SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE LATE 1990S - CROCODILE SCHLOCK

The late 1990s were a deeply insincere moment in American pop culture. Emboldened primarily, I suppose by the enormous success of Jerry Seinfeld's famous stand-up and television comedy about nothing, every facet of music, movies, and television were infested by a great desire to indulge in something that was not, in fact, irony, but was described that way so pervasively that the word "ironic" now basically refers to that. To the glib, sophisticated style of mordant humor that permits the speaker to divorce themselves from any real engagement with what they're talking or thinking about.

I bring this up because Lake Placid, from 1999, is something of an irony bomb, explicitly mouthing these exact sentiments in the opening scene through the vessel of a character who is unmistakably looked at askance by the screenplay by David E. Kelley, himself one of the leading lights of the Age of Irony, thanks to his TV show Ally McBeal (a show for whose popularity we shall have to some day answer to our children). "Look at this joyless, square cop", the movie says in this opening scene, with mirthful detachment, "he's such a hick. Doesn't like sarcasm or city folks. Hey, let's throw a line in two-thirds of the way through the movie to suggest, a propos of nothing, that he's also a homophobe".

The film itself is part of the wide-ranging trend of mixing self-aware & self-effacing comedy into horror movies, distinctive mostly because of how heavily it skews that balance towards comedy. As will happen when a TV auteur noted for his quips takes the lead on a giant killer animal movie, and make no mistake, Lake Placid is a Kelley film in all the ways that matter, even if he didn't direct it. Even if, in fact, the director is somebody like Steve Miner, who you'd think should keep the movie more firmly tied down in horror territory: Miner having the distinction of being the only man to direct films in both the Friday the 13th and Halloween franchises (F13, Part 2 & F13, Part 3, and Halloween H20, specifically). But he also spent 1998 directing four episodes of the slick teen soap Dawson's Creek, including the pilot, and it's that skill set that gets a far more robust workout over the course of Lake Placid's gratifyingly swift 82 minutes.

The movie's plot is thoroughly formulaic in a way that would become even more familiar during the glut of direct-to-video and made-for-TV creature features in the 2000s, but was as old as the very first Jaws knock-offs. In the Maine countryside, on the picturesque Black Lake (we are told that they wanted to name it "Lake Placid", but that was taken already), Fish & Game officer Walt Lewis (David Lewis), a monosyllabic snarky bastard, and Sheriff Hank Keough (Brendan Gleeson, not even feinting towards an American accent) are on a boat. It doesn't matter why. What matters it that Walt gets attacked by some kind of a Thing, that absconds with his lower half. And this is something that Sheriff Hank has no clue how to deal with, so off we dissolve to New York City, and the film gets down to its real project: forcing us into the company of the worst goddamn people in the world. The first of these is Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda), a paleontologist at the natural history museum, who finds out that her boss-boyfriend (Adam Arkin) and BFF (Mariska Hargitay) have been sleeping together, and in this circumstance, taking an assignment to the Maine backwoods seems totally reasonable. But upon arriving, Kelly starts to complain about everything. In this wide-ranging arrogant New Yorkers-hate-nature way that, to save my life, I can't tell if we're meant to laugh with or at.

Kelly, Sheriff Hank, and a new Fish & Game officer, Jack Wells (Bill Pullman) begin to investigate, and are quickly joined by Kelly's colleague, a mythology scholar and crocodile fetishist named Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt). Note that nobody at all has said one word about crocodiles so far. That's how good Hector is. For it is, in fact, a saltwater crocodile that's haunting Black Lake and devouring the local fauna, and the film give us just enough real knowledge to encourage us to really dig in and think about all the way that this makes no sense at all (a croc swimming across the Pacific is the kind of dubious science it's possible to swallow in the interests of kicking off the plot; traversing the Indian Ocean and rounding South Africa before crossing most of the Atlantic from north to south is daring us not to call bullshit). The film eases us into that: it's a good halfway through the total running time before we see the croc in more than just a flash for a second or two, at which point it is predominately played by a really neat Stan Winston Studios animatronic, and occasionally by shiny CGI that I'd say has aged poorly, except that I distinctly remember it already looked terribly insubstantial in 1999, like this massive 30-foot crocodilian weighed no more than a soap bubble, or a fairy's kisses.

But, I mean, hell! We're not at this giant crocodile movie for the giant crocodile, I hope! No indeed, we're hear to enjoy that one of a kind David E. Kelley banter, as Kelly, Hector, Jack, and Sheriff Hank have personality clashes between their four different outlooks: Jack's taciturn manliness, Sheriff Hank's bullish rural gruffness, Hector's animalistic mysticism, and Kelly's bottomless ability to hate goddamn everything in the world. There's also sassy Mrs. Bickerman (Betty White), the old lady who's the sole human being living on the lake, ever since the time her senile husband died under circumstances that are too enormously shady for words, and now busies herself feeding cattle to the crocodile. And Deputy Sharon Gare (Meredith Salenger), who's there largely to let Platt bounce lines off somebody who won't fight back.

So all these different personality types come into conflict, which in this case means hurling invective at each other. Florid insults, to be sure. Here's a nowhere near comprehensive list of the snappy things that are said over the course of the movie:

-"Maybe later you can chew the bark off my big fat log."
-"Officer Fuckmeat."
-"The longer you live, the more sex you get to have with your sister."
-"You fuckshit!"
-"If I had a dick, this is where I'd tell you to suck it."
-"It helps to hear it from a complete stranger: you're fat."
-"If you call me ma'am one more time, I'll sue you, and with today's laws it's possible."
-"They conceal information like that in books."
-"Maybe I should just wipe myself with some leafy little piece of poison oak. And then I can spend the whole day scratching my ass, blending in with the natives."

And that's not even counting the more routine "fuck yourself" and "asshole" and such that litter the script. It's truly fatiguing. In the hands of the greats, vulgar language can be the source of some of our finest poetry, but too much of it used too bluntly is beneath artlessness. It is the effluvia of filthy-minded adolescents, gleefully shouting "fuck!" because they know it's offensive, but unable to do anything beyond carpet-bomb insults.

This is, please understand, the only card Lake Placid has to play. You either find the nasty-minded writing amusing or you don't, and there's nothing left for the film to draw on if you don't. The acting is no help to the screenplay at all, which is kind of absurd: you'd think the one thing that dialogue this chewy and acidic ought be good for is providing a lot of fun for the actors spouting it. That was, after all, the entire basis of George Sanders and Sydney Greenstreet's careers. But the unifying characteristic of the cast is that they're terrible. Unsurprisingly, in the case of Fonda, who magnifies everything objectionable, shrill, and bitchy about her deeply unpleasant stereotype of a character. And unsurprisingly in Pullman's case as well, though mostly he's just a lump of meat for the vast bulk of the film, until he finally gets an outraged moralistic speech that he completely fluffs. It is very surprising that White is so weak in her role: the foul-mouthed old lady with a cheerful attitude should have been a gift to this actor among all actors, but there's not a single moment of White's performance where she appears to believe in the character, her motivations, or the words she say. Go back to that "if I had a dick" line - there are so many ways to make that line funny, or at least energetic, and White just sort of slurs it out and lets it die.

Platt's not terrible - the crude, erratic role is a liability that any actor would be hard-pressed to make work, and he at least has the right personality for it - but it mostly falls to Gleeson to be interesting in any way, with any plot beat, or any line reading. His deadpan response, "He seemed taller", when snarkily asked to identify a corpse from just the toe is the only line in the whole movie that I, for one, find even a little bit funny, and generally speaking his deliberate approach to the character - play the man, not the collection of quips - is enough to make him far and away the most tangible figure in the movie. (we know from other evidence, of course, that Gleeson is far and away the most reliably talented member of this ensemble, but I wouldn't want to use Lake Placid itself to mount that argument).

The flat acting and the deadening effect that has on the already shaky comedy is emblematic of the film's biggest overriding problem. It wants to occupy too many tonal registers at once, and can't make any of them succeed. The lurches from comedy of ill-manners to creepy monster movie to campy exercise in musty genre mechanics are ungainly at best, and they are rarely at their best. More often, the film heaves its way through the shift from comedy to horror like a drunk attempting to navigate a narrow doorway, doing through brutal force what cannot be done through mental clarity. Miner's directing is exactly wrong: he has no apparent sense of comic timing and his approach to making a thriller consists entirely in telegraphing jump scares, not all of which actually arrive. He does, at least, show off the crocodile well, lingering on half-seen animatronic shots and jumping briskly through whole-body CGI shots. And the film gets some decent mileage from the simple technique of showing nothing on the water in wide shots: a good way of suggesting both the size and the unknowability of the lake, and allowing us to sketch in our idea of the creature living inside of it.

Still, when everything is working perfectly Lake Placid is no more than the exact same creature feature that was all over the place in the years after Jurassic Park, and was often done better (it's easy to spot problems with Anaconda, but I'd never pass up a chance to watch that movie in favor of this one). And the catastrophic mixture of dumb comedy and wimpy horror that keeps apologising for itself means that things almost never work perfectly. There are many worse giant killer animal movies than Lake Placid, of course; it is a subgenre uniquely adept at producing tacky, formulaic garbage. A snotty sense of humor detaching the film from its own content and characters is certainly not a winning strategy to redeem that formula.

Body Count: A moose, a bear, two cows, and a crocodile, and then all of two human beings, in full disregard for how badly we want to watch every last one of these people die.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SCI-FI HORROR - A BAD CASE OF CRABS

In looking at the vast corpus of American movies made between 1945 and 1968 that are typically considered under the umbrella of horror, one thing that leaps to mind is that, almost without exception, they aren't scary. Nor, in a great many cases, does it seem like trying to make them scary was ever the goal. The definition of "horror" is and ought to be broader than just "scary movie", which is why the goofy dipshittery that makes up almost all of American cinema's genre work during the Atomic Age still counts. Still, it's easy to be endlessly frustrated by dumbass giant beasties and unconvincing make-up jobs and the whole nine yards, and wish that any of it was tense enough that a viewer over the age of 9 or 10 might genuinely find it terrifying, or at least creepy, or at least unsettling.

Enter Attack of the Crab Monsters, a 1957 ditty directed and produced by Roger Corman Allied Artists, from a script he extracted from one of his all-time greatest collaborators, Charles B. Griffith (the legend goes that Corman gave him a title and the directive that every scene should include action, without any of the pauses or layovers responsible for so many itchy asses in so many B-movie audiences, and Griffith came up with all the rest). This was at the very dawn of Corman's career: he'd only been producing for three years and directing for two, and this was just his eleventh feature as director. Because you know what Roger Corman did not do? He did not fuck around. And that applies to his movies as much as to his moviemaking: Attack of the Crab Monsters doesn't meet that platonic ideal of having absolutely no down time, but it gets right to business and it doesn't really waste any more time than it has to in plowing through its brief little running time, hardly more than an hour.

What I'm about to say next will sound stupid, and it is stupid, really. But here it goes: Attack of the Crab Monsters is that one shining exception to the rule I started off with. Look, it has that title, and it has that title for precisely the reason you might guess: there are giant, intelligent, mutant crabs, and they kill people. When we see them, which Corman endeavors to make sure doesn't happen too often or for too long, they look like hell. The characters being hunted by these freaks of nature are serviceable stock types played with a bare minimum of competence, and really not even that in the case of anybody with a strong accent. The shift from the second to the third act is carried on the shoulders of a tower of technobabble so confidently expressed by the script - and delivered by a dude with a fake German accent, to make it even more sciencey - that you can almost fail to notice what staggering, incoherent nonsense it is. And yet, when we know what those crabs are up to, the film manages to become honest-to-God unsettling. On top of the taboo-busting gore scene in the movie, that's enough to make this the one and only micro-budget independent trashy B-horror movie of its generation that I would actually be tempted to claim still sort of works, here in the 21st Century, as horror.

That being said, it still works better as a hilariously chintzy piece of fearless low-grade bad filmmaking. There is, for one thing, that most parsimonious of opening gambits, the stock footage montage - following the surprisingly lovely, hand-painted backdrops for the opening credits, it's ever bit of four minutes before we see anything that was actually shot for Attack of the Crab Monsters. First, we get a luxurious, unhurried array of atomic explosions, then we get a series of effects shots of a boat being swamped that, I suppose may have been original to this movie, but I'd like to think more highly of Corman than that. There's also a portentous Bible quote that makes no sense given the rest of the movie's content, but it involves killing things with water, so it makes sense as far as that goes.

With all that out of the way, we get to meet our team. Six specialists have been sent to a Pacific atoll: the leader is Dr. Karl Weigand (Leslie Bradley), a nuclear physicist, and along with him are geologist James Carson (Richard Cutting), botanist Jules Deveroux (Mel Welles, who never met an ethnic accent he couldn't chomp onto like a pit bull attacking a soup bone), radio man Hank Chapman (Russell Johnson), and a pair of biologists in love, Dale Drewer (Richard Garland) and Martha "Marty" Hunter (Pamela Duncan), because nobody would take a lady scientist seriously if she didn't have a boy's name, duh. They've been assigned two missions: one is to see what has happened to the flora, fauna, and structure of the atoll as a result of radioactive fall-out, and the other is to investigate the disappearance of the last team assigned for the first mission.

Things start going awry almost immediately: the Navy team assigned to protect the scientists suffers a gruesome casualty when Seaman Tate (none other than Charles B. Griffith) falls halfway out of the boat and thrashes around until his crewmates are able to pull him up, and find that his god damned head has been bitten off. We've seen so much more graphic and explicit things than that in the intervening half-century, but when you're watching a black-and-white movie made in this style, you expect a certain level of breezy frivolity: seeing a man's god damned head get bitten off remains just as much of a violation of the unspoken contract between the audience and the movie now as it would have in '57, and it's the first point where the viewer perks up to realise that this is going to be somewhat different than we were led to expect.

Meanwhile, the island is shaking violently at irregular moments, and when a portion of the naval mission prepares to leave, their seaplane explodes without warning. And the discovery of the previous mission's journals indicates that their disappearance had far more violent causes than the "lost in a typhoon" theory the Navy is forwarding. Something is clearly Mysterious and Dangerous on this island, and that's before the echoing, disembodied voice of the previous mission's commander starts drifting across the island at night. As the scientists, radioman, and two remaining seamen (Beach Dickerson and Tony Miller) start investigating, they're taken down at a feverish pace, by an unseen thing with barely glimpsed crablike parts (it's hard to say whether Corman was trying to create a sense of mystery - not a winning strategy in a film with "Crab Monsters" in its title - or simply avoiding showing more of the crabs than he had to), and everybody who vanishes comes back the same night in the form of another echoing voice.

Between the no-nonsense script and the even more no-nonsense direction, Attack of the Crab Monsters blazes by so quickly that its basically a whirlwind of shocking deaths, later to include a dismemberment that makes the first decapitation seem utterly banal. It's a terrific gambit, not least because it prevents us from lingering over the film in a way that reveals its shortcomings, which include at a minimum the snoozy characterisations - Marty is at the center of a romantic triangle that totally refuses to land - and the fact that the film has the indication of a story more than the actual details and fullness that really are a story. Or how much the setting does not resemble a Pacific atoll beyond the presence of an ocean.

Also, the film's pace serves a more abstract function: it keeps us out of balance, and makes us more susceptible to the eeriness inherent in the film's best element, those disembodied voices. It's a cheap trick (they're all cheap tricks), but just modifying the sound to give it a hollow, metallic edge makes those voices feel truly wrong on an instinctual level, even before we learn exactly what's causing them. The reveal of that is another one of the film's most unsettling elements, though it takes some wading through the worst of the pseudoscience to get there - the crabs, who have been nuked not just into gigantic size, but also into a quantum state where they are made of pure energy, or whatever it's supposed to be, can absorb a person's identity by eating their head. It is so dumb as the defy believe, but there's also something skin-crawling about the matter-of-fact way the film drops it in, a form of body horror before there was body horror. "Once they were men; now they're land crabs" is a loopy bit of dialogue, but it speaks to a sick notion, much bleaker than the average for a giant nuclear monster picture. Especially as Griffith lays the groundwork by referencing the real-life tendency of land crabs to devour wounded humans left unattended on the beach.

The film foregrounds none of this: it's all buried beneath some delightfully campy idiocy typical of the genre, with that extra spin of dazzling showmanship that separated Corman from all of his peers. He wasn't all the way there, yet, except in his wisdom in showing just enough of just the right parts of the crabs - when he can't keep hiding, and we can see their big cow eyes, it's all over but the laughing. It's a sturdy piece of B-movie filmmaking with a crowd-pleasing energy that's much more enjoyable than most other films on this model. It's a terrible, terrible movie - any film that gives its giant crab monster a threatening climactic line like "So, you have wounded me, and I must grow a new claw. Well and good, for I can do it in a day. But will you grow new lives when I have taken yours from you?" isn't ever going to be anything but terrible. But it is the zesty, vital kind of terrible, and this most dodgy and dimwitted of all subgenres was rarely more fun in its all-encompassing badness, or more effective in mining something memorable out of its stock elements.

Body Count: 9, though it is at least possible that we didn't see everybody who was on that seaplane.

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YOU STOOD ON THE SHOULDERS OF GENIUSES TO ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING AS FAST AS YOU COULD

Jurassic World is absolutely the best sequel yet to the 1993 Jurassic Park, which is one of the least-impressive compliments you can pay to a record-setting summer blockbuster. We should not feel obliged to mark it down as a strength when a movie can be confidently declared to be better than not just 1997's enervating The Lost World: Jurassic Park, but also 2001's brain-dead Jurassic Park III. Better than those should be obligatory. People who can't make a better summer thriller than those shouldn't be allowed out of Popcorn Movie School. But this is not the best of all possible worlds, and there's shit worse than that every year. So yes, it is the second-best Jurassic Park movie, and that is a good thing and worthy of note.

It is not, however, particularly good or interesting on its own merits, and it really doesn't even seem like it's trying to be. Even by the standards of nostalgia properties, Jurassic World goes all-in on nostalgia, and very rarely to its benefit, allowing fannish enthusiasm for recreating moments from the first movie to overwhelm the new movie's own ideas and characters and especially basic story logic. I would go so far as to call the script by director Colin Trevorrow & Derek Connolly, retrofitting an original by Rick Jaffe & Amanda Silver, a catastrophe, and not simply because of how readily it drifts into Jurassic Park fanfiction, though that happens all the time. It's criminally undernourished and erratic: filled with plot holes and unearned leaps of faith, to a degree that it's practically daring you not to nitpick every last thing to death.

Which I will not do, because that's a lazy form of criticism, but at least this much needs to be said: at no point in the movie did I get any sense of what Jurassic World, the dinosaur zoo/theme park at which the film takes place, is actually like. That is, I couldn't imagine what a tourist's trip to the park would be like on a day that all the dinosaurs didn't break out and try to kill everybody, nor how it's geographically laid out (a neat trick for a movie that keeps returning to its Big Electronic Map), nor even what attractions it contains besides the ones conspicuously designed to be death traps. Like the self-guided gyrocopic balls that allow you to zip around under dinosaurs' feet, and which don't automatically return to home base when the park managers flip the "rampaging killbeast on the loose" switch, but simply assume the teenagers joyriding around in will return in an orderly fashion because they've been asked to do so. That makes for some impressive popcorn movie imagery - very impressive, in fact - but fuck Jurassic World forever and always for pretending that it could possibly exist in anything like the form we see it.

That's one of the most glaring examples of many places where the film demonstrates a complete disinterest in building a coherent, sensible world, and it's ruinous. Any film whose plot depends on such utterly fantastic nonsense as cloning dinosaurs needs to have a stable, utterly plausible foundation - even the entirely flimsy Jurassic Park III knew how to do that - without which it's nothing but scenes of monster mayhem stitched together by mind-sapping bullshit. And surprise of surprises, that's exactly what Jurassic World turns out to be. The plot feels like a Mad Libs completed after a lazy day of watching creature features on SyFy: one day at Jurassic World, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) finds herself obliged to take care of her nephews, Zach (Nick Robinson) and Gray Mitchell (Ty Simpkins), while their parents (Judy Greer and Andy Buckley) are busy getting divorced. It being a particularly busy day at the park, she hands them off to her assistant Zara (Katie McGrath), while she deals with an immensely important business meeting on top of all her normal duties. Meanwhile, the current park owner, multibillionaire Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), is concerned that their new showcase attraction, a genetic experiment built on a Tyrannosaurus rex base by head scientist/Frankensteinian supervillain Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong, the sole character and cast member returning from an earlier film), will be unsafe, so he sends the park's tart-tongued animal trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) to take a peek at its enclosure. He finds that the animal, Indominous rex, is a supervillain in its own right, able to form complex plots that, in record time, leave it rampaging through the park and triggering the usual monster movie action. And this allows the venal Vic Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio) to try out his pet theory that the park's velociraptors, the pride and joy of Owen's career, can be weaponised.

None of the above is particularly bad as such, though it's preposterously clichéd. None of the Jurassic Park movies have been models of narrative ingenuity, and it would be unfair to expect them to start after 22 years. Still, the lifeless way that this has all been stitched together is unlovely at best, and the uniformly flat characters and performances don't offer any distraction from how the film requires all of its humans to make the most obviously stupid decision possible at virtually every turn. Howard fights with the film's laziest character and manages to turn her into something that doesn't feel totally useless, and Jake Johnson is actively good as the nerdy comic relief character in the park's control room, and that's about it as far as memorable acting; even Pratt, who so nimbly played a sarcastic dick at the center of a summer tentpole in last year's Guardians of the Galaxy, offers no personality or charm to a totally generic action hero who emerges as the structureless film's protagonist largely through attrition.

Yeah, but the dinosaurs, or so the internet tells me. And I'll spot the film that: almost all of the dinosaur scenes are terrific, up until they're not. Several of them suffer from the same basic lapses in logic as the rest of the film (the film's best monster, far more impressive than the rather dopey looking Indominus rex, is a seafaring mosasaur that's comically oversized and presented in a context where it is impossible to believe that it doesn't murder a couple dozen park visitors every week), but in such places the film exploits the rule that if the genre parts of a genre film are good enough, it gets a pass on having a brain. I mean, it exploits that rule constantly, but this is the only time it works out. Everything about the action and suspense feels mercilessly pre-ordained and overfamiliar - its best sequences don't so much "steal" from Jurassic Park, Aliens, and Predator, as they use different colored crayons to fill them in - but the film's largely gorgeous CGI (I can only point to one shot where the effects fall apart, a child awkwardly "hugging" a baby brachiosaur) makes those borrowings enough of their own thing that it feels okay to forgive them.

Even as broad spectacle, the film can't quite put itself over: the Michael Giacchino score is shockingly insipid when it's not directly quoting from John Williams's awestruck motifs (and even that poorly: the first appearance of the main Jurassic Park theme accompanies a shot of Nick Robinson's feet), and the final climax gets more and more dumb as it adds more and more complications and self-conscious bigness. But the costliness and grandeur of the spectacle is enough to keep the film from being as totally sour of an experience as its disastrous scriptwould otherwise make it. It's not memorable, and it's rarely fun, but at least the film offers up a summer movie's worth of summer movie opulence.

6/10

Reviews in this series
Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1997)
Jurassic Park III (Johnston, 2001)
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015)

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: GIANT RADIOACTIVE METAPHORS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the fourth distinct film titled simply Godzilla continues the grand tradition of movies in which the uncertain march of potentially dangerous science is embodied in the form of some kind of outrageous monster. As Godzilla'd out as this blog has no doubt become, I thought it was appropriate for one last hurrah with the genre, going all the way back to the same year that the original Japanese Godzilla premiered.

In the immediate wake of 1953's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, two films made on two different continents picked up the idea of giant monsters roused by atomic explosions and ran with it. One of these, in Japan, was Godzilla, which adopted the perspective of a country that, uniquely in the whole world, was on the receiving end of atomic weaponry: the atomic monster as an unstoppable force that leaves unfathomable destruction and death behind it, only defeated by the invention of an even worse perversion of science than the atom bomb itself. The other, in the United States, was Them! - that's an obligatory exclamation point, you'll note - is just as obviously from the perspective of that country that made and launched those attacks against Japan in the first place. It is horrified and cautious about the unintended consequences of nuclear weapons, and by no means triumphalist about Scientific Progress (but then, American genre films in the '50s probably demonstrate a more pervasive hatred and mistrust of scientists and science than any other form of drama in any other era), but it's easy to see the difference between the films. Godzilla levels Tokyo and tuns it into a smoking ruin. They! are only able to severely inconvenience the residents of Los Angeles.

That sounds dismissive, but in truth, Them! is quite damn good. Easily the best of the giant insect movies that were so common in the '50s (a genre it largely created), which again sounds dismissive. The problem, perhaps, is that Them! comes from a genre and a time frame when even being moderately decent would have been an impressive success; there are no comparisons to be made that could really point to how strong it is as a movie qua movies. It had Oscar-nominated effects work, for God's sake (this was before visual and sound effects were given separate awards). How many '50s B-thrillers can make that kind of claim? But then, not many B-thrillers were made by a studios as well-heeled as Warner Bros. (also behind The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms), boasting the resources on both sides of the camera that only a major studio could to provide to such an on-paper ridiculous conceit.

The film hides its conceit in a rather nimble way for a good third of the 93-minute feature, even if all the marketing had already spilled the beans. It's about giant ants, created by the nuclear testing in 1945, and as the characters note near the end, if it took nine years for the giant ants to make their presence felt, God knows what other fun surprises the Atomic Age will have in store. But I am jumping so far ahead: first, the movie introduces us to two New Mexico state policemen, Sgt. Ben Peterson (James Whitmore), and Ed Blackburn (Chris Drake), following a recon plane in their cruiser through the desert, investigating a weird report that came in. There's a little girl (Sandy Descher) wandering around in a nearly catatonic state, carrying a broken doll; she appears to be the sole survivor of an incident that left a car and trailer stranded in the desert, the trailer ripped open from the outside. The only evidence is an unrecognisable animal track. Later, another attack is discovered, this one leaving a body behind; a body loaded up with an entirely unreasonable amount of formic acid.

Between the track and the formic acid, the federal government gets involved, sending FBI Agent Robert Graham (James Arness) and scientists Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn) and Dr. Pat Medford (Joan Weldon), his daughter. The elder Dr. Medford has a very good idea of what's going on, but he's too methodical and afraid of causing a panic to come out and say it; instead he brings everybody out to the ruined trailer to investigate, and his unspoken theory proves itself true in a most visceral way, when they're attacked by an ant the size of an automobile. Now that they know what they're up against, our heroes immediately throw themselves into stopping the mutants, but even after destroying the nest out in the desert, the trouble is only starting: there's evidence to suggest that two ant queens left the nest before the human attack, to start their own colonies out in some yet unknown corner of the world.

It's all very close to material that would be unbearably stupid in many movies to come out in the years to follow, so why the hell is Them! so great, while something like The Deadly Mantis is so reprehensibly stupid? A lack of precursors, for a start: since Them! was where this particular subgenre kicked off, nobody involved knew that it was supposed to be tacky and disreputable. So they went and made a legitimate movie - just a fast glance over the cast raises that much of a suggestion. Edmund Gwenn was no movie star in 1954, but he was better than being dumped on a cheap programmer. No, this was a serious production, aiming to function as a legitimately intelligent horror thriller for an audience more sophisticated than the usual junky genre film crowd. Ted Sherdeman's script is damn crafty, opening as a sand-swept mystery that never tips its hat about what's going on until that first ant appears, at which point it becomes an urgent military procedural about the desperate need to figure out what's going on, and fast. There's only so far you can stretch the metaphor, but as thriller made in the Cold War, the sense of confused chaos and terror at not knowing where the threat is or where it's going to end up, despite all the powerful military tools at our disposal, has a real bite to it that makes the film land with more force than just a "we must kill the ants before they kill us!" scenario would ordinarily have.

Of course, it's still a really fine giant ant thriller. It was not a massively well-appointed production, but there was still plenty of time and money spent making the giant robotic ants look as... well, not realistic. But in their fanciful, abstract way, they're gorgeous props with an impressive range of articulation and movement, making for genuinely impressive antagonists for the humans in the cast. And after being downgraded from a widescreen, 3-D color spectacle, the full-frame black-and-white cinematography by Sid Hickox is rich and full of smart lighting and framing: the bleached-out New Mexico desert (played by the bleached-out California desert) is foreboding and bleak, while the ants' lairs are wonderfully gloomy and threatening, with the low light having the added benefit of keeping the monsters out of situations where full illumination might call attention to their technical shortcomings.

In short, director Gordon Douglas was taking all of this extremely seriously, exploring the subject with the full gravity of its horror and drawing out some surprisingly stable and earnest performances. Gwenn has a bit of comic relief business here and there (there's a little routine involving military radio etiquette that I find genuinely funny), but otherwise everyone is encouraged to behave as a normal person would under the circumstances: it's not a character-driven giant ant movie, exactly, but it's a movie where the naturalism of the acting and the steadfast refusal to allow even a drop of campiness to infect the proceedings serve to make the giant ants seem like a real and legitimate danger (the film even manages to sell what should, be rights, be a corny sequence with a grieving mother). And that is no small victory, nor a small part of why Them! is able to make the impact it does. From the little girl being plunged back into her memories and screaming "Them!" with all her might, to the sweaty tension exuded by the heroes as they crawl around the Los Angeles storm drains hunting for monsters, Them! honestly cares about what kind of fears and other emotions its loopy scenario would entail, and that invites us to believe in its objectively absurd notions without any kind of good sense holding us back. For all that it ends up suggesting that the might of the U.S. military will always save the day, and for all that there's never really the possibility of Godzilla-style widespread devastation, the film is shockingly sincere in its expression of its concept and themes, and that gives it a potency that no other giant bug picture ever came close to achieving. In it's highly circumscribed, genre-based way, this is an outright masterpiece.

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BACK IN BLACK

I sincerely doubt that Riddick counts as "long-awaited" - in order to await something, you have to assume that there's a real possibility that it's probably going to exist, and I don't see how even the most devoted fan of the Riddick films could have imagined that during the back half of the '00s - so let us instead call it a "long-delayed" third film in the Chronicles of Riddick series (Trilogy? But if this film could come out after nine years, and be cheap enough that turning a profit is a mathematic near-certainty, is there any plausible reason to cut it off at just three?). And let us further say that this long-delayed third film is, to all intents and purposes, a remake of the first film, 2000's Pitch Black, differentiated from that film largely in that it has to devote a considerable part of the first act to walking back from the second film, 2004's The Chronicles of Riddick, in order to get the setting back to someplace reasonably contained and simple after the sprawling mythology and political wrangling that made that movie such a grand epic, if you are a member of its enthusiastic fanbase, or such an incoherent slurry of fantasy tropes, if you are normal.

This is a good thing, I mean to say, even though "this sequel feels, at times, like a beat-for-beat retread of its successor!" is virtually never meant to be a statement of praise. Certainly, Riddick isn't going to replace anybody's memories of Pitch Black, though the narrative emphases and character dynamics are different enough - violently so in the latter case - to make the new film its own thing, and not just a retrenchment to the safe and familiar. Part of me hoped that, given how the first two movies were examples two entirely different and essentially incompatible subgenres of science fiction, linked only in that they centered on the same character, that Riddick would go equally as far from both of them, but the results are probably better this way.

Some time after The Chronicles of Riddick - ten years after Pitch Black and so, presumably, five years after the first sequel, but that doesn't seem at all plausible based on what we see - Richard B. Riddick (Vin Diesel, for whom we can safely call this a passion project, the thing he wanted to do with all his Fast and Furious clout) has gone from being Lord Marshal of the Necromongers, the race/religion of death cultists, to weather-wracked survivalist trapped on a savage desert planet by the machinations of his treacherous second-in-command, Lord Vaako (Karl Urban, reprising the role in a flashback cameo). The film's first act is, in its way, the boldest part of the whole: virtually dialogue-free, postponing any narrative context as long as it possibly can, just following Riddick as he scrambles through a desert environment, evading the planet's remarkably savage bestiary of striped, doglike predators, and a giant scorpion-shaped beast living in a brackish pool that straddles the only path from the desolate mountains where Riddick finds himself and the relatively lush plains below. It's a perfectly involving one-man show let down only somewhat by shaky CGI and intrusive editing (but then, intrusive editing is a hallmark of the franchise), and it captures for the first time in any of these films the idea that nominally underpins all of them: that Riddick is basically an animal himself, savage and merciless and deeply, darkly cunning.

A long while later, Riddick has managed to thrive somewhat on this planet (having raised a pet alien dog, in a deeply useless waste of screen time), when a storm begins to roll in - the first he has seen since being stranded. And something he sees in it with his augmented vision freaks him out enough that he goes to a way station left on the planet for the use of bounty hunters, triggers an emergency beacon, and brings down two different teams of mercenaries to his location, one group a bit rundown, led by the unhinged Santana (Jordi Mollà), the other far more well-equipped and polished, led by a man whose name is delayed for long enough that it qualifies as a surprise, so we'll stick with the nickname Santana gives him, Too Late (Matt Nable). Riddick disappears for a stretch, as these men and their followers - eleven all told, though only Dahl (Katee Sackhoff), the sole female, Diaz (Dave Bautista), and absurdly innocent newbie Luna (Nolan Gerard Funk) end up having a specific enough purpose that it's worth naming them - bumble around attempting to figure out what's going on, as the shadowy, unseen Riddick effortlessly outwits all of them. Eventually, he makes himself known, and suggests that capturing him isn't nearly as important as getting off-planet before the huge storm barreling down hits the mercenaries' camp in about 24 hours. He doesn't explain why, but it's clear from his bearing that whatever is coming with that storm, it's deadly and hard to stop. Spoiler alert: beasties.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the biggest problem with Riddick - more than the simple fact that it's content to retread Pitch Black in so many ways - is that huge gap in the middle where Riddick himself is just a shadowy threat to the bounty hunters. It's meant to mimic the first third of the earlier movie, I suppose, but there are two key differences between Riddick and Pitch Black, in that regard, one of which is that Pitch Black was able to play coy about its characters - arguably, until the final five minutes of the movie, Riddick wasn't even the protagonist, and he could be an unseen danger in a way that too much domestication as a character over two movies leave it impossible for him to become now. Anyway, the opening act already told us that he was to be the main character, even aside from the other films in the series, and it's a sign of storytelling bad faith to dump him like that. The other difference is that, while Pitch Black had largely sympathetic (if ill-written and poorly-acted) characters in its ensemble, Riddick lacks a single figure worth rooting for outside of the title character, and the worst acting, across-the-board, in the franchise to date; the more time we spend with these people than with the smirking, cocksure Riddick, the less interesting the film becomes.

Happily, the film regains its footing in a pretty terrifically-executed, if generic, final sequence, in which the bounty hunters and Riddick are barricaded against an army of monster, and once again Twohy and cinematographer David Eggby (returning from Pitch Black, after sitting The Chronicles of Riddick out) get great mileage out of darkness and half-seen objects therein; it's less successful than the first movie only insofar as it feels less earned by a weaker script. But aesthetically, at least, the movie never really misses a trick: the parched daylight scenes on the planet work, the effects work better, relative to the budget, than in the last movie, and once again, Twohy manages the fine trick of implying without stating, building a world out of half-expressed details instead of stating everything for us in hectoring, expository detail. Like the notion that bounty hunters have some kind of overseeing agency that populates the galaxy with supply depots on planets where bounty might need to be hunt; it's contrived, sort of, but it's also rather imaginative and speaks to a deeper world than the one the film needed. Sure, Riddick is a rehashed gimmick that has been done better, but that's not to say that in this particular case, it's not being re-done with care and consideration, and that's enough to make it feel sturdier than a quick inventory of its merits would lead you to expect.

6/10

Reviews in this series
Pitch Black (Twohy, 2000)
The Chronicles of Riddick (Twohy, 2004)
Riddick (Twohy, 2013)

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IN MY HOUR OF DARKNESS, HE IS STANDING RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME

To be sure, the 2000 genre film Pitch Black is a rattletrap old spook show, with a debt to Alien that's extreme even by the standards of the "extraterrestrial monster devouring people bloodily" genre. It boasts a mixture of stock characters and regrettably "clever" characters that, all things considered, would have been better off with a few more clichés wrapped around them, with performance ranging from the perfectly adequate to the largely unfortunate. It is plagued by dialogue that fails to give any character a differentiated style of speaking, nor anything to say that resembles human speech rather than screenwriting exposition. And yet it's a pretty terrific film all around, regardless. One could dance around, trying to come up with many different reasons why this is the case, but it's actually pretty simple, at the broadest possible level: Pitch Black was made by a director, David Twohy, who plainly likes the kind of generic hybrid (sci-fi, action, horror, creature feature) that he put together here, and was very concerned to make this one as effective as he possibly could. It's junk - sheer, unmitigated junk - but it was made with absolute respect for the junk that it was; that cannot be faked or replicated in any other way, and Pitch Black is so committed to the story it's telling and how it's telling it, that it simply works. It's a crisp, well-oiled machine, and I honestly can't think of any way to improve it without requiring that it be something totally different than itself.

It helps a lot that the film, at heart, has the kind of pared-down high concept that rings out like a heavenly symphony: a spaceship crashes on a planet with three suns that has a certain species of predator that only comes out in absolute darkness. The crash happens to coincide with an eclipse that only occurs once every 22 years, and is the only time that the planet surface is ever actually dark. Moreover, one survivor of the crash is a brutal murderer with surgically altered eyes that permit him to see in total darkness. Shake well, pour over ice.

Yeah, it makes some dubious leaps: they crash right before the once-a-generation eclipse? - but this is the kind of movie where a faintly ludicrous scenario is secretly part of the fun; if contrivance is what it takes to pit an army of murderbeasts against a musclebound action antihero with glow-in-the-dark eyes, then contrivance it is to be. For that is, at any rate, a scenario worth getting to: in Twohy's hands, this high-concept nonsense is fun and thrilling, wildly propulsive (the 112-minute director's cut - I have not seen the shorter theatrical cut - blasts by with the crammed urgency of a far shorter, more efficient picture), and full of just enough creativity in the setting and production design, headed up by Grace Walker, that you don't have to feel guilty about liking it; if I call it one of the more fleshed-out science fiction movies of the 2000s, that's absolutely an indictment of that genre in that decade more than it's praise for Pitch Black, but the fact remains that it exists in what is obviously a deeper and more complex universe than what the circumscribed scenario of this one film has room to explore. Of course, there's more to sci-fi than just world-building; but I happen to really quite like world-building, and the way it's smuggled into this film is particularly gratifying.

The film has something of a four-act structure, divided into two halves, and these halves are distinguished by the identity of the main threat. To begin with, a freak meteor storm puts some holes through a space freighter, killing the captain, and sending the vessel plummeting towards a desert planet. It's only due to the considerable skills of the new acting captain Carolyn Fry (Radha Mitchell) that it lands in enough shape that any of the 40 cryogenically-frozen passengers survive, and even then, she would have jettisoned every one of them, over the objections of co-pilot Greg Owens (Simon Burke), if the release lever hadn't jammed. By the time everybody still living has pulled themselves together, Fry has been stuck with a big case of guilt over this, which partially explains the zeal with which she acts as leader, making it her business to make sure that everyone gets off the rock in one piece. First, though, they have to attend to the problem of escaped convict Richard B. Riddick (Vin Diesel), who was being transported by bounty hunter William Johns (Cole Hauser), but was able to sneak off God knows where during the crash.

The "hunting Riddick" half of Pitch Black is surely the weaker one, if only because it feels considerably plainer: I admire the elegantly simple way that cinematographer David Eggby creates two entirely different personae for the planet based on which sun is shining on it, pushing the color balance way into yellow or way into blue as is necessary, and that's the exact kind of simple but smart filmmaking technique that more low-budget films ought to employ. The old geological survey site that serves as the survivors' base of operations is a pretty neat location, too, with fun future-low-tech touches that are woven into the film rather than pointed out be loud dialogue (like the way that we intuit how the solar energy collectors work). The problem, basically, is that Riddick is far and away the most interesting character in the movie, with Diesel, perhaps surprisingly, giving the best performance (only narrowly passing by Radha Mitchell, who, bless her, never seemed to figure out how to emote and cover up her Australian accent at the same time; given that Claudia Black is right there in the cast, Aussieing up a storm, I don't even understand why Twohy required her to try). And for a long stretch, he's only a shadowy background figure, flickering around as attention is divided by far too many dull, tedious placeholders, or Keith David being far too dignified for the movie's good as a wisely religious space Muslim.

When Riddick becomes a prominent character, it's at the same time that three other important events occur: the "stylishly" ragged editing starts to fall into something a bit more streamlined, the film's monsters make their first kill, and the discovery is made that darkness is very bad news. And just like that, a somewhat typical, though nicely-appointed sci-fi thriller shifts, piece by piece, into a survival-horror creature feature, and this new movie is simply better: Diesel's glacially-delivered sarcasm makes him far and away the most fun character, the encroaching night is achieved through truly astounding visual effects (I daresay the effects in Pitch Black hold up as well or better than any other movie from 2000), and the monsters are presented perfectly: flashes of movement, then full body shots, then long enough full body shots that we can see their design, something like a cross between a hammerhead shark, a bat, and the xenomorph from Alien, and derivative as they are, they're still among the best sci-fi monsters of the decade.

Twohy is certainly not trying to be massively creative and challenging - it's a solid creature feature, but not at all a revelatory one, this isn't The Descent. Even so, just being solid genre fare is achievement enough, and the wonderful thing about Pitch Black is how well it moves through all the usual stops, whether they are narrative (the snobby Brit who dies because of his snobbery; the fake-out where the anti-hero looks like he's going to abandon everybody) or technical (the atmospheric gloom that is, maybe, a bit brighter than script would seem to indicate, but somehow manages to be gloomier as a result). The movie only really wants to do a small number of things, but it's very hard to imagine them being done with more skill, especially if you think about all the many films on basically the same model that were a fixture of Saturdays on the Sci-Fi Channel around that time (unlike now, when they're all set in Florida and have titles combining waterborne predators like German chemical names), which were not too much cheaper than this but far more lazy about their story. Pitch Black, undeniably, cars about keeping its story upbeat and moving, and populated by active people.

The monsters are fun to look at, the darkness in which they are shot is appropriately moody, and Vin Diesel's nastiness in taking them down, and baiting the people around him as he does it, is just about the best example of his particular breed of action acting that I have seen. It's not the most inspired monster movie you will ever come across, but once Pitch Black gets going, it really doesn't commit a single error worth mentioning, and as superficial as it all might be, it's exciting and handsome, and as utterly satisfying as contemporary B-movies come.

Reviews in this series
Pitch Black (Twohy, 2000)
The Chronicles of Riddick (Twohy, 2004)
Riddick (Twohy, 2013)

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: URBAN FANTASY

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: if we're being classy about it, overt Twilight knock-off The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones could be more generously thought of as a new entry in that most modern of fantasy subgenres, in which mythological beasts interact with the glass and steel canyons of the big city. Happily, it is not hard for the bulk of such films to be better at it than The Mortal Instruments.

The word "fanboy" is almost invariably used A) disparagingly, B) in reference to audience members who rabidly consume stories in various genres of movies and comic books, and get profoundly angry at anybody who doesn't love their favored corner of the nerdosphere as much as they do. But this is not the only way to be a fanboy. In fact, a filmmaker can, himself, also be a fanboy (or "herself" a "fangirl", but I do not believe this has ever yet happened), and this, I find, is generally better than when a viewer is a fanboy; for a fanboy-director is likelier to be sincere and enthusiastic and respectful, while a fanboy-viewer is typically going to be a shouty, small-minded artistic totalitarian.

Of all the directors we could potentially call fanboys, surely the best one at it is Guillermo Del Toro - a man who in 2013 got to spend $200 million to make his giant robot toys fight his giant monster toys, under the name Pacific Rim, after all. But even that feature-length love letter to Godzilla is not, perhaps, the most overt work of fanservice in del Toro's career: for that honor, I would point to his 2004 adaptation of Mike Mignola's comic series Hellboy, a labor of love that the director (who also served as screenwriter) had been nursing along for years, passing up several surefire blockbusters to finally bring it to completion. It was not a flawless delivery of the director's precious baby - the script manages to be simultaneously overly-descriptive and helplessly opaque - but the one thing it would be quite impossible to claim is that the filmmaker's love of his subject isn't apparent throughout every lovingly-crafted frame. It is one of the most individualised and personally-stamped of all the films of the great superhero boom of the 2000s (which, increasingly, looks to be a different thing than the immediately continuous superhero boom of the 2010s), and if it doesn't end up feeling quite as much of a del Toro film as its sequel, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, it does feel much more like a Hellboy movie, and it is filled with a sense of gee-whiz joy that its follow-up, for all its flashier style and more baroque scenario, doesn't reach.

Which is not to say that Hellboy doesn't have flashy style or baroque plotting; in fact, those are perhaps the two things that most dominate. Plot-wise, the mash-up of several different Mignola stories plays very much like a Lovecraftian gloss on Men in Black, with an oddball investigatory agency based in New York squaring off against a tentacled cosmic evil, sprinkled with a healthy dollop of Nazi occultism, because after all, everything improves when you throw some Nazis at it.* It opens in the '40s with U.S. soldiers interrupting a plot by the immortal Russian mystic Rasputin (Karel Roden), clockwork cyborg Nazi assassin Kroenen (Ladislav Beran), and Aryan she-wolf Ilsa Haupstein (Bridget Hodson) to open a portal to a hell dimension filled with unspeakably evil beings, with only an infant demon making it through. 60 years later, that demon has grown - slowly - into a cynical but good-hearted lug named, with misplaced affection, Hellboy (Ron Perlman, ideally cast and wonderfully surly), who works as part of the government's Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, under the kindly eye of his adopted father, occult researcher Broom Bruttenholm (John Hurt).

That gets us out of the prologue and into the first act, and it's here that Hellboy gets a little messy in the writing. "Strained" might be a better word for. It's trying to cover a little bit too much territory in too compact a space, presenting an introduction to the characters (done through a bland origin-ish story involving new BPRD agent John Myers, played by Rupert Evans), while also playing as something like a procedural, showing what the team does in the course of their regular days, while also expanding on the Nazi villainy of the prologue, helpfully aided by three ageless Nazi villains. It frankly seems like it wants to be both itself and its own sequel, simultaneously, and this is not least of the reasons that the most straightforward The Golden Army is the better film. Though it's also what gives Hellboy it's personality, as there's a boyish sense of overreach that feels very different, and more satisfying, than mere shoddy screenwriting.

But it's really not the writing that drives the movie, and only slightly more its characters (who are, in the main, appealling and off-kilter without being annoyingly kooky). It's the design and the way that design is captured by del Toro's irreplaceable cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, who uses a hugely satisfying visual palette that's heavy on mood lighting and color balance that favors cool shades of blue, grey, and brown, all the better for the bright red Hellboy to pop right off the screen. It's a film that draws most of its power from combining a heightened but recognisable version of the real world (a depiction of New York that looks about as much like a comic book come to life with its graphic qualities intact as any city in any comics-derived film of the '00s) with stupendously elaborate and fanciful design, mostly of Hellboy himself, but also of fellow Bureau monster Abe Sapien (Doug Jones; David Hyde Pierce provided the voice, but refused onscreen credit when he watched the film and realised how fully Jones's acting did all the work of creating the character), and the otherworldly Kroenen, in both his implacable mask-wearing and hideous animate corpse editions.

In fact, Hellboy is so effective at marrying its fantasy action with stylised urban settings that in the final chunk of the movie, taking place in the only overtly fantastic locations of the whole film, it looses quite a bit of energy; it definitely doesn't help that the broad, comic-book style action choreography increasingly degrades into something very typical and CGI-addled: Hellboy was not a very costly film, and its digital effects have not aged well, making it gratifying that del Toro made certain to create so much of the effects through practical means (something he has generally done throughout his career, culminating in the bestiary of his very next feature, Pan's Labyrinth). So much of Hellboy is a breezy, imaginative treat, that it's a genuine disappointment when it turns into just another damn comic book movie.

Still, even at its worst, the film is suffused with a spirit of wide-eyed amazement at its own fantasies, with plenty of spooky-fun creatures that work as black comedy and as campfire story in equal measure. And Perlman's Hellboy is one of the truly great comic hero performances of all time, with the actor managing to be shockingly expressive under a deadening amount of latex. It's nowhere near del Toro's finest achievement, either as a story or as a work of visual imagination, but there's at least a possibility that it's his most untroubled and fun work, meant only to delight and awe, and largely successful in both aims.

(NB: There is a director's cut, more than ten minutes longer than the theatrical, and though I am sometimes agnostic on these issues, there's no contest: it's an improvement across-the-board, clarifying plot details and making the sketchy characters quite a bit more real and lived-in).

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KAIJU DIG IT?

Everything that is good about Pacific Rim is good largely on the level of "that was cool". Whereas everything that is bad about it is bad on the levels of character psychology, narrative structure and logic, interest in the world beyond white adolescent North American males, or the general feeling that no serious consideration of the story needs to go further than cataloging the other properties that Pacific Rim is ripping off, or "paying homage to" if you like the movie.

But it is, nonetheless, inordinately cool. And cool matters, particularly in this summer of 2013, where such a very large number of movies have not been cool. Besides, even if it is certainly his most uncharacteristic and money-poisoned film since at least Mimic (which I have never, anyway, seen), it has been directed by Guillermo del Toro, and there's no way of taking all of the interesting bits out of a Guillermo del Toro movie.

The most fun you can have in describing the plot is by picking the movies that del Toro and co-writer Travis Beacham have pillaged that you want to reference. Mine are Robot Jox, the 1998 Godzilla, Blade Runner, and the 1966 Japanese TV series Ultraman for various details of the scenario and design, all of it yoked to a storyline rather similar to Top Gun, though of course that film didn't invent the idea of the hotshot pilot with demons any more than Pacific Rim did. Anyway, the idea is that a dimensional rift opened in the floor of the Pacific Ocean sometime in 2013 - so it had better get a move on - and released giant monsters that all looked different but more or less resemble nightmare version of Earth animals; they are called Kaijus, for the Japanese word that the film mistranslates in its very first line as "giant beasts", which is in fact daikaiju; kaiju means any kind of strange creature irrespective of size. Having concluded that conventional weaponry would be of no use fighting these monsters, the governments of Earth sunk all of their time and resources into developing skyscraper-sized bipedal robots called Jaegers, from the German word for hunter (the first of many niggling but ultimately trivial complaints I had with the film's conceptual background: why a German name for the giant robots you have fighting city-destroying monsters localised to the Pacific?). By 2020, the battle between the sides had reached a stalemate, with humanity just being able to get back on its feet in the weeks between Kaiju appearances, and it's in this year that we meet Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) and his older brother Yancy (Diego Klattenhoff), pilots of the Jaeger Gipsy Danger, the robots being necessarily controlled by two humans sharing a mental link to operate the two hemispheres of the giant machine's synthetic brain. The Becket boys are able to successfully fend off a Kaiju, but at grievous cost, and Yancy is killed during the battle, sending Raleigh into a depressive spiral where he hides for five years, watching as humanity slowly loses a war of attrition.

That huge-ass block of text? I am unbelievably happy to report that it takes up all of 10 minutes of Pacific Rim's 131-minute running time. In this obscenely origin-obsessed blockbuster culture of the modern day, the idea of a film condensing all of its backstory into a pre-title sequence so that we can get to the good stuff as quickly as possible feels like the Second Coming; it's all too easy to imagine a more sober, serious-minded director taking an entire film to cover the ground that Pacific Rim blazes through before it even features its protagonist onscreen for the first time, and if it did nothing else besides remember that the primary calling of a summertime popcorn movie is to be fun, and not to lay out in nerd-friendly detail the mechanics by which its plot works, that would already be quite enough for me to seriously consider anointing the film my favorite tentpole movie of the summer (the only other candidate, Fast & Furious 6, is also notable for how quickly it disposes of exposition in favor of getting to the razzle-dazzle that we paid for).

The rest of the movie plays out as an unresolved tension between two forces: how immensely wonderful the design of everything is, and how terribly uninteresting the people are. Oh, and how humanity, led by irascible military leader Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), fights against the Kaijus with the last tattered remnants of the now-defunded Jaeger program, with the clock ticking down and all hope lost, and the haunted Raleigh has to return to the game, with an untested new co-pilot, Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi). But clearly you already could have guessed that part.

It's certainly not a sign of the movie's failure that every single human being feels like they came out of a die-cast mold that hasn't been cleaned out since the 1980s; that is plainly what del Toro was gunning for, in his endless zeal to create a movie that has been visibly influenced by, presumably, every science fiction movie that the director has ever enjoyed at any point in his entire life. The talented but untested newbie, the scarred vet, the hard-ass leader, the snotty rival (Robert Kazinsky), the wacky scientist comic relief (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman), the venal black marketeer (Ron Perlman). If Pacific Rim entirely fails to have any demonstrate any kind of depth or complexity to any of these characters besides the exquisitely-named Stacker Pentecost (and he only attains complexity because Elba couldn't play a coma patient without imbuing the character with nuance and soul), that's only because it never, at any point, wanted them to be more than archetypes who could carry the story without being the story. It's shallowness by design, because that's the kind of movie that Pacific Rim loves and the kind it wants to be. Which is nice and all, but a bit of a cold comfort in the lengthy scenes (it might have solved the origin story problem, but Pacific Rim, like all other modern popcorn movies, could still afford to be tightened up to the tune of about 20 minutes in the editing room) that don't involve combat, when you're wondering why you're spending time with any of these characters, or why the only woman in the film with a speaking part is such a convenient embodiment of one of the most clichéd fanboy masturbatory fantasies.

On the other hand, the film's visuals are so intoxicating that just living in the movie's world for a couple of hours is entirely worthwhile, even if it's not the most dramatically compelling place to be. Production designers Carol Spier (who has sometimes worked with del Toro) and Andrew Neskoromny (who hasn't, and whose filmography is in fact quite awful: set designer on Star Trek V: The Final Frontier? Bless your soul) have overseen the creation of a miraculous world, no two ways about it: one where something as simple as a metal warning notice has been positioned in such a way and designed with just the amount of aging to imply great narratives behind every single little grace note; it's not simply a lived-in world but a living world where everything that exists has some reason to exist, a function it fills that implies a long history that led up to it. And that's just signs and props. The big details are even better, like the Hong Kong slum built out of a Kaiju skeleton, or the way that each Jaeger's design suggests, in little ways, the preoccupations of the different cultures that built them.

And the action which is, when all is said and done, the thing that brought us all together, is pretty superlative, bombastic and creative in its scale, while also maintaining a sense of dignity about the human cost of massive destruction. Much chatter has gone around online about del Toro's decision to stage all of the fighting between Jaegers and Kaiju at night and mostly in the rain, as though he was ashamed of the limitations of his CGI, as if this was a sign of cowardice rather than smart filmmaking technique; the result is that the giants in Pacific Rim look pretty damn good, and the film overall has the most convincing and involving visual effects that I've seen so far in 2013. So if it's cowardice, it was worth it.

This is, all of it, pretty shallow and experiential, the kind of stuff that's intoxicating in the moment, and the second the movie ends the best you can say is that you weren't ashamed to enjoy it. I'd have loved it if the film had even one other performance besides Elba's that felt credible (Perlman did what he had to, but just in a cameo, and it was meant to be a caricature), or that Hunnam and Kikuchi felt like they had any scrap of chemistry between them. Spectacle is great and all, but the human element of Pacific Rim is sorely lacking, no matter how much fun it is otherwise.

7/10

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: RAT A TAT TAT

As of this writing, the Wikipedia page for the 1982 giant killer rat picture Deadly Eyes notes only one piece of production trivia: "Dachshunds wearing rat suits were used in the filming of Deadly Eyes to achieve the effect of super-sized rodents". Dear reader, I would like to assure you with all my heart: you don't need Wikipedia to figure that out.

Dogs in rinky-dink costumes are merely one of the cornucopia of flaws afflicting Deadly Eyes. The movie managed to completely piss off James Herbert, author of the source novel The Rats, for being too dumb and shallow and trashy. I have not read The Rats; my impression is that it's considered to be a modestly intelligent horror-as-social-commentary piece. I don't know. But I know that any writer who's comfortable enough with shlocky genre fare to write a book about mutant rats and title it The Rats is a writer who's not going to through around criticism of that sort arbitrarily.

Deadly Eyes certainly is a piece of crap, bad enough to be a legitimately solid candidate for an alcohol-assisted Bad Movie Night party. The script is a patchwork quilt of ideas that were a half a decade or more out of date by '82 (it feels, in a great many ways, like a mid-'70s TV movie that got an infusion of gore and wandered its way into theatrical release), with a few half-assed attempts to connect it with a more contemporary vibe - read, throw some expendable teenagers at it - that just make it feel like an already dubiously clichéd story still needed to have arbitrary padding tossed in to bump it up to feature length (the official running time is reported to be 87 minutes; the version I watched on YouTube for this review is only 83 minutes, but nothing seems to be missing). Thus does a script with significant structural issues explode into a script with devastating structural issues.

So let's have at it, eh? The very first scene sets the plot on a knife's edge: over still frames of rats, a professor, Dr. Louis Spenser (Cec Linder) drones on about the nature of the rat in the modern world, to a room of teenagers; he'll later declare it to have been largely a success, with only a few kids being obviously checked-out, but since those are the only ones we get to see, it's genuinely impossible to tell whether or not he's meant to be taken seriously. Film, after all, being a medium where what is shown trumps what is reported.

Now, the knife's edge is this: the way the scene is blocked, it's not entirely clear whether the focus is meant to be on the teens' teacher, Paul Harris (Sam Groom), or on the teens themselves, of whom the most important from an early stage is clearly Trudy White (Lisa Langlois). There's evidence either way: the conversation between Paul and Dr. Spenser is far too eager to get us to the reveal that Paul is recently divorced for that to be a disposable plot point, but at the same time, the kids' social network is detailed too exactly for that to be disposable. Spoiler alert: one of these ends up being, in fact, disposable.

But we don't find out which yet! Suddenly, in a different movie, zealous health inspector Kelly Leonard (Sara Botsford) is busy screaming at an exporter that his supply of corn about to be sent overseas is rotten with steroids from corrupt groundwater, and it would be a crime against humanity for her to allow him to control it for even one more day. He leaves the meeting thoroughly unsatisfied, and as it if weren't enough, his cat, sneaking into the room where the corn is stored, runs afoul of a rat the size of... aye, well, there's simply no way to describe it but a rat the size of a dachshund. So finally, with three different plots all buzzing about, we have our rats in this killer rat movie. I admire efficiency, and Deadly Eyes certainly gets us to the good stuff [sic] pretty quickly, if not in a particularly linear or coherent way.

The credits play out over Kelly's triumphant bonfire of the corn, and then it seems like we finally pick a subplot and stick with it: for a good ten minutes, the movie stays locked with the teenagers as they have a party, play music too loud, gossip, make out, and generally act precisely like the first-act of a generic '80s slasher movie, culminating in the first human deaths at the paws of the newly food-deprived rats, of the party's hostess and her baby sister after everybody else has left for late night burgers (I have to say, making a toddler the very first victim, even if its done in a demure, off-screen way, was a gesture of "we are not fucking around here" that I didn't remotely expect). Having thus clearly set up the rest of the plot - the teens carouse around town, being picked off by the rats - you know what Deadly Eyes does? Probably, because I've been hinting at it, but it does this: it drops the teens' subplot entirely. Hell, I don't even think the girl who died and the baby are ever even referenced in dialogue, and the only reason any of this matters - besides taking an immensely long time to establish that Trudy has a crush on her teacher, Paul, and that Paul has a phone answering machine (it's kind of dear, in fact, how much the film obviously needs to establish that fact), the only thing that this lengthy scene sets up is that one of the kids gets bitten by a rat, not knowing what it is, and it's in investigating this strange wound that Kelly is first drawn in to the rest of the plot.

I can squint and hold this at an angle where this is truly brazen, intelligent convention-flaunting; as though, knowing that in 1982, we expect our horror movie to revolve around horny teens, writer Charles H. Eglee and director Robert Clouse (of the timeless Bad Movie Masterpiece Gymkata) tease around with us, keeping us in the dark and disoriented for more than the first fifth of their movie. But nothing in the remainder of the film indicates anything resembling that level of postmodernism, or frankly, that much creativity. Whereas a great many things indicate that Eglee's story was being assembled on cocktail napkins that were sent to the editor in the wrong order, so I think it's easier to assume that Deadly Eyes merely sucks. Particularly since by this point we've already hit the first continuity gash, where the order of scenes makes it pretty unmistakably clear either that the teen boy who gets bitten by a rat waits almost 24 hours to go to the emergency room with a still-fresh wound, or that Paul (who is also the basketball coach) likes to hold practice at 10:00 PM. And Kelly's meetings with her boss (James B. Douglas) take place outside of the normal space-time continuum altogether.

Anyway, once the monumentally chaotic first act is behind us, the script hews fairly closely to good generic stereotypes: Paul and Kelly will fall in love, Trudy will fuck it up for him in a way that suggests that none of the adults in whatever city this is meant to be (one where subways are still a brand new thing in 1982, and the government is in "Washington", and to hell with the day players' accents) mind if schoolteachers have affairs with their students, and Kelly's attempts to uncover what's going on with this rats with bites the size of a German shepherd's jaw (which is transparently untrue) will prove far less effective than Paul's, even though she's a government official, and he's a high school basketball coach who doesn't even have a reason to be investigating. Though he is the one who's best friends with the rat professor.

It's business as usual for a killer animal flick of the low-key sort practiced more in the '70s than the '80s, right down to the way that the film seems to genuinely believe that it has given us a great reason to root for Paul and Kelly ending up together, and thus it's a character piece, not just a mutant rat thriller. Typical stuff, unexceptional except for the totally unacceptable dogs-as-rats, an amount of disbelief that could not be suspended using the miraculous engineering of the Golden Gate Bridge. The real devil is in the details; the constant inability of the script to get its internal chronology right (Kelly apologises for popping up again after meeting Paul just that morning; yeah, but before that morning, they'd also met at the hospital the night before), the way that the film tosses a character introduces right at that moment to the rats, just to make sure we have any deaths in the first half of the film, and the grotesque, confused editing, which fails both at the level of stitching scenes together, and at the level of telling stories within scenes. At one point, Paul steps out of the shower in the school locker room, and a hideous jump cut pushes him ahead to the other side of the room; when Trudy accosts him, and we have every reason to believe he's naked at this point, until he steps toward her with a towel, making the scene a lot less interestingly sleazy.

Look at it from every angle you like, and it ends up the same: Deadly Eyes is shoddy, arbitrary filmmaking, that can't even work at the level of making giant killer rats a credible threat, or even pulling the trigger on the "contaminated corn made them giants" plot point, which would at least position it within the eco-terror genre that, like the adult lovers fighting monsters genre, had run its course well before Deadly Eyes opened. Its saving grace is not that is is well-acted, or has good characters, or even that it's effective horror (the kill scenes are among the most baroquely-cut parts of a film where the editing is a constant liability); it is saved solely on account of how resolutely, uncompromisingly silly it all is. We had not yet hit a silly bad movie in this Canadian horror tour of summer, 2013, but there is no denying the power of dachshunds in rat suits. Once scene, it is an image not readily forgotten.

Body Count: Well, that's a tricky thing. There are, readily counted, 6 humans and one cat that fall victim to the rats' onslaught. But, there are two moments in the last third where the rats rampage through public spaces, massacring people by the armful. And thanks to the dodgy editing, it's very difficult to get anything like a proper body count for those scenes. I would say that there are verifiably 10 deaths that happen between these two, with at least another 8 that almost certainly count. So we could say anything from 16-24, and a sufficiently passionate argument could persuade me up to 30. Plus the cat, plus a whole fuckload of rats.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: WHO LET THE TROGS OUT

The operating theory behind this year's Summer of Blood is there's a certain something that Canadian horror films have that their southerly neighbors just can't match: that pound for pound, the idiotic, disposable junk made by Canucks is just better than the idiotic, disposable junk made by Yanks - more mature, more psychologically astute. Every broad assumption has its debilitating holes, though and we've come to the first one: The Pit, a Canadian monster movie (from the horror annus mirabilis of 1981, no less) that's just really fucking dumb. Hugely enjoyably dumb, I should hasten to clarify, but there's no argument that I can perceive that makes The Pit a legitimately effective motion picture. Its deranged tone, bizarre characters, and a loopy structure that makes the 97-minute running time seem every bit of 20 minutes longer than the filmmakers were ready for all contribute to make certain of that.

"Loopy structure" refers to a couple of things, but one crops up in the very first scene: on Halloween night, a teen boy dressed as a pirate (Paul Grisham) and his girlfriend, dressed as a ballerina (Wendy Schmidt) are approached by a younger boy in the classic "sheet with eyeholes" ghost costume (Sammy Snyders). The boy in the sheet, Jamie, invites the other two to follow him into the woods to look for a bag of jewelry he found there, and while this is happening, the audience is hit by a speeding truck and splattered all over the road. By which I mean, we hop back in time to the moment that the older boy punched Jamie square in the face, but it's inserted at a totally random moment, and accompanied by a jarring shift in the soundtrack that feels like a sound editor was never even called in as a consultant, and coupled with the fact that all three of the characters have been either in makeup or beneath a sheet, there's no reason to assume that this scene has anything to do with the initial action, and good reason, in fact, to assume the opposite.

But no, the point is that Jamie is about to get his revenge on the teen bully, Freddy, and he does it by bringing him to a secluded clearing where a bag of what looks rather more like costume jewelry than the real stuff is right at the edge of... A Pit. Here, Freddy starts enthusiastically hunting through the loot, nd just when his attention is fully diverted, Jame appears behind him to push him bodily into... The Pit. We can just barely see some kind of movement deep within... The Pit... and it's this over this image that the film's title appears, before we launch into-

And that, not the aggressively awful flashback, is the actual loopy structure I had in mind. See, for a long time, nobody mentions the missing bully, and God knows what happens to the ballerina. It seemed like shitty storytelling, then it seemed like a poor attempt to goose the film into starting by opening with a shock scene that had nothing to do with the rest of the film, but by a certain point it becomes clear that the film opens with a flash-forward, and at almost exactly the 60-minute mark, we'll see the whole scene we just saw play out again. The. Whole. Scene. With the addition of Christina the ballerina's really strange death, in which she literally swoons and Jamie coos sorrowful things at her while struggling badly to lift her and roll her into... The Pit. That the filmmakers couldn't even slightly condense the scene that we'd already watched - that they included the exact same random shots of trick-or-treating children having a food fight - tells me that even more than this opening was meant to give The Pit a rollicking opening, it was desperately trying to inflate its running time; if you took out everything that was just awful padding, the film would barely scrape over 80 minutes, and while that might be a reasonable length for a 1981 horror movie, The Pit's makers had more ambitious aims, or something like that.

However, I don't want to hide the fact that, without this opening, The Pit wouldn't have its first kill until 52 minutes in. So it's a really pandering gesture from every angle.

With the film proper about to begin, I need to preface the plot by saying that Ian A. Stuart's script and the film that director Lew Lehman made are not the same thing, in one unspeakably important regard. For Stuart, Jamie was around 9 years old and the monsters in... The Pit... were projections of his fragile imagination. Lehman's revisions made him 12 (and Snyders appears to have a solid year or two up on that), and the monsters are very much real. For the most part, the graft holds pretty well - the weird confluence of a 12-year-old who acts immature and looks too mature fits the film's creepy sexual element - but one of the driving elements of the plot, and the source of the film's alternate title, Teddy, is Jamie's teddy bear, who whispers (in Jamie's own voice) horrifying, psychopathic advice. A plot element far too major to be ignored, but it makes far less sense if the boy isn't "actually" killing the people he feeds to his "Trolologs", or however it is that we're meant to understand the inconsistently-pronounced name he's come up with for his monsters.

Anyway, Jamie is just kicking on puberty's door, and he's doing it badly: stealing the copy of Creative Nude Photography and bringing it to school, because in whatever nebulously North American community where this takes place (it was shot in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin), they stock erotica in public libraries. Worse still, he has just about everybody in the neighborhood concerned about his aberrant behavior, so when his parents leave on a trip to Seattle, they're obliged to hire a child psychology major to babysit and watch the house, Sandy (Jeannie Elias). Having a young lady in the full bloom of womanhood right under his roof is terrible for Jamie's already overheated sex drive, and he spends an enormous amount of energy trying to spy on Sandy in various states of undress and feed meat to the troglodytes in... The Pit... that seemingly nobody else has ever heard of, despite it being just barely in the woods outside a farmer's cow pasture.

And that is all the movie we get for an awfully long hour, until Jamie runs out of money to feed the trogs, Sandy has wised up to his stealing money from her purse, and Teddy advises that the boy start throwing "bad people" to the monsters. Being a young child, those bad people consist of the various authority figures, irritating peers, and sexual rivals that he doesn't like, and I have to be at least ironically admiring of a film whose very first victim - accompanied by jaunty, "ain't this all wacky?" music - is Abergail (Andrea Swartz), a bullying little girl of about 10, nor is she the only child to be torn apart (demurely - this is a surpassingly violence-free movie) by the trogs.

While waiting for that to happen, we find that The Pit is one hell of a warped bad movie, splitting its time between utterly tormented expository dialogue (sample, from the awful little girl: "Why don't you go back where you came from, funny person? If I see you near my bike again, I'll tell your father, and it'll be too bad for you. They'll take you away."), minimally threatening moments where Teddy murmurs evil, and a remarkable prominence of totally gratuitous boobage (it is from a 12-year-old's POV), including a scene where Jamie - not having altered his voice in the least - is able to convince his librarian lust object, Miss Livingstone (Laura Hollingsworth) to strip down in front of her window, by alleging that he kidnapped her niece (the selfsame Abergail). It's all a bit tedious, even with the comically absurd excuses for nudity, and mind-numbingly repetitive.

But when the monsters start chomping down on Jamie's enemy list, then the movie takes off into the bad movie stratosphere. Part of it is because they're so abysmally-executed, rubber suits with an unfortunately porcine cast (when Sandy sensibly suggests that the creatures she's just barely seen are pigs, the film even seems to own this bit of ineffective design) and no ability to flex. Part of it is because of the desperation with which the film starts funneling victims Jamie's way. Most of it is the jaw-dropping shift in focus the movie makes with about 20 minutes left to go, with Jamie having left a rope down to let the troglodytes out of... The Pit... (he has no more enemies, so he won't keep murdering for them), and it suddenly becomes about the police hunt to stop the wild animals ravaging people up and down the countryside, with Jamie's own story having been completely dropped except for a final scene that doesn't end up fitting with anything. Insofar as the story has been able to find any kind of focus behind the immature, psychotic Jamie and the sexually obsessed Jamie, two protagonists sharing a single body and a completely disparate set of horror movie tropes, it stops pretending for a good long time to be about either of its initial strands; it feels like not just a different plot but a different genre altogether has infiltrated the movie, and it's so strange and totally ineffective that I want to jump up and down and tell Lew Lehman that it's a sin against bad cinema that he was only able to direct one film, if this was the kind of Ed Woodian disregard for story logic that he felt was "fixing" Stuart's screenplay.

The one thing that unites all of the disparate threads of the movie - the incompatible Jamies, the leaden opening hour and the giddy final third, the boob obsession and the terrible monsters - is that all of it is impeccably stupid. There's really nothing in The Pit that's anything but terrible, and its attempts at building a preteen psycho protagonist are impressive particularly for being totally devoid of any decent observation about how preteens are (Snyder's freakishly mannered performance doesn't help). It is all deranged and dreadful and divorced from human behavior, and God bless it for being so committed to its world that it never stops and asks the question, "does anything here make a lick of sense?" For if it had realised that the answer was now, we'd have been deprived of a heck of a ludicrous So Bad It's Good movie.

Body Count: 11, and though they are largely clustered into just two spree killings, that's an impressive pile of corpses indeed for something in this generic wheelhouse. I am only counting Freddy the pirate once, though we see him die twice. Also, four trogodods, or whatever they're called.

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