Alien

There are few horror movies as good as Alien (1979). That’s probably why the director of Alien, Ridley Scott, made Prometheus. He wanted to revisit one of the highlights of his career. But unfortunately, Prometheus was a big, shiny, beautiful failure, and by comparison Alien looks better and better with every passing year. As an example of effectively deliberate pacing, Alien remains unmatched. And as an example of a scaled-down, good, old-fashioned scare movie, it’s in a very elite camp with maybe nine other horror pictures. Even though some of Alien’s depictions of technology seem out-dated or just plain off, its keen awareness of the computer as control freak marks the film as a perennially relevant piece of horror filmmaking. (And...Sigourney Weaver.)

If we put Alien in context, we see that it was somewhat responsible for starting a new cycle of big monster movies from Hollywood. This is probably not a good thing, ultimately, as most of them are crap. But it’s at least a testament to Alien’s power as a film. (I hope…Perhaps it’s merely a testament to Alien’s box office success.) What were the noteworthy science fiction and horror films that immediately preceded Alien? Going back to 1968, there was Stanley Kubrick’s pretentious but magnificent 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its many self-congratulatory shots of futuristic man and his interstellar voyages. And more recently the genre was being re-routed with space operas and reverential aliens-are-wonderful-and-mysterious flicks such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Really, Alien was the first big-budget monster film of the modern era. The only other movies that compare are Jaws (1975) and the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) by Philip Kaufman. Kaufman’s movie is a masterpiece in its own, but for some reason it’s Alien that has stuck around in the culture. (That’s a shame. You should absolutely go and watch Body Snatchers `78 because it’s fantastic and it stars Brooke Adams, an under-appreciated leading lady of the period. It also stars Veronica Cartwright, who went on to play Lambert in Alien.)

Alien is certainly a throwback to the classic monster films of the 50s, but featuring the up-to-date-with-a-vengeance special effects of the 1970s. The great horror/scifi films from this period remind us how convincing practical effects can be, even when CGI is technically “better” looking. Somehow, there’s always something unreal about CGI. For some reason.

There’s an excellent documentary on Italian filmmaker Mario Bava that discusses in some detail how Alien essentially ripped off his 1966 film Planet of the Vampires. The documentary posits that director Ridley Scott likely didn’t know of Bava’s film, but that Alien’s writers, Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, did. If you watch just a few scenes of the astronauts—in funky 60s-style space suits that were later copied in Prometheus—exploring the vampire planet, you can recall the images of Tom Skerrit, John Hurt, and Veronica Cartwright as they investigate the alien spacecraft that lured them onto a lonely planetary system while their spaceship the Nostromo drifted peacefully towards Earth.

But Ridley Scott’s film may be the first outer space movie that genuinely scared the living daylights out of people. There are other greats, such as the Howard Hawks-produced The Thing From Another World (1951), and Don Siegel’s original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Some people have likely made the Hawksian connection to Alien because it features a strong female lead, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), but actually Hawks may be more ahead of his time than Scott. Hawks’s female leads were tough and smart and sexy and they knew it. The characters in Alien don’t really have biographies or that kind of awareness that characters do in a Howard Hawks movie (such as The Big Sleep). There is a deliberate attempt in Alien to reduce the characters to the bare bones as a way of comparing them to the machines that operate much of their lives on board the Nostromo. The computer that ultimately runs the Nostromo is called Mother (a clever tribute to HAL in 2001). When Tom Skerrit goes into the little control room, which is dotted with yellow lights from ceiling to floor, he types the question, “WHAT ARE MY CHANCES?” into the computer. He’s about to go into the air ducts of the ship to try and corner the slimy, shape-shifting alien creature that has boarded the craft. “Mother” responds with “does not compute.” And then we realize how helpless they are at the hands of their modern technology. It sounds all too familiar.

The humans are almost dehumanized for much of the film, and yet there are scenes of real feeling between them and for them. Much of Ridley Scott’s work is somewhat cold and calculated, but this quality kind of works in Alien, and the actors are still able to convey something of a sense of camaraderie between the crew members, even if they don’t all like each other all of the time. Besides, how could you not feel bad for people trapped in outer space by a slimy, sharp-toothed alien that bleeds acid and has a habit of harvesting babies inside human stomachs?

Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is credited as the first genuinely modern female character in a horror movie. That’s probably true, and yet I’m not sure how much it did to advance women in movies, or horror movies, or society. I’m certainly happy that Ellen Ripley is strong, and even happier that Sigourney Weaver gained a career by her tough-as-nails performance. There were plenty of films that followed Alien’s lead. George Romero did in his 1985 Day of the Dead, finally offering up a tough female character, but this was also an apology for setting the women’s movement back several decades with his catatonic female lead in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead.

Sigourney Weaver is a marvel. She carries this picture--her first starring role--with grace and strength and confidence, and is the heart and the soul of Alien. And near the end, when Weaver is walking around the escape pod in her panties, it feels like a cheap reversion to some old-fashioned male chauvinism until she dons a spacesuit and goes head-to-head with the alien creature. Perhaps they knew what they were doing, or perhaps it was just a happy accident that the makers of Alien--and Weaver herself--gave us such a strong performance. I am inclined to think that Sigourney Weaver knew what she was doing. 

But there are still a lot of dumb characters in horror movies, and in fact, there are some dumb characters in Alien. As fantastic as this movie is, it relies on several cheap tricks to generate quality death scenes, like when Harry Dean Stanton is searching for the cat, or when two other crew members encounter the alien and—in customary Italian splatter movie fashion—stand absolutely still in sheer, passive terror. It’s a marvel that somebody thought to make Ripley as tough as she was, considering how ineffective most of her crew members were in a crisis.

But it’s hard to begrudge Alien for its little faults. It’s such a fun piece of outer space trash, so expertly made (capped by that subtle, sinister music by Jerry Goldsmith) and so deliciously rotten in a way, with all its cynicism and its nasty characters. And no, Aliens is not better.

With John Hurt, Ian Holm, and Yaphet Kotto. 

Cuba

If Sean Connery's James Bond was about English political dominance, Sean Connery's Robert Dapes is about its political irrelevance. In Cuba (1979), which is set in Havana in the year 1959, Connery plays a British mercenary who's hired by the Batista regime to help them stop Castro from taking over. (Viewers shouldn't be shocked by how that ends up.) Dapes is never particularly invested in the job, but that seems to be true of his attitude in general. He's a jaded ex-soldier who has accepted the ways of the modern world and has learned how to capitalize on them. While in Havana, he runs into an old flame, Alex (Brooke Adams), now married into a prominent Cuban family. Alex runs her husband's factory while he runs around with women. (He's also fond of booze and gambling.) Their marriage is unhappy, but she likes the control she has over him, doling out money to him when he needs it, and managing their capital.

Cuba isn't bad. Director Richard Lester has a clever sense of humor, which keeps this from being self-serious. It's sort of a modern-day Casablanca, except that nobody saw it in 1979 and nobody remembers it now. And while it is about 20 minutes too long, Cuba is generally a fascinating (perhaps unreliable) piece of quasi-historical filmmaking. What's perhaps most historically accurate isn't its take on the Castro revolution, but its depiction of American culture's pervasiveness in Cuba. Everywhere Lester's camera turns we see Cubans inundated with Western capitalist ideals: from the grandson of one of the generals playing Monopoly with his grandfather, to the "Mr. Clean" commercial playing on the television set while a seemingly unresponsive elderly woman stares at it, to the General watching a private screening of Horror of Dracula (a British film, but it qualifies as a Western influence nonetheless).

Brooke Adams, ever the photogenic actress, radiates in Cuba. She's a stunning beauty, and her dark hair makes the New York-born actress believably Latina (maybe not Cuban, necessarily) even when her accent falters periodically. The chemistry between Connery and Adams seems off, but there's something oddly fitting about it at the same time: it's a jaded, unworkable romance for the jaded soldier. Alex is spoiled and selfish but also sympathetic. And Dapes is stubborn but not unfeeling.

And a cast of amusing supporting characters populates Lester's Havana: Chris Sarandon as Alex's arrogant beauty of a husband, Hector Elizondo as one of Batista's men, hired to accompany Dapes (he begins something of an amiable sidekick), Jack Weston as a sleazy American investor, Martin Balsam as General Bello, Lonette McKee as Sarandon's girl on the side, Danny De La Paz as her Castro-infatuated younger brother, who's a pawn of the revolutionaries, and Walter Gotell. Written by Charles Wood. Filmed--convincingly--in Spain. 122 min. ★★½

Dawn of the Dead

Dawn of the Dead (1979) is a garish, exuberant horror movie, one which still leaves me feeling giddy. It's such a half-serious kind of a scare picture that you forget how dark it is under the surface, and that dark nastiness can come up from behind and take a big bite out of you. Of course some will scoff that the special effects in Dawn of the Dead are outdated now, but for me, the comic book-red blood and the pasty-faced flesh-eating ghouls are still enchanting, almost more so because they're
so obviously unreal. Who on earth could enjoy a "serious" zombie movie anyway?

(George Romero, the director of Dawn, had made something more serious in his directorial debut, the cult classic Night of the Living Dead, but that film had the effect of a surreal nightmare and it worked for it. But I can't praise Romero's first three zombie pictures enough. They're woven into the tapestry of my movie-going history. I've seen them too many times to count, which has lessened their impact somewhat, and yet I continue to find new and intriguing things in them.)

In Dawn, the zombie crisis established in Night has escalated, and the film opens at a Pittsburgh television news station, where the commentators, technicians, and program managers are all in a tizzy. The world is ending but dammit if they aren't going to continue competing for ratings. Soon, two of the TV station employees flee the city in a company helicopter, along with two members of the National Guard. They eventually land on the roof of a shopping mall, which is overrun with the walking dead, and barricade themselves inside the materialist mecca, securing it from the ghoul invasion for a while.

Critics have beaten the consumerism theme into the ground, so I won't go into detail about that here. Instead I'd like to point out how Romero's visual sense of storytelling makes this movie work. He's admitted that his screenplays generally contain twice as many shots as most feature films, and one can imagine how difficult this becomes logistically for the director of photography, the lighting director, and anyone else involved in the mapping out of a given scene and its particular actions. But Romero's ability to imagine what he wants, which is tempered by the loosening powers of spontaneous input from his cast and crew, is what makes Dawn of the Dead such a visually arresting movie experience.

You don't really need dialogue to get this movie. You don't need deep characters. Indeed, these characters don't have much more of a backstory than those of Romero's first zombie installment. We're lucky if we even get last names. While I'm no opponent of richly detailed characters, I see the value in utilizing a more shallow representation of people in horror movies. They're functional to the plot, like just about everything else in these kinds of films. This has been used as a slur on the genre, and while it tends to work against your enjoyment of movies like Friday the 13th, it sometimes works out well. There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to movies, and so there are no hard and fast rules about genre. What unites the film is a sense of menace and a sense of struggle against that menace. You root for these--sometimes idiotic--characters, even when they make silly mistakes. You jeer at the stupidity of the helicopter pilot who can't kill a zombie to save his life, and you look with derision at the token woman, who's only a cut above the catatonic leading lady of Night, who was so positively useless. (Romero later tried to atone for this by making the lead in Day of the Dead a strong female character a la Sigourney Weaver in Alien.)

But the shopping mall setting, the gaudy gore effects of Tom Savini, the histrionic synthesized score by the Italian band Goblin, and Romero's own sick view of America as the seat of self-consumerism, all conspire to make Dawn of the Dead the classic American horror movie experience. I'll even disagree with my movie critic icon Pauline on this one. Flaws and all, with every new development in movies technically that might threaten to render it less effective, it still works bloody well.

With David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott Reiniger, Gaylen Ross, and Savini in a small role as a biker. 126 mins. (Extended edition, featuring mostly unimportant footage that was rightly excised from the theatrical cut, runs 140 mins, and the European cut, overseen by Italian horror master Dario Argento, runs about 118 mins.)

The Warriors

The Warriors (1979) is a cult classic, one that reminds you a bit of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), except the gang members aren't reduced to robotic killers. They're often comic figures in The Warriors. Just about everybody's deadly serious, and that's probably partly because most of the actors are inexperienced. But their green amateurishness lends a certain authentic charm to the movie. It's so much a part of its decade. The tumult of the 60s and early 70s had given way to a kind of urban decay by the late 70s. Rather than trying to examine why youths turn to gangs for their sense of belonging, The Warriors takes such ponderings for granted. It gives a brutal but surprisingly not heavy-handed window into one night in their unpredictable lives.

The story is set in motion at a massive assembly of representatives from about 100 gangs from the New York area, where one gang's charismatic, cultish leader, Cyrus, proposes that they unite, turning their considerable numbers into a makeshift army rivaling the NYC police force by about 40,000 men. When somebody assassinates Cyrus, the Warriors are blamed for the murder, and they spend the rest of the night trying to make it back to their turf, pursued by various gangs, most of them sporting ridiculous names and costumes. It's all a part of this movie's visual schtick, which is sometimes a bit obvious, but always really amusing. There's one gang called The Baseball Furies. Adorned in face paint that makes them look like mimes, they strut around in baseball uniforms and brandish wooden bats as weapons. Not very intimidating, although the image of them conjures up the Joker in your imagination.

Michael Beck heads the small band of Warriors trying to escape assault after assault (not just from the rivaling gangs but also from the incompetent police officers). He's a compelling looking lead: stony and thin and handsome in a bland sort of way. His power doesn't extend into his acting all that much, but again, the wooden performance suits the material, which is designed like a comic book come to life. (It reminded me of some of George Romero's movies, especially the scenes in Dawn of the Dead where a large band of bikers breaks into the shopping mall, as well as the weird jousting-on-motorcycles Arthurian drama Knightriders.)

You shouldn't see a movie like The Warriors expecting brilliance. But it's a fast-moving, energetic little action thriller. The fight scenes are sometimes dated, but they're not embarrassing, and the cast is fit enough to make them convincing. They have a real kick to them at times. One scene in particular comes to mind, where the Warriors are hiding in the stalls of a train station bathroom. You know they're in there, but you don't know how they're going to surprise their attackers.

It's based on the novel by Sol Yurick, adapted by David Shaber and director Walter Hill. Co-starring James Remar, Dorsey Wright, Brian Tyler, David Harris, Tom McKitterick, Thomas G. Waites, Terry Michos, Marcelino Sanchez, Deborah Van Valkenburgh, and Roger Hill as Cyrus.

Zombie

The Five Points Horror Fest is back, with another film by Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci. Last year I had the immense pleasure of reviewing Fulci's masterpiece of incomprehensibility, The Beyond (1980), and this year I got to see Zombie (1979), which many consider to be Fulci's piece de resistance. It's certainly a piece of something.

In the poster you will notice that the title is Zombi 2. That's because when George Romero's Dawn of the Dead premiered in Italy, it was titled Zombi, so this is an unofficial sequel to that film. The two have nothing in common other than zombies. The difference between Italian and American horror movies is one of humor. Romero's Dawn of the Dead has a sharp sense of humor throughout, while Zombie is, within itself, utterly lacking in intentional humor. But the unintentional comedy is plentiful enough, because Zombie is such a painfully stupid splatter film.

Fulci sets most of the movie on a small Caribbean island where the dead are returning to life--attributed to voodoo. A reporter and a woman whose father died on the island go looking for answers, and when they arrive, they meet a doctor (Richard Johnson), who's trying to locate a scientific explanation for the zombie problem that's quickly turning all the island's inhabitants into flesh-eating ghouls. Unfortunately, the humans are just too idiotic to adequately defend themselves from creatures that, if they moved any slower, wouldn't be moving at all. And how on earth is the human body so sensitive, so permeable, that with a quick peck a zombie can rip out a hunk of flesh from an arm or a leg? It's madness, I tell you. Madness.

Tisa Farrow, a poor-man's Mia Farrow, plays the girl with a banal seriousness, and Ian McCulloch, a poor-man's Roger Moore, plays the reporter. There's oodles of blood and gore, a fight between a zombie and a shark, and plenty of bad dubbing to make the bad-movie-lover giggle with glee. And of course, being an Italian film, it's well-shot, punctuating the film with little artistic moments that are above the subject matter but somehow lift it out of the muck, if only momentarily. Pretty soon you feel numb from the gory parts, and you laugh at them, not because you're a sadist, but because it's all so dumb, so dumb indeed.

Salem's Lot

Salem's Lot (1979) is from a novel by Stephen King, adapted for television by Paul Monash and directed by Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre). I already reviewed it a couple years ago, but after watching it again last night I want to revisit it. It's probably the most memorable adaptation of a Stephen King novel with the exceptions of Carrie and The Shining. However, it's more interesting than The Shining and more restrained than Carrie.  

Salem's Lot, because it was shot for television, is limited by the constraints of cable. There's no gore and really no violence, which makes the job of the writer and director significantly more difficult in terms of amping up the horror. They were forced to build the atmosphere in a way that would give us the creeps. If you look at Hooper's directorial debut, Texas Chain Saw, you'll see an altogether different movie. Chain Saw is frenetic, unrelenting and grueling. In terms of plot, it's an episode of Scooby Doo, except the villain is a maniac with a chainsaw, not a local farmer trying to cover up his counterfeiting racket in the basement. Meanwhile, Paul Monash wrote the screenplay for Carrie, a movie that seems stylistically as diametrically opposed to Salem's Lot as you could get. My question is: how did two people whose previous work was so hyperbolic and garish manage to come up with this slow-paced, straight-forward vampires-in-New-England chiller?

You do start to miss the violence, because Salem's Lot might be a banal sitcom about small-town America if not for the vampire element. It's rather tame, but intermittently Hooper and cinematographer Jules Brenner have constructed some of the best vampire movie set-pieces ever. The King vampire, Barlow, is a direct nod to Count Orlock in Murnau's silent-era classic Nosferatu (1922). Barlow was quite different in the novel, but the change lends a sense of unspeakable horror and dread to the adaptation. Salem's Lot's banality is only ever at the surface: beneath it, there is the dreadful sense of doom that we felt in Carrie and Texas Chain Saw. The work of Monash and Hooper is very much a part of the subtext. Very little is overt. Hooper seems to be imitating Hitchcock more than ever. He did it a little bit in Chain Saw, when one of the kids unsuspectingly walks into the layer of Leatherface and meets an unexpectedly quick demise. We knew something was going to happen, but we didn't know when because there was no immediate warning.


Salem's Lot is chock full of warnings--musical cues, telegraphed shots that tell us, "someone's about to get it." And yet, there are still shudders. When we finally see Barlow's ghastly purple face with his beady, piercing eyes and yellow fangs, it's truly horrifying: one of the most nightmarish images I can recall in movies. There's no denying the film's power, and I think in the case of Salem's Lot the fun and the excitement lie in the hours of restraint that give way to the minutes, even seconds, of chilling horror that pop up unexpectedly, more and more as the film progresses. Perhaps this is simply the psychological explanation for why we like horror movies in general.


The cast is fairly convincing: David Soul plays Ben Mears, a writer who grew up in Salem's Lot and has returned to write a book about the Marston house, an iconic den of evil now presided over by the vampire and his human guardian; James Mason plays that guardian, and he utters every line with delightfully cryptic arrogance; Lance Kerwin plays Mark, Ben's teenage muse by proxy: he's into writing (as well as monsters and horror make-up). He and Ben develop a predictable but unlikely kinship (unlikely because their characters have almost no interaction until the end); Bonnie Bedelia plays the love interest, Susan, a character from the Old School of Wimpy Horror Movie Heroines, except she poses as a "partially-liberated feminist." In fact, Susan's character is mostly reactionary. She tows the line. Thankfully, Bedelia plays the part with an understated, intelligent grace. She lets the subtlety of her performance do the work, rather than jamming the meaning of her lines and her motivations into the "foreground" of her performance. Indeed, Susan would have been as bad as she was written if played by a lesser actress.


With Lew Ayres, Ed Flanders, Fred Willard, Geoffrey Lewis, Reggie Nalder (as Barlow), and George Dzundza, as a fat, drunk New England truck driver (a combination you would never want in a human being if you can help it).


Followed by the dismal A Return to Salem's Lot and a 2004 remake (also made for TV).

Breaking Away

Breaking Away is a sleeper hit from 1979 about four high school graduates in Bloomington, Indiana, who have no clue what they want to do with their lives, and feel out-of-place in their own hometown in the presence of the preppie coeds at Bloomington's Indiana University campus.

Breaking Away is one of smartest, funniest, most endearing crowd-pleasers I've ever seen. It portrays life in a small town honestly, not looking down but rather looking in. The relationships in the movie are deeply layered, so much so that every time I watch this movie I discover new qualities, new facets. The main character, Dave Stoller (Dennis Christopher), is an avid cyclist who idolizes a group of Italian racers, to the point that he's become a sort of trans-ethnic-- an Italian trapped in an American's body. He speaks with a cheesy Italian accent and wears Italian aftershave, and has transformed the walls of his bedroom into a virtual shrine to Italy.

Dave's father (Paul Dooley) is baffled by his son's bizarre behavior, but won't do anything about it other than complain. Dave's mom (Barbara Barrie) doesn't mind--she gets a kick out of his active imagination because it runs against the routine of small-town blue-collar culture. She sees in Dave a sense of passion for living that she once had, a fire that died down but remains inside her if ever so faintly.

Even though the parents have aspects of caricature--the complaining, ultra-conservative father and the deferential, quiet, mother--the actors manage to turn these caricatures into human beings with depth to them. The caricatures become enhanced, fleshed out, made loveable, made credible, made acceptable and forgivable, and at the same time they end up surprising us in many ways.

Likewise, the development of the four guys--Dave (Christopher), Mike (Dennis Quaid), Cyril (Daniel Stern), and Moocher (Jackie Earle Haley)--is a richly delightful experience to watch. Quaid is a former high school quarterback who sees a dim and unfulfilling life ahead of him, Stern is the gangly eccentric, whose weird personality alienates him but also endears him to the group: At the end of the movie, after the climactic Little 500 race (which actually exists to this day in Bloomington), Cyril is the only one without someone at his side. He seems to walk through the movie slightly alone. Moocher is experiencing new romance and trying to act like an adult, even though he's short and still looks like a kid.

Breaking Away was written by Indiana University graduate Steve Tesich, who received an Academy Award for his screenplay. It was directed by Peter Yates. Also starring Robyn Douglass, Hart Bochner, Amy Wright, and in a cameo appearance, P.J. Soles. ★★★★