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.

LORD OF THE FLIES @ 60

A grainy photo montage of  life and ritual at a rich English public school. Images of cold war armaments trickle in until they overtake the others. Finally we see a jet drifting beside an island in the Pacific. Ralph, still in school uniform, wakes in the jungle and soon meets Piggy who makes the immediate mistake of revealing that tease name so that every character and audience member forgets the real name he gave seconds before. More kids come out of the jungle and they are joined by a choir, still in their cassocks, marching like cadets along the beach and singing a Kyrie. Their leader is Jack whose cheerful aggression puts him in a race for the overall leadership. The vote, when taken, has the non choral kids clearly wary of Jack's enthusiasm for power and results in the moderate Ralph taking command.

Quickly, the group is dispatched to get bearings, gather firewood and scout for food. Soon they have a bonfire and victuals and are perfect proof of what the U.K. was still promoting as the spirit of the Empire. But William Golding's source novel had other ideas. He wanted to write a more realistic version of The Coral Island where a similar group of castaway kids reinvent civilisation through religion. With the horrors of World War II all too fresh, Golding could not let such a fantasy pass without comment and he wrote one of the definitive what-ifs about the fragility of civilisation. The new Cold War carried a promise of mass annihilation at the hands of paranoid superpowers. If that happened, Albert Einstein mused, the next war would be fought with sticks and stones. Lord of the Flies is that in microcosm.

Theatrical wunderkind Peter Brook had the stuff of Lord of the Flies in his genes. He took to the ritual of order and its breakdown through pursuit of personal power organically. When the parliamentary way of life is pricked beyond effectuality by Jack's persistent subversions, the face paint and spears come out as though they had always been there. Brooks kept his mostly untrained cast of children speak in spare improvisation which has an unnervingly realistic effect. Jack's jingoistic lines about being English and able to do anything quite rapidly degenerate into "Kill the pig!" and the chant is taken up like a "sieg heil" by everyone who can scream it. Except for Ralph and Piggy and the more vulnerable who end up fleeing ahead of the mob.

As all that happens we have plenty of time to contemplate the influence of religion and how it can be appropriated for mass control well beyond its tenets. The beastie (really a parachute attached to a dead pilot) is shown as a credible horror by Brooks, billowing over the edge of a cliff as the boys look on. Its use as a control instrument is quickly found by Jack and slots into the paranoia he needs his tribe to feel. It's Piggy who discovers the truth of it but he is long beyond credibility by the power and Ralph is soon to follow. Brooks insists that this be shown happening in available light by day and a night so black it needs the violence of torchlight. For every awkwardly stumbled line of the improvising kids or stray glances at the heart of the lens, there is so much atmosphere on screen that jungle or beach it increasingly feels breathless and claustrophobic.

Lord of the Flies remains a potent statement. It is an adaptation that feels as finely wrought as the novel it is drawn from. Golding's prose is sunlit and easily mistaken for naïve. See also Brooks's insistent naturalism. Both seduce and neither bears the misconstruction for long as we witness in horror. And if we do see this one again we should have questions for ourselves that we allow self avowed nazis to parade with their saluting arms straightened and their faces wrapped in masks alongside bizarre crowds with the freedom to roar about their lack of freedom. If a parachute can be turned into a monster by those who will not accept it as a parachute despite evidence then a public health issue can be mangled into a political one. And so it went. It's a pity we don't have prime time movies on tv anymore because we could have done with a screening of this once a week for the past three years.

THE BOSTON STRANGLER @ 55 (Some minimal spoilers)

A series of sexually complicated murders in Boston are turning from shocking to creepy as it becomes clear that the elderly women victims have been letting the perp in voluntarily. Lead after lead fails until a special state level task force is created for this crime alone. Then we meet the guy. This is not a whodunnit.

Richard Fleischer's film initially presents itself as a police procedural, with deft use of split screen to give the narrative the feel of an examination. This never gets to the kind of documentary approach that William Friedkin was to use in The French Connection only three years later but is used so solidly and boldly that it has the feel of muscular reportage. When it shows different perspectives (either side of a door, say) that converge it is the pure climax building that Brian de Palma would perfect in his own split screen work.

I begin with something fairly technical as this is a film that makes a lot of how it was made. Fleischer's film takes a stance on the psychological origins of the criminality of Albert  DeSalvo. It's one of many that have been proposed but its compulsion towards the film's fictive approach demanded a toughness in the telling and the pioneering split screen technique for time-saving and heightened tension claw back what might have let it down as a fanciful or sensationalist account. By the time we get to the tour de force that is the final confession we are ready for the interrogator to appear in DeSalvo's flashbacks as he poses questions and to return increasingly to the infinite white of the interrogation room in which DeSalvo is increasingly alienated and laid bare until only the truth will feel right. It's not an approach that survives the decades intact. Psychology is more prey to faddism than any other medical-related discipline and what we are witnessing here is a '60s version beefed up for the movies. 

There are myriad other points of datedness like the treatment of the gay community and slurs used (by cops, apart from anyone else). For balance, the gay suspect is given depth and takes some of the grittiness of the rest of the character range in service of the dialogue. While he is accompanied by a pair of campy characters they appear in their element rather than smeared with othering sleaze. He himself is not remotely camp. Thinking of it just now, I'd say that the sleaze and the othering is less on show here than it is in William Friedkin's much later Cruising where it is used to build a kind of hell dimension.

This brings us to the character of DeSalvo himself and the casting considered daring at the time. Many rising stars were considered for the role of the infamous figure but the one locked in was the blue-eyed former pretty boy glamour star Tony Curtis. Curtis hadn't just done fluff to that point (Sweet Smell of Success alone will cure that impression) but for him to step into such reviled shoes was a hazard. From his first scene, about halfway through the timeline, he quashes every fear along those lines. He's a good dad, watching the funeral of Bostonian JFK on tv while his wife cooks dinner and is patient with his young daughter's questions. A sudden compulsion gets him to his feet and he mentions a check he needs to do on a furnace he was repairing. From that point, we see the projected other, the calculating, manipulative and stone faced killer whose eyelids close in pleasure as he headlocks one of his victims. Some Like it Hot, this ain't.

From this point the procedural tone changes into a psychological study with the subject moving into further crimes and his nominated nemesis, the head of the task force and the increasing presence of the psychiatrist called in for consultation. When these converge the screen doesn't just split to save time it swings between the comforting reality of the Henry Fonda-controlled world of law and order and DeSalvo's condition. A scene in which DeSalvo sees his wife as a distant blur when she is only about a metre away is still profoundly disturbing. Then we head to the inescapable chaos of the finale which, with just enough control at the helm, would feel like the kind of psychedelic experiences that the culture was rich with if it weren't so deeply based in hard and weird violence.

The Boston Strangler is not the first serial killer movie. It's not even the first one about the Boston Strangler. But it is a fascinating precursor of the theme that turned into its own genre in the 1990s. Serial killer is a '70s term that was formed from a number of investigations by the FBI. It entered popular parlance with infamous figures like Son of Sam or Ted Bundy. Through the '80s the serial killer was presented as a true crime boogeyman who probably lived on your block and you wouldn't know it until his garotte was squeezing at your throat. The sense of the unstoppable, nihilistic threat gained traction until the movies started up, the highest profile of which at the start of the '90s was Silence of the Lambs. 

While I personally regard this film as a glossy exploitation flick that doesn't mind othering sexual diversity, I'll have to own its influence. This is where the rule book of the genre was presented in Oscar winning glitz and for the next ten years ruled its corner of crime/horror cinema. You had a bad guy who was a genius but beyond redemption whose crimes or commentary on those of others was expert and unsettling. And you got an arms race of kills of ever more incredibly engineered complexity. And you got othering, lots and lots and lots of othering. As the perps became more repulsively bizarre in order to outdo the last movie an element of sleaze rises whereby audiences are invited to cheer along as privileged young women or other hoity toity victims were tortured and killed as they surely deserved to be before the FBI breaks in and plugs the monster at which they could all switch back and feel the warmth of law and order. With few exceptions serial killer movies were exploitation films. Even Seven, which I admire, is not above the cliches (but if you can locate the great NZ title The Ugly you're in for a fine iconoclastic time as all of those cliches are deconstructed). 

If there is sleaze in The Boston Strangler it is mild by comparison with what was to come. Even the depths of the '80s slasher craze (which show spree rather than serial killing) was no match for dreck like Kiss the Girls or The Bone Collector. And by the time of 2000s absurd The Cell (a kind of psychiatric Fantastic Voyage) there was really nothing left to do but striking visuals. The Boston Strangler provided some of those itself but they were, as discussed, as pragmatic as stylish. 

It pays its own tribute to exploitation but affords so little viewer pleasure to the crimes. It engendered nothing like the craze that Silence of the Lambs did, most serial murder titles like The Zodiac killings might have been made from similar cloth to Strangler but they were made for the drive-in and the grind house, having none of the industry power of the Fleischer film. Was this just for lack of Oscars? Silence of the Lambs hogged them in its year, after all, and rendered its massive sleaze respectable. It's not as though the general public only got a taste for nasty crime stories. 

While I will admit this is not the cause, one thing stopped me while watching last night and it is something I never saw until Simon Reynolds' The Ugly. DeSalvo catches sight of himself in a mirror mid-assault and for a moment he can't look away. It ties in with the film's pop-psychiatry pretensions but it nevertheless holds its own power and it reminded me of something. In the midst of my own fascination with serial killers (yes, in the '90s and I saw as many of the movies as I could) I read an interview with Danny Rolling who said that after the first time, from that point on he only saw a stranger when he looked in the mirror. In the Boston Strangler it's a moment wherein the strength of the execution transcends the intention to reveal a moment of horror that everyone in every seat in every cinema that showed it recognised. 

1983 @ 40: CHRISTINE

Late '50s Detroit. The assembly line of Plymouth Furies is grinding ahead in all the old colours like Sonic Blue and Seafoam Green. When a Fiesta Red one comes up, it causes an industrial accident. At the end of the day one of the line workers indulges himself with a moment in the driver's seat of that one. One social faux pas later and that dirty blues Bad to the Bone comes true. This 'mobile is alive and particular about who drives with her.

It's the end of the '70s and young bottle specs nerd Arnie is getting bullied at school and bullied at home by his parents. His one friend, one of those nicer sporty alphas that happen, tries to get him out into the world. One day they're driving home and Arnie stops the car. He's seen the wreck of the car we met in the prologue, called Christine after the young family who had her first all died in their own way while on board. But it starts and the grizzled old timer who sells it to him seems glad to see the back of it.

Chrstine likes Arnie plenty, and as he restores her at a local garage, he finds there's a long way she'll go to protect him and serve his interests. Also, he transforms in about a week from awkward nerd to cool young rocker. This gets him the attention of the bad guy who bullied him earlier, whose gang show up to the garage and trash Christine in a frenzied assault. Seems like an act of war, to me.

There is signature synthesised scoring and an overall craft on show but this never feels like a John Carpenter film. Fresh from the extraordinary streak from Halloween to The Thing, Carpenter had forged an instantly recognisable style of lean and mean narrative characters that swing from cartoonish action figures to people with depth and homebaked music that any filmmaker would happily add to a film. But Christine feels like a job rather than a chance to tackle a Stephen King story and have the high box office potential after The Thing had bombed (before it's real life on home video began, of course). 

And this is a very King story with staple bullies, magic and Americana coming out of its ears. At first, when you understand this and know the context, you might make the obvious comparison with David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone, also dominated by its author's influence with a sparse film auteur's voice left in the mix. Both films work a treat, whoever's work they resemble, but I wonder if they'd swapped assignments would they have made films closer to their output. The scene that suggests this more than any is when Christine, battered and barely alive, rejuvenates herself in a show of dazzling practical effects work. Cronenberg was the car guy, after all (his other forgotten movie is Fast Company). But then, nah, both films form that blindspot that every director has at the beginning of their career when choices are made for career over their supposed lifelong vision. I'll never judge any artist who opts for a bread and butter project when that's the income and exposure they can use. Then again, do we rate Guillermo Del Toro by Blade II or Pan's Labyrinth?

One of the aspects of this film that always suggest how jobbing it is is the transformation of Arnie. The speed and profundity of his galloping confidence and arrogance are so marked that the idea is that this metamorphosis is driven by the supernatural force of Christine herself. When Arnie is examining the wreckage left by the gang he notes the movement in the car and, through his connection, takes an audience's position before saying: "Show me." This sets off the self reconstruction at the centre of the effects in this effects dependent film but also forms a point of no return. That might well be when he remember how little cost or struggle there was in Arnie's character change. Is this Carpenter saying, "hell, let's just get him alpha" and rely on some scenes of vestigial puerility to mark depth. The rest of it is pretty much mechanical in both a figurative and physical sense.

Well, there's a lot going on here to satisfy the quest for theme for those who will. There's the outright entertainment value of it that makes its screentime fly by. And it you didn't know it was John Carpenter making it while still in the first brilliant phase of this career you wouldn't need to. I suppose I just miss the mix of crafty cinema made within genre by a crafty cinephile who at his best (which is a long rap sheet) could always add originality. Is this film another proof of the Stephen King curse (that he kills auteurism)? The Shining alone challenges that but, then, that was Kubrick. There's too much variation in the time since, anyway. It's much more like a sharp artist clocking in. And when it's a still young John Carpenter doing that I can think of a queue as long as a city block that wouldn't show up with this kind of energy.

Review: THE BOOGEYMAN

A prologue that declares a broken violence limit gives way to a story about a family struggling with grief after the loss of the mother in an accident. Dad's a therapist working from home, trying to ease his way through to peace through slog. His teenage daughter Sadie is finding it hard to tell between confusion and anger. Her under ten sister Sawyer seems the best able to get through the times. Then a man without an appointment walks in for a therapy session, talks of bizarre dangers which have led to his children's death. Some thing disastrously bad happens and there is a force unleashed in the house of dark malevolence in every shadow. Remember little Sawyer? She's the one who sees it and it's soon apparent that the vulnerable and receptive are victims in waiting. Dark times.

At first sight of the trailer for this one and then knowing it was a Stephen King adaptation, I put it into a candidate in an indifferent field as a candidate for a cinema outing. Then I learned it was directed by Rob Savage. Who? Well, he wrote and directed one of the most successful debuts any young filmmaker could have and got the kind of attention usually confined to daydreams. His film Host debuted on the horror streamer Shudder in 2020. It was a supernatural tale told through a zoom meeting during lockdown. It wasn't just an effective piece, it was carved out of the times themselves and caught a mass audience without a syllable of its production team's reputation. Everyone who was already sick of screen life as the only life, bumping elbows instead of hugging, felt seen and heard. His next, Dashcam,  took the found footage concept further by being a kind of YouTube real time horror and, though not as well seen, found an audience that could make it past the intentional toxicity of his protagonist (a vile and shitmouthed influencer). Rob Savage has the audience aim of a sniper. So, what would he do with a mainstream budget and a Stephen King source?

Mostly, he does his job. So, while there are a few too many jump scares, I'll admit they are well earned and suspenseful (as opposed to almost any in the Conjureverse). There is the social pecking order at the school but there's a depth given to its players that King adaptations seldom allow. There is a monster which does look like the manifestation of a child's drawing but its revelation is sparing until the necessary reveal in the third act. This is the work of someone whose success depended on being unconventional but astute working within a long formulated genre (Stephen Kingism) willing to prod the boundaries. Those boundaries are tough and push back but there's a clear pint or two of fight in the execution here.

Mostly, and this is the case so far with Savage, it's performance that draws us in. Sophie Thatcher brings us a teenage Sadie who is failing to understand where she is in relation to the suddenness of her mother's departure. The few moments of warmth we see her take are the result of work that feels observational and realistic. As she will be the main agent between the reality of fantasy of her little sister's terror and the investigation into how to define and perhaps defeat the monster, we need her rock solid. The beauty of the performance is that this is seriously uncertain and the raising of the stakes is palpable.

So, The Boogeyman resembles the more conventional mainstream horror of Smile or Evil Dead Rise rather than the riskier and richer Bodies Bodies Bodies or Barbarian but it earns points by doing that conventional job with more finesse than it needs to. While I might not rate it among the highest of films, generic or not, this year (and boy does it already have stiff competition) I'll recall it as a pleasing horror outing that pushed, if only slightly, at the edges of its job description. I can easily say much worse of most of what I see in the genre.