Crimson Peak: written by Matthew Robins and Guillermo del Toro; directed by Guillermo del Toro; starring Mia Wasikowska (Edith Cushing), Jessica Chastain (Lucille Sharpe), Tom Hiddleston (Thomas Sharpe), Charlie Hunnam (Dr. McMichael), and Jim Beaver (Carter Cushing) (2015): Guillermo del Toro delivers a love letter to Edgar Allan Poe, Gothics, haunted houses, ghost stories, and the 1950's and 1960's horror movies of Hammer Studios and Roger Corman. Oh, and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Rebecca. "The Turn of the Screw." "The Beckoning Fair One." And a whole lot of others. Also, a guest appearance by Buffalo, New York.
The production and costume design are extraordinary, colour-super-saturated in the manner of many of Corman's Poe adaptations while also supplying the requisite amount of decay and disintegration. Mia Wasikowska is solid as the late-19th-century American woman who chooses the wrong English guy, Tom Hiddleston conjures up some Vincent-Price-like morbid empathy as he plays that wrong guy, and Jessica Chastain is sinister and loopy as the wrong guy's sister.
There are even elements of steam punk in Hiddleston's clay-digging machine, and a tribute to Sherlock Holmes (and creator Arthur Conan Doyle, fully name-checked in the narrative) in the person of Charlie Hunnam's opthamologist/ghost-hunter/amateur detective.
There's nothing subtle about the movie -- it wears its metaphors on its brightly coloured sleeves. All this, and the ghosts -- as in the del Toro-produced Mama -- are stunningly creepy, a triumph of visual effects and the imagination of del Toro and his designers. This movie isn't for everybody. The build is just a tad slow in the first half, while in the second half del Toro pulls away from the cataclysmic finale antecedents such as "The Fall of the House of Usher" have primed us to expect. Highly recommended.
The Innocents: adapted from the Henry James novella "The Turn of the Screw" by John Mortimer, William Archibald, and Truman Capote; directed by Jack Clayton; starring Deborah Kerr (Miss Giddens), Megs Jenkins (Mrs. Grose), Martin Stephens (Miles), Pamela Franklin (Flora), Peter Wyngarde (Quint) and Clytie Jessop (Miss Jessel) (1961): Director Jack Clayton's adaptation of "The Turn of the Screw" is also an adaptation of a stage play based on "The Turn of the Screw." The play supplies many of our governess-protagonist's speeches, which Deborah Kerr pretty much nails -- though I'd always pictured Miss Giddens as being much younger than Kerr was at the time of her performance.
The set-up is simple and direct. A governess is hired to take care of the two orphaned charges of their uncle. They reside at a country estate. Miss Jessel, their previous governess, died under mysterious circumstances, as did the estate's head groundskeeper Mr. Quint. But the longer the governess stays at the estate, the more disturbing the circumstances become. The children begin to behave strangely once older brother Miles returns, expelled from boarding school for unnamed acts. The governess starts to see strange figures and hear strange noises. But the cook doesn't see or hear any of these things. The Uncle in London doesn't want to be bothered with anything to do with the children. The governess is in charge of the household. What will she do?
The movie doesn't really answer the faulty either/or binary posited in much of the 150 years of literary discussion about "The Turn of the Screw." Are ghosts haunting the governess' two young charges or is everything in her head? The movie, like the text itself, evades the binary and instead works best with both possibilities existing simultaneously. They're not mutually exclusive.
The Innocents manages to create a genuinely creepy atmosphere through direction, cinematography, sound, and the occasionally unnerving performances by the two child actors. There are a couple of 'Gotcha!' moments that involve the sudden appearance of a specter, but for the most part the movie relies on a gradual accumulation of distressing details.
Two changes from the original text limit some of the film's possibilities. "The Turn of the Screw" was told as a narration inside a narration decades after the events of the story; the movie omits this construction. James' original forces the reader to consider the fact that the governess went on being a governess for decades after the events of the story while also parenthesizing the entire story inside the governess' own telling of it, recounted to another person decades later. The movie also tries to be a bit more overt in explaining why Miles got expelled from boarding school, limiting the more unnerving possibilities of what Miles is capable of -- and of what Quint and Jessel subjected he and Flora to.
The whole thing works very well, though it is occasionally a bit mannered. Both the supernatural and the psychological work within the movie to gradually build a sense of dread. The acting is fine throughout, from the salt-of-the-Earth cook to Kerr's increasingly freaked-out governess to the two preternaturally coy and manipulative children. Highly recommended.
Re-Animator: adapted from the H.P. Lovecraft novella "Herbert West, Re-Animator" by Dennis Paoli, William Norris, and Stuart Gordon; directed by Stuart Gordon; starring Jeffrey Combs (Herbert West), Bruce Abbott (Dan Cain), Barbara Crampton (Megan Halsey), David Gale (Dr. Carl Hill), and Robert Sampson (Dean Halsey) (1985): Richard Band's score channels Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho as Vertigo-riffing opening credits zip by. Then we get this weirdly faithfully unfaithful adaptation of a novella that H.P. Lovecraft essentially wrote on a dare and considered complete schlock uncharacteristic of all his other stories.
Schlock and grue and hyper-violence and nudity are all in writer-director Stuart Gordon's wheelhouse. Indeed, Re-Animator would help make his name and his studio's name as a creator of enjoyable, bloody, violent, witty, and low-budget horror movies. Gordon on less pulpy Lovecraft fare such as "Dagon" or "The Dreams in the Witch-House" -- not so good. Gordon on Re-Animator, From Beyond, or the Re-Animator sequels? Just fine.
I had forgotten the lamely acted romantic plot that weighs down parts of this movie. Really, I'd forgotten Bruce Abbott and Barbara Crampton, the ostensible leads of the movie, completely. Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West and David Gale as Dr. Carl Hill are the real stars, along with a whole lot of resurrected dead people, mobile body parts, and extremely angry resurrected cats. Gordon throws blood and guts around, but he does so with wit and a fair idea for what makes a horror movie gross and funny even as it occasionally verges on disturbing the viewer. I'll be damned if I completely understand part of the climax, though: sometimes a little exposition is a good idea.
Jeffrey Combs holds the screen whenever he's on it, which is never enough. He certainly captures the gonzo spirit of Lovecraft's obsessed Resurrection Man. And Gale is a hoot, never moreso than when he's menacing people while his head is separated from his body. The splatter effects are cheerfully bright, as is West's day-glo-green Resurrection Fluid: in reality, the liquid from inside a glowstick. Recommended.
The Pure in Heart: Simon Serrailler Crime Novel #2 by Susan Hill (2005): Realistic in its depiction of a police search for a kidnapped child, often melodramatic and overly determined in its depiction of everything else: welcome to the world of Susan Hill's Detective-Chief-Inspector Simon Serrailler and the relatively small English cathedral town in which he works. This is an improvement on the first Serrailler novel, which featured an improbable serial killer doing unprecedented things for a serial killer and virtually no Simon Serrailler. Of course, more Simon Serrailler in this novel means more space to notice what a drip he is. Hill has labelled these novels 'crime novels' rather than mysteries or procedurals. That's mainly because the novels don't focus exclusively on the solving of a crime, but rather the effects of horrific events on everyone pulled into that crime. So if you like mysteries and family melodrama but don't like closure, this series may be for you. Lightly recommended.
The Unborn: written and directed by David Goyer; starring Odette Yustman (Casey), Gary Oldman (Rabbi Sendak), Cam Gigandet (Mark), Meagan Good (Romy), Idris Elba (Wyndham), and Jane Alexander (Sofi Kozma) (2009): Poor Odette Yustman has to spend the first half of this movie as a scantily clad victim who shows an awful lot of camel-toe in one scene. The cheesecake doesn't do the movie any favours. Writer-director David Goyer has actually fashioned a pretty interesting horror movie that uses Jewish legends to good effect. It also throws several startlingly distorted monsters at the viewer.
Yustman does a good job with an occasionally thankless role. The movie would probably have benefited from not air-lifting Gary Oldman and Idris Elba in to play surprisingly small parts that might have been better served by character actors (the more rumpled and lived-in the character actor, the better). Still, this is a surprisingly good modern horror movie, especially from a major studio. It would actually be better if it were about a quarter-hour longer, so long as those fifteen minutes were spent on plot and character and scares and not more camel-toe. Lightly recommended.
The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library Volume 11: A Christmas for Shacktown (1951-52/Reprinted 2013): written and drawn by Carl Barks; edited by Gary Groth and J. Michael Catron; editorial material by R. Fiore, Donald Ault, Rich Kreiner, and others.
The Fantagraphics Carl Barks Library presents some of Donald Duck's most Marxian adventures in this volume of stories from 1951 and 1952. And by 'Marxian,' I mean Karl and not the Brothers.
Every story herein seems to be about the absurdities and inequities of capitalism. Writer-artist Carl Barks is such a fine and entertaining storyteller that no one at Walt Disney seems to have noticed the critique of Capitalism in pretty much every story. At point, it's a lot like Das Kapital with talking ducks.
This is another beautiful volume of reprints from Fantagraphics Books in the Carl Barks Disney Library. Barks' smooth, funny and often beautiful cartooning comes through on every page. The colour reproduction is sensible in its replication of the four-colour tones the comics were drawn for, the biographical and critical notes useful.
As to Capitalism and Ducks... well, in the course of this selection of 1-page, 10-page, and 32-page adventures starring Donald, Huey, Louie, Dewey, and Uncle Scrooge, money dominates. We see a quest for a rare (and real) stamp that takes our heroes to the lost city of gold, El Dorado, where an obsession with acquiring silver dominates: too much gold has made gold valueless and silver a prize beyond all measure.
We see Scrooge McDuck hire Donald to help him spend money fast enough to keep his money bins from exploding, leading to a week of wretched excess that ends with a bizarre and hilarious twist that reveals the all-devouring nature of Scrooge's wealth, a wealth he is increasingly the servant of.
We follow the odious Gladstone Gander, luckiest duck alive, as he falls into wealth after wealth after wealth while the hard-working Donald and nephews repeatedly find themselves screwed over.
I mean, it's astonishing. Maybe the critics in this volume dwell too much on the Barksian critique of capitalism. But the accumulation of these stories reprinted here and in other Barks Disney Library volumes makes an overwhelming case for Barks' often horrified bemusement at the American pursuit of money and the falseness of such beliefs as 'Cheaters never prosper' or 'Hard work always results in financial reward' or 'Rich people are wise and benevolent job creators.' That last one sees its refutation in Scrooge McDuck, hoarder and skin-flint supreme, but also in an assortment of other rich people who are absent-minded buffoons or malevolent tyrants.
But because Carl Barks is dealing with funny stories about talking ducks and other anthropomorphized animals, he can throw a blistering social critique like "A Christmas in Shacktown" at his then-massive readership of millions of children without anyone in the adult world noticing. It's an astonishing, on-going act of subversive popular story-telling. And it's the immensely entertaining and beautifully drawn world of Carl Barks, master storyteller. With ducks. Highly recommended.
Uncle Sam: written by Steve Darnall and Alex Ross; illustrated by Alex Ross (1997): This blistering, satiric attack on the corruption of the American Dream is probably the least-popular work ever illustrated by beloved comic-book painter Alex Ross. That's too bad, because Ross and scripter Steve Darnall deliver a beautifully and sometimes disturbingly illustrated graphic novel that jumps through the history of America as viewed by what appears to be a living avatar of Uncle Sam. But this Uncle Sam has been driven insane by his country's atrocities and contradictions. The ending peters out a bit, but the overall effect is quite remarkable -- a scathing satire and jeremiad done up in Ross' photo-realistic art. Recommended.
The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein (1984): The Ceremonies isn't the greatest horror novel ever written, but it may be the greatest horror novel ever written in which the stakes are the survival of the world. There were a lot of those apocalyptic and pre-apocalyptic horror novels in the late 1970's and 1980's, during the later nuclear-war-fear years. I'd probably give the edge to The Ceremonies over all of them, 1980's or otherwise, though Ramsey Campbell's The Hungry Moon and Midnight Sun would offer stiff competition.
T.E.D. Klein is a Top-Ten American horror-writing talent despite his meager output: this novel; the four novellas collected in Dark Gods (1985); the novella The Ceremonies is based on, "The Events at Poroth Farm" (1973); and maybe 200 pages of ephemera. Horror readers sit and wait, hoping that second novel announced in 1985 will some day see publication.
The Ceremonies looms large for a number of reasons. It's beautifully written. Its allusions, intertexts, and interpolations of what sometimes seems to be the entire history of horror fiction are fascinating, keenly observed, and essential to the unfolding of the plot. The plot itself is expertly machined, building slowly until the climax explodes in the last thirty pages or so. The characterization of players minor and major is deft and witty and occasionally heart-breaking. The novel follows certain tropes and conventions while exploding others along the way. It's structurally and stylistically complex in an unshowy manner -- its use of three distinct, linked narrative streams in three different voices and tenses, for one, has thematic significance that only dawns on the reader gradually as the novel and its voices accumulate in one's head to increasingly disturbing effect. And it's capable of both cosmic uneasiness and gross-out horror, the latter used sparingly but to great effect, especially in the climactic scenes.
To appreciate The Ceremonies fully, one should read at least some of the texts it interacts with. But if one doesn't do so, one of the main characters labours away on a graduate English thesis on horror fiction throughout the novel. Along the way, we get his thoughts on texts ranging from The Castle of Otranto to The Haunting of Hill House. Some of these texts are important to the novel as a whole. All of the observations are, at the very least, interesting. Some are even hilarious. Because one can certainly agree with the protagonist's view that The Castle of Otranto sucks, or that Dracula stops being interesting once the novel exits Transylvania.
The protagonist of the novel, Jeremy Freirs, takes lodging on a farm near the small New Jersey town of Gilead for the summer in order to finish his M.A. thesis. His landlords are Sarr and Deborah Poroth, members of a small Christian sect that settled in the area more than a hundred years earlier. The sect bears some resemblance to the Pennsylvania Dutch or the Amish, though the Poroths have a truck and indoor plumbing. But it's not the Poroths or their sect or even Jeremy that are the real problem.
The real problem is something that waited in the surrounding woods for 5000 years to be born again, something that spent centuries clinging to a tree branch in the distorted heart of a section of the forest initially called by the adjacent Native Americans "The Place of Burning." No one ever lived there or near there until settlers started to encroach in the 19th century. Then the thing's waiting ended, along with its life, and the Ceremonies began. And even in the 19th century, the forested heart of darkness sat only about 50 miles from New York City.
Something beyond all measure fell into or broke through or seeped up into our universe; the novel leaves the thing's means of entry a "mystery." But the novel also suggests that the thing somehow also broke through into human mythology, folklore, rituals, stories, and even folk dances. Fragments of the rituals needed to resurrect the being hide in all these things, waiting to be reassembled and used so that the thing can be reassembled and reborn. Even a Coney Island Ferris Wheel and a grumpy cat fit into the Ceremonies.
One of the keen pleasures of The Ceremonies is its combination of mystery and precision. We're taken through various rituals and preparations and signs and portents. Strange, tarot-like cards are read. Complex ceremonies that must be followed with an anal-retentive attention to detail are enacted. But the mysteries of what awaits, of what will be done to the world and how it will change, remain to the very end of the text. At no time does Klein feel the need to have the ultimate antagonist of the novel deliver an expositional speech.
And even the acolyte of the antagonist remains vague and refreshingly unglib to the very end. And this henchman, Rosie -- this short, fat, seemingly jolly old man -- is one of the novel's many terrific creations. He's awful. He's also pitiful, but only in terms of what he was before he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, nearly 100 years before the main action of the novel takes place. The third-person description of his thoughts doesn't give us the exterior charm of so many antagonists, from Hannibal Lecter all the way back to Milton's Satan. We see Rosie from inside, a manipulative and remorseless engine of death. Well, death for all humanity. If humanity were lucky. Which it probably won't be if Rosie gets his way. There are worse things than death.
The indispensable references for the novel are several late-19th and early-20th-century stories by the Welsh horror-writer/mystic Arthur Machen. The novel's title refers to three sets of ceremonies named but never fully explained in Machen's (mostly) first-person tour de force "The White People"; Machen's novella is also discussed by Jeremy in the novel itself. A short, cryptic Machen piece called "The Ceremony" also adds to one's appreciation of the novel, as do Machen's "The Novel of the Black Powder" and "The Great God Pan." These are all in the public domain, and worth reading regardless of whether or not you read The Ceremonies.
But you should read The Ceremonies. You really should. It's both its own evocative, poetic, ruthless piece of horror and a terrific act of play with what sometimes seems to be every major horror and Gothic work ever written, either explicitly or implicitly. The Ceremonies rewards close and careful reading. It rewards multiple readings. And it has a killer inversion of a horror trope that horror readers will probably associate most with Stephen King's The Shining, as creatures almost never associated with goodness nonetheless ride to the rescue by accident, driven by instinctual fury, even as Nature itself comes under existential assault. Highly recommended.
The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library Volume 5: Christmas on Bear Mountain (1947/Reprinted 2013): written and drawn by Carl Barks; edited by Gary Groth and J. Michael Catron; editorial material by R. Fiore, Donald Ault, Rich Kreiner, and others.
The Fantagraphics Carl Barks Library really is a joy. Its main content, the Disney comics written and drawn by Carl Barks from the 1940's to the 1960's, are masterpieces of all-ages comics storytelling. The editions themselves are marvelously produced, with crisp artwork and sensible, period-faithful colouring. Carl Barks was (and is) one of the giants of popular American comic books, and indeed American popular culture.
Thankfully, this series doesn't bowdlerize some of the rougher edges of Donald Duck and company's adventures. Here, all the stories are from 1947. Some of the racial caricatures are embarrassing, none moreso than what appear to be cannibalistic Australian bushmen. There are some pretty awful caricatures of lazy Hispanics as well. Ay caramba!
Nonetheless, the storytelling is tight and beautifully paced, the artwork delightful, and the characterization of Donald Duck and nephews Huey, Louie, and Dewey an increasingly nuanced production. The four have not quite become the seasoned adventurers they would be in the book-length (30 pp) adventures of the 1950's, but they're getting there.
And while the eponymous long story plays things entirely for laughs (and introduces Uncle Scrooge to the Disneyverse), the last of the long-form stories reprinted here, "The Ghost of the Grotto," foreshadows the adventure stories that would come, in which comedy serves the thrilling and the perilous. At one point, the Disney comics that introduced and then reprinted these stories were far and away the best-selling comic books in the United States and Canada. Carl Barks almost certainly had as much of a formative influence on film-makers that include George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as any other artist -- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom even cribs a number of sequences from Carl Barks.
More important than influence, though, is effect. These are great, accessible, funny, beautifully written and drawn comics. They actually make one care about perennially sputtering Donald and his originally obnoxious nephews, giving them moments of heroism and regret that they never got in animated cartoons. Highly recommended.
The Jackal Man: A Wesley Peterson Mystery by Kate Ellis (2011): Breezy, enjoyable mystery throws archaeology into the mixture, which apparently happens in every Wesley Peterson mystery from Kate Ellis. Detective-Inspector Wesley Peterson works in South Devon, thus putting a small-town, English spin on the crime-solving.
In this novel, Egyptian mythology and funerary practices come into play as a murderer puts on the jackal head of Anubis, the Egyptian God of the Dead, and starts murdering young women. While Peterson and the rest of the police investigate the crime, Peterson's archaeologist pal Neil Watson stumbles across a series of murders in 1903 that resemble the current killings. It all seems to tie into the formidable collection of Egyptian antiquities at nearby Varley Castle.
Ellis does a nice job of characterization when it comes to characters minor and major. The mystery is pleasingly convoluted without seeming too contrived. She's not the world's most interesting prose stylist, but she gets the job done. The Egyptian mythology and cultural practices make for some moments of body horror, sensitively handled. The gross-out factor is minimal, and the violence far from graphic.
Plot-wise, the only major flaw comes when Ellis goes to the stereotypical threat to the loved ones of a detective. I realize that a detective story isn't a paean to realism, but the contrivance of this event -- something that almost never happens in reality -- has come to be a real turn-off for me. It's a too-artificial source of suspense, especially in a novel that already has threats and mysteries enough to keep the reader entertained and involved right to the final solution. Still, this is a solid diversion. Recommended.
Planes, Trains & Automobiles: written and directed by John Hughes; starring Steve Martin (Neal Page) and John Candy (Del Griffith) (1987): Having only seen stretches of the broadcast-TV version of this movie for years (actually, decades), I'd forgotten how much swearing there is in the movie, especially in a great scene between Steve Martin's anal-retentive marketing guy and a car rental agent played by the indispensable Edie McClurg. And despite the heavy dose of schmaltz the movie dumps on us at the end, this remains a great comedy. Getting home for Thanksgiving has never been such a harrowing, comic enterprise.
Planes, Trains & Automobiles certainly is not subtle, and for someone whose films tended to trumpet the virtues of the working class over those of the upper middle-class, John Hughes does have a thing for using poor rural people as comic grotesques. But they're funny grotesques. John Candy is magnificent as the slob-Falstaffian shower-ring salesman Del Griffith, while Steve Martin makes a perfect foil who also gets some moments of comic rage that recall Daffy or Donald Duck as much as they suggest any human antecedents. Hughes movies were never entirely realistic, which is actually one of their charms -- they're comic fables when they're at their best, ones in which driving around in an immolated rental car singing along to the radio makes perfect sense. Highly recommended.
Virus: adapted from the Dark Horse comic-book series created by Chuck Pfarrer by Chuck Pfarrer and Dennis Feldman; directed by John Bruno; starring Jamie Lee Curtis (Kit Foster), William Baldwin (Steve Baker), Donald Sutherland (Captain Everton), Joanna Pacula (Nadia), Cliff Curtis (Hiko), Sherman Augustus (Richie), and Marshall Bell (Woods) (1999): On the bright side, this first directorial effort from visual effects maestro didn't destroy John Bruno's career... as a visual effects maestro.
The problems with the movie aren't his fault, however -- comic-book adaptation or not, Virus is an insanely derivative piece of work. It is, however, relatively competent in its direction. It's also produced by Gale Ann Hurd, and derivative of many of the other films she produced.
The crew of a salvage ship caught in a hurricane comes across an abandoned Russian science ship. Or is it abandoned? After all, there's blood and destruction everywhere. But kooky Captain Donald Sutherland -- who appears to be acting in another, funnier movie -- wants the giant vessel for the $30 million salvage fee it will bring from the Russians if they want it back. However, there's SOMETHING ON THE SHIP.
Virus might be at least a slightly better movie if the prologue were moved into the centre of the film as a flashback. It's as if Aliens (another Hurd-produced film, and one Virus cribs from shamelessly) showed us what happened to the colonists in the first five minutes of the movie. It's a dumb storytelling decision that suggests that the studio may have thought a prologue-less Virus was too hard for an audience to follow. Given what a colossal bomb Virus turned out to be ($15 million domestic gross on a 'Where did they spend it?' budget of $75 million), maybe they'd like to travel back in time and fix some of the movie's narrative decisions.
Other than trite dialogue and some dodgy visual effects (most of the storm shots of the Russian vessel in the hurricane clearly involve either miniatures or terrible CGI work), Virus also gives the viewer a mostly underwhelming nemesis. Or nemeses. Sometimes the crew has to fight evil versions of the cute robot from Short Circuit, sometimes they have to fight mechanical spiders from about a dozen SF films and TV shows, and sometimes Donald Sutherland gets assimilated by the Borg... and the Borg are nice enough to leave his captain's hat on him. That at least is some funny stuff, and surely a great leap forward in human-cyborg relations.
The actors do what they can with what they've got. Well, except for the aforementioned Sutherland, who clearly said 'To Hell with a naturalistic performance!' on Day One of shooting. He's sort of a hoot, as is Marshall Bell chewing the scenery as an untrustworthy helmsman. William Baldwin and the rest of the male cast members have almost nothing interesting to say.
The Sigourney Weaver 'action woman' part gets split between Joanna Pacula and Jamie Lee Curtis in an almost schematically on/off way -- which is to say, when one is kicking ass, the other is cowering in a corner, and vice versa. Curtis really hated this movie. It's not hard to see why. It's vaguely watchable, and some scenes in the robot abattoir have a sort of cyberpunk-meets-Grand-Guignol thing going on. But it's also relentlessly derivative when it's not just being dumb. Not recommended.
Westworld: written and directed by Michael Crichton; starring Yul Brynner (Robot Gunslinger), Richard Benjamin (Peter Martin), James Brolin (John Blane), Dick Van Patten (Banker), and Majel Barrett (Miss Carrie) (1973): Before Michael Crichton gave us a murderously malfunctioning dinosaur them park in Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton gave us a murderously malfunctioning robot theme park in Westworld.
Yes, this is the Delos Corporation's adult theme park of the near-future in a desert area of the American Southwest. It's divided into three independent sections that intentionally remind one of similar divisions in Disney theme parks: West(ern)world. Medievalworld, and Romanworld. Except for the guests, everyone you meet in a park is a robot.
The fact that you can bang the human-form robots of these three worlds is clearly part of the appeal of these expensive vacations for adults. You can also shoot them, stab them, punch them, and insult them with impunity. They're just robots, albeit incredibly sophisticated sex-doll robots. Nothing can go wrong. Or is that worng?
James Brolin as a beefy American blowhard and Richard Benjamin as his sheepish, emasculated, divorced pal play our two protagonists. Or maybe increasingly cranky robotic gunslinger Yul Brynner is the protagonist. It really depends on where your sympathies lie. The film-makers dress Brynner like his heroic gunslinger in The Magnificent Seven. But in Westworld, he's something of a dink even before his programming goes astray. Then Brynner becomes the unstoppable forerunner of the Terminator, complete with the occasional bit of pounding background music as he pursues his prey through the three worlds and down into the warren of maintenance tunnels and work rooms and labs below the Delos parks.
The movie works pretty well as a recurringly dumb bit of SciFi action with just a tinge of obvious satire. Unable to solve two narrative problems with anything involving cleverness, Crichton just stupids his way through. How do you tell robots from humans? Um, Delos couldn't get the hands quite right. On robots that are indistinguishable otherwise from human and which you can boink away to your heart's content, it's the hands that are the design flaw.
Secondly, how can the bullets be real? Oh, all guns have a sensor that shuts down the gun if it's pointed at a human being. That wouldn't seem to help if one got clipped by a ricochet or a bullet coming from a few hundred yards away, something that seems pretty likely given the giant shoot-outs we hear in the background throughout the first half of the movie. Maybe they're magic bullets.
These are the dumb solutions to problems created by Crichton himself. Surely one could put a small tattoo or mark somewhere prominent and always visible on a robot to distinguish it from a person. And surely you couldn't have real, lethal bullets flying around and maintain a perfect safety record. But Yul Brynner's gunslinger needs real bullets for Crazy Time!
Oh, well. Westworld is still an enjoyable slice of pre-Star Wars Sci Fi movie-making. The suspense in the second half is engaging and competently directed by Crichton. And now HBO will turn Westworld into a series with tons of graphic sex and nudity because that's what HBO does. So look forward to more human/robot sexual shenanigans in 2016. Surely nothing can go worng. Recommended.
