Brain Blasters

Well, I’m back, with apologies for a couple of weeks’ absence, and with some more facile musings. I’ve dumped all over M. Night Shyamalan in this space before, and it would be tempting to do it again, but I haven’t actually seen The Happening yet, so I won’t officially trash it right this minute. However, the vox populi has spoken, and the movie is officially a bomb, which makes three in a row for our boy, following up the atrocities of The Village and Lady in the Water. Which means it might, perhaps be time for a re-evaluation of the auteur, perhaps even time for a different branch of fandom to claim him for their own.
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Airport 1975 is the most famously bad of the franchise. It’s the one that gets all the attention. But in fairness, The Concorde: Airport ‘79 should not be ignored. Let’s give it a moment in the spotlight, shall we? Yes, let’s, if for no other reason that George Kennedy’s Joe Patroni character finally moves to centre stage.
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Last week: the lovably pathetic spectacle that was Airport 1975. This week: Airport ‘77. “Bigger and more exciting than Airport 1975!” boasted the trailer. And for once, the publicity was right. That doesn’t mean the film is good, as such. But it does represent an interesting exception to the law of diminishing returns when it comes to franchises. Three movies in, and we encounter as close to a high point as the franchise is going to get.
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So, last time, we examined Airport, which I see as something of a proto-disaster film. While it is in many ways the fountainhead of the 70s cycle, the disaster itself is a third act development. The same is not true of its follow-up: Airport 1975 (1974). This flick emerged at the height of the disaster movie craze (the same year as Earthquake and The Towering Inferno). There’s no ambiguity here. It’s all about its disaster. It’s also quite rightly featured in a little tome entitled The 50 Worst Movies of All Time.
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Recently, I’ve had occasion to go back and revisit the Airport franchise. The 70s disaster movie arguably came into being with the first film (though the first pure disaster film of that era is more properly The Poseidon Adventure). If the peak of that cycle of cinematic carnage was Irwin Allen’s The Towering Inferno, and its spectacularly lovable nadir is Allen’s The Swarm, the Airport movies fell somewhere between the two. The best are the first (Airport itself) and third (Airport ’77). The other two – Airport 1975 and The Concorde: Airport ’79 – approach The Swarm‘s level of cosmic ineptitude.
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I’m very late to the party here, but I’ve never been shy about jumping on a bandwagon (if I might so mix my metaphors), especially one as spectacularly kitted out as this one, so allow me to add my voice to the legion who are chanting the praises of Inside (French title: A l’intérieur). Directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, this brutally effective piece is yet further evidence that the creative vanguard of the horror film has shifted from Asia to French-speaking Europe.
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All right, I know this horse is so dead it’s glue, and I’m one of the killers, but after calling for a remake last week, I have to at least go on record with my extreme dread over some others coming down the pike.

My principle in this series has been to look at films that were botched the first time around, but nevertheless contained a germ of something that might actually blossom into a wonderful piece of work, given the right team. Meanwhile, there are some projects that sound wacky enough that they just might work, but don’t (hello, Neil LaBute’s Wicker Man). And then there are those that are doomed from the start.
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Two weeks ago, I proposed that, if remakes were inevitable, the subjects of said remakes might as well be worthy of that treatment. In other words, if the original is mediocre or worse to start with, no harm done. And maybe we’ll finally wind up with a good film. Granted, experience hasn’t given us much cause for optimism in this department, but hope springs eternal, even in the face of terrible odds, otherwise the human race would have committed collective suicide long ago.
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Kino has long been the go-to company for first-rate DVD editions of classic films, with a special emphasis on the silent era. Recently, they have released a box set that is something of a wet dream for fans of vintage, hard-to-find cinema: the German Expressionism Collection.
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And so the remakes continue apace. While we shudder at the prospect of butchered returns to Suspiria and the like, this weekend we can head on over to Prom Night and pretend it’s 1980, particularly since, by all reports, a not-very-good movie has been redone as an awful one. But it didn’t have to be this way, which is what motivates today’s musings. Let’s say I’m in a if-you-can’t-beat-‘em-join-‘em frame of mind. If the remakes are going to happen, the subjects of the remakes might as well deserve it. Prom Night is a case in point: it’s not like they were messing with a classic here. The Amityville Horror is another example. The original, though dear to my heart, is, if I’m being brutally honest, not exactly what one could call “good.” And yet the remake was even worse.
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Severed hand films. Gotta love ’em. Not because they’re necessarily good, as such. The ones that have been (the various versions of The Hands of Orlac, or The Beast with Five Fingers) have been, ultimately, psychological thrillers. There have been honest-to-god crawling hands, of course, in wonders such as Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn, but Bruce Campbell’s misbehaving limb was a supporting character, rather than the central menace. But I return to my initial statement. Even if the film isn’t that good (or good at all), you have to love it for the crawling hand.
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Let’s consider today’s exercise a companion piece to my colleague’s excellent Dare to Play the Game column. That’s by way of saying to that I’m going to risk slightly poaching on his turf by considering a tangentially game-related topic.

I’m probably not going too far out on a limb to assume that just about anyone with access to an Xbox 360 or a sufficiently powerful PC played Bioshock at some point in the last year. Among its many qualities, Bioshock is one of the best-written games to have come down the pike, and one of its not-inconsiderable delights is the dialogue it engages with the ideas of Ayn Rand. Specifically, it is her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged that provides most of the game’s philosophical fodder. Anyone with the time to slog through the book’s utterly lunatic thousand-plus pages will surely find their appreciation of the game increased (and this is one of those rare cases where the writing, characterization and ideas of a game are consistently better than the work of literature it is bouncing off). And the book is so insane that is has an absolutely compulsive, Biggest Train Wreck Ever appeal. But let’s pretend you don’t have that much of your life to give up to an experience that can best be described as the philosophical equivalent of high camp. There is a more time-efficient alternative.
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Time to praise another journeyman performer, another unsung hero of the heterodox film scene. Today: Robert A. Silverman. He’s been kicking around the scene for ages, popping up in everything from Prom Night to Waterworld to Jason X. But his most memorable work consists of the sterling character turns he has done for David Cronenberg.
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So last week, I looked at Universal’s latest collection of their vintage SF movies, a set unfortunately limited to a Best Buy exclusive. We have another one of those today: the Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive. It, too, can be tracked down pretty easily through the Amazon marketplace.
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A while back, I nattered on about The Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection, a Best Buy exclusive from Universal of films long overdue for DVD release. That collection ranged from the top-flight classic (The Incredible Shrinking Man) to the mid-level classic (Tarantula, the official Second Best Big Bug Movie after Them!) to the unsung gem (The Monolith Monsters) to the middling programmers (The Mole People and Monster on the Campus). Today, Volume 2. It’s another Best Buy exclusive, but can still be found quite easily being resold on Amazon.
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One of the most devious, and delightful, films I’ve encountered in recent years is Incident at Loch Ness, a film that, if it isn’t the subject of a cult, should be. I mean, my gawd, it has Crispin Glover in a microsecond cameo. The real brilliance of this fake documentary is having Werner Herzog in the lead, a man whose filmography reveals a constant violent collision between fact and fiction, with the relationship not always moving in the direction you might think. Anyone wanting to see just how utterly bizarre things are in Herzogland should look no further than My Best Fiend, his 1999 documentary about his working relationship with actor Klaus Kinski.
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As everything under to sun sooner or later makes it do DVD, hope turns again to those films that are long, long overdue for the deluxe treatment. Consider this another installment of the Wish List, but with an asterisk. The film in question in Seven Footprints to Satan (1929). I’ll get to the asterisk in due course.
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Having just watched 30 Days of Night again in order to review the DVD, I find myself thinking about vampires. They are, of course, among the most frequent of horror movie monsters (perhaps only zombies, in their various forms, offer stiff competition in this regard). They also take up far more than their fair share of shelf space in the horror section of your bookstore, thanks to the likes of Anne Rice, Laurel K. Hamilton, and their legions of imitators. A brief scan of the literary and celluloid incarnations of the vampire reveal to principle archetypes. The first, and by far the most common, is the vampire as sexy beast. The other, is the vampire as beast, pure and simple. Interestingly, both cinematic versions, it seems to me, find their models in the first adaptations of the same novel: Dracula.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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Some films have the sort of subject matter that just screams “cult in the making.” Sometimes, the attempt at cult status is so blatant that the sense of the film trying too hard is off-putting. On other occasions, said status is a by-product of a filmmaker simply having assured fun with torqued material. Bubba Ho-Tep is one such example. A brand new one is Black Sheep.
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All right, after a longer delay than expected (my apologies), here with go with John Brahm’s The Lodger (1944). This is actually a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 effort, but Brahm’s film stands just fine on its own, thank you very much. Laird Cregar plays the title character. He is none other than Jack the Ripper, renting an upstairs room in a fashionable district. There he performs some rather dark medical experiments and obsesses over his deceased younger brother. Meanwhile, the family (pater familias Sir Cedric Hardwicke, mother Sara Allgood and singer/dancer daughter Merle Oberon) have more and more unanswered questions about their tenant. Hardwicke holds his suspicions at bay, but Allgood and Oberon become more and more nervous. Oberon has every reason to be, as her profession marks her as a likely Ripper target (so, yes, the fact that the actual killer’s victims were all prostitutes is rather glossed over). George Sanders shows up as the Scotland Yard detective assigned to the case, and also as Oberon’s love interest.
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