Land of the Dead

Land of the Dead (2005) is a problematic zombie outing, the fourth go-round for writer-director George Romero, whose obvious attempts at social commentary have never been clumsier. The setting is a walled city full of zombie apocalypse survivors. A swanky high-rise called Fiddler's Green separates the rich from the poor (who are confined to the streets and the slummier residences), and in the scene where Romero shows us "The Green" he can't resist the urge to cut to a shot of a big birdcage. Because the birds are like a metaphor, man! Romero lays on lots of "social satire," but none of it amounts to anything revelatory. People want to go back to normal. Normal is bad. Zombies are bad but not as bad as people, who are worse. It's all so damned obvious, like a lofty essay written by a student who thinks he's spinning rhetorical gold. (There's some really bad expository narration over the main credits, too.)

I don't mean to hate on George Romero. I grew up on Night of the Living Dead and its sequels. He's done good work before, and Land isn't a terrible movie. For all their flaws, the first three Dead films worked, and much of Land works too, despite its crummy dialogue and squishy, almost underwhelming plotting. And occasionally there are good bits of dialogue, like when John Leguizamo, as one of the grunts working for the "emperor" of Fiddler's Green, says "Looks like God left the phone off the hook." But the good lines always feel improvised, while I'm convinced the really bad ones were worked out on paper by Romero, gleaming with self-satisfaction.

There's an off-kilter pace to Land that results in a lack of suspense. The movie cuts back and forth between two parallel stories that are perhaps not as compelling as the director would like to believe. I think the problem is that we all know exactly what's going to happen, and this foreknowledge takes some of the air out of Romero's story, because he seems so convinced that he's surprising us. Nevertheless, the movie is an entertaining mess, full of enjoyable visuals. (It is pretty disgusting, though, especially if you watch the unrated version, which is, unfortunately, the only version available in widescreen at this time.)

Dennis Hopper makes an amusing appearance as Kaufman, the guy who runs the city with his briefcase full of money. But it's hard to understand his devotion to capital in a post-apocalyptic world, and even harder to understand why anybody would follow him. (Romero seems too in love with his own ideas to fashion them so that they'll fit within the confines of his movie.) Simon Baker plays the hero, a guy named Reilly who used to go outside the city to procure supplies, but is tired of working for the Man and wants to find his own way. (He's like, a loner.) I really enjoyed Leguizamo's performance. He's a foil, the greedy upstart who wants to steal Kaufman's money. (Again with the money, though. Who freaking cares?)

There is one nifty idea amidst all this: when Kaufman's grunts go out of the city to make supply runs, they shoot fireworks off to keep the zombies distracted. It's a cool effect, and the one little piece of invention that seems clever without being forced or "impressive". The zombies, it should be mentioned, aren't as memorable as they were in the first three films. They look too generic, and Romero's attempts to humanize them often come off as unintentionally funny. There's one zombie, poorly nicknamed Big Daddy (Eugene Clark), who seems to be getting smarter, and he tries to rub off on the other ghouls, with mixed results. (It worked better with "Bub" in Day of the Dead.)

Robert Joy also makes an impression, as Simon Baker's sidekick. He's ostensibly dim-witted but loyal (not to mention a crackshot), and gives the best and least appreciated performance in the film. Also starring Asia Argento (daughter of Italian horror maestro Dario), Alan Van Sprang, and Shawn Roberts. ★★½

Giant

Giant (1956) is for some reason my favorite family epic. I'm no Texan, yet Giant makes me drink the Lone Star State-brand Kool-Aid every time. Based on a novel by Edna Ferber, it's about a wealthy Texas ranch family and spans a quarter-of-a-century, from about 1920 to about 1945. Rock Hudson, as the dashing cattle rancher Bick Benedict, falls in love with a beautiful raven-haired Virginia girl named Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor) when he visits her family's farm to purchase a horse.

He takes both her and the horse back to Texas to his massive ranch, Reata (there's a famous dinner scene full of double entendres about the size of the ranch), and there she becomes part of the Texas cult herself, but never at the cost of her own strong-willed identity. (There's a great scene where the fiery, confident Liz Taylor scolds the men for trying to exclude her from their political discussion.) You'll fall prey to the cult too if you watch Giant, only you won't care by the time it's over.

Giant has its tender and touching and sad moments--the fate of Bick's Tomboy sister Luz (Mercedes McCambridge), the plight of the Mexican villagers that burdens Leslie Benedict's heart, especially when her husband and his people seem unwilling to acknowledge it, the puppy love between the young adult Benedict children and their respective beaus--but never does Giant sink into histrionics. It sinks into pro-Texas propaganda, to be sure, but it also manages to portray the subtle evils of racism, the hollowed-out fruits of the American dream drenched in oil, and the strange, beautiful resilience that some people (like the Benedicts) manage, while others around them self-destruct--like Jett Rink (James Dean, who steals the film, and who died before it was released), the ranch hand who inherits a small piece of land, strikes it rich with oil wells, then falls apart after becoming a zillionaire.

Director George Stevens turns Giant into the anti-Gone With the Wind epic. He doesn't bash you over the head with profundity. He smartly lets the profundity linger in the background. On the surface, Giant is a safe movie, lauding the glories of American life and the progress enabled by fossil fuels. But James Dean's character represents such a descent into desperation because of his wealth, that you can hardly call Giant a cheerleader for oil. (He's also been in love with Leslie from afar for like 25 years. That kind of unfulfilled devotion begins to wear at a body.)

If the movie lets anyone off too easy, it's possibly Bick, except he gets his face smashed by a big burly restaurant owner at the end, and because he's finally standing up to the anti-Mexican sentiment he's ignored for so long. It's both Bick's come-uppance and his redemption: he stands up for his Mexican daughter-in-law and mixed-race grandson, and finally, as Leslie tells it, "becomes her hero." It's not the money or the vast estate or the impressive private jet, but the principles, that are rewarded.

Giant covers a lot of ground, but it's not the grand scope of the film but the breezy, laid-back style that I find mesmerizing: Stevens truly produces a kind of mythic Texas tale. It's hard to think of many movies that are able to embody a specific place with such authenticity. Screenplay by Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat. With Carroll Baker, Dennis Hopper, Jane Withers, Chill Wills, Fran Bennett, Earl Holliman, Elsa Cardenas, Paul Fix, Judith Evelyn, Rod Taylor, Carolyn Craig, and a young Sal Mineo. 201 minutes. ★★★½

Blue Velvet

Writer-director David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) exists in a suburban vacuum that's some kind of tangled 1950s-1980s dream. Lynch takes a highly normal suburban boyhood fantasy, becoming involved in a real-life mystery, and throws it into the depths of sordidness. It's almost too enticing to witness the undressing of suburbia, a place that is so squeaky clean on the outside it almost has to be a den of devils on the inside. Kyle MacLachlan plays the hero, Jeffrey, who discovers a severed human ear while walking through a field near his quiet Lumberton hometown, a place that recalls every falsely cheerful family sitcom ever made.

Jeffrey wastes no time in delivering the ear to the local police, but this effectively ends his ability to partake in the mystery legally, so, with the help of the detective's teenage daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern), he proceeds with his own makeshift investigation and sneaks into the apartment of a lounge singer (Isabella Rossellini), whose name Sandy has heard mentioned in connection with the ongoing investigation of the detached ear. The lounge singer is named Dorothy Vallens, and she's about as stable as Judy Garland. She has that tragic look, mixed with a distinctively foreign allure that makes her suspect to our suburbanite values and beliefs. (Rossellini is the daughter of Ingrid Bergman, and you can hear it in her voice and see it in her face.)

Enter Dennis Hopper as Frank, the psychotic, drug-addicted, sadomasochist who's forcing Dorothy to comply with his weird fetishistic fantasies. Frank's got to be one of the scariest human figures in horror-thriller movie history, on par with Robert Mitchum's Reverend Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter and Jack Nicholson's nutcase hotel sitter in The Shining. This is the point in the movie where Jeffrey is probably thinking that "normal" isn't so bad, and that those mysteries we read about as children and watched on television and at the movies were deliciously entertaining because they were false, safe mysteries where even the worst villains conducted themselves within reasonable boundaries. Dennis Hopper has no boundaries, nor does the director, who puts us in the position of the peeping tom and the "peeped-upon," on a far more visceral and uncomfortable level than say, Hitchcock did, in his Rear Window.

The thing about Blue Velvet is that it's an off-putting descent into a frightening suburban reality, because it breaks through the surface in others that we often feel superior to, and in the process, it exposes our own carefully constructed phoniness as an obviously thin veneer. Sandy says to Jeffrey, "I don't know whether you're a detective or a pervert," after he tells her of his plan to infiltrate Dorothy's apartment for the first time. He tells her with false coyness that she'll just have to find out. What he really means is that he'll just have to find out, because he doesn't know himself well enough to know what he really wants, why he's really attracted to the "mystery". For him, "mystery" is still a gimmick designed primarily for his own amusement, not something that involves or affects real people. It lulls him in with the siren song of the false mysteries (the camera occasionally shows us shots of various 1940s film noirs on the TV screen, a reminder of the ground we're treading, which is quite far away from the mock-sophisticated safety of Hollywood). In David Lynch territory, nothing is ever safe and neat and tidy. But it's not a pleasurable entertainment. It's on the level of a snuff movie, and for all its ironic insights into human nature and the phoniness of the world it portrays, it's hard to watch.

With Dean Stockwell, Hope Lange, George Dickerson, Priscilla Pointer, Frances Bay, and Brad Dourif.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

Fear of Laughter: Twelve years after he left audiences reeling with his 1974 exploitation shocker The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tobe Hooper returned with a sequel that tried to encapsulate the glossy, synthetic, yuppie milieu of the 80s just as its predecessor seemed to capture the 70s in documentary fashion. Tobe Hooper has an intensely kinesthetic directing style: the things going on in his movies are often too much for the camera to contain. Sometimes it seems as if the camera merely sits like a spectator while something horrendously witty and unpleasant occurs. You're often laughing just as much as you're jumping, and then you're chiding yourself for finding it so funny. But over-the-top horror is designed to be funny. It's too horrible to elicit anything but confused laughter. We're afraid of our laughter because it seems out of place, and simultaneously we're laughing because we're afraid. Few movies can achieve this, and yet I won't call The Texas Chainsaw Masssacre Part 2 a great movie, a good movie, or even a successful movie.

Frankly, it's a complete mess. It seems as though much of the action happened on the fly, and while that can frequently have promising and spontaneously happy results, much of this horror opus is experienced with a mixture of excruciating boredom and disenjoyment. We are waiting for it to be over, yet unable to look away from the pure spectacle of it all. The first half hour is the best part of the movie. Hooper opens with a really interesting scare scene involving two obnoxious frat boys driving through the Texas countryside on their way to Dallas. Their latest antic is playing "Chicken" with other cars, and as can be expected, they piss off the wrong family of backwoods cannibalistic psychopaths, and live to regret it. The whole murder scene happens while the yuppie frat boys are on the phone with a local radio station, and so the murder--apparently a grand return of the maniacal Sawyer family--is captured on the air. The deejay at the radio station replays it at the request of an equally nutty ex-Texas ranger (Dennis Hopper) who's been hunting for the Sawyer family for years (his niece and nephew were victims in the original), and of course angers the Sawyers, who make her their next target.

The scene in the radio station is genuinely creepy, capped off with a great scare moment. After meeting the crazed Vietnam Vet Chop Top (Bill Moseley), the deejay, nicknamed "Stretch" (Caroline Williams), is accosted by Leatherface, who's as mixed up as ever. After that the movie falls apart while Hooper takes us to a run-down Texas battle-themed amusement park, the new lair of the Sawyers, and attempts to repeat the unappealing scenarios of the 1974 film where the sole survivor (Marilyn Burns) became the "dinner guest" at the Sawyer's farmhouse.

The movie is full of over-acting and bizarreness, but then that's really the point. And yet, it's a fascinating subject for cultural analysis. We see the elements of a family that has completely lost touch with reality, has a paralyzing fear of the outside world and an inability to cope with the human body, dead or alive. Loss of life is countered by the preservation of family corpses in various "artistic" fashions. The Hitchhiker, killed in the first film, becomes attire, worn like a puppet to cover Leatherface's own body when he's dancing from the roof of their pickup truck attacking the yuppies with his chainsaw. The grandmother is now hoisted on a strange throne at the top of one of the amusement park "mountains." Loss of bodily function is equally problematic. Chop Top, shot in Vietnam, has a metal plate in his head and his degenerating psyche seeps out into the way he dresses and the lack of attention he pays to hygiene. I wondered if the make-up artist on Beetle Juice had him in mind when he designed Michael Keaton's face for that character. There's a remarkable similarity between Chop Top and Beetle Juice, and even the comic timing is about the same, except we feel a lot safer around Beetle Juice because that movie stays much more carefully within the limits of its genre. The macabre elements are there but the gruesomeness is deemphasized.


Tobe Hooper has always been a problematic director. Little of his work seems to be pulled off just right. I've often wanted to like the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but for all its technical pleasures it's a movie that is hard to enjoy, and likewise, its sequel is only marginally entertaining. Hooper needed a good script supervisor and a better editor, perhaps, to make Part 2 a little more compact (its 100 minutes feel like 140), but then the 80 minute original felt too long too.