Batman Returns

Director Tim Burton takes us back to the comic book city of Gotham, now ensconced in winter and looking pretty gloomy, just in time for a new villain: the Penguin (Danny De Vito). After being abandoned by his rich parents because he was "different," the Penguin lived life in the Gotham sewers. Somehow he also managed to become a crime boss and maintain control over a whole cadre of actual penguins who were living down in the sewer. (Is this normal? Are there penguins living in every urban sewer?) DeVito is dreadful as the Penguin: he's too nasty, too sinister, too corrupt, to be entertaining, and he chews up every line before spitting it out at us. I missed Jack Nicholson's gleeful madness as the Joker.

There are other villains: the Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer), and a greedy corporate executive (Christopher Walken) with a frightening shock of poofy grey hair. I was hoping that Pfeiffer would save the movie: she plays a flighty secretary who keeps getting ignored or taken advantage of by men and then finally creates the Catwoman persona. Donning a sexy, skin-tight outfit (all black) and a whip, as well as an endless supply of bad double entendres, she goes out to make her newfound power known. The first thing she does is rescue a woman from a would-be rapist, but quickly we learn that she's much more interested in getting her own name to the public than in protecting women who were once like her. This is perhaps more interesting, but the Catwoman comes off as rather shrill and thoughtless. She would have been a more compelling character otherwise.

And then finally Batman (Michael Keaton) comes back into the movie, but he's even less compelling than he was in the 1989 film. This is because in Batman Returns he seems so reactionary, so loosely connected to the other characters that his involvement feels superficial. Batman is a difficult character to act out: he's always brooding, and that doesn't leave an actor much room for any humor (except the bad puns that the series became famous for in this and other sequels). It's especially hard to take with Michael Keaton, whom we know is capable of boiling water with the intensity and sheer zaniness of his Beetle Juice performance.

Keaton doesn't get to be comically endearing in the Batman movies, and thus his character is lost in the shuffle of Batman Returns, which is truly a mess of a movie. The script is by Daniel Waters (who wrote Heathers), and it might have looked good on paper, but on film's it's like a circus that never ends. And the set design doesn't resemble the first Batman, further distancing the two films. Director Tim Burton's style is evident here too: this may be the movie that officially pushed him in that uber-Burton direction which would eventually be a road to careericide with pictures like Dark Shadows.

With Michael Gough, Michael Murphy, Pat Hingle, Andrew Bryniarski, and Jan Hooks. ★½

Housesitter

Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn work so well together that it's a wonder they didn't make a movie sooner than they did. Housesitter (1992) is yet another modern Hollywood attempt at channeling 1930s screwball comedies. The only trouble is that it's too carefully plotted to truly resemble the kind of fast, improvisational, fluid comedy to which it's paying tribute. However, Housesitter is a fun romp, bolstered by the performances and the chemistry of the two leads.

Steve Martin plays Davis, a struggling architect whose girlfriend dumps him after he proposes to her in front of the house he designed just for her. The house is in the quaint Massachusetts town Davis grew up in, but he works in Boston. Back in the city, he meets a colorful waitress named Gwen (Hawn) and in a weak moment--after telling her the whole story--has a one-night stand with her. Then she moves into the house and pretends to be his wife, winning over the whole town (including his parents) with her elaborate deception. In fact, Gwen turns out to be an expert storyteller: you never know when she's telling the truth.

This is Goldie's movie: she's always been such an engaging and appealing flake, and here she's balanced in her flakiness by Martin, who's grounded but reveals his own inner-flake at certain moments. The development of their relationship (which is admittedly predictable) is too much fun to dismiss the movie for its conventional plotting.

Dana Delaney co-stars as Becky, Martin's former girlfriend, whose love for her ex is re-awakened by Gwen and all her stories. With Julie Harris and Donald Moffat as Martin's parents, Peter MacNicol as Martin's colleague at the architectural firm, Richard B. Shull, and Lauren Cronin. Written by Mark Stein. Directed by Frank Oz. 101 min. ★★½

Bram Stoker's Dracula

In 1897, Dracula was published and experienced moderate success. Its author, the Dublin-born Bram Stoker, never knew how enduring his novel would become. When German filmmaker F.W. Murnau filmed Nosferatu in 1922, Stoker's widow came after Murnau for violating the copyright she held over Dracula. Florence Stoker wasn't able to stop the movies from getting at her late husband's most interesting and most sustained novel, but she did receive some remuneration from Universal when they made Dracula in 1931. And yet, if Dracula hadn't been made all the more popular on the stage and then on screen in these two afore-mentioned films, we likely wouldn't be talking about it today.

First of all there was a much more popular horror novel released in 1897: Richard Marsh's The Beetle, about a shape-shifting bug terrorizing London in much the same fashion as Count Dracula. The Beetle was forgotten (no movies have been made of it to my knowledge) and even though it has recently experienced a sort of literary resurrection among critics, it effectively switched places with Dracula after Stoker's novel was adapted to the big screen. Second, there was another vampire novel from 1897 called The Blood of the Vampire, by the prolific Florence Marryat. Marryat's vampire, Harriet Brandt, was a psychic vampire: she drained the life out of people without resorting to fangs and bloodsucking. And Harriet wasn't affected by sunlight or crosses or holy water. But like Dracula, she was cursed. (Harriet was mixed: her father a white scientist with an interest in vivisection and her mother a black slave and voodoo priestess from the island of Barbados.) I have often wondered what vampire movies would have been like if Marryat's had been the lasting work and not Stoker's. Would we have been stuck with Twilight either way?

Fast forward to 1992 and the release of Bram Stoker's Dracula, directed by none other than Francis Ford Coppola (The Godafther, Apocalypse Now). Watching it for the third or fourth time, I am struck by the visual splendor and ecstasy of Coppola's version. He and screenwriter James V. Hart point up the erotic overtones in the novel. The film's visual composition has a sense of passion that makes this a supremely interesting movie to watch. It's a breathtaking, thrilling, visceral movie visually speaking: the black silhouettes against an angry orange sky during the scenes of the Crusades that initiate our understanding of Dracula the warrior (although the book doesn't really touch on this much); the howling wolves in the distance as Jonathan Harker changes carriages en route to Count Dracula's foreboding Castle deep in the Carpathian mountains of primitive Eastern Europe; the grey, grim yet Dickensian-looking skyline of 1890s London; the stark reds and greens that permeate the entire film, from the backdrops to the costumes to the blood and the flowers.

As for the plotting, Dracula unfolds in a relatively straightforward and faithful way, except for the beginning, which is an attempt to link the fictional Dracula to his alleged historical persona, Vlad the Impaler. Even when the film seems a bit poky, there is the beauty, the sheer intensity, the sensationalism, as well as the passionate music score of composer Wojciech Kilar. Coppola's ability to turn up the suspense and the terror is quite limber and surprising, and there's a sick, amusing sense of humor in the movie too. Even though this rarely if ever turns campy, it's an unashamed celebration of the excess of Gothic sensibilities. Gothic novels, going back to 1764's The Castle of Otranto, have always fixated on the passion and darkness that rattled and sometimes derailed modernity's reliance on things like science and rationalism. That is the chief allure of a story like Dracula: it's simply genius to have a vampire leave the superstitious culture of Eastern Europe and head to the mecca of European progress and imperialism: London. Nobody believes in vampires there--and even God has become a relic, removed very much from the common life of the modern world--so Dracula is free to feast on the blood of unsuspecting British ladies Mina (Winona Ryder) and Lucy (Sadie Frost, who really ratchets up Lucy's burgeoning sex drive) with hardly anyone to suspect his existence.

Gary Oldman plays the Count, and he imbues him with a sense of loss and emotional torment without sacrificing the qualities that make Dracula a dangerous and frightening enemy of pure British sensibilities. Anthony Hopkins--presumably trying to balance the scales after playing such a memorably devious character as Hannibal Lecter--has a fun time playing Dr. Van Helsing, the eccentric metaphysician and philosopher who figures out what's terrorizing the English ladies; Keanu Reeves is a bit of an embarrassment as Jonathan Harker, especially since his British accent fails to hide that stoner-surfer tone in his voice. But Reeves is handsome and works as a sort of 90s Joe Dallesandro, as though Coppola were nodding a little to Andy Warhol's 1973 Dracula movie. Reeves is also fairly convincing whenever he's being defiled by Dracula's three lascivious vampire wives (one of whom is played by Monica Bellucci), who keep him a prisoner in Transylvania while the Count travels to London. Harker is such a dull, passive character that having a not-so-great actor portray him isn't such a bad idea. You don't worry that he will overshadow Anthony Hopkins or Gary Oldman, and he balances out their intensity with his banality. (I'm really not trying to insult Keanu Reeves. If you're reading this Keanu, I just want to thank you for The Night Before, a forgotten 80s teen classic.)

With Richard E. Grant as Dr. Seward, Cary Elwes as Athur, Billy Campbell as Quincy Morris, Tom Waits as Renfield, and Monica Bellucci as one of Dracula's vampire wives. 128 min. ★★★

Dead Alive

If ever a movie turned gore into an art form, surely it is Peter Jackson's cult classic Dead Alive (1992) (known as Braindead in its native New Zealand). Yes, Lord of the Rings fans, I'm sure you'll be relieved to know that the creator of your favorite nine-and-a-half-hour epic movie series was dabbling in the splatter film before he became a mainstream hit-maker. Dead Alive revels in the ecstasy of excess.

Jackson and co-writers Stephen Sinclair and Fran Walsh lovingly pay homage to the George Romero zombie classics (also, they're apparently trying to top Lucio Fulci, the director of the Spaghetti splatter flick Zombie, in terms of blood and guts, which they do, and with a much keener sense of humor than Fulci). But their story also has more than a bit of Psycho's bad pop psychology: a timid, simpering man named Lionel (Timothy Balme) lives with his crotchety mum (Elizabeth Moody), who dominates his life. When she is bitten by a Sumatran rat monkey (a fairly obvious but nonetheless icky concoction of claymation) at the zoo, she starts (literally) falling apart, and transforms into a flesh-eating ghoul. It's the ultimate picture of the clinging mother devouring her son's independence.

Naturally, the mum spreads her "sickness," until soon poor Lionel, looking wide-eyed and at his wit's end, has a basement full of flesh-munching dead creatures to contend with. He tries to pacify them with food that isn't human remains (which is sort of liking trying convince children to eat broccoli when there's an ice cream sundae in the freezer), and knocks them out with tranquilizers, but nothing works long enough or sure enough. Jackson employs the use of a sleazy, money-grubbing uncle, played by Ian Watkin, who brings a large group of moronic friends to the house for a party, pushing the movie into its conclusion: an all-out zombie bloodbath. Every scenario you could never have imagined is enacted, with every household appliance and garage gadget you could lay your hands on (including, most memorably, a lawn mower, a light bulb, a blender, and garden shears).

Peter Jackson knows how to deliver a comic-book type horror movie, one which never takes itself seriously. The characters are the stuff of old melodramas, caricatures who serve their respected archetypes as Jackson pulls everything together with blood-drenched glee. This obviously isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it's a ridiculous, audaciously horrifying black comedy for those who are game. With Diana Penalver, Brenda Kendall, Stuart Devenie, and Jed Brophy.