THE WEED WITH ROOTS IN HELL

A second review requested by K. Rice, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The 1936 propaganda film Tell Your Children, known far better under its re-release title Reefer Madness, is almost too easy to take cheap shots at. It's the most infamous of the peculiarly robust cycle of anti-drug films in the '30s, and its exaggerated horror at all of the nightmarish things that happen to people who smoke marijuana cigarettes - they become cannibals, they sell their babies, they have premarital sex - is so hysterical and divorced from reality that the end result is among the ripest camp films in history. It's also deeply cynical, playing the trick that was also peculiarly robust in those days, of looking up with a martyred, aggrieved face at the Right-Thinking People to simper about how it's an important public service announcement that simply must go beyond the pale in depicting the wretchedness of the ruined lives it takes as its topic. And heck, if that means showcasing sex and violence and in some cases nudity (not this one) to levels that were 100% not okay by the standards of the day, well that's what had to happen in favor of telling the truth. And of course you had to market it as an extreme showcase for sex and violence - the audience might get too freaked otherwise. But it's certainly not a crass exploitation film, no sir. Come on, don't you want to stop the spread of the demon weed?

On top of which, it's pretty shabbily made, so the film has enjoyed a reputation for decades as one the most overwrought, hilariously awful movies out there (I don't have the data to back this up, but it's always been my sense that it was in fact the first movie to be widely appreciated on a "so bad it's good" basis). All of which brings me back to my point: this movie is much, much too easy a target. And yet, when writers Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney took dead aim at the film with their 1998 play Reefer Madness: The Musical, they managed to make those cheap jokes land with flair and energy, enough to make their tossed-off gag of a show into a huge hit that eventually went to New York where its off-Broadway run in 1991 was another hit, and paved the way for a movie adaptation. Revised by Murphy and Studney, sharing director Andy Fickman with the original two productions, and featuring several of the established stage performers in the cast, Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical debuted on Showtime in April, 2005, capturing the latest version of the show (with a new song) for all posterity, and nailing down a terrific cast to do it with.

It's compulsively charming, making a good argument for the spry appeal of the stage show (which I have not seen) but also putting in enough irreducibly cinematic touches that doesn't come across as a filmed play. It has some jarring problems, and I'll get to those in due course, but mainly, it's a breezy lark: the leering, heavy-handed parody is lightened significantly by the sugary confection of the songs, which come by often: 16 numbers in the 101 minutes that the film runs without credits. It is, all things considered, a pretty close remake of Tell Your Children: a traveling lecturer (Alan Cumming arrives in a small Everytown in the U.S. of A., where he invites parents and teachers to watch the film's bringing along to demonstrate how wicked dope fiends could become, no matter how innocent where were to start. With frequent cutaways to show the audience's repulsed responses, or the bafflement of one less-than-concerned adult who's certain that the lecturer is trying to put one on ever everybody, this movie-in-the-movie is the great majority of Reefer Madness: The Musical Movie, and it's basically the same dread tale as the movie-in-the-movie in '36.

Somewhere in another Everytown (in '36, it was the same one as the city where the frame narrative takes place), there lives a swell kid named Jimmy Harper (Christian Campbell), fresh-faced and 16, and just about ready to ask his best girl Mary Lane (Kristen Bell) to wear his class ring. The trouble starts when they and all the other kids head to the five and dime to dance swing and drink soda fountain drinks made by the bubbly Miss Poppy (Neve Campbell, Christian's sister; though of course she's a hell of a lot more of a name than he is). This is already a touch sinful, we are assured, but Jimmy's so clean-cut and square that he doesn't even know how to swing. Along comes local dope pusher Jack Stone (Steven Weber) to seduce the boy with promises of dancing lessons; what Jack actually has in mind, once he gets Jimmy back to his wretched flophouse, where he lives in sin with Mae Coleman (Ana Gasteyer), and the crazed junkies Sally DeBains (Amy Spanger) and Ralph Wiley (John Kassir) are always hanging around being wretches is to force the boy to smoke a joint. And thus having hooked the boy with the most addictive and dangerous of all illicit drugs, Jack can sit back and gloat as his new customer ruins his life and, increasingly, the lives of all around him.

There are two general problems with the film. Three, perhaps, if we count the lame direction, in which Fickman simply props up the camera and points it at stuff, recording the action with the same clabberhanded grace that he'd later show off in timeless classics like You Again and Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. Thank God for Mary Ann Kellogg's choreography, is what I'm saying, because that's just about the only time that the onscreen action is meaningfully interesting to look at. But this is a broad parody of a shitty quickie from the '30s, and even as I doubt it's intentional, the argument is easy to make that the primitive visual style works to the film's advantage. So let's not count it, and go back to just the two problems.

One of these is that that film is simply too damn proud of itself; for every moment that's a lacerating dart of satiric wisdom about panic-mongering and ultra-reactionary impulses, there's another that plays like a loudmouthed drunk screaming at you in what he thinks is a conspiratorial tone: isn't it fucking wonderful how much more sophisticated we are than 1930s conservatives? And more often than not, this boastful self-satisfaction is accompanied by Cumming's unusually off-key mugging for the back rows in TV-scale close-ups. That's all the film's prerogative, of course, and I agree with the greater points it's making, but that much sardonic winking starts to suck the wit out of the jokes.

The other problem, which actually bothers me more, is that the material is a stewpot of anachronisms: most of the time, it hits the '30s pretty closely, particularly with the music. The nauseatingly cute romantic duet "Romeo and Juliet", Mary's earnest prayer of double entendres "Lonely Pew", and the rousing folksy showstopper "Tell 'Em the Truth" are all 100% on-point, and most of the other numbers are close enough to fake the odd bar or harmony that's not quite right. Some of the time, though, it seems like the filmmakers were only gunning to get something that fits the general 1933-1959 window: oftener in Maya Mani's costume designs than anything else, but the dialogue is ribboned with lines whose particular anti-Communist rhetoric certainly feels more like the post-WWII Red Scare than the more muted wariness of the Soviet Union in America in the '30s. And while nearly all of the humor in the film comes in the form of exaggeration of the "gee whiz!" ethos and inadvertent filthiness, a few incidental moments are jarringly modern in their sarcasm and irony.

Both of these problems, I would point out, are matters of individual moments that are a little clamorous and off-putting; they stand out only because the film in general is such giddy fun. The songs are maddeningly catchy, with line after line of showy wordplay; it's not one of the great masterworks of musical theater or anything like that, but it's intoxicating as a collection of well worked-out verbal and musical gags. And it's all delivered with unyielding commitment by a terrific cast: everybody is playing a pretty broad concept, but they're all doing it without hesitation or shame. Much of the film is wild absurdity, more and more as it goes on, and the tether to some kind of character reality that the actors provide keeps it funny and not just ludicrous.

Deliberate camp is a hard game to play well, and Reefer Madness makes it look easy: no, it's not consistent, but it's never more than a couple of minutes from some inspired piece of snarky idiocy that brings it back up, and at the very least, Bell and Gasteyer don't put a single foot wrong at any point. It's energetic, it mixes silliness and meanness well, and it threads the impossible needle of being deliberately bad in a way that's appealing and funny instead of just shrill. Nothing can top the manic ineptitude of the original, of course, but this succeeds in being distinctive enough that its strengths are its own without any reflected glory from a legendary forebear.

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ROBOT JOCKS

A trio of reviews requested by Bryce Wilson, with thanks for his multiple contributions to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

It is not enough to begin at the beginning. We have to go before the beginning, to 1995, when the 26 episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion started to air on Japanese television. Telling the story of how skyscraper-sized humanoid biological robots called "Evas", piloted by emotionally damaged teenagers, fought off the onslaught of huge trans-dimension or extra-terrestrial or Christ knows what kind of creatures called "Angels", the show was an enormous hit. It was also a costly show, and one that took a turn near the end from subtly exploring emotional trauma to openly depicting creator Anno Hideaki's battle with depression. For these reasons, the last two episodes ended up in a place infinitely different than anyone might reasonably have expected it to end based on at least the first half of the show's run. And there were riots, literal actual riots with outraged fans defacing the building that housed Gainax, the studio which produced the series. Two years later, Anno responded to his baffled and enraged fanbase by remaking the last two episodes as the theatrical feature The End of Evangelion, and in the process doing basically nothing to actually provide them with more clarity or closure.

But all this notwithstanding, the show was immediately entrenched in the hallowed annals of anime as one of the series you absolutely, no possible way around it, had to see if you cared about the medium at all, in Japan or anyplace else that the country's characteristic animation had made inroads. And five years after his second series finale, Anno was able to begin capitalising on the multinational enthusiasm for his signature project by planning an ambitious new retelling of the whole series. Collectively titled Rebuild of Evangelion in English, the initial scheme as I understand it (which was altered) was for three theatrical movies to largely re-tell the series, with a fourth movie expanding into a whole new ending, with all-new big-budget animation that would flesh out the world, the characters, and the tech, with more detailed, lusher visuals. It took another five years for the first of these to come, and eight years later, the fourth film still hasn't been completed, though it has already gone far astray from a simple "remake the show" storytelling mentality, and it's a pretty simple and even necessary thing to regard Rebuild of Evangelion as its own self-contained standalone narrative.

So with all that explanation out of the way, let's turn to the first of the three extant films, called... I lied, more exposition. The first movie exists in three versions, distinguished in English only by a number, and not distinguished in Japanese at all, that I can tell. First was the 98-minute theatrical cut from 2007, Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone. A film of the same length, with some re-timed color and other little tweaks, was released theatrically in Japan and on DVD worldwide as Evangelion 1.01, with the same subtitle. And then a subsequent DVD expanded the running time to 101 minutes, and re-titled the film once more, Evangelion 1.11. For the record, this review is based on 1.01, which I gather is the worst way to have gone about it.

But let's sweep all of that bureaucratic nastiness under the rug, and actually talk about the film, eh? Because when we get right down to it, You Are (Not) Alone is a pretty delightful piece of contemplative science fiction. It begins in the best way possible for something that intends to be heady and, in its private way, "difficult": it simply drops us into a world that looks sick and ruined, with water the color of old blood and bedraggled foliage. And having set up that world in a series of wonderfully bleak establishing shot, it drops into a plot that started shortly before we got there, and really doesn't slow down enough for us to catch up. We can pick up what we need, but it's not till the midway point or so that there's anything like the usual cut-and-dried-exposition. By which point, in theory, we're so taken in by the characters and the unpredictable rhythm of their lives, the actual details of what's going on are at least somewhat beside the point. I gather that this has offended many, including fans of the series who consider it to be unduly rushed (and it sure as hell isn't slow). But the headlong pitch into a crazed world seems exactly right to me, and I find its ragged pace to be electrifying in its own right, different than series but not inherently better or worse - it's clearer and more urgent, but less organic in character-building.

The primary arena of the action is NERV headquarters, a bunker deep below the shiny, metallic, futuristic city of Tokyo-3. NERV is the UN's military response to the Angels, of which the fourth has just made its presence felt, endangering much of the city, but in particular the life of 14-year-old Ikari Shinji (Ogata Megumi), on his way to NERV at the order of his distant, dictatorial father Gendo (Tachiki Fumihiko), leader of NERV. He's found and rescued by Lt. Col. Katsuragi Misato (Mitsuishi Kotono), who immediately latches onto him like a big sister, and helps him find his footing as he trains to be the pilot of one of the Eva-01, though he has to be guilted into it. It's only when seeing a girl his age, Ayanami Rei (Hayashibara Megumi), badly damaged from her own recent battle against the fourth angel in the prototype Eva-00, that he agrees to shoulder the responsibility.

The English subtitle of You Are (Not) Alone - chosen by the filmmakers, so it counts - speaks to its primary, almost overriding focus: this is not at all a movie about giant robots destroying giant inexplicable, almost indescribable things (the four Angels to crop up in the movie all look completely different from each other, and the sixth is defined by its absence of a stable form), which is at best its second-highest priority. Its third is on Christian imagery and overtones of the Biblical Apocalypse, which is transformed into something intriguingly weird as filtered through the perspective of a non-Christian culture (the use of Christianity in anime is something that I find endlessly fascinating, and about which I have absolutely no concrete knowledge). At times the use of Christian elements feels like Anno just pulled terms out of a grab bag without reference to what they mean (which American filmmakers do, like all the damn time, so I can't say that I actually have any problem with it), and so we have things like a command center named Central Dogma (also a term from biology, which doesn't make any more sense) and huge cross-shaped explosions when the Angels die.

The first priority, though, is depression. A crippling, low-down depression that makes it virtually impossible to function. Shinji, as we learn throughout the movie, is almost incapable of feeling anything, and his motivations for his actions are almost exclusively limited to the single desperate hope that his father will offer him a word of praise. Meanwhile, he's so confused and disoriented by the kindness shown to him by Misato, it makes him feel even worse than he did to begin with. The action sequences in the film are as much a symbolic representation of how he comes to a better understanding of the people around him, as they are spectacle. They're still some kind of spectacle, mind you, and frankly very good at it: the battle with the sixth Angel is an unusually impressive example of fluid CGI interacting with traditional animation, and it's as tense a pure action scene as I can think of in animation (which, honestly, isn't a very competitive race), while being tremendously imaginative in its use of the medium to add unpredictability to the villain.

The best thing about You Are (Not) Alone is the way it marries its personalities - sci-fi action and blunt, raw character study (it is, scene-for-scene, far more intense in its study of Shinji's depression than the series was at the equivalent point) - without it feeling at all unnatural for them to exist in the same space. And it does it in a setting that, for all its grim trappings, is genuinely fun: the characters aren't quite as complex as in the show, but they're generally livelier, the music gives a great deal of kinetic energy to even the most sedate moments, and the whole thing is utterly beautiful. The worst I can say about it is that the character animation can tend to be unusually limited, even for anime, but the backgrounds and use of color are so strong that there's never a case when the eye isn't busy anyway.

The sneaky thing about the movie, though, is that it doesn't end. It has a complete arc: Shinji's relationship to the people in his life evolves along a natural, comfortable line, and the final scenes round off the shape of the plot neatly enough that it feels like a structurally sound story. But there are almost nothing but loose ends, and the film adds more of them the closer it gets to the ending. It's easy for a movie to feel internally satisfying when it can kick of all of its most difficult elements to resolve down the road to its sequels, and while You Can (Not) Advance is absolutely promising as the first movie in a series, it signs far too many IOUs to pretend that it's a great stand-alone movie in and of itself.

* * * * *

And wouldn't you know, the second part actually pays off some of those IOUS!

We have another title situation, though this time the English situation is more straightforward. There was a 2009 theatrical cut, Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance, running 108 minutes; the only home media releases in any country are of the 112-minute version titled Evangelion 2.22. The original Japanese name for the film, meanwhile, is New Evangelion Movie: Break, and I am told that the Japanese subtitles for the three movies are an overt reference to the structure of a Noh play. I am in no way qualified to talk about such things. But I do know that the word "break" can mean "to split away", and that's exactly what You Can (Not) Advance does: while it starts off copying the original series with only some differences in flavor, by the time it ends, it's telling a completely different story using the same characters and themes.

So that being the case, let's not dwell on it. The second film, like the first, is mostly designed to tell a self-contained story, though while You Are (Not) Alone describes a pretty clear individual arc around Shinji's emotional growth, You Can (Not) Advance borrows most of its emotional resonance from the viewer's awareness of the first movie. Such is the luxury of sequels, of course, but I find it leaves You Can (Not) Advance a bit less satisfying in its own right, since Shinji's development this time around lacks such an elegant shape. The first act, if you will, is assumed, rather than depicted. This is perhaps the reason that the second movie ends up more invested in narrative progression than character development, relative to the first movie and certainly relative to the show, which had the benefit of growing over a period of hours what here needs to be covered in an hour.

What this costs You Can (Not) Advance in psychological subtlety, it earns partially back in intensity. The major new character in this film, German-Japanese Eva pilot Shikinami Asuka Langley (Miyamura Yuko), is a barreling force of antagonistic id, self-centered and arrogant and eager to lash out at the other teens for the unforgivable sin of being imperfect in her presence. She's written as a collection of bold strokes, a blast of energy where Shinji is compressed and Rei completely unknowable, and having her in the mix balances out the film's emotional energy well. Instead of the one-man study of the first movie, we have now a triangulation of three different ways of deal with self-doubt and the fear of loneliness, and the result is more complex and rewarding than You Are (Not) Alone.

That's the idea, anyway. In practice, You Can (Not) Advance is moving so quickly that something has to give, and for the most part, it's the depth of characters' relationships. It's clear that the essentialist feelings Asuka is blasting out constantly are there to distract everybody from what's going on in her head, and we're meant to be sophisticated enough to read her layers even when she's not showing them all at once. The thing is, You Can (Not) Advance is so full of incidents and developments that just about everybody is presented in more or less equally essentialist terms. It's a character sketch, not a character study, and in that respect at least, I absolutely break from the consensus opinion that the sequel is a definite all-around improvement on the first film.

Generally speaking, though, the consensus is spot on. The "break" of the Japanese title can be read as more than just a break from the plot of the original series; in a similar fashion, the movie breaks from focusing on individuals as singular personalities to focusing on individuals as elements in a more cosmic framework. Particularly in the second half, You Can (Not) Advance is more or less gunning to be an opera of sorts, using grandiose sequences and an impressively wide range of musical expressions to express a story on Big Themes expressed with Big Style.

At the most superficial level, this means more and bigger robot fights, and if there's one clear-cut reason to prefer the second film to the first, it's because the action is so vastly more impressive this time around. The ambitious scale of all the fights, both in their choreography and in the fearless way they mix traditional and computer-generated animation, puts even the most dazzling spectacle of the first movie to shame, and this one jumps to another level entirely during its protracted climax, a multi-stage battle involving a mixture of locations, characters, and depictions of fighting technique, veering from pure popcorn movie vivacity to abstract behavior mired in the twists of the series' elliptical mythology and expressed in art that seems to detach themselves from the movie to work as solitary images, like a comic book made entire of splash pages. It's gorgeous even when it's thoroughly baffling, which is more often than not; the other thing that happens besides bigger fights is more esoteric storytelling - if you noted that I haven't done much in the way of plot recapping for this second film, it's because the plot defies synopsis. It goes basically like, "Asuka comes in to upset the delicate emotional detente between the established main characters and strike up antagonistic sexual chemistry with Shinji, after which a long sequence makes deliberately no sense except that it's something to do with deliberately triggering the end of humanity, possibly to save humanity", with most of its conflict and stakes happening in a philosophical plane that's not always easy to parse, particularly since the film kicks so much of it down the line. I'll confess that this isn't not my favorite part of Evangelion, not in the TV series and not in these movies. The film does its best to make the character development and the grand-scale storytelling depend on each other, but it's a little too easy for the focus to drift.

You Can (Not) Advance leaves a lot of raggedness in its pursuit of bigger stakes presented with a grander sense of mystery; there's an entire character, Makinami Mari Illustrious (Sakamoto Maaya), whose presence suggests that she's being put into place for later purposes rather than because the plot actually needs her; she feels throughout rather like she exists outside the narrative commenting on it. And like You Are (Not) Alone, this film doesn't bother resolving itself, and compounds it by ending on a particular note of apocalyptic grandeur that is then directly contradicted by a scene that appears after the end credits. And this strikes me as sloppy storytelling more interested in the broad strokes than the fine details, anyway.

And yet, You Can (Not) Advance did the one thing I absolutely needed it to: it drew from the character development of the first movie and sent the story and characters in new directions that feel entirely organic from what went before, giving Shinji in particular a more daunting set of internal and external obstacles to overcome in the process of proving to himself that he has value, is loved, and is capable of loving. Perched on the vantage point of 2009, it's not too hard to be optimistic that the next film could redeem this one as thoroughly as this redeemed the first, even though the story has expanded so much with so little clarity, that there's quite a lot more to redeem this time.

* * * * *

So much for redemption. The third and so-far final part of the Rebuild of Evangelion series (the concluding fourth part is overdue with no release date in sight), Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo, doesn't merely fail to button up the holes left by You Can (Not) Advance, it dances around clapping and laughing about how signally it fails to do so, how little it cares if that's what we might have been interested in, and how many brand new holes it's ripping open. It's quite an aggressive little beast on that front. The first two movies, even when they were incomplete, or confusing, or weighed down with too much murky spiritual philosophy, are still ultimately appealing and enjoyable films on their own right, but You Can (Not) Redo finally goes over the edge to become simply frustrating and tedious and damn near unwatchable in stretches. It's a fans-only proposition, and based on the online conversation around the movie, even a healthy portion of the fanbase wouldn't give it the time of day.

This third film - still officially unavailable in North America, though rumors persist of an extended cut showing up one of these days, for sure this time - has the decency to seem merely mysterious and exciting when it starts, though the second those mysteries start to clear up, tit's easy to wish they hadn't. After almost causing the end of humanity but being stopped just in time by a mysterious figure watching the battles between Angels and Evas from the surface of the moon, Shinji is floating, unconscious, in space, still strapped in EVA-01. He's rescued by Asuka and Mari, but not without incident; their approach triggers a drone attack and the first of the film's grandiose action sequences, and thus comes the first point at which You Can (Not) Redo started losing me. Consistently, the action sequences in these films have been the easiest part to like: conceived with great scope, animated with a beautiful mixture of traditional and computer-generated images, and given operatic heft by Sagisu Shiro's rich score, mixing symphonic chorales that all but beg us to be suitably bowled over by the size and severity of the fighting. Sagisu, at least, is still in top form: You Can (Not) Redo has my favorite score of the three movies, richer than anything in You Are (Not) Alone and not as undermined by thin, frivolous passages in You Can (Not) Advance.

The action, though, is nowhere near the level of its predecessors. Throughout, the filmmakers' goal has evidently been to create individually meaningful shots rather than show smooth, continuous action sequences linked by clarity and easy continuity, but the fighting in the third film is actively difficult to follow, and in this first battle at least, there's no sense of scale. In the few places where it's possible to track whatever the hell is happening, the action is presented from angles that minimise the size of the Evangelion units, and without any physical context to compensate for it. A movie about giant robot fighting machines, in theory, has to do just one thing right, and...

Back to the plot, though. We'll learn soon, though perhaps not soon enough, that 14 years have passed since the end of You Can (Not) Advance, during which time an organisation named WILLE has come into being in opposition to NERV, and Misato herself is one of its leaders. Shinji is treated with a profound lack of trust by his former friends and colleagues when he's not ignored by them outright, and retreats in the empty misery that's his default mode. At a certain point, he's rescued by Rei, and dropped on the surface of Earth, in the ruins of NERV headquarters, and it's here that he meets a young man named Nagisa Kaworu (Ishida Akira) - the same mysterious figure we've seen on the moon in the final moments of the last two movies. And here we get what amounts to an exposition dump, after two and a half movies finally learning more or less exactly what's going on. What's going on is a slurry of pieces from Genesis and Revelation mixed in a blender. Shinji makes some unbelievably stupid decisions and almost brings about the end of all life for the second time, leading the film's second and distinctly more coherent giant action setpiece.

The chief practical effect of all this is to shortchange the development of the characters (the series' best element to this point) in favor of doubling-down on mythology (which I, for one, would call its worst element). And not only is this the least psychologically acute of the films, it actually works at cross-purposes to what has been best in the two movies preceding it: the hard-earned sense of family and comradeship between the insular, cripplingly depressed Shinji and Misato, Asuka, and Rei. You Can (Not) Redo runs so hard from that, it's almost openly contemptuous of the earlier character arcs. And while the conversations between the hollowed-out Shinji and the kindly Kaworu are interesting - and certainly the strongest part of the film, both narratively, and even, though probably coincidentally, visually - that hardly justifies the zeal with which Anno and his colleagues abandon what had been working so well to that point.

It's a shambles at the level of writing, leaving its characters wrecked in the quest to do something needlessly bold with the mythology, and far too eager to leave plot holes hanging everywhere, possibly to set up the eventual fourth movie, and probably just because being mystifying was more fun than being cogent. At least You Can (Not) Redo looks more or less attractive, though I find the character animation to be the least appealing of the films - it's brighter and sharper, but also more cartoony, almost, with bigger, gaudier expressions. Still, the marriage of animation styles hasn't looked better, and some of the effects animation is legitimately as perfectly executed as anything I have ever seen. That being said, it's telling that the most unique and beautiful sequence is one of the most primitive: a depiction of Shinji's feelings as he listens to Kaworu playing piano that uses line drawings and stills with lots of empty space and a reduced color scheme. In the midst of a bright and busy movie, the calm, reductive style of this sequence stands out, and it looks special in a way that all the glossy, ambitious art elsewhere in the film can't, simply by virtue of there being too much of it.

Looking handsome only goes so far, and it's not enough. This is basically the mash-up of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Michael Bay's Transformers that nobody asked for, and which doesn't work much at all. It's visually chaotic and narratively confusing, which is perhaps a marriage of form and content, but not the kind we should be celebrating. The quality of the first two movies is enough to give me some hope that the eventual conclusion is heading someplace interesting, but after the almost uninterrupted joylessness of this one, I can't say that I'm champing at the bit for the fourth part to finally come out.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE 1930s - I'VE GOT TO HAND IT TO YOU

The most reductive version of the Entire History of American Horror Filmmaking is that it all began as Hollywood's narrative and stylistic response to German Expressionism, which was, with the odd exception here or there, the only place you could go between about 1910 and 1930 to find anything paranormal in the movies. And this response came in a very direct way, for the most part: several of the leading lights of the Expressionist movement were imported, with the most important for our present purposes being Karl Freund, a top-shelf German cinematographer brought to Universal by Carl Laemmle (himself a German immigrant, though from decades earlier), where his second feature was the genre-defining Dracula. Rumor has held (though with what proof, it's tough to say) that Freund even largely took over directorial duties on that film from the perpetually drunk Tod Browning, which means, in theory, and if we want to stretch a point way too far, that Freund was the individual most responsible for show America what horror cinema should look like.

Even backing away from the most strident claims of German authorship of American genre films, it's certainly the case that Universal intentionally took its cues from Expressionism, while the other studios took their cues from Universal. It was probably inevitable that there'd be a Hollywood remake of a German classic, then - indeed, it's more surprising that the first generation of American sound horror only produced one such remake (ignoring that Nosferatu and Dracula derive from the same novel; the latter film is anyways more indebted to Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston's stage adaptation than to Bram Stoker). Admittedly, the 1935 production Mad Love only sees fit to credit itself as an adaptation of Maurice Renard's 1920 novel Les mains d'Orlac, but the more direct influence was surely the 1924 German film The Hands of Orlac, with Robert Wiene directing Conrad Veidt in the title role, the same team-up behind the quintessential Expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Not only was Mad Love inspired by a German movie, the two individuals most prominently responsible for its success were recent transplants from the German film industry. One was none other than Karl Freund, directing a feature for the eighth and last time, three years after officially debuting with The Mummy. The other was star Peter Lorre, a Jewish native of Austria-Hungary who'd become a fixture in the German film industry following Fritz Lang's iconic M. Germany in the 1930s being a chilly place for Jews, he quickly fled to France, then Great Britain, where he made his English-language debut as the villain in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934. Mad Love was his next film, the first step in a Hollywood career that would take a long time to find its footing, and never quite steadied itself. This cannot be blamed on his talents: despite the obvious labor it took him to recite his lines in English, his insane surgeon in Mad Love is a stellar piece of physical acting and uncanny screen presence, and reviews at the time were enthusiastic bordering on rapturous.

In Mad Love, Lorre plays Dr. Gogol, a genius surgeon living in Paris, who has formed a pronounced erotic fixation on Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake), the star of a Grand Guignol-style horror theater. He's attended every one of her performances, and finally presents himself to her on the night of her last performance, where he's horrified to learn that she's retiring to spend more time with her husband, the up-and-coming genius pianist and composer from England, Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive, in the role Veidt played in the German film). In a fit of demented despair, Gogol purchases a wax replica of Yvonne that has served as an advertisement for her act, which he stages in his home as his very own Galatea (a comparison Gogol makes some dozen or so times, drifting from a smart reference to an irritating distrust on the part of the writers as the film goes on). Fate doesn't have much better in store for the Orlacs; on his way to Paris, Stephen's train derails, and he barely survives, with his hands badly mangled in the process. To save his life, they must be amputated, which will end his career at its most promising moment, but Yvonne swallows her pride and begs Gogol to see if he can possibly help rescue Stephen's precious hands. He can't, but he can do something almost as good: that same day, he attended the execution of an American murderer, Rollo (Edward Brophy - his affable whimsy at the prospect of dying, especially his delight in hearing that the Hoover Dam was completed, is one of the most off-kilter and memorable elements of the whole movie), and the dead man's perfect hands - he was a circus knife thrower in life - are the perfect candidate for a limb transplant. The mad doctor tells no-one of this particular development, but when Stephen finds himself, after weeks of costly therapy, able to fling sharp objects with deadly precision, while coming no closer to being able to play the piano at his former level, he starts to wonder whether the miracle of his rescued hands has an unimagined dark side. Gogol, for his part, is delighted to have a lever to nudge Stephen into a madness all his own, and hopefully freeing up Yvonne for himself.

Mad Love has all the necessary components to be one of the great horror films of a generation, though I can't convince myself it quite gets there. A major reason for this is simply because the broadly similar story told in The Hands of Orlac (where the surgeon is a far less important character, while Orlac himself is the protagonist) is handled better there. The reconstructed version of the 1924 film runs something like 40 minutes longer than the neat and tidy American picture, at 68 minutes, and that time gives it more room to linger on Orlac's descent into mental chaos as he grows convinced that his hands have been possessed by the spirit of a murderer. Mad Love has an impeccable opening two-thirds, at which point it realises that has a hell of a lot of plot to resolve, and starts sprinting. And where the original pivots from paranormal thriller to psychological study in a way that's largely elegant and convincing, the remake delays the revelation that this is, in fact, all in Orlac's head to a moment where it rather undercuts what has gone before it.

Those are, however, mostly quibbles, and without directly comparing Mad Love to The Hands of Orlac, its shortcomings are almost invisible compared to what it does well. Sure, there are elements that don't work much at all: May Beatty, as Gogol's soused housekeeper, is on the bottom rung of dreadful comic relief characters in '30s horror, while the plucky American reporter Reagan (Ted Healy) is better mostly because he has such a low bar to clear. And Clive is a wet sponge: nothing in his brief film career is close to the level of his great insane genius in Frankenstein and its sequel, and there are worse performances on his CV than Stephen Orlac, but there's still very little depth or tension in his acting. Not many actors could have favorably compared to Veidt, of course, and Mad Love de-emphasises the character to a point that the role is neither as challenging nor as vital; still, a bit more real self-doubting terror would have been nice, and it's hard to believe that Stephen is really all that horrified by the possibility that his body is betraying his mind.

This is, for the most part, utterly terrific filmmaking, though. Lorre is so incredible as Gogol that he forgives all the other human-sized sins the film could possibly come up with. The makeup artists doubled down on the actor's already weirdly doughy baby features by shaving every bit of hair from his face and head; adding that to his great skill at bugging out his features and winding his voice up to a piercing squeak, and Lorre's Gogol turns out to be an utterly captivating and endlessly creepy figure, lumpy command of English and all, and far more difficult to get a grasp on than the usual mad scientist; he is, clearly, a gifted and passionate surgeon, which makes his descent into psychotic behavior even more disturbing.

And Lorre isn't the only great visual on hand: Freund's direction happily emphasises imagery, and he had the good fortune of an utter genius as one-half of his cinematography team: Gregg Toland shot the film alongside Chester Lyons, and it's possible to see all of the bold, geometric shadows in this film that would later become Toland's signature in things like The Grapes of Wrath and Citizen Kane. And this hard lighting makes Cedric Gibbons's big, menacing sets seem all the more imposing and Gothic.

The number of striking shots in this film is most impressive, for an unabashed B-picture: a guillotine bleakly standing against the clouds, a little mirror reflecting the wax statue in a tiny frame as Gogol dreamily plays the organ to his Galatea. In one scene, Stephen receives a visitor who claims to know the full extent of Gogol's experiments, and the revelation of that visitor's appearance is, in all honesty, maybe the scariest individual image in '30s cinema, though the thready laugh accompanying that image helps a lot. There are two montages that fill entirely different ends - one is a nightmare representing Stephen's memory of the crash, one is a time-lapse showing the Orlacs' bills piling up - but in both cases the mountain of Expressionistic imagery sliced together by editor Hugh Wynn with crazy speed and excellent relationships between frames results in terrifically purposeful style as an evocation of psychology.

That's the secret magic of Mad Love, in fact: it's both a hugely successful example of '30s horror style at its most unhinged and portentously Germanic, and also a nasty, insightful chunk of pulpy psychological study. Gogol is a clear-cut Mad Genius of the most generic sort, but he's also uncomfortably and always recognisably human beneath the madness: the sexual frustration and obsessiveness that drive him are monstrously unpleasant, but they're not unrecognisable as perversions of the way actual people feel. As a result, he's more threatening and more sympathetic simultaneously, and the movie containing him hits harder than the usual mid-'30s horror show. The film was produced, unexpectedly, at MGM - which explains Gibbons, but not really anything else about it - but it's a proud exemplar of the Universal horror mentality at its most effective, right at the moment that the horror fad was just about to start burning itself out. Indeed, Mad Love was itself a box office bomb, a most unfair fate for what should otherwise have become a iconic piece of American horror.

Body Count: 3, plus the undoubtedly large number of victims of the train crash, plus at least two flies fed ominously to a pitcher plant.

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COMING TO GET YOU

History remembers 1953's House of Wax as the first big studio film shot in 3-D during that gimmick's earliest incarnation. History remembers this so well, in fact, that history tends to overlook that House of Wax has perhaps even more significant a claim to fame: it was more or less the movie that first linked Vincent Price to the horror genre. I can't make that claim entirely divorced of hedging: it would be another half-decade until he appeared in The Fly, the first film in the almost uninterrupted run of horror movies he'd appear in throughout the second half of his career (we could maybe stretch a point and call the starting point of this run his 1957 appearance as a non-threatening Satan in the horror-free The Story of Mankind), and he'd already appeared in three horror-ish films in 1939 and '40, Tower of London, The Invisible Man Returns, and The House of the Seven Gables. But there were a lot of years and movie separating those films from House of Wax, and even if it took a while for him to stumble into a follow up, it was this film that created, perfectly formed in its first appearance, the archetypal Vincent Price Bad Guy. To wit, an erudite, well-educated genius who is turned by tragedy into a crazed madman willing to commit any number of murders to satiate his muse. And he's disfigured, to boot, an unnecessary but helpful addition to the form.

The film itself was a fairly loose remake of 1933's Mystery of the Wax Museum (which is, ironically, most significant for being a last: it was the final major studio feature shot in 2-color Technicolor), which means basically that the opening sequence, climax, and narrative hook are all the same, but the mix of characters is completely different. Mostly because Mystery of the Wax Museum was every inch an early-'30s movie, and things like fast-talking girl reporters and Depression hucksters weren't part of the cinematic landscape anymore in 1953. It's the same basic nugget, though: Henry Jarrod (Price) is the genius creator of the finest wax museum in New York around the turn of the century, but he lacks the mercenary edge to exploit his talents for profit. This aggravates his business partner Matthew Burke (Roy Roberts), who elects to set the museum on fire to collect the insurance money. Jarrod will have none of this, and tries to fight Burke, but he's overpowered and left for dead as the fires rage.

Some years later, Burke is enjoying the fruits of his arson, swanning around New York with his flighty girlfriend Cathy Gray (Carolyn Jones), but this all comes to a crashing halt one night when he's attacked in his apartment by a man all in black, of whose features we can see only that they appear to be grotesquely scarred. This killer stages Burke's death to look like a suicide by hanging, and in hardly any time, he chases after Cathy, as well; but just as he's strangled the life out of her, he's interrupted by her roommate Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk), who flees in terror and finds refuge in the home of her mother's friend, Mrs. Andrews (Angela Clarke), and more to the point, her friend's hunky son Scott (Paul Picerni). Scott is a sculptor, terribly excited to study at the new wax museum that's about to open, and guess who's running it: the not-so-burned-to-death Henry Jarrod, whose hands have been uselessly crippled and who uses a wheelchair to get around, but is otherwise in fine shape after his ordeal, and anxious to finish rebuilding his great collection with the help of two shifty assistants, Leon (Nedrick Young) and the burly, mute Igor (Charles Bronson back in the wee early days of his career, still using his birth name of Charles Buchinsky).

Scott is amazed by the detail and lifelike quality of Jarrod's work, but not half as amazed as Sue, who finds in the sculptor's new Joan of Arc statue the very spitting image of the dead Cathy, whose body was stolen from the morgue. At this point, even the most naïve of 1950s audiences is pretty much up to speed with the movie, which acts like it's a mystery, though the only thing that's even slightly questionable by the time the film hits the intermission at its halfway point (the technological limitations of early 3-D meant that only around 45 minutes could be played straight through) is whether the hideous facial scars are Jarrod's disguise, or if his apparently hale and hearty face is the mask covering his wounds. And even this isn't much of a surprise, though even the film seems guiltily aware that, in fact, a wax mask would be brittle and unyielding and not really likely to convince anybody that it's a real face.

At the basic level of communicating its story, House of Wax really isn't as strong as Mystery of the Wax Museum, simply because it's so astonishingly predictable, and with the benefit of hindsight pertaining to Price's career, it's easy to get out in front of it almost from before it even starts. In every other way, though, I far prefer the remake, which is one of the most absolutely fun of all horror studio pictures in the 1950s. It would be frivolous to avoid admitting right off that a big part of this is that same 3-D gimmick: despite being infamously directed by one-eyed André De Toth, who thus had no idea what the hell he was doing or what it looked like in the end, House of Wax has some of the most engaging dimensional effects ever, both in terms of creating a deeper, richer world, and in terms of sheer idiot spectacle. The second half is introduced with a lengthy sequence in which a barker (Reggie Rymal) entices people to come to the House of Wax by showing off all kinds of tricks with a paddle ball on the longest elastic string you could imagine - absolute gaudy bullshit that makes no sense whatsoever on a story level, and even the other characters know it. It might well be the most overt "you're watching a 3-D movie, so let's throw shit in your face" scene I have ever seen outside of a theme park attraction. And I am not ashamed to confess that I love it.

But in other places, the 3-D adds wonderfully to the inherently spooky atmosphere of the wax museum: it's slightly exaggerated, stretched for effect, and it place the wax statues in a position where they feel hyper-present, in way, all their limbs and poses distended in an aggressive way. And when that fire starts! It's one of the absolute best moments of 3-D as immersion into a dramatic, distressing situation ever filmed. Now, that leaves us with a good 65 minutes out of 88 where the 3-D pretty much just sits there doing nothing at all: no Pina is this, where every frame is aware of the depth and shape it offers. It's not even Creature from the Black Lagoon. Beyond question, though, the film gains a lot of impact and effect from its use of the technology: I have seen and enjoyed in 2-D in the past, but it absolutely belongs on the list of films that are just plain better when they have that added dimension.

On the other hand, ol' Flat Vision De Toth, as I doubt very much that he was called at the time, turned out to be great for the film in one respect: because he wasn't thinking of it in terms of dimensional gags, he was driven to make it work on its own terms as a piece of visual storytelling, and while being in full color means that House of Wax isn't nearly the moodiest or most vividly atmospheric of '50s horror pictures, it's pretty damn impressive just how much mood it gets, whether from the creepy artifice of the wax museum itself, or from Jarrod's torture chamber-esque molding room in the basement. It's not only because of its star that the film looks forward to the Roger Corman cycle of Edgar Allan Poe movies from dawn of the '60s: there's a similar use of great sets lit with a certain mustiness and gloom to create a hugely persuasive world for the gaudy, silly action to take place.

And about that star: we can talk about 3-D or sets or even the rest of the solid cast (Carolyn Jones rises to pretty fantastic in her twittery, weird performance, the rest stay stalled at "good enough to get the job done), but the reason House of Wax works is Vincent Price. It really is that simple. That man had screen presence like nobody's business, and a flawless, unmatched ability to play melodrama in a relaxed, naturalistic way. As good as that was in his early roles as a shady lover or criminal, and as enjoyably as he undoubtedly is when he's playing the hero of his horror movies, he was always at his very best playing theatrically expansive villains, and with Jarrod, we even get to see how that robust hamminess evolves out of the tamped-down enthusiasm he shows in the earliest scenes, when he's merely an eccentric artist. The transformation from that to the declamatory monster of the final scenes is as evocative as anything in the script at dramatising Jarrod's descent into madness, and the way that Price plays through his thick make-up rather than using it as a cheat (a trick he'd refine into mastery by the time of The Abominable Dr. Phibes, where he'd give a rich, elaborate performance despite being unable to move his face at all) gives a fullness and even pathetic scope to Jarrod's monstrosity that makes him one of the most engaging of all '50s horror madmen.

The scenario is clunky enough, and there are just enough flat-out dumb moments - the film's very final beat, a lame 3-D gag, is among the worst - that I can't in good faith call this one of the decade's standout horror pictures, but it's awfully damn entertaining, and it's essential viewing for Price alone. A horror film about the high cost of giving into mindless spectacle, it's awfully satisfying mindless spectacle itself, and in any number of dimensions, it's a delightfully garish exercise in low-grade creeps.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SOME WICKED THING THIS WAY COMES

Considering how much its visceral, rubbery gore effects, electronic score, the niceties of its lighting and film stock, and especially its position in the center of a maelstrom of controversy about these goddamn violence-driven horror pictures with no characterisations beyond "this guy dies then that guy dies" all mark it out as a quintessential product of the early 1980s, it's going to sound like I'm being deliberately contrary when I say that John Carpenter's The Thing is a gloriously classical piece of filmmaking. But I swear I'm not. And of course, we have now the luxury of more than three decades to reflect on a film that was initially received not only by critics but even the biggest part of horror fandom as pure nihilistic, style-over-substance drivel, and there has been a hard, long fight that has ultimately resulted in the film's canonisation, more or less, as an iconic work of modern horror. If I had tried to claim that The Thing was "classical" or anything like it in 1982, I would have been screamed out of the room, not least because in 1982 I was a baby, and babies talking about films are just about the creepiest.

But classical it is: swooning, romantic classicism. It's no secret that Carpenter has spent most of his career in the shadow of Howard Hawks, cryptically re-making or pointedly reversing that director's Rio Bravo in, like, half of his movies. And with The Thing, he went so far as to explicitly remake the Hawks production of The Thing from Another World of 1951, a film whose authorship is much, much, much too complicated to say something as blunt as "it was directed by Howard Hawks" or the opposite. But at least as much as the spirit of Hawks informs The Thing, with its hotbed of masculine games of dominance and authority, it's a film in thrall to Alfred Hitchcock as well, for The Thing is something close to an absolutely perfect exercise in how to construct a thriller. A thriller, mind you, cloaked in the most thoroughly unnerving body horror that mainstream cinema had ever seen before body horror specialist David Cronenberg decided to mount his own '50s remake a few years later with The Fly.

But it is a thriller where the film's heart lies. Adapted by Bill Lancaster from a novella by John W. Campbell (much more closely than the '51 film, which barely resembles the source material), the scenario is blunt and basic: 12 men are trapped in a remote location with the awareness that some of them are deadly killers, but nobody knows who or how many. Cue the paranoia, which Carpenter elegantly spikes by occasionally punctuating his film with a showstopper sequence of some of the very best practical effects in the more than 100-year history of cinema special effects, which the gives the film an incredibly clever structure by which a steady rise in tension is jacked up at irregular intervals. If most thrillers are like being put in a pot of water being brought to a boil over a low flame, The Thing is a film in which the dial is turned up a few notches every now and then, and left there.

I have no better demonstration of the film's genius than in noting that the very nature of its tension shifts after the first time you've seen it, arguably increasing the film's impact rather than dissipating it, and when a genre film can do that... So the thing that happens - and if you haven't seen The Thing, please do stop reading and go see it. It's maybe the only heavily gory film that I think works so well as a piece of cinema that I'd urge on even the most squeamish and gore-averse with an unsympathetic "it's a masterpiece, you're just going to have to deal with it". Those who aren't squeamish, I surely hope don't need my encouragement.

So the thing that happens, is that the film opens with Norwegians chasing a dog across the Antarctic tundra, firing at it from a helicopter, and it's a marvelously disconcerting opening; eventually they both end up dead, and a nearby American research station ends up with the dog and no sense of what the hell is happening. Carpenter keeps bringing our attention to the dog, with low camera angles favoring its height and frequent cutaways to it simply mulling around, with a little bit more sobriety than typically seen in dogs. The first time you see the movie, the dog is a synecdoche of the first-act mystery: what happened to the Norwegians? What has that dog seen, what has that dog done? The second time, when we know what the dog is up to, it's completely different, but even more tense: what is the "dog" thinking, what is it plotting? Innocuous if slightly disconcerting moments of the dog jumping up on somebody, or following them into an empty room, suddenly become nerve-wracking instances of raw terror: GET IT OFF YOU! STOP TOUCHING THE DOG! If there was nothing better in The Thing than a first act that becomes so greatly deepened in its effect and complexity on second and later viewings, I'd already be prepared to call it a great and timeless thriller. Since The Thing is, instead, a movie where nearly everything is better than everything else, because everything is just that goddamn good, I am obliged instead to call it instead one of the greatest thrillers, on top of being one of the greatest horror movies.

The film sometimes gets shade thrown its way for being too concerned with surfaces, populating its remote station with a group of men no more distinctive than you'd find in any slasher movie of the era, and that's not a complaint that can really be argued against, except to point out that it doesn't matter: the specific men involved don't matter nearly as much as the dynamics between them, and these are precisely and obviously delineated by the uniformly terrific cast, headed up by Carpenter's most reliable actor, Kurt Russell.

I might even argue, in fact that The Thing finds Carpenter for once out-Hawksing Hawks: one of that director's most important recurring themes is his breakdown and analysis of codes of American maleness, and The Thing takes that theme to an extreme end. It is among the best depictions I can name about the group dynamics of men, where the individual psychological details of those men's lives (who has a kid? who is playing two women back at home? who secretly wants to play the violin?) are less important the psychology of the group as a group. And of course, The Thing games this by putting that group dynamic, almost from the beginning in a state of heightened tension and awareness, which gives way at a certain point to outright paranoia and violent mistrust. Carpenter and Lancaster depict the backbiting, misjudgment, and rank-pulling that comes out of such a situation with supreme clarity and force.

That being said, this is still mostly an exercise in pants-shitting terror, and it's a pretty good one. Its depictions of bodies splitting apart, and bodies betraying their owners, and being forced into constant, weary awareness with death lying a split second way if you don't pay enough attention are horror of the best, purest sort: this is a movie whose depiction of the deadly, destructive, and unknown invading the safe, secure, and routine (which is my basic concept of where the borders marked "horror" reside) could not be better, owing mostly to the Lovecraftian extreme of its design of the shape-shifting, body-snatching alien force picking off the men one by one. And owing to its depiction of that force less as a monster to be fought than as a disease exploding through barely-understood vectors and perpetrating foul violence on the carrier. Indeed, with its all-male cast (the entire list of women in the film includes a female-voiced computer program snottily dismissed as a "bitch", someone seen in a videotaped game show, and a drawing of a '40s-style pin-up girl), and its depiction of something inescapable and fatal being passed between them, with the in-group tension that creates, The Thing would be an absolutely irresistible metaphor for the early years of the AIDS crisis, except it was came out too early for that to be anything but a remarkable historical coincidence.

That doesn't necessarily make it "scary" (that has never been my response to it, anyway), but it's one of the highest peaks the genre has ever reached. This is what happens when you give a genius the right mixture of budget and freedom to explore, though I am sure that Universal, who took a bath on the film in 1982, wouldn't necessarily agree with me. What it is, though, is sublimely tense: doling out info just enough that we can see the shape of the next 10 or 15 minutes, but not the details, and letting us sit and wait in agony while the not-quite-predictable shock moment happens - there's a blood-testing scene that's paced with deliberately glacial emphasis, clicking from one close-up to the next with a jagged rhythm (Todd Ramsay's editing is pretty terrific throughout but it especially makes this scene), until you can barely stand it, and then it blows up when we're looking the other way. It's simply one of the great sequences in any thriller made since 1980.

And then we have Ennio Morricone's score, a very uncharacteristic piece of thumping, bass-heavy menace. It feels like one of Carpenter's own compositions in a lot of ways, and it adds to the film a tense, driving heartbeat that becomes terribly agitating as it moves on. And also - I'm cramming stuff in at this point, because with movies like The Thing, you don't run out of things to say, just space to say it in - there's Dean Cundey's brilliant Panavision cinematography, with its uncanny color-tinged lighting (Russell is introduced with a sickly green cast over half his face), its fearless use of negative space, and moments that capture the bleak blankness of the tundra as well as anything in cinema's greatest movie about how snow looks, Fargo. Like this beauty, our first establishing shot of the research station in the whole film, and one that as much as says "oh, and in case you were wondering, this film shall be about the raw hell of isolation and being trapped with your fate".

There's a tendency even among the film's boosters to dismiss The Thing as "just a really great horror/thriller". Which it is. Also, Singin' in the Rain is just a really great musical romcom. Perfection is perfection, wherever you find it. And The Thing? Oh my yes, it's perfect.

Body Count: 11, plus a Norwegian already dead when we see him, plus the corpse of a Thing, plus three dogs (onscreen) and several more (offscreen), plus the dog form of a Thing, which doesn't count, but it's the bloodiest moment in the film and it would feel wrong not to mention it. Also a number of individual Things that would be hard to quantify. And the survivors aren't looking in too good of a shape as things end...

TL;DR Body Count: All of them.

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: AND HE'S DANCING LIKE HE NEVER DANCED BEFORE

It would be nice if more remakes found some way to justify themselves beyond "because of the money" - it would be nice, in fact, if more movies generally did the same - and this goes doubly for films that are basically flawless. Which is a phrase I feel super uncomfortable in applying to 1980's Maniac, the spetacularly notorious calling card of cult director William Lustig, because in some ways it's miserable, and in many ways it's amateurish, but I don't think you could possibly deny that it is the best possible version of what it wants to be. Namely, a brutally, unforgivingly intimate stay in the mind of a sexually neurotic serial killer, not at all unlike the ones starting to crop up in every cheap horror film in 1980, with one huge difference: while Jason Voorhees and his legions of imitators are psychological and dramatic junk food, Maniac's Frank Zito is petrifyingly plausible, and the film built around him isn't exploiting the real world horrors of violent death, but in a very sickening and inescapable way, explaining them.

We can quibble over the question of whether the experience of Maniac is something that anybody ever ought to submit themselves to, but let's skip to the punchline: any remake that even begins to justify itself needs to find some way to at least approach the original's effect of trapping us in the brain of a person who we'd very much like not to be trapped inside, or it might as well not even bother. And sure enough, the remake of Maniac that now exists is absolutely hellbent on not just matching but exploding its predecessor's skill at marrying our perspective to that of the psychopath in question. One would expect no less of a film produced and co-written by New French Extreme icon Alexandre Aja (director or not, the film has a lot of his fingerprints on it; the actual director, doing a good job of it, is Franck Khalfoun), a man with an intense passion for making sure that violence is treated with unblinking gravity and care, but even then, it's hard to predict the, as it were, literalism with which the film picks up the mantle of its forebear in making us feel like we're in Frank's head. Maniac '12, in point of fact, is shot almost exclusively from Frank's point of view as he goes about stabbing and scalping women in a glossy, unnamed city played by Los Angeles (the originally was specifically, and even vitally, located in New York).

It's a gimmick, of course. First-person movies are always gimmicks, even the very best (which is, by leagues and leagues, Russian Ark). I will claim for Maniac the merit that it is an awfully well-mounted one (none of the wobbly gimcrackery of something like Lady in the Lake here!), with star Elijah Wood and cinematographer Maxime Alexandre collaborating in the most staggeringly complicated ways to make a vivid and fleshed-out character out of camera movements and occasional glimpses of Wood's hands. Mechanically, it's the kind of thing that seems unbelievable in the moment, only to get more unbelievable as you think about it. Aesthetically, it's a gimmick, one that never stops being distracting.

Mind you, it's a gimmick that gets the point across. It also permits a singularly fantastic moment in the middle of the film, when for a brief time during a murder, the camera does shift back to show Frank's entire body, the best job that I have ever seen any film do of suggesting the high that serial killers are said to feel in the act of killing. So in general, one must credit Maniac with making its point emphatically. We are thrust in the position of lingering over the things Frank lingers over, and understanding the urgency he feels in needing to kill and also the disgust he feels with himself. Much as is the case in the original film, there's very little sense of any of this being presented as "cool" in the way of the standard generic slasher or splatter film. The first death scene happens so suddenly, before we've gotten a chance to find our footing with the film, that it shocks one into a sense of dazed confusion that carries over to the first of the film's intensely graphic and persuasive scalpings; a later scalping is presented with the victim screaming hysterically in a way that makes it the most legitimately upsetting and alienating death scene I've seen in a horror movie in a very long time.

This is all the opposite of gore pornography: it is uncomfortable and distressing, though never as much as the original Maniac, which I'd credit to the first film having such grungy, hellish cinematography along with the unsparing murders, while the new film is a good deal cleaner and crisper. Obviously, it's not an easy film to recommend: there's absolutely no uplift or entertainment, only a lot of pummeling, and the film's ultimate message, like the original, is that this kind of thing happens and it is an absolute perversion that it does, but as humans we need to confront this kind of grotesque reality. Everything about the film build to this point brilliantly: the degree to which Wood has permitted himself to devolve into schlubbery for the few shots he appears in (the ratty-ass goatee in particularly is a wonderfully queasy touch), the jagged electronic score by Rob (the professional name of Robin Coudert), which adds a layer of distorted anti-humanity to the proceedings, unworldly and distancing even more than the animalistic kabuki of Wood's performance.

It is, all told, a potent and thoroughly effective reworking of the original film for new audiences and new concerns, though my question remains the same as with the version: is it valuable? I have seen each Maniac once and am very satisfied to have done so, though I have no intention of seeing either one a second time. They're bleak movies that rub our faces in the worst things that can happen in an stable, violent mind, confronting us with bloodlust and misogyny and depravity in a most direct and inescapable way, and this is not an unworthy thing, insofar as it can't help but produce a profound effect on the viewer. And certainly, art has a responsibility to make us aware of the ugliest and darkest as much as anything else, and the new Maniac achieves that goal gloriously. But it's just not the kind of thing you "like", and not the kind of thing you want to suggest that anybody watches at any time, for any reason, even if it's pretty nauseatingly powerful.

7/10

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THE CYCLE OF REINCARNATION

The transformation of Hammer Films into the world's most prominent home for edgy, brutal, sexy genre films was completed almost entirely on the backs of 1957's The Curse of Frankenstein and 1958's Dracula, released in America as Horror of Dracula (the fuse was, however, lit by the violent sci-fi/horror film The Quatermass Xperiment). And as has been noted by pretty much everybody, these are the same two stories - though in the opposite order - that kicked off Universal's industry-defining run of horror films in the early '30s, which may or may not have been a deliberate choice. I think the one thing we can say for certain is that Universal's films had ensured that those characters would be especially prominent in the minds of horror film audiences, and the books were in the public domain and could be readily adapted.

The third major Hammer horror film, though, is the one where the studio finally, explicitly, remade a Universal classic, or rather a Universal series: despite its title, The Mummy of 1959 isn't based exclusively or even primarily on the 1932 Boris Karloff vehicle that more or less invented the idea of mummies as terrifying monsters. It is something of a condensed version of that film and the four unrelated mummy films Universal released in the 1940s, filtered through the Gothic sensibility of irreplaceable screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, and given all kinds of broody, British menace by director Terence Fisher, who wrenched the character of Kharis the living mummy violently from his cheesy B-movie roots and turned him into a figure of real danger.

The jump in quality is swift and absolute. It's amazing how the exact same elements - mummies recognize dead lovers from across the millennia, a fez-wearing acolyte of an ancient cult carting a mummy across the sea to wreak revenge - can be so much less hokey and so much more threatening with just a little bit better lighting and better acting - not even better acting across the board, really. As with most Hammer films of this vintage, it's Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee standing head and shoulders above the rest of the cast, made of solid, redoubtably British men, and women cast almost exclusively for their cup size.

It does prove, though, the difference between Lon Chaney, Jr. in the depths of his alcoholic loathing for the roles he was given, and Lee right at the moment that he had everything in the world to prove, having been more or less universally considered one of the key elements of both Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula, in both cases playing the iconic monster. Going three-for-three must have seemed essential to the upcoming actor (Christopher Lee, an upcoming actor! Almost as weird as the eternally patriarchal Peter Cushing playing a middle-aged man's son, but he does so here), who had not yet proven that he could do anything else, and needed to keep his swiftly-growing fanbase happy with his pantomime monsters if his career was going to keep evolving. It's not nearly as far to compare Lee to Karloff - their respective characters are written to be entirely different things - but if you put a gun to my head, yeah. I like Lee better than Karloff, as well. There would seem to be only so many things you could do as an actor with an unspeaking character that shuffles around and strangles people, particularly when burdened by the colossally unfortunate makeup Lee is made to wear, looking neither "face covered in rotted bandages", nor " desiccated human flesh", but "mud shaped into a wrinkly ball, with no particularly discernible facial features. Effectively, Lee has to be threatening, and later on torn with passion for his lost love, using virtually no other part of his body besides his eyes. And he does this superbly - his mummy isn't a patch on his justly legendary Dracula, but it's every bit the equal to his beloved Frankenstein monster.

That being said, the mummy barely appears - without a stopwatch in hand, I'd estimate that it's the least screentime Lee had in any of the three movies - and doesn't even start to appear until well into the movie. This is the Cushing show through and through, and though he reads onscreen as too old to play the character as the screenplay necessarily calls him out to be, he's still excellent as the heroic, thoughtful archaeologist John Banning, who was part of the 1895 Egyptian expedition that discovered the lost tomb of the Princess Ananka, guarded by the undying mummy Kharis, who in life was Ananka's secret lover (a fact we don't learn until well into the movie, during a lengthy history lesson which provides Lee with his only chance to speak - and wear bronzer to play a rather dubious Egyptian - but is otherwise the one outstanding mistake of the screenplay, punching the dramatic momentum right in the face, right in the middle). This latter fact is only discovered by John''s father Stephen (Felix Aylmer), who goes mad as a result, carrying us on a really elegant transition to 1898, and the asylum where the old man now gibbers about mummies.

It's at this time that the nefarious Mehemet Bey (George Pastell), priest of the ancient religion of Karnak (which Sangster explicitly holds to be the name of a god, an historical mistake the Universal films only made implicitly) arrives in England with Kharis in tow and vengeance on his mind. It occurs to me that one big reason that The Mummy is so much better than the later Universal pictures is that England in 1898 is a better place all around for a rampaging mummy to go on a revenge spree than New England in the 1940s, or Louisiana in whatever time frame it's meant to be. The mummy is accidentally dumped in a bog thanks to the interference of a couple of colorful locals, but raised successfully once Bey retrieves the Scroll of Life from the Banning collection, a narrative circuit that exists primarily to justify copying the wonderful "mummy comes out of the swamp" sequence from Universal's The Mummy's Curse. And from here on you can probably guess - Jimmy Sangster was a great, perhaps even revolutionary horror screenwriter, but he wasn't Christ come down off the mountain, and he still couldn't come up with better things for a mummy to do than wander into rooms and strangle people. Although he did come up with far better setpieces that make it much clearer why the victims couldn't just run, and the matter of Kharis's seemingly-resurrected lover, in the form of John's wife Isobel (Yvonne Furneaux), is at least refreshed in that she isn't an outright reincarnation, but merely a living woman with an uncommonly close resemblance to the dead Ananka. And she's given somewhat more interesting and active things to do to help stop the mummy than the bulk of the Universal heroines.

If I have any reservations to speak of with Hammer's Mummy, it's of a somewhat petty sort: basically, that it's not nearly up to the standards of the two major horror films preceding it. That's undoubtedly got something to do with the setting; vague European locales make for better Gothic fantasylands than anyplace in Britain, even the deep country where The Mummy takes place. There are still shadows filling the corners of old buildings, but the sense of grand decrepitude that makes Dracula such a visual feast are simply not here in anything like the same degree. And too, Cushing, though he's more than satisfactory as the hero, isn't being challenged as much as he had been in the first two movies, and simply isn't as interesting to watch; he's still a Hammer romantic lead, and they are simply a watery breed, even when they're being played by someone as prickly and authoritative as Cushing.

It also feels just a little bit re-tready: like "more gory, sophisticated Universal horror" was a shtick Hammer was settling into, rather than a well of inspiration (this is especially notable in Franz Reizenstein's score, when it is not being jarringly upbeat). That's almost certainly unfair; it's simply that the same writer, director, and pair of co-stars, along with predominately the same crew (production designer Bernard Robinson and cinematographer Jack Asher chief among them) rather naturally turned up a film that didn't feel hugely different from its predecessors. Still they were all luminously talented men, and the shtick was at this point still a very zesty and fun way of reviving old monsters (and would continue to be with dark/edgy werewolf and Jekyll & Hyde pictures a couple of years down the line). It's still archetypal work by Hammer at probably the strongest point of its history, and it's a completely rewarding dose of highly grim atmosphere and striking imagery.

Reviews in this series
The Mummy (Fisher, 1959)
The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (Carreras, 1964)
The Mummy's Shroud (Gilling, 1967)
Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (Holt and Carreras, 1971)

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