In Time

Andrew Niccol's In Time had to have been the easiest green light a movie has ever gotten. Imagine the pitch meeting: "I've got a high concept science fiction movie for you. It's in a future where aging has been cured, so everybody is sexy and young. Not a wrinkle or grey hair to be found! Hot young actors even play the old people!" "Stop right there. This is the easiest to market movie ever. You can start shooting next week." "Well, hold on, I might need a little time to polish the script--" "You. Can. Start. Shooting. Next. Week." "Off I go!"

I'm giving it a bit of a hard time. I actually had fun watching In Time, for all its flaws. Andrew Niccol wrote and directed Gattaca and wrote The Truman Show, which were two of my favorite science fiction films of the 1990's. Though he's never since reached the level of those first two movies, he's still quite good at high concepts and big ideas.

The idea behind In Time is that in a vague, distant future (no year is specified), genetic engineering has found a cure for aging. We are now programmed to stop aging on our 25th birthday, and then you get one year. That year isn't just the time you have left, though, it's also your currency. People buy and sell goods and services with their life. If for any reason, the ticker on your wrist runs out, you drop dead on the spot.

Niccol uses this conceit as a metaphor for the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Our hero is Will Salas, played by Justin Timberlake, who lives in the lower class district (Time Zone) of Dayton (get it? Date-on! HAHAHA). He lives quite literally day to day, and gets by working in a factory. While out drinking with his buddies, he comes across a guy with over 100 years left in his life, and saves him from the "Minute Men", who are kind of a time mafia? They steal people's time. The guy is from the land of the rich, where people can afford to live forever (New Greenwich, which is a ton more clever than Dayton). While hiding from the Minute Men, the guy tells Will all about how there's no reason everybody can't live forever, and the rich just keep raising taxes and the cost of living in order to control the population. Then, while Will is sleeping, he gives him the remainder of his life.

When Will wakes up, his first plan is to take his mom and head up to Greenwich, but when his mom dies on the way to meet him because bus prices just went up, it becomes... personal. He heads to Greenwich on his own, wins another millenium in a poker game, gets chased by Time Keepers (the time police, led by Cillian Murphy), falls in love with and kidnaps a rich man's daughter (Amanda Seyfried). Together they become Chronobonnie and Time Clyde, sort of Robin Hood figures who steal time from the rich and give to the poor.

The story is pretty fun. It lifts elements from a lot of different sources, which is OK if they are put to good use. I personally enjoy movies set in elaborate sci-fi worlds with their own sets of rules, so that aspect was fun for me. In Time's weakness is in the script itself. The dialogue is often pretty bad. Every bad play on words and pun involving time is used. The characters mostly feel pretty stock. They feel more like they're there to serve their purpose in the story than be real people. The class metaphor is forced on us pretty hard and often feels belabored and obvious.

The cast is actually pretty good. I actually like all the young-ish actors in it, and think they all could have done better if their characters had a little more depth. Andrew Niccol wisely put his best actors in the roles of older characters. Cillian Murphy and Vincent Kartheiser give the best performances. Kartheiser does a variation on his Mad Men character when playing Sylvia's father. He definitely sells the weight of old age better than I think Timberlake would have done (and Olivia Wilde, who I never bought as Timberlake's mom). There's one guy I want to point out, one of the Minute Men, who doesn't even have much of a speaking part, but decided it would be awesome if he wore a fedora slightly tilted. I have nothing to say about his performance, I just thought he looked ridiculous. He could be one of Timberlake's backup dancers.

Overall, In Time was a decent piece of cheesy entertainment. I'm not sure if it was worth a trip to the theater for, but we only paid matinee prices, so I can't complain. The fun of the movie is largely in the details of its well-realized world. I just wish they took a couple more passes on that screenplay to make the characters and dialogue a little more well-realized too.

Carnival of Souls

I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie quite like Carnival of Souls. At least, I've never seen a movie from this time period that feels like Carnival of Souls. Made independently by director Herk Harvey (his only feature), the movie feels nothing like your typical early 1960's horror fare. It forgoes traditional shocks and gimmickry many of the B-Movies of the time rely on. Instead, it tells a different kind of ghost story, mournful, elegiac, and all too human.

Carnival of Souls is the story of Mary, a young woman who, at the start of the movie, hurtles off a bridge in a car with her friends, an accident in a drag race. While the police are trawling the river for the car, she mysteriously comes ashore, dazed but seemingly unhurt. We learn that she is a professional organ player and is soon going to move to Utah to play at a church. On her way there, she drives by a creepy abandoned amusement park, and then out of nowhere, sees a ghoulish figure (played by Herk himself).

Mary moves into a boarding house and begins her job, but still something feels off about her. She is cold and distant, and has no interest whatsoever in associating with other people. This is much to the only other boarder's chagrin, because let me tell you, he is interested. Over the course of the movie, things escalate. Mary continues to see the ghoul. At times, she herself seems to fade out of existence, all sound drains from the world and nobody hears or reacts to her. She is still drawn by the memory of the old amusement park.

I think what most struck me about Carnival of Souls was the truly independent feel of the whole thing. Most movies in the late 50's and early 60's were brimming with glamor and artifice. Everybody was beautiful and wore only the most fashionable of clothing, all the locations were phony and perfect looking. Besides the actress who played Mary, who was making a real go at the acting thing, the cast is made up of amateur local actors. The acting for the most part isn't top notch, but there's something that just feels real about these people. They look normal. They dress in clothes that normal people wore in 1961. The locations aren't sets and sound stages, they're real locations. You get to see what a department store in Salt Lake City must have really looked like 50 years ago. That kind of stuff fascinates me.

In some ways, Carnival of Souls feels a few years ahead of its time. It feels much closer to a movie from the late 60's or the 70's even, than it does to its early 60's brethren. The dialogue is more natural and less stylized. The camerawork, editing and sound design have a bit of an experimental vibe to it. There's a beautiful and mesmerizing sequence where Mary is playing the church organ in a very sensual manner while the ghosts and ghouls in the amusement park waltz.

It's too bad Carnival of Souls failed to perform in its initial release. I'm not sure if this was just a one-off for him, or if Herk Harvey had aspirations of making more films. I wonder what else he would have done, if he had been given the opportunity.

House on Haunted Hill (1959)

I would stay the night at a haunted house for $10,000.  The trick is this: Stay in one place for the whole night, and never separate from the group.  Why doesn't anybody ever do this?  Come on, losers!

House on Haunted Hill is a fun little chiller brought to us by the great P.T. Barnum of B-Movies, William Castle.  He added another layer of fun to his movies with his love of twists, gimmicks, and trickery.  Even though these gimmicks were primarily to put butts in seats, there was a real sense of showmanship behind them too. 

The characters in this movie are a lot like the audience of a William Castle movie.  They have been issued a challenge by a millionaire to stay the night in a haunted house.  If they stay all night, they get $10,000, no ifs, ands or buts.    The millionaire is played by Vincent Price, a man who is on his 5th unhappy marriage.  The other four wives have met unfortunate ends. 

One of the guys staying in the house is played by the jittery dude from Stanley Kubrick's The Killing.  He's a bit of a drunk, but he knows the history of the house, and he explains to the others (and the audience) that there have been a lot of grisly goings on in there.  Bodies found with missing heads, a giant pit full of acid in the basement.  A question to all you homeowners: If you buy a house with a giant acid pit already installed in the dungeon, do you keep it?  Does that increase the property value? 

So the group gets locked in, and there are some ghost sightings, but to me they don't look like ghosts, they just look like an old lady on wheels.  But still, severed heads appear and disappear.  One particular lady appears to be seeing all these things.  Then somebody turns up dead, hanging from a rope.  Also, I don't know how far ahead Vincent Price planned for this, but he has a bunch of adorable little coffin shaped boxes containing a handgun for each of his guests, just in case.

Anyway, the plot makes little sense, and once the twists start adding up, one after the other, the house of haunted cards comes tumbling down with even a little bit of questioning.  Who is betraying who?  Is the house really haunted or not?  How long did they have that planned?  Not important.  What matters to Castle is that the shocks keep coming.  He surely knew if he kept surprising the audience, the logic of the surprises wouldn't really matter in the long run.

I've read that House on Haunted Hill played in theaters specially rigged to release skeletons upon the audience at certain times in the movie that might call for skeletons.  See?  That sounds like fun, doesn't it?  That's what William Castle's movies were all about.  Fun.  And as ridiculous and hilariously convoluted as House on Haunted Hill was, it was still a lot of fun.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

We all find the subject matter of kooky religious cults to be fascinating, don't we? I mean, as far as I can tell, that's pretty universal. The non-religious among us get to point at them and go, "SEE?" and the religious among us get to go, "at least that's not us, right guys?" Martha Marcy May Marlene is a tense, unsettling, and engrossing look at what it's like to be in such a fringe religion, and the psychological damage they can cause.

Martha Marcy May Marlene stars Melizabeth Molsen in the title role (just Martha, really), as a girl who, after two years of living on a farm with a tiny sect, sneaks away and finds refuge with her older sister and her husband. Unfortunately, though she could elude their physical grasp, it is much more difficult to escape the hold these people have on her psyche. She has become seriously warped by years of psychological battering.

The narrative unfolds in two timelines, with flashbacks covering her time with the cult alternating with the present scenes of Martha desperately struggling to adjust to her freedom. She's distant and uncommunicative with her sister (played by the always welcome Sarah Paulson). As far as the sister knows, she was off with a boy for two years and now she's back. Of course, as Martha's behavior gets more and more bizarre and downright scary, the sister figures out it goes much deeper than that.

In the flashbacks, we see Martha's initiation into the cult through her own eyes. Upon her first meeting with Patrick, the charismatic leader of this commune, played by a scary great John Hawkes, Martha loses her name and is rechristened Marcy May. Of course, that's the first step, taking away the identity. Over the course of the flashbacks, we see her shattered much further, until eventually, she is actively aiding in indoctrinating the newbies.

The acting is all around great, but this is Elizabeth Olsen's movie all the way. Your heart breaks after first witnessing the outcome of the poor decisionmaking of a wayward youth, and then seeing first hand the events that caused all that damage. She has some pretty tough scenes in the movie.

John Hawkes is also pretty amazing as Patrick. At first glance, he seems benevolent enough, though it quickly becomes clear that there's a sinister undercurrent to everything he's saying. He demonstrates in his performance that ability a cult leader has to get under a person's skin, pick away at their vulnerabilities, and bend them to his will. From the things he makes these people do, especially the women, you can tell that he gets off on the power. In the very first scene, we see that the men get to eat first, while the women wait in the next room until it's their turn to have a crack at what's left.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is written and directed by Sean Durkin. I believe it's his first film. I really liked a lot of the dialogue, I think he really nailed that brainwashed culty way of speaking. A great example is the speech Patrick gives when he teaches Marcy May to shoot a gun, before then trying to talk her into shooting a living thing. There's a single line of dialogue in the movie that creeped me out to the extreme. It implies something extremely disturbing, and then it is never elaborated upon, wisely leaving it to the audience's imaginations. I won't spoil the line, I'll let the reader see if they can figure out which one I'm referring to.

Visually, Durkin plays a lot with contrasting Martha's two homes. The farmhouse she lives in, though seemingly homey and welcoming, is crowded and claustrophobic. She sleeps in a cramped room with the rest of the girls, practically in a pile. Everything is shared, she has no possessions of her own. She's trapped in by the forest surrounding the farm. Conversely, her sister's summer home is large and open. The walls are white and pristine, and there are huge windows everywhere. She's not walled in by a forest, instead, there's a lake out front. But for some reason, the summer home never feels welcoming either. It's a rental, so none of the furniture is theirs. It feels too clean, almost alien. Adding to the discomfort is the fact that her sister's husband is openly resistant to even letting her stay, because he doesn't understand her and she's really ruining his vacation.

One going to see this movie should be warned of a couple things: 1: Not a first date movie. Some pretty disturbing sex scenes are within. And 2: Don't expect a clean resolution, or very much closure, even. This isn't that type of movie. You never know at the end of the movie if she is really free from Patrick's clutches or not. It's wide open for discussion. I know people who find movies like this infuriating, so if you think you are one of those people, this movie is probably not for you. Even I was shocked by how abrupt the ending was.

Martha Marcy May Marlene was, for me, a scarier movie than all of the horror movies I've watched in the last month. Knowing that similar things to this go on in the real world makes ghost movies feel utterly ridiculous by comparison.

The Sentinel

Whew. I think I got in over my head with this one. But more on that later.

This was a horror movie from 1977, notable for featuring young Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum in small parts. It stars Woody Allen as Alvy Singer, and follows the various pitfalls in his relationship with Diane Keaton... oh wait, that's Annie Hall. What, were Goldblum and Walken a package deal in 1977? Oh, man, they should have been a comedy team, that would have been amazing. Sorry, that was stupid.

Starting over, The Sentinel was a horror movie from 1977 by director Michael Winner, the guy who made the Death Wish movies. It's one of those Catholic horror movies that were so popular in the 1970's after the success of Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist.

It's about a model named Alison (Cristina Raines) who moves into a new apartment because she wants to live on her own for a while before hooking up with her boyfriend Michael (Chris Sarandon). The place is beautiful, and the real estate agent seems suspiciously eager to rent it to her, dropping the price like crazy. Not long after moving there, Alison starts feeling weird, having flashbacks to her youthful suicide attempt (she walked in on her dad having an orgy). She has all sorts of weird neighbors that creep her out, including an old blind priest upstairs and an old man with a bird on his shoulder and a cat that he makes cakes for, not unlike Danny McBride in Pineapple Express (ok, pretty unlike that). When she mentions them, she is told that the only other tenant is the priest. So, her boyfriend sees something wrong and he sets out to get to the bottom of all this.

Turns out that the building is the gateway to hell and all these weird people that only Alison can see are damned. Also, Michael has a secret of his own, and also also, the church has plans of their own for Alison.

I've got to say, The Sentinel was pretty watchable. My favorite stuff was the more subtle horror, but it goes all out around halfway in. There's a pretty freaky sequence in the middle where Alison is attacked by her dead orgy dad.

I didn't like Cristina Raines' acting at first, but I have to say she grew on me over the course of the movie. Chris Sarandon holds a place in my heart as Jerry the Vampire in the original Fright Night, so I'm happy to see him in stuff. For much of the movie, I thought it was a good guy role, but ultimately, I guess his character was more in line with what you would expect Chris Sarandon to play. I should have known better, he even had a mustache. There are other name actors in the movie, including Burgess Meredith, Eli Wallach, and Beverly D'Angelo, and that old vaudeville duo, Goldblum and Walken, who, joking aside, actually share no screentime with each other.

The ending was way too much for me and kind of soured the entire experience. See, Michael Winner decided that when the gates of hell bust open and its denizens come out to take Alison away, they should be twisted and disfigured. So he hired a bunch of actually twisted and disfigured people to play the parts. I couldn't look, it was too heartbreaking and made me feel guilty and gross. So I basically sat with my head down for the last 10 minutes trying to work out what was going on just by listening.

I probably just shouldn't have watched the movie. I knew going into it about that stuff, I just thought maybe I could handle it. Anyway, as far as horror goes, the movie is pretty effective, and the story is interesting. I just could have really done without the exploitative stuff at the end. I guess, watch The Sentinel if you think you can handle it, but if you're sensitive to that kind of thing like I am, you should probably skip it and watch the Exorcist again, because it was a much better movie, anyway.

The Old Dark House

I'm back, everybody! Sorry I haven't been updating as frequently lately. I plan on having a whole bunch done over the weekend. I hope nobody is getting tired of my Universal horror movie reviews, because I have another one here.

After seeing Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, and Bride of Frankenstein, I became very interested in director James Whale. In research mode, I looked to see if he did any other horror movies in his career. Turns out he did another one in between, and it's really not much like the other three. I mean that in a complimentary way, of course. Not only does it demonstrate his versatility as a storyteller and director, it's also a cracking good time.

The movie I'm referring to is The Old Dark House, made in between Frankenstein and The Invisible Man, and starring several of the same actors, including the great Boris Karloff. James Whale's moody, expressionistic horror style is still in full effect, but is tempered by a good deal of comedy. I wouldn't say the movie is a straight up comedy, per se, but it's one of those movies where a group of funny characters are put in the middle of a very serious situation. The balance is struck quite well.

The story follows a married couple, the Wavertons, and their wisecracking friend, as they get caught driving in the middle of a torrential rainstorm. After nearly getting buried in a mudslide, they're forced to stop for the night at the only house around. Now you might be asking is the house old? Is the house dark?

Highlight below for SPOILERS:

It IS.

The house belongs to the Femms, an old brother and sister. The brother is old and suspicious, the sister is super religious, deaf, and mean. And old. They have a scary giant drunken mute named Morgan (Karloff) in their employ, as their butler. They also have some secrets in the house. The cranky sister especially doesn't want the Wavertons and their bro to stay, but are persuaded to let them. The Wavertons do their best to be charming and polite but still seem unwelcome, so if that isn't enough, another stranded couple find their way to the house and, being a care free widowed nobleman and his showgirl companion, completely impose themselves upon the Femms. Once all the players are in place, a sometimes comedic, sometimes menacing narrative unfolds as the skeletons in the Femm family closet are set free upon our group of travelers.

The characters are all around great. The cast is such a fun and versatile array of character types, and they have great chemistry with each other. The movie has kind of an episodic feel to it where the cast splits up and we get to see how they each interact with different characters. Karloff gets the short end of the straw this time, though. Not that he isn't great, just that he is still stuck playing a hulking, non-communicative monster. What a role to get typecast as! The movie actually opens with a card assuring the audience that this is, indeed, the same Karloff that played Frankenstein. He's just that versatile, everyone. This time, he has a beard!

I especially liked Melvyn Douglas as the Waverton's easygoing friend character. He starts off the movie seemingly as a sidekick and ends up sort of being the hero and the romantic lead. Charles Laughton is both likeable and sympathetic as the widower who wants the world to think he's a hard partying socialite, but is inwardly sad and lonely. Gloria Stuart is quite good as Margaret Waverton, too. One of the best moments involves her playing with her shadow on a wall. Also, hey, she was pretty hot. What? She's the old lady from Titanic? Shut up, that's weird to think of. I'm leaving people out, but everyone is good, really. There is one more player that I'm not mentioning because I don't want to spoil it, but let's just say the Femm siblings aren't the only family members in the Old Dark House. Wait until you meet this guy, even by today's standards, he's a pretty freaky character.

I liked that there was nothing supernatural in the movie, just a messed up family in a house in the middle of nowhere. I know there are more movies that are like this, but they seem to be pretty rare nowadays. I also like a lot of the stylistic choices James Whale made. I think I mentioned in my Bride of Frankenstein review that I thought the comedic stuff was weird or something. Well, I take that back now, he handles it wonderfully. Also, the ending is quite intense and pretty brutal. Not, like, gory, or anything, but it's easy to forget that before the Hayes code got in the way, old movies could have some surprisingly jarring material in them.

I'm glad that seeing the other Universal movies led the way to this one. I know this could be sacrilege, but I might even have liked The Old Dark House better than the monster movies. I mean, I understand why the monster movies are great and impactful and iconic, but the juxtaposition of comedy and horror, as well as the strong characterization and ensemble feel of the cast really spoke to me. I think I need to dig even deeper sometime and see what some of James Whale's non-horror pictures are like. Just not the Showboat movie because I saw the play in 8th grade and haaaaated it.

The Wolf Man (1941)

Here we are, edging our way towards Halloween, and here I am with another classic horror film to review. Over the last year, I've been catching up on the classic Universal monster movies. It seems to me that they are required watching that I've somehow managed to miss out on all this time. Now that I've seen the first three Frankenstein movies (2)(3), The Invisible Man, and Creature from the Black Lagoon, I finally feel like I'm getting somewhere. I've been meaning to get to The Wolf Man for a while.

The Wolf Man, directed by George Waggner, stars Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot, a man who is returning home to his family estate in Universal's Old-Timey Village Set, after the death of his older brother. While there, he meets Gwen, a local who works at the antiques shop across the way. In the shop he finds and purchases an interesting old cane with a silver wolf's head for a handle, and in so doing learns of the town's rich mythology around lycanthropy.

Through persistence and creepiness (always works in old movies), Larry also manages to land a date. A band of gypsies are in town so he takes her and one of her friends to see a fortune teller (Bela Lugosi). The seer reads Gwen's friend's palm, seeing a pentagram on it, meaning she is the next victim of the werewolf. He freaks and tells her to go while she still can and takes off himself. Moments later, she is indeed attacked by a wolf. Talbot attempts to rescue her, beating the wolf to death with his cane, and gets bitten in the process.

The next morning, Talbot wakes up to find the bite healed completely. The police are also visiting. They're investigating the murder of the fortune teller, who they found beaten to death with Larry's cane. By this point, Talbot has put two and two together, whether he wants to admit it or not: The wolf that bit him was the fortune teller, and it is only a matter of time before he, too, will become a monster.

I was quite surprised how completely character-driven The Wolf Man was. The Wolf Man himself only has five minutes of screen time, tops. The movie is more about Larry Talbot dealing with the dread and inevitability of becoming a monster. Lon Chaney Jr. is really great at this. He has extremely expressive eyes. Even when he is outwardly denying that something is wrong, you can read on his face that he knows the truth.

I don't really understand why he never becomes a full wolf, even though Bela Lugosi did. Instead he becomes the hairy dog man we all know and love today. I suppose you could rationalize it by saying he's still early in his transitioning and that were he to make it further along in his transformation he will eventually become a full wolf. The truth is surely that Universal simply wanted Chaney to play the monster, not just hand those duties off to a trained dog.

The make-up effects and transformation were groundbreaking for their time, though they were still early days for these things. As I said above, the Wolf Man has very little screen time. It must have taken forever to transform him. The first time it happens we only see his legs change. We don't get the famous series-of-dissolves on Chaney's face until the very end.

The direction by George Waggner is decent, though I thought James Whale's work in the Frankenstein, Bride, and Invisible Man was far better. Still, Waggner got some great performances out of his cast, and obviously, he helped Chaney to create a truly iconic monster, who would have been nothing if the man behind him weren't so well fleshed out.

Another thing that struck me that I'm guessing people nowadays don't really consider is that the Universal movies weren't just done one after another. I think we tend to sort of clump them all together that way when we think of them. You just associate Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon as one big group. The fact is, these movies were all made over the course of several decades. I honestly don't know why that's important. I just found it interesting, I guess.

The Wolfman, while not my favorite of the Universal monster movies, was still 100% worth seeing. Lon Chaney Jr. steals the whole show, though, surprisingly, it was his performance as the man that carries the movie, adding more weight and underlying humanity to the tragic circumstances he must endure as the wolf.