The Hitcher: Don't Pick Up Hitchhikers

Hey, have you ever wanted to see the bad Replicant from Blade Runner drive around and try to stab that kid from Soul Man? Well, you're in luck, because that's basically what happens in 1986's The Hitcher. My last post was about remakes, and this movie was remade recently, as well, though I've never seen it. I'll have to check it out sometime soon and write about it.

This film stars C. Thomas Howell and Rutger Hauer, and some random other people (including Jennifer Jason Leigh, how wacky is that?). Jim Halsey (Howell) picks up John Ryder (Hauer) on a rainy night as he delivers a car from Chicago to San Diego, and he quickly finds out (quickly as in the first ten minutes) that Ryder is a psychopath and murderer, and has already killed the last person to pick him up. Jim literally boots him out of the car, and finds himself chased around the highway by this crazy serial killer, and the trail of blood and bodies start pointing to Jim, much to his chagrin. Then things get a little nutty. Okay, it doesn't really get that nutty, but some crazy stuff happens pretty consistently.

I like horror movies like this. We don't know much about these characters, and we don't really need to. Jim is a young kid just trying to get to California, because that's what kids in the 80s want to do. The John Ryder character isn't really given any motivation whatsoever for his behavior, and is purely a sociopath, killing for the joy of it. He pursues Jim so relentlessly because he had the courage to fight back and kick him out of the car, and Ryder seems to feel that Jim is a worthy adversary. In addition to just trying to kill him, he carves a bloody swatch across the highway, which leads to Jim's arrest for the murders (because Ryder's bloody knife is found on Jim's person). There are loads of car chases, and plenty of Rutger Hauer being pretty menacing. Also, C. Thomas Howell's character vomits out of sheer terror quite frequently, which is interesting. The Lady always complains that characters in movies don't seem to react naturally to extremely stressful situations (i.e. terror-vomiting), so I'm sure she'd be pretty satisfied with how this movie handles it.

The film also acts as a study in irrational human behavior. There's no real reason that Ryder should act the way that he does; he's a non-person, without any real identity, and thrives on the chaos that he creates. In Jim he finds a worthy opponent, someone who not only fights back, but genuinely seems capable of stopping him and restoring balance to the anarchic situation. Jim also finds himself acting as a criminal himself, taking two police officers hostages of sorts, trying to get the truth out, trying to get justice. He's also framed by Ryder and forced to go on the run, watching everyone he comes in contact with be killed in front of him by the ruthless and ever-present Ryder.

The fact that Ryder is clearly older, 40 when filming this, and C. Thomas Howell is 20 (literally, they were both born in '46 and '66, respectively, and the film was released in '86) is an interesting coincidence. There may be some subtle and possibly unintentional commentary on the modern "responsible" youth and the increasingly erratic and chaotic generation that came before it. When Ryder was Jim's age, it was the '60s, where things were more free, liberal, and the road movies of that era (like Easy Rider) were about existential wandering, sticking it to the man, etc. Now that it's the 80s, that aimless wandering and rebellion has taken on a sinister turn, resulting in violence and unchecked aggression, rather than civil disobedience and political dissent. Jim, a product of this decade, is bewildered and confused by Ryder's actions, though he continues to be drawn into them, unwittingly participating in this perverted twist on the road movie.

Or maybe I'm overthinking it, and taking it a bit too seriously.

I'll have to check out the remake they did a few years ago. They also made a sequel in 2003, starring C. Thomas Howell reprising his role as Jim Halsey, with the time between movies being literal time (basically, though not quite). I'll have to check them both out, and see how they compare. Given the state of remakes (and random, crappy sequels made 15 years later), I'm sure they'll both be terrible, and not in the excellent way that this version of The Hitcher is terrible. I still give it three puking and scared teenagers out of five, or three barely tolerable Jennifer Jason Leighs out of five.

The Last House on the Left: Not A Terrible Remake

Back in the 1970s, an unknown crazy dude named Wes Craven was like, "Hey, man. I've got some groovy ideas for a movie that will scare the pants off of teenagers. I bet that if I make this movie, I can basically become a household name in horror. Man, that would be cool." And so he did. That first movie was called The Last House on the Left, and it was a slasher, horror, rape-and-revenge movie that completely blew the people smart enough to get it away. It wasn't a critical success, and isn't as well known as his later work (*cough*Nightmare on Elm Street*cough*Scream*cough*), but when I was twenty, I watched it for the first time, and I was like "Whaaaaaat."

So, as Hollywood is wont to do, they waited thirty-seven years (whoa, I just realized that, holy crap) and made a not-quite-as-good-but-not-as-bad-as-the-Texas Chainsaw Massacre-remake film with a lot more useless backstory and character development. It doesn't feel as gritty or real as the original, and not enough time was spent on the actual vengeance, and too much time was spent giving the characters completely useless and rarely referenced histories. For example, we spend several minutes of the film being made aware that Mari, the daughter (played by Sara Paxton) is an avid and quite talented swimmer. Who cares, right? It's barely relevant. Also, the parents (played by Monica Potter and Tony Goldwyn) are hinted at having something of a strained marriage (in the very beginning), but it's completely useless and doesn't actually mean anything at all. We also get too much story on the villains, a strange group of criminals (played by Garrett Dillahunt, Joshua Cox, Riki Lindhome, and Aaron Paul), who share a complicated and vaguely (though for the most part literal) family relationship.

For those of you who don't know, the general plot is as follows: Too much backstory on the Collingwood family, Emma, John, and Mari. Mari is an overachieving swimmer who was deeply affected by the loss of her older brother (again, doesn't matter). Emma seems to be a teacher of some kind? I think? And John's a doctor. They go on vacation, or for a long weekend, or for no reason to their cabin/lake house/second home, the titular last house on the left. Mari goes to visit her friend Paige that works in the town (played by Martha MacIsaac), and she's pretty much the catalyst of all the crazy stuff that happens. When Paige and Mari are hanging out at the store, the son of a criminal that gets picked up on his way to jail by his brother and his girlfriend shows up to buy/steal stuff, and then invites them back to the hotel room to smoke weed. The criminals show up, kidnap the girls, bad things happen, blah blah blah. After doing the bad things to the girls, the criminals end up going to Mari's house (as it's the only one around after Mari makes the car crash), and eventually Emma and John find out what their temporary houseguests did (when Mari shows up mostly dead on the front porch, because she's such a strong swimmer get it), and then go on a crazy rampage to exact their harsh familial vengeance on them, but it doesn't last long enough for me.

Basically, in my opinion, the original was a lot better. There's far less character development, which works for horror movies. All we really need to know is some basic information, because it's likely that these people will be dead within an hour. We need to know that Emma and John are parents, and that Mari is a teenage girl, and that makes it crazy awful when the bad guys rape and supposedly kill her (and really kill her friend). The original is actually also a remake, of an Ingmar Bergman film released in 1960 titled Jungfrukällan, set in 14th century Sweden, where a farmer and his wife must exact revenge on herders that rape and murder their daughter. I haven't seen Jungfrukällan yet, but I assume it's pretty intense, as Bergman is pretty crazy. The parents are much more disturbing in their revenge acts, which they have time for because they didn't waste half the movie talking about Mari's dead brother and love of swimming, etc. This remake played out more as a thriller with vague horror undertones than a true horror film.

It seems to me that all these horror remakes are missing some fundamental aspect that was present in their original versions. It's hard to put a finger on, but I've seen a lot of these remakes, and none of them are as good. It's like when they make a movie from a book. Horror films from the 70s and 80s had that little bit of something extra. Maybe it's the lack of computer-generated images (which there isn't much of in Last House...), or a different notion of pacing and suspense. Or maybe they were just ballsier back then, fresh from the carefree days of the 60s, with plenty to say. Nowadays, they just want to make a movie that will sell, going for cheap thrills without any meaning, and trying to dress it up with shaky cameras and vague/poor efforts to develop characters.

This movie is just okay, and not too great. I recommend seeing the original Wes Craven version, and you probably won't be disappointed, and you'll probably be pretty disturbed, which is exactly why you go see horror movies. It's also interesting in the reversal of traditional roles for slasher films. The normal stuff that happens in horror movies like Friday the 13th happens within the first half-hour, and then a whole new type of slasher plot starts forming when the parents find out and exact their over-the-top and bloody revenge. You can probably skip the remake, unless you're happy with semi-poor remakes that lack all the real spirit of the genre. I give it two useless plot points out of five, or two methodically crazy parents out of five.

Death Note: Seriously Japan, What Is Up

Hey everyone, this is a big ol' two-movie post! Tomorrow's my birthday, so I'll be otherwise indisposed, so I figured I'd write about two pretty crazy Japanese movies I watched recently. It works because it's really one big long movie that they split in half, so it works out well. The movies in question are Death Note and Death Note: The Last Name, two decently popular Japanese fantasy/horror movies released in 2006 directed by Shyuusuke Kaneko and starring Tatsuya Fujiwara as Light Yagami and Ken'ichi Fujiwara as "L." The films are based on the popular Shonen Jump Advanced manga series of the same name by Tsugumi Obha and Takeshi Obata.

Set in a Tokyo much like our own, law school honor student and all around bored genius Light Yagami finds a mysterious black notebook lying in the street, mysteriously untouched by rain. He picks it up, and discovers that it is a "Death Note," a notebook of a shinigami (a god of death). Anyone whose name is written inside the notebook will die, so long as you have their face in your mind. Light is intrigued by the implications, as he feels the world is rife with crime and corruption. He uses the notebook (with the help of its shinigami Ryuk) to eliminate criminals of all sorts. His actions bring the attention of L, the world's greatest detective. They find themselves face to face, L suspecting that Light is this new criminal "Kira" (a Japanese pronunciation of "Killer"), though he can't prove it. Light is determined to continue bringing criminals to justice, even when a "fake" Kira pops up with her own notebook and professes her undying love for Light. Light and L fight a life-and-death battle of wits for the sake of their own pride, and for their own personal value systems.

Because I am such a world-class nerdlinger, I had read the manga and watched the anime before seeing this film. Nobody really cares how the films and the original story differ, but there are some pretty major differences. Some of them make sense in terms of compressing the story to fit within the constraints of two movies, but others completely alter the outcome of the overall story, leaving characters out entirely and keeping some characters alive that otherwise died. It's still a good movie though, and for the most part, I can see why the changes were made. They also did a pretty stellar job in terms of casting and attention to some character details, especially for L. In the manga, he was a strange, slouchy, unusual young man, the opposite of what one would expect of the world's greatest detective. Ken'ichi Matsuyama pulled it off pretty well, mimicking the strange way L sat, ate, held objects, and interacted with other characters. This was the first film I'd seen him in, and I was thoroughly impressed. Tatsuya Fujiawara was impressive as Light Yagami as well, pulling off the cocky genius with ease, but still maintaining the intensity that drives his character to kill strangers over and over again to perfect the world. I had seen Fujiwara before in Battle Royale and its sequel, so I knew that he was a decent actor, and apparently quite popular in Japan.

While this is definitely not as crazy as some other Asian films I've talked about before, it's definitely one of the most darkly fantastical movies I'd seen in awhile. Also, upon closer inspection, it's the first Japanese film I've talked about so far. I have a few other waiting in the queue and in my own personal library (including some mega-craziness like Takeshi Miike), but I guess it's good that I'm starting out kind of small and then getting bigger.

One of the more interesting aspects of this film is the presence of the two shinigami, Ryuk and Rem. Ryuk owns the notebook that Light Yagami, the original Kira, finds, and Rem is the shinigami for the notebook that Misa Amane finds. Oh, right. Misa is a Japanese model and pop star whose family was murdered, but then Kira took care of their killer. She pledged her life to Kira, and when she finds (or is given) her notebook, she uses it to find Light and love/serve/honor/protect him. It's kind of a twisted and complex relationship that Light takes advantage of for his own gain (especially since she traded half of her remaining lifespan for "shinigami eyes," meaning she can see the name and remaining life of anyone she sees). Anyway. The shinigami are presented in the movie as computer generated, but something about them looks kind of ridiculous, and kind of awesome. They almost look like puppets in some ways, which makes them more "realistic" in that they seem to really be on set with the characters, but they also look computer generated (and kind of "fake," though they aren't supposed to be human, and are modeled exactly after the character drawings from the manga).

I may not be cultured enough in the life and times of the average Japanese youth, so I can't really tell if there is some general Japanese commentary being made in this story. There does seem to be an overarching global commentary being made, though. Even though Light is Japanese, and the crimes originate in Japan, his attention becomes global, drawing the attention of L, as well as the fear of the world's governments. L is portrayed as Japanese, but he didn't seem to live in Japan. The idea that he is of indeterminate origin is an interesting aspect to his character, and he doesn't seem to fit in with anyone, with the exception of Light. In Light, he finds an intellectual equal, though he is constantly in a crisis because he suspects Light of being Kira, the person he's sworn to bring to justice. Their relationship is in many ways closer than Light's relationship with every other female character (including his mother and sister), and L seems to have his only real friendship with Light.

What would you do if you had a notebook that allowed you to kill someone just by writing their name in? Of course, there are a million or so rules, like you have to picture their face while you write it, you have to spell it all correctly, you can't make them do something impossible before they die (but you can influence their actions to a limited degree), and so on. Would you experiment to stretch the limits of the Notebook? Would you be able to handle the responsibility of bringing justice and peace to the world as a god of death? Light sure tries his crazy genius ass off throughout the film. I won't give away the ending, though. Even if you have seen the anime or read the manga, don't worry. You won't see the ending coming anyway, and it's pretty much nothing like the other versions.

Overall, though, the movie isn't perfect, and could be better. There's something odd occasionally about the pacing and plot direction of Japanese films in general, which may be a cultural thing. The characters are pretty interesting, but they do have the rounded and developed characters already written up from the manga to go from. I give it three creepy, apple-eating gods of death out of five, or three creepy Japanese detectives out of five.

Angel Heart: Disturbing As Hell

You guys all know who Mickey Rourke is, right? Yeah, that guy from The Wrestler, the one that kind of looks like Joan Rivers if she was a bodybuilder. Well, guess what? Twenty-two years ago, he kind of looked like Bruce Willis with more hair. Imagine that, right? Turns out, he was a pretty awesome actor back then, too. He was in this one movie called Angel Heart with Robert DeNiro. It came out in 1987 and co-starred Lisa Bonet and was directed by Alan Parker (The Road to Wellville, Pink Floyd: The Wall, Mississippi Burning).

Set in 1955, Harold Angel is a private investigator. He's called by the mysterious lawyers of the equally mysterious Louis Cyphre (DeNiro). Cyphre wants Angel to find a mysterious crooner by the name of Johnny Favorite, as he still owes Cyphre the collateral on a broken contract. Angel searches all over New York and then is directed to New Orleans, where he encounters increasingly bizarre individuals, situations, and flashbacks/visions. He finds himself over his head in a world of voodoo, Satanism, and an ever-growing pile of dead bodies. He suspects that Cyphre has something to do with it, but the true villain may be closer to home than he realizes.

I'm used to current Mickey Rourke, where he's all huge and looks like he's had some plastic surgery. I didn't realize that he used to be a fairly normal-looking dude, and a pretty good actor, at that. He plays the classic noir-inspired New York private dick to a T, and he even deals with all the supernatural craziness like I'd expect: he runs away a lot, though sometimes he fights back first. Like my previous review of The Man Who Wasn't There, this is a neo-noir, though more of the traditional genre definition of taking traditional tropes of the noir genre and updating it with updated style and the horror/psychological angle that they wouldn't have thought to use in original noir. It is a faithful version of noir and hard-boiled detective stories, and certain parts remind me of Chinatown (specifically the nose-guard that he wears at the beach and when he goes to Louisiana reminds me of Jake Gittes's nose-bandage). The horror elements are done well, but not in an over-the-top way. There's a special kind of horror that invokes psychoses and religion, and this does a very good job.

Some of the religious imagery is occasionally ham-fisted and a bit obvious (Louis Cyphre = Lucifer, Harold Angel = Herald Angel, etc.). There's a sizable plot twist in this film, which despite the 18-year-rule I'm hesitant to reveal, because I think it's something that you should really see for yourself. There are several clues along the way, and a few painstakingly placed pieces of visual metaphor (mirrors, fans, the song "The Girl of My Dreams," dogs, chickens), though some make more sense than others. For example, I don't really get what the fans are all about, really, but they appear a lot. Dogs often react quite violently or aggressively towards Angel, and he's got "a thing" about chickens (no, not a "thing for" chickens). The song is pretty subtle, too, but it makes frequent appearances throughout the movie, and Cyphre plays it specifically when he tries to make Angel understand the truth about the plot's insane twist.

Robert DeNiro is pretty cool and creepy in the movie, too. He's all beard-y, and his hair is long, and he has these crazy pointed fingernails like Fu Manchu. Surprisingly enough, Lisa Bonet is also a little spitfire in this, which is both good and bad, and the latter is this example:

She does stuff like this quite a bit in this movie, and she has a somewhat graphic and disturbing sex scene with Mickey Rourke. It ends up being quite violent and intense, and blood is literally raining down on them from the ceiling. She also dances around half-naked and covered in blood with a chicken in the above screenshot, in some sort of strange violence-and-sex-chicken-sacrifice-dance-in-the-woods ceremony which I'm sure has lost all meaning in its endless repetition throughout the generations, and is largely done out of tradition.

Ok, so I'm going to spoil the movie now, and if you don't want to know how it all turns out, you can stop reading. ... Have you stopped reading yet? Ok, so now that we're alone, here's the scoop: It turns out that Harry Angel is really Johnny Favorite. I know, right? Evidently, after the war (which explains Angel's mirror visions, which is of the 1943 homecoming), Favorite sacrificed a young soldier in order to eat his still-beating heart. Favorite sold his soul to the devil (a.k.a. Cyphre) for his singing talent, presumably. He got mixed up in tarot, palmistry, voodoo, and Satanism in Louisiana when he got involved with the daughter of a Satanist.

In an effort to work around the soul he sold to the devil, he basically tries to take the place of Harry Angel through a sacrificial ritual. Unfortunately, he's sent right back to war, and somehow loses al memory of who he originally was, and unknowingly evades Cyphre for the next twelve years. Cyphre then sends him on a wild goose chase to find himself, and in the process, kills everyone who was close to Favorite during his life. Oh, did I mention that Lisa Bonet's character is Favorite's daughter? Yeah. It's pretty gross. He kills her eventually, but he has no memory of killing anyone (he kills something like five people during the course of the film, but as Favorite, not as Angel, if that makes any sense at all). Cyphre gets what he needs from Angel in the end: as the credits roll, we see Angel descending in an elevator (we've seen flashes of this throughout the film), presumably carting his soul to hell.

This film is crazy good, emphasis on crazy. I genuinely enjoy the idea of a hard-boiled detective sent on a supernatural chase to find his original personality, buried deep inside his current psyche after a ritual sacrifice and the War. Rourke and DeNiro give great performances; DeNiro is supremely slimy and creepy (infinitely better than Al Pacino's devil portrayal in The Devil's Advocate), and Rourke is convincing as a hard-living private detective confronting what he can't understand. I give Angel Heart three and a half out of four formerly-normal-looking Mickey Rourkes out of five, or three and a half phobia-inducing chickens out of five.

John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns: If Movies Could Kill

I don't mean the title of this post to insinuate that this movie will kill you. It's not that terrible. It's not the best of John Carpenter's rather extensive work, but that may be mostly because this was done for the Showtime series Masters of Horror, and as such isn't up to normal standards. It is, however, a fairly original concept done in a mildly interesting way, so it isn't a total loss.

I realize now that I'll have quite a number of John Carpenter movies here on the ol' blog soon. I'm also waiting to review Big Trouble in Little China and The Thing, and I could always review Halloween and They Live! purely from memory. I do enjoy John Carpenter's films, and this was no exception. I did enjoy it, but given the format, it wasn't quite up to being great, and it was too short, besides.

The film stars Norman Reedus (Boondock Saints) as a Kirby Sweetman, a theater owner and pretty haunted dude, trying to pay back his father-in-law, Walter. To help his financial issues, he takes a film-detective job from Mr. Bellinger, played by Udo Kier (Blade, Halloween). Kirby is to find a long-lost film called La Fin Absolue du Monde (The Absolute End of the World), which is said to have driven its previous audiences to violence and death. Upon retrieving the film, he ends up with more than he bargains for, seeing reel-change markers (referred to as "cigarette burns" from its one mention in Fight Club, though they aren't actually known as such in the industry) in his waking life, before violent and strange hallucinations. He may slip deep into madness just from pursuing the film. Who knows what might happen if he actually watches it?

Ok, I was trying for a more concise with an actual summary of the film before really getting into a rant about it. Did it work? Meh, probably not, but I figured I'd try it out.

The main thing that disappointed me about this "movie" is that even though it has a some-star cast and is directed by a respected horror director, it's still not much more than a made for TV movie. It's too short, and I think there are some restrictions on content to a certain extent. Moreover, I was always aware on some level that this was not a theatrical film, and was originally on television. I like the general idea of the Masters of Horror, putting a bunch of horror directors together on one unified project, trying to make good horror films that are accessible to anyone paying for Showtime. I think the After Dark Horrorfest took that idea and made it into something worthwhile, an actual annual film festival specifically for horror, with excellent branding and a good marketing campaign.

I really liked the idea that a film is/can be more than just a film. This idea was touched on in the novel Three Days to Never by Tim Powers, as well, though not with the same horror twist. Basically, every time we see a movie, we put a lot of trust into it. We'll go to a theater, sit in the dark (surrounded by strangers), giving our attention totally to the screen, hoping the director doesn't try to screw us over. This is doubly true when we see a horror film; we trust that they won't show us anything that we can't handle. The film that Kirby is commissioned to find was created specifically to cause as much chaos as possible with the audience. We find that there's something subliminal in the film, something carefully edited, coupled with the immense power the film itself held. It's suggested that if the camera films something terrible, something unprecedented and terrible, it becomes powerful. In this case, the torture and forced transubstantiation of a real, live angel is captured on film amongst other truly horrific images and edits, which results in a film that drives anyone who watches it completely insane and violent. If anyone actively pursues the film (like Kirby), they begin to feel its effects, getting visions accompanied by the signature cigarette burns.

It's pretty short, as I said before, but Norman Reedus is pretty good in it, and it kind of reminds me of that Johnny Depp movie, The Ninth Gate. The plots are sort of similar (an expert is commissioned to find an evil version of something, with results that backfire, involve angels, evil, etc.), but unfortunately, The Ninth Gate is just a better movie. Cigarette Burns isn't terrible, by any means, though.

It's worth a watch if you're really a huge fan of John Carpenter. It has some interesting ideas in it, but I feel that they could have been developed more (the majority of the movie is about finding the film, and some creepiness and hallucinations), and maybe I'm just a little weird, but I wanted to see him screen the cursed movie for an entire audience and watch them all go crazy. I do like the idea and its inherent question: Filmmakers have much power over the imaginations of their audience. What if a director made a movie that would harm its audience on purpose?

I give it two accursed demon-films out of five, or two creepy wingless angels out of five.