Film Friday: True Lies (1994)

True Lies fascinates me. When it came out, the action genre was played out. Spy movies, like the James Bond franchise, were mired in mediocrity. Schwarzenegger had come off his first true failure in Last Action Hero. And Tom Arnold was intensely disliked. This thing had all the hallmarks of being a dud. Yet, it proved to be one of the best action films of all time.

** spoiler alert **

The Plot

On the surface, True Lies is a Tom Clancy-like action film. It centers around Harry Tasker (Schwarzenegger), a member of an elite agency charged with protecting the world from terrorists. Harry is the best of the best and is capable of an amazing number of borderline-impossible physical tasks. He’s James Bond on steroids. His partner Gib (Tom Arnold) is the typical sidekick one finds in these stories, who does all the leg work to allow Harry to be the hero. Together they need to stop an Islamic terrorist who has gotten his hands on two nuclear bombs.

But that’s not really what this film is about.

At its core, True Lies is a romantic comedy about the relationship between Harry and his wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis). Harry cannot tell Helen what he does for a living, so he pretends to be a boring computer salesman. He is so dull that Helen has become bored and finds herself enticed into considering an affair. . . sort of. . . with “Simon” (Bill Paxton), a sleazy used car salesman who pretends to be a spy to trick Curtis into coming to his home. Harry discovers this and abuses his power with the agency to uncover what is going on and then to make an attempt to win back Helen. But things go awry as his day job stumbles upon the game he is playing with his wife. Soon, Helen learns the truth and the rest of the film is about them resurrecting their relationship in light of the lies Harry had been telling. Oh, and they need to stop Miami from going up in smoke and save their daughter.

What Drives This Film

True Lies should be a template for how to make an effective action film. First, you have all the usual bells and whistles – exotic locations, amazing stunts, fantastic effects, and huge stakes between the bad guys and the good guys. Indeed, the explosion of the bridge is perhaps one of the best effects/scenes in action movie history, and the fight scenes are executed brilliantly. But what sets this film apart is not the action scenes, it’s what happens between the action scenes.

For one thing, the relationship between Harry and Gib is fantastic. Like all sidekicks, Tom Arnold is here to provide comic relief. But unlike most sidekicks, he’s got a strong character himself. In many ways, he’s more capable and more rational than Harry. He’s the guy who really makes the team click. And that allows their banter to be that much more fun. In effect, their relationship is that of any standard buddy film, where the two characters are equals who get along well despite their differences, and it is because they are equals that the relationship is simultaneously frustrating and rewarding. This choice makes their moments together so much stronger than most hero/sidekick moments, where the sidekick does little more than set up the lines for the hero.

Secondly, the entire subplot between Harry, Helen and “Simon” gives this film heart. Name another action film that takes forty minutes out of its plot to do something that isn’t related to the bad guy’s scheme? There isn’t one because that rarely works. But it works here because this subplot is brilliantly woven into the main plot because of the ironic coincidence of “Simon” pretending to be a spy while Harry is pretending not to be a spy and because of the way it pulls Helen into Harry’s real life. It also smartly lets the plot develop without the filmmaker needing to show every aspect of the bad guy’s plan. Instead, the bad guy’s plan advances while you are watching the “Simon” story and you pick up right at the exciting parts.

Third, you have the romantic aspect of this film. In this case, Cameron brilliantly plays upon the most common complaints of both men and women when it comes to relationships. For men, you have the “my wife doesn’t understand me” aspect of Harry not being able to convince his wife that he’s not boring. For women, you have the escapism of wanting to find a romantic-hero, like a spy, when you’re married to a dull, but decent man. Moreover, the film resolves perfectly as both get exactly what they want. Harry’s wife realizes he’s not dull and actually takes an interest in his life, which makes him happy. Meanwhile, Helen discovers that her “dull and safe” husband really has an exciting hidden side, which makes her happy. And to cap it all off, they both realize that they really do love each other no matter what. Each of those ideas taps directly into the needs of men and women in relationships and makes the film fulfilling to both genders.

Finally, this film is a brilliant comedy. This film is awash in humor that arises out of the story and which is organic to the characters. There is no forced humor here, nor is the humor assigned to just one character. To the contrary, each character has ample moments to deliver humor and almost all of those moments are things to which you can relate. And that is a key point because it keeps the humor fresh year after year because it doesn’t rely on punch lines, it relies on you relating to those same moments in your own life. That’s very well done.

True Lies is a film that blew me away the first time I saw it, and it’s proven to have amazing staying power. It’s also a film that just doesn’t grow old. And the reason for that is that this film focuses on the relationships of the characters, not on the plot. They need to make more movies like this.

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My Favorite Obscure Horror Films

In honor of Halloween being Monday night, I thought I’d put together a list of great horror movies you can use to creep yourselves out. Boo! But rather than list the usual suspects like The Exorcist, The Sixth Sense, Poltergeist, and Alien, I thought I'd give you some more obscure films that I truly love.

● The Others (2001): A psychological drama as much as a horror film, this story of a borderline-abusive mother (Nichole Kidman) who lives in a darkened old house with her two photosensitive children delves deeply into questions of paranoia and supernatural hauntings as an unseen enemy seems determined to destroy Kidman. This film also has a genuinely amazing twist you'll never see coming.

● Phantasm (1979): A true cult classic, this independent film is well known among horror aficionados for a reason: it’s great! The story of a young boy who discovers something mysterious going on at the local graveyard, Phantasm has a truly original concept, a surprisingly strong execution, and gave us a murderous flying ball, an army of dwarves, and an iconic villain: “the Tall Man.”

● Pontypool (2009): More a psychological thriller than a zombie film, Pontypool provides a very strong and unique take on zombies. This one is really gripping. (Reviewed Here)

● Prince of Darkness (1987): John Carpenter’s scariest film, POD is the story of a group of scientists trapped in a church as the Antichrist tries to break into our universe. This film combines a very original premise with some fantastically creepy suspense and some really horrific moments to give us one of the more troubling horror movies in the past forty years. (Reviewed Here)

● Session 9 (2001): I expected nothing when I saw this David Caruso/Paul Guilfoyle-led independent film late one night and I was amazed to find it tense, compelling and spooky. The story of an asbestos cleaning crew who freak themselves out as they work to clean up an abandoned mental hospital with a horrific past, this film provides enough tension to keep you on the edge of your seat throughout.

● Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983): Not a scary movie by any means, this is more of a mood movie, with Jason Robards as a father who fears he’s lost the respect of his boy, giving an opening to an evil circus ring-mastered by Jonathan Pryce to come to town and lure the townsfolk to their doom. The library scene alone is worth the price of admission. (Reviewed Here)

● The Fog (1980): Staring Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh and Hal Holbrook, John Carpenter’s The Fog is a film that is so much better than it deserves to be. The story of a California fishing town about to be overrun by a fog seeking revenge for sins committed by the town’s founders 100 year before, this film will creep you out without grossing you out. Interestingly, the creepiest moments were forced upon Carpenter by the studio. (Avoid the remake.)

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Film Friday: Halloween (1978)

I enjoy Halloween. I like Donald Pleasence and Jamie Lee Curtis, and I enjoy John Carpenter’s style. The story is good enough, if you switch your brain to “off” before starting the film. And it’s just creepy enough to enjoy. So why do I have so much ill will for this film? Because Halloween gave birth to the modern slasher flick, and it established every one of the genre’s stupidest conventions.

** spoiler alert **

The Plot

Halloween is the story of Michael Myers. He kills people. Why? Because they were there? The film doesn’t know why and doesn’t really care. As the film opens, Myers escapes from fifteen years of custody and returns to Haddonfield, Illinois, where he apparently intends to kill anyone who appears on film. His sister, Jamie Lee Curtis, appears on camera. So does Donald Pleasence, who is ostensibly hunting Michael Myers, though really he seems more interested in running around town proclaiming that he is "too late" to do whatever it was he was planning. For the next 91 minutes, Myers kills everyone except Curtis and Pleasence. Roll the credits.

So What’s The Problem?

My problem with Halloween stems from the total nonsense Carpenter uses to create his villain and the fact this nonsense became the template for slasher flicks. For example:

• We begin with Myers’ character. He has no personality or emotions and he does not speak. He is, for lack of a better word, functionally catatonic. Yet, he's also somehow a genius who can plot revenge, track people down, and do things he never learned to do (like drive) with little or no difficulty.

• Moreover, despite being effectively catatonic, Myers has the moves of a hyper-trained special forces operative. . . maybe even a Hollywood-style ninja. How?

• He's stronger than ten people, even though he’s never worked out in his life, and he cannot be brought down by mere physical injury. Indeed, no matter how much you wound him, he shows no signs of being wounded. Nor can he be killed because he’s crazy and crazy makes to invulnerable to bullets. Yeah, that makes sense.

• Strangely, Myers has the ability to know where characters will be in the next scene. Indeed, somehow he manages to place himself perfectly to surprise any character that separates from the others.

• He also has the ability to hide in plain sight, to hide behind objects that are too small to conceal his body, and to appear and disappear through closed doors and windows without making a sound. He's ultra swift and super silent.

• He also can move vast distances instantly, e.g. between houses on different blocks. Not to mention he can find the home of the person a character is talking to on the phone. . . as if he has callee id.

Does any of this make any sense? No. But for Carpenter it didn’t have to. Carpenter wasn’t making a movie with a complete story. He was making a series of murderous vignettes, which he then strung together to form a movie. We accept the lack of coherence between the vignettes because Carpenter has enough talent as a filmmaker to disguise those problems and because he gives us a strange enough villain that we spend more time pondering what he is doing rather than trying to determine how he's doing it.

The whole film is gibberish. But that wouldn't bother me if this has just been a one-off film. But it didn't stay a one-off. The formula escaped and became the template for every stupid slasher flick that followed over the next thirty years. Ug.

So What Does Halloween Mean?

Halloween has no meaning. Some have suggested Halloween is a social critique of the immorality of young people in the 1970s. They point out that Myers’ victims were all sexually active and abusing alcohol or pot when they were killed. By comparison, the lone survivor, Curtis, was chaste and innocent. . . except for that scene where she was smoking pot. So scratch that one.

More interestingly, the film may have been intended to include a feminist message. The producer, Debra Hill, was a feminist. And she and Carpenter often included “strong roles” for women in Carpenter’s horror movies. The role of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is cited as being one of these roles because Curtis survives and she does so with her own wits. But if that’s true, then the fact that Halloween became the template for the ensuing wave of slasher flicks should come as a special disappointment to feminists. Indeed, modern slasher flicks are often about as misogynistic as rap videos -- using heavy doses of T&A to put a lot male A's in the seats.

In the end, I think that it’s impossible to get any meaning out of Halloween because the movie makes no sense when you break it down. The truth is this film is nothing but exploitation. Carpenter set out to create a film based entirely on shock rather than horror, a film with no intellectual pretenses, a film that would scare you simply by shouting “boo” over and over again, and he succeeded beyond measure. Indeed, the $320,000 they spent on this film turned into $55,000,000 in gross revenue. But that's about all the depth you'll really find.

The Nature of Evil -- The Anti-Liberal Evil

So what does this film tell us about the nature of evil? Not a whole heck of a lot, with one exception. I would argue Myers’ character is a response to the prior two decades of liberalism. How’s that for unexpected!

In the 1960s and 1970s, liberals constantly whined about root causes "making" people into criminals. Everyone had to have a reason, something that pushed them to become evil. Liberals just would not admit that some people were simply rotten. Myers is one of the first human character in many years (probably since In Cold Blood (1967)) who was evil because that was his nature. He wasn’t rebelling. He wasn’t backed into a corner or exploited. He wasn’t abused as a child. He wasn’t drugged or programmed by the government. He was just evil. In fact, the biggest disappointment of the remake in 2007, directed by Rob Zombie, other than the dreadful quality of the film, was that Zombie explained Myers’ evil as being the result of his coming from a broken home and being bullied in school. Boo hoo.

So in the end, Halloween was an ok movie that should have slowly faded into movie history. Sadly, it didn’t. Instead, it became a template for slasher flicks. And slowly, but surely, this template has come to dominate the horror genre because it takes no talent to write or direct a knock-off of this film. And that’s Michael Myers’ greatest evil.

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Film Friday: Prince of Darkness (1987)

Continuing our discussion of the nature of evil, today we turn to John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. This relatively unknown movie is one of my favorite horror movies and is possibly Carpenter’s best. What separates this movie from the pack is the clever manipulation of our emotions to generate fear and the use of intellectual horror to create a terrifying movie. In essence, it inspires helplessness.

** spoiler alert **

The Plot

As an old priest dies, the last member of a forgotten order -- the Brotherhood of Sleep, Father Loomis (Donald Pleasence) is sent to wrap up his affairs. Pleasence discovers something in the basement of the closed church where the old priest lived as a caretaker: a glass cylinder containing a swirling green fluid. Pleasence calls upon Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong), an expert in subatomic physics. Wong agrees to bring a group of students from several scientific disciplines to examine the cylinder. This group includes Jameson Parker (Simon and Simon) and his love-interest Catherine (Lisa Blount).

As they begin their investigation, they learn the object does not obey the normal laws of physics, and it's locked from the inside. They also begin to experience the same dream whenever anyone takes a nap. This dream purports to be a warning from the future of something evil that emerges from the church. Meanwhile, Pleasence and Wong study the diary of the old priest, which identifies the green fluid as the Antichrist. And it’s alive.

What Sets This Movie Apart

What sets Prince of Darkness apart from other horror movies is that Carpenter seeks to generate emotional and intellectual terror rather than shock to drive this film.

Emotional Terror

To create emotional terror, Carpenter uses our fear of helplessness against us. He does this by putting the characters into a creepy setting, exposing them to danger of which we are aware, and then making them oblivious until it is too late.

Carpenter starts with a truly creepy setting: an old church. But, interestingly, he doesn’t cheat to make it creepy, as so many other horror movies do -- think about how many horror movies take place in decaying castles with rooms that scream “fire damage” or spaceships, e.g. the Event Horizon, decorated with black walls and random spikes sticking from the walls. Indeed, the church is exactly what you would expect. Its room are the right size and shape. The walls are painted like you would expect for an old church. The floors are made of wood and the furniture fits the decor. You wouldn’t want to live there, but you wouldn’t run for your life either. This is the kind of building we’ve all been in and can relate to and that gives the movie an instant authenticity that so many horror movies sacrifice in trying to create their ambiance.

Carpenter then makes the church feel claustrophobic by making us feel trapped. When the scientists arrive at the church, we see homeless people gathering outside. As the movie runs, more and more gather, and soon we realize there will be no escaping the church. Yet, we recognize the danger long before the characters do. This not only triggers our fear of being trapped, but it also triggers our natural instinct to help others. But since we cannot help them, we feel helpless, which brings on a sense of fear.

Carpenter then plays on our fear of being alone, our fear of losing our identities, and our fear of betrayal. As the thing in the basement begins to take people over one at a time, we find ourselves terrified as we helplessly watch unsuspecting students and scientists milling around as the possessed people approach them. There is little more terrifying than watching a monster slowly walking toward an unsuspecting character. What’s worse, everything that happens is avoidable if only the characters could put all of their knowledge together, but they cannot -- only we can, and we cannot help them. This fills each scene with terror as we can see the danger standing there in plain sight, but the characters simply cannot see it for themselves. Thus, the film fills us with a sense of helplessness in the face of this terror.

Also, the entire time, Carpenter cleverly uses the soundtrack to manipulate us. The music sits entirely in the background and you barely notice it. Yet, Carpenter uses the bass to drive your heart rate -- just as sitcoms use laugh tracks to trigger laughter. In this way, he expertly controls the tension of each scene without the audience even realizing it.

Intellectual Horror

In addition to playing on our emotions, Carpenter offers genuine intellectual horror -- something increasingly rare in horror movies. Intellectual horror comes not from shock, but from finding something that terrifies the audience deeply and putting them into a state of mind where their deepest fears could be realized. In this regard, Carpenter aims right at the heart of our belief system: be it religion or science.

What Pleasence discovers in the diary of the dead priest is fascinating and terrifying. Pleasence discovers that Christ was real, though he was merely an advanced being, not the son of God. His purpose in coming to Earth was to warn mankind that an evil creature, a sort of Anti-God, was trying to break into the universe. To help this Anti-God achieve that goal, there was an Antichrist (the son of the Anti-God) who would open a doorway. But Jesus trapped the Antichrist in the cylinder and gave the cylinder to the human race to guard.

This discovery causes Pleasence to lose his faith. He realizes this Anti-God is real evil, and it horrifies him that the church decided mankind wasn't ready for this knowledge and decided instead to treat evil as a theoretical concept to be found within each of us. Consequently, not only is his theology premised on a lie, but mankind has failed to heed the warning of Jesus and now stands unprepared to combat this evil.

But, at the same time, the movie tells us that science is wrong as well. Not only are the rational scientists given undeniable proof of the supernatural, but they are confronted with the realization that everything they thought was true about the universe is false, and the laws of physics which they thought controlled the universe are in fact meaningless. Indeed, this creature obeys no laws of physics. Interestingly, this is essentially how science would define “evil” if it were asked -- a lack of order or structure to the universe.

Accordingly, we are confronted with a world in which the things we rely upon to explain the world -- religion and science -- are suddenly shown to be false. Intellectually, there can be little more terrifying than realizing that nothing we know is true. Not to mention that we now know there is something nightmarish waiting to break into our universe and there are fates worse than death.

In the middle of this, Carpenter raises questions of self-sacrifice. What would you do to save the world? And to what could you condemn another person to save the world? Moreover, Carpenter smartly lets the characters engage in discussions of theology and scientific theory throughout the film. Thus, he puts the audience into the right mindset to consider these issues as they arise -- unlike most horror movies which simply dump these questions on the audience unexpectedly at the end.

The Dream

Finally, we must mention the dream, which Carpenter uses expertly. First, by having everyone have the same dream, we grasp that the dream must be something other than everyone just having nightmares, i.e. it is a real warning. Secondly, by letting the dream unfold in pieces, Carpenter gives the audience time to speculate as to its meaning and how it will finish. When you let the audience fill in the blanks, as Carpenter does, they will always find something more terrifying than you can present because they will fill in with the things that scare them personally. But most importantly, Carpenter uses the dream to raise the odds the characters face. In a normal horror movie, good will defeat evil unless evil achieves some goal. But here, we know from the dream that a future exists where evil has prevailed. Thus, rather than fighting to prevent something that is in doubt, these characters are struggling to overturn something that appears inevitable. Intellectually, this raises the level of the challenge significantly. And since we’ve been told that neither science nor religion has the answer, we have no idea how we can fight this thing, i.e. we are left intellectually helpless. Thus, the audience spends the movie struggling to find the answer to avoid a nightmare that seems inevitable. That is intellectual terror.

Try finding that in a slasher flick!

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