KWIF=Kent's Week In Film. Sniffles. Cough. Sneezes. Vertigo. Madness. Stress. Rage. Anxiety. Sleeplessness. Aches. Indigestion. Reflux. In no particular order, and often on repeat. Let's talk about some movies and forget about the rest of the week. I was hoping mirror this week's KWIF with last week's by watching another Cary Grant black and white comedy, another disaster flick from the '70s, another Fukasaku film, and Onslaught, set in the same shared reality as The Guest...but Onslaught is already gone from theatres and not quite yet on demand. Feh.
This Week:
Resident Evil (2026, d. Zach Cregger - in theatre)
Message From Space (1978, d. Kinji Fukasaku - tubi)
Avalanche (1978, d. Corey Allen - tubi)
Topper (1937, d. Norman Z. McLeod - tubi)
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I have, however, seen Cregger's previous films, Barbarian and Weapons, and enjoyed them both. As time has passed, I recognize that Weapons and Barbarian are quite different types of horror movies, and that Weapons is much more my speed and style of horror than Barbarian was. Resident Evil is likewise a much different horror movie than Cregger's previous, but it absolutely proves he knows exactly what he's doing when he crafts his stories in bringing them to the screen. Barbarian and Weapons weren't flukes, this guy's got the goods as a horror auteur.
Where Weapons is a creepy, slow burn, non-linear, ensemble piece with a mystery to be unveiled that begins in a heightened reality, Barbarian starts extremely grounded, presenting as a situational horror that is rooted in the deep discomfort of never truly knowing what another person is thinking (or capable of), and then builds into escalating levels of surreal and then traditional horror. Barbarian is genuinely scary and intense, while Weapons is primarily creepy. Resident Evil is scary, intense and creepy. Honestly, it maybe the most "horror" horror movie I've actually ever seen (I'm not a neophyte, but I'm also no expert), while also having Cregger's sense of humour sprinkled throughout.
It's largely a one-hander film. We follow Bryan (Austin Abrams) as he is takes on a critical, life-saving medical transport job. He has to go "up the mountain" to Raccoon City (makes me think they transported Raccoon City out of the midwest and into the Rockies somewhere) in the midst of heavy snowfall for which his economy-class vehicle is not equipped. While driving he learns his girlfriend is pregnant talking to her over the phone, and he reacts badly. And then he hits something.
It kicks off from there. It starts out really small, and kind of funny, and just very slowly escalates. It's barely five minutes into the film before Things Are Happening, which is incredibly smart of Cregger. Weapons felt more like a sprawling novel adaptation, like prestige (not "elevated" thank you) horror, at 128 minutes. Resident Evil is over in sub-90 before the credits start. It is simply the story of someone who gets caught up in what is effectively a disaster and has to navigate his way through it.
The closer Bryan gets to Raccoon City, the more things escalate.
There's not much to the plot here (not unlike a video game). There's a framework for Bryan to navigate. There are obstacles in his way. There are undead creatures that emerge that he has to face or flee. And there are sort of clues that could be interpreted as logic puzzles presented before him that he may or may not think through.
Yeah, from a character and story standpoint, it's thin (not absent, just thin), but boy is it thrilling. And gross. And scary. And gory. And clever. And funny.
Abrams' first big role was as the titular Dash in the teenage Christmas romcom Dash and Lily, which is one of the best romcom TV shows ever made and one of the best Christmas romcoms ever made, and one of the best teenage romcoms ever made, and Abrams was great in it. His next big appearance was in Wolfs and managed to stand out sandwiched between George Clooney and Brad Pitt, as well as putting in a great performance as part of the Weapons ensemble. But this is a spotlight. Resident Evil succeeds or fails on whether you like this guy enough to care if he makes it through this horror show in one piece or not. And you do. It's hard not to like Abrams. He's got a pluck, a charm,and a down-to-earth, fallible quality that makes him seem so ... normal. He's an everyman, not a surperman. You never get the sense that anything Bryan is doing in this film is outside of what someone like Bryan is capable of.
I mentioned the incredible opening act of Hope a few weeks back, just a propulsive 45 minutes of exceptional cinema teasing out the monster while following a woefully unprepared character through the chaos. Resident Evil basically does the same thing but instead of just throwing the character into the thick of it, he slowly wades into it. And it only does that. Where Hope then deviated into trying to tell a larger story, Resident Evil is just as non-stop propulsive a film, and it doesn't take its focus off Bryan. He is the larger story.
Just as I cannot compare this to the video game series, I'm also not a gore hound, so I can't really tell where this fits on the goriest movies ever list. I imagine it's not at the very top, but it's well past the middle. It's incredibly well made that grabs you from the start and doesn't let go. Toasty's going to love it.
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In Message From Space, the planet Jillucia has fallen to the tyrannical Gavanas Empire. The small hovel of unenslaved Jillucians send their princess Emeralida (Shihomi) off planet with warrior Urocco (Makoto Satō) and eight mystical Liabe Seeds that will reveal the fabled eight warriors that will help free their people from enslavement under Emperor Rockseia XXII (Mikio Narita) and his nasty mother.
The first chosen of the liabe seeds are roughneck pilots Shiro (Sanada) and Aaron (Philip Casnoff), as well as their shifty pal Jack (Masazumi Okabe) and also Meia (Peggy Lee Brennan) who is rebelling against her affluence by hanging with these low-lifes.
Much of Message From Space feels like live-action anime, for better or worse. While Eight Samurai had a definite Star Wars influence, with shot recreations and Japanese fantasy interpretations of Star Wars elements like the stormtroopers, Message From Space feels less like a rip-off of Star Wars than a capitalization on its success.
The best aspect of Message From Space is it's space ships and flying sequences. There is an anime energy to the astronautics and it's a pretty visceral viewing experience. There's definitely a bit of the trench run from Star Wars in what they were emulating here, but it seems more like the speeder bike sequence from Return of the Jedi and the podracing sequence from The Phantom Menace...as if Lucas watched this film and took a couple tries to match its sense of speed and excitement.
The ship designs are all over the place, but most of them are pretty great. Just like Star Wars, they feel cobbled together, like model kits that have been kit bashed and put together in unintended ways but making for unique and interesting looking pieces. My lack of experience with manga and anime is such that I don't know if Message From Space was a huge influence on anime, or vice versa...or if it was sort of a feedback loop. One of the space ships is just like an old school sailboat with giant masts that I know I've seen in anime before.
It's a shame then that pretty much the rest of the film is nonsensical dross. The characters are poorly constructed with little to no development over the course of the film. There's not a single character arc in this film that carries any weight or resonance. The dynamics between the characters is underbaked at best, without any real sense of who these people are to each other, and what they mean.
The story itself is all over the place, progressing in a staccato fashion that has no sense of coherency or flow. Oh, it takes big swings (the Gavanas have built rockets into Jillucia and move the planet into our solar system, and then proceed to blow up the moon) but none of the movements feel in concert with one another.
Even though the effects are clearly on a tight budget and pretty unrefined, there is a quaintness to them that is appealing. There's effort put into this production that's pretty easy to appreciate, so it's just the more disappointing that it amounts to a pretty underwhelming film as a whole. As much as I prefer sci-fi to fantasy Legend of the Eight Samurai is the superior, and more rewarding of these two bizarrely similar films.
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Avalanche was Roger Corman's New World Pictures entry into this fray. Starring Rock Hudson, Mia Farrow and Robert Forester, it's not quite as low-rent a cast as you might expect for a Corman-produced B-movie version of a disaster flick...except that the remainder of the cast is a veritable who's who of "who's that?" No other names or recognizable faces involved (at least not 50 years later anyway).
Hudson is the proprietor of a new ski resort that faces some controversy over the ecological impacts of its development. Farrow plays Hudson's ex-wife, coming to the resort as guest of the owner, who has plans to woo her back if he can ever escape all the damn meetings he's in. Forester plays a celebrated photographer and naturalist who lives nearby and is concerned about the amount of snowfall happening on the mountaintops.
The film is mostly interested in the love triangle of Hudson, Farrow and Forester, while making it apparent to the audience that Hudson's aggressive advances of Farrow are unwelcome (so much arm-grabbing). There are other characters introduced, like Bruce the champion skier, and his mentally unstable girlfriend Tina, and the maybe unnamed skater that Bruce cheats on Tina with sending her into a dark spiral, and Tina's ex-husband the news reporter. There's also Hudson's mom and her chaperone, the resort's accountant McDaid (there's no romantic entanglement there, but there should have been).
Where your average disaster film would spend about a half hour cutting between each of these characters before setting off the main event, here it takes about an hour before the titular avalanche kicks off. Usually some aspect of the oncoming tragedy could have been prevented if not for the hubris of one of the characters, whether the disaster could have been prevented, or at least more lives could have been saved with early warnings. Here, however, despite all this set-up of Hudson not listening to Forester about the building snow on the mountaintops and how all of Hudson's ongoing development work and cutting down of trees will increase the likelihood and severity of an avalanche, the whole event is kicked off because of a totally random plane crash. Hudson had no true culpability here.
The avalanche, as might be expected from a Corman production, is a budget production, alternating between miniatures, stock footage, Styrofoam boulders and blowing soap flakes, and superimposition effects. It's delightful in its cheesiness. By the time the avalanche is over, there's barely a half hour left in the film to deal with the fallout of the avalanche, and, I have to say, it's pretty tepid. The carnage is not insane, and the response is pretty immediate. Two of our three leads are leading the rescue effort, and Farrow is just sort of off to the side, so nobody we've spent any quality time with in the movie, besides mom and McDaid, are in any immediate danger. Putting underdeveloped characters in peril is not very exciting.
Avalanche is a sub-par execution of the disaster film formulae. It's obvious that budget constraints were the reason for it spending 70% of its time on silly romantic entanglements and hashing and rehashing the same background details over and over. But at the same time, it is one of the most 1970s movies I've ever seen. The hair, the moustaches, the clothes, the earth tones, the wood... everything, the ski suits and snowmobiles and luggage, the dancing (oh the dancing) and the finger snapping, the live music in the lounge, the corny competitions being held at the resort...all of it is pretty damn glorious if you want a hit of pure 1970's into your eyeballs. I had a great time.
I forgot, when watching Avalanche this past week that I had actually seen it before, as part of Netflix's Mystery Science Theatre 3000: The Gauntlet season back in 2017. It's not a memorable film, nor is it even close to good, but it still delighted me.
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In Rabin's current writings, he's starting looking back to film's before he coined the phrase to find earlier examples of the MPDG in cinema, and there's no shortage of them (Barbra Streisand in What's Up Doc? being just one example). Without meaning to step on his spot, I submit Topper as being yet another one...only in this case, the twist is it's Manic Pixie Dream Ghosts (thanks to Lady Kent for coming up with that one).
In Topper, George and Marion Kerby (Carey Grant and Constance Bennett) are two affluent, hard-drinking gadabouts who seem to have less than a care in the world. When we first meet them, George is driving through the countryside sitting on the back of the seat of his convertible and driving with his feet. They're heading into the big city for a board meeting in the morning at the bank (George is the majority stakeholder or something, I didn't actually follow) which means they have all night to party. Marion takes delight in flirting with buttoned-down Cosmo Topper (Roland Young), a respectable man who really would just like to dance and let loose and play, but his prim and uptight wife Clara (Billie Burke) won't let him.
George and Marion get into a car accident because George is probably still drunk and speeding, and they die. They emerge as ghost and take the whole damn thing in stride (I guess if you die fully lit, you remain fully lit forever in the afterlife). They wonder why they haven't passed on to the pearly gates, and, they surmise, that they need to do a good deed. Marion's immediate thought is they need to teach ol' Topper how to let loose, and thus the flirtatious, vivacious, playful, life-loving, liberal woman starts messing with Cosmo, and he, of course, loves it.
How could he not? Constance Bennett's performance as Marion is so damn alluring. She's designed to be, of course, so that Topper will follow her anywhere and everywhere. In the wrong hands, Marion could be seen as mean-spirited, as really fucking with Topper, but Bennett gives the impression that Marion is genuinely delighted by Topper, and her flirtatiousness is strictly that. She's married to George of course, but she has the liberty, and desire, to run around with men who amuse her. And it's true, Roland Young is kind of adorable. From the get go you understand Topper is a man burdened by rules, a man longing for fun and joy and pleasure, but he lives in a reality that seems to deny him that. And so he needs a Manic Pixie Dream Ghost to unshackle him.
Of course, Mrs. Topper finds out her husband has been running around with another woman, and part of the story is about Clara loosening up, and learning that being buttoned-down and polite society is seen as uninteresting (the society women she wants to hang out with only come around after Marion gets Topper thrown in jail and reported on in the newspaper).
For Grant, this seems like it was a contractual obligation... he had so many pictures to make in a year with a studio, lending his big name and handsome face to a marquee and poster, but he's barely in the film. This is Constance Bennett's show (and what a show). Normally a lack of Grant screentime would be a bit of a downer, but not here. Eventually George has to come back into the picture to reign Marion in. As footloose and fancy-fee as George is, even he realizes when Marion is being too much of a pixie, too much of a dream girl. In a just world, George would have been Clara's Manic Pixie Dream Guy/Ghost (and in a non-sexist world, he would have been right alongside Clara in helping Cosmo live life to the fullest).
It takes a little too long for Topper's premise to come to fruition, but when it does it's a very fun, often funny, and fully spirited tale. I would love to get a remastered version of the film as the Tubi version had quite poor sound quality (especilly for my half-deafness) and washed out contrasts. Apparently there are two Topper sequels which is baffling given how it ends, but I'm also very curious.
Would you believe I saw Message From Space when it did the theatres back in the 70s? It might have been a few years later, as NS always got movies late in the game, but it was soon after Star Wars. I recall being mesmerised by how different it was but recognized, even at that young age, it was just a rip-off of my Favourite Movie Ever. I recall feeling there could have been a good movie in there, if they weren't trying so hard to make Star Wars. How the heck was a kid just over 10 thinking these things?
ReplyDeleteJ reminded me that the "classic disaster movies" DVD is still shrink wrapped and I should probably open it and watch it. Unlike you, I have gone the other way with physical media, even so far as to download digital copies of movies I have on The Shelf.
I won't repeat my usual comment about the Resident Evil game; I am more fond of the legacy it created, than the game itself. I will definitely enjoy this.
What's on the Classic Disaster Movies dvd? Towering Inferno? Poseidon Adventure? Beyond the Poseidon Adventure?
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