Category / film

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Go West, Young Man

Slow West (John Maclean, 2015)

This is the first Kiwi western.

It may be the first explicitly Darwinist western.

Although I suppose the first label doesn’t quite work on the model of spaghetti westerns. But the landscape, having been out of a job since the fifteenth episode of The Hobbit, gets to play Colorado and so forth. It does it well — and if I get the sense that the same mountains keep appearing, that is only appropriate since there is a dream feel to much of this.

I’ve not been a huge fan of the Western — I guess anxieties about the depiction of First Nations people hovered over them as I was becoming more aware of film and I don’t know enough history to unpick it. I probably need to know more about the American Civil War since so many westerns are set then or thenabouts. I’ve seen a pile of John Ford westerns (The Searchers will be key), Leone’s work, various Eastwoods (not, yet, I think, Unforgiven?) and some made since the turn of the century. The gaps are something I occasionally do something to fill. I don’t recall seeing The Missouri Breaks nor The Hired Hand. But the western is clearly part of the U.S. selfmythologising. There’s much written on it from a structuralist point of view — Sixguns and all that, antinomies, the outsider who expels himself from the society he saves…

So here we have Jay (Kodi Smit-McKee, from The Road), a young son of aristocracy, in search of his not really girlfriend, Rose (Carol Pistorius), on the run from Scotland for crimes that are not her fault. He’s a naïf. He barely needs to shave. And yet somehow — money, lots of it — he has gotten across the Atlantic and out into the West. When he runs into a Unionist officer and two men chasing a Native American, he also runs into Silas (Michael Fassbender) who agrees to help him find Rose.

For a fee.

And that suits Silas, because he wants to find Rose and her father. As indeed do a posse of bounty hunters.

We are offered a string of vignettes of the journey, which curiously lengthens its duration beyond its otherwise economical 84 minutes without out staying its welcome. The editing studiously maintains a right to left movement for our protagonists. We find a trading post, an anthropologist wanting to make his name from studying the native tribes, a group of Black musicians who speak French, a priest with a suspicious case and an old friend with a bottle of absinthe. We also see the skeleton of a pioneered killed by the tree he was chopping down.

Trust no one.

And there are flashbacks to Scotland and stories told around the campfire and meanwhile in Rose-land.

The hut whe she lives looks suspiciously clean even if new, and imported from Inglourious Basterds. Again, there’s something no quite real, as if Jay has conjured this up out of his romantic imagination. We are breaking the rules of narrated cinema — especially when we see a memory related by someone around a campfire that Silas isn’t at. The rules are broken as it veers between comic and tragic, an odd mix of Jarmusch, Coens and Anderson without being arch.

And we build to the generic imperative of High Noon.

There’s a shot at the end of The Searchers where we see out of the door of the house that the girl has been returned to, with Ethan (John Wayne) on the outside, leaving. There’s also a shot here, before a final montage, which rejects that kind of exclusion. The curious paradox of an ending which embraces a family unit being somehow radical — at least in generic terms. Evolution gives us survival of the fittest and Dawkins versions of this add selfish genes. Is there a place in that scheme for selflessness and charity and love? That would be the romantic ending. I think the truth here is murkier — put a foot wrong and you won’t survive. Survival is not a moral act.

This, a debut film from a Scottish musician, is definitely worth your time.

And in the summer that gave us Mad Max and not so feminist dinosaurs, I’d quite like to see Rose’s film.

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You Know My Methods

“But you have retired, Holmes. We heard of you as living the life of a hermit among your bees and your books in a small farm upon the South Downs.”

*

My villa is situated upon the southern slope of the downs, commanding a great view of the Channel. At this point the coast-line is entirely of chalk cliffs, which can only be descended by a single, long, tortuous path, which is steep and slippery. At the bottom of the path lie a hundred yards of pebbles and shingle, even when the tide is at full. Here and there, however, there are curves and hollows which make splendid swimming-pools filled afresh with each flow. This admirable beach extends for some miles in each direction, save only at one point where the little cove and village of Fulworth break the line.

Mr. Holmes (Bill Condon, 2015)

So the conceit is that Sherlock Holmes is real and retired thirty-five years ago (from 1947) to Sussex, after a final, unsatisfactory case, a case that has been published by Watson and even filmed, but which Holmes cannot quite remember.

Holmes has one of those canons that is easily filled – how did he learn his skills? what are those cases we are told he solved but we’re not ready for? what did he do in the gap between “The Final Problem” and “The Empty House”? what happened to him after Watson put down his quill? And then there are the inevitable continuity errors that add further layers – was Watson shot in the leg or shoulder? why is Watson called James in “The Man With the Twisted Lip”? was Watson married twice? And despite an occasionally proprietorial estate – with little connection to Doyle, I believe – we have endeavoured to provide solutions.
So Holmes has been living on the South Downs (or edging into Romney Marsh at times, I suspect), forgetting. Forgetting and remembering is a theme – he remembers the case, he remembers dealing with Mycroft and a visit from Watson, he remembers his trip to Japan. He has forgotten coming out of retirement on the eve of World War One and “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane”. Meanwhile, Roger (Milo Parker), the child of Mrs Munro (Laura Linney) his housekeeper, cannot remember his father, killed in the Second World War.
Holmes strives to retain and win back his powers of deduction, so he can resolve that last case, and to train up Roger to take over the bees, as the son he never had.

The word we’re looking for is redemption.

Curiously, redemption through stories and through lying to others.

So, Holmes is either lying or has forgotten that he has written two stories already: “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier” and “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane”. The stories themselves tell us he disputed some of Watson’s story-telling.

We’re meant to forget this.

We have McKellen, reunited with director Bill Condon who did the James Whale biopic Gods and Monsters (1998) with him – McKellen, one of those actors who’s always seemed old to me. I remember his coming out on Radio 3 – in 1987? I recall seeing his one man show, Acting Shakespeare. I was lucky enough to catch his Waiting for Godot with Patrick Stewart. I gather he’s done other movies and a sitcom (but Michael Hordern is Gandalf). Laura Linney is divine in a somewhat thankless role. John Sessions and Philip Davies have brief cameos, Roger Allam a bit more screen time. Colin Starkey needs a better agent (or there are bonus scenes). Virtually everyone plays it straight – aside from good old Frances de la Tour who seems to have wandered in from a sitcom (although not, I guess, Vicious) when they couldn’t afford Miriam Margolyes. If the film doesn’t work, it’s at the level of plot, not acting.

And what worried me, pondering at a hidden unhappy ending of the deaths we will not see, was the prickly ash that Holmes has brought home all the way from … Hiroshima. And then ingested. As, indeed, has Roger.
Maybe they end up with super powers?

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Point and Break

Queen and Country (John Boorman, 2014)

And way back in 1987, John Boorman directed an autobiographical film which was a loving portrayal about living through the Second World War, Hope and Glory. I remember rich reds and oranges and sunsets and barrage ballons and the occasional bombsite. Nearly thirty years on, we see the celebration of the child at his schools having been bombed, before cutting to a decade later and life on an idyllic island on the Thames as a prelude to being conscripted into the British army.

It is 1952 and the British are fighting Korea (as part of the communism vs capitalism war) and the old king, who never wanted to be a king, is dying; Elizabeth is going to be crowned and the new Elizabethan Age is dawning. Alter ego Bill Rohan (Callum Turner) meets new BFF Percy (Caleb Landry Jones, who I think gets top billing) and both get put in charge of the typing school and briefing the new recruits. Life is made unbearable by stickler Bradley (David Thewlis) and bearable by shirker Redmond (Pat Shortt) – and the whole film is made bearable by Major Cross (Richard E. Grant).

Is that damning enough?

And there’s girls, glimpsed at a cinema, nurses, and the One, Orphelia (Tamsin Egerton), whom Rohan falls head over heels with despite the large warning light over her head (and the fact that she does get to talk sense about how men treat women in the period whilst still being damaged goods).

I guess this is all very mythic and there’s that whole generation of writers and directors too young for the (Second World) war who did national service and had Sensibilities Formed; some went to to private school, others failed the eleven plus, they’re all eighty or above now, if they’re still alive. If asked, I think I might have assumed that Boorman had died at some point.

The film’s conflicted; on the one hand grandfather despairs about the shame that Rohan has brought on the family, on the other I seem to recall it’s him who gets to dismiss the first Elizabeth. And Rohan is a cipher – neither communist nor capitalist, neither really betraying or supporting others, not quite seduced by his sister, not quite clear what he believes in (besides what he reads in The Times). He is, I fear, the least interesting character in the film. You wonder how Korea itself is going to be handled – an early sequence is not promising – and you slowly realise that virtually everyone over 25 has some kind of PTSD. But there’s just enough gentle comedy not to despair.

I doubt there will be a quarter century gap before this is turned into a trilogy – but I’m assuming a third film about joining the movie industry is envisaged, Pearl and Dean, say. Fun with the Dave Clarke Five. Dealing with Lee Marvin. Buggery in the woods. And Sean Connery in leather shorts.

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Bigger, Faster, Louder, Better

Jurassic World (Colin Trevorrow, 2015)

You know precisely what you’re going to get.

You have the big sexy project that some people are wary about.

You have the ambivalent capitalist who may cut corners.

You have the amoral scientist.

You have the maverick expert.

You have the jeopardy parcel.

You have the people you want gotted, gotted.

You have the bloody obvious sequel hook (which they’ll probably ignore).

So, these kids’ parents are getting divorced for reasons that aren’t readily apparent and so whilst ma and pa lawyer up, dinosaur-obsessive (he’ll have to grow up) and emo-boy (he’ll have to lighten up) are sent to Jurassic World, run by Aunty Spinster who never seems to answer her phone (she needs to learn about motherhood).

Jurassic World, a sequel to Jurassic Park — yanno where so many people died — needs a new dinosaur to beef up visitor numbers and be bigger, faster, louder and better than the last one — yanno just like sequels in movie franchises. Meta. You remember the merchandising room in Jurassic Park (1993)? Just like that kind of meta. And comic-relief  technician/geek Lowery Cruthers (Jake Johnson) wears a Jurassic Park/Jurassic Park t-shirt. (He’s also told to take it off, because what kind of crazy tattooed scientist dude would wear an offensive shirt when there might be press around).

So, to get the bigger, faster etc dino they call in the fiendish Dr Wu (srsly) to miss up the DNA of Indominus rex, a name daft enough that at least the characters have the grace to laugh at. Rather late in the day, they’ve wondered if the walls surrounding it are high enough, although What Could Possibly Go Wrong? They’ve called in maverick expert (Chris Pratt — you know he’ll be a maverick because he lives in a trailer/cabin and tinkers with motorbikes) who warns them Things Could Go Wrong and we think Of Course They Can, Otherwise There’s No Movie.

It’s not clear whether he’s employed on another part of the island by the same company or he’s employed elsewhere or quite what we’re meant to think of his West African friend Barry (Omar Sy). The film’s not big on backgrounds.

So stuff goes wrong and they start closing down the park, only the Jeopardy Kids are still out there, at precisely the point where Rex is hovering. Small world. Big Jeopardy. They also get to find the original Jurassic Park and — well, I kept thinking, this world is smaller, faster, louder, worse, because the geography seems rather tight. I suspect we have a cut scene, too, as Emo asks Baby if he still has those matches even though we haven’t already seen them.

Oh there’s some neat stuff with velociraptors and a few jokes with feet being bird feet not dino feet and the T Rex is saved … but the final stand off is a rabbit out of a hat. Aunt Spinster is very odd — robot eyes at start (business woman out of depth?),  awkward at doing the Unresolved Sexual Tension, does a weird transform into action heroine thing without ditching the high heels, does — for once — grab the bloody gun. Aside from all the dinosaurs (presumably) she’s pretty well the only woman in the film — there’s tearful techy girl and divorcing ma, but that’s about it. Oh, no, I forgot, there’s her clueless PA.

There’s something going on too about not being quite qualified to drive though — John Hammond substitute Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan) hasn’t quite learned to fly his helicopter, Emo boy hasn’t quite passed his driving test? If we’re being meta, we might consider we have a tentpole movie (which Legendary Pictures clearly need after their recent box office duds Seventh Son and Blackhat) being directed by someone who has only been low budget before. I suspect, however, all the real work is done in special effects and second units.

And I haven’t even gotten to say WTF about evil military guy Vic Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio) who figures the dinosaurs have military value, just like the Company in the Alien franchise. Let’s take off and nuke them from orbit.

ETA: this is pretty sharp on the attitude of the film to women:

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Fast and Furiosa, Or: Foiling this Fiend’s Foul Plots

Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)

Just to be clear, the Mad Max of the title should not be confused with that other Max.

But basically we have a feature-length episode of Wacky Races directed by whoever did those Lynx adverts. Only feminist. Honest.

Because that woman who did The Vagina Monologues helped out.

In Road Runner country — although actually it’s a whitewashed Namibia.

It’s post apocalypse time and Mad Max (Tom Hardy) is kidnapped and dragged back to a citadel that produces water and mother’s milk to be used as a blood bank to Tony from Skins (OK, Nux (Nicholas Hoult)).  Meanwhile, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) has been employed to drive a tanker to a refinery, only this is an escape bid for her and the wives of citadel leader Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). The citadel sends out its best warriors and drivers to catch them.

Presumably one of the genetic abnormalities caused by the apocalypse is pale skin, because almost everyone at the citadel looks pasty. The women are of various ethnicities, and presumably mutant free, and I’m guessing they had been kidnapped.

The chasers include Dux, with Max doing a Bane impersonation on the front of his vehicle and a guy with a flame-throwing, double-necked Fender guitar because, hey, in this scarcity world we can afford to waste gas like that. And someone’s been looking at too many heavy metal album covers. Seeing a means of escape, Max jumps ship from the notably rubbish chasers and joins Furiosa, along with Nux.

There’s a bizarre encounter in a canyon — somehow Furiosa has communicated long distance that she can have free passage in return for gasoline, and nobody noticed that she set off to the refinery with a lot of gasoline — and then a pretty sandstorm and then a mudflat (gloriously macabre) and then a meeting with more women, I assume the surviving lifetime subscribers to Spare Rib. And then everyone heads home, somehow avoiding the mudflat.

The action hardly gives you a chance to breathe, although it is mostly followable even if it takes a big dollops of suspension of disbelief. Max is reluctant to give his name, but then I caught barely any of the women’s names.

And somewhere, as you try to work out if the Bechdel Test might be passed in a multi-million dollar franchise, you wonder whether it might not be a much better movie without young Max. He’s clearly heroic and knows both ends of a Glasgow kiss, grunts appealingly and can’t make eye contact in a Heather Ledger/Brad-Pitt-in-Twelve Monkeys kind of way,  but is he necessary for anything other than getting the project green lit, twenty years after first mooted. There’s Ethan Edwards and Shane in the mix of course, as well as the man with no name.

However, whilst the plot is about women being more than baby factories, there is a tendency to slide back to being the hope for the future and the seeds of life to come and female as nature. There is a degree of objectification — but less so than say Princess elia by the time of being chained up in Return of the Jedi. They do seem to be able to hold their own in a fight and there is a minimum of love interest as characterisation. If there’s little character development for them then that’s true of all but Furiosa.

Curious this: a film in which at least three characters find redemption, one way or another, but no character is especially changed.

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GRUMPiE

CHAPPiE (Neill Blomkamp, 2015)

So the afternoon was skating on ice — the gallery I was going to go to is now only open Thursday-Monday, but that gave me longer to write stuff in the coffee shop. And when I got to the cinema, they said that they might not show the film, because I was the only person to show. But two people turned up for Insurance (which I may well see sooner or later, but I would have hated today) and apparently that was enough — in fact a second person wanted to see CHAPPiE. But in twenty-five plus years of solo cinema-going I’ve never experienced that. I guess they in theory make a loss, but it hardly encourages me to return. I’d hoped to see it in Westgate on Sea, but that was last week.

So Blomkamp teases us — we have the after-the-event documentary and then we have the eighteen months earlier news footage and then, clearly, he can’t be arsed as we go into standard continuity editing. There’s this RoboCop rip-off police system of robot cops remote controlled by head sets which seems to be bankrolled by the guy who won that Slumdog Millionaire (Dev Patel) competition. Wolverine, meanwhile, has an even bigger badder robot that he’s trying to interest Ripley in.

Meanwhile, in another part of Joburg, Yolandi (Yolandi Visser), Ninja (Ninja), Amerika (Amerika) and Hoodie Guy (Hoodie Guy) have pulled off a drug deal only to be caught by Evil Subtitled Guy (Brandon Auret) who shoots one of them and demands 20,000,000 Rand within seven days. Ninja decides that he will kidnap the guy from Skins to access a RoboCop to… do something or other. Skins chappie, meanwhile, has stolen a RoboCop and has developed artificial intelligence when he clearly doesn’t have any of his own.

RoboCop is the spitting image of Sharlto Copley from District 9, or would be if they hadn’t done all that MoFocking MoCapping. It’s pretty, I grant you, but you too easily forget it’s a RoboCop and it seems to have rather too much servo motion. It needed to be more robotic. Copley gives a great comic performance but Woody Allen was a more convincing robot in Sleeper (Woody Allen, 1973). Then you mix in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), because RoboCop has a broken battery — although it’s five days rather than four years. Skins chappie is a younger and more handsome Tyrell, and you keep waiting for the burning so very bright speech. Frankenstein, too, as he’s a bad father and RoboCop gets bullied by some retrobates and some rather unconvincing fire. We have a Meaningful bit when he ponders why his Creator would give a faulty body and you just know that sooner or later he’s going to need a wife, sorry, Bride of RoboCop.

Wolverine’s robot echoes the military suit from District 9, which in turn echoes the suit from Aliens (James Cameron, 1986), or possibly the first one. It’s pretty poor stuff, frankly, which perhaps explains why the South African police force ain’t buying. By now, of course, you have the sense that it’s really an audition piece for Alien This Time It’s Three, in which Copley and Patel are going to play MoCapped aliens as some kind of mismatched buddies. A certain actor presumably was only there for about two days and you have to admire her presence of mind to grab her coat and handbag before exiting in an emergency.

Copley gets to wander around more South African waste grounds and shanty towns and CHAPPiE has a certain amount appeal even if it requires an awful lot of hand waving. Just as Evil Subtitled Guy (random alleged Nigerian) in District 9 wanted Wikus (Copley), so here Evil Subtitled Guy does too. Presumably he’s evil because he’s got knarked at having his perfectly comprehensible dialogue subtitled. There’s a rather better nonwhite acting quotient here — a Black chief of police, Patel of course, Amerika, a television journalist and so forth — but only two females with any significant dialogue. With the exception of Wolverine, I don’t recall anyone getting a backstory.

Maybe I should have gone to see Insurance? Although, of course, it seems to feature Kate Winslet continuing an audition to be Sigourney Weaver.

 

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Incredulity Towards Metanightmares

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (Wes Craven, 1994)

Popular culture relies on repetition with difference and there is perhaps no subgenre that is quite so repetitive as the slasher — the crime in the past, the discrete/isolated setting, the gender ambiguous and curiously mobile villain and their double the gender ambiguous final girl, the increasing number of unmissed teen victims… none of whom go to the cinema to see slasher films. Craven, finally, is allowed to visit his idea of a Pomo slasher and puts Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund and John Saxon at the heart of a movie about making an Elm Street style film, with a real Krueger going after the cast and crew. Alongside actors playing themselves, we have Craven as Craven and Robert Shaye as Robert Shaye and no doubt best boys playing best boys. As far as one can see, Langenkamp is better as Langenkamp than as Nancy, and Englund plays affable character actor troubled by nightmares.

Yes, it is clever and we have some more spectacular deaths, as well as further cameos from actors we probably last saw in the franchise. John Saxon as father figure melds into Thompson’s father and the original footage of A Nightmare on Elm Street is folded into the film. There is a sense of biting that hand that feeds them — dangerous with those metal nails — and possibly those actors would have gone to greater things than most of them did without the Elm Street resume. 

To the extent that Pomo is radical rather than neoconservative it is fun and interesting and at least foregrounds the cynicism of film franchises, but now the final girl is the final mother, kicking slasher butt because she is the lioness protecting her cub. We’ve neatly been prepared for the denouement by the telling of Hansel and Gretel, and the script plays into the generic  imperative of the open ending. 

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There’s No Place Like Elm Street

“Welcome to Prime Time, bitch.”

Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (Rachel Talalay, 1991)

Popular culture relies on repetition with difference and there is perhaps no subgenre that is quite so repetitive as the slasher – the crime in the past, the discrete/isolated setting, the gender ambiguous and curiously mobile villain and their double the gender ambiguous final girl, the increasing number of unmissed teen victims… and every so often one has to find a new set of teens to slash and eventually decided that an origin myth is needed. Or another origin myth.

What’s new about this film? It’s directed by a woman. This shouldn’t be an issue but there aren’t a whole lot of female directors for some reason. There’s an unfortunate almost collision between the bitch allusion title screen and this being A Rachel Talalay Film. I’d noticed the b-word being thrown around in the previous film and the language here is sweary. Talalay had been production manager on the first two Nightmare films, went on to Tank Girl (1995) and has reached the giddy heights of directing two Doctor Who episodes.

So, all the teenage kids of those who killed Freddy being killed, Krueger has now gone after all the other teens in town, with only one left in Springfield (was the town named before? I’m not sure.) The last teenager is escaping by plane, John Doe (Shon Greenblatt, how about that for Renaissance self-fashioning) and finds himself sucked out through a hole in the roof before awaking in a house that is in midair á la Wizard of Oz. Never knowingly underplaying a reference, Krueger (Robert Englund) does his wacky witch impression. Doe, having left the house next to the Thompson’s, in knocked out and amnesiac on the outskirts of town. Just as the manner of the killings in inexplicable save in terms of spectacle, so his survival is inexplicable, although this lacks spectacle.

Doe is taken to that other space that ideology send those who have not fitted into bourgeois family, the children’s home, home to the hearing impaired Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan), the drug-using Spencer (Breckin Meyer) and the sexually-abused Tracy (Lezlie Dean). One of the case worker, Maggie (Lisa Zane), with nightmares of her own, takes Doe back into town with the three teens stowing away. It turns out that there are no teens in town — the children’s home has missed this somehow — and, even worse, Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold cameo.

Freddy is back, clearly, with thus four more potential victims, but it is a sign of the depths to which the series has sunk that Carlos being stalked without hearing aid is played for laughs rather than menace. Johnny Depp, cameoing from the first film, gets to do an anti drugs message, the height of hypocrisy on the part of the film on acknowledging its post-Craven conservatism. Back at the home, no one seems to have heard of the three teens and Yaphet Kotto brings a much needed gravitas to the film as someone who tries to control his dream.

Unmentioned in the earlier films, it now turns out that Freddie had a child who was taken away from him and is part of the reason he is behaving so badly. Talk about over determination. The answer is to travel into hell and 3D effects and bring him back into reality where he can be killed. But by now we know that that second death is impossible — any death is temporary when it suits the plot. Or the studio, for that matter. Watch this space for daddy’s return.

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Alice Doesn’t Sleep Here Anymore

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Stephen Hopkins, 1989)

Popular culture relies on repetition with difference and there is perhaps no subgenre that is quite so repetitive as the slasher – the crime in the past, the discrete/isolated setting, the gender ambiguous and curiously mobile villain and their double the gender ambiguous final girl, the increasing number of unmissed teen victims… By now we’re onto a new generation of teens — Alice (Lisa Wilcox) has been handed the baton — and since the opening sequence is a blue-tinted* sex scene with Dan (Dan Hassel) you can do your own double entendres. You’d think this would mark her for death and when she jumps in the shower that seems to be her fate, only she becomes part of a more complicated dream sequence.

There’s this thing in Jacques Lacan about being between two deaths and the impossibility of the second death. It’s a variant on what is called the death drive, although the death instinct is a better translation. Nature, according to Sade according to Lacan, demands a total anihilation. Everything must return to dust. Lacan discusses Antigone, who is bricked up alive for the crime of burying her dead brother when this was expressly forbidden (and also she’s being made to carry the can for her dad Oedipus’ shenanigans). Bro had not had the proper rites read and thus his soul cannot rest — he needs the right rites. Antigone is a kind of Schrödinger’s heroine.

Think of all those horror films when characters have been buried alive or put to death with some kind of curse or rite. Some idiot comes along and reads the rite and brings them back — the undead being then seeks revenge. The only way to sort things is out — having read the wrong rites — read the right rites, right? But you never know when someone else will come along and read them again.

So here, as the cast point out twice, Freddy Krueger has murdered children and been burnt alive, without a proper burial. His spirit cannot rest and seeks revenge until the rites are read — in Part III. Of course, Jason the dog comes along and pisses on the corpse — writing being much the same as pissing*** — and brings him back until the rites are read again in the form of the climax to Part IV. But that second death remains impossible. Freddy continues to go after Alice’s friends in baroque ways and has Dan in his sights.

Of course, he’s not the only one unshrived. Agnes Krueger, his nun mother, had been raped by lunatics at the asylum and sought peace through the end of her son in Part III. We see her haunting — even though we’ve also seen a gravestone. There is still unfinished business clearly. The mother — a distant relation of Mrs Vorhees, one assumes — is now the double to Alice as the latter finds herself pregnant with, presumably, Dan’s child. Paradoxically this makes her safer, as Freddy is using her foetus’s dreams to come back. Abortion is rejected as an option, however. Meanwhile, in dreams, Dan/Freddy seem to merge and the transformation of Freddy from bogeyman to father figure continues. (The following year, of course, Edward Scissorhands emerges as tragic hero.)

Theory aside, the film is visually impressive — with some of the dream sequences channelling M.C. Escher. The comic geek Mark Grey (Joe Seeley) seems to have reacted to nominative determinism by wearing rainbows — which one might assume was indexical of his sexuality, but for his desire for supposed potential supermodel Greta (Erika Anderson). Before we can say, “beard”, we can admire the transition from live action to comic books, but the duel rapidly turns silly. But then, of course, most of this is about the spectacle.

[I’ll paste in the Lacan reference later]

Notes

* Or white/gold.**

** This “joke” will make little sense sooner or later. It’s something about a dress and colour perception.

*** Especially when snow is involved. Cf. the excuse “I’m writing my name in Narnia.”

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And What She Found There

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Renny Harlin, 1988)

Popular culture relies on repetition with difference and there is perhaps no subgenre that is quite so repetitive as the slasher – the crime in the past, the discrete/isolated setting, the gender ambiguous and curiously mobile villain and their double the gender ambiguous final girl, the increasing number of unmissed teen victims… except here one of them notices that they’re dropping like flies.

Of course this begins with spoilers — three of the original children of the parents that killed Freddy survive from Part III — Kincaid (Ken Sagoes), Joey (Rodney Eastman) and Kirsten (Tuesday Knight — replacing Patricia Arquette, who has presumably gone off to solve the civil rights problem) — and these three have to be removed for the plot to develop. I wonder if this was an inspiration for David Fincher and Alien3? Meanwhile Robert Englund gets pushed to top of the bill and given more lines. Here he is on the turn from evil villain to Arnie-style quipping antihero. He’s brought back to (un)life by a dog pissing on his skeleton — there’s an allegory there if you look for it. The dog is called Jason, because we can do intertextuality.

This is more clearly a 1980s film — big hair, pounding rock soundtrack, rap interjected into the closing credits, ray bans, nods to Jaws and motorbikes, as well as calls backs to the 1950s and a diner with a jukebox and Reefer Madness on the neighbourhood cinema. In the scripting corner we have to blame William Kotzwinkle — a novelist who had done an ET novelisation and sequel — Brian Helgeland, who is showing none of the talent you’d imagine would produce LA Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997) and Scott Pierce (Jim and Ken Wheat, hiding under pseudonym). Apparently Helgelund wrote the script in a week. That long? They are clearly pushing the dream logic, as the characters’ deaths become more and more extreme. Kincaid is killed in the car graveyard where Krueger was buried, whereas Joey is drowned in his waterbed, seduced by a woman of his dreams, having not learnt from the seductive nurse monster of Part III.

There are plenty more teenagers Krueger can go after — an asthmatic moped rider, a sexy boy, a female weightlifter with big hair who turns into an insect… And then there’s Alice (Lisa Wilcox), Kirsten’s new best friend since she returned to the school from the asylum. Having watched or sensed her friends die, she finally fights back by breaking her way through the mirror; “Welcome to Wonderland!” cries Freddy, because by now we’re too brain dead to spot the reference. Having collected mementoes of her dead friends, she can imbibe all of their skills and fight back — and at last we have girl kicking demonic ass, in an anticipation of Buffy (whose filmic introduction was four years away). She (spoiler) wins…

… but the generic imperative wins out and we see a familiar reflection.

Lots of the teens here smoke — marking them for death — and there’s plenty of gratuitous nudity and more swearing here than the other films put together. Teens sneak out of upstairs bedrooms as if the film is parodying the genre. I suspect it is — clearly well enough to gain the highest box office of the sequence until Freddy vs. Jason (Ronny Yu, 2003).