Catching up on some of the famous Universal Horror films I have missed a chance to review until now. Just in time for Halloween too! ‘Tis the season…
The Wolf Man
After a trio of terrific Frankenstein features, a pair of other memorable monster pictures, and a cabinet of curiosity’s worth of assorted slippery cinematic tricks and treats, Universal finished off the 1930s in fine style. Having almost single-handedly ushered the silent cinematic stylings of playful expressionism and fantastique into the sound era, the company was apparently tired. Very tired, and withering away, but not before one final ride into the sunset before the dark days of WWII made fantastical cinematic horror largely irrelevant and quaint compared to the sandblasted nihilism of the curdled noir genre. Continue reading
Catching up on some of the famous Universal Horror films I have missed a chance to review until now. Just in time for Halloween too! ‘Tis the season…
As with his prior film Knife in the Water, which was fittingly set at sea and stitched together by jagged, knife-like, tetanus-inducing cuts, Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-sac is filmed like a pirate on a bad day. It’s as though the camera is a sword constantly teetering between literate, venomous pen and protruding phallus, both of which seek to do bodily harm to the characters in the film in their own respective ways. The film, like all of Polanski’s best cinematic scalpels, feels dangerous down to its very artistic construction – the way shots are not so much sewn together as they are stabbed into one another – rather than simply dangerous in its subject matter. That distinction between cinema with dangerous subject matter and cinema with dangerous form to test that subject matter is what separates a film with something to say and a film with a means to say it. It is what separates a mere provocateur from a truly demented, haphazard genius of the form. Roman Polanski laughs at us because he is proud to be both. 
Angel Heart begins as many film noirs do, with the grim patron of New York City – nominally in the 1950s but very much marinated in the nightmarish mental collapse style of noir so popular in comic books around the late 1980s. It’s a city with a death wish, but Angel Heart moves beyond the urban decay that so christened 1980s cinema and into the soaking wet juices and oils of sewage-filled Southern decay and centuries of forlorn backwater communities. For a decade of cinema so replete with misbegotten depictions of city life, Angel Heart is not only a lurid noir genre piece, but a trenchant reminder of the areas left unspoken and unanswered in industrial-focused American cinema. It quickly transplants its hero from the deathless New York to the backwoods of Louisiana, and the film follows him. It becomes a tale of Southern conjuration, a capsule of thought that reconnects the mystique of the urban nightmare with the cruelty and majesty of the rural areas of American imagination from whence those cities grew out of the earth. 
Italian cinema has always been a murderer’s row of contorted stylistic bravado. From elemental Western no man’s lands to diabolically garish horror cinema to rambunctiously loopy, absurdist comedy, Italian cinema has done it all. Yet the streams of neo-realism, the earliest well of Italian cinema, had largely dried up by the 1970s. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Padre Padrone nominally recaptures that spirit of earthen woe and low-to-the-ground cinema, but their style is more cosmically barren than it is naturalistic. The oppressively wide frames contrast with the grisly immediacy of the 16mm stock to evoke the sensation of peering into an empty limbo of human loneliness. The earthen hues of the piece reveal the contagious habits of the almost primordial landscape that infects the characters with its own unforgiving dejection. 
Say all you want about Werner Herzog or Wim Wenders, but the undisputed frothing mad king of the New German Cinema will always be Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a director who matched Herzog for sheer raving asymmetry and bellicose rabies and equaled Wenders for unbridled empathy and quiet cinematic majesty. His deeply volatile, unsavory films rode horses inconstantly and threw caution to the wind, and they were dueling reflections of a mind that was itself in inconstant descent. Fassbinder, mercurial and never metronomic, barely passed the decade mark as a film director, but the singular impression he left on the cinematic landscape of the world remains indelible. No director could match him for entropic cinema that nonetheless attained its own sort of dissociative cohesion and snowballing sense of purpose. 
“Preachy” is a word critics, both amateur and professional, throw out like they see the next Woody Allen movie; regularly, with businesslike efficiency, and knowing full well they are dragging themselves to an early grave in the process. We do it all the time, in other words, even though we know it isn’t good for us. There is nothing wrong with a movie with a high opinion of itself, or a low opinion of others, or a point of view it stands proudly and angrily in favor of, as long as its bite matches its bark. I’ll take a sermon any day, as long as that sermon is delivered with all the fire and brimstone a preacher can muster. When it comes to cinema, I’d rather watch a preacher than a lecturer. About the latter, all I can do is pray.
I cannot, in all honestly, fully denounce any motion picture that is photographed by Roger Deakins, but Unbroken sure puts in its best college try. Even Deakins, evoking mystery and dread in a number of shots, is going through the motions here, and the film’s most endearingly chiaroscuro frames function as little more than pictorial convulsions of superficial beauty, adding absolutely nothing to the texture and tone of a film that doesn’t have much use for Deakins’ insurmountable knack for rendering even the most mundane landscape with all the rugged fantasy and mythical imagination of a storybook. 
It is entirely possible that Big Eyes signals a new phase of Tim Burton’s career. Upon the death rattle of the vaunted “I actually care about my films” phase fifteen years ago, he went on a decade sabbatical in the tar pits. Or the cotton-candy pits, I suppose. Big Eyes is something of a lift-off away from the muck he grew to shill out throughout most of the ’00s, but having removed himself, he has not necessarily set himself on a new course.
