Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/16/23

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, December 16, 2023

Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight (Ernest R. Dickerson, 1995)

Billy Zane in Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight

Cast: Billy Zane, William Sadler, Jada Pinkett Smith, Thomas Haden Church, C.C.H. Pounder, Brenda Bakke, Dick Miller, Gary Farmer, John Kassir (voice). Screenplay: Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris, Mark Bishop. Cinematography: Rick Bota. Production design: Christiaan Wagener, Gregory S. Melton. Film editing: Stephen Lovejoy. Music: Edward Shearmur.

I was going to say that failure to access the 10-year-old boy in me kept me from enjoying Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight, but then I remembered that when I was 10 years old I thought the Tales From the Crypt comic books were repulsive trash. So maybe I really enjoyed it more than that 10-year-old would have, which isn't saying much. It's still trash, but I've seen many movies that repulsed me more. There's a tongue-in-cheek element in its slimy rotting horrors (if there's a tongue to put in a cheek or a cheek to put one in) that doesn't exactly redeem it, but at least kept me watching. And it suggests that we have come to a point in the post-Christian era that what would once be regarded as blasphemous is now only a plot device: namely, the use of the blood of Jesus as a horror movie gimmick. Mostly, it made me feel a little sorry for the actors who have to go through their paces, trying to act but knowing that anything they do is going to be chopped up in the editing and stirred into a mess of special effects. Billy Zane as the demonic Collector and William Sadler as his heroic antagonist are the nominal leads, but Jada Pinkett Smith comes off best as the ex-con on work release who labors in the boarding house where most of the action takes place. She manages to create a character we can root for, which is all the otherwise well-worn plot needs. The frame story in which the Crypt Keeper (voiced by John Kassir) introduces things is unnecessary and mainly serves to promote the HBO series from which it's a theatrical spinoff.