100 Scariest Movie Moments: #26 Seven

I’m not breaking any new ground by saying that Se7en inspired Saw. It’s a loose inspiration, with pieces wildly rearranged into a totally new product, but the inspiration is still there. In fact, Seven inspired virtually every movie about a serial killer being hunted by the police that came after it in one way or another.

So then, why do I bring up Saw specifically? Because in an odd way, Saw has overshadowed it. Certainly, Se7en is a far better movie. However, Tobin Bell’s performance as Jigsaw, in and of itself, is such an amazing presentation of a visionary killer that he makes Kevin Spacey’s John Doe seem quite quaint by comparison. As we see him, we think of Jigsaw, and we imagine Jigsaw verbally breaking Doe down into nothing more than a common thug, before jotting his name down as a possible sixth alternate on his current list of people to be tested.

Looking back on it as a contemporary viewer, this creates a natural problem for Se7en. When it came out, it seemed to be the story of an intelligent killer whose mind made a disturbing amount of sense. Now however, it’s a film about a religious nut who killed a few people out of a sick obsession with perfecting the world. In fact, the world of Se7en mostly seems too functional to really need a visionary killer to wake it up. At least when compared to the world of Saw, in which at least half a dozen murderers, rapists and other assorted low-lifes can easily be scooped up for “testing” in every film. That throws a monkey-wrench into Se7en, as we no longer feel that what we’re watching is all that important.

Se7en revolves around Detectives Mills (Brad Pitt) and Somerset (Morgan Freeman), hunting a killer who tortures and/or murders people who he views as “sinful.” He bases his murders on the Seven Deadly Sins, force feeding a fat person to death, tying a slothful individual to a cot for a full year while keeping him alive and so forth. The first two acts of the movie revolve mostly around Somerset and Mills’ interactions, with Mills as the hot-headed young cop with a massive streak of overconfidence, and Somerset as the old, jaded mentor cop.

Pitt and Freeman have excellent chemistry and are fundamentally the reason the movie works. It has a definite pre-9/11 feel, with a great deal of concern shown for the difficulty of tracking a suspect who has a right to privacy. However, this is never presented as something morally wrong, simply as a fact of life that police are expected to deal with. This sets it up as something of an unintentional period piece, reflecting two cops navigating the values of the 90s.

The most bizarre thing about the relationship is Mills’ characterization, which breaks the standard stereotype we initially expect. He’s a Cowboy Cop rule breaker, but not the cynic of the pair. Rather, Somerset is the by-the-book cop, mainly because he’s too cynical to believe that anything he does could ever make a serious difference in the world. Mills is the renegade because he believes that he can achieve some good by going above and beyond.

Only one scene in this particular film actually gave me chills, and it wasn’t one of the ones most people cite. Most people find either Gluttony or Sloth to be particularly frightening kills (...or, in the case of Sloth, not-kill). The Pride victim however had a very psychological nature to her punishment that made me feel deeply uncomfortable. Her face was disfigured, and she had a phone glued to one hand and a bottle of pills glued to the other. She was given the choice between either calling for help and showing her new face to the world, or ending her life, and she chose the latter.

John Doe himself is finally introduced in the last act, turning himself in to the police. Based on my previous comments, I’ve probably given the impression that I dislike Spacey’s performance. That isn’t true, I merely feel that he can’t compete with Tobin Bell. He does have a creepy vibe, even if we’re now jaded to the idea of a creepy serial killer who punishes people for their “sins,” and gives self-aggrandizing speeches to the police.

The ending of the movie is now well known. Doe reveals that he killed Mills’ wife in an act of Envy, causing Mills to kill him in an act of Wrath. Whether or not this represents Doe breaking his pattern is a matter of internet debate, which I can’t easily settle here. (I’d need a definitive answer to whether the Sloth victim actually died and whether the Lust victim was the prostitute or her John to determine what the precise the pattern of the murders were).

The beats of this movie are perfectly paced. I attribute that largely to the fact that this is a David Fincher film. Dialogue flows together and scenes transition as smoothly as butter. The movie’s early dialogue scenes are never boring, the confrontations are never rushed, and the visuals are never uninteresting.

I highly recommend this movie. Even if it doesn’t scare you, it’s well-worth it to see Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman together, with Kevin Spacey as a cherry on top.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #27 Frankenstein

I’ve made it my goal in each of these reviews to give at least some description of the plot, rather than simply assume that my readers already know it. And so, I will follow through with that intention. However, for anyone who doesn’t know the plot of at least the movie Frankenstein through pop cultural osmosis, I must ask the question: How in the Hell are you literate enough in English to be able to read this?

Frankenstein tells the story of Henry Frankenstein (Victor in the book, but the events are so wildly different from what happened in the book that there’s little need for comparison), who robs graves for body parts in order to create a humanoid creature, thus unlocking the secrets of life. Unlike The Wolf Man, which was never especially controversial relative to other horror films of its day, Frankenstein was considered absolutely shocking to the sensibilities of 1931.

The most famous line is unquestionably “It’s alive! It’s alive!” But among movie buffs, the line immediately following those words has taken on an almost equal degree of fame… “In the name of God! Now I know what it’s like to be God!” This line was in the 1931 original release, but was cut out of subsequent releases due to the adoption of the Hayes Code forbidding such blasphemy. For decades the line was thought lost, but thankfully, some time ago, the original audio tracks were found.

While the movie is visually unimpressive by modern standards, which is to be expected of a film from that era, the themes are still shocking, and Colin Clive (the Doctor) and Boris Karloff (the Monster) both give excellent performances. I can hardly claim them to be my favorite interpretations of the characters, simply because the 1994 adaptation Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein exists and dealt far more directly with the source material. But to compare their performances to such an incredibly different movie seems a bit unfair.

It is unquestionably a testament to the quality of the movie that after all these years it still remains creepy. You really believe that this is a man insane enough to play around with life and death simply to satisfy his own morbid curiosity, as well as with his own innocent but dangerous creation. I feel like there’s a comparison to Re-Animator to be made here, but that would be almost like comparing Saving Private Ryan to 300.

I have mixed feelings about the ending; specifically, the decision by the studio to reshoot so that Henry survived being thrown from a windmill by the Monster. On the one hand, the ending itself is obviously tacked on. They couldn’t even get Colin Clive to return for the reshoots, so they just shot a scene of several people standing outside his bedroom talking about his recovery. However, it did open up the door for Bride of Frankenstein, which is the true thematic completion of the original story, giving the monster dialogue and exploring the concepts of scientific ethics even more deeply than the original film did.

Hilariously though, Bride of Frankenstein also has a tacked-on ending in which the Monster, having decided to destroy both himself and the primary antagonist for that film, allows Doctor Frankenstein to escape with his bride. For that ending, I have no excuse. The monster had rationally reached the conclusion that not only should he be destroyed, but so should everyone who was remotely involved in his creation... except, apparently, for the man who created him!

That said, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein are both beautiful films, deserving of their place in cinema history.

Wednesday Review: The Other Side of the Door

I wish I had written my review of The Other Side of the Door the night I saw it, immediately after getting home. I was ready to let the film have it, but was tired and wanted to get some reading in before bed. So, a decision was made to delay writing it until the next day. By the time I woke up the next morning, the movie was so forgettable that it had almost left my mind completely. Now, as I sit here more than 24-hours after my initial viewing, I write only to somewhat salvage the wasted cost of my ticket by throwing up a blog post about this film.

The movie is objectively horrible. It's actually somewhat astonishing that a movie this bad isn't more easily remembered. It deals with a Western family living in India. When their car goes off the road, the mother is forced to choose between saving her unconscious daughter, or her son whose leg is trapped. She escapes with the daughter, leaving her son to drown.

She's told by her housekeeper that if she has her son cremated, and takes his ashes to a particular temple, she can hear his voice through a door. However, she's warned that if she opens the door the consequences will be dire (why the door can't be nailed shut, I don't know). I'm not sure if I need to waste my breath telling you what happens, but just in case a chihuahua is reading this: she goes to the temple, and opens the door, freeing her son's spirit to haunt her family.

Firstly, I'm a bit tempted to accuse this film of racism for it's portrayal of Hinduism. However, Wikipedia shows the film as a British-Indian co-production, and I can't claim enough knowledge of religious traditions in Indian to say for sure. Much of it seems like stereotypical savagery to me.

More significantly, the movie is simply badly made. The actors are terrible, the children especially, and there is not a single character in this film who has any real sign of identity beyond their role in the story. The children die before we get any real chance to know them. In fact, when the ghost of young Oliver demanded his mother read to him, it was literally the first time in the movie we had seen his mother read to him. The film makers lacked the basic competence to establish any relationship among these characters.

Meanwhile, the father spends much of the film away on business. This is clearly because the writers simply had nothing else to do with him during long portions of the film. That alone would not be a problem, but we're constantly treated to brief phone calls between him and his wife that add nothing to the story, and just remind us that he's in the movie. Apparently we're too dumb, or he's too bland, for us to remember that this family included a patriarch when he returns for the final act.

As for jump scares, they're everywhere. At one point a loud noise tells us that we're supposed to be scared because...a coffin contains a dead body. This isn't a coffin that appeared out of nowhere. The main character had ordered this coffin dug up, and was present while it was being unearthed. But we as an audience are still supposed to be horrified by the idea that the coffin has a dead body in it. And that's merely one of the legion of obnoxious jump scares that failed to make me so much as twitch.

It's almost as if someone set out to make a movie that's as bland and uninteresting as possible. I would be shocked to find that anyone involved in this movie had the slightest hint of a creative vision. This entire film screams an assembly-line, jump scare-ridden piece of generic trash that isn't worth anyone's time.

So, in brief, my advice is to save your money. This is a bad movie, with little to nothing to distinguish it from dozens of other bad movies, both past and future. If you're desperate to see a foreign horror, and only a recent one will do, then I would suggest The Forest. Say what you will of it, but that movie at least felt like it had a reason to exist.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #28 When a Stranger Calls

Usually, when writing these reviews, I disregard the “Moments” aspect of the list. I consider this to be a fairly prestigious list of horror films. But oftentimes, what scares me is not the same as what scares the people who devised the list. For example, I find the horse suicide in The Ring far more disturbing than the little girl coming out of the television. However, for When a Stranger Calls, the scary “Moments” are something that really aren’t under dispute.

I say this because the film is remembered, pretty much universally, for its first twenty-minutes. Most people don’t even seem to realize that the killer calling from inside the house was resolved in the first act, and that the movie then cut to seven years later with him escaping from an Asylum.

This is primarily because there’s nothing else worth remembering. The movie feels like an intense short-film with two more acts stapled on, merely because no one was going to pay to see a 20-minute movie.

Those first twenty-minutes are the story of a baby-sitter named Jill (Carol Kane), who begins receiving mysterious phone calls asking if she’s checked the children. After hours of being harassed, without having done as the caller suggested even once, Jill calls the police and gets them to trace the call. After her next interaction with the strange caller, she receives a call from the police and is told that the calls are coming from inside the house. She sees a shadow upstairs as she runs out and finds a police officer already waiting outside. We’re then shown the house a few hours later. We’re told that the children have been dead for hours and the killer was covered in their blood, waiting for Jill.

This first segment is based on a classic urban legend, and it does an excellent job of making the situation legitimately scary. The killer is never seen, giving him a real aura of dread. Furthermore, the movie averts the usual horror movie expectation of sin and punishment. Jill is, at best, a negligent baby-sitter for her failure to check the children. However, had she done so, the killer would have murdered her as well So bad things happen for no reason, and good behavior is no more likely to save you than bad.

The remainder of the movie then takes this set-up and ruins everything in a blatant attempt to expand the story to feature-length. The mysterious killer is now a British man named Curt Duncan (Tony Beckley). Beckley’s performance is great! In fact, it’s one of the few saving graces of the latter part of the movie. Were this any other film, he might actually have been good villain. However, this movie, having based its first act on the idea that ‘Nothing is Scarier,’ has now gone right out and shown us the face of the Devil, and he’s a homeless British man who we feel sorry for. It’s clear that monster or not, he’s a very lonely person, who lacks the ability to connect with others.

Most of the next hour of the film consists of Duncan making friends with a Middle Aged woman named Tracy (Colleen Dewhurst), who feels sorry for him, while being chased by PI John Clifford (Charles Durning). Clifford was Duncan’s arresting officer seven years previously, and intends to kill him under the guise of having been hired by the father of Duncan’s victims to recapture him. Eventually, Clifford recruits Tracy, but Duncan sees through the ruse. Dewhurst is at best passable, and Durning would probably have been better if the script didn’t feel like a massive anti-climax.

The final act of the film feels like a mockery of the first. I’ve heard it said that one of the rules of film making is “never remind your audience of a better movie they could be watching.” In this case, the movie decides to remind us of a better part of the same movie that we could rewind and watch all over again. Duncan, barely escaping Clifford, somehow tracks down Jill. She’s now married with two kids and is going out for a night on the town with her husband, until she gets a call at a restaurant from Duncan asking if she’s checked her children.

But of course, Duncan is not actually in the home. He was planning his attack for later that evening. His phone call to the restaurant served no purpose other than to scare Jill, tip off Clifford and remind us that we are indeed watching When a Stranger Calls. We’re then treated to a period of Jill freaking out, Duncan attacking and Clifford showing up just in time to save the day and kill Duncan.

I’ve heard it said that cliches are cliches because they work. In the case of the slasher film, that’s certainly true. When this film came out, there were already a number of films we would likely have called “Slashers,” including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Black Christmas, and Halloween. I get the impression that this film was trying to play around with the formula, but it doesn’t really work. The only onscreen death is Duncan’s. The children are killed off-screen, their bodies never shown, and Duncan does not actually succeed in committing another murder during the entire run time of the film. We feel sorry for him, sure, but we’re not scared of him.

As a film, this really isn’t something I can recommend. As I said though, the first 20 minutes are chilling to watch. I’m glad that I don’t give star-ratings, because I think it would be impossible to rate “the movie as a whole,” rather than judging it as two separate films.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #29 The Serpent and the Rainbow

I think it took me several viewings to really get The Serpent and the Rainbow. However, it’s a creepy movie. As far as I can tell, it’s the source of the “powder that makes you appear dead for several days” cliché, although I believe this may only be that powder’s primary use in horror. It generally seems to pop up in dramas and mysteries in which the plot dictates that a character be dead, then not be dead.

The film is very loosely based on a true story, because the reality was far less interesting. There was an anthropologist who claimed that such a powder actually existed. Today, there’s an ongoing controversy over whether or not he committed fraud. The alternative seems to be that there is such a powder, but it has such an unbelievably low success rate that no one’s ever been able to reproduce it under laboratory conditions, and the actual cases of zombies are rare anomalies that happen just often enough to make people believe.

That said, this movie delves into the nature of reality and belief. Dr. Dennis Alan (Bill Pullman), our main character, goes to Haiti, hoping to discover the secret of zombies because of the potential uses as an anesthetic for surgery. The movie is technically a period piece, set against the downfall of Bebe Doc’s government, but the setting is only ten years before the film was made.

Dr. Allan finds a knowledgeable practitioner named Louis Mozart (Brent Jennings). Mozart’s an interesting character, as he’s willing to help Dr. Allan purely for his own benefit. Initially, he wants money for the powder, but eventually gives it to Dr Allan simply because he believes it could make him famous. Louis is a wise-cracker, who we're led to like, but far from heroic.

On the other hand however, a priest and official under Bebe Doc by the name of Peytraud (Zakes Mokae) is determined both to drive out the foreigner and to protect the secrets of Voodoo. This is not because of his piety, but simply because he sees the power of the religion as something to keep enemies of the regime in line; so he threatens to steal the soul of Dr. Allan.

The eventual fall-out walks a line between the magical and the mundane. Dr. Allan has many horrifying experiences that may be supernatural, or may simply be the result of chemically induced hallucinations. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter, because both possibilities are terrifying beyond belief. Eventually, this culminates in Dr. Allan being buried alive and dug up to face Peytraud in a vulnerable state.

Bill Pullman gives an excellent performance. I’ve heard some accusations of racism directed against this movie, but given that every main character other than Pullman’s is black, it seems to make perfect sense that the villains are black. Furthermore, Voodoo is portrayed as a Religion that has been corrupted by the leaders of Haiti, not simply as evil magic.

The final few minutes of the movie arguably go a bit too far with their imagery and actually begin to come across as silly. On the other hand, I suppose a man who’d just been poisoned and buried alive might see some silly things. Whether he’s been attacked with magic physically, attacked with magic psychologically or just dosed with chemicals is left for the viewer to decide. Hell, any event that happens after Bebe Doc fleeing Haiti (which, at minimum, we know actually did happen) is pretty much up for grabs.

I wish more movies like this existed, mixing physical terror with the psychological. There is no monster to jump out and say “boo.” There is only human evil in whatever form you believe it manifests, harnessing whatever powers it can. This movie is great.

Wednesday Review: 10 Cloverfield Lane

I had two reactions to 10 Cloverfield Lane. The first was a strong suspicion that The Ring has just been replaced as the go-to example when arguing in defense of PG-13 horror. This movie is at times terrifying, and I can't think of a single scene that would have been enhanced with gore or nipples.

Secondly, I felt a bit disappointed that the trailer gave away quite as much as it did. The first few minutes of the film provide plenty of fodder for a trailer, with our protagonist waking up to find she's been locked in a room by a strange man played by John Goodman. The trailer gives away that they're in a bunker and that there's another man with them, as well as hinting at the outside threat. For a movie that marketed itself primarily around secrecy, it's amazing just how much is given away.

However, you could argue that that's the point. If there is a single element that runs between the Cloverfield movies it's marketing that teases a movie with twists and turns, and then delivers something shockingly straight forward. I don't say that as a criticism, in our world of shocking twists it's often far more surprising for a movie to proceed in the most logical manner possible.

Does that mean that this movie is without a twist? Not at all, it does have a twist. But that twist isn't the point. The point of the film is these three good actors in a tense situation, with John Goodman stealing the show as a character who can invoke both sympathy and terror with equal ease. A lot of the film consists both of the characters navigating their own interactions, and dealing with situations that could realistically arise from living in a fall-out shelter.

There's apparently some on the internet who didn't like the twist. I'm not among them. However, if the movie does have a flaw it's that the twist was dragged on far too long. I remember sitting in the theatre and thinking “There's the twist, roll credits!” The movie then continued for another five or ten unnecessary minutes. I could see an argument that the finale few minutes are needed to show us how our main character has been changed by her experiences, but I feel like the scenes immediately preceding the twist had already put those changes on full display. The ending comes off as downright redundant.

That's not to say the film is bad, however. Even at it's worst it's still entertaining, and at it's best it's a Masterpiece. It left me hoping for a long-running anthology of Cloverfield films, and speculating on what could come next. I can't recommend it strongly enough.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #30 The Blair Witch Project

I’ve been contemplating how to make what I have to say about The Blair Witch Project extend for more than a scant few paragraphs, and I’ve come to realize that it cannot be done. I really don’t have that much to say on the matter of a movie that has been talked about, parodied and generally referenced for well over a decade.

As for what I do have to say, firstly, I find the movie enjoyable, and secondly I find it scary. For a film to check both of these boxes, even among the 100 movies I’m reviewing, is quite an accomplishment. There are several films on this list that I haven’t enjoyed watching (Alice, Sweet Alice and The Howling being good examples), and very few actually frighten me (I tend to look at movies from a more analytical perspective). So while The Blair Witch Project did not have me jumping out of my seat in sheer terror, it did manage to at least make me feel a little uncomfortable

I could point to certain “down sides” in the movie. For instance, the characters are not particularly memorable. (This is most likely the reason why this movie didn’t catapult any of its actors to super-stardom). Also, the story is so simple that many of the scenes could be re-edited in almost any order, and I don’t think I would be able to tell the difference. However, I don’t really see these as true negatives. In other films, they might have been, but this is a film about tone. It’s style over substance. So to me, there are no genuine “down sides” to such a film.

100 Scariest Movies Moments: #31 Friday the 13th

Reviewing the original Friday the 13^th is not an easy task. Unlike most series in which the original cemented the brand, Friday the 13^th became an icon of pop-culture largely because of Part 3. This leaves Part 1 mostly as a gotcha trivia question (“Who was the killer in Friday the 13^th?” “…Jason?” “No, Mrs. Vorhees!”), and Part 2 as almost completely forgotten. It was in Part 3 that Jason first wore the hockey mask. It was also in Part 3 that it became clear the lunatics were running the asylum, as the series became more and more self-referential and just downright silly as it continued. This is not something I object to by any means, but it’s wildly different from the original.

The original came in the still somewhat early days of the slasher film. So strangely, the movie does not feel the need to correlate the character’s fears with our own. For most of the film, none of the characters know that anything is wrong as the killer makes at least some token efforts to conceal the bodies until only one victim is left. We on the other hand, periodically see a murder happen, reminding us that something is very wrong.

People have tried to claim that the movie has an anti-sex message. I disagree with this assessment, which seems built on an inability to distinguish between Mrs. Vorhees (Betsy Palmer), who slaughters teenagers for having sex because her son drowned when he was not being watched by camp counselors, and director Sean Cunningham, who set out to make a movie about a crazy woman who killed teenagers having sex.

The set-up of the movie is that Camp Crystal Lake is being reopened after two decades. It was originally closed after a series of events that included a drowning, two murders, as well as more minor issues like fires and bad water. Before the camp officially opens, a group of councilors have gathered, getting everything ready for the kids. The camp’s cook (Robbi Morgan) is picked up by a mysterious traveler whose face is never seen on her way to the camp, only to be attacked and killed by the driver.

Peeping Tom was the first film to use the killer’s perspective, but Friday the 13^th popularized it. Here, it’s used much more cheaply, primarily as a way of showing you the violence while concealing the identity of the killer. The reason for concealing her identity baffles me, because there’s no mystery. We’re introduced to Mrs. Vorhees moments before she’s revealed as the killer

The best-remembered death of this film is easily Jack’s (Kevin Bacon). That may be at least partially because of Bacon’s later success. But I suspect part of it is because as the era of slasher films has continued on-and-off for decades, it’s the only death that’s really creative. The killer is under the bed Jack’s laying on and grabs him and holds him to the mattress. She then forces and arrow up through the mattress and through his neck.

I don’t want to give the impression that I dislike this movie. It’s a classic, exploitative slasher film, following in the footsteps of Halloween. Of the dozens of movies that fit that exact description, this is one of the few that really feels like there was some talent behind it, and most of the characters are reasonably likable. It’s a shame that Cunningham did a lot more work as a producer than a director after this, I would love to see an episode of Masters of Horror directed by him.

If you ever have the time, I’d say watch this movie in a marathon with the following three, as they form a fairly complete story. Mrs. Vorhees attacks and is killed, then her not-quite-dead son returns from the lake and begins a series of escalating killings that end with his apparent death in Part 4. Even without the others though, it’s a fun ride.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #32 Pet Sematary

If I could ask director Mary Lambert one question about Pet Sematary, it would be this: The same child wanders onto the same road while a large truck is coming twice. The first time the parents sound mildly annoyed in their screams of fear, the second time they sound terrified. Why is this? Did they realize that Herman Muenster was going to save their child because it was too early in the film for tragedy to strike?

As with The Dead Zone, this is a Stephen King story that feels like it would work much better as a mini-series. The main plot doesn’t feel quite as rushed as it did in Dead Zone, but there are side plots that still feel as if they were likely intended to have more development. The most obvious of these is the character of Victor Pascow (Brad Greenquist). We’re introduced to Victor as he’s rushed to the hospital, severely injured, and dies under the care of protagonist Louis Creed (Dale Midkiff). Victor gives Louis an unbelievably vague warning,“The soil of man’s heart is stoney.’ If you know what that means, you’re doing better than me,” and then continues to appear to Louis as a ghost throughout the remainder of the film. Why is Victor’s spirit sticking around? Why does he declare in the last twenty minutes of the film that he’s not “allowed any further?” I have no clue.

There’s another subplot that seems fairly unimportant, but more than makes up for that by being the most genuinely disturbing part of the film. Rachel (Denise Crosby), Louis’ wife, tells a story about how her parents had forced her at the age of eight to stay at home while they went out to care for her ailing sister Zelda (Andrew Hubatsek). Rachel feels continuing guilt because she remembers wishing that her sister would die so that the family would be rid of her. Rachel later has visions of her sister and the evil forces try to torture her with her own guilt. Between the make-up and Hubatsek’s performance, the scenes are just messed up.

The actual plot of the film is a lot less interesting than these subplots. Louis and Rachel move to a new town, and make friends with Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne, the aforementioned Herman Muenster), a local hick who saved their son from his first encounter with a dump truck. Apparently, the trucks run every few minutes down the road next to their house, filling up the local Pet Cemetery, but building a fence around their yard to prevent their son from wandering would be too much trouble. Eventually, their cat is hit by a truck and Jud decides to let Louis in on a secret: the locals can revive dead pets by burying them in a second Pet Cemetery (declared a Sematary by a misspelled sign written by a grieving child), not far from the first, which is on top of a Native American burial ground. (I’m not even going to waste my breath on how racist that cliché is.) This works, but the cat is noticeably more aggressive, and stinks.

Then, the evil happens! Their toddler son, Gage (Miko Hughes) is hit by another truck, and so Louis ignores Jud’s warnings and buries Gage in the Pet Sematary. However, Gage comes back, not simply as an aggressive corpse, but as a demon, killing Jud and terrorizing Louis. Rachel is killed, demon-Gage is killed, Louis deludes himself into thinking that he can get Rachel to come back non-demonically by burying her immediately instead of waiting. The movie ends with him kissing his blood-covered wife as we see her reach for a knife. Cut to black, Louis screams.

I probably made that sound fairly uninteresting, and it’s true that the main plot isn’t really anything to write home about. Watching the interviews about this film in the original 100 Movie Moments special, I find it a bit hard to understand why this film was chosen. The general consensus among those interviewed seemed to be that the movie had a groundbreaking theme of “body without soul isn’t life.” New rule: If at least two sub-genres (zombies and vampires off the top of my head) have been built entirely around an idea, you’re no longer allowed to claim that it makes your story special!

The movie’s real failing point, though, is demonic Gage. Creepy children can be effective, but the movie has a problem in basically treating Gage like any other monster, posing a physical threat despite being tiny. Even using stealth and a scalpel, I find it hard to believe that Gage was even strong enough to slice up Jud so effortlessly. Biting into his neck to severe his jugular shouldn’t even be worth considering, but the filmmakers do it anyway. Say what you will about The Omen, at least it knew that Damien wielding a weapon and physically attacking the heroes would not be frightening.

I understand that there are currently plans to remake this film, and I’m curious to see what they’ll do with it. That said, there’s nothing fundamentally “wrong” with the original. It’s cheesy, yes, but the cheese mostly works. The acting is decent, and Gwynne is somehow fun to watch, even when he’s just sitting there. I think this would be a perfect film for a Halloween movie night.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #33 The Fly

The science of The Fly makes as little sense as the original 1950s version. Apparently, the transportation machine can reassemble any substance perfectly, except for DNA. I imagine that realistically, Dr. Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) should have faced instant death rather than a gradual transformation into a fly-monster when his DNA was accidentally spliced with a fly as part of a teleportation experiment. Still, the movie makes the imagery gritty enough and ‘Brundlefly’ disturbing enough that we can suspend our disbelief.

By the standards of most horror films, this movie is unbelievably subtle. We get extended sequences without dialogue in which emotions other than abject terror are communicated to the audience. The most notable of these is one in which Dr. Brundle is able to put on an acrobatic display in his lab to impress his love interest, reporter Ronnie Quaife (Geena Davis). He’s able to spin around a bar until he touches the ceiling with his feet. We can see that Seth believes this to be a great achievement, and believes that his teleporter has somehow improved him. However, seeing this sequence, the tension builds as we and Ronnie know that there is something wrong with him.

When I see this film, I fundamentally see a deconstruction of traditional masculinity. Seth meets Ronnie by showing her his teleporter, which she suggestively allows him to demonstrate with her stocking. He explains that the machine works on non-living things, but will kill anything living in gruesome ways (he demonstrates this point with a baboon). It’s clear that it’s his intelligence that makes him attractive to her. Furthermore, it’s sex with her that inspires him to finally reprogram the machine so that it’s able to safely transport a second baboon.

What destroys him, however, are his macho urges. Before the baboon can be properly tested, Seth gets drunk and decides to test the machine on himself out of some misguided attempt to prove his courage. He fails to see a fly that lands on the inside of the pod door. The fly comes to represent his most primitive urges. They feel good, but they’re destructive and unhealthy. Seth tries to force Ronnie into the teleporter, still unaware of the fly and believing the teleporter to have “purified” him. When she refuses, he goes out, challenges a redneck in a bar to an arm-wrestling contest, maims the man with his super-strength and uses the event to pick up a woman named Tawny (Joy Boushel).

While Tawny’s scenes are brief, they make the subtext extremely overt in regards to Seth’s behavior. He impresses her with his strength and then shows her his teleportation machine. Unlike with Ronnie, he doesn’t even bother to explain what it is, simply allowing her to believe that it’s some sort of magic trick. When Tawny refuses to go through the teleporter herself, he grabs her and says “you’re going to like it!” This gives us the obvious metaphor of Seth as a rapist, playing with other people’s bodies the way he played with his own, and only Ronnie’s intervention stops him from forcing Tawny into the pod.

Seth’s actual deformities develop gradually. He first grows a few unusually tough hairs from his back, then begins to develop a rash. Eventually, his skin becomes a pile of boils, his hands become distorted, and his teeth fall out. He becomes unable to eat solid food, instead dissolving his food with acid. His hair falls out and his ears fall off. The final act of the movie begins with him discovering the fly through his computer records. And from that point forward, the movie consists of us watching him decay, both physically and mentally.

Towards the end of the movie, Seth feels himself losing empathy as he becomes increasingly insect-like in his thinking. He gives a speech in which he said he’d like to be the first “insect politician,” meaning the first insect capable of compassion and compromise. However, he fails at this. When he finds out Ronnie is pregnant and seeking an abortion, he breaks into the clinic and kidnaps her, viewing her as a possession. He attempts to force her into the transporter pod, believing that he can merge with her and the baby to become a being that’s at least closer to human than his current form. When he tells Ronnie this, his skin begins to fall off and we see him fully transformed into a fly-creature, the humanity ripped away with the last traces of his empathy.

The cavalry comes in the form of Stathis Borans (John Getz), Ronnie’s ex-boyfriend and editor. He’s a character I haven’t mentioned up until now, mainly because his interactions were primarily with Ronnie. I’m a bit uncertain how much we’re supposed to feel about him. During her initial meetings with Seth, Stathis tells her that he’s a fraud and acts jealous, despite Ronnie having broken up with Stathis before the movie even starts. I believe director David Cronenberg intended to set us up with an expectation of a traditional happy ending, with Stathis attempting to call the military who wrongfully view Seth as a threat in retaliation for Seth “stealing” Ronnie, Seth finding a way to cure himself and Stathis receiving his comeuppance.

Instead, Stathis arguably undergoes the exact opposite of Seth’s journey as he becomes more empathetic to Ronnie over the course of the film. He fully supports Ronnie in her decision to get an abortion, entirely for sympathetic reasons. When Seth takes her, he comes to Seth’s lab with a shotgun, and despite being mutilated by Seth, Stathis is able to disable Ronnie’s telepod, causing Seth to be merged with the machine itself.

There were originally several different endings filmed, all of which were hated by both test audiences and the filmmakers themselves. They gave us variations of Ronnie is pregnant, Ronnie is not pregnant, Ronnie is ambiguously pregnant, Ronnie is back with Stathis and Ronnie is single. I think it’s not hard to see why these endings didn’t work: all of them attempted to give you closure on a movie that was about a situation that could not be easily resolved. Literally, any true “ending” to the story would seem false.

So instead, the movie closes with Ronnie fatally shooting Seth, now in agony from his fusion with the telepod and crying over his death. There is no final answer. There is no silver lining. Instead, there is only tragedy and despair.

One thing I want to draw attention to in this movie is the lack of overt phallic imagery. Given the obvious masculine nature of the fly, I suspect that not giving the final form of Brundlefly a more prominent proboscis was a conscious decision. The film seems to see the male body as completely unconnected to the reckless and aggressive actions that destroyed Seth Brundle.

If the movie has a failing, it’s that it’s too short. It’s only about an hour and a half, and only the final third deals with a visibly mutating Seth. I think another half-hour of watching him fall apart little by little would have greatly increased the impact of the movie.

As it is, however, this movie is a fine example of horror filmmaking that scares you with both horrifying visuals and creepy ideas while questioning societal expectations. Gene Siskel outright accused the Academy of snubbing Goldblum for a Best Actor nomination due to their prejudice against the Horror genre. This is Cronenberg’s best-known film for a good reason!