By D.K. Holm
March 13, 2006
[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on.]
Mutant Messages From Down South
[Here is the audio version of my review of The Hills Have Eyes. ]
THE HILLS HAVE EYES
Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur's The Hills Have Eyes, based on Wes Craven's film from 1977, which Craven both wrote and directed, is about the 10th '70s horror remake in the past three years. And like most of those remakes, it is better than the original.
That's to be expected on one level, since technological and filmmaking skills have improved in 30 years, and anyway, The Hills Have Eyes was a low budget endeavor to begin with. The first one cost $250 thousand, the new one probably cost 50 times more (though it was shot in Morocco, doing an excellent stand in for New Mexico). But on another level, this version, which is produced by Craven and his company, seems more thought out in its particulars. It plays up the nuclear connection in more detail, and brings more complexity to the characters.
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As is well known, The Hills Have Eyes tells of the Carter family, driving across country on vacation. It's a large extended family. There is the patriarch, former cop Big Bob Carter (Ted Levine), and his wife, Ethel (Kathleen Quinlan). They have three children and two dogs, which are a matched pair of guard dogs. The kids are Lynn (Vinessa Shaw), married to cellular phone shop owner (and liberal democrat) Doug Bukowski (Aaron Stanford), daughter Brenda (Emilie de Ravin, of Lost, and here lost again), and Bobby (Dan Byrd), the youngest, and the one who most takes after Big Bob. The two Bobs get a lot of mileage from teasing Doug for his politics and pacifism. Doug and Lynn have a baby.
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The new version hews closely to the original. Out in the desert, the family finds itself stranded far from help. Dad goes one way, back to the gas station they just stopped at, Doug the other. While gone, a family of mutants stalks the family, kills the dad, rapes one daughter and kills another, and steals the baby. The surviving family members plot their rescue and revenge.
The new HHE is better shot and better acted than the original. But possibly under the influence of Craven, Aja and Levasseur, who made High Tension, expand some of the ideas found in the original. Here, there is much more tension within the family (just as the characters in Scorsese's version of Cape Fear are compromised much more than its anodyne source). Doug is downtrodden by the teasing. Brenda is bored. Ethel and Bob are at odds, partially for religious reasons. It is she who insists that they pray before breaking up to hunt for help.
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Also, motivation for action is more carefully worked out. In this new one, the gas station operator (Tom Bower), who is also the grandfather of the diseased mutant family, intentionally sends the Carters down the wrong road, because Lynn happened to see the haul of booty that the mutant family has acquired from numerous other now dead families. In contrast, however, there is less motivation for Ruby (Laura Ortiz) who in the original was trying to escape her crazy family. Here it is Brenda who seeks escape, while Ruby is a cipher. The mirroring of the two families, which made Hills 1 so interesting and richly textured despite its drive-in origins, would have been enhanced in Hills 2 if both daughters were brought up to speed thematically.
Back in the 1970s, critics such as Robin Wood pointed out how horror films of the time, such as Hills Have Eyes, Night of the Living Dead, The Omen and others, with their emphasis on sexual repression, cannibalism, and the "terrible house" which serves as a locus for the morbid rituals of grotesque horror, seemed to be symptomatic of the American family as a social institution in crisis, of a collective nightmare from which Americans could not awaken. It was easy to infer that the foundation of society was rattled by social protest, the divisions brought on by the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement, though these films rarely explicitly referred to this social tremors. What Aja and Levasseur have done in this remake is to make explicit what was only implied in the first.
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“You made us this way … we’re this way because of you," complains one of the more disabled mutants in the movie. The mutant family lives in the prefab houses used on atomic test sites (the third cinematic use of these setting I can think of, the other two being Mann's show Crime Story, and the end of Kalifornia). The crater of a bomb test is its auto wrecking yard, where the cars of the families they've attacked are deposited. The credit sequence and some dialogue make it clear that the Carter family, standing in for America, has brought this disaster onto itself, that the mutant family is the natural result of reckless imperialism. You couldn't get an image less subtle than Doug ramming a pole with an American flag on it into the skull of the mutant who just tried to kill him, the flag another reminder of the policies that, in its name, caused the nuclear mutations.
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The first film was really just about violence. It ended with a freeze frame of the Doug character in mid blow as he continues to smash in the skull of the mutant who took his baby. He was a normal, civilized American male reduced to the level of an animal by the animals who attacked him. The story and its conclusion were the product, it appears, of Craven, a free thinking hippie type and academic, pondering how he might behave in extreme situations. The new The Hills Have Eyes stretches out the climax with uplifting music and a reunion scene in which the survivors hug in a heartfelt (or grotesque, depending on how you view it) mirroring of Ethel's group prayer, which at that time everyone resisted participating in.
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The Hills Have Eyesbeing ultimately a Craven film, it can't resist the suggestion in the final image that the family is still being stalked. However, this image can be interpreted as a sign of the general American malevolence that the Carters have to beware of, not an immediate threat, or a hint at a sequel (though there was a sequel to HHE, famous for its over-reliance on "flashback" footage to the first film, as various survivors from the first, including the pet dog, remember the past). I'm not sure how much further a sequel to this one could go in terms of political commentary, but it would be hard to beat purely on the level of suspense. By the way, Aja and Levasseur have complained about certain cuts made in the film to meet MPAA requirements, so expect the DVD release to offer an unrated version that should be a minute or so longer.
Here is the facet that distinguishes Fox noir films from all the others. They're not much fun. The noirs of Warner Brothers or Paramount, or especially RKO and the poverty row studios, were meant to excite, thrill, scare, amuse. They may also have had deeper impulses, but excitement was the ostensible goal. Fox, under the leadership of Zanuck, wanted to educate. Being a well-meaning mainstream liberal type politically (though a Republican when it came to business), Zanuck wanted to make movies that helped rectify the ills of society. That's all well and good, but it's an attitude can make for some pretty dry, polemical, didactic films, especially in a genre that advertises itself as all action and thrills.
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Take No Way Out (Fox, Fox Film Noir No. 13, 1950, 106 minutes, black and white, NR, full frame, DD stereo and mono in English with English and Spanish subtitles, static musical menu with 28-chapter scene selection, keep case, one disc, $14.95, released on Tuesday, March 7, 2006), one of the three films from Fox's latest batch of noirs. It stars Sidney Poitier as a young doctor caught up in the racist schemes of a foiled robber (Richard Widmark). Brought in wounded along with his disturbed brother, Widmark's character manipulates the perception of events so that Poitier, who was performing a spinal tap, is under the cloud of having intentionally killed the brother. Widmark also goes on to fan flames of racism through the agency of Linda Darnell, who was married to Widmark's brother (I think; their relationship wasn't clear to me). The film ends with Widmark getting his wish, a race riot, but it doesn't go the way he expected.
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The film takes itself rather seriously, to the point that the music score, by Alfred Newman, begins over the Fox logo, replacing the traditional fanfare. It's shot in flat black and white, with very little in the way of noirish shadows, by Milton Krasner, for the unusually sober Joseph L. Mankiewicz. In many ways, No Way Out anticipates the social protest films by Stanley Kramer that were to follow, and not just because Poitier is in the cast. It's actually pretty strong stuff, with Widmark (who apparently didn't want to be in the movie) and the others loose with the racial epithets. But it's not clear to me why this qualifies as a noir since it seems to have none of the identifying characteristics. It's probably more likely to see in DVD form as a noir, rather than if it was in its more logical line, the Fox Film Classics series.
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The film enjoys a fine transfer and audible sound, and a small array of extras, including two photo galleries, two Movietone News clips, one of Darnell selling movie tickets as part of the film's promotion, and another of Widmark getting his sidewalk block in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater. There's also the theatrical trailer. The audio commentary track is by Eddie Muller, who does all three of this batch of Fox noirs. As usual Muller gives an informed survey of the film's production history, cast, and impact.
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Slightly more like a noir is The House on Telegraph Hill (Fox, Fox Film Noir No. 15, 1953, 93 minutes, black and white, NR, full frame, DD stereo and mono in English with English and Spanish subtitles, static musical menu with 28-chapter scene selection, keep case, one disc, $14.95, released on Tuesday, March 7, 2006). This is a woman-in-jeopardy in the Suspicion mode, but based on a novel by Elick Moll, and crafted into a script by two others. But again it is hyper serious. It begins in a concentration camp, where inmate Victoria Kowelska (Valentina Cortese) takes on the identity of her deceased but rich friend just as they are about to be freed. Traveling to America, she inserts herself into the fragment left of her friend's family, which includes a son, a family guardian (Richard Basehart), and a maid (Fay Baker). Basehart marries her, but soon comes to the conclusion that he really wants to kill her for her money. The only person she can turn to is family friend Marc Bennett (William Lundigan), the lawyer scion of a rich family, who was also, coincidentally, the Army officer who processed her release from the camps.
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The film has spooky shots and suspenseful moments but, as Muller says in his commentary, director Robert Wise was always prone to the safe choice. The film gets the job done but it's rather inert.
Extras include a whole panoply of photo galleries, the trailer, and Muller's highly personal yak track. It turns out that it was Muller's interest in Cortese, though in Thieve's Highway, that got Muller interested in noir as a kid, leading to numerous books, novels, and the founding of a noir preservation society. He knows a lot about the film and Cortese, who is still alive as of this writing, including the fact that Basehart, whose wife had died a few years earlier, fell in love with her and joined her in Italy when she quit the American movie business.
Uncharacteristically delirious is Fallen Angel (Fox, Fox Film Noir No. 14, 1945, 98 minutes, black and white, NR, full frame, DD stereo and mono in English with English and Spanish subtitles, static musical menu with 28-chapter scene selection, keep case, one disc, $14.95, released on Tuesday, March 7, 2006), but maybe that's because Otto Preminger directed it.
The tale is based on a novel credited to Marty Holland, though apparently this is a typo for Mary, and the script is credited to Harry Kleiner, an old student of Preminger's when he taught at Yale. The film is an attempt by Fox to weave the same magic it did with Laura, and it features Dana Andrews again, though this time in a much more roguish role, as Eric Stanton, a publicity agent on the outs who drifts into a small California coastal town where he gets a crush on the local waitress, Stella (Linda Darnell), and seeks to bilk the local socialite, June (Alice Faye). When murder happens, Stanton is the prime suspect.
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Now this is noir photography (by Joseph LaShelle). It's moody, charismatic, and often traveling. There are numerous stunning tracking shots, one that follows Andrews and Faye from inside a coffee shop out onto a real street (if you want to see how they laid out the tracks, there are numerous shots of the location in the abundant photo galleries, but more about them in a second). The music by David Raksin, who also did Laura and "Laura," is also lush and moody. The plot is delightfully complex (it's more like a Jim Thompson novel than anything else) without being hard to follow, and the cast looks great.
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The project was set up as a vehicle to announce the return of Faye, who was a popular singer in the '40s but who had gone into semi-retirement. She ended up being irked by the attention she perceived being shifted from her (she does look rather matronly) to Darnell (they have no scenes together), and in fact got so mad that she quit the studio after completion of the project. Muller theorizes that one element removed from the film was a scene between her and Andrews in a convertible in which she sings along to the song on the radio that also happens to be Stella's "theme song," the one she plays on the jukebox in the diner. It's interesting that Faye was so jealous of Darnell. Though it is true that Zanuck made a big push to make her a starlet, she really more has the appearance of a 1950s silent era star. She is dark and husky, which serves Preminger's purposes as he creates a light-dark contrast between the two women, who represent two lifestyle choices, so to speak, but she isn't particularly riveting on screen. I suspect that she would have been better off at Warners. Despite all of Zanuck's labors, Fox was more successful crating male stars.
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But there are other obvious changes. A careful survey of the photos in disc's three photo galleries reveals a whole scene between Andrews and Charles Bickford, who plays the cop on his trail, that starts in a car and ends on a cliff over looking the ocean. Presumably this was the first climax, thrown out at some point for the simpler climactic confrontation in the diner. Muller doesn't mention this scene in his otherwise voluminously informative and appreciative commentary track, which he shares with Andrews's daughter, Susan. Also on hard is the theatrical trailer.
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Den of Lions (Dimension, 2003, 100 minutes, color, R, 1.85:1 enhanced, DD 5.1 in English with English, French, and Spanish subtitles, static silent menu with 15-chapter scene selection, keep case, one disc, $29.95, released on Tuesday, March 7, 2006) is a routine actioner, set and shot in Western Europe like a lot of Dimension films. It concerns a rogue cop, Mike Varga (Stephen Dorff), sent to Hungary as part of an FBI task force set to help officials there deal with the rise of the Hungarian mafia. He goes undercover, and his nemesis turns out to be Darius Paskevic (Bob Hoskins), and of course Darius has a daughter named Katya (Laura Fraser, who made such an impression in the British series Conviction). Varga has to bring down Darius but at the same time protect his daughter. I watched the whole thing yet remembered very little of it and could hardly follow it (I was always puzzled as to why Varga was always so angry). It's well cast though and no one does anything ridiculous, though Hoskins is made to repeat the "bat" scenes from The Untouchables and Party Girl). The transfer is good and the disc has no extras.
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Zu Warriors [Suk san: Sun Suk san geen hap] (Miramax, 2001, 104 minutes, color, PG-13, 2.35:1 enhanced, DD stereo and mono in English with English and Spanish subtitles, 15-chapter original Cantonese version, making of doc, static musical menu with 17-chapter scene selection, keep case, one disc, $29.95, released on Tuesday, March 7, 2006) is Hark Tsui's remake and / or sequel to his film from 1983. The cast is slightly different (Sammo Hung Kam-Bo remains and Zhang Ziyi is added) and the special effects are non-stop. In fact, it's practically an animated film. But it makes as little sense as the original and devolves into a series of set pieces.
The transfer is gorgeous, however, and the extras make sense. That is, there are two versions of the film, the English language version, and the original Cantonese film (which is shorter). There is also a conventional making of which fails to illuminated the tale's mysteries.
And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.
Not only that, I've got a new book out on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!
And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, March 22, at 9 AM, with the critics' ten best lists.
COMING SOON: A package of Hitchcock movies and TV shows, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, the third annual DVD Tray of Horror, and more!
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