Well, as Halloween approached, nothing much really resonated with me. There are very few movies that scare me outright, which is disappointing, and I was just feeling out of it with the weather shift so I wasn't even in the mood to watch my old standbys.
So I ended up watching a few movies over that span of days that weren't necessarily terrifying but I do find interesting:
---
"Flatliners". An old favorite of mine, despite its flaws. There was some bitching years after about how Julia Roberts' plot thread ended up being significantly different from the "guys" in the movie due to the producer not wanting to sully Roberts' pristine image. I won't spoil it here, but I actually liked the fact that each thread played out differently; it gave the movie variety, and it didn't diminish her journey, as Rachel (her character) had been tormenting herself for years over this event in her life, and those scenes played beautifully with the lighting and tone. I really don't like Schumacher much as a director, especially his action and Batman crap; but here is probably some of the most finesse I've seen him use as a director, dramatically. You also see a very very young Hope Davis as a supporting character with a good 5-10 minutes of air time, and she shows her promise even then. (Kimberly Scott makes an appearance too, as well as Beth "I'm beginning to doubt your commitment to SparkleMotion" Grant.) The ideas are cool, the science a bit dubious, but the ending boys choral / orchestral piece by James Newton Howard has been one of my favorite pieces for a long long time.
---
"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (Donald Sutherland version). I haven't seen the movie since I was a teenager and maybe not in total altogether, I streamed it off Netflix. There was kind of a curio factor in that it had lots of actors I know today, early in their career [and darn it, but doesn't Veronica Cartwright do anything but shriek insanely?]; glad to see Goldblum was always rather quirky.
I didn't like the opening sequence that kind of gives away the movie; I like keeping stuff like that secret; but then again, I found it to be a kind of blend of early American cinema + later cinema sensibilities, kind of a "bridge" movie. Another example: The music. There were scenes that should have been shot more dramatically but in essence the music was handed the job of making a scene tense (like when the one couple flees as a decoy to allow the two main protagonists to escape), so it was more noise to me rather than real psychological drama.
The real money shot happens a little over halfway through the movie, when Matthew falls asleep in the garden and
I like how they just went balls-to-walls with that scene and pulled it off within view of the camera for a prolonged period of time.
Great handling of the last 15 minutes or so as well, including the famous conclusion in Wash DC. It was heartbreaking to finally observe what happens to the human host when duplicated, and then a great ending. But there's some great philosophy that ends up being discussed near the movie's end, which is where it brings the "science fiction" into the horror -- about the nature of being independent and isolated from the group, and why Matthew and the others are so terrified of a transformation that in some ways could be very liberating. Are they truly dying or are they being perfected? (Interestingly, the final movie I watched also addresses this to some degree, and it was made around the same time.)
----
"The Thing" by John Carpenter was the third movie I watched over Halloween season. Again, some decent actors earlier in their career: Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley (where's the walrus moustache??), a slimmer Richard Masur, Keith David, Richard Dysart, Donald Moffat.
Carpenter's been a "hit or miss" guy with me too. One famous quote about him: "If you give him six million dollars, John Carpenter will make the best six-million dollar movie that you have ever seen. And if you give him fifty million dollars, John Carpenter will make the best six-million dollar movie that you have ever seen." That's kind of how this movie does come across. But damn, Carpenter can build tension just with a simple repeated synthesizer beat. The whole first 10-15 minutes is just a bit unnerving, without you having really seeing anything, just because some characters are doing things that seem really weird, lives are threatened, and that damn beat just continues to pulse.
I have mixed feelings about the special effects, which when they were "in motion" were not as effective as I found them to be when we were looking at them in still. For example, when they find that twisted alien-looking carcass at the Norweigen camp early in the movie and the cast is looking at it back at their HQ, the camera generally doesn't show it all at once, it is slowly panning around to capture only pieces of the corpse + the look on people's face... and as the camera pans, you realize that the body they are looking at can't possibly be human or... rather... it incorporates pieces that looking human but are configured in such ways that it's like a screaming distortion of human beings melted together. Some of the lingering shots on the "running tallow" faces melting into each other were as unsettling as anything Giger ("Alien") has done.
Some of the camera edits are choppy; not all the acting is great. But the jumping through time actually adds to the disorientation; we're trying to figure out which humans might have been infected, and with the time jumps, where we KNOW we we are missing parts of the chronology (and even during the shooting, where certain characters are "off-screen," we can't even trust the protagonist any longer. Anyone might be a "thing." Everyone is suspect. This makes the "blood test" scene extremely tense, as we really have no idea who will be discovered to be an alien or even if the test works. Which is the beauty of this movie, as some of the "best" scenes are pretty basic at core, and don't even need the special effects. (Of course, there are a few scenes of an active "thing" on film, and Carpenter there seems to cover up any silliness in the shots by extensive use of blood and gore so if you aren't scared to death, at least you'll feel sick to your stomach.)
The movie does end perfectly. I heard there was a "happy ending" filmed, where a survivor is picked up and determined to be human; instead Carpenter did the right thing and went with the open ending
.
Peter Watts (not the character on "Millenium") was issued awards for a short story he wrote in 2010 or so from the "thing's" perspective, and while a little long in spots, the ideas in it are definitely worth a read, and that's where the connection is back to the 1978 "Body Snatchers" flick... Is absorption and transformation into the collective really a bad thing after all? We see it as cannibalism, being devoured by the "other" -- but the thing views it differently and comes to some realizations about humanity as the movie progresses.
Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy : The Things by Peter Watts
