Maine Arteries

Why is Ralphie Glick in his pajamas?

He disappears in the woods, walking home from a friend’s house with his brother Danny. The vampires have got him. But then he appears, hovering in the fog at his brother’s window. In his jim-jams. What’s that all about?

I turned to Stephen King’s book for answers, and learned that the window-floating scenes (it happens again, when Danny’s in hospital: kid just can’t catch a break) aren’t in it. So I have to take my hat off to Tobe Hooper and screenwriter Paul Monash (THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE). The scariest thing in the show, possibly; certainly the thing everyone was talking about at school the next day. And it’s pure filmic invention, born out of the inference that the vampires must have gotten at Danny somehow.

I put my hat back on again so I can take it off to Ronnie Scribner, who plays the littlest vampire. Good work, kid! You’re terrifying in that show.

This might be a question best put to regular Shadowplayer Scout Tafoya, whose book on Tobe Hooper is here.

Salem’s Lot stars Original Hutch; Prof. Humbert Humbert; Ramey Holvak; Holly McClane; Dr.James Kildare; George Peatty; Mr. Creepy; Father Dyer; Brisbane Bird; Eddie Goody; Baron Vladimir Harkonnen; Ed Harken; Sherry Peatty; and Needles, Yellow Jacket Assassin.

Flame-Grilled Whopper

The people in my neighbourhood — my neighbours, in fact — who have been setting off their bonfire night fireworks since before Halloween, are undoubtedly arseholes, but I guess they aren’t as big arseholes as the person in my editor friend Stephen’s neighbourhood who set off at least one big firework in broad daylight. So there’s that. Anyway, we are now properly approach Guy Fawkes’s night — time for some pyrokinesis.

I yield to no one in my admiration for the good Tobe Hooper films, and I’ll stick up, in a half-hearted and befuddled way, for the merely strange ones which can’t quite be called good. And now I must admit that even the bad ones are still redeemingly peculiar… like SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION, which stars Brad Dourif and ought to be better than it is. There aren’t enough movies with meaty roles for this thespian.

Something about Hooper seems to need incoherence, and here he has plenty of it, despite a lengthy prologue and lots of exposition setting up and then unravelling a fairly clear conspiracy story in which an adorable ’40s couple are irradiated by the US army and give birth to a pyrokinetic offspring, who grows up to be Dourif. This structure was obviously too sane for Hooper’s liking, so he augments it with things like: Melinda Dillon as a German scientist who doesn’t visibly age from 1945 to 1990; a nuclear power station plot line, complete with miniature cooling towers, that doesn’t ever pay off or connect to the rest of the story; John Landis making a cameo appearance with his knee exploding; Dourif turning into a luminous puddle for no reason.

Pure liquid Dourif.

This crazy stuff is actually quite welcome — we need more of it — because there’s a creeping blandness to the characterisation and dialogue and settings, though a few lines stand out. “I heard you burned your finger. Are you OK? Should I come over?” is a great little telephonic speech. How come I never get attention like that? I’m not such a bad guy when you know me.

Hooper’s filming style is elegant and expansive as ever, despite some obvious budget difficulties — the first two key deaths happen offscreen, which seems odd for this kind of movie, and the opening desert scene is a terribly cramped and unconvincing interior set.

Question: is the worst Tobe Hooper film better than the best Wes Craven film? On the basis that Hooper is always at least dementedly distracting, always has stylistic surprises. Craven joints are certainly efficient and loaded with suspense and jumps, but never look very interesting, to my eye. His NEW NIGHTMARE strikes me as the only one with an actual idea in play, which it proceeds to worry to death. With Craven, the good stuff and bad stuff are oddly interrelated, and there are sometimes more ideas than the films can handle.

John Landis’s knee explodes.

A DD-Notice Situation

We watched LIFEFORCE recently, to get me in the mood for my trip to London. With Fiona protesting that she’d rather watch THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE or any of the, you know, GOOD Tobe Hooper films. Because the man had just died, and was this really the way he’d want to be remembered? But then, I bet he’d want to be remembered as more than JUST the director of TTCM.

I also read some good defences of the (arguably indefensible) film and that, coupled with the fact that, you know, the man had just died, made me sort of afraid to write about it, because I couldn’t really bring myself to say that the film is “good” — but at the same time, we had a hell of a good time watching it, so there’s that.

How do we parse this distinction between “good” and “a good time”? Are movies like women in ‘forties films? At any rate, much of what is hilarious and delightful in LIFEFORCE *could* be deliberate, which should lift the movie clean out of the “so bad it’s good” category. What makes my head go all Linda Blair is a feeling that even IF the ridiculous choices ARE purely intentional, they still seem crazy and impossible to defend on any normal grounds.What do I mean? Well, the story, adapted from Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires by Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby (INVADERS FROM MARS) deals with a naked space lady (Mathilda May) sucking the energy out of London’s masculine population. I think the idea of a monster movie where the monster is a naked girlie is kind of hilarious — as if they asked the question, What are teenage boys REALLY scared of? I think they could even have gotten away with the nude, but not a really busty nude. The film looks glorious — Alan Hume’s lovely lurid colours in anamorphic widescreen — but the shot of the menacing shadow of tits on the wall should arguably have been vetoed. Except no, because it’s perfectly in tune with the film’s demented tone. Hell, it exemplifies it.

(Colin Wilson was England’s top existentialist angry young man for a fortnight in the fifties — I don’t know what led him to write a Quatermass knock-off. I first encountered him during research for a Jack the Ripper project — he was a prominent ripperologist — but, as I discovered in my reading — he really didn’t know very much about the case, and much of what he claimed to know was wrong.)

Hard to explain the odd effect of the dialogue: apart from Steve Railsback, it’s a lovely cast of Brits, speaking in a pastiche of Britishness that seems at least ten years out of date. V FOR VENDETTA has a similarly timewarped quality, highly gigglesome. I don’t imagine it sounds so comical to Americans, because it’s not THAT off. It’s a good pastiche of Hammer horror dialogue, or maybe a tough crime drama with Stanley Baker.That cast — Frank Finlay is playing it quiet, well aware how close to looking ridiculous he is. He only loses it when he has to shout over a radio link, and his Shakespearean enunciation makes the whole thing rather Toast of London. Peter Firth is superb — full-on restrained camp. That thing when restraint becomes in itself a form of ham. And then there’s good old Michael Gothard, yielding sweatily to the temptations of the flesh just as he did in THE FOUR MUSKETEERS and THE DEVILS and…And Patrick Stewart! As if the second question they asked was What else will freak out teenage boys? and their answer was Homosexual Panic. Possessed by the naked space babe, Patrick turns on his sexual magnetism, and Railsback just can’t resist leaning in for a kiss. Hilarious to watch Firth and Aubrey “PR Deltoid” Morris dashing in to manfully prevent this same-sex violation of the norm, and then the room going poltergeistically haywire as the thwarted sex drive runs amok. (“CAN YOU IMAGINE how much fun Patrick Stewart would be having with a scene like that?” asked my host in London when I described it.)There’s more, so much more. The film is much less interested in its male vampires, but one of them does get to say to Firth, “It’ll be much less terrifying if you just come to me.” Whoops and cheers.

There’s lots of impressive animatronic zombie-work, all cut SLIGHTLY too loose, spoiling the illusion, and lots of fun QUATERMASS AND THE PIT panic on the streets, and as I say, the film looks great. In fact, my host in London was taught at the NFTS by Alan Hume. “He called everyone darling, regardless of sex.” He was clearly the man for LIFEFORCE.And Frank Finlay’s finale is terrific — the film’s one genuinely great scene for which you don’t have to make apologies or suspend disbelief or try to wedge yourself into a previously unimagined tone encompassing camp and B-movie thickear, the knowing and the unknowing. A scene that would hold its own in a real Nigel Kneale script. And FFinlay, having held back so long, makes a perfectly judged decision to have fun with it, as he expires in a welter of bladder effects. Stirring stuff.

(This is arguably as inappropriate an homage to the late Mr. Finlay as it is to Hooper, but I watched him in Dennis Potter’s Casanova too so I’m covered on that score.)

So why can’t I give the film total respect? It does seem to know what it’s doing. I feel like a humourless critic at a Ken Russell film, recognising that he’s displaying a comedic attitude but unable to grant him permission because the precise timbre of his wit seems unacceptable. I love Ken Russell, I *can* accept his bizarre tonal combinations and jokes that seem designed not to get laughs but just to buffet the sensibilities. Maybe LIFEFORCE isn’t serious enough to get away with it? Maybe I should just bloody well RELAX? “It’ll be much less terrifying if you just come to me.”