The Keep (Michael Mann, 1983)

The Keep (Michael Mann, 1983)

Cast: Scott Glenn, Alberta Watson, Jürgen Prochnow, Robert Prosky, Gabriel Byrne, Ian McKellen, William Morgan Sheppard, Royston Tickner, Michael Carter. Screenplay: Michael Mann, based on a novel by F. Paul Wilson. Cinematography: Alex Thomson. Production design: John Box. Film editing: Dov Hoenig. Music: Tangerine Dream.

Could the 210-minute cut of The Keep that Michael Mann originally submitted to Paramount really have been a better film – or even a good one? Because the 96-minute version now available on the Criterion Channel is a hopeless mess, incoherent and only mildly provocative in what ideas it seems to contain about good and evil. The story of its muddled production, the result of studio interference and the death of a key member of the crew, visual effects supervisor Wally Veever, has been widely told. Even its fine cast, which includes Scott Glenn, Jürgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne, and Ian McKellen, can’t save it. Glenn, who is one of those actors who make almost any film they’re in better, is oddly cast as some kind of superhero named Glaeken Trismegistus, who instead of setting to work immediately dealing with the monster called Radu Molasar (Michael Carter), spends time bedding Eva Cuza (Alberta Watson), the daughter of the professor (McKellen) brought in to solve the mystery of the keep, the fortress constructed to contain Molasar. Moreover, the professor and his daughter are Jewish, but the SS commandant (Byrne) who has taken charge of the keep doesn’t mind pulling them out of the crowd waiting to be sent to a concentration camp: He’s losing too many Nazi soldiers to the monster. Yes, there’s the makings of a good horror thriller in the film, and there are those who claim to find it in what exists, by filling in its many blanks. But I can only dismiss this as a rare failure by the director who gave us such exceptional films as The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Collateral (2004), and the first movie (and one of the best) to feature Hannibal Lecter, Manhunter (1986). Talk about bouncing back!

 

Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009)

 

Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009)

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, Bill Murray, Amber Heard. Screenplay: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick. Cinematography: Michael Bonvillain. Production design: Maher Ahmad. Film editing: Alan Baumgarten. Music: David Sardy. 

Zombieland feels so much like a parody of the series The Walking Dead that I had to check to make sure that the movie premiered before the first installment of the TV show. (It did. The series started on Halloween in 2010.) I think if the series had been as entertaining as the movie, I would have stuck with it past the three or four seasons it took for me to burn out on it. Because really there’s no way to take the notion of zombie Armageddon seriously, even though the idea of a viral plague of zombieism may have gained a scintilla of credibility after the Covid pandemic hit. Ruben Fleischer does many things right in the movie, starting with the casting. Woody Harrelson is one of those actors who always improve the movie they’re in, and Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin give him solid support. And Fleischer does something I appreciated: He gets most of the gross-out effects, the splattering of blood, brains, and body parts, over with in the opening credits so he and his screenwriters can just get down to concocting funny situations and lines for his characters: the nerdy Columbus, the Twinkie-jonesing Tallahassee, and the con-artist sisters Wichita and Little Rock. The idea of putting Columbus's “rules” on-screen to be splattered with blood and guts was inspired. This was Fleischer’s debut as a film director, and while he hasn’t quite moved beyond this first achievement, there’s still time. 

The Velvet Vampire (Stephanie Rothman, 1971)

 

Cast: Michael Blodgett, Sherry E. DeBoer, Celeste Yarnall, Gene Shane, Jerry Daniels, Sandy Ward, Paul Prokop, Chris Woodley, Robert Tessler, Johnny Shines. Screenplay: Maurice Jules, Charles S. Swartz, Stephanie Rothman. Cinematography: Daniel Lacambre. Art direction: Teddi Peterson. Film editing: Stephen Judson, Barry Simon. Music: Roger Dollarhide, Clancy B. Grass III. 

You won’t see worse actors than Michael Blodgett and Sherry E. DeBoer (billed as Sherry Miles) as Lee and Susan Ritter, a young couple who fall into the clutches of Diane LeFanu (Celeste Yarnall) in The Velvet Vampire. And you probably won’t encounter a wackier vampire movie, one set in the desert, of all places. But blood-sucking Diane seems immune to the sun until the very end, when she’s attacked by a gaggle of cross-brandishing people under a sun that has pierced the Los Angeles smog. So what is this low-budget programmer doing on the Criterion Channel, that streamer of international film classics of the highest order? It’s probably there because it’s October, and the channel is doing its best to fill the annual glut of horror movies with some that demonstrate the history and variety of the genre. And also, perhaps, because director Stephanie Rothman was a product of the Roger Corman quickie-movie factory that gave a start to directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and James Cameron, and actors like Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, and Diane Ladd. Rothman never reached those heights, but she built a career in exploitation movies that were marked by her emphasis on strong women and her shrewd instincts as a writer-director. So The Velvet Vampire has become a cult classic for reasons that transcend the ineptness of some of its performances – though Yarnall, in fact, is actually quite good in her role – and the creakiness of its screenplay. Rothman makes the most of the desert setting, and she finesses the lack of a budget for stunt work and special effects when Diane meets her demise at the end. Unable to make the character appear to burst in flames, she cuts from the cowering Diane to a shot of logs in a fireplace, achieving the effect with simple editing. She provides an erotic charge by suggestion, with a comparative minimum of nudity. It’s not a good film, but it’s an entertaining example of how to do a lot with very little.

The Witch: A New-England Folktale (Robert Eggers, 2015)

 

The Witch: A New-England Folktale (Robert Eggers, 2015)

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson, Julian Richings, Bathsheba Garnett, Sarah Stephens. Screenplay: Robert Eggers. Cinematography: Jarin Blaschke. Production design: Craig Lathrop. Film editing: Louise Ford. Music: Mark Ford. 

Robert Eggers’s The Witch has a subtitle, A New-England Folktale, that is essential to understanding what the writer-director is up to with the film: an evocation of the state of mind of a place and period. (The hyphen in the subtitle is a deliberate archaism, as is the on-screen spelling “VVitch.”) Because without recognizing this aim, we are left with merely a genre piece, a horror movie to be reeled out every Halloween season. Or else we’re seeing a movie which asserts that the Puritans of 17th-century Salem, Mass., were justified in their persecution of women they thought to be witches. Both of those aims for the film hardly justify the care Eggers took in researching and re-creating the speech and the dress of the people who set out in the wilderness of America, not to mention their anxious, terrifying belief in both God and Satan. Eggers’s film is a work of art, as potent as the painting that may have inspired it, Francisco Goya's “Witches’ Sabbath (The Great He-Goat).” It’s an often harrowing film that transcends the genre it’s usually assigned to, thanks to meticulous production design and intelligently cast actors, then mostly unknown. (It was Anya Taylor-Joy’s first film.) If I have a quibble, it’s that my aging eyes have trouble with the cinematography, designed to use only available light (and dark), so others have seen things in its shadows, particularly in the abduction of the infant Samuel, where I saw only shapes and blurs. But that seems to be a feature of Eggers’s films, including The Lighthouse (2019) and The Northman (2022), and not a bug. An altogether satisfying debut for Eggers, as well as Taylor-Joy.

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)

 

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)

Cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar, Henrik Dahl, Karin Bergquist, Peter Carlberg, Ika Nord, Mikael Rahm, Karl-Robert Lindgren. Screenplay: John Ajvide Lindqvist, based on his novel. Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Production design: Eva Norén. Film editing: Tomas Alfredson, Dino Jonsäter. Music: Johan Söderqvist. 

For those blog-readers getting ready to outfit little Jake or Jenny with plastic fangs and felt cape, let me remind you that the vampire legend, with its penetration and exchange of fluids, is always and invariably about sex, or the fear of it. Even when the vampire is 12 years old. Or maybe especially when the vampire is a 12-year-old girl who moves in next door to a 12-year-old boy on the cusp of adolescence. Of course, as a vampire, Eli (Lina Leandersson) is going to be 12 years old forever, and she tells Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) that she’s not a girl, raising a note of ambiguity: Does she mean that she’s not a girl but a vampire, or that she’s transgender or even neuter? (There’s a flash of nudity which suggests that she has undergone some sort of genital trauma.) No matter, for the film is really about the relationship that develops between a boy who is being tormented by bullies and a vampire/girl with the power to put an end to his tormentors. Let the Right One In is such a richly textured film that it transcends its horror-film elements, its bloodlettings and its suspense-engendering narrative. A good deal of the screenplay is devoted to giving the secondary characters lives (and deaths) of their own, including Oskar’s estranged parents and the man who lives with, and serves, Eli. Even incidental details, such as Eli’s odd possessions, and the ending, Oskar on a train, Eli apparently in a box beside him, are tantalizing. No surprise that the film was remade in the United States as Let Me In (Matt Reeves, 2010) and became the basis for a TV series in 2022.

Hocus Pocus (Kenny Ortega, 1993)

 

Hocus Pocus (Kenny Ortega, 1993)

Cast: Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy, Omri Katz, Thora Birch, Vinessa Shaw, Amanda Shepherd, Larry Bagby, Tobias Jelinek, Stephanie Faracy, Charles Rocket, Doug Jones, Sean Murray. Screenplay: David Kirschner, Mick Garris, Neil Cuthbert. Cinematography: Hiro Narita. Production design: William Sandell. Film editing: Peter E. Berger. Music: John Debney.

I come late to the Hocus Pocus party, but then so did almost everyone else. It was a critical and commercial flop when it made its debut in theaters in 1993, and only over the years, as Disney marketing shrewdly took advantage of Halloween hype, did it become a small phenomenon. Parents wanting something for kids to watch other than gory horror films during the Halloween season snapped up the videos and Disney rolled it out on TV along with merchandise like dolls and bedspreads. And now, almost 30 years later, comes a sequel. Disney never butters its bread thinly. You can also thank (or blame, as your inclination may be) the gay community, since the film features two actresses, Bette Midler and Sarah Jessica Parker, who have become iconic for many gays. I finally succumbed to the hype last night and sat through the movie that Gene Siskel called “dreadful” and Roger Ebert squished under his thumb. It’s not as awful as that. Midler, Parker, and Kathy Najimy, the trio of witches, seem to be having fun behaving like drag queens, there’s some wit in making the teenage hero (Omri Katz) the “virgin” who lights the candle with the black flame, and the precocious Thora Birch makes the ideal spunky kid sister. It’s too noisy and too frantic, but we do get to hear Midler’s version of the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins classic “I Put a Spell on You.” Still, I think I’ll wait another 30 years before watching Hocus Pocus 2 (Anne Fletcher, 2022).