Posts by David Annandale

This may be a bit perverse, but I’m going to talk about a film that not only is not currently available on DVD, there is no release date for that format as yet. Fear not, though, as it will surely not be long in coming. The film is Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain!, and it is currently on tour, proving that there is still enormous creative life in the silent film, especially presented when presented in the fully live format. The DVD, inevitably, will be a reflection of the theatrical experience, and while that won’t be as optimal as the live version, it will still be essential viewing for all lovers of the brilliantly bizarre.

As with Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), the protagonist shares the director’s name, which adds a weird layer of god-knows-what to the proceedings. The story sees Guy (Erik Steffen Maahs) returning to the now-deserted island where he grew up. He has come, at his ailing mother’s request, to put a coat of paint on the lighthouse that was: a) the family home; b) the orphanage run by his tyrannical mother; c) the laboratory of his obsessed father. Once there, Guy lapses into memory, and the bulk of the film is traumatic flashback. A young Guy, on the cusp of adolescence, and his older Sis (the only name the film gives her) strike up a friendship with Wendy Hale, one of the Lightbulb Twins, a pair of teenage detectives in the vein of the Famous Five or the Hardy Boys. Wendy has come to investigate Guy’s parents. Guy falls in love with her, but she falls in love with Sis. She then disguises herself as her brother Chance, in order to better seduce Sis, and what follows is a typically Maddinesque nightmare of contorted Freudian sexuality, hilariously melodramatic subtitles (liberally sprinkled with exclamation marks) and comically gothic horror. The style can best be described as a mixture of German expressionism, D.W. Griffth-style adventure melodrama and Eisensteinian editing filtered through a 21st Century sensibility. As with so much of Maddin’s work, the film is an almost indescribable fusion of the cinema’s past and its future, and as such is, in a odd way, timeless.

Every few years, word arrives that the much-lamented Hammer Studios will shortly rise from the ashes. Back in the 90s, for instance, Richard Donner was supposed to be behind a resurrection of the Quatermass films. Well, the word has arrived again, and the revived Hammer has gone at least as far as releasing a teaser trailer and a set visit for its first production in decades: a vampire tale called Beyond the Rave.

You’d think I’d be ecstatic. I love the old Hammer films. When I was a wee tyke, I read about them in my first horror film book. Denis Gifford was writing in 1973, did he but know it very close to the end of the Hammer era. Some of his comments are ironic in one sense or another today. In his introduction, he speculates that “Perhaps time will add its own patina to the Hammer horrors of today.” Very true. But: “In quantity Hammer films are fast approaching Universal, but in quality they have yet to reach Monogram.” Harsh, and history has certainly reached the contrary conclusion, elevating Hammer’s efforts far above those of that poverty row studio. Something else Gifford says has bearing on today’s subject: “The new age of horror was geared to a new taste. Where the old films had quickly cut away from the sight of blood, Hammer cut in for a closeup.” Well, The Curse of Frankenstein and its ilk look pretty tame today, but they were strong meat in their day, and yes, Hammer offered much that was new even as it revived classic gothic horror, which had effectively vanished from the face of the earth from 1946 until 1957, when Hammer stepped up to the plate.

As promised last week, this monster-lover’s thoughts on Cloverfield. In a word: joy. In the pantheon of giant monster rampages, this one should find a place of honour. There have been a few good such films in the last while (most notably The Host, though one could argue that its creature is too small to make it a proper Giant Monster Movie), but this is the first really fine example to emerge from Hollywood in decades. Among other accomplishments, it washes away, once and for all, the sour taste left by the Emmerich/Devlin Godzilla (partly by taking some similar moments and showing how they should be done).

I won’t say too much about the plot, out of deference to those who might not have seen the film yet. The less you know, the more fun you’ll have. Suffice to say that a giant creature attacks New York, and the whole thing is presented as being shot on camcorder by a terrified witness and his friends. But then, you already knew that.

And so here we are, on the opening night of Cloverfield. This is a film that, as a huge fan of creature features, I devoutly hope will be good. So my thoughts on that perhaps next week. But with the possibility of the first original giant monster movie to come out of Hollywood since... since... Tremors?... being worth seeing, an unfortunate screening experience last night has moved me to reconsider some remarks I made here some time ago. At the time, I was mounting a defense of cheap CGI creature-featrues (of the sort that inevitably winds up on the Sci-Fi Channel) by making the case that they were analogous to the B-level monster movies of the fifties.

To a certain degree, I stand by those remarks. But I do wish to temper them somewhat, because I just watched Lake Placid 2. In the first place, this is a sequel a little tardy in coming. But perhaps the filmmakers were counting on the fact that most people would remember little else beyond the original’s title and the fact that there was a crocodile, since they re-use the same character types (only none are at all interesting). The humour of the original has also gone AWOL, even though the film seems to think that it’s being funny (it isn’t).