ESSAY: I Ramble About Piranhas, 3-D, Frenchmen, and Gore

This marks the fourth time this week I’ve sat down with the intention of addressing Piranha 3-D, the multidimensional spectacular that offers viewers the pleasure of watching a fish puke up Jerry O’Connell’s penis.  It’s a genuine pleasure, truly.  As are many moments in the film, some relating to the gore, but most to the actors wise enough to oversell this material.  I’m thinking especially of O’Connell, Ving Rhames, and Christopher Lloyd, who provides vital information with such volatile bluster that it’s remarkable he doesn’t require hospitalization.

That’s not to disparage the sturdy contributions from Elisabeth Shue and Adam Scott, who don’t wear out their welcome as the sobering leads, mostly because of their pluck, but also because Piranha 3-D stays under ninety minutes, which is vital when you’re a movie called Piranha 3-D.  Aja does his job mostly right, producing a zippy creature-feature that tries to both honor and kid its inspirations.  Richard Dreyfuss gets a cute opener as an ill-fated boater named Matt, but his demise emphasizes speed and carnage instead of suspense.  Message received: this film is not Jaws.

I like to think they're watching Party Down.

Unfortunately, Piranha 3-D is also not an even film, which hurt my earlier efforts to write a more unified review.  No matter the mood, no matter my approach, I kept lapsing into discordant asides.  “This works.”  “This part was stupid.”  “Was Paul Scheer’s death lost in the editing room?”  Stray observations for a film full of stray events.  Fast as it is, the film is sloppy and unfocused.  Easy example: Shue’s steadfast policewoman vies for main character status with Jerry O’Connell’s sleazeball producer and Steven R. McQueen’s Jake, the teenager chasing his unrequited crush.  Who’s our hero?  However, there’s a more complicated example here that aggravates me.  There’s too much gore.

Specifically, there’s too much gore, and it does not work with this subject.  The film’s non-piranha scenes suggest lighter fare, like Tremors and Gremlins, with the colorful townsfolk confronting an invasion of chittering beasts.  Piranha 3-D even thieves its police-mom/frustrated-child dynamic from the underrated Eight Legged Freaks – another film that incongruously gave ferocious animals light-hearted chirping sounds.  Of course, that worked with Freaks’s cartoon attitude, where the spiders did double-takes and the deaths were bloodless.

No joke - this may be his best work ever.

Here, Aja angles for the dread of inevitable carnage, rather than the suspense of threat and escape.  One sequence has a woman (topless, natch) parasailing, legs dipping in and out of the water.  It isn’t enough to see the water bubble and hear her scream.  It is imperative that she rise back up, breasts flopping, body nearly shorn at the waist, blood streaming down.  Another sequence has a broken wire slice a woman in half.  The emphasis stays on the gore, and, again, it’s not enough to see her top half slide off.  We must see also it fall through the lake’s water, blood billowing into the murk.  Piranha!

To be fair, I thought some of the gore was clever, and some of the deaths felt righteous (O’Connell’s especially), but then we get hit by a scene where children watch a nearby woman fall slowly into the lake, pulled by her hair, becoming chum for a feeding frenzy.  Aja likely understands the disconnect, which is why he tries to ignore it and power through the scene.  Compare these scenes to the early films of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, who balanced their horror-coms by amping the gore to the point of surreality.  That might’ve made this film cohesive and impressive.  Aja loves his gore effects too much, to the point that horror makeup guru Greg Nicotero cameos as a survivor helping people out of the lake.

In a nod to the eighties, sexual liberation equates to violent death.

Much of the method here reminds me of Aja’s background as a horror director from the so-called New French Extremity.  This loose “movement” includes boundary-breaking pictures like Martyrs, Frontieres, Inside, and Aja’s own High Tension.  The films couch themselves in unheard-of sights and visions of body horror, from live flaying to skin melting to Aja, in Tension, reducing a man’s head to pulp, using only a stairway and a bookcase (the lesson: don’t buy books).  Some of these films have the substance to support the envelop-pushery.  Martyrs and Trouble Every Day have especially compelling undercurrents.

Piranha 3-D doesn’t, conflating its breasts, boobs, and boneheads into an energetic mishmash of goals and interests.  Yeah, it’s energetic.  It’s fascinating in its Jekyll/Hyde personality.  It'll make horror fans think a bit about the nature of gore, its pros and cons.  The flick's worth seeing...but I would never call it successful.

Especially not the 3-D.  The in-your-face cheapness (self-aware, to be sure) was obvious and trite and flat and it gave me a headache.  I’ve actively disliked the current 3-D fad, with the inflated prices and the failure to elicit any sensation greater than “Ooh, look at the depth!”  Even so, Cameron’s Avatar never gave me a headache, which occurred during Piranha 3-D, to the point that I frequently took-off the glasses, mid-frenzy, and closed my eyes.  I don’t think I missed much – I could hear the screams and chirps just fine.

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REVIEW: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season One (Joss Whedon, 1997-8)

 Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar), looking smug.

Formula defines the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a rigid formula that keeps the stories both reliable and occasionally stifled.  Fans of horror television probably know this formula well, since so many genre shows follow the rubric.  Kolchak, The X-Files, Millennium, Fringe.  Detectives chase monsters (figurative or otherwise), following breadcrumbs that inevitably make the conflict more personal (the monster attacks one of the heroes), forcing an action conclusion that ends with a tease of future threats.

On the one hand, it’s the nature of the beast.  Buffy is classic mystery narrative adapted to a medium in which “acts” must be quick and punctuated with twists.  On the other hand, this formula has become so pervasive in network television that it’s impossible to watch Buffy without feeling the weight of tradition.  For all the texture employed by Joss Whedon and his writers (the irreverent teen banter, the high school setting), Season One of Buffy the Vampire Slayer often feels restricted.

Eldritch abominations are always welcome. 

That’s not to say the show isn’t entertaining.  In point of fact, Whedon’s comedy deflates the lurking pomposity of recurring villains and keeps the high schoolers on the right side of angsty melodrama.  In “I Robot, You Jane,” Xander warns Buffy about how Willow’s falling for an anonymous stranger online, and they whip themselves into a frenzied paranoia, just before Buffy realizes:

Buffy: “Xander…we are totally overreacting.”
Xander: “But it’s fun, isn’t it?”

In addition to the welcome humor, the monsters cleverly reflect the anxieties of their heroes.  While a show like The X-Files offered compelling heroes, Mulder and Scully mostly came to blows for ideological reasons instead of personal ones.  Mulder ran in pursuit of the unknown, while Scully chastised him for ignoring the scientific process.  The beasts rarely affected Mulder and Scully past the threat of physical violence.

Willow (Alyson Hannigan) is my favorite.

Compare that to an episode from Buffy, “The Pack.”  While the episode is unusually cruel (hyena-possessed teens devour the school principal), the idea of outcast Xander joining a new clique, and alienating his friends, plays into not just general teenage anxieties, but Xander as a character.  Xander experiences popularity outside his group of misfits, with the caveat that he has to betray his compassion.  The “monster” becomes a way to study the protagonists.

Buffy’s first season improves as it goes, not just because of the humor, but because of how the creators refine their main characters and further shade side players like Cordelia and Angel.  Additionally, the stakes grow more potent with season finale (and standout) “Prophecy Girl,” which bravely closes the first run of episodes with optimism instead of a frustrating cliffhanger, leaving us with the image of likeable heroes earning a chance to rest.  Despite the growing pains, Whedon understands that the monsters draw us in, but the detectives keep us watching.

RATING: B

REVIEW: Parasomnia (William Malone, 2008)

It’s too bad that William Malone wasn’t born in the 1880’s.  Then he could’ve wowed audiences during the silent era, without worrying about nonsense like plot, dialogue, or internal logic.  Just him, dazzling the crowd with his macabre visions.  He has an eye for the expressionistic possibilities of the genre, and a self-funded, self-written tale like Parasomnia should be an opportunity to impress.  Instead, the film disappoints, buttressing the impressive images with scenes of inane chatter and predictable scares.

The titular “parasomnia” (behavioral aberrance during transitional sleep phases…or something) belongs to Laura Baxter (Cherilynn Wilson), a girl with such severe narcolepsy that she hasn’t aged mentally.  Lovely, innocent, her purity attracts the main character, Danny (Dylan Purcell), as well as a sociopathic mesmerist (Patrick Kilpatrick) who uses his hypnotic powers to ensure a hospital room next to Laura.  Danny’s efforts to rescue Laura provide the structure for the film, and her dreams allow for flights of fancy, as she wanders through a field of mirrors, pursued by creatures that move with the twitchy gait of Doctor Vannacutt in House on Haunted Hill and resemble the demon of “Fair-Haired Child.”

If you don’t know those two titles, you should.  House on Haunted Hill was a trite remake that became a good film thanks to a great eye for the gothic and surreal.  The scenes of people simply investigating the asylum hallways remain some of the creepier imagery of horror in the nineties.  “Fair-Haired Child,” Malone’s creepy-as-hell episode for Masters of Horror, remains a career high.  At an hour long, the dark fairy-tale story moves furiously through its images of ghost-faced monsters and expressionistic dreamscapes.

Parasomnia is not compact.  At a hundred minutes long, the film offers too many scenes of characters sitting down and talking, or standing and discussing, or standing and opining.  As a writer, Malone doesn’t inspire much confidence.  Despite Laura’s youthful mind, it’s too much to see her, freed from endless sleep, chewing on a newspaper and joyfully spreading ice cream on her face.  Additionally, Malone doesn’t always trust when to cut, allowing conversations both expositional and incidental to go on too long.  Thankfully, he gets away with a few of these scenes, especially one where Detective Garrett (Jeffrey Combs, a pleasure as always) discusses the hypnotist.

I can’t think of another current horror director who would cover such a scene with those angles, with those kinds of faces, with those bold colors that celebrates the monochromatic.  Likewise, the dream sequences occasionally impress, as when a body grows outward from a tree.  And the climax of the film stuns.  The hypnotist gathers two girls from a recital (one of them Alison Brie of TV’s Community), puts them in goggles, and forces them to play Gustav Holst while puppets creak in the background and drapes cover the enormous room in enormous contours.  Watching it, I thought of the scarred Erik in The Phantom of the Opera, who likewise buried his ruined soul behind music and environment.  He thought that exterior beauty could mask a broken interior.

Maybe there’s a lesson there.

RATING: C+

PS: Some of Malone’s visuals here get their inspiration from Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński.  His remarkable artworks, which belong in the same category as H. R. Giger and Salvador Dali, are available online.

REVIEW: Werewolf of London (Stuart Walker, 1935)

“Gaze, if you will, dear reader, on the face of the real werewolf.  His name is Edward Hyde.” - Stephen King, Danse Macabre

Stuart Walker’s Werewolf of London holds a historic place in horror history: the first werewolf movie.  However, the picture fails to live up to its status, instead repeating and diluting the tropes of Rouben Mamoulian’s superior Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  Once again, a scientist, obsessed with his studies and distant to his wife, suffers a curse that transforms him into a monster that stalks the streets of London.  The similarities were not lost on the critical establishment of the day, as The New York Times noted “[Werewolf of London] goes…back to Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and permits Mr. Hull to be transformed…from a frock-coated botanist into a fanged apeman with homicidal tendencies.”

The film begins in Tibet, as Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) ignores local superstition and finds a “mariphasa” flower (Asia’s wolfsbane) in a forbidden valley.  After an attack from a hairy assailant, he returns to London to study the bloom, and he learns that the flower’s sap can treat his werewolfism.  Unfortunately, the elusive Tibetan assailant learns this as well, and the film becomes a race who will be cured and who will be damned.

Director Stuart Walker directed Werewolf of London for Universal in the wake of the studio’s first successful monster pictures (The Invisible Man, Dracula), and while his work is efficient (the film’s only seventy-five minutes long), his style and imagination remain fleeting.  The opening in Tibet evokes an eerie displacement, recalling the imposing Romanian landscapes of Nosferatu, and the transformation and effects, headlined by Jack Pierce (makeup artist from Frankenstein) highlight the skillful monster makeup.  A highlight (see pictures) involves Hull transforming via wipes disguised behind foregrounded pillars.  Unfortunately, the majority of events take place as drawing-room conversations between Glendon, wife Lisa (Valerie Hobson, stalwart), and romantic foe Paul (Lester Matthews, upright).

The performance by Henry Hull as the dispassionate Glendon proves problematic.  Lacking the sympathy granted to Fredrich March’s Jekyll, much less the puppy-dog sincerity of Chaney’s Talbot in The Wolf Man, Glendon walks stiffly, declares curtly, and fails to emphasize the tragedy.  The drama from transformation stories depends on the disparity between opposing personalities, but Glendon’s natural state proves too neutral.  He mutes the dynamic.  To be fair, there’s some mild erotic intrigue, as Glendon’s lack of interest in his wife contrasts with his feral attacks on the looser women of London.  Indeed, his impotency, emotional and otherwise, becomes clear when he forces a kiss upon Lisa halfway through the picture, trying to prove that their love is real, and, of course, it is not.

Even then, Hull’s performance lacks juice, and the sexual energy here can only echo Mamoulian’s animalistic predator, who still feels transgressive and boundless.  Even now, there are few scenes in horror as potent and lustful as the moment when Hyde gazes upon the naked back of Ivy.  For much of history, Werewolf of London remained little-known, a stop-gap for horror connoisseurs between more significant fare.  While it’s not a bad picture, perhaps we’re just as well ignoring it.  Werewolf of London may offer some interest to genre completists, but, even then, the appeal is small, as are the rewards.

RATING: C+