Three Norwegian film students secretly follow a man into the woods, believing him to be a bear poacher who they expect to catch in the act and to expose. As they search the dark forest, flashes and roars emanate from behind a hill and the man they’ve stalked runs down screaming, “Trolls!” Disbelieving at first, they soon find that his frenzied warning is genuine and begin a trek through the north of Norway, following the government-contracted trollhunter (Otto Jespersen) as he puts down dangerous trolls and watching the government’s haphazard attempts to hide the truth from the public.
Trollhunter (2010), written and directed by André Øvredal, is a docu-style horror fantasy replete with dry Scandinavian humor and some beautifully rendered creature effects. Trolls, we learn, come in all varieties and sizes, and a lot of the fun derives from seeing their multitude of forms. They feed mostly on rocks and coal but sometimes kill animals and humans when they stray too far from their protected habitats. Ultraviolet light is fatal to them – the old ones turn to stone while the young ones explode. Also, they can smell the blood of Christians, making the majority-godless Norwegians safer as a result. Some of the lore is drawn from myth, and some the filmmakers make up, but there are peppered throughout allusions to troll stories like the Norwegian fairytale “Three Billy Goats Gruff” which involves a particularly humorous encounter. If this sounds fun to the present reader, this movie is for you.
The characters drive through gorgeous landscapes, the camera revealing Scandinavia’s natural beauty as waterfalls cascade like ribbons down vibrantly green hills. The script touches upon themes of environmentalism as we hear radio stories about climate change or the trollhunter looks back gloomily at his record of extermination in the name of human greed and profit. Some subjects are more national in nature, such as the continuous controversy of Norwegians not wanting huge wire towers going through their lands. However, the film is not heavy-handed in its messages and instead focuses on the adventurous aspects of the story.
Trollhunter is a fun ride that sparks the imagination and brings out the inner child of the viewer. Despite one’s previous inclinations, you’ll find your mind occupied by bulbous-nosed trolls for days after.
After the success of 1996’s Scream, horror became self-referential. The trend affected many films in the immediate years that followed, such as 2000’s Jason X, where franchises and the genre as whole showed greater self-awareness. Hell, in 1999 even Troma went “meta”. Terror Firmer is filled with references to the production company’s history and nods to its previous films. Lloyd Kaufman, Troma’s co-founder and the film’s director, plays a parody of himself as a blind filmmaker trying to make a new Toxic Avenger movie while a killer picks off people associated with the production. The film is written by James Gunn and loosely based upon Kaufman’s own 1998 autobiography, All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger.
Terror Firmer is balls-out insane, even by the standards of a company like Troma which prides itself on tasteless humor and exploitation. It follows the manic formula of Airplane! (1980), having a joke every three seconds because if one joke fails you can quickly move on to the next one. It throws everything on the screen hoping enough will eventually stick, and I’m not just talking about the copious amounts of gore. Just as Airplane! is a parody of the 1970s disaster genre, Terror Firmer is in many ways a parody of the production company’s already satirically exaggerated filmography. Troma die-hards will find plenty of “Easter eggs” with which to keep busy as the film is Troma’s love letter to itself – the equivalent of cinematic masturbation.
Terror Firmer is probably the most purely Troma film, completely unfettered. It is replete with over-the-top, unconvincing but no less disgusting, gore, gratuitous nudity, jokes revolving around bodily fluids, and juvenile jokes meant to offend as many people as possible. It’s what you come to Troma for, and here Kaufman gives it to you in spades. However, all its excess reveals that Troma is at its best when it’s reined in just a little, more in style than in substance. The jokes run too long (which is itself sometimes the joke) and a lot of the immature humor falls flat. The hermaphrodite jokes in particular already feel tiresomely outdated.
I wish I had seen this film when it first came out, around the time I would have been graduating high school. I would have been at the point in my life when I would have best appreciated the film’s humor and antics, for my friends and I were busy making our own purposefully terrible Troma-esque movies. I’m not claiming that maturity has ruined me for Kaufman’s exploitative humor, as I remain a fan of both The Toxic Avenger (1984) and Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006), I just think that the satire, gags, and overall pacing work better in those films than in this one – in fact, as I’ve grown older I’ve come to value absurdist humor more, because the more we conform to the realities of adult life the more difficult it becomes to tap into that ridiculous creativity that came so easily in adolescence. For keeping that alive, I will always salute Lloyd Kaufman.
Throughout much of Terror Firmer I was bored or impatient for a tired joke to move on, but much of that was saved by the last act. Will Keenan, who played Tromeo in 1996’s Tromeo and Juliet, commits to his role with an admirable gusto, channeling an emotionally broken Dr. Frank N. Furter, adding a dedication to character in a film where bad acting is the norm. Keenan, in my opinion, makes what came before worth it retrospectively. Nevertheless, I can always support Troma’s methods, summed up by one of the film’s characters: “Sometimes pissing people off is the only way to get them to look at shit.” While Kaufman doesn’t always embrace subtlety, he undoubtedly understands art.
Movie Review – The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920)
While filming The Student of Prague (1913), Paul Wegener heard the 16th century legend of Rabbi Loew, who tradition says saved the Jews of Prague from persecution by creating a Golem – a clay statue infused with life – to protect them. Wegener became captivated by the story and made a film version inspired by it in 1915 called The Golem, and then in 1917 The Golem and the Dancing Girl, considered the first film sequel (if one does not count serials). Wegener was dissatisfied with the first film, which was set in a modern Germany in which a Golem is found and raised by an antiques dealer and goes on to commit murders before falling to its own demise from a tower, and also with the sequel which was more of a comical take on the legend. Unfortunately, both movies are lost, though a few minutes of footage from the first remain and serve to confirm Wegener’s feelings about it. Nevertheless, his 1915 performance appears to have affected viewers much in the way Boris Karloff would do sixteen years later. As one reviewer, Arnold Zweig, writes in a contemporary issue of the theater magazine Die Schaubühne, “What makes the film worth discussing is only Wegener’s embodiment of the Golem… In lyrical passages Wegener demonstrates possibilities of the film which transcend those of the theatre” (as quoted by S.S. Prawer in Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror).
The Golem (1915)
In his 1916 lecture Wegener described his inspiration for the creature and what his first Golem film meant for his vision of the future of cinema:
“I got the idea for my Golem from the mysterious clay figure brought to life by the Rabbi Loew, according to the legend of the Prague ghetto, and with this film I went further [than The Student of Prague] into the domain of pure cinema. Everything depends on the image, on a certain vagueness of outline where the fantastic world of the past meets the world of today. I realized that the photographic technique was going to determine the destiny of the cinema. Light and darkness in the cinema play the same role as rhythm and cadence in music.”
In 1920 Wegener again returned to the legend, rounding out his horror trilogy (another first), with The Golem: How He Came into the World. As the title implies, this story establishes the origins of the creature, making it perhaps the first prequel, as well. In it Rabbi Loew reads danger in the stars for the Jews and soon he’s informed that the Christian Emperor has decreed that the Jews must be expelled from Prague. Loew creates a Golem, possessed by a demon, to help his people and brings it to the emperor’s court where he has been called to entertain, not so much to intimidate as to astound. As Loew shows them magical images of the Jewish patriarchs the court laughs and the palace begins to crumble, but the Golem is instructed by Loew to save them and does so, securing the promised safety of the Jewish people by the emperor, at least for the time being. The Rabbi returns to tell the good news, however, the Golem begins acting odd and Loew soon learns that the Golem is destined to turn on its creator and so decides to deactivate it by removing a star, the source of the Golem’s power, from its chest. However, another plot involving an illicit affair collides and the Golem is reactivated, causing havoc in the ghetto.
The Golem is a prime example of German Romantic cinema, though it’s often mistakenly classified as Expressionist. As Steve Haberman writes in Silent Screams: The History of the Silent Horror Film:
“Expressionism and Romanticism have much in common. Both emphasize emotion over intellect, and both conjure dreamscapes of the mind over objective reality. But Expressionism responds with despair over the lust, violence and hate of society, especially following the horrors of World War I. In cinema, this results, of course, in distorted sets and sharp, tortured camera angles, all lit with chiaroscuro shadows” (pg. 52).
The Golem is Romantic in nature because, though it is still stylized, it is meant to be a believable world, unlike the nightmarish landscapes of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari which resemble shards of broken glass. Expressionism seeks to evoke negative reactions from its audience – to shock and disturb them – while Romanticism seeks the general acceptance of its viewer, even if certain aspects of the film are exaggerated for artistic effect. Indeed, though Caligari deserves credit for influencing the genre to immeasurable degrees, it remains that the majority of silent German horror films which followed took their cues mainly from Wegener’s work.
Rather than embracing Expressionism, Wegener was most influenced, as were most of his fellow German filmmakers, by the experimental stage director Max Reinhardt. Reinhardt was a pioneer in the use of lighting on stage to evoke atmosphere and to signify scene changes, making the most of limited budgets and churning out productions at near lightning speed. Many of Reinhardt’s most successful innovations would be lovingly imitated by German silent film directors and production designers. The production designer which Wegener chose for The Golem was the revered architect Hans Poelzig, who in his lectures proclaimed that, “The effect of architecture is magical”. When Poelzig conjured images such as magic, he wasn’t just speaking figuratively. He was a student of the occult and an adherent of mysticism, hosted séances in his home for his medium daughter. In his notebook he wrote: “Film… the magic form… the form of magic… Devil’s Mass”. During his time working on The Golem he mentored a teenaged Edgar Ulmer who would go on to direct 1934’s The Black Cat, and Ulmer showed his appreciation by naming Karloff’s villainous character (who was also an architect and Satanic high priest) “Hjalmar Poelzig” in his honor. When Poelzig died in 1936 Wegener, in his eulogy, called him a “gothic mystic” (Haberman, pg. 45).
What Poelzig designed was indeed impressive. It did not resemble reality but still felt real and created a world unto itself. As Wegener boasted proudly in an interview, “It is not Prague that my friend, the architect Poelzig, has built. Not Prague and not any other city. Rather, it is a city-poem, a dream, an architectural paraphrase on the theme ‘Golem.’ These alleys and plazas are not intended to resemble reality; they create an atmosphere in which the Golem breathes” (Haberman, pg.45). The architecture of the Jewish ghetto of which Wegener speaks is made of leaning lines, as though the buildings have grown organically from the soil, like hovels, or have been crafted from clay like the creature. Many of the set pieces are massive and triangular, and I wonder if this was meant to evoke the Star of David which is featured heavily in the film.
The Golem’s birth scene is imaginative and memorable, and the difficulty of pulling off such effects at that time, which had to be accomplished in camera, is no doubt underappreciated by most modern viewers. The unblinking performance of Wegener, cinema’s first horror icon, as the Golem effectively evokes menace and inhumanity. His vision for the Golem had an undeniable influence upon James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), and many scenes here clearly inspired those in that later film. Unlike Karloff’s monster, the Golem is at first far less sympathetic, especially as it drags a young woman around by her long pigtails as though she were a plaything that has captured its curiosity. However, like Karloff’s monster, the Golem shows eventual signs of yearning for humanity, which ultimately proves its undoing.
All of this is filmed with the terrific lighting and cinematography of Karl Freund, a master of his craft, who would go on to film Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), which many consider to be a defining masterwork of the silent era. In 1929 Freund immigrated to the United States and in 1931 he filmed Dracula for Tod Browning. However, the scheduling was so chaotic that Browning was sometimes absent, and therefore many consider Freund to be an uncredited co-director (ironically, there’s little cinematography to appreciate in that film). The following year Freund would sit in the director’s chair to helm The Mummy (1932), starring Boris Karloff, and then again in 1935 for Mad Love, starring Peter Lorre. In 1937 he would briefly return to Germany to fetch his daughter as the Nazi pogroms began to protrude their claws. His ex-wife would be interred in Ravensbruck concentration camp during the war. (As an odd addendum to his career, given his horror credentials, Freund would be hugely influential in television as the cinematographer for I Love Lucy, designing the “flat lighting” system which eliminated shadows and allowed cameras to be moved between shots but the lighting to remain the same. It’s still the standard for TV sitcoms.)
The Golem was well-received upon its release, and when it arrived in the U.S. in 1921 American critics were once again forced to concede the superiority of the German offerings at that moment in time. A review from The New York Times sums up the sentiment:
“The black magic of the Middle Ages, sorcery, astrology and all of the superstitious realities of people so legendary in appearance and manners that the unnatural seems natural among them have been brought to screen… in The Golem, the last motion picture to come from the explorative innovators of Germany. The photoplay gives the impression of some fabulous old tale of strange people in a strange world, fascinating, exciting to the imagination and yet so unfamiliar in all of its aspects that it almost seems remote, elusive even, when one would like to get closer to its meaning… This power is derived mainly from a combination of exceptional acting and the most expressive settings yet seen in this country” (Haberman, pg. 47).
All of this is well and good and entirely deserving of praise, however, one cannot discuss The Golem, given its subject matter and the time and place in which it was made, without addressing the subject of anti-Semitism. Is the film anti-Semitic? Wegener would go on to become the actor of the state for Nazi Germany, making many propaganda films, so one might assume the answer is an obvious affirmative. The Jews in the film are depicted as the exotic “other” who dabble in black arts, and some stereotypes certainly make themselves shown, such as the camera locked onto the hands of a bribed Jewish gate-keeper, eagerly taking the silver coins being offered to him. Wegener clearly had no real understanding of Jewish religion, as the symbols and rituals which are shown have nothing to do with actual Judaism. The Jews in this film have about as much in common with real Jews as the “Injuns” of classic Western cinema have with real Native Americans. They’re stage Jews, meant to reflect the existing notions of the viewer. Furthermore, is the Golem meant to be evidence that Jews can only make flawed works of art? Perhaps.
Nevertheless, there’s more nuance here for which Wegener deserves credit. The Jews here are seen as the sympathetic party. We’re meant to feel their plight as they suffer in poverty. Their very safety is at the whim of a frivolous Christian emperor. Loew is well-intentioned and, though flawed, not at all a villain. He simply wants the best for his people. The Christians, on the other hand, are entirely depicted as self-centered, arrogant, and vain. When the Christian women of the court see the Golem, they are clearly sizing him up, if you catch my meaning. The anti-Semitism in the film is more by circumstance and perhaps Wegener’s own limited understanding than in anything intentional.
To further focus on Wegener and his intentions, and rather than present only the opinions only of this author – a white male American humanist of Christian upbringing – I offer a quote from a website offering rabbinic commentary on films called “Rabbi at the Movies”. It states, “Paul Wegener was no Nazi. He was an actor and a pacifist, interested only in telling his stories… [The film is] worth studying by the student of anti-Semitism, precisely because Wegener had no axe to grind: he was simply telling a good story, using images that he thought would captivate. What those images reveal about the hearts of his audience, however, may be truly chilling.”
Additionally, S.S. Prawer, whose family was among the last to flee the Nazis in 1939, has said this about the subject of the anti-Semitism of this era’s German cinema, and may very well help to support the claims above:
“Each age, each nation, incarnates the uncanny in a different way. It is fed by, and may be made to nourish, popular prejudices: sinister monks and nuns invade the Gothic novel in the wake of the Gordon Riots, sinister scientists appear in greater and greater numbers in the course of the nineteenth century, and the use made of grotesque Jewish figures in the consciously uncanny works of such writers as Meyrink, Ewers, Panizza, and Strobl should have given the wise food for thought.
The same might be said of the use of actors with pronounced Jewish features, or made up to simulate such features, in German films made during the Weimar Republic. There was rarely any conscious anti-Semitic intent in this… [Most often just copying what they saw] the film-makers were usually oblivious of what they were doing; but the subliminal influence of their work was none the less powerful for that” (Caligari’s Children, pg. 132).
I’ve been unable thus far to substantiate the claims, but I’ve read that Wegener secretly hid people from the Nazis, financed resistance groups, and scrawled anti-Hitler speech on walls. After the war he indeed helped to rebuild Berlin’s art scene. It’s of course difficult to know just what Wegener thought as he made The Golem, but it appears to me that he was perhaps accidently anti-Semitic in certain aspects of his storytelling, but considering what the film could have been it is remarkably and undeniably on the Jews’ side, perhaps for the last time in Germany until the fall of the Third Reich.
2010’s Monsters is a sci-fi horror filmed on a micro-budget of less than $500,000. Director Gareth Edwards shot the film guerilla-style on location in Central America and Texas with a small crew consisting of himself, the two main actors (Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able), a sound operator, a line producer, a Mexican fixer, and a driver for their van. Edwards did not write a script or storyboard for the film and instead allowed the actors to carry much of the dialogue and narrative, being sure to hit certain important marks in the story. The extras in the film were locals who happened to be around and who agreed to be filmed. Shot in three weeks with digital cameras, Edwards then edited and created the special effects himself on a laptop.
Despite its humble origins, Monsters feels much grander than it actually is. This is largely accomplished by concentrating the film on the romantic tension of its two protagonists who trek across landscapes both depressing and beautiful, and by only showing the monsters in rare but gracefully rendered and effective moments. Edwards has created creatures – really alien life seeded here by a returning probe – that appear to be a cross between the monsters from The Mist (2007) and something reminiscent of Cthulhu, and he manages to create awe each time they appear, including one scene towards the end that will remind any Trekker of “Encounter at Farpoint” (1987).
The creatures roam an area of northern Mexico called “the infected zone” which our two American characters have to cross to get home. This of course invites viewers to read into the film commentary on immigration, American exceptionalism, and even American interference as the locals tell our characters that American fighter planes agitate the creatures. Despite what may very well be valid readings, Edwards has maintained that any of these themes are unintentional.
Monsters succeeds whenever the creatures are present, and the landscape is reason enough for viewers to keep their eyes on the screen. However, the central love story is generally weak. Though McNairy and Able were a real life couple at the time and would eventually marry, the film doesn’t sell their story beyond some sexual tension. McNairy’s character is more developed than Able’s, but only barely. The actors’ performances are fine, but the narrative does nothing to invest the audience into their budding relationship.
Monsters is a quiet creature feature, especially when compared to Edwards’s next outing, 2014’s Godzilla. In that film the monsters were awesome but the humans around them were flat and uninteresting, and Monsters at least manages to make the peripheral characters feel real and interesting. Monsters is a better film and well worth the time of people who appreciate the lengths filmmaking can reach when so few resources are at the filmmaker’s disposal.
The Road (2011) is a Filipino psychological horror directed by Yam Laranas. It is a non-sequential ghost story which concerns a number of deaths along a remote road, taking the viewer from 2008 to 1998 and finally to 1988, essentially telling a Norman Bates-style tale in reverse. This makes for some interesting storytelling techniques, such as revealing the origins of ghosts as the film goes on, and it succeeds in displaying some nice cinematography and some genuinely creepy imagery.
Unfortunately, whatever dread is conjured is regularly dispelled by awkward editing, two-dimensional characters, and a chronology that can become confusing. This isn’t helped by failure of basic math, for in the opening scenes, which take place in 2008, we learn of a twelve-year-old cold case file of two girls who went missing in 1998. Read that last sentence again – those years are correct, there isn’t a typo. Suspense is lost as the film continues, and is lost entirely in a highly improbable twist ending that viewers will not only see coming, but will be left scratching their heads at just how they’re supposed to swallow what the filmmaker tried feeding them.
The Road is a film with great elements that never coalesce into a satisfying whole. Sure, the scenery is nice, but the potholes make for a rough ride.
2012’s comedy-horror Grabbers is, I believe, Ireland’s first ever monster movie. Directed by Jon Wright and written by Kevin Lehane, the film centers around an alcoholic cop and his new workaholic partner as the two battle alien sea creatures while, as is the way with such movies, recognizing a romance budding between them. They learn that the largely aquatic monsters, who need only water and blood to survive, are poisoned by the toxicity of alcohol in the blood-stream. They thus devise a plan to get the town shitfaced in a pub in order to survive a rain-drenched stormy night. Much of the comedy, naturally, revolves around the protagonists trying to function and defend themselves while fighting through the copious amounts of booze they’ve ingested.
Grabbers showcases stunning cinematography, capturing much of Ireland’s natural beauty, and impressive CGI creature effects. The creature designs pay homage to the face-huggers in 1979’s Alien. In terms of both tone and comedic set pieces, the film owes a lot to earlier movies of a similar vein, especially 1990’s Tremors, but also 2004’s Shaun of the Dead. If you enjoyed those two movies, Grabbers easily fits within that niche. The characters are colorful and the actors do a convincing job of acting drunk, having filmed themselves intoxicated and self-studied their own quirks before filming.
Grabbers is funny, though not hilarious and while it’s got some great creature moments, it’s not particularly scary. Over all, the film rides a comfortable line between humor and horror but as I watched I kept hoping that it would stray further into either territory to really give me something to remember. It never does, and while it’s a thoroughly enjoyable film there’s not enough there to distinguish it to make it truly remarkable. Grabbers is still worth seeking out and perhaps even viewing with some friends and copious amounts of alcohol.
The 2013 documentary Birth of the Living Dead, directed by Rob Kuhns, traces the seminal zombie film Night of the Living Dead (1968) from its modest origins to its eventual cultural influence. Along the way interviews with George Romero and various academics trace the filming process, which was itself pioneering of modern independent cinema, and the context in which it was made and released. It’s eye-opening to realize just how involved the cast was in other aspects of the film and how much they worked to ensure its success.
The film effectively sets the stage for 1968 and persuasively examines why various elements of the film resonated so deeply with contemporary audiences, taking into account such turbulent events as the urban race riots or the media coverage of Vietnam. Focus is especially and rightfully paid to the performance and dignity of Duane Jones as Ben and the impact this character had on African-American viewers at the time.
Birth of the Living Dead is an informative and entertaining documentary that will give fans a deeper appreciation for an already much loved classic horror film. I think it’s a stronger and smarter film than the more popular zombie documentary Doc of the Dead, which released the following year. Be sure to stick around for a post-credit interview with the late Bill Hinzman, the original Cemetery Living Dead.
The Den (2013) is the directorial debut of Zachary Donohue. It is a found footage slasher that exploits web-paranoia to an admirably effective degree. Told entirely through web-feeds, computer and phone screens, and security cameras, the story follows a researcher whose grant involves continuous activity through a chat-roulette-like site called, as the title would suggest, The Den. She becomes witness to a murder and is soon being stalked by a killer who uses technology to target her unsuspecting friends and quickly destroy her life.
The Den moves swiftly and provides an inventive premise for a found-footage film – one that would be imitated the following year by 2014’s Unfriended – though aspects of it become increasingly absurd, especially towards the end. I’m admittedly not a technophile and my knowledge of computers is limited, but even I could gather that it’s best not to think too much about the technology on display and how it’s presented. For every effective scare there is one that strains believability. For instance, the killer lures a woman away from her home and plays a lame trick on her only to dump her body back where she started – wouldn’t it have been a better use of time and resources to just kill her in her house?
It leans heavily upon its gimmick, but for the most part that’s enough to see it through. Regardless of its shortcomings, The Den is an entertaining experience that has an energetic, suspenseful finale and will make you think twice before clicking on an unsuspecting link – in case you needed reminding, that is.
In 2010 Dimension Films had a revelation. They realized that if they did not make another Hellraisersequel fast they would lose the rights to the franchise. Like a procrastinating student cramming an hour before an exam, they quickly threw the ninth Hellraiser film together for a paltry $350,000, filming over just three weeks. Doug Bradley declined to reprise his role as the iconic Pinhead, not submitting to the meager sum which they offered him, and the role went instead to Stephan Smith Collins.
The deck was clearly stacked against this film, and the budget constraints and reckless speed with which it was made are painfully apparent. The sets look cheap, the camerawork is sloppy, the acting is generally poor, the script is weak and the dialogue is stilted, and the story is mostly an unimaginative rehash of the first Hellraiser, with a heavy dose of incomprehensible tropes thrown in (why do their friggin’ cars disappear?). They copy the imagery of Clive Barker’s directorial debut but they don’t fully understand it. Do I need to even mention the families being named Bradley and Craven? Plus, Collins is given the short shrift with fan loathing by not having his voice properly reverbed in post-production, making his delivery sound ridiculous. This is no fault of his own and while the circumstances would have been better served to create a new Cenobite – maybe even another Lament Configuration – had he been given the appropriate treatment his Pinhead would have been passable.
Honestly, this is truly a shame. Revelations is the first Hellraiser movie to be written as an original entry into the series since 1996’s Hellraiser: Bloodline. While it’s a thin rehash of the original film and doesn’t quite understand its source material, it actually comes closest to embracing the themes of the first film. After a victim gets his face ripped off, Pinhead speaks of “pain and pleasure, indivisible.” The characters are once again attracted to the Lament Configuration for its promise of extreme experiences, particularly pleasures.
Had this script gone through more rewrites and been given adequate care, there may have been a decent Hellraiser film in there. Alas, such a film we were not given. Hellraiser:Revelations is a low point, even after the terrible Hellraiser: Hellworld. The mythos which Barker created is still relevant to our era and deserves better.
2014’s Animal, directed by Brett Simmons and produced by Drew Barrymore, is a creature feature whose formula is about as imaginative as the title would suggest – a group of friends go hiking and get attacked by a creature, joining with another group inside an abandoned house before being picked off one by one.
Despite being generic to a fault, Animal still manages to make the most of its obviously limited budget with a decently designed creature and competent direction. The movie looks good and the film provides for some effective jump scares as well as at least one tension-filled scene involving portable two-way radios, no doubt inspired by 1979’s Alien (a film that proves a basic title needn’t necessitate an unoriginal plot). The cast, too, is generally capable: Keke Palmer plays a strong role as Alissa and Paul Iacono as Sean gives a good performance, particularly in a well-acted but ultimately unnecessary scene where his character is cracking under the pressure and wishes to reveal painful secrets before it’s too late. The film tries to create some depth with the characters, which is appreciated, even if it doesn’t always succeed.
Yet it could have been more. We never learn about the lore of the creature, and certain aspects are hinted at but frustratingly undeveloped. For instance, the friends are going hiking to enjoy the forest because it’s going to be cut down in a few years. Then a road is closed due to “forest regeneration,” which suggests that the forest was already cut down and is now being allowed to re-grow. We then get a quick bit of dialogue about how they’re uncertain the trees will be cut down at all. Perhaps there was a conspiracy plot point that was dropped. It’s no matter, because it all goes nowhere.
While Animal doesn’t excel in originality it also doesn’t have much to offend. Unlike its characters it sticks to the well-worn trail and it gets where it needs to in the end, and provides a passably entertaining experience along the way.
Rick Bota returns to direct his third installment of the Hellraiser series, the eighth in the franchise, Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005), released just three months after his Hellraiser: Deader (2005). Unlike the previous couple of films in the franchise, the script is based not on an unrelated horror spec but on a short story called “Dark Can’t Breathe” by Joel Soisson.
Bota had directed the fan-favorite Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002) and the almost passable Deader, and all indications pointed to him being able to finally deliver a capable Hellraiser film for his third try. It makes the film’s failure, therefore, all the more painful. The implausible plot follows a group of thinly veiled stereotypes who are also recovering video game compulsives. They once played an online game called Hellword, based upon the Hellraiser universe, until one of their “addicted” friends lit himself on fire. Two years after his death they’ve all been invited to an exclusive Hellworld party at a mansion deep in the woods where they slowly get isolated and picked off. The film is at its heart a teen slasher, though it still manages to still give us the now obligatory it-was-all-a-phsychological-hallucination-until-the-big-reveal-at-the-end franchise sequel formula. Nevertheless, Pinhead (Doug Bradley) is nothing more than a wise-cracking slasher who kills quickly (and at least one time painlessly) whenever a death is needed. That Hellraiser had nothing to do with the original story is clear, but it’s made painfully apparent in the continued misapplication of the mythos by the supposedly obsessive characters: the history is wrong, the Lament Configuration is mispronounced, the Cenobites don’t torture, and after eight films I can tell immediately that when the puzzle box is solved in the film, it’s solved backwards. Really, Bota already made two of these – how do you fuck up the little Hellraiser that’s in the movie that badly?
Unfortunately, Hellraiser isn’t the only thing this film gets wrong. Though released in 2005 its depiction of the internet and gaming world is shown more like Hollywood’s depictions of them in 1995 – as dangerous, almost mystical realms unto themselves. Those who designed the Hellworld game might have known less about gaming than they did about the internet, yet with the video game as a plot device the script shows clear influence from Scream (1996) as it attempts a cringe-worthy meta-analysis through poor dialogue and lame jokes.
Other problems abound. The script can’t keep its characterizations consistent, such as when the anti-social Jake (Christopher Jacot) suddenly becomes a social butterfly just when it’s convenient in the plot to reveal that he’s invisible. Other plot devices either go nowhere or are immediately shown to be nonsensical. For instance, at the party there are masks with numbers on the forehead, and those who wish to partake in anonymous sex can wear them and use cell phones to call the numbers of the people they’re interested in. Except that everybody almost immediately takes off their masks to hit on each other and the whole thing is essentially forgotten. The characters wander alone around the mansion, snooping into places they shouldn’t until it’s convenient to kill them off. For every odd item they uncover a cliché is there to be found. Even the dependable Lance Henriksen, who plays The Host, can’t redeem his corny dialogue.
As a teen slasher Hellword is subpar and as a Hellraiser film it is atrocious. That this was Doug Bradley’s swan song as Pinhead its shortcomings are amplified. As The Host says, “Like a bad horror movie, isn’t it?” Yes it is, Lance, yes it is.
From July 1914 to November 1918 the Great War raged – a tantrum of metal, fire, and pride that rent the earth and chewed flesh. A generation of men would be decimated, their views about life, government, authority, and mortality inextricably altered. Gone were the delusions of glory and nationalism and the jingoistic jingles to which they marched to the front. By the end more than nine million combatants and seven million civilian lay in graves, many unmarked. Anyone who reads the literature of this period, from Erich Maria Remarque’s unforgettable All Quiet on the Western Front to the potent poetry of Wilfred Owen, cannot but feel overcome with the profound sense of bitterness and betrayal these men felt toward society, authority, and their own families. The French war drama J’accuse (1919) dealt with this directly by depicting dead soldiers rising from the battlefield to confront their families and neighbors for their complicity in the war. Such resentment was felt by both sides.
The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
– Wilfred Owen (1918)
In the spring of 1921, though the war was over, American anger was still fresh, particularly toward the Germans. Veterans, many of them baring the tell-tale marks of battle-born disfigurement, marched on Miller’s Theater in Los Angeles to protest the opening of a German film for which the theater advertised, with a signature from the owner scrawled upon it, as “a fantastic European picture, which will… undoubtedly have a significant effect on American methods of Production. It brings to the screen an absolutely new technique, and its influence, I believe, will be tremendous.” For the protesters, it was not just that the film was German was their anger fueled, but also the implication that it was superior to America’s offerings. In the end the protesters won and Miller’s Theater pulled the film, but it was eventually shown in Los Angeles five years later when tensions had cooled. Nevertheless, 1920’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was a film that changed cinema forever.
The LA Times, May 8, 1921
As cultural historian David J. Skal writes in The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, “It is difficult to overstate the kind of revelation Caligari represented to much of its audience, which felt it was witnessing an evolutionary leap in cinema, one comparable to the coming of sound…” for it was a film that “reconfigured the possibilities of space and form for the general public” (Skal, pg. 39). The movie hit contemporary critics like a gut-punch, exciting them to new possibilities in movie-making (and established countless precedents that the horror genre is still mining today). This new approach was as much a psychological reaction from the Great War, which will be discussed below, as it was a calculated move for German filmmakers who sought a style distinct from Hollywood, against which it knew it could not compete on equal terms with similar movies. As Erich Pommer, head of the Decla Bioscope production company which made Caligari, once explained:
“The German film industry made ‘stylized films’ to make money. Let me explain. At the end of World War I the Hollywood industry moved toward world supremacy… Germany was defeated; how could she make films that would compete with the others? It would have been impossible to try and imitate Hollywood or the French. So we tried something new: the expressionist or stylized films. This was possible because Germany had an overflow of good artists and writers, a strong literary tradition, and a great tradition of theatre. This provided a basis of good, trained actors. World War I finished the French industry; the problem for Germany was to compete with Hollywood” (as quoted by S.S. Prawer, Caligari’s Children, pg. 165).
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is not only the first great horror film; it is also the first German expressionist masterpiece. Expressionism was an artistic movement which emphasized the portrayal of emotion over realism, and was largely a reaction to the contemporary popularity of Naturalism and Impressionism. Heavily influenced by such works as Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” expressionists blurred the lines between what is real and what is conceptual, often offering distorted visions of people and their environment. What they created is both beautiful and inherently grotesque. As German cinema began to adopt the style, with inklings to be found in 1913’s The Student of Prague, the subject matter became necessarily cerebral, and the skewed perspective naturally horrific.
The highly stylized expressionist movement in Weimar Republic cinema, with its absurdly piercing angles, bold shadows, and leaning architecture that looks poised to crash down upon the inhabitants, was born as much by necessity as by creativity. As the Great War engulfed Europe, Germany banned all foreign films, creating an exclusive domestic market for its films. Due to effectively non-existent budgets and unreliable electricity, the closed sets had to be controlled. Instead of creating shadows with light they painted them in broad strokes that stabbed at the rest of the scenery. The themes of expressionism often understandably dealt with madness and matters of the psyche, as Germany particularly had just witnessed a war-torn world seemingly gone insane. Haunted by war, the film opens with the lines: “Spirits surround us on every side… they have driven me from hearth and home, from wife and child.”
The roots of silent horror drink from many wells, with the Gothic literary tradition being the most obvious. However, less discussed is the role played by carnivals and their macabre attractions. Customers would pay to see the grotesque and the deadly, from the prevailing freak shows to a young Tod Browning’s own act of being buried alive for up to two days at a time, coining himself “The Hypnotic Living Corpse.” It is from this tradition that Caligari’s script, written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, partly takes inspiration, as we see the unhinged Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) present his somnambulist sideshow of the hypnotized Cesare (Conrad Veidt). It would also not have been forgotten by contemporary filmgoers that movies were once the subject of side-show curiosities, much like Cesare. Janowitz was also inspired by a macabre event in his life which occurred just before the war. He had been attending a fair and spied a beautiful girl. He was searching for the girl he had only glimpsed when he thought he heard her laughing in some nearby bushes. Suddenly, the laughing stopped. A man step out from the bushes and he briefly saw the shadowy face. The next day he saw a newspaper article recounting sexually tinged homicide of a girl at the fair and attended the funeral to see it was the same girl he had been admiring. There he saw the man who had stepped from the bushes, and the man seemed to recognize that Janowitz had spotted him. This eerie event lingered in Janowitz’s mind for years as he wondered how many murderers, if indeed this man was one, roamed free.
Janowitz and Mayer both became pacifists due to their experiences in World War I. Janowitz served as an officer in the Germany infantry regiment. Mayer’s early life had been tough – his father was a chronic gambler who committed suicide when Mayer was sixteen, leaving him to care for his younger siblings – and when the war arrived officials forced him to undergo traumatic psychiatric examinations to determine his fitness for service. Both gained a healthy distrust for those to whose will they were supposed to bend. Unsurprisingly, the script they conceived presented an image of authority drunk with power, sending a sleepwalking soldier to do its killing. The metaphor for the soldier’s experience, and the way they felt used by those they trusted, is apparent, even if it was clearer in hindsight than it was to them when they wrote it. As Janowitz would write: “It was years after the completion of the screenplay that I realized our subconscious intention… The corresponding connection between Doctor Caligari, and the great authoritative power of the Government that we hated, and which had subdued us into an oath, forcing conscription on those in opposition to its official war aims, compelling us to murder and be murdered” (as quoted by Steve Haberman, Silent Screams, pg. 36).
Fritz Lang was first signed on to direct the film and supposedly (accounts seem to differ) it was he who suggested the famous “twist” framing story – revolutionary for its time – of a mad man recounting his delusions. Sigmund Freud and his influential psychoanalysis, it may be noted, were then experiencing their heyday. Janowitz and Mayer claim to have protested the change, believing it diluted their pacifist message by revealing the maliciously insane authority to be the mere ravings of mad man. The writers appear to have been justified in their criticism for contemporary audiences focused on this later mental aspect, yet it also appears to have allowed them to more easily swallow the radically expressionist sets, performances and narrative. The anti-war message appears to have gone unnoticed, at least upon its initial release. Regardless, Lang left the project and Robert Wiene signed on, keeping the new framing story intact.
However, the framing device does not discount the cautionary symbolism of the film, it merely adds another level of unease, inviting the audience to question their own perceived reality. Additionally, these story elements are there for a reason, no matter what twist comes in the end. To illustrate by way of a more popular and beloved film, Dorothy awaking with her family around her bed does not make the messages about friendship, self-worth, and appreciating one’s home now null and void. Even in delusions and fantasies can valuable lessons be learned.
It must also be recognized that the film’s last scene hardly lets the audience off the hook. The naturalistic framing scenes in the garden provide a contrast to the expressionistic visions of Francis’s insanity, which the audience has been made to share, but the cell in which he is placed at the end is identical to that which he envisioned in his supposed delusions. Add to this the last long shot of the film as the camera stays upon Werner Krauss’s face, where once we knew him as the insidious Caligari he has now been revealed to be the asylum’s supposedly benevolent director. Yet the look he gives is unfeelingly eerie, leaving the viewer to once again question his motives, his sincerity, and whether or not Francis was right all along – or whether we have not come to share Francis’s own paranoia. Perhaps it even serves to challenge the audience: Would you recognize insane authority, even if it’s staring you in the face? Is the destruction of evil authority merely an illusion, and do we actually remain beneath its boot-heel? Furthermore, the ambiguity of what we have witnessed serves to add a layer of paranoia as we’re compelled to ask if the hero who we’ve invested in is the true danger, or has our only hope been made impotent by the real threat? All these questions conspire to create unease, and they reflect with distorted clarity the anxieties and wounds of the era. As S.S. Prawer succinctly writes in his examination of the film’s terror iconography:
“[We may consider] the profound disorientation the film conveys, the questions it leads us to ask about authority, about social legitimation, about the protection of society from disrupting and destructive influences, and about the shifting points of view that convert enemies into friends and friends into enemies, whose origins may well be sought in the German situation after the First World War. Like any genuine work of art, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has its roots deep in the society of the time; but its significance, its appeal, and its influence far transcend its origins” (Caligari’s Children, pg. 199).
Wiene had directed Conrad Veidt’s first known appearance on screen in the 1917 horror film Fear, which deals with similar themes of madness, though most of his films up to this point had been dramas and comedies. Nevertheless, watching The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – whose sets were designed by Hermann Warm, whose oft-cited credo was that “the cinematic work of art must become a living picture,” and influenced by the stage work of Max Reinhardt (of whom many of the film’s actors were former students) – is like watching a disturbing dream. Indeed, when I look back on it now I remember it like it was a dream of my own. The actors move through the surreal landscape, moving intentionally unnaturally, like ghoulish porcelain dolls. Conrad Veidt as the sleepwalking Cesare looks like he belongs in this nightmarish world, unnerving viewers as he slowly awakens and stares into the camera with his wide, expressive eyes. And yet Veidt is able to retain sympathy for the somnambulist assassin, no doubt influencing the pitiable monsters which would follow in the decades to come.
The other performances, particularly by Werner Krauss as the titular Caligari and Lil Dagover as Jane, are equally strong. Krauss’s look was inspired by a photo of an elderly Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophical pessimism and belief that humans were driven only by their own basic desires fits well with Caligari’s own selfish motivations.
Robert Wiene would create two more horror films, the largely forgotten Genuine, filmed the same year as Caligari, and 1924’s The Hands of Orlac, which also stars Conrad Veidt, and he would find success with many non-genre films. In the 1930s he left Germany, never to return, though it’s unclear if his reasons were political. He would die of cancer in 1938.
Hans Janowitz would retire from the film industry in 1922 and go into the oil business, eventually moving to the United States. Carl Mayer would write many other successful film treatments, including 1921’s The Haunted Castle, directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, and Murnau’s American work, the brilliant drama Sunrise (1927). Being a Jew and a pacifist, he fled to England to escape the Nazis but anti-German sentiments meant he could not find adequate work in the film industry. He died of cancer in 1944 practically penniless. His epitaph reads: “Pioneer in the art of the cinema. Erected by his friends and fellow workers.”
Werner Krauss specialized in playing villains, both on stage and in film. He appeared as an antagonist in Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1924) and in 1926’s The Student of Prague, both of which also starred Conrad Veidt. However, unlike Caligari’s pacifist writers or co-star Veidt’s defiant anti-Nazism, Krauss was an outspoken anti-Semite and supporter of the Third Reich, becoming a cultural ambassador for Nazi Germany and specializing in playing cruel Jewish villains. This is ironic as Veidt, who fled Germany and supported the war against Hitler, spent much of his later career playing Nazis in American and British films. The late Oxford scholar S.S. Prawer, whose own family fled to England to escape the Nazis in 1939, found an interesting insight into these two great actors’ on-screen choices that’s worth pondering, suggesting that each man donned the monster mask they feared the most. As he states:
“It is perhaps not without significance that of the two masters of macabre acting who combined their talents in Caligari Werner Krauss stayed in Germany during the Second World War and played a whole congregation of uncanny Jews… while Conrad Veidt went to Hollywood where the parts he was given included the sinister Nazis he played so well… In real life, of course, as these very performances serve to show, it was Werner Krauss who sold himself to the Nazis and Conrad Veidt who shared the lot of German Jews that managed to escape the holocaust. Some of the most effective screen performances may thus be seen as projections of inner fears and loathings, or of usually invisible aspects of their personality by the actors, as well as the writers and directors, of a given film” (Caligari’s Children, pg. 62).
After the war Krauss was banned from acting and forced to undergo de-Nazification. He died in Austria in 1959. (For more on the life of Conrad Veidt, see my review of 1919’s Eerie Tales.)
What The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari deals with is madness, abuse of power, and the ways in which people might be compelled to circumvent their better nature and commit acts of murder. It became the subject of 1947’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film by Siegfried Kracauer, the first truly influential study in German film. Kracauer’s argument was largely teleological, arguing that one could see the coming of the Nazis through an examination of films from the Weimar Republic. Unfortunately, his reasoning is often undermined by his fuzzy recollections of the films (which he would not have had readily available to him) and by the subsequent findings of evidence that run counter to his claims. Nevertheless, he recognized the symbology of Caligari which affected Germans at the time and saw what the film said of their fears and anxieties. Fortunately, the twist only slightly softens these aspects while serving to explain the dreamlike quality of the film.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari transformed cinema in immeasurable ways, spreading its influence through generations of artists, musicians, and filmmakers. Even the late David Bowie in his last music video, “Lazarus,” evoked the film. We see Bowie dressed similar to Cesare, making exaggerated gestures in the way some silent film stars acted broadly, and in the end retreats into a wardrobe that looks eerily like Cesare’s box. These allusions and more are difficult to miss and impossible to dismiss, and what Bowie meant by them may be interpreted differently by individual viewers. Nevertheless, it proves that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari still has the power to create unease and to fascinate, and the questions it raises, along with the disturbing answers it suggests, have lost none of their importance or potency.
Hellraiser: Deader (2005) is the second directorial entry by Rick Bota and the seventh installment in the Hellraiser series. It is in many ways like the two previous movies as the script began as an unrelated horror spec but was adapted to accommodate the Hellraiser hallmarks. We once again get the psychological approach where someone opens the box, is tormented by nightmarish hallucinations, and then meets Pinhead who reveals the meaning behind it all – to varying success. This normally makes the narrative incomprehensible, however, Deader at least deserves credit for not becoming overly convoluted until the final act.
Kari Wührer plays Amy Klein, an investigative reporter who specializes in exposing the seedy underside of society. Klein is a breath of fresh air, being the most competent series protagonist since Kirsty Cotton. She makes some odd choices, such as not calling the cops when she comes across a corpse or not helping people who are seemingly bleeding to death in public, but the film allows Wührer time to react in other ways, such as an extended sequence where she tries to get a butcher knife out of her back, bloodying the bathroom as she’s slipping around. There are some good set pieces for her to work with as well, such as a corpse on a toilet that she must try to reach around.
The themes are also a welcome return to the original film, with the Lament Configuration reclaiming its position as an object of desire tempting those who would open it with promises of ultimate pleasures. The cult of “Deaders” which Klein investigates is comprised of young people who have grown weary of what life has to offer, seeking ever more extreme experiences, even courting death to gain them. Desensitization in a world of immediate gratification, reflected in Joey’s pleasure train, is once again fertile soil for the Cenobites. Doug Bradley returns as Pinhead, and refers not to Hell but to his realm, invoking the idea of the puzzle box containing not an entry into biblical hellfire but a pocket universe unto itself. This is complicated by certain aspects, certainly, but Pinhead’s victims are not targets because they’re sinners, but because they are intruding on his domain. It’s refreshing to see the series continue to drift towards its origins and further from Inferno’s Christian moralizing.
Of course, Deader has its problems. The movie was filmed in Bucharest, Romania, but doesn’t utilize its location at all – I think Klein only talks to one person with an Eastern European accent. For a movie filmed in 2003 and released in 2005, it feels outdated with its use of VHS tapes and aesthetics that feel much more akin to the 90s. The waking nightmare that Klein finds herself in is at first effective but becomes, as stated before, a jumbled mess in the last fifteen minutes (e.g., when did Joey join the “Deaders”?). The finale is a lazy, underwhelming closure to an otherwise, up until that point, competent and interesting film.
I’ve read many reviews that completely pan this entry, and admittedly the title is stupid. However, there’s a lot to respect in how many of the aspects were handled. If it hadn’t shit the bed in the last act, it would be my favorite sequel after Hellbound. Hell, considering what it’s up against, it might still be, but that’s jumping a hurdle whose bar is set so low it’s practically buried.
Vagina dentata – this Latin expression for “toothed vagina” is found in myths across the globe and is generally thought to stem from a fear of sexual intercourse, whether as a man entering an alien place where a piece of himself is left, or as a woman fearful of injury or rape. Female biology, for the vast majority of human history and unfortunately in some communities still today, was a source of mystery. As we all know, the woman’s sexual organs are on the inside, not exposed like a man’s. Therefore people asked: What could she be hiding? Why does she bleed each month? What mysteries are at the root of her ability to create and pass life through her body? Lack of scientific knowledge, coupled with age-old superstition, is at the root of the idea that a woman can house teeth in her vagina, ready to devour any man’s denim bulge who might be seduced into her hungry fly trap.
While female biology is little mystery to most modern Americans, or should be, there are still conservative segments who believe such knowledge is damaging to maturing teens, leading to temptation and spiritual corruption. They champion abstinence-only education and such puerile gimmicks as purity rings, despite a wealth of evidence that suggests such an approach is not only less effective in preventing unwanted results such as teen pregnancy, but may in fact help contribute to it.
Such a person is the central character to 2007’s Teeth. Dawn O’Keefe (appropriate last name), played by Jess Weixler, is a Christian creationist teen who is committed to saving her virginity for marriage and who champions purity rings at church youth groups. Her own body is an enigma and when she’s raped by a trusted love interest she finds that she possesses a special biological adaptation that quickly puts the forced entry to a mangled end. Such a situation is repeated throughout the film, giving the viewer many shots – mostly darkly humorous – of severed penises and shocked males holding their bloody, emasculated stumps.
As a male viewer this is horrifying stuff, but the film is filled to the brim with guys who want to take advantage of her so there’s no end to the justification for her castrations. Dawn goes from naïve innocent to feminist vigilante, embracing evolution and her own sexual prowess along the way. The depiction of men is decidedly negative – I half-expected her step-father, the only half-way decent guy in the film, to try to molest her, so prevalent was the male misogyny – and the film might have been better served to at least have one sympathetic young male to relate to, or a positive male sexual role model to at least let the audience know that they exist. Certain characters were arguably not entirely deserving of the level of malice she bit into them, though they were not at all sympathetic.
Despite this quibble, Teeth is elevated by a strong performance from its lead. Weixler plays the role just right, from perky good-girl teen to horrified man-eater to confident man-devourer.
Writer and director Mitchell Lichtenstein smartly infuses his movie with black comedy and symbolism. Of the latter, there are the many references to serpents, which represent not only Satan’s temptation of Eve (“the serpent beguiled me and I ate”), signifying her drift from Christianity, but also Medusa, as Dawn herself becomes something that can be considered gorgonesque. As a visual metaphor, the cave opening in which she first discovers her power is dripping with toothy stalactites. An environmental message seems to also be at play. We repeatedly see two huge breast-like smoke stacks continually spewing smoke into the air. We can surmise that this is the source of Dawn’s mother’s cancer, and perhaps the cause of her mutation as well.
There were some choices made by the filmmaker that had me scratching my head. The cinematography is sometimes grainy, as though scenes were lightened significantly in post-production. Also, we see a lot of chewed man-meat, but despite the film partly addressing society’s fear in even acknowledging basic female biology (such as the anatomy textbooks having stickers covering the vagina), her weapon is never brought into the light. I am not saying this is a bad choice, but it is perhaps an odd one that undermines at least one of the film’s messages. Nevertheless, Teeth is a smart, funny, and entertaining film that will likely resonate with most women, but is a movie that guys should be sure to see too.
Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002) is the sixth installment in the Hellraiser franchise. Directed by Rick Bota, it marks the return of Ashley Laurence as Kirsty Cotton, heroine of Hellraiser(1987) and Hellbound: Hellraiser II(1988), albeit in a small role. It is also the last Hellraiser film to have any input from Clive Barker, who was outspoken in his dislike of its predecessor, Hellraiser: Inferno (2000) and the direction in which Scott Derrickson took the mythos. In small ways this story seeks to correct the moralizing direction of that entry and focus once again on the dualities of human existence, notably good and evil and pain and pleasure.
As Pinhead, played once again by Doug Bradley, asks Dean Winters’character, “Which do you find more exhilarating, Trevor, pain or pleasure?” As I prefer pleasure, we’ll start with the positive aspects of this film. Though her role is small, it’s great to see Kirsty again, and the direction her character takes, while very dark, is also entirely consistent with her actions in the first two movies, particularly her penchant to bargain. She’s a survivor who’s not above sacrificing a scumbag to save her own skin, and the skin of her loved ones. Truly, the film could have used more of her.
Likewise, Pinhead is neither the windbag bore speechifying solely about pain nor is he an agent for divine justice. He treats the main character Trevor as a character study – a curious plaything – and his intentions are purely business. The movie does not attempt to point its finger at the audience for our transgressions, but instead tries to show metaphorically that the potential for the sublime or the suffering or the noble or the cruel are within us in equal measure, and it’s up to us to balance these aspects. Those souls who fall victim to the Cenobites do so seemingly not because their sins damned them, though they may be morally bankrupt, but because they ran afoul of a very human vendetta.
These aspects work… mostly. Now for the pain. Like the last film, this one takes way too many notes from the excellent Jacob’s Ladder (1990). Trevor loses part of his memory after his car goes into a river, his wife Kirsty now missing, and hallucinations, dreams, and fragmented memories constantly intrude on his mind in a surreal manner. Yet Jacob’s Ladder knew when to stop. There are so many of these sequences that by the first act I knew that each time a moment of horror came on screen it would be revealed to be a delusion. You know the old horror trope of the horrible event that turns out to be a nightmarish dream sequence, the character sitting up in bed in a cold sweat? If you’re tired of those, imagine an entire film of it. The writers lean on this technique like a crutch – when they seemingly don’t know how to end a scene, they have Trevor grab his head in pain and forcibly transfer him to the next one. In addition, these transitions are so frequent and awkward that we have no sense of how much time is supposed to be passing. The twist ending partly explains this, but it makes it no less frustrating to watch.
Speaking of Trevor, all of this is not helped by Dean Winters’ flat performance. As a character who is a partial amnesiac, when he talks to people it’s difficult to tell what is supposed to be being conveyed to the audience: Does he remember this person? Does he remember sleeping with this person? Does he remember his lines? It was a performance I was unable to connect with, especially as his reactions to the endless hallucinations are so subdued – if he doesn’t seem to care, why should we?
There are also plot elements that don’t add up and in order to present them here spoilers will be found in this paragraph. For those wishing to avoid them, skip to the next one. Firstly, did Kirsty and Trevor live together in that shabby apartment? It looks like a bachelor pad and considering how women just show up to get boned, I have to wonder if this married couple ever lived under the same roof. The second plot problem lies in Kirsty’s bargain with Pinhead, which is to bring him five souls in exchange for her own. How is she bringing them to him? She may kill them but if they don’t open the Lament Configuration can Pinhead still claim them? It makes no sense that she could collect these souls for Pinhead simply by shooting people in the head without tricking them into opening the puzzle box, thereby rightfully making them the property of the Cenobites. The deal between Kirsty and Pinhead is a twist I actually really like but it simply does not hold up to any amount of scrutiny.
Thematically, I like Hellseeker, and I love seeing Kirsty again and following her along on her character arc. Nevertheless, it is a jumbled, frustrating movie and the plot doesn’t hold up to any degree of inspection. It’s an improvement from Inferno in spirit only.
The Revenant Review 