Friday the 13th Part 2

Because Friday the 13th (1980) was such a huge hit, more teenagers had to die in Part II (1981), which picks up a few years later, when another group of camp counselors is butchered one by one at the now infamous Crystal Lake. As with the original, the idea here is body count, and the uninteresting characters are dispatched in the usual ways. The writers even manage to steal the famous double impaling scene from Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood. But this is the kind of pedestrian thriller that makes you yearn for something a little more sophisticated, a little more clever, and a little more fun. However, it's a wonderful movie to heckle with a group of friends. Directed by Steve Miner. With Amy Steel, John Furey, Warrington Gillette, Betsy Palmer, and Adrienne King. ★½

Raiders of the Lost Ark

The template for all the big, overlong adventure films of the past quarter-century, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) still looks impressive, but it's a slightly overrated piece of pop, the product of H. Rider Haggard-inspired boyhood fantasies. It's from a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman, and a screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan. As Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford, the modern-day Allan Quatermain, is an admittedly perfect casting choice: he's the right mixture of intellectual, heel, and romantic, driven by his singular fascination for the Ark of the Covenant. Karen Allen, as his girl Friday, Marion, is one of the spunkier heroines in American adventure films. She's right up there with Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley in her ability to hold her own, and that's a breath of fresh air. (Apparently she had to fight director Steven Spielberg on this; he must have chosen Kate Capshaw for Temple of Doom because he knew she wasn't above screaming and whining for the entire film.)

The creators of this behemoth once again show their inability to restrain themselves, pulling in everything from the Ark of the Covenant to the ancient Egyptians to the Nazis: it's set in 1936, when Hitler was allegedly doing research on the occult, among other things. Thus, Indiana Jones becomes involved in one of those dreary races against time, fighting Nazism, venomous snakes, giant, fast-moving boulders, skilled Egyptian sheiks, and any other potential obstacle that can be put in his way. The film is best when it lets a little levity into the mix, but it's such a busy production that Spielberg and company barely have time for such trivial things as humor.

Ultimately Raiders of the Lost Ark doesn't capture as much of the exotic charm and fascination of Egyptian culture (much of it takes place in Cairo) as it would like, despite good set design and production values. It's too much of a pastiche of other films, mixing some Humphrey Bogart vehicles (The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca come to mind) with King Solomon's Mines. As overblown movies go, Raiders isn't offensive (despite John Williams' overbearing music score, which announces triumph at the drop of a hat); but the fact that its success (along with Jaws and Star Wars) has made modern movies what they are--too big, too long, and too cookie-cutter--is quite offensive indeed. Raiders still manages to be entertaining, with noteworthy scenes including the chase scene in Cairo and a descent into a snake-infested tomb. With Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliott, Wolf Kahler, and Alfred Molina. ★★½

True Confessions

True Confessions (1981) is a story about rot and how it taints institutions like the Church. It's also loosely based on the grisly Black Dahlia murder case. The film is set in Los Angeles in 1948, and the focus is on two brothers: one a priest (Robert De Niro) who schmoozes with wealthy laymen in order to get funding for church buildings, and the other a hardboiled detective (Robert Duvall), who's a cynic. He's seen the corruption of religious institutions first hand, and it's no different from the corruption of law enforcement or any other supposedly pure organization.

When Duvall's character confronts a big-time construction magnate (Charles Durning) who's been helping out the Church, he unflinchingly mocks the man's moral character, and he gets something of a kick out of doing it. He's overly pleased with calling people out, but then he has a right to be infuriated when the Church celebrates a man who frequents prostitutes. But he's a hypocrite, too. Near the beginning of the film, he does the Church a favor by removing the corpse of a priest who suffered a fatal heart attack while visiting a house of ill fame. It would be a nasty scandal for the Catholic Church and in particular his brother, so he takes care of things for them.

True Confessions, which was based on John Gregory Dunne's 1977 novel and adapted by Dunne and Joan Didion, seems to be reaching for profundity when it exposes the rot with which it is so consumed. But when the police are investigating the brutal murder of a young woman found in a vacant lot (she was cut in half and eviscerated), they treat the murder as though it were a routine, unremarkable event. There's no feeling for her or for the particularly horrifying circumstances of her death.

It's only later that Duvall's character develops a kind of sympathy for the murdered girl, as well as a compulsive desire for justice, which he finds is just as elusive as the mysterious girl herself. It's hard to buy his sudden transition from callousness to compassion, because Duvall's character is a grim, pasty, unfeeling cardboard cutout out of a detective character from the 1940s. He's Humphrey Bogart without the charm and fast-talking wit. He has a sense of humor, to be sure, but he doesn't talk in all the lovely double entendres Bogart did in The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep.

De Niro too seems embalmed in True Confessions, and he appears as though he had no idea of how to play the priest any other way. It's probably a fault of the writing, which vacillates clumsily from murder mystery to morality tale to family drama, never successfully getting across any concrete ideas about any of them. Instead it just pounds us over the head with its one crystallized theme: Rot. By the end of the movie, you certainly feel it spreading, and it makes you wish the whole experience were over sooner. (And, there's a wedding scene near the beginning that has echoes of The Godfather, as though they were trying to make a film about the Catholic Church on that level; it's merely a reminder of how pale a comparison True Confessions is.)

Directed by Ulu Grosbard. With Ed Flanders, Burgess Meredith, Kenneth McMillan, Cyril Cusack, Dan Hedaya, Jeanette Nolan, and Rose Gregario. 108 mins. ★★

Polyester

John Waters' first sort-of mainstream movie was Polyester (1981), a celebration of everything Waters loves: bad taste, bad melodrama, bad hairdos, and bad people. Divine stars as Francine Fishpaw, a suburban housewife living in Baltimore whose life is falling apart: her sleazy husband, the owner of an adult movie theater, is having an affair with his tacky, obnoxious secretary (Mink Stole), her daughter LuLu (Mary Garlington) is dating a scuzzy punk named BoBo, and her son Dexter (Ken King) is addicted to Angel Dust and has a foot fetish, which has morphed into a penchant for roaming around town stomping on the feet of unsuspecting women.

Polyester is funny up to a point, although it runs out of steam in the last third. It's perhaps a little too easy to turn suburbia inside out, and yet it's still amusing to see it happen, especially by someone like John Waters, who grew up in suburbia and constantly demonstrates his acute familiarity with--and enjoyment of-- the sordid private lives of middle-class Americans. What's most memorable about Polyester is that Waters shot it in "Odorama," a gimmick designed to emulate one of his cinematic icons, director William Castle (who was himself famous for an endless supply of gimmicks geared toward marketing his movies). For audience members to experience "Odorama," they were given a card with 10 "scents" on them, and whenever a number flashed on the screen, they scratched and then sniffed that particular number so they could experience the same smell as the star of the film. You can imagine where that one leads to.

Divine is at her most histrionic, the icing on the cake being her hilarious Liz Taylor wig. Tab Hunter co-stars as Todd Tomorrow, the handsome stranger who happens into Francine's life. With Edith Massey as Cuddles (Francine's only true friend), Joni Ruth White (as Francine's malicious mother), and Stiv Bator. The title song is sung by Hunter, and all the film's music was written by Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of the band Blondie, and Michael Kamen. 86 min. ★★½

Atlantic City

A flunky named Lou (Burt Lancaster) who works for a rich old widow accidentally comes into possession of some cocaine when he meets the ne'er-do-well brother, Dave (Robert Joy), of a casino dealer-in-training, Sally (Susan Sarandon). Lou sees this as one final opportunity to become the sexy tough guy he never was. He becomes drunk on the perceived power of being an effective criminal. But he's a high-functioning drunk who's too old and too careful to make the stupid mistakes of someone young like Dave, whose dearth of caution does him in.

Atlantic City (1981) is one of those movies that leaves you feeling unmoved, unless you find its characters appealing. Lancaster is much like Art Carney's character in The Late Show: a has-been whose power lies chiefly in the fact that nobody takes him seriously anymore. Lancaster is confident and still a convincing lead even in his mid-sixties.

Kate Reid also turns in a strong performance as Grace, the crotchety but still sexual old broad he takes care of. She's given moments of grace and subtlety that elevate her character from the cartoonish way she's presented at first. We see a softer side, a manipulative side, a needy side, a bitchy side, a humorous side, and a tough side. In fact, this may be the reason Atlantic City has been considered something of a great movie by some people.

The director, Louis Malle, and the writer, John Guare, manage to show us different sides, different angles, of their characters, in their relationships with each other. Like Grace, we get a different Lou when he's with her, with Sally, with Sally's brother, with the career criminals in Atlantic City, and with the old chum he runs into giving shoeshines in the hotel washroom. And it's easy to see how this film helped Susan Sarandon's career take off. Sarandon possesses a radiant confidence mixed with tender vulnerability. She's a fiery actress who you believe totally, and who you can like almost immediately. She's soft without being weak, and tough without coming off as as drag.

But the movie itself feels a bit like a tease. My sensibilities and the movie's sensibilities are both trashy but in different ways. I can revel in the pulpy deviousness of film noir, but the world of Atlantic City casinos and drugs and old flunkies high on the allure of their own streaks of good luck leaves me feeling disinterested. And the setting is grim: Atlantic City doesn't seem like a place anybody would ever want to live in, let alone visit. I suppose that was the film's purpose: showing us why people would see Atlantic City as their version of a silver lining, just as faded and fleeting as all the other silver linings. This movie combines the Hollywood dreams of the 40s and 50s with the feeling of waking up to the cold hard world of economic decline in the 70s and early 80s. Atlantic City hasn't the allure of Las Vegas, which is just as artificial but a lot more glamorous. By the end, you don't even worry much about what will happen to Lancaster's character, although the ending is still pleasing.

The Howling

One of three werewolf movies to come out in 1981, The Howling has all the visual qualities of a vividly remembered nightmare, but it never lets horror get in the way of its canny sense of humor. It has all the makings of a good late-night horror flick--replete with scenes of ghastly werewolf transformations that are still pretty impressive. Like An American Werewolf in London, which came out the same year, the physical special effects leave a brazen impression much more so than computer-generated effects. Half the fun comes in watching how the filmmakers manage to manipulate the scene to convince us we're watching a human undergo a horrifying mutation.

However, as clever-looking as the movie is, and as amusing and pulpy as it tries to be, it never builds up to a strong finish. Its attempt to critique the sensationalism of television journalism is unfocused because it's trying its level best to be a werewolf movie at the same time.
And moreover, The Howling is never as exciting or thrilling as you'd like it to be. There's a great deal of "atmosphere," but something about it feels artificial, and in the end you feel like you're trekking into the territory of a filmmaker who isn't all that attuned to how to make a horror movie tick. The film's sense of humor is obvious and at the same time very niche, so only devoted horror movie fans are likely to get all the genre references (half the characters' names pay homage to 1950s horror film directors).

Dee Wallace (E.T.) heads the cast as Karen White, an L.A. reporter who witnesses a traumatic encounter with a serial killer, and heads to a secluded therapy retreat with her husband Bill (Christopher Stone) to try and recover. Of course--and we saw this coming--the place is overrun with werewolves. (We've seen this before: they were witches in Rosemary's Baby and robots in The Stepford Wives, etc.). Dee Wallace is an interesting case: she's worked most memorably in the horror and scifi genres, usually playing somebody's mother (as in E.T. and Cujo). But she isn't being used to her full potential in this movie. Director Joe Dante doesn't let her fall back on her natural comic abilities as much as other directors have, and he seems determined to present her as a drag, and the least interesting woman in the film. The bewitching werewolf queen Elisabeth Brooks seduces her husband, presumably because he's tired of her being a drag. And her newsroom pal, played by Belinda Balaski, is far more energetic and loose in front of a camera. Of course, Wallace's character is overcoming the traumatic experience of encountering a serial killer/stalker/sexual predator at a dirty movie theater, so she's understandably rattled. But this was an unappealing characterological move, especially for an actress like Dee Wallace, who's normally plucky and fun to watch: instead of making her strong, she's a blank canvass. Sigourney Weaver raised our expectations for what a woman could do in a horror movie situation, and Wallace's character is sort of channeling Mary Richards, the newsroom gal from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Weaver would have kicked werewolf ass, severely, and even Mary Richards would have been smart enough to get the hell out of there sooner. Dante keeps a tight reign on this woman in order to keep his movie on his track. Everything happens to Karen White. She is a totally reactionary heroine. Her character never develops or grows, and the result is a stilted performance from an actress who's capable of much more than that.

Written by John Sayles and Terence Winkless, from the 1977 novel by Gary Brandner. With Patrick Macnee as the fatherly psychiatrist who heads the retreat known as "The Colony," Dennis Dugan, and Robert Picardo.

Escape From New York

John Carpenter's trash-art action yarn Escape From New York (1981) has two things going for it: Kurt Russell's bad-ass performance as Snake Plissken, and a gritty, pulpy atmosphere that transcends its paper-thin storyline. The film is set in the near future, where Manhattan Island has been transformed into the country's lone maximum security prison. (Presumably there was low interest in preserving the Big Apple's iconic cultural monuments and history.) When the President's plane goes down inside the premises, the government makes a deal with a war criminal, Snake Plissken, to rescue the President in exchange for his freedom.

This was Carpenter's fifth feature film, coming off the phenomenal success of Halloween (1978) and the moderate success of The Fog (1980), but more closely related to his cult thriller Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). Both Escape and Assault have a certain neo-Western apathy for cinematic niceties, an attitude Carpenter seems to apply to all his movies. He's in love with those 1950s Westerns by Howard Hawks and he seems to have embedded into his movies a sort of synthetic sense of Los Angeles cool, even when the setting isn't L.A.

The problem with Escape From New York is that it never builds enough momentum to sustain its intriguing but problematic story. The idea feels like something contrived by a 12-year-old kid. It has wonderful cinematic possibilities, but Carpenter seems to have written this in a hurry, or perhaps when he decided to make this movie (he had written the screenplay years earlier) he didn't revise it. There are kinks in the plot, most embarrassingly the incredulous prospect of getting all the law-abiding Manhattanites to give up their jobs and their homes and their lives and leave the city to the underworld of criminals that inherit it in this movie.

The film itself looks like a comic book, and it's this dark, guttery, gloomy, nightmare-metropolis  production design that really makes Escape From New York a fun diversion, despite its shortcomings. You can tell the film's money pool wasn't too deep, and in a way, the shoestring budget works for it. It's a throwback to the  B movies that probably made Carpenter want to make movies when he was a kid.

The film was shot by Dean Cundey, who did the cinematography for several Carpenter films, and produced by long-time Carpenter collaborator Debra Hill. It moves along without much sense, but you find ways to enjoy yourself anyway.

The cast of stock characters, poorly fleshed out (such a shame, considering the collection of talent assembled), includes Adrienne Barbeau (whose wonderful comic abilities are barely used), Lee Van Cleef, Donald Pleasence, Harry Dean Stanton, Isaac Hayes, Ernest Borgnine, Tom Atkins, and Charles Cyphers. ★★★

Absence of Malice

A semi-bland newspaper story set in Miami about a scrappy young reporter (Sally Field) who's set up by her boss (Bob Balaban) to leak a story about Paul Newman's alleged involvement in organized crime. Newman is the entire movie here. Twenty-five years into his career he hadn't lost the ability to carry a picture. Field is moderately successful at playing a woman who's too focused on getting a story to care about how it might affect the lives of ordinary people. Balaban plays with a rubber band incessantly. It's supposed to make his character seem more real but it serves as a distraction. Melinda Dillon plays Newman's best friend, who is deeply affected by the story put out about Newman (She can provide an alibi, but it would cost her her job and her sense of community as a good Catholic girl: she was getting an abortion.)

At its best, Absence of Malice is a fairly absorbing drama, but somehow it's never as compelling as you'd like it to be. The stakes never seem high enough. Directed by Sydney Pollack. The script is by Kurt Luedtke. With Wilford Brimley, Luther Adler, Barry Primus, and Josef Sommer.