On paper, you could be forgiven for thinking that you probably had seen it already, as many of the elements that would define the series are present and correct from the start – a man in a rubber monster suit smashing up miniature replicas of Tokyo, the anti-nuclear subtext, hundreds of Japanese people screaming in panic… But whilst subsequent Godzilla films have their moments, they’re a world away from the heart and soul that you’ll find in the very first film. There is absolutely nothing camp about this movie; instead it’s a stately, emotional and at times even harrowing film that treats its subject matter thoughtfully and with gravitas.

Godzilla is of course an ancient monster woken up after millions of years and given terrifying powers by the Japanese H-bomb tests. Obviously, this puts the theme of nuclear weaponry front and centre in the film, but to describe it as simply an anti-nuclear polemic is an over simplification. Godzilla is far more multilayered than many subsequent horror and sci-fi movies that use a simplistic environmental warning as a narrative rationale for monsters and zombies; instead, director Ishiro Honda’s triumph is the way he rejects upfront preaching for a sophisticated threading of ideas throughout the film. Godzilla indeed represents the destructive power of the atomic bomb both on a literal and an allegorical level; however, Serizawa’s dilemma over the deployment of his Oxygen Destroyer (which occupies most of the second half of the film and is written off too easily by many critics as a simple plot device) reflects the wider issues surrounding the ethics of atomic power: should a discovery be suppressed if there are many ‘bad’ applications for it above and beyond its immediate advantages? And once a discovery has been made, can there ever be any turning back? That the Oxygen Destroyer ultimately saves the day, despite being an even more destructive superweapon than those lamented in the film, suggests a thoughtful ambivalence about the nuclear issue, rather than the soapbox grandstanding of lesser directors.

But as well as brains, the film has a very human heart to it as well. Honda deliberately resonates with recent events that would sit very heavily in the Japanese national memory; characters discuss openly the horror of nuclear warfare that hit the country only nine years previously, and the opening scene on the boat is uncomfortably close to the Castle Bravo test earlier in 1954, where the crew of a Japanese fishing boat was poisoned by the fallout from American nuclear testing. These are scars that run deep, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the scenes surrounding Godzilla’s first attack on Tokyo. Subsequent films shied away from showing the human cost of the monster’s rampages but here it is in full force: orphaned children in hospitals sending Geiger counters into overload; a hysterical mother sitting with her two babies on her doorstep shouting that they’ll all be joining their dead father soon; schools of children praying for an end to the onslaught. It’s sobering, harrowing stuff, made all the more emotional by the dispassionate way Honda’s camera simply records the events as they unfold.

Crucially, the effects – although creaky by modern standards – don’t let the side down. This is partly helped by the noir-ish black and white look of the film, where most of the monster action takes place at night, but equally it’s hard not to be impressed by just how well Godzilla’s destruction of Tokyo is realised. Unlike the friendly green dinosaur he would later become, here the monster is a dark, brutish killing machine who towers over the city with ominous force. Helpfully, the actors play it for real as well with no mugging to the camera, and it’s hard not to find at least some pathos in the central love triange of Serizawa, Ogata and Emiko.

Honda and his team made plain their debt to King Kong nearly twenty years earlier, and whilst that film may have been the first to successfully realise the concept of a huge creature running rampage in a major city, to my mind Godzilla remains the finest giant monster movie ever made. The spectacle we expect from such a film is there if that’s what you’re looking for, but almost uniquely for the genre, it is overshadowed by the concepts, ideas and genuine emotion. In subsequent films we root for the monster and cheer when he knocks down another skyscraper, but here Honda successfully conveys the sheer terror of living through such an unstoppable onslaught. Godzilla is never preachy or presumptive in its nuclear subtext, but instead offers a harrowing and heartfelt yelp of pain from a culture that had all too recently suffered the worst destruction that science could then concoct.

The rise in people getting off on filming themselves means that, a decade on from The Blair Witch Project and its flurry of imitators (and indeed, nearly three decades on from Cannibal Holocaust, the big daddy of all “found footage” movies) film-makers are dusting down the tried and trusted technique of the first-person hand-held narrative. Brian De Palma’s Redacted is apparently “Apocalypse Now for the Youtube generation”, George Romero’s poised to release Diary of the Dead (“Night of the Living Dead for the Youtube generation”) and we currently have Cloverfield, which is meant to be “Godzilla for the Youtube generation”. Cloverfield tells the story of a group of friends trying to escape Manhattan during an attack by a giant monster. One of the friends has a camera, which keeps rolling as they run. On paper, it looks like a pretty good concept but in practice the results are wildly variable.

There is a lot to admire in Cloverfield. The monster is fantastic in both concept and design, and in the grand old Romero tradition isn’t over-defined – refreshingly, the apocalypse just happens, without requiring a reason or rationale. There are some genuine shock moments that do get the heart racing, particularly in the helicopter sequence towards the end of the film. Perhaps the most effective scenes are those where director Matt Reeves plays with the audience’s expectations of the handheld style; there’s a brilliant scene in a subway tunnel where one of the characters suggests putting the camera on night-vision so they can see where they’re going. As an audience, we know they’re going to see something horrible when they do, but Reeves has the characters spend what feels like an eternity fiddling around trying to find the right button, ratcheting up the tension in the process.

Unfortunately, there’s far too many scenes which consist of little more than a lot of running around and people shouting things like “We’ve got to get out of here” and “It’s not safe, we’ve gotta go”. And herein lies the main fault with the film: there’s absolutely no reason for it to be filmed first-person hand-held. At a time when the rule of the day in Hollywood is to go big big big, producers JJ Abrams and Bryan Burk are to be commended for having the balls to go small; however, of all the stories that will be told in cinemas this year, surely the tale of a giant monster that levels New York warrants the big screen blockbuster treatment? Much as Reeves does his best, our inability to get a good look at what’s going on is actually irritating rather than tantalising. All the action is reduced to a lot of incoherent banging and crashing. It’s akin to being forced to watch a Broadway spectacular through a keyhole. There’s a really exciting story here, it’s just that it’s all happening off-camera; you become resentful of all the cool stuff that’s going on just outside your line of vision.

I also resented having to see the apocalypse in the company of some of the most vapid, substance-free, zero-note characters I’ve seen in a long time. The whole point of the first-person narrative is that there’s inherently got to be something about the narrator that’s interesting or comment-worthy to justify the sacrifices in objectivity and omniscience that third-person gives you. Unfortunately, despite going through the worst ordeal ever with the characters, it’s hard to feel anything other than total indifference to their fates. The first 20 minutes or so, before the monster shows up, are excruciating. It would be fine if they were there just as monster-fodder, but they’re on screen, in our faces, ALL THE TIME, whereas the monster (which is far more interesting) is only fleetingly in the foreground. The whole plot revolves around Rob’s romantic mission to rescue and win-back his on-off girlfriend Beth; unfortunately Rob is as dull as dishwater, and our understanding of the depth of their relationship is limited to a couple of shots of them giggling together on the subway. Some reviews I’ve read have tried to pass this as a comment on the narcissism of the Youtube generation, but frankly I saw no evidence of this; if we were supposed to dislike the characters I would have been more interested but I have a horrible feeling that Reeves intends for them to be our point of identification in the ensuing madness.

Crucially, despite the shakycam, you never once get the impression that this is real footage or that these are real people. They are clearly actors working from a script, and they’re not doing a particularly good job of it. Now, horror and sci-fi don’t necessarily have a proud history of naturalistic performance, but the Cloverfield’s gimmick relies on us buying into the reality of the situation to sell the rest of the story, which falls apart as soon as any of the characters open their mouths. Most ruinous, however, is the decision to make the cameraman a Hollywood stock “comedy dork” figure. This fulfills the Hollywood rule of only putting beautiful, aspirational people in front of the camera, but his irritating babbling actively saps the tension out of some rather good setups.

Cloverfield is not a bad movie by any stretch, but it’s a frustratingly missed opportunity. It’s been ages since Hollywood made an honest to god, balls to the wall, giant-monster-smashes-stuff-up film. For a while, I thought Cloverfield might be that film, but it wimps out by taking the hand-held route – a technique designed to suggest modernity and immediacy, but that actually feels horribly old hat. It’s jarringly uncinematic; I’ll give the DVD a go when it comes out as I have a feeling that I might enjoy it more on my TV, but on the big screen it feels neutered. As a big-landmarks-get-destroyed film, it can’t hold a candle to Independence Day, which is nearly twelve years old now. As a monster movie, it happily sits in the first division, but comes nowhere near the premiere league of Godzilla, King Kong, Gamera 3 or The Host – for my money, still the best 21st century monster movie yet.

There’s no music in Cloverfield, except over the end credits, where we hear a stirring, militaristic, doomy march in the spirit of the old Toho kaiju films. This pretty much sums up what the film could have been, but wasn’t. Monster movies don’t have to be a treatise on the human condition, but if you’re going to make the characters more important than the monster then it helps if you have something interesting to say about them. Cloverfield should have been an all-out popcorn belter, but in truth it’s just a bit incoherent and unexciting – which is the worst crime of all.

I don’t normally mention DVD extras in these reviews, but Contamination comes packaged a pretty engaging 20 minute interview in which Cozzi, clearly on the defensive, explains how pretty much every aspect of the film is a product of compromise, commercial considerations and interference from the producer. It was the producer who wanted “an ugly woman” to play Colonel Stella Holmes, hence the casting of Louise Marleau, which seems slightly uncharitable. The production company was based in the office next to the company who made Zombie Flesh Eaters, and hearing how much money that film made, they decided to get the same cast – to find that only English thesp Ian McCulloch was available. Budgetary constraints meant that huge chunks of the film were made in a studio in Rome, which explains why it boasts some laboratory sets that even the 60s Batman series would wince at.

Cozzi – or Lewis Coates as he is credited – is keen to give the impression that as an artist, his main motivation was to pay tribute to the science fiction films he loved, particularly Alien. In practice, he achieves this by liberally helping himself to much of Scott’s iconography. The chest bursting scene is present and correct – replayed a dozen times, in fact – as are the green eggs, which vary between being close-ups of olives and something resembling a rubber bath toy. The massive alien Cyclops, meanwhile, harks back to the B-movies of the fifties in both design and direction, whilst the opening ten minutes are pretty much identical to the opening ten minutes of Zombie Flesh Eaters.

So far, so derivative, but is Contamination entertaining? It is to start with. The first forty minutes are pretty good fun as long as you’re prepared to look past the appalling scripting, wooden acting and flaccid direction. I’m not normally of the ‘so bad it’s good’ school – you either like it or you don’t – but it’s hard not to admire the gall of writing lines like “call it intuition – but I think they were going to put those eggs in the sewers!!” as late as 1980. The early scenes try to feel so epic – complete with budget-busting helicopter shots of New York, to desperately try and sell the idea that the whole film was made there – that it’s hard not to get swept along, and your patience is rewarded by an exploding man less than 12 minutes in. The music (by Italian horror stalwarts Goblin) is great too, all farting synths and funky bass guitars.

Unfortunately it all falls apart at the halfway point, where Contamination turns into a terrible James Bond ripoff, complete with sabotage sub-plots and a secret base on a coffee plantation. Cozzi claims that this turnabout was forced upon him, but it’s pretty clear that he must shoulder the blame for some extraordinarily leaden pacing. The film almost grinds to a halt, and although McCulloch – brilliant as ever – does his utmost to lend some much-needed grit to proceedings, Louise Marleau and Marino Mase sleepwalk through their parts, including possibly the least convincing romantic subplot ever seen on screen.

All of which means that when the alien Cyclops does arrive, it’s a blessed relief – partly because it means the end is in sight, partly because it reduces the amount of inert acting we have to sit through. In keeping with everything else in Contamination, the Cyclops is a bit rubbish; apparently designed as a hugely expensive mechanical prop, it failed to operate on the day, meaning Cozzi had to film it in 100 different shots to cover the fact that it was being operated by hand. Suffice it to say that Mase’s death more resembles a terrible accident with a vacuum cleaner than it does consumption by an evil alien.

In light of these real failings, it seems churlish to criticise the script’s brave lack of logic – Marleau’s character in particular seems to alternate between making jaw-dropping leaps of logic to missing clues that are bleeding obvious – because if these were the film’s only problems it would still be a fun, ropey piece of trash cinema. Unfortunately, Contamination’s main crime is that it simply becomes rather boring, which is ultimately Cozzi’s fault. Apparently he now runs a film memorabilia store, which seems a far more apt way of paying tribute to his beloved sci-fi movies than this brave but ultimately unsatisfying effort.

It isn’t that surprising to watch a George Romero movie and see someone being brutally murdered. Nor is it that novel to see how he delights in charting the downfall of mankind, usually as a result of our own folly. What marks him out as a great filmmaker is his ability to weave his pretty linear story into a complex narrative on the tragic weakness of humanity, namely our unfathomable combination of dauntless courage and distasteful arrogance. The Dead series is steeped in this notion, with Romero executing a beautiful full-circle from Night to Land in showing audiences how, when the going gets tough we generally go to pieces.

The Crazies seems to hint at all of these themes but never really draws them out. Initially the signs are hopeful, with a town suddenly thrown into chaos when a military plane crashes nearby and disgorges its deadly cargo of the top-secret TRIXIE virus (a nice name for the instrument of Armageddon I thought). In the Dead series the military’s role in the downfall of mankind is always hinted at (along with NASA; the British public will doubtless be thankful that our own modest excursions into Near Space usually fail miserably) but here there is little doubting the military-scientific establishment’s culpability. However, the anti-military polemic never occurs. Perhaps this has something to do with the timing of The Crazies release. By 1973 the Vietnam War was limping to its pitiful conclusion and the American people were starting to see their returning GIs as at best equal victims of a war beyond their control or at worst as pitiable agents of America’s shame who should be paid off and forgotten as quickly as possible. There are some anti-military gestures thrown in for good measure, such as soldiers looting the corpses of the infected townsfolk, but they feel like just that-gestures. Overall it is very difficult to heap too much blame on the rank and file soldiers, a novelty in Romero’s films and one which could perhaps have been developed further.

What about the high command? Again Romero seems to posit them for a kicking but then deflates them as a target. One cannot help but sympathise with the officers sent to Evans City to try and sort out a problem which is clearly not of their making. It has been noted in other places in the Lagoon that Romero’s use of race to deliberately confuse notions of the heroic can be over-analysed but generally seems to hold true. It is instructive therefore that the only black lead in The Crazies is Colonel Peckern, turning Ben from Night on his head. Peckern is an entirely likeable character who obviously has the best interests of Evans City at heart, even when he instigates a brutal regime of martial law. Even those who have concocted the deadly TRIXIE virus (good to see Richard France returning as a heartless if not logical scientist) escape with some sympathy as they struggle to understand what is going on.

The result of this is that the film feels a lot more confused than one might expect from a Romero offering of such promise. It is excellent that everything is thrown into disarray but it is also quite a pit-fall, especially as audiences are left with little resolution as to what exactly has happened. If the film remained focused on those making decisions (i.e. the military and government) it might just have worked. However, by having a parallel plot of some townsfolk trying to escape the quarantine things get a little too disparate and as a result the interesting ideas are bogged down in the detail of execution. For instance, by following Judy, Clank and the others as they try and flee Evans City it is difficult to know whether we should encourage their flight or castigate their selfish folly. The military are rounding people up, but this appears to be for the sole purpose of treatment. Only when rednecks in the outlying farmlands start to resist do the military start to fight back. The only menace that our band is fleeing is that of the virus itself, however it is abundantly clear that one (which means ultimately all) are already infected. Again, it is a novelty for a Romero piece to feel pity for the soldiers gunned by our ‘heroes’. There is a real problem with direction here too, a rare criticism of a Romero film. The two sub-plots are afforded disproportionate attention, and by leaping from one to the other not enough time is granted to allow them to gel together as a whole. This is especially telling of the flight of the townsfolk; because we know little about them it is difficult to mourn them as they succumb to their various fates.

For all of its flaws I enjoyed The Crazies. My disappointment stems from the fact that it is a good movie which had the potential to be a fantastic one. Romero quite obviously looked at the momentum of his earlier Dead offerings and abruptly flipped it on its head. As a result The Crazies does possess the ethos of those earlier works and is, in many respects, even more complex and rewarding. However, there is an undeniable shortfall in the execution of these ideas. The flight of the townsfolk seems to have been dropped in to provide some human anchorage to the abstract and seemingly heartless calculations of the various policymakers. It is superfluous though, as the complex rendering of each of the policymakers is laden in itself with Romero’s narrative of flawed redemption. As a result the film feels crowded and sparse in equal measure.

]]> http://www.blacklagoon.info/movies/creepy-stuff/the-crazies-1973/feed/ 0 http://www.blacklagoon.info/movies/slashers/alien-1979/ http://www.blacklagoon.info/movies/slashers/alien-1979/#comments Sun, 13 Nov 2005 18:56:00 +0000 Carl http://www.blacklagoon.info/?p=61 When you come from a crappy region like mine you tend to hold onto the merest sources of civic pride with a pronounced vigour and trumpet them for the world to hear. With such thoughts in mind it is my honour to announce that Ridley Scott was not only educated here but also drew inspiration for the stunning opening in ‘Blade Runner’ from the surrounding industries. Not much you might retort if you managed to get through an entire sitting of ‘G.I. Jane’, but you’d have to concede that for the awe-inspiring Alien we should at least have named a library after him or something similar.

Alien stands unrivalled in successfully combining science-fiction with horror, and it’s difficult to know which of the genres to slot it into. Scott isn’t content with staging a simple story of ‘death stalking innocent victims’ in space; the success of Alien comes from the fact that he utilises his premise to its utmost effect. From the opening shots of the crew of the Nostromo coming out of hibernation we are clearly intended to feel uneasy at how reliant our human heroes are on the technology that surrounds them. That technology has dated remarkably well considering the film is over 25 years old (compare it to Star Wars, released a couple of years before). Scott throws us into a cold and mechanical environment where the noises and whirrs of the Nostramo add to the claustrophobic anxiety that steadily accumulates as the film progresses.

This is accentuated by the captivating special effects that bombard the senses when the ship makes its ill-fated diversion to the home of the aliens (deservedly bagging the Oscar for Best Special Effects). Again we know that John Hurt’s descent into the pod field is a stupid thing to do but the world that we’re thrown into is as mesmerising as it is repellent. The alien itself quickly established itself as something of a horror icon which will surprise first-time viewers of the movie as it doesn’t appear that often. With his time-bomb in place Scott moves the focus of the film onto the human struggle for survival, as the perfect killing machine takes its relentless toll. Though they cannot help but play second fiddle to the effects none of the cast puts a foot wrong. Sigourney Weaver really grows into the character of Ripley, becoming the sole figure of strength as things collapse around her but clearly terrified ever step of the way. Ian Holm is excellent too, never batting an eyelid as his part in the unfolding tragedy is unmasked.

As the inevitable siege begins the scale of their helplessness becomes oppressive. It’s obviously true that ‘in space, no one can hear you scream’ but Alien is wonderfully effective at creating a sensation of watching something that’s actually unfolding in front of you. In part I think this has something to do with the fact that our heroes themselves don’t know what they’re up against. To all intents and purposes they’re simple miners returning from work and the fact that they’re on a spaceship is neither here not there. This is obviously the first time that they have come across aliens before and when the killing begins you genuinely feel for them. Now their technology counts for nothing, and it’s always liberating to see humans knocked off the top of the evolutionary table for a while. A lot of things are feeding into this – a non-too subtle critique of the heartlessness of big business, a human indifference/arrogance to the environment around them, the unsettled status of females in the gender wars of the 1970s – but at its heart Alien is a bloody scary take on the future. The sum total of this is beautiful and hypnotic, captivating and terrifying and without doubt one of the best science-fiction/horror films of the 1970s, if not ever. And we still haven’t built him a statue…..

Unashamedly aspiring to cult status by being as silly as possible, there is nothing sophisticated about Killer Klowns. From entombing their victims in candy floss through to their circus tent shaped spaceship (they’re aliens by the way, in case you missed it in the title), we’re never given any indication as to precisely why the Klowns are doing what they do. This is a shame as I’m quite intrigued by the idea of an alien race of killer clowns who draw sustenance from human blood (it’d spice up Royal Variety Performances no end). The scenes where hapless humans realise that these aren’t real clowns but are instead quite bitey are a treasure to behold, with most of the cast trying to play it straight but the few lucky enough to be wearing the red noses realising they have more to gain by playing it for everything it’s worth.

What the Chiodo brothers offer up is a film fitting the mould of the numerous ‘made for midnight’ movies that the big American TV networks pumped out to provide waddage to their late night schedules in the late 1970s. You shouldn’t base your evening around watching Killer Klowns but I can’t, as much as I try, say you should omit to viewing it all together. It’s one of the silliest films you’re likely to watch but there’s something inherently enjoyable about watching clowns kill people, especially so when they’re aliens and wrap them in candy floss. Surely it sells itself?

In truth, none of the characters in the film are massively interesting, but Marty’s unwhingeing sense of hopelessness at the start of the film means that she’s at least sympathetic. Interestingly, Ferrara makes the best possible use out of the clipped, strictly regimented military base setting; in a situation where everyone is trained to keep their emotions under wraps at all times, it becomes quite difficult to tell who’s an alien duplicate and who isn’t, which means Marty’s attempts to escape the base are pretty compelling with some quite surprising twists. Initially, I found Billy Wirth’s performance as Tim (ostensibly the dashing pilot who Marty falls for) to be gratingly wooden, but his lack of expression is eventually his saving grace and does lead to some tension as we try and work out if he’s to be trusted or not. By contrast, the change in Marty’s family when they are duplicated is so marked that it becomes screamingly obvious that they are aliens – thankfully, these transitions are not dwelled upon too much, although Carol’s fate is drawn out for far longer than is dramatically satisfying.

Body Snatchers does sag a bit towards the end, and suffers from an overly linear plot, but at 87 minutes it doesn’t outstay its welcome. The limited sets and occasionally plastic-y special effects (especially the human ‘husks’) mean it feels rather more like a TV movie than a cinematic blockbuster, and in all fairness it’s probably a rather minor entry into the history of cinema; however, Ferrara’s sensitive updating of the novel’s themes means the film is definitely worth a look. Whether 2006′s Invasion remakes – starring Nicole Kidman – achieves the same feat remains to be seen.