I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 21
But this movie violates more rules than the First Rule of Repetition. It also violates a basic convention of story construction, which suggests that we should get at least a vague idea of where the story began and where it might be headed. This movie has no plot in a conventional sense. It is simply a series of ugly and bloody episodes, strung together one after another like a demo tape by a perverted special-effects man. There is nothing the heroines can do to understand or change their plight, and no way we can get involved in their story. That makes Hellbound: Hellraiser II an ideal movie for audiences with little taste and atrophied attention spans, who want to glance at the screen occasionally and ascertain that something is still happening up there. If you fit that description, you have probably not read this far, but what the heck, we believe in full-service reviews around here. You’re welcome.
Her Alibi
(Directed by Bruce Beresford; starring Tom Selleck, Paulina Porizkova; 1989)
You know a movie is in trouble when you start looking at your watch. You know it’s in bad trouble when you start shaking your watch because you think it might have stopped. Her Alibi is a movie in the second category—endless, pointless, and ridiculous, right up to the final shot of the knife going through the cockroach. This movie is desperately bankrupt of imagination and wit, and Tom Selleck looks adrift in it.
He plays a detective-novelist named Blackwood, who has run out of inspiration. So he goes to criminal court for fresh ideas, and there he falls instantly in love with Nina (Paulina Porizkova), a Romanian immigrant who is accused of murdering a young man with a pair of scissors. Blackwood disguises himself as a priest, smuggles himself into jail to meet Nina, and offers to supply her with an alibi: She can claim they were having an affair at his country home in Connecticut at the time of the crime.
These developments, and indeed the entire movie, are narrated by Blackwood in the language of a thriller novel he is writing as he goes along. One of the minor curiosities of the movie is why the Selleck character is such a bad writer. His prose is a turgid flow of cliché and stereotype, and when we catch a glimpse of his computer screen, we can’t help noticing that he writes only in capital letters. Although the movie says he’s rich because of a string of best-sellers, on the evidence this is the kind of author whose manuscripts are returned with a form letter.
If the plot of his novel is half-witted, the plot of the movie is lame-brained. Blackwood and Nina move to Connecticut to make the alibi look good, and they’re shadowed by a band of Romanian spies who make several murder attempts against them, including one in which they blow up Blackwood’s house. The movie betrays its desperation by straying outside the confines of even this cookie-cutter plot for such irrelevant episodes as the one where Blackwood shoots himself in the bottom with an arrow, and is rushed to the hospital by Nina in one of those cut-and-dried scenes where the racing vehicle scares everyone else off the road before arriving safe and sound.
In a movie filled with groaningly bad moments, the worst is no doubt the dinner party at which Blackwood becomes convinced that Nina has poisoned him and everybody else at the table. Why does he think so? Because the cat is dead, next to a bowl filled from the same casserole. We are treated to the sight of eight characters doing the dry heaves, and then another visit to the hospital, after which we learn it’s all a false alarm and the cat was accidentially electrocuted in a neighbor’s basement and returned by the solicitous neighbor to a resting place beside the suspicious bowl. Uh-huh.
The explanation for the whole story is equally arbitrary and senseless, and the big reconciliation scene between the two lovers is not helped by taking place at a clown’s convention, with Selleck wearing a red rubber ball on his nose. But for a full appreciation of just how much contempt Her Alibi has for the audience, reflect for a moment on the movie’s last scene, in which Blackwood and Nina are back home again at last in the snug Connecticut farmhouse, for a big love scene and a fade-out. The people who made this movie apparently actually forgot that they blew the house up half an hour earlier.
Highlander 2: The Quickening
(Directed by Russell Mulcahy; starring Sean Connery, Christopher Lambert; 1991)
This movie has to be seen to be believed. On the other hand, maybe that’s too high a price to pay. Highlander 2: The Quickening is the most hilariously incomprehensible movie I’ve seen in many a long day—a movie almost awesome in its badness. Wherever science fiction fans gather, in decades and generations to come, this film will be remembered in hushed tones as one of the immortal low points of the genre.
The story opens in the year 1999, and then we get the title card “25 years later,” following not long after by the title card “The Planet Zeist, 500 Years Ago.” Uh, are those Earth years or Zeist years? Apparently Zeist, which has a sun so close it takes up a quarter of the visible sky, revolves around that orb so slowly that a Zeist year is exactly the same as an Earth year, which accounts for the fact that one of the Immortals sent to Earth 500 years ago found himself in medieval Scotland, also 500 years ago.
Now about the Immortals. They led a rebellion on Zeist, and were banished to the planet Earth, under a sentence of eternal life. They cannot die. In a sense. Actually, they can, but it depends. Or, as one of the characters explains it more helpfully, “You will live forever here, until you return to Zeist, where you can die, or, under certain circumstances, you can die here, but not on Zeist.”
The immortals are played by Sean Connery and Christopher Lambert, and they have both been on Earth 500 (Earth) years, and will be here a lot longer, looks like. Meanwhile, in the year 1999, the disappearing ozone layer is causing global panic on Earth. The ozone has finally been destroyed by billions of deodorized armpits, and people are dying like flies, until a corporation headed by Lambert devises a shield to save the planet. This shield, known as the Shield, involves using all of the energy on the planet, concentrated into a laser beam that is shot up to an Earth satellite, whereupon Earth is saved from excess solar radiation, but there’s a catch: It will always be night, and the temperature and humidity will both hover around 99.
Flash forward twenty-five years, as the older Lambert goes to an opera, wearing a tuxedo, which people still wear despite the heat wave and the 99 percent humidity. Life in big cities has grown dangerous and criminal, although people are still alive and should not complain, considering that you would think that the total blackout on earth might have curtailed food production, since nothing could grow.
For that matter, why isn’t everything covered with a carpet of fungus? And for that matter, why is the humidity 99 percent—after all, the lack of sunlight should have (a) ended the process of cloud formation, so that, without rain, all of the water would end up in the oceans and the land would be a desert, and (b) without warmth from the sun, a new Ice Age should have begun.
Never mind. Earth is in the grip of an evil cartel which manages the Shield, until a brave underground scientist (Virginia Madsen) hacks into the computers of the Shield’s owners and discovers, as she breathlessly reports: “The solar radiation above the Shield is normal!!!” She explains that the ozone layer has “repaired itself.”
Meanwhile, Sean Connery, still a creature of the medieval Scotland where he first arrived from Zeist, appears in the twenty-first century wearing a kilt and talking in a thick brogue, and gets himself suited up in modern dress before there are several sword fights and some byplay involving bad guys on the planet Zeist. If there is a planet somewhere whose civilization is based on the worst movies of all time, Highlander 2: The Quickening deserves a sacred place among their most treasured artifacts.
Film note: “Quickening” is a process by which two people touch each other and are surrounded by special effects making it look as if one of them is standing in a puddle and the other had just stuck his finger into a light socket.
The Hindenburg
(Directed by Robert Wise; starring George C. Scott, Anne Bancroft; 1975)
The Hindenburg is a disaster picture, all right. How else can you describe a movie that makes people laugh out loud at all the wrong times? Why else would they film a story with an ending everybody knows and then try to build up suspense about it?
The movie’s so bad I’ve made a little list. You just can’t dismiss it; you linger over it. People stand in the lobby afterward like the survivors of a traffic accident.
First on my list is the movie’s fundamental flaw, a lack of understanding of what makes disaster movies interesting. We go to see the characters in the process of experiencing the disaster. As the disaster develops, so do the characters. The skyscraper in The Towering Inferno catches on fire in the first fifteen minutes and burns for two hours. The good ship Poseidon is hit by a tidal wave ten minutes after we walk into the theater; it turns over, and the characters spend the rest of the movie fighting fire and flood. The airplanes in the two Airport! movies fly for ninety minutes after things go wrong, with George Kennedy wringing his hands on the ground and Dean Martin and Karen Black fighting the controls.
But in The Hindenburg almost nothing of consequence happens until the last few minutes of the movie. How can you thrill people with the saga of a dirigible floating across the Atlantic Ocean? We know it’s going to blow up over Lakehurst, New Jersey—but we also know that it’s not going to blow up before then. And so George C. Scott searches his conscience, and Anne Bancroft camps it up as a mysterious German countess, and the captain peers confidently out over the wheel, and for nearly two hours little of any consequence happens.
Meanwhile (no. 2 on my list) the movie has to deal with the fact that Nazi Germany used giant dirigibles like the Hindenburg as propaganda devices. They were the symbols of Hitlerism, floating in the sky past the Empire State Building, the queens of the air. Their crews were German. Their makers were German. Their sponsors were Nazis.
And so, while nothing else is happening except that the characters are making inane conversation with each other in futile attempts to piece together vignettes of human nature, the good Germans and the bad Germans and the in-between Germans climb through the rigging of the airship playing a cat-and-mouse game with sabotage.
George C. Scott is an in-between German. He’s deeply disturbed, you see, because the Nazi youth movement enlisted his teenage son, and the poor lad was misled by bad company: While climbing up onto a synagogue to paint a swastika on it, the hapless youth fell off and broke his neck. This forces George C. Scott into a crisis of agonizing indecision. Meanwhile, we laugh, because the information has been imparted so artlessly, so awkwardly, it seems like a sick joke. Moviemakers talk about “bad laughs.” That’s when the audience laughs when it’s not supposed to. This is conceivably the first movie which is in its entirety a bad laugh.
Meanwhile (third and last point) the Hindenburg drifts toward its rendezvous with destiny. And here the director, Robert Wise, uses actual newsreel footage. There’s not much of it; the Hindenburg went down pretty fast. So he keeps stopping the footage to give us ground-and-air developments, as people race about in flames and fall to their deaths. This isn’t fun. We go to disaster movies for fun. We know a few supporting players are going to catch their lunch, but we figure Paul Newman and Steve McQueen will come out all right. And here are all these people burning up and falling out of the Hindenburg. Well, at least we stop laughing.
The Hitcher
(Directed by Robert Holman; starring Rutger Hauer, Jennifer Jason Leigh; 1986)
The Hitcher begins and ends with the same sound: a match being struck, flaring into flame. At the beginning of the film, the sound is made by the villain, a hitchhiker who is a mass murderer. At the end of the film, the sound is made by the hero, a young man whose life has been spared so that he can become the special victim of the hitchhiker.
The movie seems to be telling us, by the use of the sounds and in several other ways, that the killer and the hero have developed some kind of deep bond through their shared experiences.
The victim’s identification with his torturer is not a new phenomenon. In many of the hostage cases in recent years, some of the captives have adopted the viewpoints of their jailers. What is particularly sick about The Hitcher is that the killer is not given a viewpoint, a grudge, or indeed even a motive.
He is deliberately presented as a man without a past, without a history, who simply and cruelly hurts and kills people. Although he spares the movie’s young hero, he puts him through a terrible ordeal, framing him as a mass murderer and trapping him in a Kafkaesque web of evidence.
At the end of the movie, there is, of course, a scene of vengeance in which the two men meet in final combat. And yet this showdown does not represent a fight between good and evil, because the movie suggests that there is something sadomasochistic going on between the two men. The death of the villain is not the hero’s revenge, but the conclusion that the villain has been setting up for himself all along.
This unhealthy bond between the young hero (played by C. Thomas Howell) and the older killer (the cold-eyed Rutger Hauer) is developed in a movie that provides a horrible fate for its only major female character. As Howell flees down empty desert highways from the violence of Hauer, he is befriended by a young waitress (Jennifer Jason Leigh). She believes that he is innocent and goes on the run with him.
But the movie does not develop into a standard story of teenagers in love. And the Leigh character’s death—she is tied hand and foot between two giant trucks and pulled in two—is so grotesquely out of proportion with the main business of this movie that it suggests a deep sickness at the screenplay stage.
There are other disgusting moments, as when a police dog feasts on the blood dripping from its master’s neck, and when Howell finds a human finger in his french fries.
The Hitcher grants the Hauer character almost supernatural powers. Although that makes the movie impossible to accept on a realistic level, it didn’t bother me. I could see that the film was meant as an allegory, not a documentary.
But on its own terms, this movie is diseased and corrupt. I would have admired it more if it had found the courage to acknowledge the real relationship it was portraying between Howell and Rutger, but no: It prefers to disguise itself as a violent thriller, and on that level it is reprehensible.
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
(Directed by Chris Columbus; starring Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern; 1992)
I have a feeling that Home Alone 2: Lost in New York is going to be an enormous box-office success, but include me out. I didn’t much like the first film, and I don’t much like this one, with its sadistic little hero who mercilessly hammers a couple of slow-learning crooks. Nor did I enjoy the shameless attempt to leaven the mayhem by including a preachy subplot about the Pigeon Lady of Central Park. Call me hard-hearted, call me cynical, but please don’t call me if they make Home Alone 3.
I know, I know—the violence is all a joke. Some of the gags are lifted directly from old color cartoons, and in spirit what we’re looking at here are Road Runner adventures, with the crooks playing the role of Wile E. Coyote. As the two hapless mopes fall down ladders, are slammed by bricks and 500-pound bags of cement, and covered with glue and paint and birdseed, you can hear the cackling of the old Looney Tunes heroes in the background. And just like in the cartoons, the crooks are never really hurt; they bounce back, dust themselves off, bend their bones back into shape, and are ready for the next adventure. When little Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) taunts them (“Hey! Up here!”) he sounds like Bugs Bunny, and when they chase him (always unwisely) they’re in the tradition of Elmer Fudd.
The problem is, cartoon violence is only funny in the cartoons. Most of the live-action attempts to duplicate animation have failed, because when flesh-and-blood figures hit the pavement, we can almost hear the bones crunch, and it isn’t funny. Take, for example, the scene in Home Alone 2 where Kevin lures the crooks into trying to crawl down a rope from the top of a four-story town house. He has soaked the rope in kerosene, and when they’re halfway down he sets it on fire. Ho, ho.
The movie repeats the formula of the best-selling original film. Once again, Kevin’s forgetful family leaves home without him (he gets on the plane to New York instead of Miami), and once again they fret while he deals effortlessly with the world. He checks into the Plaza Hotel on his dad’s credit card, and has time for heartwarming conversations with a kindly old toy shop owner (Eddie Bracken) and a homeless bird lover (Brenda Fricker), not to mention Donald Trump, before running into his old enemies, the crooks (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern). When he discovers they plan to rob the toy store, whose receipts are destined for a children’s hospital, he knows he has his work cut out for him (“Messing with kids on Christmas Eve—that’s going too far!”).
The kid outsmarts the usual assortment of supercilious adults, including hotel clerk Tim Curry, before setting a series of ingenious traps for the crooks. As before, he seems to have a complete command of all handyman skills, including rigging ladders and wiring appliances for electrical shocks—and, of course, he finds all the props he needs, even for rigging the exploding toilet and setting that staple gun to fire through the keyhole.
In between the painful practical jokes, there’s his treacly relationship with Fricker, as the Pigeon Lady, who shows him her hideaway inside the ceiling of Carnegie Hall. Christmas carols swell from the concert below as the sanctimonious little twerp lectures the old lady on the meaning of life. If he believes half of what he says, he’d give the crooks a break.
