¡QUÉ HORROR! 2019

Candidate #14

OVERLORD

(September 2018)

“This is war, ja? People die in many unfortunate ways.”

In a world where the trailer, one sheets, and other marketing material for Overlord did not exist, you’d be forgiven if you thought that for its roughly first half, the film was merely a specimen of the contemporary World War II film**, with its narrative lens filtered through the blood and grit of the “War is Hell” aesthetic (as opposed to the glorified nature of conflict in old school WWII cinema).

There’s a fleeting glimpse of a “sick” woman and a passing mention of “tar” with “some kind of a power” at about the 30 minute mark, but it’s only at nearly its halfway point that it takes the in-your-face plunge into a strain of pulp horror tragically rooted in the real life atrocities of Nazi medical experimentation.

It’s that plunge that gives Julius Avery’s sophomore feature (from a screenplay by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith***) leave to gradually show its true colors.

“Does somebody wanna tell me what the f*ck is going on here?!”

True, there’s a healthy amount of action in Overlord, but it’s again that pulp horror portion of its cinematic DNA that makes it prime ¡Qué horror! material.

Think of it as the genre-infused prequel**** to Saving Private Ryan, where we get to see a mission that was instrumental in paving the way for Tom Hanks and company to storm Omaha Beach.

What’s also notable about Overlord are the brief moments it takes to subvert old school WWII cinema.

“… the Nazis are rotten sons’ a b!tches! And rotten sons’ a b!tches will do anything they have to to destroy everything that is good in this world!

“That is why we have to be just as rotten as they are!”

It’s the kind of film that casts Wyatt Russell in a role that would be the film’s nominal lead if this were an old school Hollywood WWII film, as a man of action and few words, a character that gets the job done, whose driving motivation is the capital M-“Mission.”

A character that brooks no deviations from the Mission, and is willing to unleash violence to achieve his goals, an exemplar for the ideal of the all-American can-do brand of machismo that was the stock-in-trade of the WWII cinema of yore.

Given the way the narrative unfolds, you can virtually see where the character arc of Russell’s Corporal Ford will end up.

There’s also a moment that involves Grey Worm himself, Jacob Anderson.

It’s a moment that brutally punctuates that, in the end, no amount of words can encapsulate the horrors of war, where any individual soldier is not a person with hopes and dreams, but rather just grist for the mill, expendable units ready to be jotted down as an “acceptable loss” on the road to victory.

The script also ensures the only prominent female in the narrative (Mathilde Ollivier) gets her own Moment or two, as she endeavors to help the American soldiers complete their all-important Mission.

“A Thousand-Year Reich needs thousand-year soldiers.”

But in the end, of course, this is not meant to be an accurate depiction of World War II, nor a complete deconstruction of WWII cinema, nor an existential war movie in the vein of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.

This is a more or less straightforward war movie that’s got action and some horror mixed into it. It’s genre infused cinema produced by J.J. Abrams, so settle in for a wild and bumpy ride.

“How does it feel, the blood of Eternity flowing through your veins?”

**  Granted, of course, that you were willing to suspend your disbelief long enough to accept the possibility of a desegregated military unit four years before President Truman signed Executive Order 9981.

*** Billy Ray (to whom a Story By credit is also given) co-wrote the screenplay for E. Elias Merhige’s Suspect Zero, while Mark L. Smith penned the script for Nimrod Antal’s Vacancy.

**** Because, hey, as proven by everything from Batman (the wrapping-up Gotham and the upcoming Pennyworth) to Breaking Bad (Better Call Saul) to The Big Bang Theory (Young Sheldon) to Game of Thrones to Star Wars, prequels are apparently the new sequel…

(Overlord OS’ courtesy of impawards.com.)

SANTA CLARITA DIET
(January 2017)

"... On the other hand, maybe nothin’s impossible. Who would have ever thought an octopus and a kitten could fall in love?
"It’s on YouTube. You gotta see it. It’ll give you hope.”

There’s a select group of actors who, because of a Single Fantabulous Film (or TV Show) that they helped shepherd into reality, have got a lifetime Pass from me; they can choose to come out in whatever kind of film or series they want, and I will have no right to look at them askance or criticize them, because I’m eternally grateful for that Single Fantabulous Film (or TV Show).

Nicolas Cage immediately comes to mind. Because he produced E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire, I can forgive him for a lot, even (gulp) The Wicker Man remake.

There’s also Drew Barrymore, who now has two lifetime Passes from me: the first, for Donnie Darko (executive producer), and the second, for Santa Clarita Diet (again, executive producer). And she backed both up with her star power by appearing in the cast.

Thanx, Gertie!

“No. Don’t do anything, okay? Just relax.

“I’m dead. It can wait until tomorrow.”

Barrymore and co-star (and co-executive producer) Timothy Olyphant are husband and wife realtors, Sheila and Joel Hammond, doing their best to cope with Sheila’s new titular diet, which is (gasp!) human flesh.

Seriously, I haven’t had this much fun with anything zombie since Shaun of the Dead.

Which is why I’m talking about it here, outside of the ¡Qué horror! rundown, since this isn’t really a horror show, so much as it is a comedy with some horror elements.

“Maybe we should just keep driving. Go home, get some clothes, and just never come back.”

“Well, that’s crazy! We can’t just run away. Where would we go?! Oh, we have so much equity in our house!”

“Ah! I didn’t think about the equity! I’m a monster.”

The beauty of the show though is, as much as it’s about the hijinx that result from Sheila’s zombiefication, it’s just as much about the way a family deals with seismic upheavals, about finding family wherever you can, and embracing the reality that, even if something’s changed, that doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful.

And not only do we have Barrymore as the newly confident and energetic Sheila, and Olyphant as the weed-smoking, occasionally manic Joel, but there’s an excellent supporting cast here too, starting with Liv Hewson (as their headstrong daughter Abby) and Skyler Gisondo (as lovable creeper next door, Eric), and stretching out to the two cops who live on either side of the Hammonds (uh-oh), Richard T. Jones and Ricardo Chavira (who also happens to be the jerkface stepfather to the aforementioned lovable creeper Eric).

Oh! And a 2-episode appearance by Grace Zabriskie! So awesome, ‘cause we all know there is No Such Thing As Too Much Grace Zabriskie!

And for another dose of awesome, Portia de Rossi shows up at the tail end of the season (in a role that was apparently written specifically for her).

“Hello.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not in the mood.”

“Just saying ‘Hello.’”

“I know your ‘Hello’s, honey, and that one was pouring me a glass of wine.”

If you’ve frequented the Iguana in the past, you’ll know that we’re pretty big here on atypical titles of bone-tired genres, and most everything zombie these days is so SO tired. So I wasn’t going to pass up the chance of trumpeting Santa Clarita Diet just because it wasn’t full-on horror. (Here’s hoping Netflix renews it for a second season.)

I dubbed I Am a Hero “the perfect antidote for those all-too-relentlessly grim soap opera zombie titles.”

I was wrong.

Santa Clarita Diet is the perfect antidote for those all-too-relentlessly grim soap opera zombie titles.

Boom.

“I really don’t think I bit him.”

“But what if you did? And what if that makes him turn, and then he bites someone, and they bite someone and pretty soon, we’re like the biggest a$$holes ever!”

(Santa Clarita Diet OS’ courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com & impawards.com.)

AFTERTHOUGHTS (77)
NEIL’S NEW CLASSIC MONSTERS

Amidst all the “New Classic” craziness currently going on at ew.com, Neil Gaiman has a list of his choices for 10 New Classic Monsters. (And by “New Classic,” they mean anything that saw the light of day from 1983 till the present.)
Among Neil’s choices:

9. The Pale Man from Guillermo del Toro’s El Laberinto Del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth)

7. The Nightbreed, from Clive Barker’s Nightbreed

6. Eugene Tooms, from The X-Files episodes “Squeeze” and “Tooms”

5. Grendel, in Gaiman’s words, “The first and the best,” seen most recently in Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf (which Neil co-scripted)

4. Hannibal Lecter (though Gaiman specifies the Lecter from Thomas Harris’ novels Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, “… back when he wasn’t quite human and was all the scarier for it.”)

2. Max Schreck, as portrayed by Willem Dafoe in E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire

And at the top spot…

Swamp Thing. As Neil puts it, “The 1984-87 Alan Moore/Steve Bissette/John Totleben revival. The best muck-encrusted monster in the best comics.”

You can find the entire list here.

Parting shot: Reviews of El Laberinto Del Fauno, Beowulf, and Shadow of the Vampire, can be found in the Archive.

(Images courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com [El Laberinto Del Fauno and Shadow of the Vampire]; amazon.com [Clive Barker’s The Nightbreed Chronicles cover art]; fredfarm.com [The X-Files]; and dccomics.com [Swamp Thing Vol. 1: Saga of the Swamp Thing cover art].)

reVIEW (43)
SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE

“Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the moving picture.
“Because we have the moving picture, our paintings will grow and recede. Our poetry will be shadows that lengthen and conceal. Our light will play across living faces that laugh and agonize. And our music will linger and finally overwhelm because it will have a context as certain as the grave.
“We are scientists engaged in the creation of memory. But our memory will neither blur, nor fade.”
-- F.W. Murnau

Nicolas Cage certainly has an interesting view of vampires.
In 1989, he starred in Robert Bierman‘s Vampire’s Kiss, a black comedy in which he played poor, befuddled Peter Loew, who believes—perhaps mistakenly—that he’s been bitten by a vampire.
11 years later, Cage chose as his feature producing debut, E. Elias Merhige’s brilliant take on Nosferatu, Shadow of the Vampire.

Here, noted German director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (John Malkovich) sets off to film (without the widow Stoker’s permission) Dracula, and in the interests of authenticity, has a real vampire (Willem Dafoe) pretend to be an actor named Max Schreck, to play Nosferatu’s Count Dracula stand-in, Count Orlock.
As early as that singular premise—with its funhouse mirroring of truth masquerading as fiction, to play a fiction which is both truth (as Schreck/Orlock really is a vampire) and a double fiction (Orlock is merely Dracula, under a different name); all of this, of course, a fiction of a truth, as we see a behind-the-scenes-look-that-never-was of the making of Nosferatu—it should be plainly evident that Shadow of the Vampire is so much more than your average cinematic blood-sucking experience.
With a script by Steven Katz, Shadow of the Vampire asks the central question, How far is an artist willing to go for his art? And in asking that question, Shadow also explores the double-headed metaphor of art as vampire, and art as a means to immortality.
It also takes the film industry to task. Humourously, by poking fun at how a star’s ego can hijack a production, and darkly, by presenting the camera (in the film, merely an extension of the director) as cold, apathetic observer and recorder, as leecher of vitality and life, an idea which reaches its apex in a chilling sequence that touches on the ultimate disposability of actresses in the grand old Boy’s Club of movie-making.

Merhige takes all of this weighty material and crafts a tantalizing portrait of the high cost of art and the dangers of obsessively brilliant artists.
And who else to play the narrative’s obsessively brilliant artist, but John Malkovich?
Malkovich’s Murnau is calculating and exacting, a cinema despot who asks his extras not to “act,” but rather, to “be.” In his white lab coat and goggles, he is the mad scientist only too willing to go to extreme lengths to complete his celluloid Monster.
But he meets his nemesis in Schreck, a role that Dafoe clearly dives into with relish. As part of the ruse, his Schreck is apparently the ultimate method actor, appearing to the cast and crew always in costume, and constantly in character.
And if you’ve seen Murnau’s Nosferatu, you’ll note that Dafoe nails the oddly disturbing mannerisms actor Max Schreck displayed in that classic of German Expressionism.
But it isn’t just that peculiar physicality that Dafoe brings to his performance. He also brings a humour, curiously both self-effacing and cunningly self-aware, as when, in one scene, he is at first coached as to his character’s motivation, before taking his first stab at ad lib.
Dafoe also brings a strange air of pathos to his character that serves to inform a role that could easily have been all melodramatic pantomime gesture and Vaudevillian tics, with some genuine longing and emotion.
What gives Shadow even more of a kick is how awesome and effective the rest of its cast is: genre stalwart Udo Kier, Eddie Izzard, Cary Elwes, Catherine McCormack, who all go about recreating scenes and sequences from Nosferatu like skilled and particularly respectful grave robbers, making the film, aside from everything else, a wonderful homage to a masterpiece of black-and-white cinema.

Shadow of the Vampire also has much in common with films like John Madden‘s Shakespeare In Love and Ken Russell’s Gothic, films which use actual historical figures to propose a fictional scenario that ultimately informs an artist’s work and creative sensibilities.
Or, as I put it earlier, films that show a behind-the-scenes-look-that-never-was of a film, or play, or novel.
So at this point, I think it should be stated in so many words: Shadow of the Vampire may have fangs, but it really isn’t about neck-biting and blood. It’s a fascinating and complex entry in the vaults of vampire cinema, one that is only willing and eager to be discussed and debated over.
After all, with so many funhouse mirrors around, it makes it that much harder to determine, where is the real Monster of the piece?
The ancient, bloodthirsty creature, only seeking to slake its inhuman thirst?
The despotic director, to whom all are merely a means to an end?
Or the film itself, the aforementioned end, for which all else is sacrificed?

Parting shot: A review of Merhige’s follow-up to Shadow of the Vampire, Suspect Zero, can be found in the Archive, where the article series “The Cinematic (Un)Life of Count Dracula” can also be found. Part I (“A Symphony of Shudders”) discusses F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu.

(Shadow of the Vampire OS courtesy of impawards.com [design by Samuels Advertising]; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.co.uk.)

reVIEW (32) 
SUSPECT ZERO

I only recently got to see the amusing faux documentary Incident at Loch Ness on cable, which got me some good looks at one Gabriel Beristain (cinematographer on Guillermo Del Toro’s Blade II and David S. Goyer’s The Invisible) and one Zak Penn (who directed Incident). Since Penn co-wrote Suspect Zero, I thought, “Why not?”
A few years back, E. Elias Merhige gave us Shadow of the Vampire, the canny exploration of creativity set against the backdrop of the filming of the classic German silent film Nosferatu. Now, Merhige returns with Suspect Zero.

“A 50 foot shark. Ever see one?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”

FBI Special Agent Tom Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart) has been relegated to the Albuquerque field office after a six-month psych evaluation following a much-publicized breach of Bureau protocol. As it turns out, Mackelway has become the obsession of Benjamin O’Ryan (Sir Ben Kingsley), a man who claims to be a former FBI agent, and is apparently a remote viewer, a psychic individual able to “see” things happening in distant locations. Shortly into the film, Mackelway becomes embroiled in the investigation of a man murdered by O’Ryan, a man whose eyelids have been sliced off.

If you’re beginning to get the impression that Suspect Zero is a grisly, disturbing piece of film, well, you’re partially right. Though certainly nowhere near as grisly and sordid as Seven was, Zero is a subtly disturbing exercise in the building of mood. With masterful editing and the use of eerie audio tracks and an eclectic and interesting musical score, Merhige manages to construct a movie that keeps itself afloat by virtue of atmosphere.

“Okay, but a serial killer, by definition, is condemned to repetition, isn’t he? I mean, isn’t that what he’s all about?”

Where Zero falters however, is its script (by Billy Ray and Zak Penn), which doesn’t allow itself to build any momentum to carry us forward. The fact that there doesn’t seem to be any sort of urgency to solving the case doesn’t help matters much either. Unlike The Silence of the Lambs or The Cell, where we are given a specific victim in current jeopardy to identify with, the victims in Suspect Zero are too much of ciphers for the audience to care about, except in the most abstract of ways.
Though not as handicapped as Seven is when stripped of its technique, Zero nonetheless lacks a certain something to make it a film of substance. Or perhaps, there is a little too much there to make it a tight, coherent piece. Much like the frantic and cluttered writing and art of O’Ryan, one detects a certain busy-ness of plot elements and details that only serve to obscure the merits of what could have been an excellent film.

Fortunately, we have Eckhart and Sir Kingsley to keep us occupied. Eckhart, with his past work with Neil LaBute (In The Company of Men, Possession), has proven to be an engaging performer, and Sir Kingsley brings both a borderline psychotic intensity and world-weary humanity to O’Ryan that is a privilege to watch. Given that, it’s sad that Carrie-Anne Moss, who proved in Memento that she can do more than just fancy martial arts on wireworks, isn’t given much to do by the script.

And once again, the script is the culprit, which I believe is the case with practically all the post-Silence of the Lambs serial killer thrillers, including its sequel Hannibal, and its prequel, Red Dragon. Not even Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter could save Copycat, and as I alluded to earlier, bereft of David Fincher’s moody technique, Seven’s script isn’t much to write home about either.

“We saw things men shouldn’t see. Agony. Torture. Evil.”

In trying, among other things, to posit a new sort of serial killer for the new millennium, the metaphorical “50 foot shark,” which may exist despite not having been seen by mortal eyes, Suspect Zero only succeeds in giving us a muddied view of a grab bag of ideas that never quite comes together into a cohesive whole. Perhaps if Ray and Penn had trimmed down some of the story’s minutiae, focused less on ideas and more on the story’s rhythm, Suspect Zero could have been the film it clearly wanted to be. As it is, though it isn’t a total waste of time, it also isn’t an entirely satisfying cinema experience.

Parting shot: Eckhart, who was also great in Jason Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking, will be seen in next year’s The Dark Knight, as D.A. Harvey Dent, a.k.a. The Man Who Will Be Two-Face.

(Suspect Zero OS courtesy of impawards.com; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

(The above review began life under the title, “A View To A Kill.”)