FALLING DOWN @ 30

An angry middle aged man with a crew cut walks out of a pressurised traffic jam. His number plates read D-FENS. A cop in the same jam helps push the abandoned car on to the side. It's his last day on the job and his colleagues are all pranks and heckles. Unlike D-Fens he tends to wear crap like this. D goes on a rage walk, frustrated every few steps by one impediment or other edging toward outright violence. 

Our detective, Prendergast, is getting through the contempt of his fellow peace officers ok but starts noticing a pattern to a series of petty crime reports, the pattern on the city map starts looking like someone making their way through the bad neighbourhoods. When D started walking and the angry guy in the car behind him asked where he was going, he just said, "I'm going home". We've seen him call a few times (the first included his first tantrum like demonstration). A woman answers but he can't talk. She knows who it is.

This film was trailered in a strange manner, starting like the kind of social comedy that was the benchmark at the time, all violence and testing, but soon starts looking more serious. The opening in the traffic jam could have been in an Ivan Reitman or Harold Ramis movie with the lens creeping over the bonnet and getting into the car in silence. It already looks like stress and when the audio turns up you can smell it, too. By the time D gets out of his car and says he's going home you're ready for some fun, cartoony overreactions. 

But when the violence does start it's interracial with the middle class white guy in triumph. The Korean shop keeper gets a serve for reading out prices that anger the self-styled ordinary American guy who thinks they should still be the same as when he was younger. We get a mini lecture about how much support America gives to Korea .. to a Korean who is no longer anywhere near Korea. Followed by a pair of Latinx gangers he slams them with his briefcase and then the sawn off baseball bat he stole from the shop keeper. 

For balance he also threatens the whitebread staff at the fast food place with annihilation and then faces off against an uber bigot neo Nazi in a guns 'n' helmets shop. By the time he ignites a coronary in the ancient privileged golfer we get the idea that his fury at world's unfairness is colourblind and even. But that really isn't where it started and any writer and film director who knew their audiences would know to start with those triggers. Getting on to corporate stiffness and class entitlement can come later, let's get the easy stuff going first.

D's nemesis is a man so Zen that not only does he deal with the traffic jam as though he's watching a river ripple from the shade of a tree, he sails through the hostility of his colleagues knowing that that too shall pass. His peace fits D's warfare snugly. The clever casting of Robert Duvall who toned his usual macho bluster to near zero for the part only reinforces his character's genuine powers.

That's necessary, as Michael Douglas' put another notch in the Mr Mad America he'd been decorating since the eighties with the likes of Fatal Attraction and Wall Street. As a figure from the low rung of the white collar world in Falling Down who had run his career and then marriage into the ground and cannot comprehend how any of it happened, Douglas plays somewhere between reality and the kind of born yesterday naif of fable. When he says, "I'm the bad guy?" toward the end, the cabin briefly loses pressure and here endeth the lesson.

Joel Schumacher isn't a subtle filmmaker nor has ever pretended to be. He can make a good movie, though and there are plenty in his rap sheet but when it comes to this kind of social parable it can be difficult to work out quite what he is trying to say and to whom.

The late '80s and early '90s were busy at the cinema and a lot of lines were blurred. Erotic thrillers were harking back to '50s domestic values and sexual diversity othering was enjoying a revival. Were Tim Burtons movies made for kids or grown ups? Oh, and feminism was getting it in the neck again after a brief respite in the mid '80s. Who was Falling Down preaching to? Is Duvall's silent gen detective straightening out D's boomer mess? Barbara Hershey's turn as D's ex wife is solid even with the little she's given but there is a disturbing confusion between the actors playing D's mum and Duvall's neurotic bullying wife who not only look near identical but share an eerie monster-bearing passivity. 

As a narrative progression straight up, this film works a treat. Not a shot wasted and not a scene a second too long. It is impossible to miss the points presented about the state of American society at the time, regardless of your position on them. As a whole piece this is not a racist movie but one ready to confront its audiences with teh phenomenon. Then again, it's not above fanning a few of those flames on the sure bet that they're warming up unspoken sympathy in the cinema. 

Few would want to admit any empathy with Frederic Forrest's neo fascist and D's contempt of him might well have raised cheers that the sacking of the Korean shop might have ... then. The Korean shop scene now looks brutal and bullying, carrying only the barest of comedic intentions it was originally made to serve. And that's early. It's very hard to relate to D, even when he's railing against rigid fast food outlet rules about when breakfast stops and lunch begins. I remember the scene being funny but I was laughing from the outside, having no connection with the character. Looking at it now, after decades of mass shootings, it just looks brutal.

It also made me wonder how many Q-zombied conspiracists that stormed the Capitol building two years ago would have their own VHS copy of this movie in a shelf close to the old VCR, and how many upgraded disc versions. The thought that the real audience for this movie was only to emerge into action decades after frankly horrifies me. Is it fair to taint a decades old film with the atrocities of recent years? No, but as the film itself suggests, fairness can feel like a weapon. I don't mean the fairness of Duvall's one-good-cop as much as the imagined fairness of the righteous, deluded, patriotic bozos who were happy to nearly crush one of those cops in a glass doorway on January 6. Crusaders always think they're right and their witnesses know the reverse is more likely. We have both on screen here in a highly entertaining film. But who's it talking to? 

Review: OPPENHEIMER

I was dreading this one. I've not been a big fan of Christopher Nolan since he began making important movies. Memento? Sure. Prestige? Right on. But the Batman movies, Interstellar and Inception all left me feeling like I'd spent an afternoon having something very plain made very convoluted. I did like how he used different timescales for Dunkirk but in the end it felt clever rather than profound. So, when I knew that he was making a movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer, I was first in line. 

See, while I know most of his blockbusters are really just big popcorn movies with a few decent brushstrokes, I still think he does have an unlimited number of potential masterpieces in him, now and to come. This historical figure comes with ready made complexity so the struggle there is only to choose what to leave out. That his efforts gave rise to the nuclear age which made the Cold War terrifying right up to Glasnost in the 1980s makes him ripe for storytelling. So, how'd Nolan do?

Ok, first: assume premium grade film making on visual and audio lines. He shot in IMAX (which I chose against for convenience), chose a strong score composer and great sound engineering team. This means that Oppenheimer simultaneously feels like a contemporary film but looks like the best of the '70s, all grain, depth and colour you can eat. Even when I don't care about the movie I know it will look and sound superior to anything on the same block.

So, how's the story? It's three hours long, does it need to be? Not by a country mile. The first hour is all setup, Oppy did this, met this guy, said that and got to the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. As I watched this I kept thinking that it felt like a compressed few episodes of a streaming series, it's all dialogue from an old desk calendar and getting pointers to significant characters, and details that you should collect like game tokens so you can play later. It's a previously on Oppenheimer but it goes for an hour. 

Then, as the person Oppenheimer gets tangled in ethics, messy affairs, politics as well as history, the performances start getting enjoyable and the cinema separates itself from the streamer model and gets into gear. The best of these scenes - the blending of memory with testimony when Oppenheimer is talking about his mistress, a particular moment of bad news, and the crescending tension leading to the first detonation at Los Alamos, and the rally like congratulation scene which is interrupted by a stylised  imagining of the Hiroshima blast - are great film making, pure and simple.

But biographies of any kind must seek to teach, to provide a life lesson or at least talking points toward one. Most of these in Oppenheimer are centred on a few moments that play like leitmotifs and come to fruit in the final act when the character's historical downfall is examined. This will feel overlong and anticlimactic to many as it effectively bars the excitement of the Trinity test sequence (which is what many will expect to be the film's climax) to concentrate on the political fallout (see what I did there) and figures involved. My advice is to just keep watching as the conclusion is both sobering and satisfying. The pieces of the debate about potential arms races, the power of deterrence and the question of a permanent standoff (later MAD or mutually assured destruction) feels like a standpoint appropriately fragmented and only beginning to form.

Nolan has, for most of his career, been able to marshal impressive forces for his productions, not least of all are his casts. Well, look, everyone's good in this but I'll just concentrate on two. Cillian Murphy is Oppeheimer. When you see stills, especially those social media mugshots of him against a similar photo of the real thing there's a kind of uncanny valley effect where you end up rejecting Murphy as a lookalike. Murphy's big eyed boyishness has persisted well into his career and it is hard to imagine the face on the left at the centre of history. On screen, in motion, he establishes a swing between action and stillness that erases the photographic difference and allows us to concentrate on his character's presence and predicaments. His voice work is particularly impressive as he keeps his accent Yankee patrician but timbre about half an octave lower than normal without a moment's strain. This is dedicated character acting. 

On par is Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer who uses every second of her screen time to variously suffer in period correct silence or blister with rage or numbly wade through alcohol. Her appearance in a late scene when she turns to us and her husband takes us (and Murphy) aback with the violence of the ravages she has borne (her advanced rosacea looks like burns). In another, when she responds to an offered handshake with the contempt she feels, we know she is restraining all action and channelling her hatred through her eyes alone. It's magnetic.

So, then, how'd ol' Chris do? Is it worth your time staring at a screen for a bum numbing three hours? Well, it didn't feel like that long. the opening great moments in history pageant moves at a clip and when it gears down the stakes are raised to compulsion. If you can, after it has delivered its quota of multiplex thrills, keep with the length and detail of the epilogue you will feel rewarded. This is one of the good ones.

THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR @ 55

A split screen slideshow of eyes and faces floats against a black background. Pieces of Steve McQueen's face alternate with Faye Dunaway's. Other players in the story also appear and the '60s classic song Windmills of Your Mind plays with its lines about deceptive appearances and the power of the mind to change what it senses. Oh, if you're thinking of Dusty Springfield's haunting version, forget it. This version is sung almost absent mindedly by Rex Harrison's son Noel who was trying to start a recording career in swinging London. Composer Michel Legrand had wanted Andy Williams. That said, the editing matches the song's rhythm perfectly and adds a smoothness to the suggested complexity to come. This really is a groovy way to start.

Thomas Crown organises a complex heist where the gang only meet when the operation is underway. He's a high finance swashbuckler who likes to tell his clients that they overpaid after congratulating them on their purchases and glides through modernist offices ticking with computers so up to date that they have screens in 1968, and endlessly ringing phones. What does someone like this want with a bank job return? Fun. As so much of this film's look and feel suggests the lifestyle so warmly presented in old Playboy magazine ads. He really is the kind of man who reads Playboy. And I mean reads. As every one of the well heeled young men suited up around the logos of Old Spice or Cutty Sark scotch, he is effortlessly accompanied by a stunningly beautiful young woman.

Enter Vicki Anderson freelance insurance investigator. She comes in with a screen filling shot coursing through the airport, big '60s sun goggles and stylish hat and a slinky jazz theme that means business. She's good at her job and traces the crime back to Crown in a few swift moves. And then the movie's big second act takes off as she closes in professionally and romantically on Thomas as the pair pound the dunes in a beach buggy, cook lobster on the beach or play erotically charged games of chess in his city mansion.

What stops this from getting too far into money porn is the investigation, staffed by real police headed by a tough egg whose fears over Vicki's loyalties border on horny jealousy. Without the horny jealousy part, we're wondering ourselves as we watch. Vicki is open about her suspicions to Thomas. He seems to enjoy the puzzle of how to change her course, if not by sexual seduction then by something more Faustian. His power, after all, depends on the effects of chaos in the monetary realm, not order and convention and his role does take on a Satanic tint.

When you've got a young Steve McQueen facing off against a young Faye Dunaway, framed in such pop art film making, you've pretty much got a sexy package that reaches across decades. McQueen had already established himself as a type. By the middle of the next decade, Francis Ford Coppola nixed the casting of him in the Willard role in Apocalypse Now as McQueen insisted on his character being that wise guy type which was utterly against that character's edgy secrecy. But here in the playboy setting his brand fit perfectly. That's not a slight. The thinking woman's hunk in perfect clothes and an athletic kind of disruptive energy is exactly what the role needs and what it got.

As a foil, Faye Dunaway's corporate bloodhound meets her adversary where he lives, in the margin where heavy intellect and sexiness are indistinguishable. In the company of the grunty cops she's all business and job centred, not a woman, even in 1968, that the senior guys kiss on the cheek instead of shaking hands. With Thomas, she's with her quarry who is also her match and her hardness of task yet allows some thrill in his seduction as it offers a challenge of keeping on track with her pursuit as well as having a strange kind of fun. Fresh from her nuanced turn as Bonnie Parker, she was imaginably heading towards her career best in Network.

Norman Jewison as director is clearly having a ball with the new technologies of film making. His use of split screen doesn't remind us of Richard Fleischer's in The Boston Strangler. They are both used practically to reveal essential information but where Fleischer's adds to the sordidness Jewison's serves to lighten the mood of the complex motion around the capers and procedure of the various players. It's less grimy paranoia than elevated Monkees episode.

Also, he might well have relished yet another new mood to his arsenal, coming in off the experience of the gritty Southern crime procedural In the Heat of the Night. After the fab fashion and games of Thomas Crown he went epic for Fiddler on the Roof but then hippy experimental for Jesus Christ Superstar and dystopian for Rollerball. He's a John Huston, that way, lots on the rap sheet but no known pattern, just a solid film maker.

And when a solid film maker gets the opportunity to fashion some high crime glamour just after the summer of love, invited to splash as much pop at the screen you are going to get this constantly enjoyable and cheeky piece of cinema. Then when you move on to auteurism-defying career choices (compare Robert Wise who went from Val Lewton horrors to upscale The Haunting and The Sound of Music, same thing) you are headed for a satisfyingly accomplished creative life. Oh, very worth pointing out that all this slinky editing was done by Hal Ashby, very soon to carve his own name with pride with the likes of The Landlord and Harold and Maude.

This might not strike you as the kind of film that warrants celebration as an anniversary for the lightness it appears to have but as an exercise in putting a gentle smile on a story of manipulation and white collar piracy without rendering the latter too cute, you won't do much better.

Viewing notes: The Thomas Crown Affair is hard to find on physical media. I rented it through Google Movies which suggests it's also available through Apple Movies. 

RESERVOIR DOGS @ 30

A gang is formed for a jewel heist. The heist turns bloody and deadly and the gang members flee back to the post heist rendezvous with the strong suspicion that one of them is a cop or an informer. As each responds to this according to his violence level it looks like they're heading for a solution or a stand-off. That's pretty much it.

When I saw the trailer for this three decades ago before it turned up in local arthouses, it looked like a stylish retro piece recalling '70s heist movies from California or Hong Kong: tough snappy dialogue and action with flair. The song playing under the trailer was to become glued to the film's most notorious scene, Stealer's Wheel's Dylanesque classic Stuck in the Middle with You. It looked like a Scorsese movie but with a goofier sense of humour. I was in. I even liked the way the credit came up at the end: A Quentin Tarantino Film. Who? Yeah, you're getting it. This was someone who knew he would be making a splash.

By no means the first post-modern feature film, Reservoir Dogs at least loaded its decade with style that stole rather than borrowed, amped up the radio oldies for irony value and played fast and loose with the  timeline. By the late '90s you couldn't throw a cricket ball down movie street without hitting five to ten clones of the manic, self-consuming movies that plugged into the Tarantino M.O. And if you went to film student screening nights that's almost all you'd see. It the '80s it was Eraserhead clones but in the '90s it was comedy violence and passionate dialogue about pop culture.

You get all of that in the first twenty minutes of Reservoir Dogs when the gang argues about tipping and there's a diversion about the meaning of Madonna's Like a Virgin, before we get a getaway scene with a bloodied gangster in the back of a car. I'm in my cinema seat with a group of cronies and a near full house thinking, this is it, everything I want in a crime movie pressed into every scene, and then some.

And then it winds down. It winds down even when the violence on screen gets into straight razors and ear lobes and white hot tempers that threaten to explode into yet more violence. There are well constructed flashbacks to the planning stages and the revelation of who the rat in the ranks is and it plays to exact specifications. Don't get ne wrong, it was never anything less than entertaining, it's just that, as it went on it started feeling circular, as though this zippy new cine auteur was really only putting the good bits in: it started feeling like a feature length trailer.

I wondered if this sense of deflation came from the film's deliberate exclusion of any scenes of the heist itself. The events of it are reported by characters which gives rise to a lot of that punchy dialogue. But all we really get is a loop of find-the-rat and sudden violence. At the time I mused that Scorsese would have added a point to it. Reservoir Dogs doesn't have one. As Tarantino fronted up in interviews telling everyone that he used to work in a video shop and that the movie really was just meant to be guys in suits doing cool things, it made me wonder if this statement was less like punk (as more than one commentator had it) than techno which dressed a mollied up heartbeat with a few fun samples, packing only the essentials in.

Maybe that's what we needed, though, at that time; a cinema culture that only had to look like it was busy, so we could get our tickets' worth in a hurry and get on with whatever else nagged at our disposable time and money. My 30th anniversary (it came out in Australia in 1993) rewatch tested this. I saw it on the stunning 4K release from Lionsgate and the AV quality alone had me gaping. But this time I relaxed and let it happen. It still left me wanting but memories of the decade in its wake that sought to reproduce it (and at the indy level, not always as a big studio cash grab, importantly). While you did get a Guy Ritchie whose cover versions are so difficult to tell apart that you'll remember scenes from one that are from another, but we also got fun fests like Go or Human Traffic which were appropriately one and done like the best pop songs.

Tarantino, himself, moved on quickly with the more expansive Pulp Fiction (where he continued to revive faded careers as well as kickstart new ones with his casting), the superb and side steering JAckie Brown and so on until whatever he releases is lifted by his name more than an expected style. Tarantino became not just a brand but a gauge.

I also recall that the Tarantino decade ended with one of the great years of popular cinema with the likes of Fight Club and Being John Malkovich which sidestepped the QT primer and made way for the 2000s. And I recall most poignantly, that one of the most successful films of that year was as famous for its pioneering viral marketing as it was for its content. The Blair Witch Project cleared the table of the mainstream genre films that left the '90s bland by going back to dirt and basics, immediately distinguishing itself from its surrounds. Reservoir Dogs had done that in its year and both cases engendered misguided copying that missed the point by replaying the moves alone. But the reason I like Blair Witch more than Reservoir Dogs is that it feels like it just wants to make a living whereas Reservoir Dogs wants to make a brand name. It's great fun if all you want is great fun.

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS @ 70

A prologue detailing the advancement of earthly weaponry gives way to a militaristic title sequence that settles into relatively gentle extra prologue that tells us that the Martians, after exhausting the other possibilities in the solar system have picked out Earth to invade so they can flee their own planet's death spiral. Then, in a small Californian town, the first of the meteor-like pods blazes to earth. 

Investigating, the townsfolk find that the rocky masses are in fact space craft and bug eyed machines are coming out of them that can render people and objects into thin air. A trio of scientists handily fishing tripping near by are asked to come and help but they can do little. The military is called in and begins a campaign of escalating futility against the Martian invaders, up to the ultimate weapon whose atomic blast leaves the invaders somewhat unmoved.

From scenes of mass panic, despair down to the localised skirmish level we find out that the metal things are not the Martians but their attack craft and that they themselves are squat frog limbed things with tricolour eyes. The stage is set for conquest.

Bryon Haskin's film of Barre Lyndon's adaptation of H.G. Wells's novel (in the court of King Caractacus) is an update of both the original source and the other Welles's radio play by removing the emphasis on a single narrator and spreading the action among the wider world of mid-century American society, from farming folk to the Pentagon. There is a small coterie of characters and they are gathered around the development of the central couple Clayton and Sylvia. This is significant as it allows the film to avoid the rule of the source's difficult to love narrator and suggest a community expressing the humanity well and badly. 

The other updates are of course the post war technology available to counter the invasion and the politics of superpowers still emerging from the ashes of the second world war. With this in mind there is little need to push the Martians as being from the Reds Under The Bed Planet as the equivalence would have felt clear to contemporary audiences. As far as the technology goes, though, we're having a ball on screen with armouries of new weaponry are paraded out to kick the Red Planet guys' asses. This culminates in the delivery of the atom bomb in the awe inspiring flying wing. But all of this is as nothing against the oncoming invaders and this Cold War science fiction goes with the conclusion that Wells so cannily imagined. 

If none of that interests you then I can recommend the spectacle of the rich Technicolor pallet on display that shows the landscape smoking convincingly beneath the disturbing beauty of the alien craft as they hover without hurdles over the land. The experiment to recreate how the Martians see from a captured piece of their equipment is sublime as Ann Robinson looks in terror at her own image through the filter of the aliens. Even if you feel it lacks a payoff the sheer imaginative construction of it and use of facial expression should nudge you a little in the right direction.

Apart from these, the 1952 War of the Worlds has little more to offer as an epic of imagination. Clayton and sylvia are believable as a couple and other set pieces like the square dance work a treat and the reveal of the Martian in the farm house is genuinely eerie but what's on offer here as a rasion d'etre beyond the film technology and the military technology it depicts, is a story of human resilience that would have held greater substance to an audience fresh out of both World War II and the Korean War. The Martian/Soviet transference is quite easily sidestepped today and the impact on community looms a lot larger. If you're concerned about an overall lack of depth in favour of action it's no worse here than any given comics universe instalment or macho star vehicle today. There's still so much on screen to enjoy with this one.

Viewing notes. I watched the spiffy 4K presentation made available through Australia's own Imprint label which I'll happily plug here for consistently stunning work.

 

SPOILERS AHEAD

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The religious figure in Wells's novel is a snivelling bronze age minded goose whose end feels deserved, even if you don't share Wells's contempt for religion. In this film, his equivalent seeks reconciliation with the invaders and he goes to a Martyrs death as the flying pods zap him with their own brand of the light.

At one point the despairing thought is offered that the Martians would probably only need another 6 days to destroy the Earth. Sylvia is struck by this and says, "as long as it took to create it." This, even now, might sound profound but outside of the fact of her being the Pastor's niece and so steeped in it, really just ends up sounding hollow and antique.

Wells's conclusion praises the forces of nature and evolution for the presence of the germs that eventually kill the Martians through infection. This film closes with an absurd narration about god in his wisdom placing the germs there to save us. Really? He couldn't have just reached down and swatted them like flies? 

This is a '50s movie and to be fair on it we have little cause to damn it for expressing a religiosity that its writers and cast probably felt sincerely. But it's still a travesty that such old mythology should rear its head over the work of a writer who had dispensed with it generations before.

1983 @ 40: PSYCHO II

After a black and white Universal logo animation and a replay of the shower scene from the original, we leap forward twenty or so years to a law court to witness the liberation of Norman Bates after decades in psychiatric care. This is not a joyous occasion for all. Vera Miles, from the original film, as the sister of the victim in the shower scene, goes all bammy, trying to overturn the decision. Norman gets driven back to the old motel which has become an off road oasis of sin under the management of the sleazy Toomey. Norman, known for his worst days locally, takes up a rehabilitation job at a local diner. There he meets and connects with Mary, the harassed young waiter. Mary's boyfriend dumps her and Norman offers her a room at his place. He has heaps of them, after all. She's understandably hesitant to take him up but her situation is bad. What could go wrong?

Making a sequel to an icon is a tough one. Do you just remake it with lots of goofy callbacks and updates or do you go harder and extend what you have? It's to the great credit to Psycho II's team that they chose the latter. The tortured Norman Bates so twisted by possession in the original has emerged through decades of care. He's edgy in the outside world and it takes him time to get into the swing and there's always the possibility that he'll just fall back into the same vortex of madness. That's the notion they went with and added a solid blurring of reality and fugue states to produce something not just new but felt necessary.

The sample scene from the original at the opening of this one is poignant here. It's both an acknowledgement and point of departure. There's no point in pretending that you're not treading on cinematically sacred ground because that's always going to be there. And this was 1983 when a rapidly popular home video market was making available a cosmos of retrograde cinema to audiences who didn't make it to the rep cinemas. By the time Psycho II came out the shower scene was long warped through pauses and replays on VHS tapes the world over. This chance to see it on a big screen before the next chapter was more than a "previously on..." moment, it was an invitation to more of Bates Motel.

It was blessed with fine casting, too, starting with the director. Australian Richard Franklin had already wowed with his Hitchcockian Patrick and Road Games thrillers and was a natural (Hitch-clone Brian de Palma had wisely demurred, it probably being a little too close to home). Franklin barnstorms the new material, keeping the ugly conspiracy plot close to the hazards it's meant to engender. 

Anthony Perkins returns as Norman but an older and more weathered man than the high strung bundle of nerves he was in the 1960 characterisation. His pathos is palpable and compels us to grind our teeth wanting his to get through and win against his new torments. Meg Tilly whose spacey presence had already illuminated screens in The Big Chill and would again in Agnes of God, brings an effortless vulnerability to Mary adding credibility to her difficult role. Vera Miles as Lila is all lifelong bitterness and shriek but that is serving the script she's given. Robert Loggia adds a gangster toughness to his Dr Raymond, wiping the table of the still tawdry cliches of psychiatrist characters (especially after Donald Pleasance had gleefully resurrected them in Halloween).

I avoided this film at the time, being a film student (on the theoretical rather than practical side) as I thought the original "text" was best left untampered or modified with '80s explicit screen gore. A fellow student argued much more wisely that Hitchcock would have got up from his laurel couch and done all the tampering and bloody violence that the culture would allow (at a time when the slasher sub-genre was only gathering strength). Yes, of course, he would have. Yes, he created all manner of invention as he circumvented the censors of his heyday but he was absolutely never above the call of popular cinema. Also, I don't know why the gouge-eyed corpse in The Birds didn't occur to me, it's still pretty strong. And after that I just never got around to it. Then the anniversary came up. 

Psycho II was a sequel that worked to be its own film while clearly in tribute to the greatness of its original when slasher sequels were almost to the last just more of the same with an advanced number in the title. It's odd to think of the concept of restraint here as Psycho II is intended to carry on the work of Psycho but restraint it is that in answering the question "what happened then?" it didn't say "what do you think?" but "it's complicated".

1958/1988: A TALE OF TWO BLOBS

1958. Two teenagers, Steve and Jane, are negotiating their way around mutual attraction and the horror constraints on sex in the early cold war when they see a massive red meteor crash in the distance. An old timer has also seen it and finds the landing site. He pokes at a small cratered ball which splits open. A red gelantinous mass emerges which climbs up his stick and takes possession of his hand. Steve and Jane have given up their search for the meteor and drive off for a sandwich at the local diner when they come across the old timer who is still alive but in agony from the alien splodge colonising his arm. They zoom him to the local doctor who has never seen anything like it. Steve leaves the patient with the doctor but is hounded by the local teen gang who can't quite work out if they're rock and rollers or beatniks but can settle on their place in car culture. After a tricky solution to get rid of them, Steve is stopped and lectured by the local good cop and let go. Steve was on a mission to check the area where the old guy lived to see if anyone else was affected. At his cabin they find his dog which they take with them while the beatrocker gang catch up and make nice and try to get everyone along to the local allnight sci-horror marathon at the local cinema. But the offworld jelly shot has its own agenda and, after absorbing more and more of the tasty humans around it, it heads into town for more.

1988. While the big highschool football game is on, young tearwaway Brian tries to jump the gap in an old bridge with his motorbike. He crashes and falls but picks himself up and says hi to an old timer who's collecting cans. That's the one who finds the meteor that crashes to earth and is himself found by two teenagers negotiating their way around etc etc. This time they take the afflicted man to the local hospital. Meanwhile, lots of other things until the big government saviour team arrives but reveals itself to have its own agenda. 

There is a commonly accepted wisdom that cinephiles seem to have agreed upon telepathically in the '90s that proposes the rule-proving exception that the only good remakes are The Thing, The Fly and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. All else travels back in the spectrum from good cover band versions to the great mass of half baked attempts at cashing in on old classics. The '80s Blob, after a second viewing, is its own case.

The original has plenty of appeal. Whether it's the apparition of a young Steve McQueen playing lead teen or the still impressive effects work that brings the titular jelly mold to life, The 1958 Blob deserves its classic status. I missed this on tv in the mid-'70s and my Nanna recounted it for me in her stern Russian accent. She imagined it (on her black and white tv set) as a kind of sick jade green which made every moment that it used to "consoomp" a human that much more vile. She was delighted to infect me with it but it wasn't for many years that I saw it first and in colour and saw that the blob was a thick Cold War red. Actually, at first it's clear but with every bloodfilled human it meets and greets it just gets bigger and redder. But really, that's just a fallback, the blob is pretty obviously a red menace. Its attack on the cinema is a master stroke. Not only is it done with the gleeful irony of doing for real what the things in the horror movies are only playing at, but the chance taken to suggest the insidiousness of the red monster invading minds through culture and it is of course the way anybody saw it on release. And then there is the solution which proves ingenious and carries the sense that the blob, like any idea, can't be killed but might be contained. The question mark that appears as the final shot fades was meant to carry a lot of weight. As I'll suggest in the soiler section ahead, this weight has changed in a way that the original film makers would never had suspected.

The problems with the film are largely those of pacing. It can take a lot of screen time to get something established by which time our anticipation for the next plot point is fuelled with impatience. There is one positive feature to this, however. As the sets give very little indication of the town surrounding them, the world building is down to the various relations between authority and trouble, youth and maturity are given more breathing space than a schlockier outing would afford. This adds a veneer of naturalism to the fantastic elements. Is the casting of Steve McQueen a problem? For some it will be, especially if they are better familiar with the roles of his heavily successful 1960s and '70s. He does seem like a forty year old with amnesia who has been coached in teenage mannerisms but his roundness, just enough vulnerability and screen magnetism break him out of the obvious age mismatch. This was nowhere near his first gig but it was his first movie lead and his restrained youthful aggression could easily trump the more histrionic outbursting bonanzas of his then more famous contemporaries. I wonder if his counterpart, Aneta Corsaut's Jane, was cast to alleviate the shock of the older McQueen pretending to be seventeen. While she is clearly younger than McQueen she also does look older than her supposed seventeen. 

I love the title sequence in this movie. A kind of hand drawn red spiral turns as the title appears in ominous red. While that happens we get one of the strangest pairings of music to movie in cinema history. No screaming Black Lagoon trumpets or storming orchestral chords for this bub. Nope, we get a kind of Latin cocktail hour spritz of one-two cha-cha-cha that is almost made from modernist  geometric wallpaper and little swords to use as olive picks. Then the goofiest stacked male vocal booms in with a goofier lyric warning us of the blob which "creeps and leaps and slides across the floor". Music by Burt Bacharach and lyric by his usual collaborator ..'s brother. At first experience it seems to drag the whole movie into Rocky and Bullwinkle territory but subsequent viewings give it more heft for its period perfection. It really doesn't need to announce itself as a moment of terror as the movie itself does a lot of that work. Strangely, it feels retro, a mix of carefully reconstructed oldie and a fab op-shop find.

The remake starts in with a montage that builds the town from the word go. Small place but grows with the snow season which is imminent. The metal font of the credits with the cyberpunk glow behind it yells '80s like nothing else can. The teens at the game actually look like teens (in the teen cinema decade that Spielberg built) and no one more than the Steve substitute Brian who is played by a Kevin Dillon who really does look about seventeen. 

The plot follows the original at least initially but veers off  with a decidedly different take on the day-saving government forces. In the '50s these sealed the deal and physically removed the threat. In the '80s of Reagan and the more terrifying thing that the Cold War had become, they are the stuff of nightmares. In scenes that might well have inspired the following decade's X-Files, the contamination-suited military personnel only look like they're there to help but the closure of the town is not for the town's protection. After a big climax we get another proto X-Files moment where a particular character who has gone from comic relief to a sleazy worry has a potentially apocalyptic last word.

The '80s remake undercuts the sense of order that the original must serve for tis resolution. The era of Glasnost had already dismantled the reds under the bed paranoia that older sci-fi could exploit (The Blob '58 was paired with the infiltration horror I Married a Monster from Outer Space). The Reagan years government various diced with scandals like Iran Contra, invasions of Grenada and Panama, and a palpably popular view of a government running away from control by congress. The teens aren't only bored and horny in this one, they're alert to the forces of control and how that can stamp on concepts like patriotism or humanism when the possibilities of weapons development are in the offing. The 1988 Blob is a fine remake. No, not a Fly or Body Snatchers, but a strong response to its own time through a revisit to a concept of an all consuming force. If you come across it (especially, if you are familiar with the original) give it a burl.

SPOILER SECTION

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The original movie ended with the discovery that the blob could be immobilised with cold and was subdued with CO2 fire extinguishers. This involved a local school teacher bursting out of his anti-youth fuddiness as he broke into his own school building to get at more extinguishers which drew a massive cheer from all the teens around him.

The military airlift the frozen blob to the Arctic where it will stay neutralised. One character comments: "as long as the Arctic stays cold." As we see the blob lowered to the icy wasteland we are confronted with a screen filling question mark. Did that refer to nuclear weapons at the time? These days it might only refer to the daily news.

The 1988 remake reveals that the blob emerged from a U.S. military satellite and is being investigated by the military as a possible mass weapon. The town is cordoned off as an experiment, not just for quarrantine. The avuncular Dr. Meddows is prepared to be a mass murderer.

The final image in the 1998 version is of the priest preparing for the Apocaylpse as he holds a jar with a piece of the blob writhing inside. It's not just the soldiers that this film wants to warn you about.