Ten Days of Terror!: Phantom of the Paradise

Films: Phantom of the Paradise
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on various players.

There are times when you realize just how failed we are as a species. In the 1970s, we had a choice of rock operas with which we could have become collectively obsessed as a culture. Tommy might have been the choice of pinball had become a thing, even if Quadrophenia is clearly the better Who-based choice. Had we been an even more religious society, Jesus Christ Superstar might have been the one. But for off-the-wall entertainment value, the world collectively decided to fawn over The Rocky Horror Picture Show when we could have instead been going to midnight shows of Phantom of the Paradise.

At first blush, you figure you know what is going on here. It’s clearly going to be an updated version of The Phantom of the Opera, but with different songs and a different kind of theater. Truthfully, it kind of is that, but it’s so much more. It’s as much a version of Faust as it is anything else, and there are elements of The Picture of Dorian Gray here as well. Three classic horror tales for the price of one.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Fury

Film: The Fury
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on The New Portable.

In 1976, the release of Carrie based on Stephen King’s novel probably started what would become a series of horror/science fiction movies about or involving psychics. Dreamscape, Firestarter, The Shining, Scanners…all of these were variations on a theme. Many of these centered on government plots to produce or strengthen psychics through one means or another. While Carrie might have been the first killer psychic movie, it was The Fury that gave us a governmental twist on the proceedings. It’s not a coincidence that Brian De Palma directed both Carrie and The Fury.

Because The Fury was directed by Brian De Palma, we’re going to get the joy of a bizarre thriller with the sort of cast list that someone like De Palma could arrange in his prime. This means Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Charles Durning, and Carrie Snodgress. It also means that we’re going to get Amy Irving, etched forever into public consciousness as the girl who goes to Carrie’s grave at the end of Carrie.

Ten Days of Terror!: Dressed to Kill

Film: Dressed to Kill
Format: DVD from Peotone Public Library through interlibrary loan on The New Portable.

I’ve never seen Dressed to Kill before now and yet I have distinct memories of it. Primarily, I remember that my sister loved it. She was at the age to go to the theater just about every weekend and had the desire to see anything vaguely horror related. She loved this movie, and now having seen it, I get why she was there when she was about 20. Of course, I’d need to put myself in 1980 mindset to get there, and that’s a little harder to do; Dressed to Kill hasn’t aged very well.

The truth about Dressed to Kill is the truth about Brian De Palma in general. De Palma spent a great deal of his time picking the bones of Alfred Hitchcock for any scraps of meat that he could find. When he was at his best, he found more than just scraps and was able to do quite a bit working in Hitchcock’s milieu. In the case of Dressed to Kill, the bones he’s picking in earnest are those of Psycho. Hell, there’s even a shower scene.

Wednesday Horror: Raising Cain

Film: Raising Cain
Format: DVD from Peotone Public Library through interlibrary loan on The New Portable.

There was a glorious moment of time in the 1980s and early 1990s when it was a legitimate casting choice to have John Lithgow as a heavy. Movies like Ricochet and Cliffhanger had Lithgow playing a vicious, scowling bad guy, a psychopath or sociopath who reveled in the pain and degradation of others. Y’know, the guy from Third Rock from the Sun, the actor who has put out multiple CDs of children’s songs. Toward the end of that wonderful moment in history comes Brian De Palma’s Raising Cain, which has the lovable Lithgow playing a man who is truly malevolent.

Carter Nix (Lithgow) is a child psychologist who has taken a few years off from his practice to study the early development of his daughter (Amanda Pombo). But we learn quickly that there’s something really off about Carter. In the first 10 minutes of the film, Carter has blown some sort of dust into the eyes of a woman and chloroformed her so that he can kidnap her child. Oddly, Carter’s twin brother Cain (also Lithgow) shows up in the middle of nowhere to help him deal with the woman. It doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but Cain claims he will deal with the woman and take the child to their father, Dr. Nix (Lithgow again).

Off Script: Sisters

Film: Sisters
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

For a guy who has made some pretty important films, Brian De Palma doesn’t seem to get a lot of credit. Who remembers Dressed to Kill, for instance? Folks remember Scarface, but even that film’s once-stellar reputation has faded a bit. Sisters is an early De Palma film, and one of his first successes, but it too seems to be all but forgotten. That’s a damn shame, because this is a film that belongs in a special class of horror thrillers. Like Jacob’s Ladder and Altered States, Sisters is the sort of film that plays merry hob with what it presents to the viewer, making it difficult to determine what is reality and what is delusion.

The title comes from the condition of Danielle and Dominique Blanchion (Margot Kidder), formerly conjoined twins who were separated as adults. Danielle is a model and actress who spends a night with a man she meets in the course of a television acting job. The man (Lisle Wilson) contends with Danielle’s former husband Emil (William Finley) and ends up spending the night. The next morning, he overhears Danielle in conversation with her sister and discovers it is their birthday.

Why I Skipped Prom

Film: Carrie
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I like a lot of smart horror movies from the 1970s and 1980s. It was sort of a golden period for horror films, and while there’s plenty of dross, there’s also a crap-ton of quality films. Carrie is one that passed over me. In fact, it’s one of the few pre-1990 Stephen King books I haven’t read. I guess I was never interested enough in the story to get through it. Still, eventually I’m going to see everything on the giant List o’ Doom, so the night before Halloween is as good a night as any to finally put it in the spinner and see what I’ve been missing.

Carrie is the story of a shy, awkward high school girl named Carrie White (Sissy Spacek). Essentially friendless and even mocked by her teachers sometimes, Carrie is very much the social outcast through and through. She isn’t helped by her mother, Margaret (Piper Laurie), who is religion-obsessed. Actually, that puts it mildly. Margaret White tends to favor the Old Testament over the New except for the blood of Jesus. Everything in her world is a sin. Our introduction to Carrie comes when she experiences menarche (go look it up) during a shower after gym class. True to her pathological religious roots, her mother claims that this is due to sin. Carrie is frequently punished by being thrown into a closet and forced to pray to a pretty gruesome Christ statue.

Breaking the Costner Rule

Films: JFK; The Untouchables
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library (JFK) and personal collection (The Untouchables) on kick-ass portable DVD player.

So what’s the Costner rule? Simple. Kevin Costner films that are Westerns (Dances With Wolves, Silverado) or sports movies (Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, Tin Cup) are good. Other Costner films (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Postman, Waterworld), not so much. Today’s films break the mold—Costner doing something other than swinging a bat or riding a horse (kind of), but still producing a vastly entertaining piece of cinema.

Few events in American history have had the sort of lasting impact and caused more controversy than the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was inevitable that Oliver Stone would eventually give us his take on the assassination. That take is JFK, in many ways the definitive artistic statement on Kennedy’s death and the several years afterward. JFK details the only time in American history that charges were brought to trial in the Kennedy case.

But before discussing this film, I need to include a bit of disclaimer. A number of years ago, I worked as a freelance copy editor. I was subcontracted to do the final copy edit and proofread for a book on the Kennedy assassination that came out under the imprint of the Library of Congress. The intent of the book was to give a (sorry to use this phrase) fair and balanced look at all of the evidence on every side. It was a glossary of sorts, an encyclopedia of the assassination. And I read every last entry multiple times. Because of this, because I saw both biased and unbiased information, opinion, and detailed facts on the assassination, I have a fairly informed (I think) opinion.

Essentially, I think Oswald acted alone. However, Oswald had connections to the Soviet Union, the marines, the CIA, communists, the mob, and people on both sides of Cuba. And when it turned out that Oswald was the guy, all of those groups with connections to him panicked and started covering up their involvement with him. So the cover up and conspiracies happened after the fact from what I see. Anyway…

Knowing that, it’s very much my opinion that Stone’s film is filled with vague notions, innuendo, half truths, and whole cloth. So rather than look at the film in terms of historical accuracy or its reflection on reality, it makes more sense to judge it as a film. Even this isn’t that easy to do. Stone’s film is necessarily long for the sole reason that a great deal of the film is exposition, repeated exposition, and new exposition and versions of the truth.

What this means is that in many ways, JFK plays like a pseudo-documentary. Standing at the center is not Kennedy, but Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), the District Attorney of New Orleans. Several years after the assassination of Kennedy, Garrison begins to see a connection between some local people in New Orleans and everything that happened in Dallas. Using this as a starting point, Garrison begins to investigate and discovers an unending web of deceit, betrayal, and deeper and deeper intrigues. Watching the film, it is difficult not to consider the truth of Stone’s vision.

JFK is blessed with one of the deepest casts around. In addition to Costner, the film features Sissy Spacek, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Vincent D’Onofrio, Gary Oldman, Brian Doyle Murray, Michael Rooker, Wayne Knight, Laurie Metcalf, Tommy Lee Jones, Joe Pesci, Kevin Bacon, Walter Matthau, John Candy, and Donald Sutherland. Seriously, wow. In fact, the actual Jim Garrison shows up in the film as Earl Warren.

Throughout, Garrison is painted as an underdog and the victim of the same sort of conspiracy that he claims killed Kennedy. It’s an interesting idea when a District Attorney is viewed as the heroic loner working against the system.

Stone’s style is interesting here. He goes on long tangents that in any other film would kill the narrative, but here becomes something that spirals the audience in deeper. The scene with Mr. X (Sutherland), for instance, is nothing more than an extended piece of conspiratorial background and fancy. The closing courtroom speech seems eternal; it goes on and on, but is a masterstroke of scripting in that it never gets dull. It builds and builds, creating a case that is both compelling and built on a foundation of sand and conjecture.

What it also is, though, is proof that Costner can do more than sports films and Westerns. Hell of a film, even if it is all conjecture, conspiracy theory, and Stone’s paranoia.

Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables is a similar film in many ways. Both films essentially deal with a small group fighting against long odds and people who want them dead, and, of course, both feature Kevin Costner in the role of main fly in the ointment. The Untouchables is a hyper-violent, completely non-historical and totally Hollywood-ized version of Eliot Ness and his band of treasury men going after Al Capone in 1920s Chicago.

Ness’s team was called “untouchable” because they couldn’t be bribed. This, of course, was in a time when anyone in Chicago could be bought and anything could be had for the right price. Ness’s job was to find a way to take down Al Capone. Ness, of course is played here by Kevin Costner, and his rival, Al “Scarface” Capone, is none other than Robert De Niro.

Capone’s first foray into the life of trying to bust bad guys doesn’t go over well, but it does help him assemble a team for himself. He gets Agent Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith) from the FBI. Wallace isn’t a field agent, but an accountant, and it is he who first puts the idea of getting Capone for tax evasion into Ness’s head. He also recruits long-time beat cop Jim Malone (Sean Connery), who has the knowledge and street smarts to be a real asset. Rounding out the team is George Stone (Andy Garcia), a dead shot with a pistol.

And so the team immediately starts trying to mess with Capone’s business, and they do so with various success. They score a major coup when Capone attempts to bring in a shipment from Canada. This also gives us a good look at the men who make up The Untouchables. Stone and Ness are relatively cool under fire. Wallace, though, has never been shot at before. When Stone takes a round, Wallace becomes mildly unhinged. But the true moment belongs to Jim Malone. With one of Capone’s bookkeepers captured, Malone threatens him. Then, to get him to talk, he puts his gun in the mouth of an already dead Capone soldier and pulls the trigger. It’s a moment of pure, brutal genius.

Naturally, Capone fights back, knocking off two of Ness’s men, both in brutal and painful ways. By this time, though Ness has agreed that tax evasion, while not very sexy, is a way that Capone can be had. And Capone knows it, too. This means that Capone is moving his accountant out of town, leaving Ness and Stone to capture the guy in a train station. While the train station scene is not the end of the film, it is in many ways the most key scene. De Palma took this scene in no small part from Eisenstein’s Brononosets Potyomkin, and the influence is evident. It is one of the great scenes of its decade. Ness and Stone draw weapons on the accountant’s bodyguard, who draws a weapon as well. And as gunplay goes off in slow motion, a baby carriage tetters through the melee down a set of marble steps. It is nearly damn perfect, and made all the better by being almost entirely in slow motion.

Of course, that isn’t the actual end, which happens in court with Capone, and which ends in something cinematically awesome but completely illegal. But so what, right? It’s a movie.

I would be remiss without bringing up a couple more characters. The first is Ness’s wife, Catherine (Patricia Clarkson). She’s not in the film much, but she brings a nice bit of warmth to the film that is otherwise almost nothing but violence. The second is Billy Drago, who plays Capone’s go-to hitman, Frank Nitti. Drago is blessed or cursed with a face that gives him a feral look that makes him perfect to play villains. And that’s exactly what he does here—there’s nothing nice or pleasant about Frank Nitti.

The Untouchables is hardly historically accurate, but it also doesn’t pretend to be. What it is is almost pure action, and it’s damn good at being that. It had been a long time since I had watched The Untouchables, and I had forgotten just how good it really is. It’s worth a watch. Really.

Why to watch JFK: Oliver Stone at his conspiratorial best.
Why not to watch: As compelling as it might be, it’s mostly hokum.

Why to watch The Untouchables: This is what we like to think the Roaring ‘20s were like.
Why not to watch: The reality almost certainly wasn’t this cool.