell’s (Ian McShane) doting but strict expectations, which include marrying her off to the kingdom's scenery-chewing, transparently treacherous steward, Roderick (Stanley Tucci). During a market day at Cloister castle, Jack crosses paths with Isabelle, and it’s love at first sight—or so the film asserts, although there's little evidence of it onscreen. To Jack's consternation, the king' Guardians, led by the dauntless Elmont (Ewan McGregor), appear suddenly to whisk Isabelle away. Shortly thereafter, an anxious monk presses a pouch of beans into Jack’s hand with an admonishment: never, ever get them wet.

In one of those oh-so-convenient fairy tale plot turns, Isabelle flees the castle that night and takes shelter from a thunderstorm at Jack’s mud farm. The peasant boy and princess engage in some gooey, nervous flirting until a raindrop moistens a mislaid bean and an enormous vine begins—*ahem*—growing uncontrollably. (To the film’s unexpected credit, the ribald subtext to this scene is played completely straight and never commented upon, making it far more effective and subtly amusing that it has any right to be.) Isabelle is carried up and away to Gantua by the towering beanstalk, while Jack is left behind, neatly setting up a standard-issue princess rescue mission. King Brahmwell orders Elmont and the Guardians to ascend the stalk and retrieve his daughter, and gives permission for both Jack and Roderick to join the quest, to the soldiers’ annoyance.

Things go pear-shaped before the rescuers have even surmounted the stalk, and everyone except Jack is eventually captured by the Gantuan giants. Now that the path to Earth has been regrown, the titans’ cunning two-headed general Fallon (Bill Nighy and John Kassir) intends to lead his people to King’s Brahmwell’s doorstep on a mission of vengeance. These plans are altered somewhat when Roderick shows his true colors and produces the fabled enchanted crown, which he uses to seize control of the giants and launch his own war on Cloister. Meanwhile, the king despairs that the giants will strike before Isabelle is rescued, and so he reluctantly commands that the stalk be hacked down. (This is a monumentally stupid decision given the size of the plant and the foreseeable effect it will have on the countryside when it topples. Still, it’s not half as stupid as waiting until the last second to flee the area, which is exactly what all the unwashed Middle Age looky-loos do.) This proves to be only a short setback for the giants, as Jack has carried the remaining beans to Gantua, and the enchanted stalks are apparently capable of growing down as well as up...

There’s quite a bit more to the story than the above summary conveys, but it hardly matters. The narrative is really just a scaffolding for the expected fantasy adventure components: searches, confrontations, chases, escapes, and a climatic, chaotic battle involving siege weaponry and enormous creatures. On this score, Jack the Giant Slayer delivers, although the film is more of an unremarkable diversion than a compelling work of escapism.

Neither Singer nor his usual cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel—who two years ago provided such a visual jolt in Drive—do much that could be regarded as cinematically distinctive. Likewise, the production design by Star Wars prequel veteran Gavin Bocquet is appropriately lavish, but almost anonymous in its storybook predictability. Cloister is all Disney gloss, while Gantua is all Mordor grime, and both are swallowed up by the carelessness of the Once Upon a Time, England-but-not-really-England setting. Depending on the scenery or costume element in question, Jack could take place anytime between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries. This is not normally a problem in fantasy films, but Jack awkwardly reveals in its final moments that—surprise!—Cloister was really England all along, and the giant-controlling crown was eventually forged into the present-day Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. At which point any self-respecting Anglophile will be tempted to give the film the finger and walk out.

In most other respects, however, the film plays fair with its rules, presenting a fairly snappy plot that hustles from Point A to Point B without tripping over its own feet. The screenplay by Darren Lemke, Christopher McQuarrie, and Dan Studney maintains a sense of overpowering menace around the giants, and finds all sorts of engaging ways for the human characters to stymie the brutes without resorting to one-on-one physical confrontations that the giants would doubtlessly win. (The film's one fudge on this matter occurs when a couple dozen humans somehow manage to hold a drawbridge shut against the might of a comparable number of giants. How exactly does that work?) True to his folkloric roots, Jack defeats his foes by cleverness, not by transforming into a sword-wielding, giant-slaughtering demigod. This approach almost makes up for the film’s musty conventionality. Most predictably and gallingly, Isabelle is not given much to do after she is spirited away to Gantua, at which point the filmmakers seem to forget her previously established itch for independence. It’s a frustratingly retrograde story in many respects, particularly given that it’s been less than a year since Brave’s sneaky audacity.

It doesn’t help matters that Tomlinson fails to make much of an impression, as do most of the other cast members: Hoult is pretty, McShane is stern, McGregor is droll, and all of them are generally forgettable. Nighy’s voice work should be a pleasure, but Fallon so closely resembles his iconic turn as Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels that the effect is distracting. Tucci sneers, struts, and waggles his eyebrows in an amused way that doesn’t so much convey malevolence as shout, “Can you believe I’m getting paid for having this much fun?” As Roderick, he alone seems keenly aware that he is a character in a fairy tale, and while Tucci’s performance matches almost nothing else in the film tonally, it’s at least enjoyable to watch. (This also means that Jack becomes far less interesting when Roderick suddenly perishes at about the 70-minute mark.)

Ultimately, what salvages Jack the Giant Slayer from middlebrow dullness by a narrow margin is not its acting, design, or storytelling, but the sheer formulism of its breathless, thunderous thrills. Singer’s no-frills, earnest presentation of boilerplate fantasy action, super-sized for contemporary multiplex viewers, possesses a kind of adolescent simplicity. Like a roller coaster that one has ridden a dozen times, it offers a soothing kind of excitement, but no genuine surprises or risk.

What Has Sunk May Rise: Die, Monster, Die! (1965)

1965 // UK - USA // Daniel Haller // February 17, 2013 // DVD - MGM (2005)

​Based On: "The Colour Out of Space" (1927)

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Part of a series on film adaptations of the works of H. P. Lovecraft.]

The titles of H. P. Lovecraft’s 1927 short story “The Colour Out of Space” and its 1965 film adaptation Die, Monster, Die! promise very different experiences, and both works deliver on their pledges. “Colour” is one of Lovecraft’s finest short stories, a frightening alien encounter tale that stands as both a paragon of the author’s distinctive prose and the purest expression of science-fiction-as-horror in his bibliography. Like most of the writer’s work, it’s an exercise in slow-burn dread, in which stalwart but guileless New Englanders slowly discern that a terrifying, unfathomable entity squirms just beyond the borders of their understanding.

Die, Monster, Die!, meanwhile, is what one would expect from American International Pictures in late 1965: a low-budget, flamboyant horror film replete with hammy dialogue, lush sets, and gruesome makeup effects. The film’s climactic rampage by a glowing, super-strong Boris Karloff is a weirdly emblematic moment, an almost perfect embodiment of the schlocky yet shamelessly entertaining character of Hollywood horror and science-fiction in the 1950s and 60s. Yet despite Die, Monster, Die!’s significant divergences from "Colour" in terms of both plot and tone, it quite capably conveys its source material's mingling of secular and Puritan dread.

“The Colour Out of Space” is in some ways the essential Lovecraft story, as it concerns humankind’s inability to adequately describe the breadth of the universe with its primitive scientific vocabulary. The meteorite that falls on the Gardner farm near Arkham, Massachusetts in 1882 is subjected to all manner of experiments, producing remarkable yet perplexing results. Most prominently, spectrographic analysis indicates an otherworldly new color that is dissimilar from any conventional hue. (Lovecraft performs some fascinating linguistic acrobatics in order to convey the striking qualities of this alien shade without referencing the familiar colors on the red-to-violet spectrum.) The meteorite and the mutagenic, mind-shattering entity that it carries to Earth are not mystical in nature, but “hyper-scientific”. They represent natural cosmic phenomena that lie so far outside the bounds of human understanding that our species’ crude science can characterize them only incompletely.

Cunningly, Lovecraft embeds this extrastellar nightmare within a rural New England landscape that is thick with spiritual fears, spooky folklore, and all manner of whispered Indian and colonial legends. While “Colour” suggests that a secular framework is ultimately the correct one for understanding the alien horror that gradually overtakes the Gardner farm, the occult anxieties of the locals lend the story a unsettling resonance. Moreover, the learned men who are so flabbergasted by the meteorite’s properties eventually return to the city after collecting their specimens and recording their observations. It is the superstitious country folk left behind who witness the area's subsequent slow-motion ecological catastrophe, as the local flora and fauna—and, most chillingly, the Gardners themselves—undergo disturbing changes. In this way, Lovecraft portrays the demon-haunted bumpkin worldview as flawed, while simultaneously enjoining the reader to value rural people’s intimate familiarity with their natural surroundings.

Exasperation with the wild fears of rural landowners, combined with dismissal of their environmental observations, would eventually became a hallmark of government and corporate attitudes wherever twentieth century progress sought to extend its reach into “underdeveloped” American spaces. Significantly, “Colour’s” tale of 1880s terror is couched within a 1920s framing narrative about just such an endeavor. The “blasted heath” where the Gardner farm once stood is scheduled to be drowned beneath a new reservoir, and a nameless land surveyor has coaxed local eccentric Ammi Pierce to provide his recollections of the weird havoc once wreaked by the meteorite. Upon hearing Pierce’s fantastical and unnerving tale, the surveyor confesses relief at the forthcoming inundation of the accursed area...and a resolve to never, ever drink Arkham city water in the future.

As H. P. Lovecraft short stories go, “Colour” has obvious advantages as source material for a cinematic adaptation. Its core scenario is relatively straightforward—a falling space rock brings radioactive terror to a small town—and would have been quite familiar to the young Atomic Age filmgoers that AIP notoriously coveted. The story contains several fascinating visual hooks, from the ominously glowing meteorite to the twisted vegetation spawned by its alien emanations. There is, of course, the vexing matter of that ineffable color that plays such a prominent role in Lovecraft’s tale, a hue that by definition no cinematic work could adequately convey. (This is likely the most abstract example of one might term “the Lovecraft problem,” the difficulty in translating the author’s baroque yet ambiguous descriptions into effective images.) The screenplay for Die, Monster, Die!, penned by genre television writer Jerry Sohl, sidesteps this problem by cutting out references to the impossible color altogether. Indeed, the script completely strip-mines “Colour” for its essential components and then recasts them in a more conventional gothic horror mold, complete with a forbidding ancestral estate and a comely virginal damsel.

It’s easy enough to see why executive producers Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson would push the film in this direction, even if it resulted in a feature that bore little resemblance to Lovecraft’s original story. AIP had just completed its Corman-Poe Cycle of films with The Tomb of Ligeia in 1965. Faithfulness to Edgar Allan Poe’s works had not been a prominent characteristic of those features—to put it mildly—and yet the films had been wildly successful. Doubtlessly, this was due partly to Poe’s status as an iconic American horror brand, partly to the presence of lead actor Vincent Price, and partly to viewers' ambivalence to concepts like “literary fidelity”. Certainly, Lovecraft’s name did not enjoy the same level of mainstream recognition in '65 as Poe’s. Indeed, this is what led AIP to disingenuously market 1963’s The Haunted Palace as a Poe adaptation, when in was in fact based on Lovecraft’s novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Even in the case of Die, Monster, Die!, the first film to properly credit a Lovecraft work as its sole source, the writer’s name is spelled out on the movie poster in the tiniest text not reserved for legalese. A keen-eyed cinema patron could surmise from this graphic design snub that the faithfulness of the adaptation was not a significant concern for the filmmakers.

Although short on devotion to its source material, Die, Monster, Die! possesses a bevy of classic horror landmarks that quickly orient the viewer. Indeed, a filmgoer who had dutifully lined up to see the features in the Corman-Poe Cycle would have been right at home in Die, Monster, Die’s crumbling, fog-shrouded surroundings. Upon disembarking from a train in the English village of Arkham, American scientist Stephen Reinhart (Nick Adams) questions the local residents on where he might acquire transportation to the outlying Witley estate. He is rebuffed with almost comical gruffness by the villagers, who treat him as though he were asking for a lift to the Ninth Circle of Hell. Forced to make his way on foot, Reinhart passes by an enormous earthen crater surrounded by decimated trees and shrubs that crumble to ash at his touch. He eventually arrives at the Witley grounds, where he is unknowingly followed by a veiled, black-clad figure to the front door. Upon entering the grim manor, Reinhart is quickly confronted by the elderly, wheelchair-bound Nahum Witley (Karloff) and his owlish manservant Merwyn (Terence de Marney). The master of the house acidly but reasonably demands to know why Reinhart is trespassing despite ample signs that visitors are not welcome.

The scientist hastily explains that he is a former classmate of Nahum’s daughter, Susan (Suzan Farmer), and it was she who extended an invitation to visit the estate. On cue, Susan delightedly bounces down the stairs to embrace Reinhart, providing a fresh-faced, almost jarring counterpoint to the suffocating Old World atmosphere of the Witley manor. Despite the glowering objections of her father, Susan insists that Reinhart meet her ailing mother, Letitia (Freda Jackson), who wheezes behind the curtains of a massive four-poster bed. Susan and Reinhart’s not-so-secret engagement pleases Letitia, but she asks to speak to her future son-in-law alone. In fearful whispers, she tells him of a servant girl who was similarly ravaged by a mysterious illness and subsequently vanished, and then begs him to take Susan far from the estate as soon as possible.

The encounter with Mrs. Witley rattles Reinhart, but he and Susan resolve to stay at the manor for least another evening, notwithstanding Nahum’s smoldering hostility to the younger man’s presence. It’s at this point that Die, Monster, Die! settles into a narrative pattern that consists almost entirely of Reinhart wandering around and attempting to untangle exactly what sort of foul strangeness is transpiring at the Witley estate. The film is not entirely beholden to his perspective, as it occasionally follows Nahum while he skulks about and pursues his own sinister agenda. In the main, however, Reinhart’s halting explorations are the means by which the plot unfolds, creating a sense of a piecemeal revelation. Bizarre occurrences abound: Merwyn collapses suddenly at dinner, an unnatural light pulses within the greenhouse, Letitia's condition suddenly worsens, and Reinhart is violently ambushed by the veiled stranger. As he begins to unmask the estate’s secrets, Reinhart finds that all of the weird goings-on seem to point to the aforementioned crater and the force that created it. Meanwhile, Nahum seems to be losing what little control he once possessed over a mysterious glowing object in the cellar.

This narrative approach doesn’t exactly lend itself to propulsive drama, as most of the film’s plot points consist of Reinhart discovering horrible things about the Witley manor and about Nahum’s schemes. Many of the film’s significant events would arguably have occurred whether or not Reinhart was even present at the estate. This leaves the protagonist in the awkward position of having no particular role in the story other than as a vessel for exposition, although he does ultimately deliver Susan from the film’s requisite climactic inferno. In this respect, Die, Monster, Die! is actually comparable to many Lovecraft stories—including “The Colour Out of Space” itself—in that the “hero” plays the part of a glorified bystander while fearsome cosmic forces lurch to and fro. Such stakes-free storytelling is risky, but it’s to the credit of Sohl and director Daniel Haller that the film is still quite engaging, even when it’s doing little more than gaping in fear at mutant horrors. The filmmakers maintain an appropriate sense of the uncanny throughout the feature, keeping the viewer slightly off-balance with intense but carefully parceled shocks.

Neither Haller nor cinematographer Paul Beeson have the same flair for widescreen compositions that Roger Corman and Floyd Crosby exhibited in The Haunted Palace and the AIP Poe films. Still, while Die, Monster, Die! is not exactly a visually stunning film, it is rich in memorable sights thanks to the vivid special effects by Ernie Sullivan and Wally Veevers and the downright stomach-churning makeup by Jimmy Evans. Nearly all of the film’s standout scenes center on a bizarre practical effect that sears itself into the mind’s eye. Karloff’s regression into a blank-eyed atomic brute at the film’s conclusion is a particular highlight, as is a startling sequence in which a revolting mutant stumbles through the estate in a bloodthirsty frenzy. There is even an all-too-fleeting glimpse of a formless, classically Lovecraftian monstrosity gibbering in a darkened cell. Haller and editor Alfred Cox—a veteran of Hammer Films horror features—present all of these weird, disturbing components in a manner that maximizes their horrific impact.

This sense of ghastly showmanship distinguishes Die, Monster, Die! from its more academic-minded source material. Nonetheless, both the literary work and film adaptation skillfully exploit the narrow, unsettled area where science-fiction and horror overlap. On paper, Die, Monster, Die! is a “pure” example of the former genre, given that the film’s menace originates from outer space and the story has no place for magic or other supernatural forces. (Indeed, the film draws attention to the hokiness of the “Satanic” devotions that were once perpetrated by the Witley ancestors.) However, Die, Monster, Die! relies to a significant extent on well-worn horror elements, from the mysterious locked room to the suspicious midnight burial. The result is a curious hybrid of an atomic monster feature and a cobwebby gothic mystery. While it doesn’t ever discover the singular, almost agoraphobic dread that characterizes “The Colour Out of Space,” the film does succeed in resolving its disparate generic constituents into a satisfying and genuinely frightening work.

Side Effects

2013 // USA // Steven Soderbergh // February 13, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza)

Squint a little, and one can discern a resemblance between Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 global pandemic thriller, Contagion, and the director’s latest and (allegedly) final film, Side Effects. Both features were written by Scott Z. Burns, who injects a conspicuous dose of public health relevance between lines of urgent, jargon-laden dialogue. Where Contagion aimed to highlight the anemic state of the world’s infectious disease countermeasures, the new film draws attention to the inescapable reach of psychiatry and Big Pharma in contemporary life. Production designer Howard Cummings and Soderberg—who, as usual, serves as his own cinematographer—employ a similar visual scheme in both films: subtle low and high angles, liberal use of shallow focus, and a palette that alternates between chilly blues and sickly yellows. Both features make good use of Jude Law’s affinity for conveying peevish, overweening characters, although his role as psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Banks in Side Effects is more ambiguous (and more prominent) than the opportunistic, activist blogger he portrayed in Contagion.

There the resemblance between the two films ends, however. Contagion’s novelty as a scientifically literate pop entertainment conceals a remarkably one-dimensional film preoccupied with presenting a Cassandra-style warning of real world pathogenic catastrophe. On its surface, Side Effects appears to be a similarly shallow work, little more than a cluster of murder mystery tropes given a glossy, cold-blooded Soderbergh makeover. In this respect, the director’s new feature actually has some strong similarities to his underrated Haywire, a film which also shamelessly traffics in genre formulae. Side Effects is to legal, medical, and psychological thrillers what Soderbergh’s 2012 film is to the cloak-and-dagger action picture. Granted, there is nothing in Side Effects that comes close to the apex of Haywire’s visceral, voyeuristic pleasures: Gina Carano and Michael Fassbender in a protracted, barehanded fight to the death. Still, there is a kitschy appeal to the former film’s corkscrewing story, which borrows plot elements from a dozen episodes of Law & Order and wraps them in the garish outlandishness of a Brian de Palma feature.

The bloody smears and footprints glimpsed in Side Effects’ opening flashforward shots point to a looming calamity, although the viewer’s suspicions are at first directed towards an act of self-harm rather than murder. To wit: New York graphic designer Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) suffers from severe and presently untreated depression, a condition that has been aggravated by her husband Martin’s (Channing Tatum) recent parole from a white-collar prison sentence. Following a suspicious car wreck—in which she appears to have deliberately accelerated into a parking garage wall—Emily comes to the attention of Dr. Banks, who swiftly places her on a regimen of prescription antidepressants.

Unfortunately, the leading pharmaceuticals afflict Emily with crippling side effects, among them vomiting, sleepwalking, and panic attacks. Banks reaches out to his patient's previous psychiatrist, the velvety Dr. Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), and she urges him to place Emily on a breakthrough drug marketed under the trade name Ablixa. In short order, Emily is enjoying a sudden and significant upswing in her mood, and Banks is coaxing his other clients into an Ablixa study...in return for generous compensation from the drug manufacturer. For a moment, everything is going splendidly for both psychiatrist and patient, and then the floor drops out: Emily’s sleepwalking returns in spectacularly violent fashion, and Banks finds himself in a police interrogation room being peppered with awkward questions about his treatment methods and professional judgment.

Where the story goes from there is best witnessed first-hand. Even so, what makes Side Effects intriguing is not the fine contours of its double and triple cross-packed plot, but the ways in which Soderbergh and Burns upend expectations regarding how such thrillers are typically presented. Emily’s apparently pharmacologically-induced break corresponds to a slight shift in the film’s focus, such that it begins to favor Banks’ point-of-view rather than his patient’s. The back half of Side Effects unfolds in a manner consistent with countless cinematic tales of legal gamesmanship and media frame-ups, with Law playing the part of the unwitting dupe who must outwit malevolent chess masters in order to clear his good name.

However, even this familiar premise is given a cynical bent. The expected moment when Banks sees the light and his goals align with those of justice never truly arrives. The psychiatrist remains a full-fledged antihero to the end, obsessed with proving not merely that his suspicions are correct, but that he is more cunning and ruthless than his opponents. He is ultimately an unsympathetic protagonist, a preening prick whose arrogance is both the cause of his downfall and also his most significant well of strength. An argument can be made that this is an alienating way to present the story’s ostensible Good Guy. Nonetheless, it’s an approach that dovetails neatly with Side Effects’ broader depiction of humankind as a self-absorbed species battered by conflicting urges and pressures. In this respect, the film is the airport paperback cousin to Soderbergh’s frigid, elliptical tragedy The Girlfriend Experience. Side Effects conceals its nihilism behind a paper-thin upbeat ending for Banks, but it works to illustrate throughout its running time that people are fearful, backstabbing bastards at bottom.

A Fine, Good Place to Be: 3 Bad Men (1926)

1926 // USA // John Ford // January 26, 2013 // DVD - Fox (2007)

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Part of a series on the silent films of John Ford.]

When considering films that were created three generations ago, it’s often all too easy to assume a stance of jaded dismissal towards the proximal pleasures of story and characters. In the present age of irony, there’s a temptation to sidestep an older film’s most obvious narrative features and proceed to a discussion of formal qualities, thematic subtleties, and cultural context. It’s not an unreasonable act of negligence: films of a "certain vintage" can seem simplistic by contemporary standards of storytelling, relying overwhelmingly on stock situations, broad character archetypes, and a comforting predictability in the resolution of conflicts. (On second thought, maybe old films aren’t that different from today’s cinematic offerings...) However, when the most compelling thing about a particular Silent Era feature is its plot, the critic who fails to engage with the story in a straightforward manner does the film in question a senseless disservice.

Case in point: John Ford’s 3 Bad Men from 1926, an undeniably solid work of silent filmmaking that spins a warm, rousing tale of Western gallantry, dotted with rumpled frivolity and bittersweet moments. Given that it is a Hollywood tale of the Old West, Ford’s film naturally features a romance between a dashing frontier hero and the sassy maiden who catches his eye. In the case of 3 Bad Men, the cowpoke in question is Dan O’Malley (George O’Brien), a somewhat shiftless but clean-cut adventurer who has recently journeyed to the Dakota Territory with a throng of gold-hungry pioneers. Shortly before arriving in the unsavory boomtown of Custer, Dan stops to assist a damsel in distress, Lee Carlton (Olive Borden). Southern horse-breeders, Lee and her father are headed to Custer to sell their stock to settlers, who will need speedy mounts during the upcoming government-sponsored land rush. Initially, Dan attempts to play the droll loner, while Lee regards him with narrowed eyes, but sparks of passion begin to fly between the pair in short order.

Borden gives an alluring performance as Lee, despite the fact that the film occasionally wedges her toughened, self-assured character into a moment of uncharacteristic virginal quavering. Still, it’s a scrumptious little role, quite bold and nuanced by the standards of female leads in 1920s Westerns. The scenario by John Stone and titles by Ralph Spence and Malcolm Stuart Boylan do a fine job of economically conveying the character’s blend of Dixie delicacy and Western ruggedness, trusting Borden to sell it with an arched eyebrow here and a crooked pout there. O’Malley’s performance as Dan is not as memorable as his lead turn in Ford’s 1924 epic The Iron Horse, where the actor had a gleaming Boy Scout presence that centered the sprawling story. In 3 Bad Men, O’Malley’s character is more of a bland do-gooder than a paragon of manliness, though this has less to do with the actor than with the film that surrounds him. Ford and his scenarists just don’t have much time to spare for Dan, relying on his status as the handsome hero to hold the viewer’s attention.

While the romantic dance between Dan and Lee is charming in its way, it is likely that 3 Bad Men would have been a much shallower, less compelling film had it presented the couple’s courtship in a straightforward manner. What makes Ford’s film so intriguing as a cinematic narrative is that the love story is approached diagonally, through the eyes of a trio of horse-rustling, hard-drinking, tender-hearted scalawags: “Bull” Stanley (Tom Santschi), Mike Costigan (J. Farrell MacDonald), and “Spade” Allen (Frank Campeau). Slightly over-the-hill and a little ragged at the edges, Bull and his partners are a good-natured breed of outlaw. Notwithstanding their affection for fighting, cards, and whiskey, they are more rascally than wicked, preferring crimes that can be pulled off without undue violence. (That said, the scoundrels do seem to glean a childlike delight from the prospect of gunplay, especially when the odds are stacked against them.) What’s more, the trio harbors an almost chivalrous sense of honor. In an early scene, this code compels them to intervene when Lee and her herd are attacked by bandits, despite the fact that Bull and company had themselves been contemplating this exact deed of horse thievery.

The grateful Lee thereafter hires Bull, Mike, and Spade as foremen for the looming land rush in Custer, and before long the rogues are resolved to see their lovely, unattached employer married off to a proper husband. Consistent with the film’s admiring, humorous depiction of the outlaws, this compulsion is presented as simultaneously noble, affectionate, and exasperatingly presumptuous. A self-important middle-aged newspaper editor, a trembling dandy with barely a whisker on his chin, and various ethnic minorities are briefly considered and then discarded as possible grooms. Fortunately, a more acceptable candidate appears when Dan stumbles back into the picture in Custer, whereupon Bull persuades the bachelor to join the Carlton operation. The outlaw does not know, of course, that Dan and Lee have already met and been struck by Cupid’s arrow, and a dose of comedy-of-errors silliness ensues.

Meanwhile, an action-adventure plot unfolds in parallel with the romantic storyline. The horse rustlers who raided Lee’s herd are in fact the minions of Custer’s corrupt sheriff, Layne Hunter (Lou Tellegen). Unfortunately, the lawman develops a venomous grudge against Lee and her companions that boils over into a brushfire conflict filled with fistfights, shootouts, and explosions. Hunter is quite the fop—affecting a look that can only be described as “Roy Rogers’ Cabaret”—but he is also a gleefully vicious antagonist. The Sheriff is so accustomed to the cover afforded by his position that when his guileless sweetheart, Millie (Priscilla Bonner), presses him on the matter of marriage, he responds with cackling contempt. In keeping with the tidy plotting that is standard procedure in the Silent Era, Millie just happens to be the long-lost sister of Bull. The outlaw has been searching tirelessly for the silver-tongued snake who wooed his sibling away with false professions of love, and the cad in question is none other than the Sheriff.

This is already quite a bit of story to pack into 92 minutes, and the film throws in another subplot for good measure. A righteous preacher (Alec Francis) has recently arrived in Custer with the intention of rectifying the town’s wanton ways, a mission that naturally attracts the wrath of the Sheriff. In an apparent attempt to establish his credentials as an unmitigated bastard, the Sheriff at one point sets the local church ablaze while the preacher and his parishioners are huddled inside, requiring Bull, Mike, and Spade to ride to the rescue. The film’s various storylines eventually intersect in the climactic land rush set piece, where Lee’s group takes an early lead and the Sheriff and his lackeys close in to gun down the whole lot of them in cold blood.

Despite the sheer amount of plot that unfolds in 3 Bad Men, the film hums along at a easygoing pace, rarely feeling rushed or perfunctory. The action sequences are appropriately exciting and frenetic, but the film also takes the time for humorous diversions and for extended shots of characters mulling over their fates. Bull, Mike, and Spade in particular are allowed more screen time than the other characters, permitting a sharp depiction of the honorable rogue archetype that they embody. The extent to which the film lingers on the outlaws to the exclusion of the romantic leads is novel, and it is this cock-eyed approach that elevates 3 Bad Men above its satisfying but standard-issue genre components. Indeed, the film that most recalls Ford’s feature is Walt Disney Production’s 1959 animated adaptation of Sleeping Beauty, another romantic adventure in which three comic characters nudge the leads together and perform the bulk of the heroics.

In the current era of darker, edgier, ambivalent anti-heroes, there’s something fresh and appealing about Bull, Mike, and Spade: unrepentant petty criminals who nonetheless possess a clear-eyed, almost conservative set of values. Santschi, MacDonald, and Campeau all do a remarkable job of conveying the trio’s shared traits, while using their individual quirks as character actors to provide subtle shadings. (Ford cunningly gives each member of the trio a hat with a distinctive silhouette, which not only permits some visual gags, but also adds a striking flourish to that classic Western visual idiom, the long shot of men on horseback at sunset.) Santschi presents Bull as the sternest and most wrung-out of the three—he is, after all, the one member of their band with a personal vendetta—while MacDonald and Campeau give Mike and Spade more mischievous, acerbic streaks.

All three outlaws, however, demonstrate an unhesitant nobility and selflessness when the chips are down, which in Mike’s case in particular veers into an almost jovial determination to sacrifice himself in a blaze of glory. Ford creates unexpected emotional resonance by maintaining the myriad, contrasting aspects of the trio's character throughout the film: their sardonic view of criminality and violence; their paternal affection for Lee; their bull-headed loyalty to one another; and their doleful recognition of their looming fate. These bold strokes mark the men as idiosyncratic Western heroes, and ultimately make 3 Bad Men a memorable work of character-centered filmmaking.

Warm Bodies

2013 // USA // Jonathan Levine // January 29, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20 Cine)

Zombie films are now such a ubiquitous aspect of contemporary pop culture, it’s difficult to believe that a little more than a decade ago the subgenre was in a bit of slump. A mere month after George Romero’s original Living Dead trilogy was completed in July of 1985, the sophomoric goofiness and embarrassing “punk” aesthetic of the Return of the Living Dead franchise rose up to take its place. Occasional bright spots such as Tom Savini’s remake of Night of the Living Dead (1990) and Ryuhei Kitamura’s undead-against-yakuza feature Versus (2000) managed to keep the zombie flame alive during those dark days. However, it wasn’t until 28 Days Later hit the ground running in 2002 that the zombie tale was truly reborn as a borderline-respectable cluster of horror conventions, one that could eventually support lavishly produced hour-long television dramas. This resurrection happened quickly, too, if one can assess the maturity of a trend by events of sub-subgenre fission. Only two years passed between 28 Days and Shaun of Dead (2004), the first post-revival zombie comedy and unquestionably the finest example of the form.

Sadly, the zombie comedy has had a lackluster unlife in the wake of Shaun, delivering one reasonably strong also-ran (Zombieland) and a string of forgettable features that range from the merely dull to the howlingly unfunny (Dead & Breakfast, Boy Eats Girl, Fido, Dance of the Dead, Dead Snow). Writer-director Jonathan Levine’s new film, Warm Bodies is the latest clammy-skinned hopeful in this particular category of cinema, and unfortunately it stumbles far more often than it succeeds.

Adapted from Isaac Marion’s post-apocalyptic “zombie romance” novel of the same name, the film strikes an unusual tone that is somehow both earnest and acerbic. Its narrative is a rather shameless mash-up of warmed-over love story fragments: both Romeo and Juliet and Beauty and the Beast lend their contours to the story. The former work, in fact, is referenced so overtly that the film is practically a zombie retelling of the Bard’s tragedy (with a happy ending!). Warm Bodies presents the bland, star-crossed romance between awkward pretty-boy zombie R (Nicholas Hoult) and tough, sensitive human Julie (Teresa Palmer) in a blithely matter-of-fact way. (R and Julie: get it?) The ardor of their forbidden love is more asserted than illustrated through dialogue or action, and Hoult and Palmer lamentably don’t have much chemistry with one another. Levine’s screenplay dresses up this tale of necrophilic puppy love with doses of tiresome action-horror and equally tiresome science-fiction allegory, but these elements only serve to draw attention to the thin, unengaging romance.

Yet despite the straightforward, shallow stance that the film assumes towards its central love story, Warm Bodies strives to be a satirical riposte to the serious-minded angst of most fictional adolescent romance. The resulting tone is damn strange. While the film never feels phony, there is a smug heedlessness in the way that its winking ridicule is scrawled in between moistened, unconvincing declarations of emotion. To the film’s credit, R’s professions of love are groaned in a gurgling Tarzan pidgin, consistently underlining the vacuousness of the couple’s fairy tale yearnings. However, this sardonic impulse never convinces, if only because the film is never truly bloody-minded about attacking mindless storytelling formulae.

Nonetheless, Warm Bodies does score some critical hits against deserving targets: the leaden longing of post-Twilight young adult lit; the creepiness of male characters in Sundance-bait relationship films; or the rotten, god-awful cliches of mainstream romantic comedy cinema. (One standout gag involves a character putting a screeching halt to the use of “Oh, Pretty Woman” during a Makeover Scene.) Most of the film’s mockery is delivered loudly and unambiguously—often via R’s pointedly ironic internal voice-over—but there are some exceedingly sly moments here and there. When R haltingly insists on the superiority of vinyl over digital music, it’s presented in such a deadpan manner that it’s difficult to discern if the script is satirizing actual music snobs, the Hollywood conception of music snobs, or the lazy use of music snobbery to denote character depth. The film’s humor really only falls flat when it lamely attempts to ape Shaun of the Dead by pointing out the similarities between the pre- and post-undead worlds.

Zombie movie purists will likely find the entire premise of Warm Bodies objectionable on a certain level. The story is predicated on R having retained a sliver of intelligence and emotion within his moldering brain, an idea that flies in the face of the normally strict depiction of the living dead as mindless horrors that are beyond salvation. What’s more, the plot presents Juliet’s love for R as a sort of redeeming contagion, capable of stirring not only her undead boyfriend’s putrid heart to beat, but also the blood of other zombies with whom he comes into contact. While this concept is faintly ridiculous, it’s not self-defeatingly stupid, nor is its contravention of zombie tropes especially bothersome. Works of fiction can, after all, posit whatever rules that the creator wishes, and there’s only so many living dead films that can be made in the unremittingly bleak mode of 28 Weeks Later and [REC]. Far more annoying than the film’s conceit of a curable undeath is its failure to play fair by its own rules. The zombies seem to move slowly, until the plot necessitates that they need to sprint. They can smell human flesh with shark-like precision, but are easily bamboozled by a smear of undead ooze.

These might seem to be the nitpicky gripes of a horror obsessive, but they are indicative of the slipshod quality to the broader story. The filmmakers add a third prong to the human-vs.-zombies conflict in the form of the feral, desiccated “Bonies”: living dead who have become sightless, walking strips of beef jerky. It’s an arguably necessary device in order to maintain a sense of threat even as the less monstrous “Corpse” zombies are being humanized, but it nonetheless seems narratively cheap. There is an obligatory showdown with the Bonies in the film’s final act, during which the spacial relationships between the three factions are so hopelessly muddled that it’s unclear where the hell events are even occurring.

Indeed, the geography of the film’s post-apocalyptic landscape is downright ridiculous at times. R force-marches Juliet from the human survivors’ walled city to the zombie-infested airport in an afternoon, but their later return by car inexplicably takes a couple of days. The majority of the interior spaces are governed by a kind of fractured geometry: subterranean crawl spaces seem to connect to parking ramps, which connect to subway stations, which connect to baseball stadiums, which connect to chemistry labs. This sort of careless disregard for spatial coherence is the marker of a third direct-to-DVD horror sequel, not a theatrical film in wide release (even if it is a February wide release). Ultimately, the biting humor that Warm Bodies occasionally exhibits is not sufficient grounds to overlook either the banal romantic plot or the laxness of the film’s construction.