The Terminator Looking Glass: THE KEEP (1983), DARK ANGEL (1990) and Planet Arous

THE KEEP

1983 - ***

Director Michael Mann's so busy with capturing the way backlit German soldiers cast weird light and shadow as they Chariots of Fire through the fog towards no noticeable finish line under a haunting two chord synthesizer in The Keep that any semblance of story sinks deep beneath the ocean of consciousness. Fresh from playing a sympathetic U-Boat captain in Das Boot, Jürgen Prochnow is sufficiently war weary as the Wermacht officer assigned to a remote Romanian fortress that was built into the side of the Carpathians thousands of years before recorded time. Colorful villagers bring the food and sweep up and wear crosses for der mudder's sake and never visit after dark, and advise the soldiers not to either. Since the Keep's been there longer than their remembered time, they don't even know why they're so freaked. But Jürgen has his orders!

The first night a couple of sentries decide to dig the silver cross out of one of the walls, and what happens next will blow your mind, Mann hopes, so that you don't notice how most of the rest of the film is blown as well, like dust in the slow motion wind, sparkling like diamonds in cross-shaped rays of ambient light, illuminating mysterious spaces vaster than the ocean within the stone blocks of the walls.

Soon Jürgen's men begin disappearing at  geometric rate. Backwards fog machines absorb German souls for use incarnating a dark giant with glowing red eyes and a body that slowly beefs up from accumulated evil soul steroids; Prochnow doesn't see it but does notice his men are vanishing, and as an SS officer, Gabriel Byrne is busting his balls. So bottles are opened, drunk despair occurs, and bloody graffiti in an ancient text prompts him to send for an old Jewish archaeologist-linguist named Dr. Cuza (Ian McKellen) currently cooling his wheelchair in a nearby concentration camp. The linguist brings his hot daughter (Alberta Watson), leading to attempted rape by German guards who are promptly absorbed into our monster via a lengthy shot of backwards fog. Is this the fabled Jewish golem? The original Dracula (this being Romania and all)? Whomever he is, he comes to Cruz to offer vengeance against Hitler in exchange for a small favor that will enable him to escape the Keep. As an advance, the being infuses Cruz with youth and he can suddenly walk and looks as young and spry as Ian McKellen was at the time, relatively speaking.

As this weird creature is so muscular he begins to resemble the Terminator, which then awakens the Hebrew Sex God equivalent of Kyle Reese (Scott Glenn). From far away he senses a disturbance in the force and takes a slow mo boat at dawn up the Elbe at sunrise, scored to hypnotic synths as the sky streaks red, letting you know all you need to about Mann's future Miami Vice series, which began the year after The Keep.  Like so many shots in the film there's really no point to this drawn-out dawn-on-the-Elbe boat shot (besides future placement on Mann's reel). Sorry if that sounds snide of me to say. If I wasn't stuck seeing the film on a crappy full-frame crop from Amazon Instant Video (it's not on DVD) I might have just swooned away as I did watching Mann's Miami Vice feature film on blu-ray.

Anyway, Scott Glenn's been making sure this being stays in the Keep, for centuries, and even if it means Hitler won't be devoured in a dust storm, Glen's got to stop him from leaving.  Maybe he can shag McKellan's daughter in the process, for he is no sourpuss Christian god, and everyone knows the Hebrews have never considered sex a crime. No wonder they're so damned sensual...

The last time I tried to see this all the way through was in high school when my buddy Alan and his girlfriend (and mine) came over and we played hooky and hung out all day while mom was at work, having sex, which made the film even harder to understand through my ADD brain. It's almost too slow even now, on lots of SSRI meds, but Michael Mann's career is such that we can now admire it as a fledgling auteur's first attempt at transformation even if its ultimate hook--that all the bad guys are done in by their own unconscious manifesting their darkest fears and desires in the rarefied realms of the foggy backlit stony corridors--has been done to death and back again (it you substitute the keep for a mysterious planet or spacecraft, you have Galaxy of Terror, Sphere, Event Horizon, Solaris, and even to a certain extent Forbidden Planet). But unlike some of those films, which get way too solemn, Keep still has the mighty monster, a tall giant gray juicehead square with shoulder muscles that make the average linebacker look like Ichabod Crane and a ruthlessness towards fascism that even fascism itself might think extreme. 

Maybe if it was a shade less opaque or Mann used less slow motion it would be a classic, but still, it's worth any price to see Ian McKellan, who is now as old as the character he plays at the start of The Keep, suddenly cast off his current age and be young again. Imagine if that were true and we were guaranteed another 30 years of Magneto and Gandalf! Now that we so belatedly know and love him, we would not waste un minuto del McKellan!

Another benefit this film has going is its accurate portrayal of some complicated interrelation between the German army, the SS, and their Romanian allies. WWII historians watching this with their less-sophisto peers can use the events of the film to pompously explain the friction between the relatively sane German infantry and the conclave of sociopaths in the SS, here led by the evil but at least consistent Gabriel Byrne (with a Crispin Glover haircut) and why the Romanians signed on with the Axis (to help them fight off the Soviets) which makes an interesting corollary to the deal between this golem monster and McKellen's linguist. 

I'm a big WWII and horror fan and used to read a ton of comic books and this film reminded me of one of my pet imagination projects, an adaptation of DC Comics' Weird War Tales. The Keep would make a damn good middle entry in a horror-war trilogy. Its story could cut down to 30 minutes with ease. I think that's how long it would be anyway if Mann just sped it back up to normal speed. Either way it's weird enough (and played straight enough) to just about sneak by coherency's dozing sentry. And it's good enough to make me hope some day we'll get a blu-ray HD restoration and be able to fathom what what was holding Mann's attention so glacially.  

--------

I COME IN PEACE (DARK ANGEL)

1990 - ***

Speaking of thick necks, what about Dolph Lundgren's? A Swede with nary a trace of accent, he plays a tall anti-authoritarian cop in Dark Angel, AKA I Come in Peace. There are some cliche lines, a cliche lady cop girlfriend who is angry at him for not calling, and a cliche uptight yuppie partner, but the killer is all kinds of awesome, a kind of German Alec Baldwin on stilts with Wuxia hair, shoulder pads, and serious Lugosi-at-the-end-of-Bride of the Monster platforms. Turns out he's a drug dealer from another planet who's here on earth to harvest our opiate-spike pituitary chemicals. They fetch a high price back on his home planet. So he kills a mess of drug dealers with a flying CD, then uses their supply to shoot up random civilians with a crazy wrist snake device, then drills a hole in their forehead to harvest the ensuing dopamine gushes, and accumulates it all in little crystalline vials in a wrist pack for future off-world export. Man, that's about as cool a deviation from the standard alien drug dealer as I've ever seen. And brother, I've seen it all. I got lucky having not heard of this before the great Shout Factory blu-ray, so my first viewing is in crisp HD widescreen where the neon and explosions shine.

It wouldn't be a post-Terminator film if there wasn't also a cop alien, lagging behind and always a little confused, coming after the drug dealer with all sorts of sci fi fire power. There's also a conglomerate of great evil yuppies in a satisfying side plot that allows us to see them getting shot to pieces, and exploded, always a comfort in these harsh economic times, and the end is a long cool chase through an abandoned smelting plant, or something, ala the end of Terminator 2, and just about everything is thrown into an all-out brawl that's pure Dolph!

I didn't know much about old Dolph prior to writing this, but was shocked to learn he's a Fulbright scholar in engineering, a former Swedish Olympic karate team leader, still married to the mother of his children and looks like a damned cool dad. Check him in this picture below teaching one of his daughters some karate moves while on a family vacation!

It would have been great if he'd been allowed to act the full breadth of his Swedish ubermensch intelligence in more films, as anyone can play a dumb cop with a gut instinct for crime who refuses to play by the book, especially by 1990, the pinnacle of lame catchphrase saturation. The drive-in era was dying by then, and where else was a film about a 'think from the gut' cop--the type who finds out anything he wants to know by going to a seedy strip club and shaking down the perennial sniveling snitch, Michael J. Pollard--going to go? It had to wait until now, on the Shout disc, bathed in the Hong Kong neon blue hue of 80s nostalgia, to shine crazy diamond-style.

All that aside, if you're willing to bask in this 80s capstone's sheer muttonheadedness then you can appreciate the weird aspect of the alien being on earth to siphon the brains of people getting off on drugs (he avoids junkies, since their glands are often burned out). It works best when trying to not be clever -- the action is easy to follow and the only distraction is how the editor prides himself on a million little clever smash cuts, from someone opening a car door to someone opening a bottle, for example; there's also the issue of the shrill yuppie smug FBI partner to get past, and the way the roundhouse kicks are filmed is such that one instantly looks for stunt doubles, which makes no sense; if your lead can do his own martial arts it pays to live in the wide shot.

But hey, it was the 80s, or rather the end of the 80s, the final in a long line of films about heavies from another time, planet, or dimension pursued by an agent of good from the same dimension.  It's the same formula used in The Keep, though in that instance it came out the year before Terminator's release. So... maybe it all really began with The Brain from Planet Arous (1957) with Gor vs. Vol. You seen that? Now that's a film you should see, oh alien brain word receiver, descrambling this mess of alphabet called a post. It's cheaper than a Jack Benny doorman tip, but John Agar, in dark contact lenses, ranting about world domination whilst under the possession of Gor, that's something even Fullbright can get behind.

Read More

The Slashological Strata of Fate: HALLOWEEN to THE TERMINATOR (1978-1984)

The early 80s --the dawn of and height of the slasher craze --was for many impressionable, alienated teens like myself a time of fear, paranoia, isolation and frustrated sexual awakening; it all pooled together to form a budding fascist militarism within our ranks. Slasher films were an inescapable part of the landscape even if you avoided them: TV commercials, newspaper print ads relentlessly ogling cowering or showering girls from the perspective of killers --there was no escape. And it was before internet, so we couldn't really find like-minded pre-PC people, the ones who, like me, thought women very very vulnerable and felt horrible for being too small and young to protect them and to naive to realize that women weren't turned on by guys who made themselves miserable worrying about them. We developed an anti-misogyny, a misandry. We sneered at humanity in general and how sex and booze made them sloppy and indifferent to their own self preservation. We tried to absolve ourselves by thinking well, any bitch dumb enough to sleep with so-and-so, to fall for his dumb line and drink his gauche drinks, deserves all she gets.... Jason was to us what the Monster from the Id was to Morphius in Forbidden Planet. My poor Krell...

We'd later get sloppy drunk too but for now, age circa 12-16, the borderline to forbidden knowledge was heavily patrolled by a legion of masked, silent, shambling butcher knife wielding, unkillable automatons.We who saw the line dared not cross. Instead we carefully quietly armed ourselves for future battles, stashing mom's old butcher knife under our pillow and a bat under our bed, preparing for the time when we would need to battle the shambling slasher and jock armies.

Get thee to a gunnery...

The automaton killer who won't die who comes out to suburbia and stalks kids originated in Halloween (1978). I hadn't even seen it but I was still traumatized just from the clip Siskel and Ebert showed on the special episode of Sneak Previews devoted to "Dead Teenager" movies, wherein they taught me to turn my queasy dread onto outraged feminism, where it would remain until I read Carol Clover's Men Women and Chainsaws and learned that was the whole point... I didn't have to afraid for girls, or of girls, I could be afraid through girls, the only way to fly.

Meanwhile, the main dread was that the slasher would get us in our sleep, or when we were alone, and we all thought of what we would do if he came home, as Halloween's tag line read, and the thought he was never going to die held us in a giddy grip that made it necessary to keep the TV or radio on, and a nightlight, to drown out the scrapings of trees against the house, and the creaking footsteps we couldn't be sure we heard as we tried to sleep.  My fear never stopped until I learned after watching Battle of the Bulge one night that just thinking about WW2 eased my fear. It could occupy my brain and all the armaments made me feel secure in the way armaments will, even if it was only in my imagination, that's where the monsters were too, so it worked. If that's not an encapsulation of the rise of 80s action movie militarism I don't know what is. So, retrace the steps and wonder... did Halloween indirectly cause the Iraq war?

The thing you have to remember though is that poor Laurie Strode didn't have a Laurie Strode before her to teach her to not drop the knife by the killer just because he's temporarily playing dead. Myers was the first of this type, this emerging breed of mute, indestructible automaton killers patrolling suburbia and in the first Halloween, Jamie Lee doesn't yet know he's got nine hundred lives and you need to take drastic steps like defenestration, or what I eventually determined was an unbeatable and less messy course of action: thumb removal (no thumbs, no strangling or holding weapons, all he can do is lunge and snap like a turtle).

Every kid had their own late night strategy for tackling a Michael Myers / Jason variety killer and in hindsight it's clear Laurie Strode's ignorance was the root force for the 80s action movie surge. The new heroes killed their enemies eight dozen ways at once, obliterated them. Sometimes they even tangled with indestructible psychos personally: Chuck Norris went on a round of futile karate kicks against a modified killer in Hero and the Terror (1988); Charlie Bronson tangled with a freaky psycho who kills while buck naked in Ten to Midnight (1983); Clint tangled with a kinky leather man in Tightrope (1984). We all thought The Terminator was--based on the previews--Arnold's contribution to the by-then passé formula; it looked like an low budget Italian knock-off slasher/action sci fi hybrid based on that preview. There he was, our Conan now dressed like he should be riding a scooter in Rome, using a laser sight at a phony looking 'Tech Noir' bar. We figured he had really gone off the A-list with this one, that he'd be doing dinner theater next. So we were stunned with incredulity when we read the glowing reviews and heard the record box office. Seeing the film a few weeks later I understood why: this time the opponent knew all the unstoppable killer's tricks before the movie even started, so it was like the final girl finally had a guy who understood her. There would be no more dropping butcher knives, ever.

Won't get fooled again: Blue Steel, Escape from New York, Aliens

The idea that kept us up at night was there there might be some crazy killer who has us earmarked for death for reasons beyond understanding: maybe your friend called him a creep when he drove past you on the street, but what allowed us to sleep was the idea that for every Moby Dick monster there would be an Ahab or Dr. Loomis and vice versa. In Halloween the same essential dynamic takes place, just substitute Donald Pleasance's quiver-voiced shrink for Michael Biehn.

To help lay all this out I've assembled the following horror strata map Most crap horror film directors never get past the topography, while a few get all the way down to the bottom, which is the universal top, for this pyramid:

Topographical: Mise en scene; iconography: The mask. axe, chainsaw, screaming woman, corridors advanced down stealthily, shocks around the corners, cowering, rising up, sudden face in the bathroom mirror, closet doors being peered through. A killer presumably killed sitting slowly up and turning his head,
Textual: Condemnation of lustful behavior; warning to never take your security for granted; taking the 'safety bars' of our first world social order consumerist entitlement for granted  (i.e. Marie Antoinette letting them eat cake).
Subtextual: Feminism; homophobia; collapse of the American Family; critique of sexual repression; man's inherent savagery; castration anxiety; Marxist ideology, psychosexual pre-genital jouissance
Structural: The uncanny rhythm of slowed down time and sense of danger erupting from even normal things as they exist in an unsteady relation to language and perception, closet doors, darkened laundry rooms, cars, darkness, bushes outside the house, staircases, mirrors, telephones, porches, windows
Core: Death Drive; initiation from child to adult through endurance and conquering of fear; the learning of aggression; rise to violence / fascism inherent; the encouragement of militarism; distrust of neighbors and people walking past your house (i.e. itchy trigger-finger neighborhood watches)

It's in this last one we see how, in its way, The Terminator, Rambo, and Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, are all illegitimate sequels to the slasher movie craze, and just maybe so is our modern trend of abducted daughters, torture porn, and NRA zealotry.

----------------

So that was the first half of the 80s. Maybe we never had a midnight visitor with a laser sight or a knife but it hardly matters now. I still can't sleep in dead silence. I need a white noise machine, old radio shows, a whirring AC, the TV left on all night on low volume, or all of the above; I moved to the city that never sleeps--which after seeing The Warriors and Escape from New York I vowed to never do--but the crime of the 70s was my boon, because dead bolts, steel doors, small apartments on high floors all made one's safety from outside monsters easily secured. Meanwhile my "little" brother has a gun locker and lives in a city that encourages concealed weapons permits. Is this all the fault of Michael and Jason?

I would say, maybe.

The personal freedom of the 70s ended coincidentally the same time slasher movies were widely available on video where moms and little kids could see them despite the R-rating. Most of the violence was innocuous, even laughable, but the cumulative effect--the sheer number of R-rated violence available, even just looking at a shelf of the covers--was traumatizing. I could be traumatized by catching the end of Looking for Mr. Goodbar on The Movie Channel thinking it was Annie Hall one year, and get refused admittance to see Creepshow (1982) at the local cinema the next. Funny how fucked things are.... maybe it's in our nature to destroy oah-selves, but it's also in our nature to then get preachy about how destructive we are, and refuse admittance to teenagers for films perfectly suited to sick children.

At least one good thing came of all that fear and mistrust: Woman got a gun and learned to be her own Dr. Loomis. She kept watching the dark, and would never fall for a killer playing possum ever again. By Terminator 2, she had arsenals stashed away in Mexico just waiting... the fan was shit-caked and the Blockbusters were busted. There was nothing left now to scare us... not even the bomb.
----

For further reading on the Tick-Tock Momentum and the Halloween: A Clockwork Darkness: Hawks, Subjectivity, Halloween

Mr. Sandman (Slight Return): Halloween II

The Tick Tock Initiation: Phantasm

Friday the 13th Killed my Childhood

Read More