You're Gonna Die

So that's pretty scary, right?  With the eyes and the blood and the teeth?  It's an image from Evil Dead, the new remake of the Sam Raimi classic (or, really, classics), directed by Fede Alvarez and written by Alvarez, Rodo Sayagues, and Diablo Cody, that just opened after a rather surprisingly large wave of goodwill among horror fans, who are not typically known for their ready embrace of quite possibly cynical rejiggerings of their beloved favorites, and, indeed, why should they be?  I've said before, and will say now again, that I'm not ideologically opposed to remakes as a concept, and I'm pretty sure I'm still not, but boy, theoreticals aside, I feel like I'm becoming, practically speaking, actually bone-numbingly sick of the whole deal.  "Enough already," is I think a phrase that is sometimes used. There have only been a small handful of really great ones, a slightly larger handful of good ones, and a big heaping pantful of acceptable-through-useless horror remakes that justify the bitching, while nodding distractedly and walking away from us as we cry "And another thing!", with a giant sack of the money we've handed them slung over their shoulders. 

But again, Evil Dead was somehow able to circumvent all that to simply become a horror film that people were really looking forward to.  Supposedly, it was going to be terrifying, which is always nice.  Still, this was a remake of Sam Raimi's 1981 film, which, in case you don't know, is adored by horror fans the world over.  It is also a remake of Raimi's Evil Dead 2 from 1987, which itself is essentially a remake of the original, but more wild and inventive and goofy and funny, and which is, if anything, even more adored by horror fans the world over.  This in turn would lead to Army of Darkness, the third film in the trilogy, from 1992, and in the spirit of full disclosure I will admit here that neither the 1981 film nor Army of Darkness are particularly strong in my memory, having seen each only once a long time ago, and my interest in any of it, when it perks up, tends to be satisfied by Evil Dead 2, and after watching that one I generally go about my business.  I say all this only by way of explaining that very little of what I'm about to say about Alvarez's remake has anything to do with Sam Raimi-related baggage I hauled into the theater with me.  The only thing about the Raimi films, or rather in this case the making, and existence, of the Raimi films, that I thought much about while watching this new version, outside of the obvious recreation of certain famous moments, was that what made those earlier movies special was that Raimi and his crew were not so much forced by their meager budgets to be especially inventive as much as they understood the potential for inventiveness within those limited means.  Alvarez and Co., meanwhile, were granted a considerably more expansive budget, a fact I'm not holding against them, but managed to not be quite so inventive.  While filming their remake.  I suspect there is a lesson here.

All of which I'll loop back around to.  The plot here is simplicity itself, though Alvarez and his cowriters admirably refused to flagrantly produce something quite like what Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon so surgically deconstructed in last year's The Cabin in the Woods.  After a prologue involving a group of what at first appear to be hideous redneck marauders violently kidnapping a young woman found wondering in the woods, but are then revealed to be forces of good who are working to eradicate the vile demonic force within her, we are then transported some years -- how many is not made clear, or anyway I didn't catch it if it was -- into the present, where a group of young people are gathering not for a weekend of debauchery, but rather what might be considered the exact opposite.  Mia (Jane Levy) is a heroin addict, and her friends Olivia (Jessica Lucas) and Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) are waiting with her at an old, secluded family cabin for her brother David (Shiloh Fernandez) and his girlfriend Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore) to arrive, so that an intense period of getting Mia through her cold-turkey battle against her addiction can begin.  The relationship between David and Mia -- and with David and Eric and Olivia -- shows some potential once we learn that Mia was left to tend to their mother during what seems to have been the particularly horrible end of her life, while David's excuses for his absence paint him as quite possibly a coward at best, a selfish dick at worst.  Not so bad as that, but not unnoticed by Eric and Olivia, who have already stuck by Mia through an overdose and a previous failed attempt to kick her habit, is David's apparently casual turning of his back on everybody else in his life as well, as he left town to pursue work and whatever else in Chicago.

And then later on evil deads attack and blood goes everywhere.  Alvarez gets there pretty quickly, just as I was wondering if this was the kind of film that would take its time, and if the people with whom we would be spending that time before the horror is let off its leash could carry such a load.  We'll never find out, but Eric and Olivia's prior experience with Mia could have yielded something, and Lucas and Pucci appeared to be equal to the task, had it been given to them, and the film even makes a successful, though very brief, stab at making Mia's situation feel reasonably harrowing.  David's ignorance and fear makes him a rather weak-seeming hero, which I find interesting, and Levy plays Mia's hanging-by-her-nails sobriety in such a way that the line between that and the supernatural horror that's about to overwhelm her feel very fine.  This is of course the point, because this is a metaphor, you see, which will quite soon ennoble all the splatter.  But anyway, that's where we are when the characters follow a nasty odor down into the cellar of the by-no-means-suitable-for-a-freshly-recovering-heroin-addict cabin in the woods and discover mummified cats and skin-bound books of evil spells, which one way or another will unleash an ancient evil that infects (but doesn't actually addict, so that metaphor doesn't carry through all the way), and the whole reason for Evil Dead's existence gets rolling.

Which is?  Well, look.  Raimi's film took classic horror ideas, the kind that go back to the campfire, and brought to them his own particular and wild imagination and sense of humor (the latter of which, of almost any kind, is absent from the remake, but I don't mind that; I don't need my horror movies to function as undercover comedies).  Alvarez, Sayagues, and Cody approach Raimi's expansion of the oldest of horror ideas and add other horror movies they saw and liked to it.  It's a sporadically effective, occasionally bizarre, and ultimately tedious way to go about this.  While I doubt this was the goal, though with things as they are in horror these days who can say, this new Evil Dead is almost as postmodern, if not more so, in its take on the genre as The Cabin in the Woods was, and being postmodern about this exact stuff is the whole reason The Cabin in the Woods exists in the first place.  But Alvarez's film starts with Raimi, then adds The Exorcist, then dumps in a plate of that "New French Extremity" horror movie stuff, you got your The Descent in there (which itself had some The Shining and etc. in it), you got all the infection horror, you got your zombie horror, because when you're infected you're not unlike the fast zombies that they got now, and so on and so forth.  Once the horror begins, there isn't a moment that isn't meant to remind the horror fan of something else.  Evil Dead refuses to wink during any of it, but it would like you to notice it winking at you anyway.  Which, if you're into this sort of thing, the movies that have been cobbled together here, and I am, you will.  If you didn't notice, then this would all just be stealing.

So, but, how good is Evil Dead at doing any of this?  At first, reasonably good.  After Mia becomes demonic and is locked in the cellar, it is inevitable that another character must soon fall, rise, and attack, and this -- along with a scene involving a scalding shower -- is probably the single most effective sequence in the whole film, not least because at this point Alvarez hasn't yet had the opportunity to become boring.  But give him a minute.  The gore becomes relentless and ridiculously extreme, in precisely the style of French films like Inside and Frontier(s) and Martyrs and Sheitan, and just as impossible to feel anything about, because as stupid as it all is, it's somehow not a joke -- when stepped back from and looked at objectively, this is like being shown a Bugs Bunny cartoon and told you're supposed to be frightened by it.  (I exempt from all this, by the way, Martyrs, an extraordinarily violent film that nevertheless has some flesh and bone you can actually bruise and break, and I realize that I must further clarify that in no way do I find Bugs Bunny cartoons to be stupid.) Sam Raimi, of course, played his splatter for laughs, in a way that was, among other things, satirizing the horror violence that was in 1981 beginning to become popular in horror, and by 1987, when he made his first Evil Dead sequel, had more or less taken over.  And again, it's not that I prefer, or even usually want, horror films to contain some central joke to ease me through the nasty bits.  I just wonder when contemporary horror filmmakers will realize that there is, in fact, a difference between "ridiculous" and "not ridiculous."

Then of course they have to drag The Exorcist into it all.  When Mia becomes full-on possessed, the references and nods and all that shit to Friedkin and Blatty's 1973 masterpiece come pretty fast and furious, and, well, put it like this:  lines like "You're gonna die, you bitch!" and "I'll tear your soul out, you pathetic fuck!" don't carry with them quite the same chilling, transgressive, bizarre quality as "Do you know what she did?  Your cunting daughter?"  Just as a for instance.  Nor is a voice that sounds like the fancy new state of the art 2013 update of Dr. Sbaitso really able to match the ingenious vocal performance by Mercedes McCambridge as the demon in The Exorcist.  But of course all that matters is that you know they're doing The Exorcist stuff here!  That is all the fuck that matters! If something else is meant to be taken from the shot of Mia in the cellar crouched and giggling like Linda Blair's Regan after the death of Father Merrin, then please, enlighten me.  Yeah, I've seen The Exorcist.  It's a great film.  You're nowhere near as good as it.  Now what?

The Cold-Blooded Type

In Scott Smith’s novel A Simple Plan, three men – Hank, his brother Jacob, and Jacob’s friend Lou – are chasing a fox through the woods (Hank, a married man with a baby on the way, a responsible man who disapproves of the foolishness and general drunkenness of the other men, has joined in reluctantly) when they found a crashed plane. Inside that crashed plane, along with the body of the pilot, they find a bag of money, totaling more than four million dollars. After some uncertainty and debate, they all decide to keep it.

I read Smith’s novel some brief time after Sam Raimi’s film version first came out. The book has a very, very black heart, confronting, as it does, with unnerving directness the ease with which a “normal guy” – in this case, Hank – can switch from that law-abiding normalcy to a level of violence that literally reaches the level of butchery, all the while justifying to himself that he needs to do it, because he has a new baby, and the money will give his family a new life, and anyway if he doesn’t kill this person, he will go to prison. And the one thing that trumps all is that he cannot go to prison. One does what one must to avoid that sort of fate.

An excellent, near-great novel, I thought, and think, though I had a sense even then that Smith might have been better off reigning things in a little bit. A Simple Plan, the novel, is in some ways quite bonkers, in a way that sometimes stretches credulity. At the same time, I can’t help but admire Smith’s nerve in sticking so ruthlessly to the terrible path of murder and karmic retribution he’d mapped out. I was most curious about how the film version would play out, though I have to admit my anticipation for the film (which I eventually saw on video) was tempered, in a particular sort of way, with thoughts like “Sam Raimi???” A not dissimilar reaction greeted the notion of the not-dissimilar-to-Sam Raimi Peter Jackson, he of Dead Alive fame, directing the far grander Lord of the Rings, but I knew little of Jackson at that time, while I knew plenty enough of Raimi. At the time, I would say my favorite film that Raimi had anything at all to do with was Miller's Crossing, in which he has a cameo as "Laughing Gunman". After that, and more significantly, would be The Hudsucker Proxy, which he co-wrote. Then Evil Dead II, which I honestly enjoyed, and after that...what? Not Darkman, I can assure you. I'm in the curious position with Raimi (and Jackson, too, come to think of it) of not really beginning to enjoy his films until he decided to break out of his role of the crazy drive-in ironic genre guy (which is a role that his true fans -- which you'll notice I don't put in quotes, because they really are his true fans -- hold very dear) and go mainstream. A Simple Plan was the movie that found him really tucking into that new filmmaking life, and it ranks as one of my personal favorites.

A Simple Plan is a crime film, obviously, and, set as it is in a Minnesota farming community, a snowy one. This is crucial in one sense, because as he embarked on making the film, Raimi consulted with his old friends Joel and Ethan Coen, who had recently knocked the world on its face with Fargo, also a crime film, also set in Minnesota (and thereabouts), and also very snowy. What the Coens offered by way of advice, I don't know, but Raimi and DP Alar Kivilo succeed entirely at depicting a frost-beaten Minnesota, whose warm homes seem all the warmer, and whose drafty cabins, such as the one inhabited by Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton), seem like they barely count as "indoors". The cast is rounded out by Bill Paxton -- a most curious actor, I've always thought -- as Hank, Brent Briscoe as Lou, and Bridget Fonda as Sarah, Hank's wife. My math tells me that this comes out to two out of four, or two and half out of four. In different ways, Briscoe and Paxton have the same problem, in that it often feels to me as if they're reading their lines as opposed to saying them, but while Briscoe -- saddled with the most basic, cog-in-the-plot character out of all of them, to be fair -- never really breaks that habit, Paxton sometimes does. I'm thinking primarily of the film's wrenching climax, which I won't spoil, but at one point a realization dawns on Paxton's Hank, and the horror that twists his face comes only partially from what has just been suggested to him. The rest comes from the fact that he knows he's going to do it. This is the heart of Scott Smith's wretched, pitiful, sympathetic and hateful protagonist.

But as in the novel, the beating heart of A Simple Plan is Jacob. It is my belief that Billy Bob Thornton has never been better, either before or since this film. A bit of a cliche', in that Jacob is both the dumbest and the kindest of all the characters, the writing and Thornton's performance make him thrive -- pathetically thrive, if that's even a thing. The key to getting Jacob off the ground is the dialogue, and Scott Smith, who wrote the screenplay (and cut out a fair amount of what made the novel so crazy, for better or worse), gives him some wonderfully funny, stumbling bits, such as when he looks at Hank's iced-over porch and says "You gotta scrape that shit off'a your, you know, your watcha-callit deal, there" or when he notices crows in the branches overhead and says "They just sit around waitin' for somethin' to die so they can eat it. Weird. What a weird job." At his best, Thornton has always sat really easy inside these simple rural characters, but never more easily than here. The lifelong sadness of Jacob, the basic desire for money that lets him follow Lou, and then Hank, into this nightmare, followed by the ultimate moral catastrophe that wrecks him completely, is always played just right by Thornton.

Meanwhile, if Jacob is the beating heart, Bridget Fonda's Sarah is the black mind. Not even aware she's as terrible as she is, Sarah is a pragmatic monster, sensing just the thing to do to avoid getting caught by the police, either for the stolen money, or, far more troublingly, for the murders that follow along. I remember reading the book, and getting to a certain point and telling my mom, who had already read it, that Sarah was going to cut Hank off at the knees when the opportunity presented itself. Well, I was wrong, but Sarah is almost the most shocking character in either the book or the film. Before she knows anything about what's going on, it's very easy for her to spout off basic moral points because serious temptation like this has never come her way. Once it does, she blossoms, and while Hank's the one getting blood on his hands, she finds it not at all difficult to skate over that and on to other matters, such as how to keep the murders from tracing back to her. And Fonda nails it all. It's crucial with both Sarah and Hank to play them straight, and to play the guilt, and the disbelief, and the terror. Murders aren't only committed by people like Jeffrey Dahmer. They're also committed by people who would never suspect themselves capable of such a thing. This is the central power of A Simple Plan.

So Raimi has moved on, dabbling in movies pitched at about the same level of studio interest and budget, until being surprisingly picked, Peter Jackson-like, to helm the Spider-Man franchise. And leaving aside all the problems that eventually came along with that, I'm a big fan of those movies, and the choice of Raimi. I like the guy. He's bent just enough, and he wears a suit every day when he's making a movie. But I have a feeling that I will always regard A Simple Plan as his best film, because it's the one time he's ever really plumbed the depths. I hope he does again some day.

------------------------

This post has been part of the Raimifest blogathon, hosted by Bryce Wilson of Things That Don't Suck.

If You Like Blogathons and Sam Raimi, Well Have I Got News for You!

.

Bryce Wilson, he of Things That Don't Suck fame, just kicked off his Sam Raimi blogathon...er, yesterday. But it goes on through April 2nd, so there's still plenty of time to make up for my neglect, and I suggest you do. Raimi is quite the curious fellow, beginning his career as a filmmaker with an unabashedly drive-in sensibility, before eventually graduating, or rather switching gears to, Hollywood blockbusters. Quite surprisingly, to anyone who'd followed his career from the early years. And then, of course, came Drag Me to Hell, which might signal a return to his roots. Anyway, I'm most interested in the middle period of Raimi's work, after the Evil Dead stuff, and before Spider-Man, when he was first making his mark with the studios. I will be writing up one of those films in the next couple of days, and, sadly, I think that anyone who has any feeling for my tastes and sensibilities will probably be able to correctly guess which film I'm going to take on. I'm doing it anyway, though!

Meanwhile, check out Bryce's links for the first couple of days, as well as his own write-ups, and should you have a blog of your own, why not throw in your own two cents?

On Becoming a Superhero

I don’t know about you, but it wasn’t so long ago that I used to wake up in the morning, sit morosely on the side of my bed, and wonder “Why am I not a superhero yet?” The answer, I eventually realized, was a simple one: I wasn’t putting in the work! I was going to bed every night, hoping that by the time the sun rose I’d have turned into Spider-Man. It’s embarrassing to admit now, but I thought that radioactive spiders were everywhere, and, because I do not keep my home clean – I at least did that much – it would only be a matter of time before one found its way in and bit me. From there, it would simply be a matter of determining if my “webslingers” were organic, or if I’d have to make them myself. Given my lazy thinking, I was hoping for the former.
.
Then one day, a friend of mine provided me with humbling inspiration, and helped me put my life on the right track. This friend works in a scientific laboratory, and he’s a big Daredevil fan. One day, he was looking at all the jars of science potion they have there, and he took one off the shelf, opened it, and poured the potion into his eyes. And guess what? He’s completely blind now, which means he’s already halfway there.
.
Now I know that nobody’s going to just hand me super powers; I’ll have to take them from the cosmos, or the Earth, or the Earth’s oceans, or the Realm of the Eldritch Unknown – whatever is best for me. The best part is that I want to pass on what I’ve learned to you! I want to motivate you to get your own super powers, although if you and I live in the same city, we can’t have the same super powers, unless one of us (you) wants to be a supervillain, in which case you’d better stop reading now, because I’m not going to help anybody do that shit. In fact, I was going to save this for later, but let’s go ahead and get the “supervillain” portion of this essay out of the way now. Okay, I know that some of you are thinking “Hey, if I had a super power – like, say, I could control fire – then I could use it to burn down girls’ locker rooms and banks and so on. Can that hero nonsense! I’m gonna look out for number one, see!?” I believe that it is natural to have these thoughts. But come on, man. Don’t do that.
.
Back to the point. The important thing to remember when trying to obtain a super power is this: keep a positive attitude. What you’re trying to do isn’t easy, but there are also lots of different ways to achieve your goal. For instance, there’s the radioactive spider I mentioned at the top. What you need to remember about this method of super power acquisition is that it’s pretty much pure luck. Anybody can get bitten by a spider, but that spider has to bring some pretty serious stuff to the table himself if you’re ever going to get anywhere. Of course, you could buy a spider, and a radiation machine, put the spider into the machine, and then put the spider on your arm and say “Bite my arm.” This can work. If this is where your heart takes you, then Godspeed. But what I’m trying to get at here is that there are alternatives. For instance, you could train to become an astronaut, and when you get launched into space, maybe your ship will pass through a magic cloud. It’s space, so the chances of this happening are pretty good. If NASA rejects your application for any reason, you could always stowaway on their next mission. This kind of pluckiness will serve you well in the future.

.

Perhaps you want to take a more practical, hands-on approach to gaining super powers. Maybe the off-chance that there aren’t any magic clouds in space renders that option too uncertain for you. Perhaps, also, you have a great admiration for Matter-Eater Lad, from the Legion of Super Heroes, but the prospect of transforming yourself from a “Regular Joe” to someone who can consume all matter is, while enormously appealing, also quite daunting. “Where,” you must be thinking, “am I to begin?” Well, how about this? Go home and eat a bowl of soup. The next day, try a sandwich. Then you can try to be like one of those guys from the Guinness Book of World Records, who eat bicycles and cars, one tiny piece at a time (I’m pretty sure I saw somebody do that with a plane once). Once you’ve mastered this, see if you can take a bite out of a brick. If you can, then you know what? You did it, buddy. You’re there.
.

There’s another option that I’m sure many of you are probably considering, which is the “superhero with no powers” route. This sounds pretty boring to me, but I guess okay, if that’s your thing. If you’d rather have a belt full of shit like marbles, and duct tape that has your name on it, then go to it. When you see me flying over your head with a hot naked girl in my arms, be sure to blow your special whistle at me. But so anyway, if you think you know best, then what you’ll need is some sort of trauma. Everybody has some trauma in their lives – the death of a loved one, the rejection of your poetry and monologues by an ignorant critical “elite” – but if you’re going to use it to shape your superhero persona, you’ll need something special. Your parents will need to be murdered by somebody wearing a snake costume (allowing you to become The Mongoose), or maybe your trauma is something you feel guilty about, like you accidentally killed your best friend in a “watch me swing this axe with my eyes closed” mishap, which would spur you to become The Lumberjack. Or no…who fights lumberjacks? You know what, never mind. This no-super-powers business is really not my thing, so you’re on your own. Good luck!
.
As for the rest of you, remember: YOU CAN DO IT! Your quest has an endless number of destinations. Just walk into the ocean and see what happens, or put on a metal hat, go out during an electrical storm, and touch whatever animal happens to pass you by. This is an adventure! Enjoy!
.

The Collection Project Film of the Day:
.
Remember that scene in Spider-Man 3 (d. Sam Raimi) when the butler tells Harry that he's known for probably about forever that Spider-Man didn't kill Harry's dad, but he kept mum about it for some reason long enough for Harry to become a supervillain? Yeah, I own the movie anyway.