The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016 -- Beyond Re-Animator (2003), directed by Brian Yuzna

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "The Drifter", by H. P. Lovecraft

     Aside from John Carpenter’s The Thing, there is probably no other film that’s ever received as much consistent praise on these lists as Re-Animator. A then-modern adaptation of a classic story by H.P. Lovecraft, which itself was a spin on the even more classic Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Re-Animator centered around Dr. Herbert West, played by Jeffrey Combs (who you might remember from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. A gifted but rebellious medical student, West isn’t interested in curing simple diseases or mending broken bones, but instead solving the one problem that has plagued doctors since the dawn of time: Death. To that end, West develops a reagent which, upon injection into the spinal cord of a corpse, actually returns the subject to life. Well, a semblance of life. Well, it turns them into savage flesh-starved monsters, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few abominable eggs, right?

     Re-Animator was basically what 80’s horror B-movies were all about, or at least what they should have aspired to be. The premise was simple, which made the story itself uncomplicated and easy to get into. The special effects were excellent, which in turn made the gore and the violence particularly gruesome, of which there was plenty to enjoy. Jeffrey Comb’s performance as Herbert West, not so much a simple ‘mad scientist’ as a unapologetically immoral yet devilishly charismatic manipulator of the human form, putting him far above your typical Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger-style horror villains of the time. There’s no cardboard acting, no hackjob editing, no obnoxious soundtrack blaring during important scenes, it’s does everything right and looks good doing it. If you’ve read any of the previous lists, if you’ve read the entries on this list right now, you know how common it is to see me write ‘the special effects were good, but the story was crap’, or ‘you might enjoy this, if you overlook these characters’. Those kinds of statements never really seem to come up for me when it comes to Re-Animator, which as far I’m concerned is the only way to quantify whether a movie is ‘good’ or not in any meaningful sense. Subjectively speaking of course, objectivity is for fancy computers and Steve Ditko.

     Then came Bride of Re-Animator a few years later, which was actually featured on the Marathon a while back. Horror franchises can generally get a least two good films out of a property before things get shitty (See: Frankenstein & Bride of Frankenstein, Halloween 1 & 2, Alien & Aliens), and Bride is no exception. There’s no attempts to reinvent the wheel here, but it does try to maintain the standards of the original while using the safety of the Re-Animator name to explore some directions, which is what everyone expects of proper sequels. In that way, while I probably enjoyed the original more, I have to admit that Bride of Re-Animator is far more bizarre film than its predecessor. Creatures made out of human limbs, disembodied heads with bat wings flying around, things get really weird there for a while. An entertaining movie and worthy sequel, and a good way to end the series. Barring any tie-in comics down the road, that is.

     Then around a decade or so later Beyond Re-Animator comes to our doorstep, proving that the Two Movie Rule was more like a Two Movie Law.

     Ugh.

     So the premise itself is fine. Herbert West, who somehow survived the end of the last movie, has been in prison for the past thirteen years after his last experiment ended up a little deadly. Eventually a new rube (Dr. Howard Phillips, a Lovecraft reference and what passes for our protagonist) arrives at the prison, eager to work with West and his reagent and completely willing to experiment on prisoners without their consent and knowledge. After a decade of research however, Herbert West has moved beyond merely raising the dead. By transferring something called Neuroplasmic Energy from a living thing into a previously living thing, one can finally restore cognitive thinking and rationality to the reanimated, bypassing the one roadblock that had hampered the success of the reagent in the past. Messing around with the ‘souls’ of living things is a risky gamble though, especially when you’re in a horror movie, and things start going to shit almost immediately. If you thought prison was bad before, just wait until the abominations of science start showing up.

     It sucks though. As good a setup as that premise is, touching upon the abuse of power in the American prison system, providing an inherently violent and isolated setting that only becomes more so when you add the reanimated, it’s a bad movie. Cardboard acting (Pinocchio is less wooden than Howard Phillips), Friday the 13th style editing which pushes the violence offscreen, rather unfortunate portrayals of women (there are three women in this film. The first is murdered, the second is forced to expose her breasts, and the third is raped and murdered. Not the best track record), and ‘comedy’ scenes that occasionally try to match the morbid absurdity of the previous films but just come off as painfully stupid. About the only thing it doesn’t manage to screw up is the occasionally decent bit of gore and the soundtrack, which while forgettable at least features the theme from the original movie. Oh, and Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West, the rock which weathers the shit storm of a movie raging around him. Love ya buddy.

     So is Beyond Re-Animator supposed to be the Army of Darkness of the Re-Animator series? There does come a point in every horror franchise’s life where it devolves into self-parody after all, H2O for Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, it’s basically inevitable. You’ve reached the limit to how you far can push the formula, so you push the fact that you have no new ideas as the new idea and hope that debasing yourself will squeeze a few more drops of blood from the stone. Freddy Krueger goes from a demon of your nightmares to Bart Simpson, dropping sarcastic one-liners and making hip pop culture references in a bid to connect with ‘the kids’. Jason Vorhees becomes a space zombie. Michael Myers gets his ass kicked by Xzibit. Monster movies sure are dumb, right guys? Look at this hot chick with big boobs, look at all these horror tropes we’re messing around with! Buy our movie and we’ll let you spit in our mouth.

     The thing is, the Re-Animator series wasn’t tired. There were two movies in the 80s, and then the franchise was basically dead for 10 years. So what was the point of even bringing it back if you were going to pull this half-assed shit with it? In one fell swoop you turned the Re-Animator series from an underrated cult classic with plenty of potential material into a fucking Syfy Original Movie in one fell swoop, sinking it even lower into obscurity than it was before your attempts at revitalizing it. Why not comics? Why not pen & paper RPGs? Instead we got a movie where a rat puppet fights a detached human penis, and although that probably sounds funny out of context, the reality is that you’ll have stopped giving a shit long before that scene ever shows up. I know I did.

     Do I think that you should watch Beyond Re-Animator? No, not really. Do I think fans of the Re-Animator films will find something to enjoy with Beyond Re-Animator? Probably not, aside from a few choice special effects and the presence of Jeffrey Combs. Do I think my love for Re-Animator is keeping me from viewing Beyond Re-Animator more critically? Possibly. For any pros this film might have had though, it’s the flaws that shine through the brightest, and it’s the flaws which stick in my mind. If the only things you remember about a movie are the bad things, doesn’t that make it a bad movie? Write five pages on that and get it in to me by Monday.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016: The Guyver (1991), directed by Screaming Mad George and Steve Wang

The Trailer

and
The Appropriate Tune: "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger", by Daft Punk

     In this day and age, we are all very well-acquainted with the idea of the ‘comic book movie’. Well, ‘superhero movie’, to be more precise. What with all the cinematic universes and television universes and netflix originals and all that shit, it’s easy to forget that comic books still exist, or that there are comics that aren’t about people in silly costumes punching each other in this world. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy a good cape book every now and again, but at some point I realized that the vast majority of discussion around superheroes weren’t about the comics themselves, or even about the heroes really. It was arguing over box office numbers and Rotten Tomato scores, and how everything was sexist or racist or rants about those darn ol’ SJWs and I just didn’t give a shit. Or I did to some extent, but not enough that I wanted to be subjected to that white noise of the same shit over and over. So I stopped, and don’t feel like I missed out on all that much.

     Still, what with the enormous popularity of ‘CBM’s’, it’s a bit surprising that not many attempts have been made to capitalize on adapting manga for the Western market. There’s been a few obviously, Fist of the North Star (starring Malcolm McDowell for some reason) and Dragon Ball Evolution (starring the crushed dreams of anyone who was a young boy in the mid-to-late 90s) come to mind, and the Hollywood rumour mill always threatens us with a version of Cowboy Bebop with Keanu Reeves or an Akira that takes place in Vancouver, but rarely do these plans seem to come to fruition. Maybe the studio heads don’t want to put money into a property that hasn’t already been driven into the dirt, or maybe they’re afraid that the culture gap is too great and Western audiences wouldn’t be able to relate, I don’t know. Seems to me that if you’re so convinced that something won’t work that you don’t try then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, but then I’m not in the movie-making business. I’ve also seen a bit of Dragon Ball Evolution, so maybe it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie after all.

     Moving on to The Guyver…

     Based on the 1985 manga by Yoshiki Takaya, The Guyver (co-directed by Screaming Mad George and Steven Wang, they also did some of the monster designs), shares the basic premise of the source material but is otherwise it's own thang. In it, the film posits that thousands of years ago, aliens arrived on Earth in order to create the ultimate organic weapon, which happens to be man (suck it xenomorphs). Some humans found out about this alien influence however, and through genetic manipulation were able to produce the Zoanoids, humans with the ability to transform themselves into monstrous super-soldiers. The strongest of all the Zoanoids, the Zoalord, then established the Chronos Corporation, not only to hide their army under a public facade but also to research the bizarre alien relic known as the ‘Unit’. The only known device of its kind on Earth, it supposedly grants Zoanoids a great defensive power. In the hands of a human who can activate it however, it can transform them into a living weapon of unimaginable power. It transforms them into...The Guyver.

     You find all this out in the first two minutes, by the way. Just felt like giving it here.

     One dark night, Dr. Tetsu Segawa learns of the world-domination plans of the Chronos Corporation and decides to steal the Guyver unit and hand it over to Max Reid (Mark Hamill, of Mark Hamill fame), an agent of the CIA. Before he is murdered by the Zoalord’s goon squad Tetsu manages to hide the device, where it is ultimately discovered and activated by Shawn, the boyfriend of Tetsu’s daughter and grade-A whiny fuckboi. When the Zoalord decides to send in his goon squad to capture the daughter (I honestly never caught her name. Mizzki? Mitzi? Mizuki? Something like that), Shawn must master the abilities of his bio-boosted armor and eliminate the Zoanoid threat once and for all.

     When you watch The Guyver, the first thing that comes to mind is that old Pizza Bagel commercial, you know the one. Not because there are any pizzas or bagels, but because of this pervasive air of ‘Hey kids! Isn’t this cool?!’ that permeates this film to the core. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II also came out in 1991, so you can’t help but think this is a case of The Guyver trying desperately to compete and just utterly failing to be in the same league You’ve got wacky sound effects, Scooby Doo-esque chase gags, motherfuckin’ Jimmie ‘J.J.’ Walker (what 90’s kid didn’t love Good Times?) doing his best impression of what white people thought rap was in those days, just...I don’t even know what to say about it. If I were a young boy at the time I might have eaten that shit up like it’s sherbert, but in the modern day it’s that right amount of awkward and unfunny that it’s actually not funny in an ironic sense. I’ll watch TMNT II any day of the week, invite a bunch of friends over, but if even one person came in and saw me watching The Guyver, I’d have to go chop woods or do taxes or something. Just to prove I’m still a man.

     You want to make a movie that’s fun for the whole family to enjoy? Fine. The trouble is that Guyver is a seinen manga, meaning it’s geared towards adults, and the violence is at a level considered suitable for adults. Rather than dropping the kiddie and going for a teen-geared film or toning down the violence for the kiddies, The Guyver attempts to mesh the two into one cohesive whole, which ends up making it a surreal experience. In one scene you have Mark Hamill and Vivian Wu running from a goofy rat creature, and in another you have Guyver tearing himself out a monster’s stomach. Not to mention SPOILERS Reid’s transformation into a Zoanoid, otherwise known as the creepiest fucking thing outside of a John Carpenter movie SPOILERS. I’m not a parent, so I don’t give much of shit, but I can’t imagine Cronenbergian body horror is the selling point that will drive parents to get little Timmy a Guyver action figure for X-mas.

     In The Guyver’s defense, the work that went into the design for this movie is worthy of praise. In an era where Tim Burton’s Batman was so rigid that he couldn’t turn his neck, the Guyver suit not only looked damn close to the source material, but offered a much greater degree of mobility, so fights could in fact look more flashy and complex than simple punches. The Zoanoids also look pretty top-notch, and a lot more diverse than you might expect a B-movie to attempt. I guess an emphasis on special effects is what you should expect when you get special effects guys in the director’s chair, but when it works out it works out.

     The Guyver is a dumb movie, but unlike movies like Nightbreed, it doesn’t pretend it’s deeper than it is. So if you the type of person who doesn’t mind early 90s cheese movies like The Monster Squad or Super Mario Brothers: The Movie, or you’re not such a diehard Guyver fan that the idea of treating it like a joke sends you into fits of rage, then you’ll probably be okay. It’s not something you need to rush out and see, but if you ever need a movie to make fun of with your rifftrax buddies, keep it in your back pocket.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016 -- Nightbreed (1990), directed by Clive Barker

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Monster", by Kanye West

     If any of you out there remember last year’s Marathon list, and I know I don’t, you might remember a little film by the name of Hellraiser. You know, guy finds a magic puzzle box that opens a doorway to Cthulu’s creepy sex dungeon, loses his skin and then Pinhead gets very non-consensual with everyone involved. Well you might also recall that said film was written and directed by noted horror writer Clive Barker, who combined the supernatural with freaky sex stuff long before ‘50 Shades of Grey’. While he’s never had the reach of Stephen King, Clive Barker was definitely the young rebel badass of the paperback novel game in the day, especially after the success of 1987’s Hellraiser and its’ subsequent enfranchisement. It was the success of that movie, one of the few films that was written, directed, and adapted from the same person, that no doubt gave the studio heads the confidence to fund his next directorial work, whenever that day would arrive. Three years later, we got Nightbreed.

     I’m pretty sure the only one that really understands the story in Nightbreed is Clive Barker, but I’ll try to give the shortened version for those interested. Aaron Boone is an average white Canadian, with an average white Canadian girlfriend named Laurie, who apparently has bizarre dreams that pertain to a city called Midian, wherein monsters live, and also gruesome murders for some reason. Turns out these murders aren’t dreams but reality, committed by his psychiatrist Dr. Dekker, who manipulates to get Boone murdered by the fuzz. However, before Boone dies he finds out that Mideon really does exist, populated by a race of monsters known as the Nightbreed. Being a Nightbreed is supposedly super cool according to Boone, so he's super psyched when he gets to come back from the dead and join up with these ugly bastards in their underground city. All good things come to an end though, and when Laurie ends up in Mideon searching for Boone’s missing corpse, it sets off a chain of events that spells bad roads ahead for the Nightbreed.

     So onto the positives… well, much like Event Horizon, Nightbreed does not skimp when it comes to art design and special effects. If you were a big fan of the Cenobites back in Hellraiser, then you’ll be pleased to find out that Clive Barker has doubled down on bloody gore and weird monsters this time around. Nightbreed might be worth it just for the scene where Laurie makes her way through Mideon, and we get to see all the Nightbreed in their natural habitat. Just the range of creatures that we get to see is impressive, all unique, all gruesome in their own special way. If you remember the scene in Star Wars where Luke and Obi-Wan step into the cantina for the first time, and it’s just a sea of aliens, aliens that don’t look like humans with pointy ears even, it's a bit like that. Only spoooooooky.

     Also worth noting, Danny Elfman does the score for this film. Now I’m big Elfman fan, whether it’s his film work or Oingo Boingo, but I don’t think it really works out Nightbreed. By the end it’s more-or-less, but when you got a scene where some dude literally rips his scalp off of his head and that goth circus march comes barreling in, it just doesn’t fit the tone that a scene of that nature is meant to convey. At least in my opinion. Maybe I just associate Elfman’s music too closely with Tim ‘Hot Topic’ Burton, and his movies never move beyond ‘morbidly quirky’.

     As for the cons, I feel like it’s more efficient to make a list:

• This film is was adapted from a novel known as ‘Cabal’, which was also written by Barker. In that book, I imagine the story is coherent, the plot logical and well-defined, and the audience isn’t left in the dark about what the character’s are thinking. Not so for Nightbreed, the film where no one knows anything, and the ones who might know won’t explain it. At least not in a way that really makes sense. Storywriting gold right there. 

• I watched the director’s cut edition, as that was the version available on netflix, and it’s reminded me why author and editor are generally separate positions. CHRIST this is a long winded movie, 45 minutes left to go and I was actively searching for anything to do other than to continue watching, and this was literally the most action-packed section of the film. The Good, the Bad & the Ugly was a 2+ hour long movie, but it never feels like two hours have passed, because there is actually stuff going on on the screen that is interesting to watch. Maybe their is an inherent quality to the movie that’s lost between the theatrical cut and the director’s, and maybe we wouldn’t get to see as many cool monsters in the theatrical release, but as long as it didn’t feel like I was waiting for a damn bus I’d be okay with it. 

• Sure there are plenty of tits in Nightbreed, but it never feels quite as gory as you would expect from a pre-CGI horror movie. Don’t get me wrong, I said the special effects are great and they are great, but it never quite hits the levels of ‘what the fuck am I looking at here’ that you got with Hellraiser. I don’t mean to blow smoke up that movie’s ass either, but c’mon, there’s a whole scene where we see a guy regenerate from a puddle of blood into a skinless freak almost step-by step. That’s something that sticks with you. 

• Here’s something else that Nightbreed has in common with Event Horizon: shit characterization. Unlike EH however, where you didn’t care about the characters because they were too bland, here you don’t care about the characters because they’re one-dimensional props that feel more at home in your local internet fan fiction than in a Hollywood movie written by a famous author. Boone is the proto-Edward Cullen, Laurie’s entire existence revolves around her relationship (spoiler alert: she literally kills herself when she thinks Boone is leaving her, which is about as ‘high-school girl’ as you can fucking get), and every single cop is a violently sadistic stupid piece of shit. None of them are realistic, or at realistic as you get in horror movies, none of them act like humans would, it’s all too exaggerated and up its own ass to be relatable. It’s not that huge a leap from Hellraiser to Nightbreed admittedly, you can tell immediately that they’re written by the same guy, but Nightbreed manages to make Hellraiser look like Taxi Driver by comparison. The smaller cast probably helped in that regard. Hellraiser seems like an isolated incident in that world, in Nightbreed the world is apparently populated by extras from Troma. 

     With all that said, I don’t think I can recommend Nightbreed as a film you should see. Yes the special effects and costumes are great, and it’s offbeat enough that it’s probably managed to form a substantial cult following based solely on that. However, it’s also really, really dumb and really, really slow, and all the great monster designs in the world can’t cover up the fact that watching Nightbreed more of a chore than it was entertainment. If you want to give it a shot yourself then more power to you, but I think there are far darker and far better movies out there that deserve your attention than Boone’s Wacky Canadian Monster Adventures. Some of which we might even get to on this year’s Marathon, if you can believe it. I know I don’t.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016: Event Horizon (1997), directed by Paul W.S. Anderson

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Can't Take My Eyes Off You", by Frankie Valli and The 4 Seasons

     While tales of evil invaders from beyond the stars have existed for over a century at this point, going all the way back to H.G. Wells’ seminal work ‘The War of the Worlds’, it was only after humanity managed to break out into the last frontier that the concept of ‘space horror’ really came into being. Writers like H.P. Lovecraft may have scratched the surface of the issue, but it wasn’t until outer space became a matter of public knowledge that the reality of it all began to sink in. That space is a vast, unknowable thing that stretches out farther than the eye can see, filled with things that we only can only theorize and speculate about. That the only way to even begin to experience it is to shelter yourself within a tiny little suit and a tiny little ship, and hope that you thought out every contingency so that your and your crewmates don’t suffer a painful, horrible death. It’s a humbling reminder of just how frail humanity really is and just how small our reach is when compared to the grand scale of the universe.

     It does make for some pretty good movies though.

     In 2040, decades after Earth has established itself on the Moon and Mars, a ship known as the Event Horizon disappeared somewhere around Neptune. The Event Horizon was a research vessel, outfitted with an experimental engine known as the Gravity Drive, which was meant to enable faster-than-light travel and propel us beyond the solar system. Specifically, the Gravity Drive used a magnetically contained singularity to open up ‘dimensional gates’, allowing you to pass through two points in space simultaneously. Had it not disappeared, it would have been the most important scientific discovery since the splitting of the atom.

     Seven years later, Dr. Weir (the designer of the Event Horizon and the Gravity Drive) and the crew of the Lewis & Clark rediscover the E.H. on Neptune after receiving an bizarre distress signal from the ship, despite the fact that the ship is way too damaged for the crew to have survived. Sure enough, the former crew are dead, with strange abrasions around their eyes, as if they were clawed out. Even stranger, the Gravity Drive seems to be active, which it shouldn’t be according to Dr. Weir. Then the hallucinations start, and the crew of the Lewis & Clark realize that their lives are about to become a living hell. Literally.

     There’s one thing I’ll say in Event Horizon’s favor: aside from some dated CGI, this film is fucking gorgeous.The scene with Weir inside the duct with rows and rows of glowing circuit boards lining the walls, the spinning blades of the walkway leading up the Gravity Drive, even the cockpit of the Lewis & Clark just look so meticulously crafted that you just want to be in those rooms, to just stand there and watch all the lights blink and pieces turn. Sure, the influences are obvious, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Scott’s Alien, but plenty of other movies have tried walking down the same road as Event Horizon and haven’t looked even half as good. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery when it’s done well, and in terms of artistic design Event Horizon has done very well.

     As nice as the films looks, the truth is that Event Horizon just...isn’t scary. At all, really. Sure, they try to do scary stuff, like ‘ooh, this person hallucinated some gross thing’ or ‘wowee, that lady has no eyeballs’, but it never takes that extra step forward that pushes it into truly disturbing territory as proper lovecraftian-style horror. I’ve heard that executive meddling cut down a good portion of the more graphic scenes in the film, and while I’m sure they tried to make the best with what they were dealt, it just comes across as flaccid. I mean Hellraiser wasn’t exactly movie gold either, but it managed to be far more bizarre and far more disturbing for what was probably a far smaller budget, and I respect that film for it. It’s both science fiction and horror man, the only limit should be your imagination! Maybe you should have taken a lesson from John Carpenter’s The Thing while you were busy making the giving the spiky black hole engine room a moat for whatever reason.

     Also, I don’t know if this is worth mentioning, since this is Paul W.S. Anderson and all, director of as many shitty Resident Evil movies as there are shitty Resident Evil games, but Event Horizon kind of gets really, really dumb by the end. I don’t know if this was the end result of more studio meddling or what, but it seems like that by the last third of the movie Anderson decided that he was done making a spooky horror movie and shifted into making an action movie instead, and a painfully corny one at that. Suddenly the wise-crackin’ comedy relief character is showing up to save the day, despite being launched into Neptune’s orbit earlier in the film, and Laurence Fishburne is fighting a psychic manifestation of evil, and it just feels way to energetic and hopeful for what should be a hopeless psychological horror story. It’s less jarring of a tonal shift than in From Dusk Till Dawn I guess, which went from murderers and rapists kidnapping a family to making jokes and shooting vampires with a penis gun, but in that case you had two different directors (Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino) working on their own halves. You can’t have lovecraftian horror while giving the audience a feeling of hope and human agency, otherwise it doesn’t work. Why be scared of hell if you can blow it the fuck up and be done with it.

     One last thing I should mention: the characters suck ass. Once again, you can tell they’re doing the Alien thing (which is the slasher movie thing in a broader sense) by introducing a large cast of characters (typically falling into certain archetypes) that we’re meant to identify with and have an opinion on whether they live or die. Not so in Event Horizon, where the entire cast (aside from Larry Fishburne and maybe the comic relief character) manages to sidestep most common narrative tropes by not being interesting in the least. Even Stark, who was apparently the female lead the whole time and I never noticed, who had less dialogue than the other female character and actually did far less. Even Dr. Weir, the architect of the whole shitstorm and the character who logic would dictate is the dramatic centerpiece of the film doesn’t really do or say anything dramatic or interesting, and ultimately fizzles out into some kind of weak Pinhead ripoff. Except Pinhead was the fucking monster of Hellraiser, not even the main antagonist in a sense, so it didn’t really matter if he was one-dimensional or not. Weir invents a portal to the Cthuluverse, has visions of his wife committing suicide and claws out his own eyeballs and yet I could not give less of a shit if I tried. If you can’t even write a worthwhile scenario for ‘scientist falls victim to his own creation’, which is literally the oldest science-fiction story in the book, then you know you’ve got problems.

     Still, sci-fi and horror films are not always the bastions of fantastic writing that we like to think they are, a lot of the time they’re just so the audience can marvel at the weird shit they see on the screen. So if you’re a people who is more interested in being entertained when watching movies than character archetypes and if it’s a ‘good’ story or not, then you might have some fun with Event Horizon. For all its flaws, it certainly is a spectacle.

     I’m not liable for any eye-gouging that occurs during the viewing of this movie, by the way.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016 -- The Usual Suspects (1995), directed by Bryan Singer

Hard to believe that another year has passed, but it is indeed time for another Long Dark Marathon of the Soul. Going into it this year, I decided to do things a little bit differently. Instead of a 'must-watch' kind of list, which doesn't really work with blind watches anyway, I've decided to be as candid with these films as I am with my other write-ups. Which may mean you see more than a couple of entries that's mainly me calling a movie shit, but that's the gamble you take when it comes to art, I guess. And no matter what I think of the movie post-watch, I've taken a lot of time to try and root out the stuff that looks the most interesting or that deserves the most attention. That way, even if you don't agree with my opinion (and you wouldn't be the first), at least you'll be turned on to something you might end up enjoying. Which has been the point of this list since the beginning, and will remain the point until I stop.

Anyway, let's get things started...

The Trailer

and
The Appropriate Tune: "Main Theme", by John Ottman

     Any action, if done well enough, can be considered an art. Painting, composing music, cooking, the arrangement of flowers in a vase or furniture in a room, and even crime. Indeed, there have been a countless number of films, books, television shows etc. dedicated to the ‘art’ of crime; Tales of men and women who live life on the edge, navigating webs of intrigue and danger, flipping the bird to society’s rules, all the while shooting big guns and collecting piles of sweet, sweet dosh in the process (and occasionally getting shot in a poignant moment near the end of the story). While the reality is much more mundane and terrible than the romanticized picture of it we get in pop culture, the thrill that comes with the idea of ‘getting away’ with something and the removal of normal life’s restrictions make for some powerful escapism. We may not actually want to be a Cuban drug lord but all of us want to be Tony Montana, if you catch my drift.

     So arrives 1995’s The Usual Suspects, directed by Bryan Singer, which attempts to take it’s place amongst the annals of good crime thriller movies. A flaming boat and 27 dead Hungarian gangsters in an high-stakes drug deal gone bad have the L.A.P.D very interested, and crippled small-time conman Verbal Kint is the only one with any knowledge of what really happened on that night. Through a series of flashbacks, he tells us a story of Fenster (Benicio del Toro), Hockney (Kevin Pollack), McManus (Stephen Baldwin), Kint (Kevin Spacey) and Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), a collection of criminals who are arrested and harassed by the NYPD over the theft of a truck full of gun parts. Feeling vengeful, the Suspects decide to team up and pull one over on the NYPD, which ends up being wildly successful. However, a move to L.A raises the stakes, and soon the crew discover the horrible truth: Each of them has done something to cross Kaiser Sozey, the mysterious and ruthless criminal mastermind who is as much fantasy as flesh in America’s underbelly. Reconciliation is unlikely, retaliation impossible. Their only choice is to pull off one last job, and hope they don’t end up dead in the process…

     The Usual Suspects seems to owe much of its success to two things: it’s choice of cast and it’s Shyamalan style twist, which was actually three years before M. Night got into the game with The Sixth Sense. While cultural osmosis has pretty much taken care of the twist at this point (you could also probably figure it out if you just thought about it for a bit), I will give it credit for the casting. The characters tend to fall into common archetypes, McManus is the douchey alpha male, Pollack is the wiseass who just wants get paid and so on, but they make the character their own and they all play off each other well. All except Gabriel Byrne, who plays the world-weary ex-cop Dean Keaton, and along with Kevin Spacey is the major focus of the story. You’d think that with that amount of screentime along with the narrative drive of protecting his girlfriend and pulling the fabled ‘one last job’ that’d he come across as a more interesting character, but he honestly doesn’t. It’s like his charisma is inversely proportional to his importance in the film.

     The problem is, the vast majority of that character interaction that really makes this movie is frontloaded into the beginning of the film, and then you start seeing the holes in the armor. Like the soundtrack, which should be tense and exciting and instead comes off as goofy and melodramatic (more comic booky than any of Singer’s later comic book movies). Or the fact that that a story that revolves around plans within plans and all that are incredibly hard to do right without coming across as hokey and circumstantial. Once you understand the nature of the story, you have to wonder why a supposed mastermind like Sozey would leave so much up to chance and why he would bother using these guys, and it goes ‘clever story writing’ to ‘that’s the way I wanted to tell the story so that’s what’s happening’. That’s the problem with writing thrillers and mysteries, you can’t just go ‘because I say so’. Coincidence might be a cornerstone of fiction but you have dress it up a little, you have to properly build up to it or else any sense of tension is lost. Which is what happens to The Usual Suspects by the end; it appears to be present an intriguing howdunit type mystery, but the further we work back from the solution the less coherent the narrative becomes, and the less valuable the mystery becomes in the face random circumstance. Use coincidence in moderation is the lesson the day.

     See also: the first half of Death Note with L as compared to the second half with Near.

     Of course I might be a bit overly critical, and cultural osmosis may not have affected everyone as I assume it has, so check it out yourself if you’re interested. It may not rank amongst the greatest crime movies I’ve ever seen, but it’s an enjoyable enough time that it pairs well with popcorn and friends. As long as your friends aren’t the type to over-analyze movies that is, which explains a lot about my life.

Update on Things

Hey everyone. I know there hasn't been a lot in the way of content here for a while, and I apologize for that. Part of it is work-related, part of it has just been that I've just been too down on myself to even want to write anything. As of a couple days ago however I have gotten started on the write ups for the Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016, which you will hopefully see in October. Don't know if this means you'll be seeing any content until then or not, but I'm hoping that knocking out a good portion of them now will give me the incentive to continue writing, and give you folks something to enjoy in the interim.

Until next time,
His Royal Majesty, King Thunderbird I

No No: A Dockumentary (2014), directed by Jeffrey Radice

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Can You Get To That", by Funkadelic

Or, The Art of Intimidation

     If I have to be honest, and honesty does seem to be the preferred policy in most circles, I must admit that I’m not really a fan of sports. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy it; I’ve enjoyed several games of basketball and soccer in my day, and I’ve always tried to catch the Olympics when they roll around, but I’ve never really made the emotional connection to football, baseball, etc. that seems to drive so many people in the world. The NFL and MLB have become multi-billion dollar industries because of the world’s love of sports, talent scouts lurk around middle schools in the hope of discovering the next big quarterback, and athletes are elevated to such an iconic status that they seem almost untouchable (the recent news about Peyton Manning’s smear campaign against someone he sexually assaulted a decade ago seems especially relevant). It’s just baffling to me I guess, someone who has a casual interest in sports, as much as a sports fan would find my obsession with film and comics. 

     Similarly, I also tend to avoid documentaries, at least when it comes to these little writeups. I’ve done a couple of course, Crumb comes to mind, as well as Lost Soul, but in general I’m of the opinion that documentaries, particularly biographical documentaries, aren’t really conducive to the review process. Because the majority tend to follow the same beats, don’t they? ‘Subject does really cool thing, people love them, then they get into drugs or become huge assholes and they end up either dying or fading into obscurity’, adding in animated sequences and talking heads when needed. Formulaic by its very nature, I suppose you could say. It doesn’t mean that these films aren’t artistically valid or can’t be entertaining, as I believe both documentaries I’ve reviewed were worth watching/reviewing, but when it comes to biographies, you’re really dependent on the subject themselves to make or break your movie. Even Ken Burns couldn’t make a movie about Kevin Federline interesting.

     Which brings us to our film for today, No No: A Dockumentary, which details the life of Dock Ellis. For those who don’t know, which included me before I actually watched this movie, Ellis was a pitcher primarily known for his tenure with the Pittsburgh Pirates (who he helped earn a World Series win against Orioles) and the New York Yankees throughout most of the 1970s. Known for a time as the ‘Muhammed Ali of baseball’, Ellis frequently pushed himself into the forefront of sports news by virtue of his inherent charisma and willingness to challenge the status quo in any way that he could. Whether it was drawing ire from the old guard for knowingly violating dress codes or calling out racial prejudice in Major League Baseball, during a time when an all-black major league team was still unheard of, Ellis was a living example of the changes that were going through American society at the time. The Civil Rights Act being passed, African-Americans establishing a distinct cultural identity... it was an era that demanded action, for people to push the boundaries, and from all accounts Dock Ellis was all too eager to answer that call to action. Not as famous a figure as Jackie Robinson perhaps, but important all the same.

     Almost as important as his contributions to the sport of baseball and the Black Power movement, at least from the way this film presents it, was his use of drugs. The name of the film, No No, is a reference to the infamous story of Dock pitching a no-hitter against the San Diego Padres in 1970 while high on LSD, which ironically only makes up a small part of the movie, while the rest of the film focuses on Ellis’ substance abuse and subsequent sobriety and anti-drug activism. Which is nice to hear, even if it does end up feeling like an episode of Behind the Music rather than a movie about a professional athlete by the end. I mean I’m not trying to belittle the man’s accomplishments, it’s just that I’ve kind of heard this story about personal redemption before, and personally it feels like the ratio is 70% is about Ellis using drugs and 30% is about why Ellis deserves to be remembered in the first place. It’s fine if you’re already familiar with the man’s work in baseball and are looking to dig deeper, maybe not if you’re just learning about him at that moment.

     So is No No: a Dockumentary worth a watch? Well, if you’re a baseball fan, then I’m sure getting a little history about the sport will appeal to you. If, however, you’re someone like me who watches documentaries on various subjects ‘just cuz’, there might not be enough here to really grab your attention. I found it fairly interesting though, so if you’re of similar tastes, you might find it enjoyable too. Try it and find out.

Result: Recommended