Carnography

Invaders From Mars (1986)

The first time I saw Invaders From Mars I was maybe 8 or 9 and home sick from school. It was a tradition when I was sick that I was allowed a movie from the local video shop (this being the 80s, when everything was on VHS and you had to walk a whole 10 minutes to get to a brick-and-mortar rental shop), and so while looking for my usual Transformers and M.A.S.K. go-tos I saw this movie in the Children's section and thought it looked like something good to watch. I didn't know anything about horror back then and certainly nothing about the director, Tobe Hooper, but the movie captivated me and probably planted the first seeds of what would later become my love of horror movies.

David Gardner is woken up in the middle of the night by a thunderstorm and sees an alien spacecraft land behind the hill next to his house. He tells his parents about this and, although they are skeptical, his father goes to check it out the next morning and returns acting strangely and with a strange wound on the back of his neck. Gradually more and more people go up to the hill and its accompanying sandpit for varying reasons, and all come back with the same strange behaviour and wound on the back of their necks, including two police officers and David's thoroughly unpleasant Biology teacher Mrs. McKeltch. The only person David can get to believe him is the school nurse Linda, and the two of them end up on the run from the changed townspeople, who turn out to be doing the bidding of Martians who have landed on Earth for predictable nefarious reasons. David has to convince people that the Martian threat is real and stop them before they succeed in their plans...

You have to wonder just who said to themselves, "You know who would be a great director for our remake of the 1953 sci-fi Invaders From Mars, which we're planning on marketing as a kids' film? The guy who directed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre!" To be fair though, Hooper was working with studio Cannon on a three-picture deal, of which Invaders From Mars was the second (the first was Lifeforce and the third The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), so it's unlikely that this was the result of someone just mixing up their genres badly.

The thing is, Hooper makes a really good kids' horror film. Watching it 25+ years later, of course, I found myself looking for my nostalgia glasses quite a bit, but I still remember how enthralled I was by it back then, because it taps into those fears that just about every child has at some point in their childhood. The fear of losing your parents and/or having them turn against you; that your most hated teacher really is something inhuman; that you're the only one who knows what's really going on but no-one wants to listen to you because you're a kid... All of that is going to strike a chord with the kids watching because it's all stuff they think about at some point while growing up. As the movie progresses, in fact, it becomes more and more of a child's fantasy of how they would save the day, climaxing when David convinces the US Marines to launch an attack on the Martian spacecraft, complete with guns, explosives and tanks, and they take him with them because he's still the only one who can help them save the day. I'm pretty sure that if the rights had been available, Superman and Batman would have flown in to help as well and made David an honorary member of the Justice League at the end (although J'onn J'onzz would probably have had some awkward questions to answer back at the Watchtower afterwards).

This, however, leads me to the film's biggest flaw. Technically this is a SPOILER, so be warned: at the very climax of the film, when anything non-human has been shot, blown up and generally massacred, suddenly David wakes up in his bed. It was all a dream!... Or was is just a premonition?

No! Bad movie, no! Don't make me get the rolled-up newspaper! We've talked about this before - the "it was all just a dream" ending is a cheap cop-out for a film to pull on its audience. It effectively erases any and all character building and attachment to the characters we've made through the last 100 minutes or so for a cheap ending. Even if it's a kids' film, the audience should still be treated better than that - it's lazy writing and it tarnishes the whole film. Urgh.

Aside from that... misstep at the end, there are still plenty of genuinely creepy moments in the film. David discovering Mrs. McKeltch doing her best impression of the Visitors from V is one; another is the design of the interior of the Martian ship and the Martians themselves. The ship has a very bio-mechanical design, thanks to Stan Winston, that made me think as I rewatched it now of the Alien movies; the aliens are just... freaky-looking. Although the Martian Supreme Intelligence bears more than a passing resemblance to Kraang of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon...

 

Poltergeist (1982)

Before Steven Spielberg hit him up to direct Poltergeist, Tobe Hooper's luck with films in the UK hadn't gone too well. Of the four films he had directed since the 1970s, one was practically considered the root of all evil, one was banned, and another was mistaken for a film with a similar name and banned by mistake. So despite the enduring theory that Spielberg directed far more of the film than Hooper, the simple fact that Poltergeist ended up being Hooper's most commercially successful film (as well as not being banned) must have brought him some relief.

So, I think everyone knows the basic story: the Freeling family live in their new house in their newly-built suburb and everyone is happy... until one night when youngest daughter Carol Anne starts talking to the static on the television after closedown and before you know it there are noisy spirits all over the house. At first the ghosts seem harmless enough; limiting themselves to moving furniture around and playing with the family dog. Then a tree comes to life and tries to eat the middle child Robbie and Carol Anne is sucked into the closet and vanishes. The Freelings have no other choice but to call in a team of parapsychologists to try to work out what is happening in their house and to get their daughter back, along with a diminutive psychic by the name of Tangina Barrons...

Poltergeist is another of those movies that became a cultural phenomenon. Even if you haven't seen it, you still know the plot, several of the characters, several scenes and can quote from it ("They're here!" being the most notable - and imitated - line that everybody knows). It's been sequelized, satirized, parodied and most recently remade. Much like The Exorcist was one of the must-see horror films of the 1970s, Poltergeist became one of the must-see horror films of the 1980s.

A large part of that is because it is quite clearly a Spielberg movie, to the point where the more cynical might wonder just how much directorial input Tobe Hooper had at all. You have the family unit, living happily in the suburbs, who face something alien/supernatural which threatens to tear them apart but in the end unites them as they triumph against the evil (whatever it is) and come out the other end stronger. The children - Robbie and Carol Anne - are the ones in danger for most of the movie, and perhaps most importantly, the family are ordinary people facing something unexplained. It's also memorable for having child characters (and actors) who are believable, competent and not ridiculously dubbed (although that last one really only applies to Italian cinema...), rather than twee and/or annoying brats as seems to be the usual fare in horror.

It's a very good film, although by today's standards several of the effects haven't held up too well, chief among them the scene where one character's face falls apart that is so obviously a puppet that you wonder how we were all so scared and horrified by it in the first place. I also found myself watching at least one other scene and thinking to myself, "Didn't I see this in Raiders of the Lost Ark too?" because their effects are that similar. Other big scenes, however, have held up very well - the Tree and Clown scenes, for example, because somewhere deep down we can all still identify with those childhood fears, and the climactic scenes at the end because the special effects team went and used real human skeletons rather than plastic ones because the former were cheaper. Thanks guys, they had to create a rule against that. For the most part though, the film's success hinges a lot on its characters being so ordinary that the audience found it easier to relate to them in the midst of all the supernatural horror, because when you can relate to characters you can understand and experience their fears so much better.

Of course, because it was such a successful and memorable horror film, someone had to go and do a remake, which came out here in the UK last week. I haven't personally seen this remake yet (and if you read this blog at least semi-regularly you should know my feelings on remakes) but from what I have heard it seems to have apparently missed the mark - and the point - when compared to the original. And was 3-D, because every fucking thing has to be 3-D now if they can cram it in somewhere. But it's not too surprising that the Poltergeist remake apparently isn't as good at the original, as lightning in a bottle generally only comes around once.

 

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The Exorcist (1973)

Spontaneous Combustion (1990)

I feel like I've been neglecting the '90s Horror' category of late, so I went out to find a 90s horror film that I'd not seen before. And when I saw that this movie was directed by Tobe Hooper and starred Brad Dourif (star of a great many films but usually recognised as the voice of Chucky from the Child's Play movies), I knew this was the one.

...my ability to spot bad movies has either gotten a lot worse or a lot better as the years have gone on, depending on how you look at it.

Spontaneous Combustion starts in 1955, in an underground nuclear bunker. The military are testing two things - their new hydrogen bomb-proof shelter, and a radiation vaccine, and they're using newlyweds Brian and Peggy Bell to test them both. Their experiments both seem to be a success, but there's a snag - Peggy has gotten pregnant while getting daily doses of the vaccine, and when their son is born both parents burst into flames within minutes of touching him. Fast forward to "the present" (ie. 1990) and their son, now named Sam Kramer, is a high school teacher with an ex-wife and a new girlfriend, and seems perfectly happy, apart from the headaches he's started to suffer from. Then people Sam gets angry with burst into flames minutes after he's left them. And then Sam himself starts to spew flames from various body parts whenever he gets agitated, which as you might imagine is quite often when you keep spontaneously combusting. The scientists from the original experiment now want to kill Sam before he explodes on someone important; an evil pharmacuticals mogul wants to breed Sam with other children from similar experiments to create some sort of atomic superchild, and Sam just wants to know what the hell is going on without any more body parts catching fire.

Watching this film all I could think of for large parts of it was, "Wasn't this the origin of at least one Marvel Comics supervillain?" (Answer: yes, kind of) It certainly has a very four-colour comic-book feel in several places, only with a higher body count and several moments of body horror - mainly whenever poor Sam starts shooting flame from another body part. It's certainly not particularly horrific, as we don't even see most of the charred victims of Sam's out-of-control abilities, apart from his parents at the start and an unlucky radio technician about halfway through the film. So really the horror is much more in Sam's realization of how he's been controlled and manipulated all his life, and his dwindling sanity as things get worse and worse for him (offering Dourif plenty of opportunities to chew on every available inch of scenery).

As for Sam's abilities themselves... well, even the film doesn't seem too sure as to how they work. Early in the film they bring in an "expert" in spontaneous human combustion who mentions a theory regarding static electricity and conductivity, and certainly at several point in the film Sam's abilities seem to work that way (although I still maintain that setting people alight via the telephone is stretching the theory too far); later on it seems to be implied that Sam is effectively a walking hydrogen bomb (water makes his flames worse, for example). And none of this explains how Sam has gotten to the age of 35 without a single incident before this one very flammable day.

Overall though, Spontaneous Combustion is dull, and that's a great disappointment. This film is from the same director who gave us such films as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist and even Lifeforce (because whatever else you might say about that film, it was never dull), and so to find this film to be so... limp is depressing. It had potential, certainly, but between lackluster effects - there's only so many times you can see superimposed flames or flash paper going off before it gets boring - and some flawed execution that potential went off like a damp squib instead (if you'll forgive the pun).

 

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Lifeforce (1985)

Lifeforce (1985)

Back in 1976 an author called Colin Wilson wrote a book called The Space Vampires. It was moderately well-received, and so in 1985 they decided to adapt it into a movie. The screenplay was written by Dan O'Bannon of Alien fame, it was directed by Tobe Hooper, the musical score was from none other than Henry Mancini, it had a budget of $25 million and the cast list was a who's who of British talent of the time (and the proposed cast list read like a Doctor Who cast reunion). The movie that resulted from this was called Lifeforce, and while it might have something of a cult following now, at the time it was a box office bomb and didn't even make back 50% of its budget at the US box office.

A British and American space mission is investigating Hailey's Comet when they discover a large spacecraft in the comet's corona. The craft is apparently long-derelict, containing  several hundred dessicated giant bat creatures and three naked humanoids in some sort of stasis pods. Throwing caution (and the first contact protocols) out of the window, the astronauts decide to take the three humanoids back with them. By the time the craft returns to Earth, however, all but one of the crew are dead, and when one of the naked humanoids is taken out of her pod for study, she promptly revives and starts draining the energy (or "lifeforce", natch) out of anyone she kisses. And of course, anyone killed in this way turns into a shrivelled-up zombie who has to feed of someone else in the same way or explode into dust (except when they don't, but we'll get to that later). It ends up being up to the one surviving astronaut, Colonel Tom Carlsen, and SAS Colonel Colin Caine (who spends the movie running around in an impeccable turtleneck and raincoat, like a Tory John Constantine) to save London (and theoretically the rest of the world) from being sucked dry by the space vampires.

That's a long plot synopsis, and believe me I've made it pretty brief. This, unfortunately, was one of the things that led to Lifeforce's downfall - it has a very long and complicated story. This was made worse by two things - the film's shooting ran over both budget and schedule, so several important scenes ended up not being shot at all; and the film was then further edited for different markets, losing between 12 and 27 minutes of footage in some cases. So quite often the audience was left trying to follow the plot despite it doing a lot of jumping around. Not to mention the fact that the plot tended to forget things it had already established earlier in the movie. People drained by the vampires turned into dessicated husks - except when they didn't and just became generic running zombies instead. The space vampires could jump bodies - except when they couldn't. And the climax of the film took place inside St. Paul's Cathedral and, in outside shots, from the Greenwich Observatory. At the same time.

But hey, most people don't remember that much of the plot. Or anything else, for that matter. Instead, most people will probably describe Lifeforce as "that movie with the hot girl who goes around naked for most of the movie and sucks people dry (nudge nudge wink wink)". I'll agree there - Mathilda May was very hot in this movie. But I think the filmmakers wanted their film to be remembered for more than just her well-formed assets.

And while we're on the subject of naked women in Lifeforce, I do have to say that the sexual politics of this movie were very confusing. While all three of the space vampires are naked and can do the energy-sucking thing, only the "Space Girl" (all the name she gets) is ever shown doing so, and she's nearly always naked or being sexually provocative when she does. So is this film celebrating female power, or being afraid of it? At another point in the film Carlsen is attempting to get information out of a woman that Space Girl had briefly possessed, and he starts slapping her, shaking her and generally beating the shot out of her, with the explanation, "I'm going to have to force her to tell me. Despite appearances, this women is a masochist. An extreme masochist. She wants me to force the name out of her. She wants me to hurt her." Umm. Did someone's therapy notes about their issues with women accidentally end up in the script?

I'm being maybe a little unfair though. Despite it's myriad of production issues, Lifeforce is actually far from bad, and more than a little fun. It also features scenes of London being overrun by zombies a full 17 years before 28 Days Later freaked out the British with its scenes of a completely deserted London. And while some of its effects are dated nowadays, the physical FX of the zombies, being entirely practical, still hold up excellently. There are far worse films to spend a couple of hours watching (feel free to make up your own story for the plot gaps, though).

 

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