Retro Review: Jurassic Park III

 Jurassic Park III is the one that Steven Spielberg didn't direct, the one that has a dream sequence with a talking Velociraptor that says Alan Grant (Sam Neill)'s name on an airplane. I mean, that really ought to cover it, right? It's the one that's universally recognized as terrible and that director Joe Johnston (Captain America: The First Rocketeer) somehow managed to bounce back from. William H. Macy and Tea Leoni are in it, somehow they talked Laura Dern into shooting a cameo but Jeff Goldblum said, "nah, there's a line and I'm not crossing it again." I guess that Cats and Dogs money was too good to pass up. But enough about Jeff Goldbum - people will debate until the end of time about whether The Lost World really sucks or just kind of sucks - Alan Grant is back you guys! I choose to believe that this is the work of Sutter Cane, but obviously I have no evidence to support that because Cane hasn't given me any.

 Anyway, so I saw Jurassic Park III in the theatre because that was back when I'd go see anything and maybe we didn't know it was going to suck. Or we hoped it wouldn't. Or maybe we did know and we went to see it anyway because, hell, we'd already seen Jeepers Creepers. It was a long time ago. We watched the terrible movie where the Raptors have quills because dinosaur research had continued to advance and now they're closer to birds than lizards to yeah, multi-colored quills. Some dumb kid with rich parents got lost on Isla The Other One from The Lost World (I would like to point out that in The Lost World you can also see this island chain includes Isla Muerte. I'd love to see the dinosaurs on that one) and Alan Grant has to find him. Even though he's never been to that Island. I guess Vince Vaughn isn't considered trustworthy enough to find a kid. Probably a good call.

 So we left the stupid movie and went to a friend of a friend's house, which is never my idea of a good time, especially when the friend who brought you there (and is driving) goes in one of the back rooms to get high and you're watching South Park with some dude who is half conscious and mostly paying attention to his turtle aquarium behind the couch. Good times. If that doesn't already sound sketchy enough to you guys, the people who lived in this apartment would later steal a bunch of stuff from some girl, get confronted about it, and decide to just leave it all on the runway of the airport for them to find. True story. But eventually my friend comes back out and he's going to drive me home which is what I wanted to do, and he grabs two beers "for the road." This is my only option of getting home and we're well before the days of cell phones here.

 Well, as luck would have it, while driving back there's a police checkpoint and he's already opened one of the beers to drink while on the road (in his defense, he's a very functional alcoholic) and can't turn around. So, uh, we're going to have to deal with this prickly situation. In his infinite (read: under 21) wisdom, he opens the other beer and proceeds to pour both of them onto the floorboard of the driver's side, hoping that they won't notice. Take a guess how that well that worked. We are both ordered to get out of the car and to submit to a breathalyzer, which is fine with me because I haven't been drinking and I'm not going to jail. On the other hand, they continue to ask him "Sir, have you been drinking?" and he answers "No."

 Taking the breathalyzer out: "Sir, are you sure you haven't been drinking?"

 Him: "I have not"

 Handing him the breathalyzer: "Are you certain that you were not drinking tonight?"

 Him: "No"

 He's blowing into the breathalyzer: "One last time, have you been drinking tonight?"

 BEEP!

 Him: "Well, maybe one beer."

 And they put him in handcuffs and take him off to jail. Me? I'm sober and without a ride home, so I get to walk with the officer back to his truck so she can take a look around and see if there's anything else they should know about. The entire cabin reeks of cheap beer and I'm getting a headache just standing there. She finds his back pack filled with issues of High Times and says "this is promising" and to this day I don't know how she didn't find his bowl or why she didn't check the ash tray, which is exactly where what he normally smoked was tucked away. I mean, you are a cop, right? Well, I'm not going to be too rude, because she very apologetically explained that I would have to take his truck home because they couldn't spare an officer to drive me to my parents house (that'll be important in a minute). She have me her badge number and name in case someone pulled me over and noticed the pungent odor of beer everywhere, and off I went.

 I was living with my parents, who were asleep, so I had to sneak into their room to get the cordless phone out. That way they wouldn't wake up when he called me from the drunk tank to come pick him up, as he did at about 2 in the morning. I took my car (much better idea) and navigated through downtown - which I didn't know very well - and found him outside of the jail, giving a homeless guy the last five dollars he had. Then he smoked a cigarette and I took him back to his truck, which he drove home without incident. He lost his license for a year and there was probation or something else and now he has a PhD and four masters and is an expert on bats. So I guess it worked out. One time we shared a motel room during a wedding and there was a bat outside. He brought it in, but because he was drunk, he dropped it and the bat went under the bed. He laughed and said "that's what you get when you party with me!" and then went to sleep.

 Where was I...?

Shocktober Review: In the Mouth of Madness

 True story: the Cap'n has often mentioned, but never officially reviews John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness. There's no good reason why I haven't; it was on my "Top Ten Horror Movies" list, I played it for college students during a pre-Horror Fest III event, and generally speaking I think of it fondly. Hell, when I picked up the Blu-Ray, I thought I'd throw it on just to check out the picture quality and ended up watching all the way until Sutter Cane first appears. The phrase "this is reality!" comes up frequently in conversation with friends (to be fair, we talk about Lovecraft quite a bit). For its twentieth anniversary, it only seems fair to actually talk about In the Mouth of Madness, my second favorite entry into Carpenter's "Apocalypse Trilogy."

 Many years ago, back in the early days of the internet, I remember going to an H.P. Lovecraft fan site and looking at the "adaptations" section, only to find that the entry for In the Mouth of Madness goes out of its way to insist that Carpenter's film is in no way "inspired" by Lovecraft and was clearly more influenced by Stephen King. Because, uh, King is mentioned by name in the film? Because it sort of sounds like his name? I hadn't laughed that hard since a Cliff's Notes knock-off insisted that MacBeth's "parade of Kings" was in no way Shakespeare flattering the royalty because "he was above such things." So In the Mouth of Madness is not directly lifted from a Lovecraft story (true), but it shares locations, character names, and thematic elements that come from his stories. Let's not forget the direct passages from "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Haunter in the Dark" attributed to Cane. It's as clearly tied to the concept of "cosmic horror" as Guillermo Del Toro's Hellboy is, and that doesn't get brushed away into the broom closet.

 Perhaps it's because In the Mouth of Madness is Carpenter at his most unabashedly pulpy (at least, until Vampires). This is the last of his great run that began with Halloween and came crashing down with Village of the Damned (the less said about Ghosts of Mars and The Ward, the better), but as I mentioned in the Horror Fest III recap, it's "quaintly 90s." It represents the last of an era of "contemporary" horror films that don't have any version of cell phones, the internet, or digital anything. I'm not actually sure how you would make In the Mouth of Madness today, as some intrepid Sutter Cane fan would have easily found (and posted) the map to Hobb's End online well in advance of the publication of his final novel.

 That's also why In the Mouth of Madness still works, because at first, we're not entirely sure what's happening to John Trent (Sam Neill). We know he's in an asylum (Arkham, if you were curious), and that he's been admitted under the care of (sic) Dr. Saperstein (John Glover) - hello, Rosemary's Baby reference - and that "things are really going to shit out there." When Dr. Wrenn (David Warner) comes to visit, we're introduced to the flashback of how insurance investigator Trent ended up unleashing the "Old Ones," with the help of literary agent Linda Styles (Julie Carmen) and, inadvertently, Arcane publisher Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston). But it's a slow burn - aside from the framing device, most of the first thirty minutes of In the Mouth of Madness are procedural. This is punctuated with moments of violence, or hallucinations and, in one case, and old Carpenter favorite - the "double dream" fake-out.

 Well before we're aware how much influence Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow) has over the story we're being told, a sense of unease permeates In the Mouth of Madness. It's arguably more effective than Prince of Darkness, which attempts to set the same kind of tone of foreboding menace. Carpenter and screenwriter / former New Line President Michael De Luca (who often doesn't get the credit when discussing this film) wisely frame the film through the perspective of the pragmatic John Trent. He's trained to spot a con, to find the angle in any story too good to be true, and the "disappearance" of Cane in anticipation of his novel In the Mouth of Madness is one he can't pass up. Not that, if you take the ending at face value, he ever had any choice, but his stubborn insistence on what is "real" juxtaposes nicely with the increasingly impossible world he finds himself in. Paired with Styles, Trent becomes the Dana Scully to her Fox Mulder, in some improbably warped version of The X-Files.

 Cane's novels have an "effect" on readers, one that slowly works on Trent as he does "research" - Carpenter sets up the overlapping dreams as being grounded in reality (an overzealous cop beating some kid in an alley) and slowly distorts it, introducing imagery we'll see later in the film. In the Mouth of Madness benefits greatly from multiple viewings, as Carpenter and De Luca set up much of where the story's going well before Trent and Styles leave to find "Hobb's End," the fictional town that Cane is believed to have disappeared to. There are a number of other, smaller, details, like Trent's asylum and hotel room number or the color of everyone's eyes being tied directly to something Cane says that you might not catch the first time through. In many ways I think that Carpenter improved on the weaknesses of Prince of Darkness and made In the Mouth of Madness a stronger film for it. This could, to be fair, also have something to do with my affinity for Lovecraft, whose influence hovers over every minute of the film.

 This brings us back to the distinction between Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft. In the Mouth of Madness presents us with a sort of hybrid of the two - a wildly popular horror writer whose fiction is tied together by a sense of impending doom. It's an unofficial version of Lovecraft's mythos, to be sure, but De Luca and Carpenter are treading into the territory of the "normal man who stumbles into a vast conspiracy of cosmic proportions and goes mad" almost from the end of the opening credits. This is not a story of good vs. evil (which, I would argue is a hallmark of King's novels, if not his short stories), but of inevitability, of humanity realizing its insignificance in the presence of the "Old Ones," for whom Cane is a conduit. (If you're SPOILER averse, I'd skip the next sentence) As tends to be the case for the poor sap who wanders headlong into the Mythos, Trent eventually succumbs to his own madness, embracing his fate and transforming in a final audio cue. His hysterical laughter while watching the film-within-a-film (that is the film we're watching) is all the more telling. He's just a pawn. Embrace the change.

In the end, Carpenter might have one too many visual or editing flourishes (the kid on the bike, for example), but In the Mouth of Madness is one last great salvo from a director who would largely fall off of the cinematic map by the end of the 1990s. Sam Neill is great as the hard boiled-ish type who slowly but surely melts down in the presence of something more ancient, more powerful. I've always been shaky about Julie Carmen as styles, but as time passes I find her less grating. And how can I finish without mentioning Wilhelm Von Homburg, aka goon from Die Hard but more importantly as Vigo the Carpathian? He has a small role in Madness as the father of a boy that Cane takes in Hobb's End, and his two scenes ("Cane! Give me back my son!" and "I have to, he wrote me this way") are memorable in a film full of chilling moments. It's certainly the most pessimistic of the Apocalypse Trilogy, but if you're going to follow The Thing and Prince of Darkness, why leave any trace of hope?

Top Ten Horror Movies

You got lucky, Blogorium readers: the Cap'n was thinking of taking the night off, what with a wedding to attend tomorrow, but a social network-related message from an old co-worker prompted your fearless leader to spend far more time than should be necessary to put together a list.

His message, in its entirety, read "top ten horror films..."

So you try that. Try to do it quickly. Maybe you can, maybe you can't. Do you go for the easy answers? The best known favorites? Do you throw in something that you love but you know others aren't as familiar with? Is that why he asked the Cap'n in the first place? Am I supposed to go unorthodox?

After mulling it over, I put in the first two without hesitation. Here's the entire list (which is technically twelve movies, so sue me):


The Haunting (1963)
The Evil Dead
Let the Right One In
Re-Animator / From Beyond
The Wicker Man (1978)
Night of the Living Dead
In the Mouth of Madness
Hellbound: Hellraiser II
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
From Beyond the Grave / Tales from the Crypt



Notice I left out the entirety of the Universal "Classic Horror" films, in part because as much as I love Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Dracula, I feel like everybody's seen them at one point or another in their life. The same cannot always be said of The Evil Dead and Night of the Living Dead, which are recognized more for having popular sequels than are seen.

I left off A Nightmare on Elm Street... well, I'm not sure why. Most of you (I'd imagine all of you reading this) have seen the first Nightmare over and over again, and maybe I just wanted to branch out a little bit. Even rabid fans of Re-Animator haven't necessarily seen From Beyond, which is as good if not better. I remain an ardent supporter of John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness, in part because it's construction replicates the experience of reading H.P. Lovecraft in a way most direct Lovecraft adaptations don't.

As sequels go, Hellbound and The Final Chapter are on par with the original film and in many ways both more successful. From Beyond the Grave and Tales from the Crypt are two of my favorite anthology films, a sub-genre in horror that doesn't get enough love from my perspective.

Oh, and The Haunting and The Wicker Man just creep me out. Put them on late at night, in the dark, right before bed. Good luck sleeping.

One thing I'd like to point out is until the very last second Terrovision was in the "top ten" list, and then I replaced it with Let the Right One In, which is a hard - but fair - substitution. Slashers films didn't get much of a showing there, and neither did "true story" movies like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Horror comedies went largely unrepresented, but what can you do? I had ten spots to fill and no more.

As I challenged him, so too do I challenge you to provide me with your top ten horror films. Would you include Near Dark? Return of the Living Dead? Black Christmas? Ginger Snaps? An American Werewolf in London? The Fall of the House of Usher? Suspiria? The Hills have Eyes? The Horror of Dracula? Nosferatu? The Exorcist? Martin? The Thing? Phantasm? [REC]? Cat People?

You have ten slots to fill. You can push it to twelve, but they'd better be closely linked, and no more. Good luck.

Blogorium Review: Daybreakers

Much to my surprise, Daybreakers is a very good, mostly serious vampire movie. I don't really know why, but I thought based on the trailers that it was going to be very silly or corny and stupid; a kind of Underworld mentality crossed with the vampire society from the first Blade movie. Fortunately, it's nothing like that, and better still, it's less tonally messy than Michael and Peter Spierig's previous film Undead. While it's not quite a Thirst or a Let the Right One In, I fully recommend you check out Daybreakers, as it is a damn solid film that manages to tell a different kind of vampire story, and even manages to add to the lore instead of pick and choose (ahemTwilightahem).

Set in the not-too-distant 2019, Daybreakers is the story of a world post-vampire plague, a world where the Wesley Snipeses and James Woodses and William Ragsdales have failed miserably. Being that all of these vampires used to be humans, they do what people do best: adapt. Vampires work at night and sleep during the day, have subterranean travel systems if they need to do some daytime work, and have cars with clever window tinting and cameras to compensate for the lack of reflections in mirrors.

I actually like the idea of showing (not telling) the various little ways that vampire society adjusted to the change, and it actually makes sense considering the shifts we would probably making if forced to adapt to a nocturnal lifestyle. In short order, we're given a quick indicator of how the disease probably spread, the way that society operates (hint: not much differently than ours, except at night), and the class structure (hint also: really not that different, save for one important point I'll get to in a second). Clearly they're all pretty happy being vampires, as immortality cleaned up pesky diseases and smokers are allowed to go for it because, well, what's going to happen? Not much.

The downside to the world of Daybreakers is that the human population is rapidly dwindling, and so too is the blood supply that vampires so desperately need to survive. Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke), a hematologist at Bromley Marks, is trying to synthesize a blood substitute with little to no avail, much to the concern of Charles Bromley (Sam Neill), who watches his existing blood supply diminish daily. Bromley's attitude towards finding a substitute is (mostly) from a business standpoint, but Edward has some genuine concern about humanity, in part because he was "turned" against his will by his brother Frankie (Michael Dorman).

When Edward accidentally runs a group of humans off the road and hides them from the police, their leader, Audrey Bennett (Claudia Karvan) introduces him to Lionel "Elvis" Cormac, a vampire-turned-human by circumstances Edward can't quite explain. With the possibility of a cure at hand, will a society accustomed to eternal life be willing to go back to mortality if it means solving the blood crisis? If the cure is as hard to crack as Edward thinks it is, will anyone try to change back?

The reason this matters at all is that Daybreakers sets up an interesting conundrum: if vampires go too long without drinking human blood, they begin to regress into feral, bat-like creatures. Early in the film viewers get a glimpse of blood-starved, homeless vampires, ignored by the upper class and two or three days away from posing a serious threat. When Frankie comes to visit Edward on his birthday ("I've turned 35 ten times now") with a bottle of human blood, an ensuing fight about ethics leaves shattered glass and blood on the wall, attracting the attention of a wandering feral vampire. The subsequent home invasion is handled in a way that's unnerving and a bit sad. It's clear that the bat-creature is just starving, and it's attacks on Edward and Frankie are instinctual rather than malevolent.

I enjoyed the way that Daybreakers doesn't go for silly or over the top most of the time. It tends to set things up in one direction (making you think that Audrey might be the long-missing human daughter of Bromley) only to head another way (introducing her in a later sequence which is tangentially related to the main story). Many of the problems that I had with Undead came from the fact that it was never clear what kind of movie it wanted to be: was it a horror-comedy? A zombie film? An alien invasion film? Daybreakers manages to be a serious (and entertaining) movie about vampires that doesn't treat them as disposable fodder for some badass hunter or as a prop to tell teen romances or sell books.

The one issue I had with the film came from an initially broad performance from Willem Dafoe, who plays Elvis a little broader than anybody else in the movie. This is not to say that Ethan Hawke or Sam Neill are playing wholly restrained mopey vampires - there is actually some nuance to both characters - but Elvis rolls into the film singing "Burning Love" and flinging around a southern twang that really sticks out initially. Eventually he settles down, but I couldn't help but feel like Dafoe was more like a character from John Carpenter's Vampires than the Spierig brothers' Daybreakers.

Still, it's a very minor complaint. I had really expect Daybreakers to be some goofy, over-serious film about vampires contemplating mortality, a maudlin extension of Interview with the Vampire or The Hunger or something like that (both movies I like, by the way), but instead the Spierigs take the material seriously, aren't afraid to play both the quiet and vicious sides of vampire lore, and ultimately deliver a story that's fresh and fun to watch. These vampires aren't just cool or scary, and they don't spend all of their time pissing and moaning about living forever (in fact, the film opens with a child vampire committing suicide because she'll never grow up). Much like Thirst, the film takes a concept that could be pretty trite and goes in different directions with it, and I for one was pleased with the results.

Now it's just a matter of conveying it to the folks sick to death of The Vampire Diaries...