Author: phil

   Note—From Beyond was released in 1986 with an
R rating.  Years later, the deleted material was
rediscovered and edited back, into the unrated DVD.  This
is the version the filmmakers originally hoped to release.

     Unfair as it may be,
From Beyond will likely be compared with director
Stuart Gordon’s earlier movie,
Reanimator.  Reanimator may well be better
but don’t let that blind you to what’s good in
From Beyond.

     People may feel–not much of a story.
 From Beyond feels like more of a rush
job–not enough time available to develop the plot, the characters.
But that’s not such a big deal; Its focus isn’t plot so much as
breaking down barriers.

     What sort of barriers?  First, barriers
in the scientific sense; the search for new dimensions, hidden
sensory awareness, concealed worlds.

     Second, breaking barriers simply by creating
its outrageous plot and characters.  

     Like a peeping tom, you get to watch people
change, as they surrender to forces from their subconscious.
 As Bubba Brownlee the streetwise detective says, “It’s
changing us…and not for the better.” 

Detective Brownlee; streetwise but unprepared for the
Resonator’s effects

     
      Like
Reanimator, this movie is based on a short story
by the horror/fantasy/science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft.
 Lovecraft died fairly young in 1937.  Unlike most of
us, he was alive when Einstein published his Theory of Relativity,
the Wright brothers flew the first plane,  physicists gained
insights into energy levels within the atom, and many more
scientific ideas came to light.  

     Like another excellent writer of that era,
Algernon Blackwood, (The
Willows, The Wendigo), Lovecraft became intrigued
with other dimensions.   People are still fascinated with
these questions years later—remember the
Little Girl Lost episode on
Twilight Zone, (1962) expanded in 1982 as
Poltergeist.

     Like Poe and Ambrose Bierce, Lovecraft
ventured deep into dark, grotesque environments.  A cynic
could say that Lovecraft’s fiction is not ideal movie material
because it’s virtually lacking in sex and humor.  Both
Reanimator and From Beyond add
sex by the shovel-full, and also a bit of humor.  Still,
these movies (and Gordon’s later Dagon) manage to
capture Lovecraft’s spirit better than anything before or since.

     From Beyond is not
particularly strong on ideas.   I doubt very much this is
what the filmmakers had in mind. In one revealing interview,
Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, the director’s wife, summed it up:
 “Stuart’s approach is: ‘Too much ain’t enough.’”   The
filmmakers are fixed on being as outrageous as possible.
 Aiming more at a series of shocking scenes than a well-told
story.   This approach is not that different from Dario
Argento’s, although its style is quite different.    

     The story’s message, perhaps:  Until you
really get your shit together, there are places you need to stay
out of.  

     Two scientists, Pretorius and Tillinghast had
created a resonator, with the power to expose them to another
dimension.  Pretorius, the more reckless, has had his head
twisted off, and returns as a slimy mass able to change his form
at will. (Most of the special effects are quite good, especially
given the limited budget.)  

     But Pretorius, like so many people you’ve
known, finds that his massively increased powers don’t solve his
sexual and ego problems. Despite all he’s seen and his new powers,
Pretorius is still the same loser as before.  Tillinghast,
who knows him best, describes Pretorius as sexually impotent and
fixated on S&M.  

     Now Pretorius has monstrous powers, but he has
remained an abuser.  He only talks a better game.

     Dr. McMichaels is a psychiatrist assigned
custody of Tillinghast, whom the authorities believe murdered
Pretorius.  Her brief journey into black leather doesn’t
teach her much either.  Probably she managed to keep her
sexuality in check before.  Now she is unable to control her
wilder urges.  But as you would expect, being touched by
someone as slimy as Dr. Pretorius brings her only disgust.

     I don’t want to let ourselves, the viewers,
off the hook so easily either.  The bizarre, sleazy sexuality
we view allows us to indulge our idle curiosity, our morbid
fantasies.  Remember how innocent Dr. McMichaels looks at
first, in her white dress and large eyeglasses. 

      Hard as it is to admit, I bet many of us have
tried to picture sex between such a woman, and a shapeless, slimy
creature from another dimension.   That lots of us, riding a
train, perhaps sitting at a business meeting, have had similar
fantasies about someone dressed in perfect style and revealing no
emotion.   The more sophisticated, out of reach, and straight
out of Elle or GQ  they
look, the more intense our daydream.  I suspect that we’ve
had fantasies of being Dr. Pretorius for a day (remember his
classic piece of dialogue:  “Humans are such easy
prey.”) 

     So many of Lovecraft’s short stories begin or
end in insane asylums, with a character’s mind blown-out,
overwhelmed by the enormity of their experience.  In
From Beyond, Tillinghast (the closest thing to a
traditional hero) is accused of murdering his colleague, then
diagnosed as schizophrenic.  

     Dr. McMichaels’ professional reputation gives
her the authority to take Tillinghast back to Pretorius’lab.
 The only condition; they go accompanied by a police
detective, Bubba Brownlee.

     Here’s where you get a taste of
the bizarre imaginations of Gordon and screenwriter
Dennis Paoli.  In a scene worth the price of admission, Dr.
Pretorius, believed dead after having his head torn free of his
body, reappears.   Transformed into a mass of unknown life
form.  

     Pretorius tells them he did not die…only
“passed beyond.”   Adding   “I am master here.”  
Then changing the subject, “Who’s the lovely woman?” The same
imagination and flair that made Reanimator such a
revelation. 

Dr. Pretorius–not dead, but…passed beyond

    Unfortunately, Dr. McMichaels has developed a real
taste for the resonator’s effects.  Tillinghast and Brownlee
are convinced it is dangerous, much like a physical addiction.
  But McMichaels’ interest in the pineal gland, and in the
resonator’s ability to erase sexual inhibitions overcomes her
caution.  While the two men sleep, she turns the
resonator back on, its force blowing her dress away from her.
 When Tillinghast comes upstairs, she kisses him
passionately.  

     Then Pretorius is back, part human,
part…something from the next dimension.  He pulls her against
him, licks her cheek, feels her breasts with slimy, elastic,
elongated

  

 Dr. McMichael’s sex fantasy… turned really ugly

     Tillinghast runs down to the basement to
disconnect the main power source but is attacked by a huge
worm-like creature.  Pretorius transforms into an organism
with an orifice that envelopes McMichaels’ head.  Both
creatures seem inspired by incarnations of
The Thing, made only a few years before.
 Finally Tillinghast is able to cut the power, shut down the
resonator.

     While Suspiria is well known
for its bright blues and reds, From Beyond uses a variety of
pinks, magentas, violets and purples to underline its atmosphere.
  These shades do the job, lending each of these scenes a
bizarre, out-of-control feel.

     What other scenes make
From Beyond such a powerful experience?
 Take a look at the scenes where the pineal glands take
people over.  (This gland is not fiction; it is a
small structure located in the brain.  After much research,
its functions became understood, but not until the 1950’s.)

     But in this movie, the pineal gland functions
like an id running berserk.  Pretorius and Tillinghast’s
enlarged pineal glands actually resemble small snakes poking out
of holes in their foreheads.

     Tillinghast wakes up in the hospital and
begins to stagger around with a sudden appetite for human brains
(best served raw).  At first, he has to settle for getting
diseased brains he finds in hospital waste bins.  Shots from
Tillinghast’s point of view show things around him in bright,
iridescent colors— more vivid because the real corridor is
practically all black and white–it looks like a cheap video game.

Dr. Tillinghast–craving brains  
  

You sit there thinking–it can’t get much weirder than this.
 Then it does.

     Again, don’t be in a hurry to compare this one
with Reanimator.  Just be thankful for
Gordon, Paoli and their sick minds.  

   

     Dead Alive is an easy movie
to dismiss.  It features non-stop humor, most of it over the
top and too camp-y to believe.  But its approach to the humor
is similar to Reanimator; It doesn’t try to be
cute in its attitude and give you a lot of knowing winks. This is
one of many signs of the still-developing, but enormous talent of
its director, Peter Jackson, later to direct
Heavenly Creatures, then the
Lord of the Rings trilogy. 

    The basic story seems simple, but there’s more going
on than you notice at first.  Lionel, one of the two main
characters, will probably strike you as the ultimate mama’s boy, a
complete nerd. 

  Owing to that, you expect him to react in some horrible way
to a different woman.  That another woman will treat him
well, then pay the price.  Several times in the story you
expect him to snap completely.  Anthony Perkins all over
again.

     The charm of this movie is watching how
differently things work out.  You are primed for this moment
where he loses it, where we get the real Lionel; he is off on the
serial-killer express.

    It doesn’t turn out this way.  The other main
character, Paquita, senses the good in Lionel.  She is not
the woman you think she is: a good-hearted but hopelessly naïve
person; not able to see how damaged the guy is, until it’s too
late.  Paquita may not be book-smart but she is brave, loyal,
and has learned a lot from the folk-wisdom her family gave her.
 

    To be fair, Lionel is no Norman Bates either.
 Again and again, he tries his best to be kind to his mother,
Vera.  She is unable to return kindness to anyone, though.
 All she knows is selfishness and a desperate desire to keep
up appearances.  Things fall apart when mother is bitten by a
rare monster-monkey while she visits the zoo.  Instead
of heading off to the ER, she calls a nurse to treat the wound.
 Big mistake.  The toxins from the monkey will soon kill
her and turn her into a zombie.

Lionel’s mother–bitten    

Dead Alive will no doubt be fun for people who
enjoy its many tributes to earlier movies.  Most of us enjoy
that.  What you may miss though, is a strange sort of
back-and- forth between Vera, in a feverish delirium with her
festering wound, and her fantasy about Lionel and Paquita having
sex. Vera’s infected wound, swelling and pulsing, is contrasted to
the increasingly hot sex; the wound finally bursting and spitting
out liquid like some foul ejaculation.  Except for David
Cronenberg’s movies I can’t remember ever seeing sex associated
with a festering wound before.

    You get a hilarious dinner scene, complete with
obnoxious, boring conversation, while suddenly Vera’s ear falls
into custard dessert.  Then Vera is dead from her infection.

    Remember Norman Bates cleaning up after his mother?
 Lionel seems headed in the same direction.  He seems
more concerned with getting the blood off the floor than in his
mother’s death.  But Paquita doesn’t just stand there
watching.  She suddenly remembers her grandmother’s prophecy
about the man she, Paquita, loves—”Dark forces are amassing
against him.“  She is still unable to help him right away.
 But you get the feeling that she will do more, later on.

    Sometimes, you can watch a movie, and find yourself
asking, for example, “What if this character had made the opposite
decision 15 minutes ago?” or “How would this scene look if this
movie was a heavy drama instead of a light comedy?”
 Questions like these went through my mind, about this point
in Dead Alive—so many of the situations reminded
me of Psycho.  Lionel, like Norman Bates, is
clearly trying to do the right thing.  He does not want to
reveal his mother’s death and tries to hide all traces of her.

    But “doing the right thing” works out better for
Lionel than for Norman Bates.  You don’t expect this mama’s
boy to do what Norman could not—ask for outside help and get it.
 Lionel  moves  away from the bad mother’s spell,
and reaches out to Paquita  (and her grandmother) for help
against the “dark forces.”  And she helps him by giving him
an amulet which will save him over and over again.  

Paquita–always there for Lionel through all the horror
   

No doubt about it, Lionel does need plenty of help.
 In no time, he has a whole houseful of zombies to take care
of.  Besides his mother he soon has her nurse, the minister,
a monster baby (inspired partly by It’s Alive and
by Baby Herman from Who
Framed Roger Rabbit) and a gang of thugs he met
while digging up his mother’s body.  He feels that all of
them are his responsibility to care for, and he does all he can.
 Yet he is also trying to escape his Joan of Arc martyr
tendencies.  He wants more from life than just a second
dysfunctional family.  When his sleazy uncle shows up and
wants the house, Lionel says he can have it.   And he means
it too.

Monster baby

     Dead Alive finds outrageous
humor in these plot twists and turns.  Much of the humor is
camp-y.  Check out Lionel’s armor as he enters the basement
to tranquilize his mother.  And the overhead light swinging
crazily, as it did in the Psycho basement when
Vera Miles finally learns Mrs. Bates’ secret.

      Lionel needs to tranquilize his zombie-mother
just to keep her quiet at her own funeral.  Mother and son
wind up in a bizarre embrace during the service.   Lionel
can’t even dig up his mother’s body without aggravation.  He
is surrounded by thugs who taunt him.  Ironically, his mother
shows up to save him (a brief but effective tribute to the
original Carrie).  This lucky break permits
him to bring her back to the basement, the first of many other
zombies to hang out there.  

   Meanwhile, his uncle has invited a whole bunch of his
friends over to party.   The worst kind of rowdy trash.
 You get a bad feeling you’re going to see a train wreck
where the party people run smack into the zombies.  

    The situation is not so different from the wind-up
in the original Dawn of the Dead, one of the most
violent movies ever at the time it was released (1979.)
 Peter Jackson deserves a lot of credit for dealing with this
nonstop splatter with a surprisingly light touch.  Making it
disgusting without any real viciousness is a task that
somehow he manages.

        Dead Alive is one of
the goriest, over-the-top movies you will ever see.  But it
is also fun (and not just for real sickies).  And it could be
most affecting for anyone who has ever had a crush on someone, but
was held back by a dysfunctional family of origin or their own
shyness. 

    This may sound hard to believe but take my word for
it.  This is a true original.

    Sometimes you have to accept a movie on its own
terms.  Many critics would mention
I Walked With a Zombie as an example.  Like
these critics, I feel that the mood it creates is what is
important.   Mood is more important than the plot, at least
as important as the characters.  
Suspiria is even more of an extreme case, with
characters and plot not well developed at all.

     But in many ways these two movies could not be
more different.  It’s like comparing Mozart to
Foxey Lady (Jimi Hendrix).  One is subtlety
itself, one grabs you by the throat.  Both movies have their
share of faults and both have the courage of their convictions,
something I respect.

     If you were forced to pick a category, you
could say that Suspiria is about witchcraft.
 Yet the movie barely scratches the surface of history,
practices, and folklore in witchcraft.

     This won’t come as a big surprise if you’ve
seen other movies by its director, Dario Argento.  You might
describe some as “murder mysteries” but you’d be disappointed if
you watch them for the detective work.  Finding out the
murderer’s identity and their dark secrets isn’t a big deal.
 Not much explanation for anyone’s “motivation.”

     What you do get is a beating, from the
pounding, surging music, from the endless bright red and blue
colors, from the voices veering wildly from soft conversation to
screaming, from the facial expressions, especially the eyes wide
with terror.

Not just the brilliant red and blue colors, but the
way Suzy is made to look
tiny; her courage is even more memorable

 

     Suspiria was said to be an
influence on John Carpenter’s original
Halloween and it probably was.   But while
these  movies were made about the same time, there are
serious  differences.  In Halloween,
the frequent, jumpy camera movements and close shots of people
standing alone and vulnerable keep you on the edge of your
seat.  Most of the time these are false alarms.   Only
you can’t relax because enough of them are the real thing.

     Suspiria, too, sets you up
for some major violence.  Unlike Halloween,
it’s no great surprise that the violence comes.  When and
how it comes is the big surprise.  (You do get some
false alarms too.)  In my opinion, both of these movies broke
rules when they came out.  Halloween
appeared to over-use the false alarms,
Suspiria appeared to over-use both the lead-ups
and the scenes of gore.  Both changed film styles.  
Neither movie is for everyone.

     For instance, it’s not easy to take
Suspiria’s plot seriously.  Suzy Bannion, an
American ballet student, travels all the way to Germany to attend
one of the world’s best dance academies.  The night she
arrives, a student is killed inside the school. The police find
few clues to the murderer’s identity.

     Suzy has no interest in living at the school
and immediately finds an apartment to share near-by.  But
during her first dance practice, she passes out.

      She wakes up in a room at the school.  A
medical “expert”, Professor Vertegast, says she must rest for a
week and take a specially prepared diet, including red wine with
every meal.  The headmistress tells Suzy that her roommate
Olga has generously brought all her things over, so that Suzy can
move in.  (Exactly what Suzy did not want to do.)

      That night, fly maggots drop from the
ceilings by the hundreds in each student’s room.  The
headmistress, Madame Blanc, blames a shipment of spoiled food
stored in the attic, the floor above the rooms.  Not exactly
what you expect at a world-class school you have travelled 3,000
miles to attend.

 Maggots force the ballet students into temporary
sleeping quarters

     It sounds far-fetched and it is.  But the
plot does the job.   Suzy is the only character you have a
chance to identify with, and she never gets the opportunity to
plant her feet on the ground.  From the minute she walks out
of the airport into a driving rain, she moves from chaos to…more
chaos.  Her hair tangled from rain and wind, she hails
cab after cab.  They pass by as if she is invisible.
 The driver who finally stops for her appears to be sealed
off, like a tomb.

     When she arrives at the school, no one will
let her inside.  A girl runs by her in terror.  The only
words Suzy catches are  “secret flowers.”

     Next morning, Suzy returns to the school.
 The headmistress is friendly enough, but you sense something
false about her.  She announces that the student murdered
last night was Pat, the girl Suzy saw running away.  For most
of the remaining story, it is clear that Suzy’s special diet is
drugged, as though the school authorities want her as sedated as
possible.

     Okay, clearly not the best of story lines.
 But what is so memorable about
Suspiria’s style?  

     You already sense it the minute the airport
door opens.  The wind blows Suzy’s clothes so hard they rise
insanely; she looks as though a ghost has literally grabbed her.
Intense music begins to play.  The sound is like a
harpsichord, possibly synthesized.   Seven notes repeated
over and over, loud.  Then whispering voices,
La la la la la la la, in time with the melody, even
louder.

     Suzy’s cab reaches the school, as the rain
still pours down.  The outside walls an intense red color.

     You see Pat run past Suzy.  Suddenly Pat
is in a forest, with endless thin white trees.

      Then Suzy is gone in the cab, and Pat is
somehow back inside the school.   She is dressed in white,
but the bright red walls and lighting all but turn her clothes the
same red.  The style of the lobby is like some exaggerated
art-deco. 

      Pat is alone again in her room.  She
stares out the window at a bright blue night.  Just as the
red color in the hallway practically drowned out every other
color, now blue does the same here.   Pat looks further out,
then sees a pair of eyes in the blue night.  Nothing else,
just eyes.  Then madness…chaos.  You will want to see it
for yourself

     No doubt, critics have analyzed the roles of
the bright reds and blues, and the use of white in
Suspiria.  Blue dominating the screen
definitely highlights many violent scenes, such as Sara’s (Suzy’s
best friend) desperate attempt to escape a room on the top floor.
 While a killer tries to use a razor to lift the latch, Sara
focuses in on a lone white window in the upper right part of
the screen.  White appears to represent peace, salvation… a
way out.  Another, much quieter scene shortly before this:
Suzy and Sara, both in white suits, alone in the school’s huge,
ancient swimming pool.  Like the window in the later scene,
they are virtually the only white parts of a scheme that would
otherwise be solid blue.  In this overwhelming blue,
they float like white angels.

.

Suzy and Sara; angels in a sea of
evil     

     One advantage of using the witch theme in the
under-developed plot:  it gives Argento the freedom to allow
anything to happen with no explanations.  The maggots.
 A faithful, peaceful guide dog suddenly turning on his blind
owner.  A room at the top floor of the school filled
thigh-deep in razor-wire, wall to wall.  An evil figure, his
or her identity never revealed, stalking the school, carrying a
straight razor.

 

Again, a vulnerable creature in a landscape with unseen
predators

     I don’t know if Argento wanted, or chose the
American actress Jessica Harper
(Inserts, My Favorite Year) for the role of Suzy.
 But Harper turns out to be very good.  Her voice
doesn’t betray much of her feelings; it remains calm throughout
most of the craziness she goes through.  For a long time, you
aren’t sure if that calm voice reflects Suzy’s passivity, or her
strength to endure all she is forced to go through.  In
contrast, her large, expressive eyes provide most of the clues to
her soul.

Suzy–overwhelmed, terrified…but unwilling to be intimidated
 

But when Suzy finally finds herself without help and alone, you
see her courage.  Not only is she ready to venture into the
forbidding top floor, (where she imagines her one friend, Sara,
either captive or dead) she is willing to take on the witch whose
spirit still controls the school.    Like John Carpenter
soon afterwards, Argento was willing to take his style into
uncharted waters.  This movie has its faults but it is an
original vision.  And it grabs you by the throat as he
intended.

    Even before the credits finish, you can tell
Night of the Hunter won’t be your average
western…or thriller…or anything else.  You hear
music—straight out of the most savage  westerns.  Music
that screams out: a killer’s coming—Lee van Cleef… maybe Robert
Mitchum?      

    And facing the killer down–John Wayne… Gregory Peck?
 No, a young boy alone, really alone, in a world of chaos.
 Abruptly, the music changes into a child’s lullaby,
“Dream Little One, Dream.”  You can’t figure
out what’s going on, but if you have a pulse, you are getting
curious.  

    Night of the Hunter is now ranked
as an American classic, a World classic.  Yet when it was
released (1955) it did not make money.  Its director, the
great actor Charles Laughton worked long and hard to get
everything the way he wanted.  He dreamed of directing more
movies.  But the poor showing at theaters stopped him cold—he
never directed another.

    One problem–the movie was hard to put in a category.
 Second, maybe 50’s audiences felt it was too creepy—they had
enough anxiety in real life, thank you.  Soviet Union moving
into Eastern Europe.   Atomic bomb tests.

    Most of us wanted something reassuring— something
telling us basically, if you go to church  every week, then
things should be okay.  

    But in this movie, almost everyone believes in God
and the church… at least they claim to. Yet the most devoted man
of God—the self appointed preacher Harry Powell is a serial
killer. Many are taken in by him.   

    People are narrow-minded, often mean-spirited. Most
50’s movie-goers were looking for escape… and this wasn’t
it.

    No one can forget Harry Powell, the fanatic with one
hand tattooed “LOVE” the other “HATE.”  The riveting sermon
using his hands that he preaches at a minute’s notice.  

 

Robert Mitchum’s iconic role–sociopath posing as a man of God
   

But overshadowed by this great character and Mitchum’s great
performance is an under-rated character and performance—the boy
John Harper, played by Billy Chapin.   His career shorted out
before the 60’s even began; he was still a teenager.  

    He is a kid forced to be a man.    People
around him want to help but they are useless.  His world is
in free fall.  John becomes hard as nails—by necessity.
 Yet later you see his need for love…his acceptance of
love—it hits you like a mule’s kick.

  Billy Chapin as John; a forgotten actor giving a much
under-rated performance

     The story begins with an overhead shot of a
small town on a river.  Far from the noise and stress of the
big city.  The good old days…

   Not for long.  A group of young kids approach
cellar stairs behind a house.  Sprawled on the stairs the
dead body of a woman.

    Next, Harry Powell driving through the countryside
and small towns.  Loudly asking God what’s next for him.
 He says he hates women wearing anything provocative.
 But when you see him next, he’s in a burlesque theater.
 You have a bad feeling—a religious fanatic with some heavy
compulsions.

Harry watches the burlesque show

     Meanwhile a young brother and sister sit
quietly, not knowing their peace is about to be shattered—forever.

    Suddenly their dad appears, on the run after a bank
robbery: he killed two people. Only a minute to tell his son John
everything.  

    I’m hiding the money I stole.  Only you will
know where. You can’t tell anyone where it’s hid.  From that
moment, John is thrust into an adult’s world.  Again and
again, the movie reminds you he has no choice.

    The father, Ben Harper is sentenced to hang.

    Sharing Ben’s cell is the same fanatic, sentenced to
30 days for car theft.  Ben talks about the money in his
sleep; Harry is desperate to know where the cash was hidden.
 Ben quotes the Bible; “a child shall lead them.

    You see John’s new life—all quiet desperation.
 Kids sing a nasty song about a guy being executed—they don’t
care if John and Pearl hear them.  

    The movie goes out of its way to make Harry seem a
force of nature.  The proverbial wolf in lamb’s clothing that
eventually finds us.  You see his shadow as a train speeds
by; he sings a hymn loudly.  A man mentions meeting him.
 Next the preacher is in town.  Doing the dramatic ‘Love
and Hate’ parable again.  John stares at him with pure
dislike; he knows bullshit when he hears it.

       But John is finding out fast that no
one else can see through Harry.  The store owner Mrs. Spoon
is taken with the preacher from the beginning, and she is someone
people listen to.  She is shallow, vain, ignorant…and sure
about her small-minded opinions.  Her words are important in
getting Harry to stay, and in getting Willa, John’s passive mother
to marry him.

    Maybe this was the biggest reason people disliked
this movie in 1955, for not  taking that populist attitude.
 That down-home, salt-of-the-earth people may not be
educated, but they have instincts; they can spot a liar by
intuition.  

    Here, they often come off like Mrs. Spoon.  Not
just foolish but self-assured in their foolishness.  A good
talker with Bible-knowledge can sucker them.

 

A facade no one sees through

    Once again, you watch John, unable to control what
happens around him.  He can only try to stay strong.
 His mother, without much will of her own, soon agrees to
marry the preacher.  John snaps at Harry: “You’ll never be my
dad.  You’ll never make me     tell—“

    He catches himself a second too late; he knows Harry
knows. 

    The honeymoon is painful for Willa.  Not so
much that Harry says sex is disgusting, but the way he throws it
in her face.  Telling her—look at yourself in the mirror (she
is not even  dressed slutty).  

    Willa becomes a powerful speaker at Harry’s prayer
meetings.  But even she can finally realize Harry wants more
than preaching.  The subject of the stolen money will not go
away.

    Willa has a realization.   A strange one.
 She tells Harry the Lord brought him into her life to
deliver her from sin.  The money is gone but that no longer
matters, only her soul being saved.

    Harry’s reaction is quick and brutal; he stabs her
to death.   Next day the grieving preacher tearfully tells
Mr. and Mrs. Spoon that Willa drank, took the car and ran away.
 But he will do the right thing by his kids.  All the
while, the hand tattooed HATE stares right in your face.

    Here, the movie goes furthest into horror film
territory.  The next time the children see Harry, they watch
him through a filthy basement window.  John suspects
(correctly) that nothing can stop Harry now from hurting them.
 

    So much of the next stretch is shown from the kids’
point of view—watch the shot where Harry talks to them from the
top of the basement stairs.  For the first time he shows them
his knife…and mentions using it on ”meddlers.”  Both kids
know he means it. 

     John’s plan is to say the money is in the
basement—and somehow get the time to escape.  But Harry’s not
stupid—he tells both kids to come down with him.

    You see Harry put a hand on John for the first time;
forcing his head against the top of a barrel.   Harry pulls
out his knife—like someone about to make a ritual sacrifice.
 Pearl can’t take anymore; she tells him the money is inside
her doll.  

    Before Harry can move, John drops a heavy shelf on
him.   For a second it looks like both are within reach of a
furious monster…then Harry’s foot slips on a glass jar.
Terrifying; you remind yourself, these are children.
 

    They get a rowboat.  The look of the movie is
suddenly different.  Dark sky, large bright stars; more like
an illustration from a kid’s book.  Almost as if the children
have left the everyday world and entered a fantasy.    
 

    But ‘fantasy’ is not the same as ‘safe.’  You
see a shot of their rowboat far off, and much closer, a thick
spider web—the boat seems to pass right through it.  

    The message is clear—Harry is part of this dream
world.  On a stolen white horse, he patiently follows the
river road.  Days pass.  Once in the dead of night, John
hears him singing a hymn as he rides by.  “Don’t he
ever sleep?”  John asks himself.

    Exhausted, half-starved, the children reach a muddy
riverbank and sleep a long time after sunrise.  A shot of the
daytime sky; dark clouds but a holy light breaking free.  A
woman calls to them, sounding tough, like a disciplinarian.
 But lighthearted music makes you feel that first impression
is wrong.  And the words she speaks tell you for sure:
“Gracious, so I’ve got two more mouths to feed.”
 Unconditional love.

    Pearl is more than happy to find a new family.
 (Four other kids live with Rachel Cooper, this gracious
older woman.)  John is afraid to trust anyone.

   Slowly, you feel him open up, risk trusting Rachel.
 When she takes the kids into town, people know her eccentric
ways.  But they definitely like and respect her…John can see
it.

     Rachel tells a Bible story.  Everyone
faces her except John.  But he listens to every word.
 When the two of them are alone Rachel tells John to get her
an apple.  A long pause.  “And get one for yourself
too.”  

    Not for the first time, she asks him about his
parents.  Hesitantly, John puts his hand on top of hers.
 It’s a powerful moment.  His need for love was not
dead; only frozen inside him a long time.

    But it was certain Harry would find John and Pearl.
 He rides up to the house on the white horse.  You want
to believe he has finally met his match; someone who sees him for
what he is, who will risk everything to protect her children.
 

     You want to believe that John’s time in Hell
may finally end.  Life has taught him the world is not a safe
place.  He has met bad people, actively ignorant people.
 His mother was passive she failed her kids.  His (real)
father made a decision too, one that left his kids alone.
 Much later in the movie, you see an owl looking for food,
then a rabbit.  From inside, Rachel hears the rabbit’s
scream.  “It’s a hard world for little ones,” she says.

Rachel (silent film star Lillian Gish)–the first to protect
John and Pearl

     Rachel is special, unlike anyone John knew
before. Not that she knows everything.  Her oldest foster
child Ruby fools her a long time, sayings she goes to town for
sewing lessons.  She is actually hanging out with town boys.

    But Rachel never claims she knows everything.
 More important, she knows how to forgive.  Watch the
scene where Ruby tells her she’s been lying.  Rachel
understands what Ruby was looking for– love.  Ruby thinks
Rachel will hit her.  “Did I ever—“   Rachel starts to
say– you know right away she never has.  A “Christian” in the
best sense of the word.

    John finds Rachel after a long time drifting.
 Without a father, with no one to guide him.  A cynic
could say it was actually John who caused a lot of his own pain by
keeping his word about the money.  

    They have an argument.   But remember, John is
just a kid.  A kid trying to function as an adult…but still a
kid, with a kid’s emotions.  You can’t judge him like an
adult.  

    Like so many other child actors, Billy Chapin (John)
crashed to earth and never came back.  Watch this movie and
judge for yourself how much we lost.  

    The years spanning the mid 60’s and the early 70’s
saw some major changes in American movies, and in movies
worldwide.  Barriers on nudity (The Pawnbroker, Women in Love) violence (Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch), sex (Barbarella, I am
Curious Yellow) and language (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Tropic of Cancer)
were smashed… dramatically and rapidly.  Not to say this new
freedom meant  everything in those years was better than
before—it was not.  Go out and rent
Mandingo, or Zardoz, and judge
for yourself.

   But many adventurous filmmakers took advantage of
what was given them—with startling results.
 Carrie, written by Lawrence D. Cohen, and
directed by a young Brian De Palma, is a good example of such a
daring attitude paying off—big time.  Carrie was based on the
first novel published by a young unknown named Stephen King—soon
to become the best-known writer in the field of horror.  Its
plot is rather simple, its characters not all that deep.  The
dialogue is nothing great. 

    But dialogue is not what Carrie is
about.  It features some deeply intense acting from Sissy
Spacek (Carrie).   Other stand-outs are the up-and-coming
John Travolta, Amy Irving, and Nancy Allen.  Not to mention
the first movie in years by the veteran actress Piper Laurie.
 And Carrie is loaded with images that add
up to the impact of a tidal wave.  

    You know this only a few minutes into its story.
 As the credits roll, you become a privileged viewer in a
high school locker room.  In slow motion, girls walk, fully
nude out of a steamy shower.  The effect is more sensual than
pornographic—you sense their freedom, their confidence.  
Their whole lives are ahead of them and they know it.  They
seem comfortable with their bodies, and have a sense of belonging.
 

   Something else too.   As the excellent
commentary to the new Carrie DVD points out, the
nudity has another purpose.  Generally, films of this period
saved nude scenes for late in the story.   This scene tells
you you’re dealing with filmmakers not afraid to do anything.
 Be very afraid.

   One girl, Carrie is left to shower alone, and the
contrast with the others is painfully obvious.  Carrie is an
outsider, rejected by all.  She is not comfortable with her
body.  During the shower, Carrie gets her first period, and
unlikely as it sounds, she has never learned what to expect.
 Her reaction is pure terror.  She runs, nude into the
locker room, desperately seeking help.

 

   Intense fear and shame

     None of the girls shows the least bit of
compassion.  Instead, they throw a shower of tampons at
Carrie, chanting “Plug it up!  Plug it up!”

   Only the gym teacher Miss Collins understands what
Carrie is experiencing.  The way Carrie reaches out for her
makes this obvious.   But in order to calm her, she must slap
Carrie in the face—hard.  At the same moment, a light bulb
abruptly shatters—a sign of worse things to come.

 
Miss Collins wants to help but has only a clue how deep the
family problems go

     Carrie is taken to the principal’s office.
 The administration appears to understand that Carrie never
learned about periods.  But they don’t know where to go with
this.  In addition to their lack of concern (they call her
“Cassie” three times in a row) Carrie senses, correctly, that they
simply wish to get rid of her.  An ashtray on a desk begins
to vibrate intensely—then breaks.

   You follow Carrie home.  You expect the ultimate
dysfunctional family, and you’re right.  Carrie lives alone
with her mother, a religious fanatic in the worst sense of the
word.  Not only does she show her daughter a complete lack of
love, she is obsessed with sin and sinning.   Someone who
rules totally by force–not one to be reasoned with… and proud of
it.

   She is convinced that Carrie is filled with sin.
  Later you will find out her reasons.  But looking back
on the story, it’s no real surprise.  Mrs. White slaps her
several times, then locks her in a closet.  In this closet,
Carrie is forced into close range with a statue of St. Sebastian,
body pierced by arrows.

     Abuse she justifies as doing God’s will

      That week, Miss Collins announces that the
entire gym class will be punished for their treatment of Carrie.
 Most of the class accept this matter–of-factly, but one
girl, Chris (Nancy Allen, who later married De Palma) defies the
teacher, and begins to plot her revenge.  At the same time,
prom announcements go out, and students begin making their plans.

    One girl, Sue Snell, decides to make things right
with Carrie.  Sue asks her boyfriend Tommy to take Carrie to
the prom.  Carrie accepts.  Sadly, Sue’s plans are on a
collision-course with the violent revenge thought up by Chris and
her boyfriend Billy.

      For the first time in her life, Carrie
stands up to Mrs. White, over the issue of  the prom.
 You already know that Mrs. White sees the prom as the
Devil’s work, a place for evil doings.  But Carrie stands her
ground, and goes ahead, despite her mother’s warnings of doom and
damnation.

Carrie’s yearning for love is unmistakable

     Without giving away too much of the plot, the
prom starts out like a dream come true for Carrie.  Then
suddenly, all Hell breaks loose.  The trap set by Chris and
Billy does its deadly work.  Sue is helpless to stop it.

     Amy Irving, who played Sue, mentioned that
many viewers misunderstood what went on, thinking that Sue was
part of the revenge plan too.  On a second viewing, you can
see clearly that Sue is not.   But the
first time you watch, things happen too fast—the action is hard to
follow.

   Brief moment of pure happiness away from home

   Carrie lets her powers loose and people die.
 The gym, with its perfect prom setting, is turned into
chaos, then into an inferno.  In seconds, people are crushed
to death, electrocuted, burned alive.  Those who die are bad
people, good people (including Miss Collins who always did her
best to protect Carrie), and indifferent people—it is strictly a
matter of chance who survives.

Carrie’s world destroyed   

     Carrie walks slowly home, her face filled with
expressions of agony and terror.   Desperate for comfort.
 You may remember Robert Frost’s famous line of poetry;

     “Home is the place where, when you have to go
there/ they have to take you in.”

     That is all Carrie gets from her mother, to be
taken in.  To Mrs. White, Carrie is now a lost soul.
 Even Carrie’s pleas to her mother to hold her, are in
vain. 

    Life for Carrie has become ultimate emptiness.
 No one to sympathize with her, much less be a friend.
 The world, that her mother warned her about again and again,
has turned out to be as just as bad as Mrs. White
promised. 

   
An insane response to insane events–Carrie lashes out

     But the true horror; Home is every bit as bad
as the outside world.   

   Sissy Spacek, no longer unknown by 1975, but not
famous yet, was a revelation in Carrie.  Her
large eyes and face full of expression keep you riveted to her.
 To say that you feel her pain is the ultimate
understatement.  How many of us as teenagers let ourselves
trust someone we didn’t know that well, and (for whatever reason)
suffered deeply for trusting them?  How many of us, feeling
unloved and hopeless, wanted to act as Carrie does? 

   You may be a teenager, recently a teenager, or
someone with memories still fresh in your heart; memories of
wounds that cut you to the bone.  
Carrie may well reopen the pain of those old
wounds, whether you suffered them out in the world, or behind
closed doors where you lived. I can’t speak for everyone.
 But I feel a lot of us have a part of ourselves that longs
(if only for one second) to take the revenge Carrie did.
 This movie allows you to experience the mix of joy and
horror in that revenge.  

Some of us are fortunate enough to experience a novel, poem,
painting…or movie, that strikes us as perfectly planned, all the
way from the outline in the artist’s soul.

Maybe you felt it right away.   Or maybe
you read about it, or learned about it from someone who loved it
too.   A friend, a review, a teacher.  Someone who could
interpret the artist’s vision.  What they dreamed of
creating… how they went about doing it—going from a simple idea to
a finished piece of work.

Don’t expect this from
Pet Sematary.

You won’t feel the filmmakers,
especially Stephen King (who wrote the novel and the screenplay)
knew exactly where they were going.   Not everything fits
together… not by a long shot.

Yet not only is this a pretty scary movie, it
may leave you with unanswered questions you think about a long
while.  Disturbing questions.

The DVD commentary mentions that it took King
a long while to publish the novel
Pet Sematary.  Not much explanation, but
strong hints that the book’s themes hit close to home.  Like
the novel’s family the Creed’s, King and his wife had young
children then, and lived in a house close to a highway with trucks
speeding by.  Like the young Ellie Creed, King’s daughter had
a cat killed on that road.  Writing it had to take a toll on
King.

The movie starts out bland.  The Creed
family moves from Chicago to small-town Maine.  Louis, the
father starts a job in a small-college infirmary.  Rachel, a
home-maker, daughter Ellie, full of life; perceptive, endlessly
curious, and subject to strange dreams.  Their son Gage just
starting to walk, and as full of life as Ellie—a sweet, sweet
child.

Their new house a dream-come-true, in every way but
one.  It’s located just off a busy highway, filled with huge
trucks travelling from a local manufacturing facility.  Day
and night these monsters speed by.

The Creed’s bond right away with their new
neighbor, Jud Crandall.  A huge, gruff looking guy, Jud is
actually full of kindness and warmth.  The Creed’s are
neighbors he has longed for.

Right away the Creed’s ask Jud about a path
near their house.  Jud shows them where it leads, a cemetery
(misspelled by a child) for dead pets, many of them killed on the
road.  Most of the markers are hand-written, in phrases a
young child would write.  Only Rachel finds it frightening.
Jud’s take?  Not a scary place, but a place of rest.

His first day on the job, Louis encounters death.
A student, out jogging, hit by a truck, killed instantly.

Ironically the dead student, Victor, becomes a
sort of angel for Louis, doing his best to steer him away from
danger.  The first night Louis sees him in the bedroom, he is
sure he is dreaming.

“Who said you were dreaming?” Victor says.
He leads Louis down the path to the pet sematary, then warns
him.  “The barrier is not meant to be crossed.”

Thanksgiving.  You learn about bad blood
between Louis and Rachel’s family.  No explanation, but bad
enough that Louis refuses to visit.  While his family is
away, Louis takes a phone call from Jud.

Ellie’s cat, Church, on the road, run over.

Louis and Jud know how much Church meant to
Ellie.  It’s Jud who gives Louis the idea to bury the cat in
the other pet sematary—actually a Micmac tribal burial ground.

Church is back the next day.  Not physically
changed much, but…different.  Real me 

Church–brought back to life

Finally Louis gets the story from Jud.
As a boy, Jud had a dog he loved.  When the dog died, Jud was
heartbroken.  A ragman, half Micmac, told Jud about the
burial ground.  Jud buried the dog there.   The dog
returned—as savage as Church is now.

Louis and Jud hoped to spare Ellie from the pain of
death.  The plan works better than expected.  Church is
vicious with most people, yet treats Ellie pretty much the same.

Ironically, the Creed family experiences
death nevertheless.  Missy, their housekeeper, diagnosed with
terminal cancer.  Unable to deal with the unending pain, she
chooses suicide.

Ellie finds some peace in talking to her dad
about life after death.  Louis does not follow any organized
religion, but has faith just the same in an afterlife.  “I
believe we go on,” he says to Ellie.

But Missy’s death reminds Rachel of her sister
Zelda; her slow painful death from spinal meningitis.  Her
family never explained why, but her sister got no outside medical
care.

“…like a dirty secret,” is how Rachel
describes her situation.

The burden fell on Rachel, still a child.
Many felt that the scenes of Rachel caring for Zelda were
the scariest in the movie, and I can’t argue with that. Could her
family have experienced some kind of inappropriate shame about
Zelda?  No one will say.  Clearly they had money to
spare.    Rachel has never asked them about it.

When Zelda finally died, Rachel was relieved…
to the point of joyfulness.  The guilt about her gladness
still haunts her. 

Zelda–memories Rachel wants to forget

But worse tragedy will strike the Creed’s; the
worst misfortune a family can suffer.  No big surprise;
death seems to follow them.  Jud’s words:  The
road, the road, the road.  A beautiful breezy fall day, a
kite soaring in the sky.  Jud and the Creed family in harmony
with the season, with their world.

A few miles away, another monster truck.  The
driver blasts loud, primal music, Ramones music.  A
bringer of sure death.  The Creed’s lose sight of Gage
for just a few seconds.   But enough time.  Gage never
has a chance.

You know what happens next.  Louis, unable to
face his grief, will wait until after Gage’s funeral, dig up his
body, and bury him where he buried Church.  Already knowing
the odds; Gage will come back a monster.  Louis ignores
Victor’s warning about crossing the barrier.

You expect this movie to deliver on its promises of
terror, and it does.  I won’t throw in many spoilers.

Leave it at this:  The excellent directing,
screenwriting and acting succeed at a difficult job– making the
horror in this story believable.

Why is the story so unlikely to be believable?
Think about it.  A sweet young kid, returning from the
grave, now a demon… These scenes should have been unconvincing,
could easily have been embarrassing, if handled badly.  Give
everyone credit.

I remember renting
Pet Sematary when it first came to video stores.
My own kids were young.   My feelings then; the story
played dirty.  Any time you use a child’s death this
way, you are playing dirty.

Two brief insights 20 years later:

First, none of us gets to say what someone can or
cannot write about.  Neither can we cannot limit where
writers get their inspiration.  On the DVD extras, you see
King watching the movie being shot.  King is all smiles.
But what he went through in creating the book is another
story.

Second, if you hold up older movies as measuring
sticks for comparison, saying Pet
Sematary crosses the lines of decency.  You
may be forgetting the savage beating movies like
Horror of Dracula, Peeping Tom, and
Freaks
got when they were released.  People then, convinced
these movies played dirty.

Speaking as a fan of all those movies, I don’t
ever want to get old and talk about the good old days.  I
want  people free to experience barriers smashed, the way I
did, watching
Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist.

Still, by mainstream standards, this is a grim,
pessimistic, ugly story.  Louis’ decision comes from
love, not evil motives.  He only wants a chance to get back
the life his family had, for Gage to experience growing up.

To a fundamentalist Christian, for example, Louis
probably sinned deeply; interfering with God’s plan.

But I doubt that’s where King was coming from.
The story of a sinner getting his just desserts would not be
as scary as this.

Scarier still, King possibly had no point to make at
all.  Maybe the real-life death of his own cat simply created
a story inside him, and he followed where it went.  The cat’s
death made him imagine something worse.

We can be amateur psychologists and ask if
Louis “loved too much.”  Not likely.   Not enough
evidence.  I think King wanted all of us to be dragged into
Louis’ agony—to make it a universal experience.  You would
lose that by making Louis over-possessive, a bad father, a
workaholic.

One way I think the story does play dirty.  It
forces every parent of a child who died accidentally to re-live
that agony.  Part of the American Dream is the universal
human dream—the joy of watching your kids grow up.  In a
different way, movies like Ordinary
People make you feel the impact of having that
dream grabbed away.

Ordinary People shows you a
family’s struggle to get over a boy’s death; his older brother,
his father and mother.   Father and son finally deal with the
pain and survive the grieving process.

The mother had never learned to deal with pain; she
retreats.  First by pulling back into herself, second by
literally leaving the family she loves.  She has to turn
away, to stay alive, to keep her sanity. Many saw her character as
empty…or worse.   Always smiling, always capable of saying
the right thing, yet giving no nurturing to her son Conrad.

But watch the movie again; she is not a monster.
She is someone with no other way to deal with death.

I don’t want this to sound like a paper for a
literature course.  To say:  The resurrected Gage
symbolizes this or that.  But I will for a moment.

Gage the monster may be the quiet horror the mom,
Beth, feels in Ordinary People.   The horror
of what can happen to your life at random, with no one to blame.
No one responsible.   No one to say, “It’s not your
fault,” in a way you believe it.

In fact, no one can say anything that can ease your
pain…those words don’t exist.  You feel that you have failed,
that your life will never be the same.  By giving you a taste
of these feelings; that probably is the way Pet Sematary plays dirtiest.

Gage

     Deliverance is not a movie
you find in the horror section of the video store.  My
feeling though; if this isn’t a horror movie, what is.

My arguments would be these. First, the
violence, the degree of violence the characters must
experience.  Two strangers suddenly appear into your life.
You can’t get them to listen to a word you say.  They
pull out a shotgun, point it at your face and demand…now drop them
pants.  They are not kidding.  One of them rapes you up
the ass, then and there.  As he finishes, the other starts to
tell a friend with you, you are going to blow me right now.

The second argument; In the 70’s, you saw
movies about Vietnam veterans, forced to deal with violence back
home. The sadly-forgotten Gordon’s War (Paul
Winfield), and Rolling Thunder (William Devane,
Tommy Lee Jones), then a few years later, the much more popular
First Blood (Stallone).  These characters
can slip back into a soldier’s role easily; almost like putting on
an old sweatshirt. I can understand people grouping these movies
in the ‘action’ category.

Ed, Deliverance’s main character is
not a guy like that.  If he was in the military
(even peacetime) the movie never mentions it.  Violence is
thoroughly unfamiliar to him; watch his scared face time and
again.  Yet in the space of several hours he realizes he
needs to kill someone, or he and his friends will never see home.
This is horror for sure.

Lewis, a good friend of Ed, is different, an adventurous
man who loves the wilds, the risks you take in the wilderness.
He has tried to bring that out in Ed.  Lewis is angry
and sad about government plans to dam the largest river in
Georgia. Where there was wilderness for thousands of years, there
will be a “dead lake” in a few months.  He convinces Ed and
two other friends to take a canoe trip; to experience this river
before it is gone.

The irony is this; they want to grip hold of
the present before the future grabs it away.  But the reality
they find is actually a remote past: the worst of the Middle Ages,
where everyone carried weapons and precious little law enforcement
existed.  Or maybe the prehistoric age pictured in the
prologue of 2001. Or the chimpanzee societies you
watch in documentaries, where tribes go out raiding, find monkeys
for food and literally tear their arms and legs off.

Ed–perceptive enough to sense they have entered
another world

In just a few hours, four suburban people realize
they have entered another reality.  And the door back to
suburbia, to civilization, has been slammed shut behind them.
To open that door, they need to do some killing themselves.

Lewis told Ed and their friends Drew and Bobby
to expect a weekend trip; they will be back Sunday in time to
watch the football games.  No problem there.  But Ed has
seen enough, and heard enough from Lewis, about disrespecting the
mountain people they will run into.  That can get you hurt.
Watch his face when Lewis offers a man forty dollars to
drive their cars, and the man says he’ll do it for sixty.
“Sixty, my ass,” Lewis says casually.

Ed’s eyes go wide.“Lewis, don’t play games
with these people.”

This same man is okay with compromising at
fifty dollars.  But you see enough of these isolated people
so you understand; walk softly.  At least two
children who appear to be results of inbreeding; cousins marrying
cousins already married to cousins. Noone else around to marry

Local people–not shy about telling Lewis he is a fool

The first day and night, almost the way Lewis
promised they would be.  Mild rapids, excitement enough—good
times for everyone.  Comfortable camping—Ed and Bobby drink,
Drew plays guitar; he loves to play.  Lewis stays in the
moment; getting a sense of this wilderness doomed to extinction.

xxxxxxxxxxx

Ed wakes early next morning.  Dressed
only in sweats, he takes his bow and arrow and wanders away.
What is he looking for?  Ed is no kid anymore, but he
is young in experience—he is searching for who he is, what he is.
Not far away, a young deer stands.  Ed places an arrow
in the bow and pulls the string back.  You can see he has had
plenty of experience shooting at targets.  He knows how to
prepare himself for a shot and he has the physical strength to
pull the string and hold it still.  But fear overcomes him.
He is barely able to shoot and when he does at last, the
arrow never even comes close.

Is he disgusted with the idea of killing an
animal…or afraid of how he will feel?  Maybe the age of the
buck strikes something in Ed; no doubt it is a young animal, with
small, velvety antlers.  And Ed has a young son at home.

So much in the wilderness he is ambivalent
about.      Being with Lewis is always an
adventure, yet Ed wonders how adventurous he really is.
When Lewis bargains with the tough-looking mountain
guy about driving the cars, Ed’s comment: let’s play golf instead.

An uneventful start to the day.  The day
before, Ed paddled with Drew.  Today he is with Bobby.
They wind up ahead of Lewis and Drew, and stop on the bank
for a short rest.

Standing on the shore, they can see two men
walking fairly close.  The strangers don’t appear with a
shock like Freddy Krueger or Norman Bates’ mother; they simply
walk up slowly.

Yet you are about to witness one of the
all-time brutal scenes in American—or World, movie history.
Truly men without positive emotions.  People who make
you question your feelings about capital punishment.  They
tie Ed to a tree, pull out his knife and test it by cutting his
chest.  A small man does most of the talking.  Ed tries
to reason with him, appease him with talk about money.  The
answer is short and direct: “We want your money, we’ll
take your money.”  He tells Bobby to drop his pants.

.

Not people anyone can reason with

Bobby, whose business is sales, desperately
searches for a way to reach them.  He is realizing fast… you
can’t.  The only question is how much humiliation they want
before raping him.

The small man finishes with Bobby.  The
other man stares at Ed, makes a comment about his mouth, and
starts to unzip his pants.  First he tells Ed to drop to his
knees and pray, “and you better pray good.”

He starts to pass the small man his shotgun.
Suddenly, an arrow tears through the small man’s chest.
It passes all the way through him, extending about equally
out of his front and back.  Lewis’ arrow.  The other
stranger runs for his life into the woods.  The small man
stands paralyzed, dying.

Drew is dead set on taking the body back with
them, and giving the whole story to the sheriff tomorrow.
Lewis points out that any jury judging them will be local
people—all or most, related to the man he killed.  His idea–
bury the man here, and the lake will take care of the rest.
“That’s about as buried as you can get.”

Lewis respects Drew’s attitude, though, and
agrees to go by a majority decision—everyone gets a vote.
First Bobby, then Ed, vote with Lewis.  They bury the
man in the wet riverbank soil, then run back to their canoes.

They paddle mindlessly—everything feels wrong
now.  Drew never even puts on his life jacket.  You
may hear (probably only if you pay attention), a deep,
soft thud sound, just before they reach the rapids.  Seconds
later, Drew slumps straight forward.  No one has time to
react—the rapids sweep them up, then down hard.  They fall
out of both canoes—one canoe is snapped in half completely, front
from back.

The river has changed, no more wooded banks;
rocky cliffs now.  The three men are lucky to pull themselves
onto rock.  Lewis’ leg is broken badly—a bone sticks out of a
hole in his clothing.  He tells Ed and Bobby, Drew was
shot.  The river noise is intense.  They can’t
see Drew, even hear him.  Seconds later, Drew’s battered
guitar floats by, then…nothing.

Right off, you see a different look on Ed’s
face.  “He killed Drew.  He has to kill us.”
“Now you’re gonna have to play the game,” Lewis
answers.

“We sure as Hell know where he’s gonna
be…right up there,” Ed points to the top of the cliff.  In
that moment, he has realized what he needs to do.

Once darkness falls, Ed’s struggle begins; he
needs to climb the face of the cliff alone, carrying the bow and
arrow and some rope  .A dangerous, exhausting ordeal.
Endless chances to rest but endless moments he can give it
up to his exhaustion.  At one point, he takes his wallet from
his pocket.  He needs to see the photo of his wife and son to
find the strength to go on.  Then the wallet falls from his
tired hand.  He wonders if he will have anything left if he
ever reaches the top.

What will come next is terrifying—facing the
beast inside you.

We all have gotten ourselves a good look at
the beast already.  In 1972, the homosexual side of the rape
scenes was devastating.   All I can compare it to before, was
Dov’s (Sal Mineo) short description of concentration camp
experiences, before he joins the Irgun terrorists, in
Exodus.  And you don’t see any flashbacks.

Here, you sit through the whole thing.
Christopher Dickey, the 19-year old son of the screenwriter
and novelist James Dickey, worked on the movie crew, doing
whatever was needed.  One job was going over this scene to
help the technical people—who would be standing where, how far
they would move… etc.  None of the actors were there yet, but
he still found it terrifying.  He also mentioned the
lighthearted, good-natured atmosphere early in the shooting.
But once they shot this scene, things were never the same.

Times were different.In 1972, the idea of
being turned into a homosexual (as irrational as that might sound
now) was a devastating one.You have probably heard stories about
boxers trying to psyche each other out before a fight: one says to
the other, “I’m gonna make you my wife.”

Now I think, most men have a clearer
understanding of women, straight sex and gay sex, than in 1972.
The sheer brutality is what devastates you now,
like the scene in Cape Fear where Max Cady
literally bites a chunk out of Lori’s face.

Or even Tom’s (Nick Nolte) horrifying
childhood memory in The Prince of Tides where
three escaped convicts broke into his house and raped him, his
mother and his sister.  The words of one convict say it all,
better than any of us could.  “Fresh meat.”

That’s all Tom’s family was, and all that the
four suburban men would ever be.  I don’t want to spend much
time on the argument: was the rape about sex, or was it about
domination.  To use another over-worked word, I think it was
about dehumanization, something that cuts right across
heterosexual/gay/bisexual lines.

Look at the average straight porno site, the
descriptions of the women: fat slut, MILF, whore.  A
disconnect between your sexual attraction and any signs of
compassion.  People may say, these sites are for guys
dissatisfied with their wives; these women are fantasies.
Maybe, but what about those feelings for women you see only
in photographs?

It was rarer to see characters like the two
mountain men in 1972.  You might say they are beyond feeling,
yet they definitely enjoy the humiliation that goes along with the
violence.  And though you never find out for sure, they
probably have homes and families to go back to.

Yet you say to yourself—Ed is making the right
decision, the only decision.  During the video
extras James Dickey says, this is one of the themes I wanted to
look at.  Any of these guys might have done what Ed
has to do.  It just happens to fall on him this time.

     Deliverance was a big
box-office hit.  It was one of those movies that come out at
the right time to reflect a lot of fears people had.  For
example, Lewis talks about the wilderness disappearing as
developers grab it, build over it.

“They paved Paradise/put up a parking lot.”
Most college kids knew the line, knew the song, related to
the message.  People were beginning to realize that the
1950’s concept of “progress” might not only be hollow, but
destructive.

Another important change: migration of baby
boomers to the promised land—back to the country.  Big-city
conditions were reaching an all-time low; many people felt it was
too late to repair the damage.  And many baby-boomers had no
use for suburbia, the “little boxes on the hillside/ little boxes
made of ticky-tacky.”

In the country, they saw possibilities of
clean air and water, cheap land for sale, safe schools for their
children, and opportunity to be their own boss.  They
imagined the people would be the opposite of the jaded, uncaring
folks around them.  The ones who routinely walked by someone
passed out on the sidewalk and didn’t know the name of the people
next door.

But who were their new neighbors, really?
Maybe they didn’t fit that polite, welcoming, tolerant
stereotype.  People started admitting to themselves they
might not know what they were getting themselves into.
Deliverance tapped into that fear–running
into country people with rigid ideas about outsiders—you were
guilty till proven innocent.

And maybe you’d never get the chance to prove
your innocence.Those two men from the woods were our ultimate
nightmare—nothing you said made a difference.
Travel agents got questions they had seldom heard before.
Foreign-born executives, engineers, scientists, whose first
American jobs had been in Northern cities.  Now their
companies were asking them to relocate to the South.  A
common question: how many hours will it take me from New York to
Memphis if we drive straight through?  These people had seen
Deliverance or heard about it, and imagined
people like the nameless mountain men behind every tree in the
South.

Small towns outside the South could
be dangerous too.  Thomas Tryon’s novel
Harvest Home was made into a TV-movie.
Another “small town hiding a deadly secret.”  At least
in the big city, you knew how to get a cop when you needed one.

That was probably the bottom line.  What
are you, alone, going to do when no cop is coming?  Ed, Lewis
and Bobby all bring terrible secrets back with them.  Secrets
they can never forget.  All of us hope we won’t have
to carry around secrets like that.  One of Deliverance’s many
themes: forget about “you hope.”  It’s strictly a
matter of chance; you’d best be ready when the shit comes down.

 If you’re a fan of Suspiria, Reanimator,
and other movies where filmmakers show no fear of going too
far, you might love Phenomena.
Phenomena takes loads of chances, and
mostly succeeds… if you’re willing to take it on its own terms.

But don’t get the wrong idea.  You may
have never seen Suspiria, or not give a shit
whether the movies you watch take chances or not.
Phenomena is good, simply for what it is…a movie
with the grip of an angry bear.

If you’re familiar with director Argento’s
movies, (I mention Suspiria because it’s another
of my favorites) you probably won’t expect much plot or
character development. You’d be right, even though both its stars,
Jennifer Connelly and Donald Pleasence, are excellent actors.

Many of Argento’s movies feature a character
forced to track down a murderer, without much training or
experience.  Circumstances force them into this.
Jennifer, the hero of
Phenomena, finds herself in that exact
position.   Way in over her head, the way Suzy
(Jessica Harper) was in Suspiria. 

But Jennifer turns out to have a guardian
angel—in fact, thousands of them.  By some unexplainable
destiny, she was born with a deep bond with insects.  She
protects them, every chance she gets, even a bee trapped inside a
car with her.  In return, they do their best to watch over
her…and save her from danger.

Jennifer–a kinship with all insects

Jennifer shows up at a snobby, clique-ish new
school.  Friends are hard to come by.

But Phenomena is not a movie
about friendship.  It’s a story of survival—a young,
vulnerable character trying to navigate a sea full of danger,
heading straight into the path of the most insane shark in the
ocean.  Jennifer finds herself looking for a serial killer.
But she’s no Sherlock Holmes.

Her weapons?  Courage, ingenuity.  And the
guardian angels mentioned previously.

But that’s all.  You expect that she’ll
be put to the test…big time.

Phenomena  immediately
shows you Jennifer’s danger.  You’re in a wild, mountain
area—right away, “ the picturesque Swiss Alps” comes to
mind.  A school bus, state of the art in appearance, stops to
pick up students.

One girl is a moment too late.   She goes for
help, into a house that looks like a ski chalet.   Not the
least spooky.

But little bits of hard rock begin to sneak into the
bland music soundtrack.  You get a point-of-view shot from
inside the house…very creepy.  The girl goes inside, calls
out to see if anyone’s home.  She gets no answer but you see
a quick shot of chains bolted to a wall, then shaken hard, as the
music turns to full blast rock and roll.  Someone pulls the
chains free.

Suddenly the chains are around the girl’s neck…
tight.  She’s unable to open the door and run.  Scissor
points stab through her hand.  Finally she gets the door open
and runs onto a walkway over a fast mountain stream.  She
follows the path between mountains into a clear plexiglass
passageway.  Even surrounded by mountains, a feeling of wild
Nature, of endless freedom …

Then suddenly she is stabbed again with the
scissors.  You watch a long shot of a severed head plunging
into a cold mountain stream, and realize crystal-clear, that
things are not what they look to be.
This is the Universe where Jennifer, the lonely hero, now finds
herself.

Critics have described Argento’s movies as flimsy
plots used to link a series of shocking scenes, some as violent as
the one just described.  Others just teasers.

On the surface, Phenomena has a more
realistic setting than Suspiria, which played out
like an ultra-nasty fairy tale, a nightmare version of Disney’s
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  What is
similar?  A teenage girl, trying desperately to deal with
chaos around her.

Like Suzy, Jennifer tries to get her bearings in a
new environment, but is forced instead to react, barely
getting a chance to function pro-actively.   People at her
new school are mean, snobbish to her from the first; the only
exception her new friend Sofie.  And oh, by the way,
someone’s been killing people on the campus.  Welcome to our
school.

And Jennifer carries yet another cross; she’s a
sleepwalker who finds herself outside her building, just when the
murderer could be stalking their next victim.

But one time, this curse turns out to be a
blessing.  Alone in the woods, Jennifer is actually led to
safety by a pair of ladybugs.  More unlikely, she then meets
a gentle young chimpanzee.

Inga with Professor MacGregor

The chimp, named Inga, leads Jennifer to the
man she takes care of, Professor McGregor, a biologist confined to
a wheelchair.  He has taught Inga to follow an electronic
pointer, and to assist him around his house.   His field of
study is insects.  A reserved, gentle individual, McGregor
bonds with Jennifer.  Inga too, soon responds to Jennifer’s
kind nature.

Jennifer and McGregor have a lot in common:
great chemistry with Inga and deep interest in insects.
McGregor is concerned about Jennifer’s sleepwalking and shows her
a way she can wake herself to avoid danger.

Jennifer and MacGregor–unexpected common ground

She  has to be grateful for this
friendship.   The school faculty is so misguided, it places
Jennifer in danger.  They send her to a doctor to investigate
the sleepwalking.  His expert opinion?   “The first step
toward schizophrenia.”

Thanks a lot, doc.  The harassment by the
other students (and the teachers) only grows worse.

Then Sofie, Jennifer’s only friend at school, is
murdered.  Jennifer, sleepwalking close by, escapes narrowly.

But Jennifer is able to find an important clue—a
glove small enough to fit a child.  Inside the glove are
maggots, and (if I understand her expression correctly), the
maggots can communicate to her–that the glove was the
killer’s.  She explains this to McGregor who, rather than
doubting her sanity, trusts her intuition.

McGregor can sense the circle closing fast on the two
of them.  He believes that the killer does
not dispose of the victims’ bodies, but likes to keep
them around.   He proposes a bold plan, using the “two
greatest detectives” he knows.  One is Jennifer.  The
other…an insect known as the Great Sarcophagus Fly.  This
insect is the mature form of the maggot found in the child’s
glove, and has a strong attraction to dead flesh.  And, like
all insects, the fly develops an instant bond to Jennifer, as you
see when it immediately lands on her, then stays still.

McGregor tells Jennifer he’s sure more bodies are
close by; it won’t take long to sense their presence.   She
will know right away by the fly’s behavior.  Like Suzy in
Suspiria, Jennifer is frightened but finds
courage to bring a close friend’s killer to justice.

You watch Jennifer and her companion, the fly, riding
a bus on a mountain road, through an area like the one in the
opening scenes.  Argento seldom gets credit for bringing
performances out of his actors (I tend to agree) but these scenes
are exceptions.  Without any unintended laughs, he is able to
show the bond between Jennifer and the fly; actually make you
believe it, as hard as that sounds.  When the fly suddenly
goes into a frenzy of activity, Jennifer knows that this is where
they begin their search.

They find the same house where you watched the first
attack.  The fly is able to find a severed hand, but Jennifer
is interrupted, then forced to leave.

She doesn’t know yet what you, the viewer already
have seen.  Her last friend, McGregor, is dead.

You watch the killer, face never shown, as they enter
the house and slam the door shut, as Inga plays outside.
Inga screams, watching through the window as McGregor is stabbed
in the chest.  A moment too late, she finds a door open,
races inside, touches his wound, knows immediately he is
dead.  For a long moment, she shows her devastation…then true
fury.

You remember the killer’s black leather gloves as you
see them again on a steering wheel, the car accelerating.
Inga suddenly leaps onto the windshield and struggles to get
inside, her expression one of pure vengeance.  But she has no
chance; swept off the car as it speeds away.

Jennifer returns to find the police taking McGregor’s
body away.  She knows her only hope now is to run.   As
the old cliché goes, the hunter has become the hunted.

From here on, Argento is able to do what he does
best—pure action.  Desperation leads Jennifer to accept help
from a woman she finds out (too late) is probably the
killer.  Trapped in the woman’s mansion, she finds more than
enough fly maggots to confirm her fears.  The detective
Jennifer met the day before comes to the house.  Jennifer,
locked in a bathroom, overhears part of the story.  The woman
may have been raped years before at a mental hospital and given
birth to a child, then raised it herself.

From here on come a rapid-fire series of nightmare
scenarios: the detective trying to help Jennifer but instead
chained to a wall, only escaping the cuffs by hacking off his own
thumb.  A telephone she tries to use to call the police, only
to watch helplessly as it falls into a hole in the stone
floor.  A plunge into a pool full of dead bodies.
Escaping the pool, to find a child, sobbing alone in his
room.

Jennifer, convinced this boy has been abused by the
woman for years.  The child turning toward her, his face a
monster’s.  The monster-child pursuing Jennifer, following
her onto a motorboat…

I won’t give away any more.  One review on the
imdb website actually called the ending the all- time best in any
movie, period.  I wouldn’t go that far, but I definitely see
where he/she is coming from.

For the record, several of Argento’s movies have
disappointed me; I am not someone who loves everything he
does.  There may be a lot in Phenomena that
makes you say, “Yeah…I’ve seen this before.”

Never mind all that.  This is the real deal…an
angry bear coming after you, not knowing the meaning of the word
‘stop.’  Don’t miss this one.