The Mist (2007)

Directed by: Frank Darabont

Screenplay by: Frank Darabont, based on the novella “The Mist” by Stephen King
Starring: Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, Laurie Holden, Andrew Braugher, Toby Jones, William Sadler, Jeffery DeMunn
Running Time: 126 minutes
Tagline: “Fear Changes Everything.”

This is what happened.

Artist David Drayton (Thomas Jane) isn’t happy when he emerges from the cellar of his home with his family the morning after the small town of Bridgton, Maine (played by Shreveport, Louisiana, I say with some pride) is hit by what has got to be the most savage thunderstorm in recent memory. There’s a gigantic tree parked on top of the extension that he used for a studio, not only wrecking his work space but completely ruining his latest project, -- a poster for a movie adaptation of THE DARK TOWER, no less -- and if that wasn’t bad enough, the Drayton’s boathouse has been completely flattened by another tree, an old dead one that belonged to his next door neighbor, New Jersey lawyer Brent Norton (Andre Braugher), and has been a bone of contention between the two men, whose relationship can be described as adversarial at best. So you can imagine Drayton’s relief when, due to yet another tree getting dropped on Norton’s vintage Mercedes, his normally bull-headed neighbor is willing to call a truce and even asks to join Drayton and his son Billy (Nathan Gamble) when they make a supply run into town. It seems that the whole town had the same idea that Drayton and company did, though, because when they arrive at the local supermarket, the place is packed. Unfortunately, the power is out and with the market’s generators only there to keep the freezers running, everyone’s going to have to be rung up the old fashioned way. That little supply run is going to take a lot longer than anyone expected.

With more immediate problems on their mind, you can’t really blame Drayton, Norton, or anyone else around town for not giving too much thought to some rather strange goings on. All radio, cell phone, and land line communication seems to be inoperable, for one. Not too alarming, I suppose, considering the storm last night, but then there’s the unusually large number of military vehicles heading en masse to the army base located on the other side of the lake. That base would home to the enigmatically named Arrowhead Project, the exact purpose of which has been the topic of gleeful speculation for the more conspiracy minded of Bridgton residents. Stranger still is this weird fogbank that’s been hanging around since the storm. It seems to originate from the same direction as the Arrowhead Project, and while fog obviously isn’t unusual for a lakeside town, this particular one doesn’t seem to be behaving like any natural phenomena anyone’s seen before. It’s moving against the wind for one and as it slowly makes it way further and further into town, we get more and more signs that something’s wrong. Emergency vehicles come roaring down the road outside the store with their sirens blaring; the firehouse warning horn goes off; then, as the mist begins to envelope the store itself, local man Dan Miller (Jeffery DeMunn) stumbles in covered with blood and screaming his head off about monsters in the mist killing his friend…

“The Mist” was written in 1976 and first saw publication in 1980 as part of Kirby McCauley’s famous “Dark Forces” anthology and you can tell with a glance at the cover of the old hardcover edition that it was meant to be the main attraction; the words “A Short Novel by Stephen King” are printed in noticeably bigger letters than any other name on there. And you should note that the other names listed on that cover includes heavyweights like Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon Joyce Carol Oates, Ramsey Campbell, and Robert Bloch, in case you need a reminder of just how big a deal Stephen King was at the height of his popularity. (I actually had a chance to get my hands on a copy of “Dark Forces” while browsing my favorite used book store once and I don’t think I could tell you why exactly I passed it up even if you put a gun to my head.)  As the story goes in the afterward of “Skeleton Crew,” inspiration came when King found himself in much the same situation that Drayton finds himself at the start, stuck in line with his son at a crowded grocery store after a storm had wreaked havoc, when he was suddenly struck with the image of a prehistoric monster flying around in the store with them. Loving that image, he took to writing as soon as he got home, resulting in a story he described as “THE ALAMO as directed by Bert I. Gordon.”

I definitely think “The Mist” is one of King’s best pieces of short fiction, exciting and fast moving despite clocking in at a hefty-for-a-novella one hundred and thirty plus pages. It’s certainly the story by the man that I’ve read the most over the years. You also don’t have to look far to see the story’s tangible influence on horror and science fiction. The popular video game franchise SILENT HILL begins with a father searching for his child in a town enshrouded by an otherworldly fog that hides pterodon-like creatures and other monstrosities. One of the streets in the town is named after King. HALF-LIFE, which also deals with an intrusion by an alien reality, was originally called QUIVER, a tip of the hat to The Arrowhead Project. Brian Keene’s novel THE DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN simply swapped out the mist for some all consuming Lovecraftian darkness and well, word of advice to all writers: namechecking the work you’re pretty much lifting wholesale from is not the best of ideas. Heck, there was even an episode of ULTRAMAN TIGA that lifted its threat from King’s story and they even titled it “The Mist.” So, with all this in mind, one could wonder why it took until 2007 for a movie based on this story to happen, when even stories like “Graveyard Shift” and “The Mangler” had gotten film adaptations – seriously not very good adaptations -- in the interim. Well, that would have something to do what King would come to refer to as “The Dollar Babies.”

The term “Dollar Baby” is used interchangeably to describe both creators and creations. In 1977, King, after receiving letters from college students seeking permission to make films and plays based off of his work, decided to set up a policy that someone could have the one time right to adapt any of his short stories (and only the short stories, mind) in exchange for a single dollar. These works could not be exhibited commercially without approval from King first and he was to receive a video taped copy of the short film once completed. The Dollar Babies were generally not seen outside of film festival circuits and school presentations, and the general impression is that a lot of them weren’t very good, but three of them were considered quality enough to be packaged together and sold as an anthology movie titled STEPHEN KING’S THE NIGHT SHIFT COLLECTION, which was released by Granite Entertainment Group. This trio would include adaptations of “The Boogeyman,” “Disciples of the Crow,” and most importantly, “The Women in the Room” by a then twenty year old aspiring filmmaker by the name of Frank Darabont.

Born in a French refugee camp in 1959 to parents fleeing the Hungarian Revolution, Darabont came to the United States while still an infant, his family eventually settling in Los Angeles right around the time Frank was the age of five. Inspired to pursue a film career after a chance meeting with George Lucas during the filming of THX-1138, Darabont got his start as a production assistant on movies like HELL NIGHT and the original TRANCERS, before taking his first crack at filmmaking with “The Woman in the Room.” By all accounts, Darabont wasn’t particularly happy with how “The Woman In The Room” turned out, but King apparently saw something in it that impressed him and got in touch with Darabont. (The short would also wind up on a semi-finalist list for an Academy Award.) This meeting would be the beginning of a long standing association and friendship between the two men and after Darabont expressed interest in directing another of King’s works as a feature film, the prison drama “Rita Hayworth & The Shawshank Redemption,” King famously gave the rights to that story to Darabont for a handshake.

If you only know Darabont’s work from the likes THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, THE GREEN MILE, and THE MAJESTIC, films with painterly visuals and a tonal sensibility influenced by Frank Capra, he might sound like an odd choice for “The Mist.” A quick look at the man’s career between “The Woman In The Room” and THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION would dispel this notion. Darabont would spend much of his career during that period as a screenwriter, his first big successes coming via collaboration with Chuck Russell, and he had a hand in writing the screenplays for a number of genre movies that were better than they probably had any right to be: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: THE DREAM WARRIORS, the 1988 remake of THE BLOB -- where else can you see one of the most spectacularly gruesome deaths in b-movies and Shawnee Smith, dressed as cheerleader, spewing profanity and machine gun fire at the titular beastie? – and THE FLY II. His credits also include episodes of TALES FROM THE CRYPT, a regular writing stint on THE YOUNG INDIANA JONES CHRONICLES, unaccredited work on the screenplay for THE ROCKETEER and the recent American GODZILLA film, and probably most tantalizingly an unproduced screenplay for a sequel to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s muscles-and-machine-guns opus COMMANDO. One can only speculate on what that was like.

-- “I didn’t think much of John Matrix when he first arrived at Shawshank…” And clearly Red would be played by Carl Weathers in this version. --

Heck, the man was about ready to accept an offer to direct CHILD’S PLAY 3 before the opportunity to make SHAWSHANK finally came up, if you want another What Could Have Been to dwell on. And an adaptation of “The Mist” was always in the cards for Darabont, weighing it as a possible choice for his first crack at directing a film, and he had King’s full support. Over the years, whenever someone would come around making offers for the film rights to “The Mist” King would inform them that he had already given the rights to Darabont.

It seems that even Darabont understood that he seemed like an unusual choice for this project and intended to make something wildly different from what he had done before. Though the budget is substantially higher than most, he intended to shoot the film in the same manner as a low budget horror movie. To help get a handle on shooting things quick and dirty on limited resources, Darabont took to directing episodes of FX’s gritty cop drama THE SHIELD and would hire on the same director of photography, camera crew and editor for this project. THE MIST’s camera work possesses an almost documentary like feel and I think that approach goes a long way in instilling it with a genuine intensity, even outside of its more chaotic scenes. Though it is a nice little touch that those brief moments of calm before and during the monstrous siege are shot more traditionally.

“The Mist” contains what has to be one of the largest and most varied monster menageries you’re likely to find in one of King’s stories, which would probably go a long way to explain why its one of my favorites. There are swarms of man-eating tentacles (“What were those things attached to?”), dog sized spiders, skyscraper dwarfing behemoths, winged insects the size of your head, that “ptero-buzzard” that started it all and gigantic lobster-like monstrosities. So, it’s a little disappointing that the creature effects are something of a mixed bag. Due to the short shooting schedule and prep time, they’re primarily realized through CGI and while there are a number of shots that are absolutely fantastic looking, such as the enormous tentacle that reaches inside the loading dock during the first monster attack or the enjoyably Ray Harryhausen feeling bird creatures, others, such the insects once they’re in the store, stick out too much. (Darabont originally wanted to shoot THE MIST in black and white and this version is included with the DVD release of the film. It does go a long way to covering up some of the rough edges.) On the upside, the monster designs, handled by KNB EFX and artist Bernie Wrightson, are aces, my personal favorite being the “Grey Widower” spiders and their distressingly human like faces. (A nod of the head to a classic OUTER LIMITS episode, it seems) I was also very pleased to see that they completely nailed the scene with the behemoth creature. When word that an adaptation of “The Mist” was being developed, me and probably everyone else who was a fan of that story was hoping they got it right and boy did they ever. Seeing that big sumbitch looming over our characters as it strides on by, blocking out what little of the sun there is has got to be one of my favorite visual spectacles to come out of the past decade and change.

Right about now, you may be asking yourself, “Bill, this is Political Science Fiction review round table. Just what the hell does THE MIST have to do with either of those things?” Well, the science fiction part is easy enough, since we’re on the topic of the film’s monsters. At its heart, THE MIST is an alien invasion story. Or to pit more aptly, an alien intrusion story, the accidental collision between otherworldly life and our own. As unbelievable as these creatures are, they aren’t the Great Old Ones coming forth to overthrow man but animals from a wholly different ecosystem that’s so very not compatible with our own. The spiders only attack because people intruded on their nest, the insects were drawn to a light source like any other bug and the birds were there because they wanted to eat the insects and found something else tasty to gnaw on. This is part of the reason why the actions of Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), your standard King small-town-religious-looney who comes to believe that this mist is some kind of harbinger of the apocalypse and only a “The Lottery”-style blood sacrifice from their number can save them, are so dangerous: predators don’t abandon a convenient food source.

It’s the threat that Mrs. Carmody and her mad beliefs represent to the people inside where the political aspect of the film comes in. For that, we must look from Stephen King to another horror icon whose work holds just as much influence over THE MIST as he does: George Romero. As much as it is an adaptation of King’s work, THE MIST is in many ways a spiritual successor to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Like Romero’s film, THE MIST is an examination of how easily systems can fall apart and groups can cease to function together in times of crisis and you can see traces of NIGHT’s legacy throughout. The film adds in a romance between a local army officer (Sam Witwer) and a cashier (Alexa Davalos) and much like Tom and his girlfriend in NIGHT, being Beautiful Young People In Love does absolutely jack squat to protect them from their eventual grisly ends. Then there’s the character of David Drayton. Now, in King’s novella Drayton is the protagonist but his role in events isn’t nearly as proactive as his movie counterpart. He’s more of a supporting character, in a way, to the story’s version of Dan Miller, and the two men seemed to have switched roles in the transition from source to screen. (Interesting to note that it’s with the death of Miller and another more proactive character in the novella that things really go to hell for people in the store.) Here it’s Drayton that people look to as a leader because he offers a solution considerably more sane than Norton’s willfully oblivious insistence that the mist is nothing to worry about or Mrs. Carmody’s More-Old-Testament-Than-Old-Testament blood and guts approach. Trouble is that David Drayton’s as confused, out of his depth and grasping for solutions as anyone, and much like Ben in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, his role exists to pull the rug out from under the idea of The Hero That Saves The Day…but I’ll get to that in a minute.

What separates the two is the angle they approach this from. NIGHT is all about how Ben and Cooper’s clashing personalities and their need to be the one in charge played a major factor in dooming the people trapped in that farm house. THE MIST comes at it from the idea that if you scare people bad enough, they’ll come running to anyone who offers a solution, whether or not the person offering that solution actually understands what they are dealing with or even if the solution that person offers could potentially be worse than threat. Furthermore, both the story and film are about how mishandling that fear can bring out an ugly side in people who you thought you knew. Mishandling fear is what causes the people in the store to split into factions in the first places. It causes Brent to refuse blatant evidence that there’s more going on than a simple fogbank and his suicidal decision to lead a group out into it early on. We are left to only guess at what their fates are. It's people's fear that empowers Mrs. Carmody and as more and more tragedies occurs, she uses that fear to whip them into a frenzy, leading to the death of an unfortunate convenient scapegoat.

 

I will agree that things escalate rather quickly in this movie but well, it's a movie. You have only a certain amount of time to get your point across. Fortunately, despite the expediency in which thing go full-on "Lord of the Flies,"  THE MIST never quite devolves into becoming a cartoon. The documentary feel and Darabont's writing plays a part in that but a lot of it comes from the fact that the movie is blessed with an incredibly good cast, including Jane, Jones and Braugher, as well a number of regular players in Darabont's movies. We've got Jeff DeMunn, Laurie Holden, Brian Libby and William Sadler, who funnily enough played David Drayton in an earlier audiobook adaptation of "The Mist." Special consideration must go to Marcia Gay Harden, looking very much like Karen Black, as Mrs. Carmody. Such an extreme character is difficult to pull off and one could easily see the character being too much. She almost is in the story, with her bright yellow pantsuit, crone like appearance, and King's tendency to remind us of her existence by having her cry out "Death!" in the background of certain scenes, which reminds me a little too much of Grandpa Simpson. But Harden pulls it off, giving a performance not all that far removed from Jack Nicholson in THE SHINING; a dangerously unhinged person letting a fevered nastiness to come out and play. The result is one of the most utterly hissable villains to show up in a Stephen King adaptation. I was lucky enough to be one of the few people to see this movie in theaters and when Carmody bought it, the audience cheered.

Audiences were a little more divided in their reactions to the ending which brings us to what becomes of David Drayton and the world at large in THE MIST's closing moments. Spoilers ahoy, obviously. Like I said, Drayton isn't quite as successful a hero that his role in the films usually is and his attempt in the film's ending to spare his loved ones a horrible death ends up backfiring in the worst possible way. This isn't the ending of King's story, which more or less stopped at a good enough point, leaving the characters fates ambiguous. Darabont wanted something more concrete for the conclusion to this film, however, and it's not quite the ass-pull that many of its critics claimed it was. Rather it was Darabont taking one of the more chilling thoughts David has while he and others make his escape in the story and carrying it on through to the worst possible result. I can understand why people hated it. Rewatching the film for Halloween, I came away from it feeling like David Drayton's fate, when piled on top of all the other horrors that occured in the movie was simply too much. It comes dangerously close to simply wallowing in misery, something that THE WALKING DEAD, which Darabont served as a showrunner on for the first two season, is regularly criticized for. But I can't deny that I find it be an effectively done scene, some wonderful bits of acting done almost completely with glances and moments of silence and no matter how many times I've watched this movie, and believe me, I watched it a lot the year it came out, I still flinch when that first gunshot goes off.

But for all the attention the meaningless of Drayton's actions have received, there's something else horrifying about the ending, I find, which gets things back to the political part of the review. There seems to be a curse of sorts for horror films that are allegories of their time to become only more prescient as the years pass. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was never about "THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE COULD, LIKE, TOTALLY HAPPEN BRUH!" but about underlying tensions in the country and a growing distrust with the powers that be. Watch it today and not only has not much changed but one can't help but bring to mind Tamir Rice and others when Ben, a black man, is shot down by law enforcement officers who don't even bother to confirm whether he's a threat or not before they open fire. Likewise, one can easily see THE MIST as playing on tensions of the post 9/11 / Bush-era, with a group of people splitting apart and turning against each other in reaction to a sudden and destructive event. Well, it's unfortunate to say that just under a decade from the film's release, a lot of those tensions and fears are still here and strong as ever. Wouldn't you know, this election year we happen to have a Mrs. Carmody of our own, a candidate who rose to prominence by playing on those fears, by pandering to and whipping the worst parts of the country's psyche into a frenzy, regardless of whether he actually believes or plans to follow to through with any of it. It's unearthed something genuinely ugly. THE MIST ends with the threat banished but the people who survived it will never be able to go back to normal. David Drayton, the others at the supermarket, they'll have to live with what they've done for the rest of their lives. Regardless whether or not that idiot is elected today, the damage he's and his ardent supports have done with this campaign's fearmongering won't go away when the polls close tonight. I doesn't matter if we settle back into our routines, that ugly thing they unearthed is still going to be there, hungry and snapping at our doors. Hell, I can at least empathize with the people in that supermarket. They feared for their lives. What are the hardcore Trumpers afraid of? Being forced to admit that there are different kinds of people in the world? That it's not all aboout them? Is that why they stirred all this crap up, something that we'll have to deal with the ramifications of further down? That doesn't make me want to empathize with them. That just makes me angry.

 

This review was part of the Celluloid Zeroes Political Science Fiction Roundtable, because we had to do something besides lose our dang minds in anticipation of whatever happens. Hop on over Checkpoint-Telstar to read his take on THE PARALLAX VIEW, Microbrew Reviews for INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, and The Terrible Claw Reviews for SHIN GODZILLA before stopping off at Web of the Big Damn Spider for A REPORT ON THE PARTY AND GUESTS.

The Delta Force (1986)

Directed by: Menahem Golan
Screenplay by: Menahem Golan and James Bruner
Starring: Chuck Norris, Lee Marvin, Robert Forster, Shelly Winters, George Kennedy, Martin Balsam, Robert Vaughn.
Running Time: 2 hrs. 5 min.
Tagline: "The Siege...The Ordeal...The Rescue..."

EDIT: Unfortunately, no matter how muuch messing around with the settings I do, seems that half the text in this is locked in at "eyestrain," so you might want to adjust your browsers zoom settings accordingly. Thanks a lot, Blogger.

Well, if things had gone according to plan, the next thing you'd have read on this blog would have been the first of my requested reviews; DEATH WISH 3, one of the most ludicrous sequels ever filmed and standee alongside COBRA and INVASION U.S.A. in Cannon Film's Glorious Trinity of garbage action movies. But ya'll know that line from DEADWOOD I'm always quoting. The passing of George Kennedy, co-star of COOL HAND LUKE, THE DIRTY DOZEN, THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT, and numerous other films and television series and a welcome sight whenever he appeared, couldn't go un-remarked upon. So me and the other knuckleheads in the CELLULOID ZEROES blogger cabal decided it would only be right to pay tribute to the memory of Captain Ed Hocken by doing a round table about some of the loopier movies he's put an appearance in. For my contribution, I give you THE DELTA FORCE, yet another in a long line of movies that illustrate why getting on a plane with George Kennedy is a bad idea.

THE DELTA FORCE kicks off, like all good military themed exploitation movies, with a big explosion, as in the very first thing we see is a helicopter go up in flames. It's 1980 and we're dropped into the tail end of Operation Eagle Claw, a real-life attempt to put a kibosh on the Iranian hostage crisis that went south due to mechanical failure and bad intel, resulting in the death of eight American serviceman and at least one Iranian civilian. As the troops are getting the hell out of Dodge, Captain Scott McCoy, since he's being played by Chuck Norris, establishes himself as our movie's Gung Ho Man of Action type by ignoring his commanding officer Colonel Alexander’s (Lee Marvin, in his final film role) orders and charging recklessly into the burning wreckage of that helicopter we saw get blown up really good to rescue one of his comrades, who is actually in fairly good condition considering he was just in the center of a huge fireball. Once he's back on the plane, McCoy, obviously not happy with how the powers that be caved to public pressure and ordered a hastily thrown together op that was botched from the get go, announces that he's resigning from the military when he gets back to the States. Obviously, since that's Norris's name and granite mug right up there front-and-slightly-off center on the poster, we can safely bet that his retirement isn't going to last for very long.

Anyhow, with our heroes properly established, the film now needs to set up the stakes and introduce those enemies of freedom, mom and apple pie that are going to be in dire need of a good old fashioned all-American boot to the face. Fast forward about five years and things pick up again at the Athens International Airport, where an American airliner is hijacked by a pair of Lebonese terrorists and forced to fly to Beirut. Proclaiming themselves as members of the New World Revolution, the terrorists (Robert Forster and David Menaham) announce that they are declaring war against “American imperialists, Zionist and all other anti-socialist atrocities” and will kill the hostages if their demands are not met. Which, y’know, I’ve seen this movie about three or four times, twice just for this write-up, and I don’t think they ever actually specify what those demands are. Regardless, news of the hijacking makes its way to the proper authorities and the Delta Force is called in to deal with the situation. And yes, it should come as no surprise that that they’ll be joined by Captain McCoy, who was given a presidential decree by Ronnie Reags himself to come out of retirement (and a promotion to Major) for this mission because Chuck Norris is just that dad-blasted important to the American military.

Of course, the hijackers aren’t just sitting on their hands while all of this is going on. For starters, they separate the Jewish passengers and a trio of Navy divers from the other hostages to have them smuggled off the plane while bringing in at least a dozen more terrorists on board. With a clutch of hostages stashed away in a militant controlled section of Beirut, the terrorists now have a bargaining chip in place should the authorities try anything. That done, they order the plane to take off and fly to Algiers, where after landing they agree to let the women and children go. Delta Force is on stand by to raid the plane once the freed hostages are clear. Unfortunately, the order to go ahead is given moments before Colonel Alexander learns about what transpired on the plane from a stewardess and his attempt to warn the McCoy and the others that they’re about to go charging into a death trap tips the hijackers off. There’s a brief gun battle and one of the hostages ends up getting executed before the plane takes off again, returning to Beirut.

If you were alive and aware of things in any capacity at any point during the mid-eighties than it’s pretty clear to you that what we’ve just seen is Menaham Golan and company doing a serial-numbers-filed-off version of the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 by members of Hezbollah. Quite a few of plot points in THE DELTA FORCE’s first half were pulled from the hijacking itself, such as a German stewardess being forced to help the hijackers determine which passengers were Jewish and the murder of a Navy diver whose body was then dumped on the tarmac. There is a key difference between the film and actual events, though. In real-life the situation was resolved when Reagan negotiated the release of over seven hundred Shi’ite Muslim prisoners in exchange for the hostages, something that’s conveniently forgotten when Reagan-worshippers blow a gasket over two or three prisoners being let out from Gitmo. In the alternate universe that THE DELTA FORCE takes place in, however, the president has no patience for resolving things peacefully and informs Delta Force that it’s clobbering time. Sure, the hostages are scattered throughout Beirut but Beirut just happens to be within spitting distance of Israel and by total coincidence, the American heroes of this Hollywood film produced, co-written and directed by an Israeli guy (the film was shot in Israel, too!) will have the full cooperation of the Israeli government in launching a small-scale invasion on the terrorist’s base of operation.

Yes, what started as a fairly straightforward “ripped from the headlines” scenario transforms at the film’s midpoint into a whole lotta exploding, bullet riddled jingoistic wish fulfillment. THE DELTA FORCE is what I like to call a “We Get To Win This Time” movie, where thanks to Hollywood, the United States can take a mulligan and get to do over situations that didn't go so hot for them in real life but with the messy and complicated situations of actual reality now simplified into something that can be solved with a lot of crowd pleasing brute force. It probably won't come as a surprise that this type of movie really found its home in the Ronald Reagan-era, where the country was still smarting from that whole Vietnam thing. RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD, PART 2 would be the iconic example of this sort of film, which ditched the original FIRST BLOOD'S somberness for a lot of triumphant chest thumping and presented a new version of the Vietnam War where all we needed to win it was a muscled up, stony-faced super-soldier with a machine gun. Funny thing is that FIRST BLOOD, PART 2 wasn't the first movie to tackle this subject: Golan and Globus beat Stallone to the punch by about a year with their own Vietnam Revenge flick, MISSING IN ACTION (another Chuck Norris vehicle) and the original FIRST BLOOD'S director Ted Kotcheff and writer John Milius gave us UNCOMMON VALOR the year before that. UNCOMMAN VALOR, which featured Gene Hackman leading a Dirty Dozen-esque team in a raid on the prison camp holding his son, is actually my favorite of the bunch, as rather than going for the obvious gung-ho route, becomes a story about coming to terms with loss and in many ways, feels like more of an actual successor to FIRST BLOOD than anything with RAMBO in the title. Stallone’s movie was the one that made all the money, though, so it was the one that set the template for the imitators that followed, which included the other Rambo sequels, which saw our All-American hero winning other countries’ “Vietnams.”

- I’d actually love to see a better writer than me take a stab at examining the different kinds of action films that were born from the post-Vietnam mentality. If movies like RAMBO and MISSING IN ACTION presented a fiction where real life events weren’t losses just delayed victories, on the opposite end you’ve got movies like ALIENS, SOUTHERN COMFORT, and PREDATOR which present fictionalized faux-Vietnam operations that are doomed from the word go. Plus, I’d like to see someone go further into how the DNA of these sorts of movies live on in the modern action / superhero blockbusters of today, where we’ve got Iron Man fighting the War on Terror and The Avengers and Superman stopping airborne attacks on major American cities. -

Which brings us back to THE DELTA FORCE. We’ve got the same idea as RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD, PART 2, it’s just applied to a different conflict. In fact, THE DELTA FORCE gets two for the price of one, because this faux-TWA hijacking also gets to be framed as payback for the Iranian hostage crisis. Hell, Ruhalloh Khomeini gets name checked at one point, with our Delta Force heroes laughing at how their monkey wrenching of the terrorists’ attempted escape into Syria is really going to give the Supreme Leader the ole stink-eye. You will note that our hero is still a Vietnam vet, though, which begs the question of how we managed to lose Vietnam in the first place if we had a bunch of invincible super-soldiers like Rambo, Braddock, and McCoy on our side. Willing to bet INVASION U.S.A.’s Matt Hunter was running around there somewhere, too. Weirdly enough, THE DELTA FORCE also seems to be a bigger-explodier quasi-remake of another film Menaham Golan made back in Israel, OPERATION: THUNDERBOLT, which itself was based on a real-life hijacking that took place in Uganda.

Throw all that together and you’ve got one very odd movie. Like I said, THE DELTA FORCE has that whole FROM DUSK ‘TIL DAWN thing going for it where it starts out as one movie and shifts into a completely different one halfway through only this time it’s a bug, not a feature. For the first hour or so, it’s this claustrophobic suspense film which, turns out, actually succeeds at generating some drama and even genuine tension, such as a stewardess having to stick the pin back in a grenade or Colonel Alexander’s rush to warn the assault team about the trap they’re about to go charging into. Even the terrorists get have some sympathetic moments, like one telling a young girl that he’s only fighting because his family was killed or helping out a pregnant hostage. Of course, it also has a scene where the same guy says “six million Jews wasn’t nearly enough” when the German stewardess refuses to help them single out the Jewish passengers on the grounds of that whole Nazi thing. Something of a mixed message there, movie. Regardless, you get the sense that for the first half of this film, Cannon is attempting to make something that resembles, y’know, an actual movie, rather than the assembly line schlock they were known for. People coming here to see Chuck Norris kicking ass from minute one will probably get rather frustrated waiting on that to happen, as it’s a good hour before a single shot is fired or karate kick is thrown. Once the action does ratchet up, though, the film goes into total la la land and becomes exactly the kind of movie that one would expect from Golan-Globus. What started as a fairly grounded movie ends with Chuck Norris sliding down zip lines while firing a machine gun and nailing faceless terrorists a hundred yards away with pinpoint accuracy while everything explodes around him. The last half hour to forty minutes of this flick is almost one extended action scene as the raid on the terrorist compound leads into a chase through the desert which gives way to the Delta Force finally retaking the plane, with Norris taking a detour to hand out an incredibly one sided beat down to the terrorist leader before blowing him up with a rocket launcher. Hey, come to think of it, that’s how INVASION U.S.A. ended, wasn’t it? Well, wouldn’t you know it; both movies have the same screenwriter. (“INVASION U.S.A. had a script?” we ask, horrified.) Heck, with its crack commando unit running around the desert driving dune buggies and motorcycles with rocket launchers mounted on them, the second half of THE DELTA FORCE feels like Menaham Golan decided what the world really needed in 1986 was a gritty reboot of Hal Needham’s MEGAFORCE. Can’t help but wonder how this movie would have played if somebody stuck Norris in the gold spandex / blue headband combo that Barry Bostwick was rocking in that flick. 

Better, probably.

I don't know how much THE DELTA FORCE made at the box office but the film was successful enough to get two sequels greenlit and even inspired a Pre-Asylum made-for-video cash-in called OPERATION DELTA FORCE which managed to get more sequels than the movie that inspired it. I also remember this movie playing all the time on TBS's MOVIES FOR GUYS WHO LIKE MOVIES back in high school, so I'm willing to bet that video and cable played a part in that. As for the critical reception it received upon release, well you can imagine that it was quite a bit chillier. (Though the film did get a good review from Roger Ebert, oddly enough.) Naturally, people weren't too happy to see an actual tragedy that occurred a year before being used as an excuse for Chuck Norris to blow up foreigners. (I especially don't think the family of Navy diver Robert Stethem appreciated seeing their loved one's murder recreated for that purpose.) One wonders how RAMBO would have gone over in 1976. Now, if you've seen ELECTRIC BOOGALOO, Mark Hartley's amazing documentary about the rise and fall of Cannon Films, you'll know that Menaham Golan actually had people at the site of the hijacking, reporting back to him to what happened. He was developing this movie while the actual event was going down. Damn, even by the standards of Cannon Films, that is pretty shameless.

But, jingoistic political leanings and tasteless origins aside, I do think that THE DELTA FORCE is a fairly decent b-level action movie. I will admit that a good chunk of this is due to the fondness I have for Cannon Films in their hey-day. The Go-Go boys were this weird, one-of-a-kind mix of opportunists looking for the latest trend to cash in on and filmmakers who sincerely loved making movies. They were the kind of studio that could be producing some chintzy ninja movie one minute and then give someone like John Cassavetes carte blanche to make whatever movie he wanted to make the next. Sure, a lot of their output was schlock but there was something genuine behind it, something that gave it more character than you’ll find in a dozen “you’re supposed to like it ironically” movies today. Lord knows that something as completely insane as THE APPLE couldn’t have been made by someone who wasn’t being one hundred percent sincere. (And, yeah, high on cocaine. So much cocaine.) The other thing about being a schlock assembly line is that Golan and company had been doing for this for so long they had managed to get making this kind of movie down to something of a science. THE DELTA FORCE clocks in just a hair over two hours but the film keeps things moving quickly enough that it never feels like you’re watching a two hour movie. Considering the bloated, two and a half hour plus action blockbusters were getting inundated with today, I’ve come to appreciate Cannon’s no-frills approach more and more. Hey, anybody ready for that three hour long cut of BATMAN V. SUPERMAN?

Another thing in its favor is that THE DELTA FORCE was made in that weird little space where Cannon wasn't quite overreaching themselves like they would when they made SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE or MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE but could still throw some actual money at some of the movies they were making. It's a favorite joke among my friends and I that THE DELTA FORCE is the flick where Cannon could afford to wreck two fruit carts during the big car chase. This was the period where Cannon could afford Sylvester Stallone's paycheck, remember. Not only does this mean that the movie could get away with having some pretty elaborate stunt work and a lot of it, but could also have a cast of recognizable faces in front of it. Now, Marvin, Forster, Kennedy, and Vaughn weren't of Stallone's pay grade but these are people that starred in actual movies that folks have seen. Furthermore, they’re a group of actors that know how to not overplay things and prevent things from getting too histrionic. (Norris is still Norris, though, his face stuck in that perpetual grimace that’s either communicating steely-eyed determination or profound confusion depending on the camera angle.) Which brings us back around to talking about George Kennedy, finally. It had been a while since I had seen this movie, so I was a surprised to discover that his role wasn’t nearly as big as I remembered from my last viewing of the film. His Irish priest is a major supporting character for the first part of the movie but once the hostages are removed from the plane, he’s regulated to the background, only coming forward to say a prayer over a dying soldier in the film’s closing moments. He does get one of the better moments of the film, where he throws in his lot with the Jewish hostages, informing the terrorists, “I’m Jewish, just like Jesus Christ.” Yeah, you could argue that’s a pretty corny line, but I’ll be damned if Kennedy doesn’t sell it like a pro. So, I’m putting my memories of Kennedy having a more substantial role down to his skills as a seasoned character actor who knows how to make the most of his limited screen time.

I am disappointed that Lee Marvin gets little to do beyond barking orders at people. I had almost hoped that during the film’s closing moments, where scenes of the hostages being joyfully reunited with friend and family are being contrasted against the Delta Force members solemnly carrying away the body of their slain teammate, for him to turn to Norris and declare, “No, it was the hostages who won. We of Delta Force always lose.”

This review is part of PETRONI FIDE! a round table review session dedicated to the memory of George Kennedy, presented by the Celluloid Zeroes blogger cabal. Want some more? Pop over to Micro-Brewed Reviews for their look at NIGHTMARE AT NOON, then onto Cinemasochist Apocalypse for THE UNINVITED, and settle into the Web of the Damn Spider for STRAIT-JACKET. And if that's still not enough for ya, Checkpoint Telstar has a look at THE HUMAN FACTOR and The Terrible Claw finishes things off with DEMONWARP.

A Little Something Extra:
"The Delta Force" by Alan Silvestri of PREDATOR and BACK TO THE FUTURE fame, from that weird period where every composer seemed to be slathering everything in synthesizers:

Don't Torture A Duckling (1972)



Directed by: Lucio Fulci
Screenplay: Lucio Fulci, Gianfranco Clerici, and Roberto Gianviti
Starring: Barbara Bouchet, Tomas Milan, Florinda Bolkan, Marc Porel, Irene Papas, Georges Wilson
Running Time: 102 minutes

As the old saying goes, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. I had two other choices in mind for this VENGEFUL WITCH films round table and both had to be put on the back burner. SUSPIRIA was going to be my go to choice for this but that had to be put aside because I've decided to save that for a special project I'm working on for this blog. The next choice was going to be the bizarre Dutch silent "documentary" HAXAN: WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES but then that got hit with that bane of Netflix queues everywhere "Short Wait." Fortunately, I still had some notes left over from another project that ultimately didn't pan out, a series of posts about the films of Lucio Fulci that I planned to post this Halloween, so I had a back up handy. And unlike those other two, this one actually does feature a vengeful witch in a predominant role. "Vengeful" was more of a guideline than an actual rule, you see... From 1972, Lucio Fulci's unique entry into the Italian giallo genre, DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING, or as it's known in its native country, NON SI SEVIZIA UN PAPERINO. 

So, what's a giallo? I guess the first time you really start to discuss this genre on your movie review blog, you're sort of required to do a quick recap of the origins of the term. In 1929, an Italian publisher named Mondadori released a series of cheap crime / mystery pulp novels, most of which being Italian reprints of American and British crime authors such as Agatha Christie, Ed McBain, Ellery Queen, Raymond Chandler and others. The book series was titled "Il Giallo Mondadori" due to their trademark yellow covers. ("Giallo" being the Italian word for "Yellow.") The series proved to be popular and some other publishers wanted in on some of that fat cash, so they too put out their own series of crime novels, complete with yellow covers. Cultural osmosis being what it is, "giallo" would eventually become synonymous in Italian pop culture with any type of detective / mystery thriller. Movies like Hitchcock's PSYCHO and VERTIGO would be considered "giallo" by Italian audiences, for example. However, what is popular considered a giallo wouldn't really be established until the 1960's, which is when Mario Bava released two films: THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and BLOOD AND BLACK LACE. These two films, the latter especially, would be what would codify the basic tropes of a giallo: mysterious killers in black gloves, heavily stylized visuals, baroque titles, elaborate murder set pieces, outsider protagonists, glamorous women as the victims, etc. But while critical hits, neither of these movies apparently made much bank at the box office. The movie that would do for the giallo what A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS did for the spaghetti western wouldn't be along until 1970. That film would be THE BIRD WITH CRYSTAL PLUMMAGE, the directorial debut of Dario Argento, a former film critic and screenwriter. (Prior to this, he had co-written the screenplay for ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, one of my favorite movies.) The film, which apparently drew heavily from Bava's BLACK LACE while ramping up the stylized violence, was an international success and kicked off the giallo's stint as a viable money maker. Between 1970 and 1973, Italy alone produced more than sixty five of the damn things and even the Spanish and German film industries would get in on the act. Their influence can even be seen in notable American films, such as Hitchcock's FRENZY, Brian DePalma's controversial DRESSED TO KILL, Wes Craven's A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, and the original HALLOWEEN, which John Carpenter would call "his Argento movie," making them a connective tissue of sorts between Hitchcock-ian thrillers and slasher films.

I must admit, that while I'm a familiar enough with them to recognize a giallo film or the elements in other movies that were influenced by them, the whole giallo genre is one of my big blind spots as far as my movie watching goes. I think I've seen more movies that take their cues from them, like some of the ones mentioned above, than I have the real deal, completely unfiltered pure uncut giallo experience. From memory I can only name DEEP RED and PHENOMENA, both by Argento, and seeing part of Bava's BAY OF BLOOD / TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE a while back. SUSPIRIA is one of my favorite horror films and it definitely has a lot of giallo in it's DNA, for obvious reasons, but ultimately it's more of a supernatural horror film / dark fairy tale. Well, I've been off and on something of an Italian horror kick since the middle of October as of late, so I've decided to correct this. DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING was the movie that started me on this, in fact.

I've seen DUCKLING described as Fulci's fun house mirror version of Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and, y'know what? That's actually not as absurd as it might seem at first glance. At their heart, both stories are of the manner in which a town's suspicions and prejudices escalate due to a horrible crime and how the fallout of that leads to the death of an innocent scapegoat. (Movie Morlocks has a good little write-up about how the influence of the 1962 film adaptation of MOCKINGBIRD can be traced through the entire horror genre. Read it here.) Even the title is somewhat evocative of it. The setting is Southern Italy rather than Alabama, here the rural village of Accendura standing in for Maycomb and in many ways, Accendura itself seems to be more of the main character of the story than any of the people in the film. When a twelve year old boy goes missing and is later found dead, Accendura finds itself the center of attention from both law enforcement and the national media. This is just first of several murders that will take place in this seemingly quiet town and as more and more young boys turn up dead, the town turns its suspicion and rage towards its various pariahs, culminating in one, a disturbed woman who practices witchcraft (Florida Bolkan), getting savagely beaten to death. When another of the town's outliers (Barbara Bouchet), a drug addict who was in a habit of making sexually provocative advances towards the victims, finds herself as the new prime suspect, she's forced to work with a reporter (Tomas Milan) to uncover who the real killer is.

DUCKLING is nestled in an interesting spot in Fulci's overall career. Like a lot of Italian directors, Fulci was a jack-of-all-trades, getting his start directing screwball comedies and westerns (one of which featured a pre-DJANGO Franco Nero) before tackling crime thrillers, horror films, and even dipping his toes into CONAN THE BARBARIAN knock-offs with his truly "What the hell?" CONQUEST. It was his horror work that made him an international success, marking him as one of the "big three" of Italian horror with Bava and Argento. The flashpoint, in this case, being ZOMBIE, his notoriously gruesome and grotty gutmuncher that was marketed in Italy as a sequel to George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD. It's ZOMBIE or perhaps his unofficial "trilogy of death;" CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD / THE BEYOND / HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY that horror fans know him for best over here and made "A Lucio Fulci movie" practically into a genre unto itself. However, before ZOMBIE, he made a trio of giallo movies that, like I said, are interesting to look at in the context of his entire career because they seem to represent something of a transition for Fulci from his earlier to later movies. 1969's PERVERSION STORY seems almost like an ancestor to 90's erotic thrillers ala BASIC INSTINCT, while LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN seems to be Fulci's first attempt at the hazy, hallucinatory narratives that would define his later work. DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING would be the third film of the bunch, and it's probably the most interesting, not only for how much it diverges from what we've come to expect from Fulci's films but from gialli as well.

First off, there's how it differentiates itself from other films by Fulci. When you think of a Lucio Fulci horror film, odds are you'll be thinking in terms of something like the aforementioned ZOMBIE or the GATES OF HELL trilogy. These are movies that run on a sort of feverish dream logic. Stuff just happens in them, basically, as if Fulci and his screenwriters had ideas for scenes and then whipped a vague idea to connect all of them. (Like say "You really shouldn't build your hotel over a Hellmouth.") Thing is, when Fulci's has a handle on things, this ends up working in the film's favor, such as in THE BEYOND, where the incomprehensible narrative actually helps instill the sense that reality is becoming more and more unhinged. His movies are also known for their extreme gore, even by the standards of the Italian horror film, with his trademark being something truly egregious happening to a character's eyes. (Poor Paola Menard.) Hell, ZOMBIE's level of grue was so infamous it had barf bags made and distributed as a promotion. His previous giallo, LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN, had a scene which featured eviscerated dog props that were so realistic looking Fulci and special effects artist Carlo Rimbaldi had to prove in court that they were fake! Here, content serves story and the tangents the film ends up going on, like whole subplot with the witch Maciara, actually work as a part of the whole. As for extreme violence, there’s really only two scenes. One is the attack on the witch Maciara by the townspeople, a vicious whipping with chains that presages a similar scene that opens up Fulci’s THE BEYOND. The other is the death of our killer, who smashes their face on rocks repeatedly as they fall from a cliff. It has to be said, this would already be a fairly ridiculous sequence but that it features a dummy that couldn’t be more unconvincing if you tried doesn’t help. Sparks shoot out of the thing’s face at one point! The rest of the time, we only come across the aftermath of the violence, the discovery of the boy’s bodies. The only other killing depicted on screen is a brief strangling. Obviously, there’s a very simple explanation for this. I imagine that even with it’s lighter restrictions on violence and sexuality, the Italian film industry still considered depicting graphic murder of children something of a no-no, so much of DUCKLING’s running time, Fulci had to find other ways to get his shocks across. This would be achieved either through imagery such as the film’s opening scene where we witness Maciara digging bare-handed in the dirt, unearthing the bones of a small child, or in edits like the one where we cut from one of the boys still alive immediately to the discovery of his battered body face down in a stream. Not yelling “influence” here but I’d like to note that depicting the results of the violence, rather than the violence itself, would also be put to good use in David Fincher’s gialli influenced SEVEN.

It’s effective and the fact that DUCKLING doesn’t rely on over-the-top murder sequences to knock you on your ass gives it a feel that’s fairly distinctive from other movies of its kind. The violence itself isn’t the only way in which DUCKLING goes out of its way to differentiate itself from other giallo. Many popular giallo elements rear their head here; the “outsider” protagonists, the mystery that’s “solved” more by not letting yourself get tripped up by red herrings than any actual piecing together of clues, and yes, the one murder we do see is carried out by an unseen figure wearing black gloves. But in many other ways, DUCKLING likes to screw with your expectations. Getting back to what I was talking about earlier, whereas most giallos would rack up a body count primarily of attractive women, much like slasher films, DUCKLING goes the more taboo route of makings its victims male children. In fact, the women are among the film’s more sympathetic characters, the movie even allowing Patrizia, a promiscuous drug addict, to become one of the heroes. Then there’s common technique of keeping your killer hidden, by only showing their hands as they prepare or stalk their victims. This is used here but that’s to help set up Maciara as a red herring!

How about how this movie looks? There is certainly some memorable imagery, such as the skeletal grim reaper figure that looms over the boys while at prayer, and some disorienting camera angles are used, but you won’t see much in the way of garishly colored, baroque visuals and sets. This wouldn’t fit with the story Fulci’s trying to tell. Instead, DUCKLING opts for a more naturalistic, earthy look and many of the locations used in the film wouldn’t look too out of place in a spaghetti western, in fact. That film’s other eventual hero is played Tomas Milan, star of THE BIG GUNDOWN, Sergio Corbucci’s COMPANEROS, and one of the myriad DJANGO sequels, adds to this. (Also, good lord, that’s mustache he’s sporting.) Patrizia’s modern home is the only set piece in the movie that resembles anything you’d expect to see in an Argento movie and that’s supposed to stick out like a sore thumb, the home’s inconsistency with the surroundings, not to mention her modern brightly colored outfits serving as marks of her outsider status.

It’s actually a bit frustrating that information about Fulci’s childhood and early life is so hard to come by. All I was able to dig up was that the man had a Catholic upbringing, which isn’t surprising – a Catholic Italian? Come on! – because Catholicism and more importantly, Catholic guilt hangs over everything in the movie. Fulci got into a bit of hot water, in fact, with the Church with this movie because it felt that it presented a negative image of the organization. The reason I became interested in learning about Fulci’s early life because Fulci cited DUCKLING as his favorite out of all of his films and called it his most personal movie. There’s something incredibly autobiographical about this film and the way it depicts life in small town Italy. Unlike his much of his later work, you get the sense that Fulci is trying to really say something here about this. And well, whatever he’s trying to say, it’s not too good. In DUCKLING, small town life isn’t presented as some sort of wholesome counterpart to the decadence of the city, but rather a place that has its own form of corruption simmering under the surface. The modern world is encroaching on Accendura, represented by a newly built highway on the town’s outskirts, and the people there aren’t happy with it. Repression is the name of the game here, with the town showing suspicion and prejudice against anything that doesn’t fit their ideals. At one point, a Catholic priest tells a reporter that the church has final word on what magazines and other publications can be distributed in Accendura. This repressive attitude is taken to its most cynical extreme when we finally uncover the identity of the killer, who was murdering the children because they had began to show interest in things like smoking and sex and didn’t wish for them to fall into sin. Of course, no one in the movie (or in real life, either) grasps that it’s this repressive attitude that’s driving them to behave like this. When you emphatically tell a kid to not do something, well, that’s going to make them what to do it even more but without any real understanding of what they’re dealing with. Take the movie’s most infamous scene, where Patrizia teases one of the boys after he stumbles across her sunbathing in the nude. That kid, who was all bravado earlier, becomes scared, timid and is in completely over his head. Man, way to make “nude Barbara Bouchet” disturbing, Fulci.

It’s this whole repression angle that ties into my observation that real main character of DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING is Accendura. The idea that the environment they’ve created made the murders possible and that a moral authority may be the one responsible for it never crosses the villagers’ minds. Instead they turn against the freaks, the weirdos, the Others, because in their minds they’re a convenient, guilt free target. They don’t fit with whatever moral standard we’ve imposed on ourselves so obviously only they could be capable of doing this horrible thing. Whenever a scapegoat is offered up, the townspeople immediately form a faceless mob and start baying for blood. (A theme Fulci would briefly touch on again with CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD) Which leads to the entire subplot with Maciara, who, to get back to the TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD parallels, is our Tom Robinson figure. Maciara confesses to the murders but when her confession entails putting a “curse” on the initial victims in revenge for their defiling the grave of her stillborn child, the police realize that these are simply the ravings of a disturbed woman and let her go. What follows is without a doubt the stand out stretch of the film and one of the best scenes Fulci ever staged. Walking through Accendura’s sun-baked streets, Maciara is spat upon by old women and then later followed and corralled into a local cemetery by some of the men, where she’s beaten bloody all while pleasant music from a local radio plays over the scene. Shades of Tuco’s torture scene from THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY, perhaps? Maciara doesn’t die there, managing to drag herself to the local highway before expiring, passersby ignoring her or deciding that they don’t want to get involved. When the police arrive on the scene, the officer in charge pieces together fairly fast what happened and just by glancing at the gathered crowd, knows that the entire town had a part to play in the murder of an innocent women. You can’t arrest an entire town, though, and police can’t do anything but leave the one’s responsible to live with what they’ve done.

This, I think, represents another transition in Fulci’s horror films. While I haven’t seen them, discussions of PERVERSION STORY and LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN made them out to be very moralistic films, stories about how these people have done wrong and they’re getting their just desserts. This isn’t quite the case with DUCKLING. Yes, the killer is eventually unmasked and dies but look at the damage left in their wake: families destroyed, an innocent woman dead, and people with her blood on their hands. ZOMBIE, THE BEYOND, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, etc. all seem to be set in an uncaring universe, where, to quote UNFORGIVEN “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” We see the beginnings of that here, where it doesn’t matter if what age you are, what walk of life you’re from, how moral you are, if circumstances deem that you are screwed, then buddy there’s nothing you can about it.

Or to put it another way, “Forget it, Jake…it’s Accendura.”



This review was a part of DIRTY HEX APPEAL: A Vengeful Witch Round Table, presented by the CELLULOID ZEROES blogger group. First up is WEB OF THE BIG DAMN SPIDER and their take on ATOR, THE FIGHTING EAGLE, then hop over to MICRO-BREWED REVIEWS for MIDNIGHT OFFERINGS. Still not enough? Then swing by CINEMASOCHIST APOCALYPSE, who's cooking up some BLACK MAGIC or stop off at THE TERRIBLE CLAW REVIEWS for THE HAUNTED PALACE!

A Little Something Extra:
"Burn The Witch" by Queens of the Stone Age. Getting into the music of Brody Dalle also lead me to check out Josh Homme, her husband's music, which includes Kyuss, Eagles of Death Metal and this band right here. A mix of classic and stoner rock, Queens have joined Monster Magnet and White Zombie on that list of bands where the volume just can't go high enough...

An American Werewolf In London (1981)

Director: John Landis
Screenplay by: John Landis
Starring: David Naughton, Griffin Dunne, Jenny Agutter, John Woodvine, Brian Glover
Running Time: 97 minutes
Tagline: "From the director of ANIMAL HOUSE...a different kind of animal."

"Beware the moon, David."

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON came to Landis in a moment that sounds like it could have been the opening of a werewolf movie itself. It was 1969 and he was working as a production assistant on KELLY’S HEROES in Yugoslavia. While being driven to a shooting location in the countryside, Landis witnessed a burial being performed at a crossroads by a group of gypsies. The man being buried was done so feet first and had his body wreathed with garlic. When Landis inquired as to why he was being buried in this manner, his driver informed him that this was to prevent the man from rising from the dead. Wondering what would happen if the man didn’t stay in his grave was all that it took to send Landis on a writing jag, resulting in a script that was a contemporary update of THE WOLF MAN. Had things gone as planned, WEREWOLF would have been the follow up to SCHLOCK!, Landis’s 1971 debut feature. It was going to be his second collaboration with special effects and make-up man Rick Baker, who created SCHLOCK’s ape-suit and Landis, correctly, thought was just the guy to pull off this ambitious idea he had for how they would approach the werewolf’s transformation scene. Things had to be put on hold, however, due to studios not wanting to pony up the funds it would have cost and furthermore, not understanding how to sell a movie that was too horrific to be a comedy and yet too comedic to be a horror film. So, onto the back burner it went and there it remained for a nearly a decade, until the success of ANIMAL HOUSE and THE BLUES BROTHERS gave Landis the clout he needed to get the project off the ground. That Rick Baker had worked on this small, independent movie called STAR WARS in the interim probably didn’t hurt, either.

Two American college students, David Kessler (David Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne), are backpacking across north England when they come across the sleepy village of East Proctor on a stormy night. The place makes a rather ominous first impression; what could charitably be called the center of town is dominated by an Angel of Death statue and the local pub carries the rather uninviting name of The Slaughtered Lamb, its sign depicting a severed wolf's head impaled on a pike. ("Where's the lamb?") But the boys are cold, hungry, and could use a rest, so despite their misgivings, they head inside. Once there, they run into the expected throng of suspicious-of-strangers types you find populating sleepy English villages in this sort of movie, and when Jack inquires to the purpose of a five pointed star on the wall,"The sign of the wolf man" according to him, they're asked none politely to move on. Their departure sparks an argument among the bar patrons, with some saying that they've just committed murder by sending the boys out on this particular night before the village leader (Brian Glover) shuts them all down with the usual "outsiders shouldn't be stickin' their nose into our business" spiel.  Besides, they reason, the boys will be alright as long as they obey the cryptic warning to stay on the road, steer clear of the moors, right? Maybe nothing will happen...

Almost as if it that was its cue, something that sure as hell isn't a dog cuts loose with a very unpleasant sounding howl. The creature, a hulking beast that looks like a shaggy bear with canine features, chases the boys down, tackles Jack and rips him to pieces before David can come to help, and all that little act of bravery earns him is some teeth in his shoulder. The villagers, finally deciding they don't want the boys' blood on their hands, intervene and shoot the creature dead. Before David loses consciousness, he catches a glimpse of their attacker, which, strangely enough, is now a naked man.


David comes to in the hospital and discovers that weeks have passed. Jack's body has already been shipped back home and buried. Confusing David even further is when officials question him about the attack and he discovers that several witnesses blame it on an escaped lunatic. David's claims that his friend was killed by a monster are dismissed as the ravings of someone who's just been through a very traumatic event. That would be all she wrote, but David's having these dreams, you see: real vivid ones. Ones where monsters are killing his family or he's going through some form of transformation. Then there's the visit from his good buddy, the dearly departed Jack Goodman, Jack, who now looks like he's been thrown face first into a threshing machine, informs David that they were attacked by a werewolf. Seeing as David survived the werewolf's attack, the creature's curse has passed onto him and as long as the bloodline of the werewolf lives, Jack is condemned to walk the earth as a ghost, unable to pass on. As much as for wanting to save his friend from the cruel fate in store as he is wanting to be free from his own horrible unlife, Jack urges David to kill himself before the full moon rises.

If there's one bright spot for David in this whole mess, it's the Florence Nightingale-esque romance he's struck up with Alex (Jenny Agutter), the nurse who has been serving as his primary caregiver during his recovery. It's a testament to the actors and the filmmakers that they're able to sell us on this relationship despite it developing so fast, so we don't bat an eye, much, when he goes home with her once he's discharged. (And hey, it's Jenny Agutter.) The two sleep together that night but David's good mood doesn't last, because Jack makes a return appearance looking much worse for wear, and again warns him of what's coming. Up until now, David's been able to convince himself that everything; the monster, the dreams, Jack's ghost; was all in his head but he's beginning to question that. He won't have to wait long to get a definitive answer. The full moon is tomorrow night.

If you’re going to discuss AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF at any length, you’re almost required to discuss that other werewolf movie that opened in 1981 and also featured a totally boss transformation sequence, Joe Dante’s THE HOWLING. They’re practically joined at the hip at this point. I had even planned on reviewing both movies in one go for this blog entry, only to find my copy of THE HOWLING had deteriorated to the point of being unplayable. Despite the close proximity of their release dates, the two movies are pretty dramatically different. LONDON is a fairly traditional werewolf story by design, adhering close to the template established by THE WOLF MAN. We’ve got the male American outsider in a foreign country, the mysterious societal outliers for whom the patient-zero werewolf is their dirty little secret, transformations that come with the full moon, and our hero’s doomed love with a local girl. Only deviation from the norm here is that silver isn’t necessary to kill him (good ole buckshot will do just fine) and there’s no old lady with a thick accent to proclaim “the way you walked was thorny…” THE HOWLING, on the other hand, wants to put as much distance between it and Lon Chaney Jr. as it can; portraying werewolves as a secret society of competing factions and philosophies, tossing out any overt supernatural elements, and picking up the ball and running with the Freudian and sexual underpinnings of the werewolf archetype, all while skewering mental health fads and the news media culture in the process. (I saw someone describe THE HOWLING as the closest thing we'll get to a Brian DePalma werewolf movie and can only nod.)

Both were noted for their pitch-black humor, but THE HOWLING approached that through inside jokes and satirical touches, while AMERICAN WEREWOLF goes broader and more absurd, it's success laying in knowing exactly how to utilize that mixture of comedy and horror that so confused studios and later critics; when to contrast imagery and tone and when one needs to intrude on the other. Think of David's dream where he sees his family butchered by shrieking, monster headed Nazis while The Muppet Show plays in the background. The image is so over-the-top and bizarre that it's certainly amusing, like escapees from a creature feature crashed into some Family Ties-style sitcom, while at the same time...Holy Shit, right? Or the scenes late in the film where he sits in a theater with a particularly naff porno playing, surrounded by the bloody shades of his victims, all of whom are suggesting any number of methods he can use to kill himself in chipper tones of voice. It also helps that WEREWOLF knows when to pull back and let one aspect take over completely. The moments that are just straight comedy, like David having to escape from the zoo after waking up naked in the wolf's enclosure are legitimately hilarious. ("A naked American man stole my balloons!") Then, scenes that focus entirely on horror, such as the initial attack on David and Jack or a transformed David stalking his victims, still effectively generate a palpable amount of tension even after any number of repeat viewings. (I watch this flick at least once a year around this time, for obvious reasons.) The distance between terror and laughter isn't as far as many people think, and the best horror comedies like this or RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, know how to use one to underline the other. It doesn't hurt either that AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF may be the most quotable skinwalker flick, some of its best lines coming from the banter between David and Jack's ghost. ("Have you ever talked with a corpse? It's boring!" "I will not be threatened by a walking meatloaf!" "He is your good friend, whereas I am a victim of your carnivorous lunar activities!")

If there's one thing that both AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF and THE HOWLING have in common it's the major shifts they represented in the werewolf genre. The biggest one being that, after these two movies, just dissolving between shots of an actor with more hair glued to his face wasn't going to cut it for a transformation anymore. Special effects technology had finally reached a point where you could show the hair grow, claws sprout, the limbs and face distort, selling you on the idea that yeah, changing into a completely different species was horrifying and painful to watch. Horror fans will debate 'til kingdom come which movie had the better wolf-out scene but neither are anything to sneeze at. Coincidently enough, Rick Baker was attached to do the effects work for THE HOWLING but decided to jump to WEREWOLF due to his earlier commitment to Landis, handing Dante's movie off to his protégé, Rob Bottin. I'd say things worked out for both. THE HOWLING made Bottin's career and opened the door for projects like THE THING, ROBOCOP, and TOTAL RECALL and Baker received the first Academy Award for Make-Up Effects thanks to WEREWOLF. (Presented by Vincent Price!) Thirty odd years later, they still impress, WEREWOLF's even more so because it makes no effort hide it through dim lighting or excessive editing. Landis had complete confidence in Baker's skill and lets the audience linger on every detail.

Not only did these two films change the way in which the werewolf's transformation was depicted, but the werewolves themselves. Before then, the popular image of the werewolf in cinema was Larry Talbot stalking through a fog shrouded forest in the shadow of his family castle. I can't think of too many werewolf films before these that used a then modern urban setting as its backdrop; moving away from the moors so its creature can run down its prey in subway stations or the seedier side of Los Angeles and cause all manner of carnage at Piccadilly Circus. But more importantly, after 1981, filmmakers finally got it into their head that maybe it was high time that werewolves started looking like wolves, damn it. Now, werewolves weren't just some brute with fangs and a mighty need for a wax job but gigantic hellhounds and towering wolf-headed bipeds. Even designs which were meant to evoke the older form would incorporate aspects of these new ones, i.e. THE MONSTER SQUAD. 'Bout time.

There’s one more thing I’d like to discuss about AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF before I close out this post, something that stuck out at me when I re-watched it for this review. Now, we’re all familiar with the various spiels about what fears your classic monsters represent, right? The vampire is unrestrained sexuality, zombies are the inevitability of death and societal decay through conformity, etc. etc. Our good friend the wolf man? Loss of control. Giving in to your subconscious primal impulses. The Old Adam, as Stephen King calls it in his treatise on the horror genre, DANSE MACABRE, which is a phrase that I love and so badly want to use as a title for a horror story that I’ll probably never write. The beast beneath the skin is the go to supernatural archetype for stories about someone’s bad side coming out to play and has been used as such for everything from abusive relationships (an episode of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER) to young girls going through puberty. (GINGER SNAPS) What I find interesting though, is how rarely lycanthropy is used in fiction and film in connection with mental instability, especially when so many stories of it from history and folklore come across sounding a lot like a person suffering from that. Just ask Nebuchadnezzar. THE WOLF MAN touches on it a bit, but in the end, that’s simply Larry Talbot desperately trying to find a rational explanation for what is happening to him. THE WOLF MAN is too straightforward a movie for the connection between the two to take. THE HOWLING definitely plays around with it, what with its setting being a mental health care retreat that its beasties use as way to hide in plain sight while learning to keep their animal side under control. Werewolf rehab, if you will. But in the end, its focus remains primarily on the tried and true angle of werewolf as the monster from the id. (No, not that one.) Discussing this with some of my fellow movie buffs, the only movie that uses werewolves explicitly as a metaphor for mental illness we could name was one of the GINGER SNAPS sequels. In that, it’s basically a medical condition and if the main character doesn’t get the medicinal herbs she needs to keep it in line, she starts self-harming and doing other things that you often see in cases of people who need treatment for depression.

What does this have to do with AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF? Well, look at what David experiences through the whole movie. He suffers from nightmares and hallucinations so frequently he begins to wonder what is real and what isn’t. He struggles with suicidal impulses. When he transforms into his wolf form, he blacks out and has no memory of anything that he does. Alex and David’s doctor certainly don’t buy into any of this talk of werewolves but they certainly believe that David is in a state where he could be a harm to himself or others. And consider that what starts this is seeing a close friend get killed horribly before he himself is badly injured and put into a coma. I don’t know about you guys but I’ll be damned if this doesn’t read like some of the more extreme cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF does a fantastic job of making you experience its main character’s disassociation with reality, with only its repeated cuts to the perspective of other characters preventing it from being on par with say, MIRACLE MILE, in that regard. What’s surprising about this and a good indicator of how sometimes the end result can get away from a creator’s intentions is that I don’t think that was exactly what Landis and company were going for. The reoccurring instance of David waking up from dream after dream until you’re left unsure whether what he’s seeing is real or not, Landis admits, was something he lifted from a Bunuel film that achieved a similar effect through that motif. You also have to account for how much AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF draws from THE WOLF MAN, so of course, it would feature characters blaming what’s happening as the result of the protagonists fractured mind. Then there’s the fact that in interviews with Landis and Naughton, they show that while they did think of David’s condition in terms of a disease, it was a physical sickness, not mental, they approached it as, playing him as someone who refused to face that he has a terminal disease. So, as it turns out, the most effective “werewolf-as-mental-problem-stand-in” story may have been the result of an entirely coincidental combination of influences and shooting close to the mark, with what we understand about the werewolf represents filling in the blanks as necessary. 

This review was part of the Celluloid Zeroes ADULT ONSET LYCANTHROPY ROUNDTABLE. Want more? Head over to Checkpoint Telstar for Tim's review of THE BAT PEOPLE, or maybe stop by The Terrible Claw Reviews for Gavin's opinion on SSSSSSS. Still not enough? Cinemasochistic Apocalypse bites into the samurai werewolf flick (!!) KIBAKICHI, 3-Beer Theater is inflicted with THE CURSE OF THE BLACK WIDOW, The Tomb of Anubis takes on ROMASANTA, Las Peliculas de Terror deals with a were-cicada infestation with THE BEAST WITHIN, and Web of the Big Damn Spider goes back to SUMMER SCHOOL.