Horror Sequels: Revenge of the Toenail!

Thursday I shaved away my beard intending to be photographed as I intended to travel. Passport photos were required for a Chinese visa I need, but in the end the Chinese Embassy was closed for visas Thursday afternoon and all day Friday, so I'll have to go out on Tuesday. The day wasn't wasted though; I bought my plane tickets and met up with Barry B. for lunch. Thanks again Barry.

On Friday I continued my lunch dates. In contrast to what was to follow, I had a very pleasant Italian lunch with Ali (stunning as ever). Pasta, wine and good company are perfect for a Friday lunchtime. The afternoon, perhaps something I might normally fill with films, was a relaxing lounge around town. There have been no interesting film releases for weeks, however, all was not entirely dead cinematically as I had another venue for getting my fix; the Dublin Horror Movie festival, the Horrorthon.

Intrigued by the prospect of seeing new work by John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper, last night I went along to a screening of three episodes of the "Masters of Horror" series. This series, only aired in the States, takes well-known directors of the genre (eg. Coscarelli, Argento, Stuart Gordon), gives them 2 million and 10 days and asks them to come up with an hour long tv episode. John Landis completed the trio with a piece called "Deer Woman", but I was less interested in that. Landis is rightly lauded for "An American Werewolf in London", but outside of "Innocent Blood" hasn't done much else of genre interest. No, Carpenter and Hooper, despite the disappointment of recent years, are always auteurs to watch. Predictably though it was Landis's piece, laced with humour, which proved to be the best of the three even with (or probably because of) a totally implausible monster called, you guessed it, a deerwoman. Anyhow below are some reviews I put into the IMDB. There may be, as they say, spoilers.

[WARNING! The next paragraph includes toenail scenes of a graphic nature that some readers may find offensive.]

All was well when I got home, but at 1.30 in the morning my big toe began to throb. By 2.00 it was agony. Out with tweezers and scissors, I tried to tackle what was yet another ingrown toenail, or rather the recurrence of my first one. What was happening to me? What was wrong with my toes? I took away some nail, but could get nowhere and ended up getting very little sleep. Emergency! I looked up Golden Pages and got a chiropodist in Lucan who could see me at 12 today. I won't dwell any more on this. Suffice to say he had to anaesthetise the toe (more needles!). It was major. He extracted a HUGE piece of hidden nail, nail I never even suspected and nail that I carried around with me in a little wad of tissue for the rest of the day. He suspects I suffered a foot injury some months back that has caused the problems I've had. I think he may have hit the nail on the head (which is probably what I did). All should now be well, but as he himself said, I had my own little horror movie today.

Anyhow resting at home I finished off "The Continental Op". Tough stories well told. In "The House on Turk Street" and "The Girl with the Silver Eyes", Hammett created perhaps the definitive femme fatale, Elvira. Almost supernatural in her sway over men, she is as mean as they come right to the wonderful last line of the latter story.

There's a lot of humour too. In one story the Op holds up two crooks, relieving them of $19,126.62. His partner finds some stamps. "Take 'em along," says the Op. "That's practically 8 cents."

Anyhow the horror reviews.

The Damned Thing

As someone with a lot of time for Hooper, and as a fan of Ambrose Bierce, I was excited at the prospect of a Hooper directed adaptation of Bierce's story, "The Damned Thing" (a kind of American version of Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla"). The original story, though chilling, was a short and simple piece, so some broadening of the tale was always going to be necessary. Unfortunately this proves the undoing of the episode.

Inasmuch as he draws nothing but a one-note performance from Flanery and an inappropriately over-the-top one from Raimi, Hooper must share some of the blame for the failure of the piece. However, he achieves a sense of dread at the start that he doesn't let disperse. His hinting at greater terrors, also hearkens back to his "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" days, and overall I saw more to celebrate than criticise in his direction. The main flaw lies in Richard Christian Matheson's screenplay. [Richard Christian Matheson is the son of the truly great Richard Matheson, author of "I am Legend", "The Incredible Shrinking Man" and so much more.]

From a subtext point of view, Matheson is good. Tying the damned thing to oil exploration and so to the basis of American wealth and prosperity is clever, linking the evil of society to its very mainspring. However, his charting of the disintegration of Cloverdale leaves far too much to the imagination. One day there is bad weather and restlessness, the next it's the end of the world. There is too much of Flanery moping around with his whiskey, instead of small vignettes of growing madness (such as the hammer suicide).

Sheriff Reddle, for all his centrality in the story, is a truly wasted character, serving very little purpose. For instance, for all his paranoia and remembrance of things past he fails to respond when his wife uses practically the same warning phrases that his mother once used. Instead of preparing for the coming storm and protecting town and family, it seems his sole function is as catalyst for the unfolding of the exposition; a journalist tells him his family history; a doctor tells him about deaths; old newspapers tell him about the original oil drillings (adding very little to what we've learnt already); and at the outset he is the child who witnesses an earlier manifestation. All these things come to him, he himself doing very little. Then to sabotage what psychological realism there was, we have this apparently socially conscientious sheriff abandon the town to carnage while he drives his family home. Even if one charitably sees him as being possessed at this point, it's a pretty stupid course of action.

As I wrote, the original story was slender to begin with. However, this simplicity opened it out to all sorts of interpretation. This adaptation is strongest when it seizes on this ambiguity to make a reasonably clear ideological point. Ironically it is the telling itself that proves to be confused. Next time Matheson should keep it simple.

Pro-life

I had a lot of hopes for this episode. Good reports about the
"Cigarette Burns" piece in Series One suggested Carpenter was back on
song. The story too featured a couple of Carpenter staples, principally
the assault on an isolated enclave of goodies and the threat from
within. Add to this the presence of genre favourite Ron Perlman in the
cast and the signs were good. Sadly the end result didn't deliver.
Firstly Cody Carpenter is no match for his father in the score stakes.
Carpenter senior made musical magic with a cheesy synthesizer in his
heyday; just recall "Halloween", or "The Fog". Cody keeps the
synthesizer, but can't seem to do anything memorable. To be honest he
tries, but then he gets no support from the movie itself.

Perlman is dependably fine as the pro-life father. Despite his villain
role, Perlman invests Dwayne with a certain amount of humanity, creating at the outset a character more appropriate to a realistic, complex issue drama. However, this is a monster movie and it is a real shame that the scriptwriters have to go to extremes to demonise him. Having told his sons not to hurt anyone, that their
prime objective is to recover their sister, Dwayne inexplicably spends
most of his time executing a sickening death on Dr Keever. Wasn't his daughter, preventing an abortion and "Saving the child" his principal aim? This scene is
gratuitous and seriously wounds the movie.

Concentrating on Dwayne's attack on the clinic and working that strand out to its
logical conclusion realistically probably would have resulted in a far
more interesting movie. Unfortunately Carpenter is also saddled with a
feeble Rosemary's Baby element. Even though this provides him with an
opportunity to reprise his "spindly-monster-in-the-operating-theatre"
scene from "The Thing", it also leads to a unintentionally funny scene
involving a demon and its dead spawn. For all the modern special
effects, the demon struck me as no more credible than the monster in
Tourneur's '50's classic, "Night of the Demon", while the whole demonspawn birth very much echoed a similar scene in a British low budget flick called "Cradle of Fear" (a not too dissimilar story, similar creature born).

In the end, there was simply too much going on for this to be
effective. Having said that at least he didn't plump for a "There's a
twin!" ending.