With From Beyond, H.P. Lovecraft firmly joined Edgar Allen Poe in the canon of horror writers whose cosmic meditations on the limits of sight proved finally unadaptable to cinema. Or, at least, not adaptable directly. Quite amazingly, From Beyond is even less connected to its Lovecraftian source material than its immediate cinematic predecessor, 1985’s Re-Animator. With Lovecraft, at least, this is thoroughly unsurprising. The moonless prophet of the incalculable and unseeable would, presumably, struggle to find any light in cinema, one of the more naturally representational of all mediums. How, of course, does one visualize the limits of visualization?
Thankfully, writer-director Stuart Gordon and writer-producer Brian Yuzna seem to have responded by running in the opposite thematic direction. While the narrative content of From Beyond superficially explores the limits of human vision and the consequences of potentially megalomaniacal attempts to overcome those limits – “five senses weren’t enough for him,” one character remarks on the ostensible antagonist– the style of the thing is saturated with cinema’s capacity to visualize. Like many great horror films, From Beyond is essentially about the ability of humans to comprehend the totality of having been forced into a film world, which plays the role of a diviner, creating a catastrophic shadow play that doubles as, and threatens to become, a genuinely dark art. Rather than asking whether cinema can see, as many Lovecraft films would likely be inclined, Gordon’s film asks what cinema shouldn’t see but will anyway, and what the consequences of its vision might be for the souls trapped in it.
Whatever may or may not be true about the demise of the New Hollywood in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the story practically writes itself, and it certainly helps spice up the films. Michael Cimino’s oneiric Heaven’s Gate, Francis Ford Coppola’s dementedly luxuriant Apocalypse Now and his heartfelt, slovenly One from the Heart, and, of course Robert Altman’s own Quintet and Popeye all went grossly over-budget and wear their exaggerated passions on their sleeves. But, unlike the others, Popeye was nominally intended as populist entertainment! And it is as thoroughly scatter-brained and bedeviling and dumbfounding as any last one of them, a truly suis generis slice of creative hack-work, as perplexing as the crystal Mrs. Miller looks at, searching for an impossible answer to America’s riddles at the end of Altman’s masterpiece McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Much like Coppola’s One from the Heart, it is fundamentally about Great Depression popular cultural, and like One form the Heart, it is absolutely deranged. As with Coppola’s film, it went colossally over-budget producing a set that it could not possibly justify (and yet does!) that was constructed, in Altman’s case, on location seemingly with the intent of evoking a soundstage. Or to serve as Altman’s backdrop for a production-length coke party. From Shelley Duvall’s note-perfect, almost impossibly serendipitous performance as Olive Oyl, to Robin William’s dangerously committed, deliberately alienating turn as the titular outsider who genuinely seems to occupy a different world from everyone else in the film – and because the film is so thoroughly estranging, therefore the same world – this is an absolutely uncompromising dispatch from another cinematic world. It is so feverishly committed to its own disturbed wavelength that it feels like it could have been directed by John Boorman, although probably without the Sean Connery nut-slings.
Still, it’s an Altman film, through and through. Many of Altman’s films were, in one way or another, a dissection of how America related to its own visual and aural iconography, finding (at times accidental) truth in fiction. Popeye, at the time chastised as Altman selling out to the pop cultural lexicon he so often dissected, explicitly tackles a recycled consumer property by name, and under the belly of the Hollywood studio system. Opening on a shot of the animated Popeye, black-and-white, speaking directly to the camera, informing us that he’s “in the wrong movie,” the film smash-cuts to a stormy seaside town as “A Robert Altman Film” appears overhead, usurping the titular character’s authority with a decidedly different breed of central figure. Popeye initiates itself by dissociating itself from the fiction audiences might expect, already foregrounding disharmony and hinting at the difficulty, even the incomprehensibility and delirious idiocy, of making a live-action adaptation of E.C. Segar’s comic franchise and the Fleischer Studios animated cartoons at the end of the 1970s. The introduction is a direct descendant of Altman’s Brewster McCloud, where the iconographic MGM lion roars with the audio replaced by René Auberjonois’s “I forgot the opening line,” another confrontational fiction-breaking abnormality and a promise on Altman’s behalf that the story we expect has been distorted and defanged.
After spending the better part of a decade running riot with the works of Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft’s chthonic short stories seemed like the obvious next step for American International Pictures, another textual canvas to scrawl on and fascinatingly deface. Unsurprisingly for any connoisseur of low-brow, high-aspiration mid-century horror, this is a decidedly untethered adaptation of Lovecraft (which befits AIP’s extremely loose orientation toward Poe as well). Rather than a paean to celebrate or altar to worship, Daniel Haller’s The Dunwich Horror appropriately figures the author as a portal to channel or an opening to explore, a cosmic constellation of images and suggestions to tease out rather than submit to.
Haller’s film opens with a kind of precis for the texture of the whole film: a tableau of static figures locked in time, a fully ordered, barely moving presence, that is nonetheless cut up and disfigured by the editing, never fully clarifying into a clear vision or a pierceable image, something at once obvious and misleading, manifest yet ephemeral. The scene seems to give us everything and nothing: a woman seems about to give birth to a demonic entity, marking this as a Rosemary’s Baby pastiche, but the bit ends before we can fully grasp it. In this tension, The Dunwich Horror disorients itself but also finds a mode of expressing its theme, a battle between order and chaos in which the delineation between the two may not be so easy to divine, and the forces of societal control may not be what they seem.
Mute Witness begins with a self-consciously showy, bravura gesture, but it takes a few minutes to really set itself apart. Opening on a breathy, lascivious, leering POV outside an apartment window, the camera sways, shimmies, and then strikes as it, and we, get closer to its, and our, inevitable prey. Soon enough, our reflection in a bathroom mirror informs us of our obvious identity, a stocking-ed killer on the prowl. It’s a ghoulishly effective opening, but it isn’t what separates the film from the chaff. Nor is it the inevitable reveal that this is all a sequence from a film-within-a-film being presently shot on a film set. Opening in precisely this way, even a moderately experienced horror film viewer will already be expecting someone to yell “cut” from the get-go. This kind of “film-within-a-film” opening from a first-person perspective dates back at least as far as Brian De Palma’s Blow Out. And the concept itself is just Hitchcock’s Rear Window with an inability to use one’s legs traded for an inability to speak, both signaling an increased attention to the eyes. Mute Witness is, if nothing else, decidedly comfortable with its thorough-going lack of conceptual originality.
No, what separates the film is how it brings down the veil. Instead of the usual director’s voice yelling “cut,” the killer stabs his prey and simply saunters off to the corner of the room to observe his handiwork, taking out a cigarette before another hand simply pokes into the frame to light it as he watches with a smirk on his face. Then another hand enters with a swig of alcohol, all struggling to batten down a laugh. The “dying” lady is really over-selling things, making a spectacle of herself, making a real meal of the demise, flopping around every which way. What we assumed was a shot within the film-within-a-film is now just a shot within our film, Mute Witness. There is no “cut.” We aren’t shocked into another, critical perspective but surprised that we’ve nonchalantly sidled into one without even realizing.
Without even so much as a cut to separate the film-within-a-film from the film, the prey from the predator, one layer of audience from another, we’ve moved into an entirely different imaginative universe, one in which we aren’t unwilling coconspirators the camera’s penetrative gaze but giddy co-compatriots with its capacity to hide and reveal, deny and expose, to play and replay. We’re made to notice that what we are watching is a theater of perspective in which knowledge and power are always thorny and unstable, and we’re invited along for the ride.
Rumble Fish is plainly the product of a director who had been bruised and humbled. After producing at least four genuine cinematic classics during the 1970s, the near-death experience of making Apocalypse Now, an exercise in cinematic self-flagellation that wanted nothing less than to both channel and contest the very warp and woof of the world,did nothing to quiet Coppola’s ego, which went on to just barely stabilize the remarkable, unfeasible, impossible flop One from the Heart. Reigned in but not daunted, Coppola looked to the aspirations and dreams of his children to make a pair of S.E. Hinton adaptation The Outsiders, which certainly conjured images of his own youthful days. The evocative but nonetheless straightforward The Outsiders was Coppola on guard, proof that he could – for the moment – play ball. But Rumble Fish, his second Hinton adaptation in the span of a few months, was something else entirely. Forced to domesticate himself, to play house with the corporations, he became a termite, gnawing away at the wood from the inside. Working as a director-for-hire turned into a secret, sideways passion project, a buckling of the man’s Ahab-like desire to conquer the cinematic machine becoming a quieter rebellion, a tacit conspiracy with the machine itself. Rumble Fish reaffirms that art, even swallowed by the very belly of the beast it once tried to destroy, cannot be killed.
North by Northwest lacks Vertigo’s deliriously unhinged inner excavations, or Psycho’s id, or The Birds’ nihilistic opacity, or Rear Window’s playful self-contemplation, but it may be as wry and wiry as Alfred Hitchcock ever got. In inching toward the sleek, aloof, maximalist delights of high-gloss, haute-couture 1960s pictures, North by Northwest isn’t necessarily nervier than it otherwise would be, but it certainly does provide an impish new spin on Hitchcock’s wickedly self-amused sense of self. It’s superficially glossy feel somehow makes its observations all the thornier, like a razor wrapped in cotton candy. That Hitchcock’s most overtly pleasurable film so smoothly and surreptitiously smuggles in so many minuscule wrinkles and devious intimations that all is not right with America may even be a surer display of his astringent talents. Figured as a grand confidence act at the end of the 1950s, it feels like the last time Hitch could celebrate the delirious excesses of modernity, and pungently dissect his own complicity in it, before Psycho and The Birds took him into the cloacal core of terror and abjection respectively. It’s far from Hitchcock’s cruelest film, but something about its chipper demeanor feels uniquely nasty nonetheless.
For North by Northwest is very much a sly deconstruction of America, one that practically announces itself with its famous final set piece, a suggestion that America’s national monument, and its pretensions of greatness, is really just a home base for conniving and cheating one another. Climaxing atop Mt. Rushmore, Hitchcock’s hilarious planned Lincoln-nose sneezing gag never came to fruition, but there is something amusing about the censors only allowing advertisement executive Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) to slide around between the faces rather than on them, as though the film is playing around in the crevices and shadows of American monumentality but never quite getting to the core of the matter, either because America is too dense to really know or too shallow to be worthy of exploration. Atop an edifice of stone, a monument of national lies and hubris, we find only a slippery conspiracy of ne’er do wells that runs on battery acid. North by Northwest is the ur-film, the apotheosis of Classical Hollywood, a cinematic snake oil salesman that sells us on itself even as it tells us what kind of poison we’re about to drink.
I won’t say that Escape from L.A. wasn’t working for me from the get-go – the first diegetic image is pretty stellar shot of the Sam Fuller school, a quick-fire slug of Nazi-adjacent American soldiers lined up against the camera, as though blockading it from access to some dark secret behind them – but the moment where John Carpenter’s fifteen-years-later sequel clicked for me is the one where it seems to completely collapse. When our resident eye-patched libertarian outlaw Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is tasked with rescuing a black box containing US satellite codes from post-apocalyptic prison-colony Los Angeles, he takes a one-man submersible into L.A., which is now separated from the rest of the U.S. and only accessible via air and water. We, however, take a roughly 60 second slalom through some of the roughest mid-‘90s CG you can imagine, Snake’s comically sleek submarine hurtling through an abstract void that is meant to connote “water”, passing by a toxic garbage plate of pixels registering ever-so-briefly as a “shark”. Finally, in a split-second, we rush past the drowned Universal Studios sign, now a lost relic from a forgotten age. The shark suddenly clarifies as a CG travesty of Universal’s great hit Jaws, itself a famously iffy effect thoughtfully used in only privileged moments, and Escape from L.A. clarifies its own status as one of the great Hollywood piss-takes, a mockery that is also a howl of frustration aimed at what Hollywood had done to Carpenter’s medium of choice. The title is not a not a statement of fact but a genuine wish, not a declarative claim but a plea for help.
Judging from the rest of the film, its deeply caustic ambivalence and jovial nihilism, its playful absurdity and nasty cruelty, it is impossible to read this as anything other than a vicious take-down of the idea of a CG action sequence, a curdled critique of the limits of Hollywood, even the idea of making a sequel to 1981’s Escape from New York. The consequence of this ferocious, even callous brazenness is that the film’s vision of redemption is reduced to apocalypse, and that Carpenter’s vision of anything like politics essentially consists of an empty void, but the beauty of the film is that it registers the sadness of a director reduced to that position. If Escape from New York was a caustic scalpel, Escape from L.A. is a libertarian broadside aimed at society writ-large. Gone is the sense of impromptu, even thorny, community in New York, or Carpenter’s The Thing, with its paranoid ruminations on humanity’s capacity for self-destruction, or Big Trouble in Little China, with its comparatively convivial reflections on the inadequacy of Hollywood male archetypes, or Prince of Darkness’s mercurial meditations on the potential for science and religion to work together. The possibility for human salvation through collectivity has no place in Carpenter’s mature brand of nihilism. While his deeply underrated Christine implicitly assaulted Hollywood’s acts of cinematic necromancy, its inability to fashion anything new and need to feed off the corpses of earlier visions of youth and coolness, Escape from L.A. is his most full-throated bite of the hand that feeds.
In that sense, the cosmic uncertainty of Carpenter’s wonderfully underrated 1994 film In the Mouth of Madness was a pivot point. With its harrowing and sublime investigation of the limits of directorial control and the disturbing psychic and cosmic forces unleashed by the intersection of art and corporatism, Madness seems to have opened a portal from which humanity may have no return. Escape both explodes outward – into a brutal, deliberately un-subtle burst of savage playfulness – and implodes inward, into a cloacal vision of Hollywood’s intestinal tract. When Snake’s submarine lands in L.A., the ground immediately gives out from under it, as if it can’t bear physical soil or withstand real concrete, can’t exist outside the false machinations of a Hollywood CG sequence, but also as though the film is plea-ing for Snake to stay on the island, to not return to a world that has no place for him anymore, to appreciate what Hollywood has to offer. In the vortex of chaos, he has found grace, has located the possibility of home.
From there, we’re off to the races, a transparent, scabrous mockery of Hollywood that is also a celebratory account of Hollywood’s genre-hopping excess, from a simply breathtaking absurdist surf interlude where Snake hangs ten with Peter Fonda, washed ashore from another genre entirely, to a hang-glider ride that ends in Disneyland’s “Happy Kingdom,” now turned into a haven for potential leftist revolt that, the film can only suggest, is another illusion of Hollywood radicalism, a fantasy of immediate satisfaction and sudden solution. Stranded in the middle of all this, we start one sequence where Snake is about to punished passing by several scenes of gladiatorial combat, Carpenter teasing a replay of the same set-piece from Escape from New York, before we learn Snake’s fate, a hilarious undercut: a basketball sequence, five shots without missing, ten seconds for each shot. It’s the mid-‘90s, Carpenter seems to suggest, and we need a basketball film in our map to the stars.
More generally, Escape from L.A. film is a work obsessed with the fabrication of Hollywood mythology, from the obvious (Bruce Campbell as the Surgeon General of Beverley Hills, who collects bodies to recover skin to keep his scions perennially beautiful) to more subtle remarks, such as the continual refrain “I Thought You’d Be Taller” that becomes a sort of needling chorus throughout the film for characters who meet Plissken. Snake twice attempts to assault or kill his U.S. government captors early on, reminding him that they know more tricks than he can muster, and that he, and we, will have to learn that we are being manipulated and may have to play the same game to get our revenge. Snake finally learns this in his phenomenally disastrous exit from the film, a blast of cosmic nihilism rarely seen in any film, let alone a blockbuster.
In many ways, Snake has to learn what, and if, Hollywood manipulation has anything to offer him. In a stellar sequence, he sets the stage for an Old Hollywood standoff against his enemies and then devastates the very rules he sets up. Shooting before he says he will, his opponents ae too locked in their Hollywood idiom, in the L.A. vision they still, however loosely, assent to, to know what hit them. The tensions are deep here. There is remarkable ambivalence within the film: for all that the film posits L.A. as the last vestige of possible freedom, L.A. itself is also a transparent theme park, a self-conscious Hollywood vision of absurd that is both celebrated and lamented by Carpenter, who seems to suggest that no other freedom may be possible other than that afforded by Hollywood, that the only forms of freedom we’ve been reduced to are those proffered by American movie fantasies. From here, Carpenter would return to collectives in Vampires and Ghosts of Mars, but both of those films offer little possibility of escape.
It’s not a subtle film, you can probably tell, but it isn’t dumb. When Snake tells the feds that he’s lost his hologram projector, for instance, we’re meant to intuit that he’s lied to them when he achieves a devastatingly mischievous coup with it at the conclusion, even though the film never explicitly reminds us that we’ve been lied to by our protagonist an hour earlier. The film knows that we’re watching, and maybe not watching well enough. When we first meet Steve Buscemi’s “Maps to the Stars Eddie,” he sidles into the frame behind Snake as the latter is resting in placid repose, quietly frustrated to himself, yet also posing in classic Hollywood bearing. He too is a star charting his course, the film seems to say, but he is also being charted, both by others around him and by decades of Hollywood archetypes he cannot fully shake off, and that this film cannot escape from. How else to explain the final shot. Having shut down the world, Russell interrupts his own final moment of solitude, only to catch a stray suspicion and stare at the camera, striking a cheery-nasty pose for the viewers he now acknowledges. Snake, the film seems to know, simply can’t exist as a real person. The only home he can know is an assemblage of smoke and mirrors. In his quest for escape, he comes to realize that he was always-already a cinematic type. He isn’t our savior, and he doesn’t want to be, but Hollywood cinema can’t actually posit a kind of hero useful for everyday life. The best thing the film can do is conclude, to turn this film’s end into a thesis on film’s end. We, the film says, can only be left to our own devices.
Motel Hell opens with an absolute pip of a silent sequence, a seemingly offhand shard – as though the film started too early, or we’re watching things sidle into place – that ultimately becomes the lens through which the whole film might be viewed. As the camera fades in, Vincent (Rory Calhoun) slyly and somewhat laconically smokes his pipe on the porch of his mostly defunct roadside motel Motel Hello, the “o” flickering out and the red bathing him in a warm but hellish glow. It’s a remarkably casual, easy-going, even lethargic bit of filmmaking – nothing is really happening, except another moment in this random person’s day in anywhere U.S.A. – and yet the texture of the scene folds us into a milieu and a mood. The font of the credits itself mimics the Motel font in a simple but effective means to suggest that we, ourselves, are now entering the headspace of the hotel itself. I have to say, readers, I was instantly smitten. Motel Hell is like that: it accomplishes more than most films, yet it barely does anything at all.
Before watching Two Evil Eyes, you would be forgiven for assuming that director Dario Argento was the hanger-on. Originally planned to include sequences by Argento, John Carpenter, and writer Stephen King, Argento certainly seems like the odd man out. Carpenter and Romero seem like an obvious match, and King and Romero had already collaborated on the phenomenal Creepshow, a deliriously kooky anthology horror film that fully recaptured the spirit of the EC Comics horror tales. (Carpenter, too, had already directed an adaptation of King’s Christine). The obvious impetus for this film is Creepshow and Romero’s subsequent, lesser Tales from the Darkside show (also adapted into a 1990 film whose best segment also features a fiendish feline), and Argento, who didn’t usually sign on for this sort of thing, may have just been along for the ride.
The script for 1990’s The Guardian was finally credited to William Friedkin, Dan Greenburg, and Stephen Volk , but, watching the monstrosity, it is immediately obvious how many unmarked hands touched and tore the film to bits before its release. This slapdash production is transparently the work of many eyes and voices working at cross purposes, a cinema born of unfulfilled expectations and necessary compromises. While loosely based on the novel The Nanny by Greenburg, the film’s producers invested heavily in director William Friedkin’s history with supernatural horror and insisted that the film incorporate Exorcist-like cosmic tendrils absent in Greenburg’s book (which I have not read). Rather than Phil (Dwier Brown) and Kate (Carey Lowell) Sterling being threatened by Camilla (Jenny Seagrove) – your everyday local duplicitous nanny with a penchant for stealing human newborns – they are the victims of Camilla, a malevolent cosmic force and eldritch, Druidic forest demon who needs to sacrifice babies to her God. Rather than a parable of domestic fear, The Guardian assaults the senses with a thoroughly supernatural account of Christian theology’s Other. Sometimes things just go like that.
The bandages of the film’s construction are plainly apparent watching the finished film. Scenes end too early, last too long, or seem to be missing completely. Ideas are brought up and dropped within the span of a scene, the tell-tale sign of a film scrambled in the editing rhythms either to rush to the proverbial “good stuff” or to recover from a lack of coherent footage. It’s difficult to tell whether this happened prior to filming or during the process, but Friedkin seems palpably divested from the main currents of the story or the emotions of the characters. If, say, his The Exorcist is an exquisite diamond of a horror picture calculating every scene for maximum effect, The Guardian is much closer to that film’s famously tortured, unfocused, misbegotten sequels.
The Long Take 