The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

Horror and Fantasy in the Media Edward Bryant

I have mixed feelings about the fact that science fiction or fantasy films rarely trigger as much discussion among viewers as does, say, Thelma and Louise. Actually I got a big kick out of watching—and participating in—mixed-gender discussions of Ridley Scott’s examination of women as aliens (I don’t think it takes too large a sophist’s shoehorn to slip the film in as a first cousin to The Man Who Fell to Earth . . .). Do Bill and Ted audiences exit the theatre with at least half the crowd mildly radicalized—and the other half either sobered or defensive? Is the end message of Body Parts as open to debate? Do viewers of The Rocketeer make observations like, “Huh, do you know Thelma and Louise is sort of a gender-turnaround of Richard Sarafian’s classic (well, I think it is) Vanishing Point from twenty years ago?” Does the latest Star Trek installment or even Terminator 2 catalyze the same level of activity in the head and the heart as Jungle Fever or Boyz N the Hood? Are all these unfair questions or just inappropriate ones?

Just asking, friends. As far as I’m concerned, Thelma and Louise doesn’t hold a candle to the controversy of such past masters as Do the Right Thing. Before I talk myself out of writing this summary survey of the film of the fantastic for 1991, let me sip a slug of caffeinated diet cola, calm myself and admit there was plenty to talk about with last year’s crop. But I think you see the point.

The Rapture is a film that could have been a contender. Much like a jet fighter, it screamed down the runway, started to lift off, then lost power and control toward the end and threatened to stall. The Rapture was director Michael Tolkin’s second feature film. It is fantasy, though there are many who might consider it a prescient documentary. For others, the film would fall into no other category than horror. It’s an unabashedly religious drama, though nothing like the cheapjack features you can catch for free at storefront tabernacles. The Rapture stars Mimi Rogers as a directory-assistance operator whose arid, empty life is filled only with the attentions of a kinky lover and group sex. She starts to sense the possibility of meaning after overhearing her co-workers talk around the water cooler about shared dreams of The Pearl. What occurs is a very literal playing out of the prophecies of Revelation, which is all done straight. Even though I don’t think Tolkin’s script really ever satisfactorily grappled with the material, it’s a brash and sensational idea, and a genuinely ambitious film. More important, The Rapture may well turn out to be a bellwether, as the proximity of the century’s end triggers more and more millennial pop art.

And now for some of my favorites, films that worked for me on a lot of levels. My two picks from the horror side are actually more dark—very dark—suspense— if you insist on sticky categories. A 1988 Dutch film, The Vanishing, finally was released in the U.S. last year. Directed by George Sluizer, this starts with one of everyone’s favorite paranoid scenarios. A young Dutch couple who are in France to see the Tour de France stops at a bustling freeway service area. The woman disappears. Her boyfriend then spends three years obsessively trying to locate her. The viewers quickly find out who the kidnapper is, an otherwise dull French lxviii chemistry professor played by Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu. This villain is one of the screen’s great psychos. Until the end, we do not understand his motives. He torments the disappeared woman’s lover with teasing postcards. Eventually he works an act of evil that, for most beholders, is unforgettably disturbing. I found the surprise to be fairly planted, but still shocking in a way no film’s done for me in years. One of the great achievements of The Vanishing is its total lack of blood. No graphic violence. No dismemberment. I didn’t think this sort of horrific thriller could still be made.

The American film industry came through just fine with Jonathan Demme’s film translation of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs. Minimally graphic, this bombshell way outclassed all the other new films of terror. I’ve got no problem with the aesthetic of carnography, but that makes me all the more admire filmmakers who can create intensity in a movie with tools other than a simple violent bludgeon. Writing, acting, editing and cinematography can certainly help. The Silence of the Lambs made an instant shivery pop star of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, and deservedly so. But that shouldn’t detract from Jodie Foster’s strong performance as the smart, courageous, FBI rookie. Scott Glenn was almost invisible as her boss, which is too bad. Interestingly, both The Vanishing and The Silence of the Lambs are adaptations of novels. I haven’t read the progenitor of the former, Tim Krabbe’s The Golden Egg, but I am a great fan of Harris’s novel. The script was a successful version of a very good book.

I also have a low-budget fondness in my heart for Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs. This was an inexpensive horror comedy with no element of the occult, despite the rather misleading print campaign. The story’s about a young black boy called Fool who attempts action when there’s a landlord threat to raze the ghetto tenement in which his family lives, so that a new corporate tower can rise. Turns out, the greedy landlords are a psychotic couple who live in a sprawling old mansion, keep a lovely little blonde girl named Alice imprisoned in the attic, have a passel of Romero zombie look-alikes in the basement and are determined to replace the whole ghetto with pricey urban renewal projects. The humor’s a little campy, but I was amused. When the police come to investigate neighborhood complaints of a shoot-out that would rival scenes in The Wild Bunch, the couple’s spruced everything up. They’re dressed just like Ward and June Cleaver, elevator Muzak is piped over the home’s sound system, and they’ve reversed the growling, glowering painting of their Doberman pinscher to show a benign, cute-doggie portrait. The high-concept description of this movie’s goal would be: What if John Sayles set out to create a modern, urban fairy tale in the mode of Edward Scissorhands? Wes Craven’s reach exceeds his grasp, but it’s a wonderful attempt and a great comeback.

For out-and-out fantasy, the champ is probably Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. This animated feature has become an instant classic. The music’s not terribly memorable, but everything else is. Robby Benson as the voice of the Beast? Yes, he’s fine. Charges have been leveled that this movie is feminist propaganda. Strong, competent and altogether admirable, the heroine is a good role model for kids and an attractor for adults.

There were a couple of good romantic ghost fantasies, one very popular, the other rather more successful at what it set out to do. The popular one was Dead Again, directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, along with his wife, Emma Thompson. The production values were lavish, the craft superb but the story was a bit wooden and all too predictable. Then there was Truly, Madly, Deeply, directed by Anthony Minghella, which featured a kinder, gentler Allan Rickman. If your only image of Rickman is as the cold, deadly villain in Die Hard, or the scenery-gobbling Sheriff in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, then rent a cassette of Truly, Madly, Deeply. You’ll enjoy it.

There wasn’t a whole lot of big-screen, unabashed science fiction in 1991. The one feature that most people in America saw was Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Director James Cameron followed up his own megahit Terminator almost as successfully as he did Ridley Scott’s Alien. This was the highest grossing film of the year, to the tune of a fifth of a billion bucks. This adventure epic of a boy and his terminator succeeded not just because of the incredible effects (the shapechanging technology, which created the water creature in the Abyss and transmuted Michael Jackson into a black kitty, has lately been selling Goodyear allweather tires), but because the movie actually has heart. The relationships between mother, son and cyborg transcend the superficial. Linda Hamilton actually has the tougher acting role—her character is psychologically valid, but has to go through an incredible amount of change with only a limited opportunity afforded by the script. There’s moxie here, and some brain and an awful lot of action.

The other science fiction film of the year was Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country directed by Nicholas Meyer. Neither the best nor the worst of the series, it was a fine grace note to sound as Gene Roddenberry transported from this plane. The plot was a nice reflection of contemporary realpolitik, the blood-globules-in-zero-gee effect was great, and Christian Slater stole a chunk of the show with a walk-on. No smart cookies are laying bets that there won’t be a Star Trek VII.

Okay, let’s look at a smorgasbord of what else was playing out there. This is certainly not all the cinema of the fantastic released during the year, but it’s a sampling I think covers the spectrum.

Switch was the year’s high-water mark for the rash of essentially dumb gender/ life-and-death/age-switching movies. Although it wasn’t Blake Edwards’s greatest moment, this comedy of a swinish yuppy who is murdered and then transmigrates into the body of a woman (he’s been very, very bad to females) works for one reason—Ellen Barkin. She plays the karma-cursed sexist with a keenly nasty edge.

Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life was an earnest and slightly plodding treatment of fate in that twilight zone between Heaven and Hell. The characters’ backdrops—celestial cities composited from real and imaginary earthly buildings—were masterfully realized. Their lines needed a bit more wit, more bite.

The surprise Christmas hit was The Addams Family (it has made about $100 million). The characters looked great, especially Anjelica Huston as Morticia. Some of the best jokes came from the original Addams cartoons. They were freighted, however, with the more banal feel of the TV series (that juxtaposition has led to a lawsuit filed by the creator of the TV show against the makers of the feature). This is a good kids movie for adults.

Perhaps the most obscure science fiction adventure of the year was Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. Starring Mickey Rourke and Don Johnson, this peculiar melodrama takes place a mere handful of years in the future. A manic (as ever) Rourke and a disheveled Johnson (actually quite good) become embroiled in corporate chicanery and have to deal with a squad of lethal goons who dress in black Kevlar dusters. No one seems to understand the value of head-shots in situations like this, nor that Kevlar only stops slugs—not the force behind them. The movie contains one enormous inside joke probably intelligible only to L.A. residents: in the future, Burbank Airport will become one of the great high-tech, big-money, international crossroads. . . .

The Rocketeer, a big-budget Disney production of Dave Stevens’s comic was a very large disappointment. The heroine was watered down, the hero seemed to have had a lobotomy and only the villains handled themselves like champs. The zeppelin scenes notwithstanding, what this latter-day pulp adventure really needed was a healthy transfusion of intelligence.

And speaking of intelligence . . . Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey—which really should have stuck with the original title, Bill and Ted Go to Hell (changed when the marketing folks nervously glanced at the Bible Belt)—was still amusing, but not as laugh-provoking as the first film in the series. Death had all the good lines.

Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King should be seen, even though Robin Williams inexplicably didn’t bring his title character to life as well as one would expect. This contemporary retelling and resetting of the English legend in New York City mostly works just fine until the ending wimps out.

Earnest: Scared Stupid? Earnest is, urn, an acquired taste. This episode in his saga is about a malevolent troll set free in the rural South. It’s funnier than you might think—at least it’s funnier than the Ma and Pa Kettle movies. Then there was Suburban Commando, a lightweight adventure for kids of all ages and skewed IQs. As the star of this chase-adventure of alien bounty hunters stalking each other here on Earth, Hulk Hogan generates some real charm and a few funny lines and bits of business (though the cut-apult sequence is probably the topper).

Child’s Play 3 was maybe a little better than Child’s Play 2, but that’s arguing extremely fine points of tedium. Rent the cassette of the first one—it’s got more than a few good bits. But don’t even buy a Chuckie doll with the suction cup limbs to stick on the inside of your car window. Garfield owners will laugh at you. Highlander II: The Quickening? Russell Mulcahy, who directed Highlander, somehow also directed this wretched follow-up. Watch it, if you must, for the twenty minutes or so of Sean Connery (the production company was doubtless holding his loved ones hostage). Try not to laugh at the bargain sub-basement Bladerunner sets lest you wake the other patrons.

The British time-travel horror thriller Warlock, directed by Steve Miner, was finally released in the U.S. Richard E. Grant and Julian Sands did well as the witch hunter and witch antagonists. An adequate horror movie, if not a good one. In Body Parts, writer-director Eric Red grappled with that old chestnut, Does a person’s innate soul dwell in parts of the anatomy aside from the brain? Naturally the answer is “yes” or this wouldn’t be a horror movie. Eric Red’s scripts (The Hitcher, Near Dark) are better produced when others direct than when he directs his own work (Cohen and Tate). This one had promise but ultimately foundered in silliness.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II’s legacy of charm from its spectacularly successful predecessor wore a little thin this time around. The good will dissipated, partly because the quirkily endearing human love interest from the first film is gone. Perhaps another reason is that the filmmakers paid more attention to the “morality” and the nature of the role models in this sequel.

There’s not much to say about The Neverending Story II. It’s the same director, the same character, the same story. ... I think maybe that says it all right there. Everything’s the same. Ate de Jong’s Drop Dead Fred is an incredibly irritating comedic fantasy. Phoebe Cates plays a young woman, jilted, who is aided by her childhood invisible friend now come back in adult form. Imagine Michael Keaton’s character from Beetlejuice with absolutely no redeeming charm at all. None. Not funny, McGee.

Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare allegedly terminates the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Don’t rest easy. This made a respectable amount of money. True, it did explain more of Freddy Krueger’s history and had an amusing series of cameos by actors from the other films in the series. But, like its fellow sequels, it never equalled what Wes Craven’s original accomplished. The final twenty minutes of Freddy’s Dead is a 3-D sequence. When I saw this at a dollar cinema, the box office was out of polarized glasses. Nobody in the audience seemed to care.

And then there’s Hook—Steven Spielberg’s project that deals with a grown-up Peter Pan returning to Never-Never Land to help the Lost Boys and do battle with Captain Hook. This must have seemed like a great idea in development meetings. Robin Williams as Peter? Dustin Hoffman as Hook? Cool. And Bob Hoskins as Smee is great. This one tries very hard to be a children’s classic for all ages. But it’s just too self-conscious. The effect of absolute belief in the material and the effect of craft pushed to the limit are, alas, not guarantors of the same result.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was another movie that wanted to be a classic. Oh, well. Kevin Costner’s Robin never quite generates the passion this legend needs. Not that he needed to be an Errol Flynn, but Costner’s character ended up a little too much a passive, sensitive male for the 1990s. The movie does take a genuine chance, though, when an unannounced Sean Connery turns up as King Richard in the last five minutes. The crowd murmurs. The viewing audience is amazed. And Kevin Costner might as well be invisible.

Gregory Hines starred in Eve of Destruction, yet another adventure about a robot jumping its programming tracks and causing consternation. Renee Souten-dijk played Eve, the robot. Hines and Dutch actress Soutendijk both have immensely attractive presence. What this movie doesn’t have is a good story.

Here are two gorgeously photographed and fairly interesting historical sagas with fantasy elements. Shadow of the Raven, directed by Hrafn Gunlaugsson, is a violent eleventh-century Icelandic saga about the onset of Christianity and the twilight of paganism, family blood feuds and political hardball. Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe, from the novel by Brian Moore, takes us to a Canadian winter in 1634, where we see the French dealing with the Native Americans. Both are fascinating glimpses of cultures alien to our own, which make us all glad for modern central heating.

Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita starred Anne Parillaud as a beautiful young career criminal who is programmed by CIA-type folks into becoming an assassin. Less static and stylized than Besson’s earlier efforts, but it’s still not quite in a class with The Manchurian Candidate or A Clockwork Orange. Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers, from Ian McEwan’s novel, worked from a script by Harold Pinter. It’s a drama of menace as young innocents are manipulated by the older and jaded; it looked great but stumbled badly at the end.

The 23rd International Tournee of Animation wasn’t the best in the series of showcase compilations, but such pieces as “Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions” (the usual weirdly surreal suspects) and “The Potato Hunter” (prehistoric man stalking stop-action spuds) made it well worth watching. If you’re a fan of endless beautiful tracking shots, find a copy ofThird Stone from the Sun, Jan C. Nickman’s desperately earnest paean to regaining humanity’s empathy with Mother Earth. Filmed in a pristine, pre-Exxon Valdez Prince William Sound, this fantasy of a young boy on a quest benefits from Linda Hunt’s voiceover as the soul of a magic ship. The sentiment is unimpeachable. But it does go on.

Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique stars Irene Jacob in a dualrole as two young women, one French, one Polish, who were born on the same day, share the same musical talent and who each have the same potentially fatal heart condition. They are linked tenuously, psychically, as doppelgangers. It’s a beautiful, dreamlike production that, for most viewers, will lead to post-screening, semibewildered discussions over espresso.

And what was happening on the small screen this past year? Quite a lot, actually. David Lynch’s and Mark Frost’s “Twin Peaks” just seemed to run out of steam, out of punch and out of fuel altogether, and slid to an unceremonious stop. With a different tone, “Northern Exposure” took up some of the surreal slack. NBC’s “Quantum Leap” stuck around successfully with Scott Bakula hopping from body to body. “Star Trek: The Next Generation” grew ever more successful, even as Paramount appears poised to shut the show down in favor of syndication, and to open the gate for “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.”

Matt Groening’s “The Simpsons” continued to ornament Fox’s schedule, although it got some hilarious competition from two new series. ABC’s “Dinosaurs,” retooled after an abortive trial run as “The Sinclairs,” added some wonderful surrealism to what first appears to be standard sitcom fare, though populated with animated dinosaurs created by Jim Henson’s company. I love the Sinclair family’s running feud with the live leftovers in the fridge. The cable service Nickelodeon presented John Kricfalusi’s “Ren and Stimpy,” the cartoon series about the chihuahua on Prozac and the big silly-looking cat with the blue nose. The show's become a big underground hit on college campuses, and such venues as MTV have picked up on the characters. The big attraction is the manic pace, totally twisted humor and the makers’ tendency to go beyond usual dramatic pacing by pushing scenes right over the top.

Other cable attractions include Lifetime’s “The Hidden Room,” a suspense series aimed particularly at women. It’s much like “The Twilight Zone,” with a budget and production values measurably higher than “Monsters” or “Tales from the Darkside.” A wonderful short feature to catch on cable services is Jeff Barry’s “The Secret of Easter Island.” This live-action piece about a bored inhabitant of Easter Island (human body, large statue-type head) who makes his way to California, is priceless.

On Saturday mornings, try out Hanna-Barbera’s “The Pirates of Dark Water.” This is a reasonably adult science fantasy about adventurers on a distant planet. It’s nicely textured. There’s enough substance here for adult viewers.

NBC’s new series, “Eerie, Indiana,” is tenaciously clinging to life. It’s about a kid’s-eye view of weird things happening in a little midwestern hamlet. It’s good. Then there’s Fox, always eager to field a new high-concept potential success. “Hi Honey, I’m Home” (what if the Nielsens—as in the TV ratings—were a real family who were moved to a real neighborhood by the Sitcom Relocation Program) scored about what you’d guess. “Charlie Hoover” (an adult male nobody has a miniature alter ego who’s trying to help him become a somebody) and “Herman’s Head” (a young guy actually has four personified components of his personality— conscience, intelligence, sensitivity and lust—duking it out for control inside his mind) both have some substance going for them.

Stephen King’s “Golden Years” had a lot going for it as an 8-hour miniseries on CBS. This melodrama about a man growing younger after an industrial snafu maintained some excitement and some interesting characters. Then there was the pilot for a Fox series, “Blood Ties,” a multigenerational vampire saga, which just couldn’t get it together.

The highwater mark of made-for-TV movies of the fantastic was probably HBO’s Cast a Deadly Spell starring Fred Ward. This is a noir-style parallel-worlds period piece in which the wonderful, but all too frequently overlooked Ward plays a detective named Harry P. Lovecraft in a Los Angeles inhabited by magic-users. The low-water mark was probably ABC’s To Save a Child, a movie-pilot aimed at introducing a series once called The Craft. The melodrama about a young woman whose child is kidnapped by southwestern witches was clearly designed to be a Run for Your Life!Fugitive-type chase series. Even Anthony Zerbe, as one of the villains, couldn’t save it. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Wiccans lobbied to keep the show from being seen and picked up. Disastrous writing and production accomplished what political action could not.

Let’s switch gears and look at some music. This is a truly patchwork area for me this time, but beyond that, I won’t apologize. Expect some truly idiosyncratic choices. During the year I didn’t encounter any albums that had the same conceptual impact as previous years’ Transverse City by Warren Zevon or Bloodletting by Concrete Blonde. One nicely downbeat all-around compilation was the score from Wim Wenders’ new feature, Until the End of the World, a film I’ll be talking about next year. The soundtrack album was released in advance of the movie. The performers contributing to the film include Lou Reed, k.d. lang, R.E.M., U2, Peter Gabriel, Neneh Cherry, Talking Heads, Depeche Mode and a lot more. It’s a solid catholic collection.

Warren Zevon’s new album, Mr. Bad Example (Giant) isn’t overtly science-fictional, but it sure feels right. It’s got the dystopian, winding-down-to-the-end-of-the-millennium feel, the sensibility. And “Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead” is certainly dark fantasy.

I want to thank Kristine Kathryn Rusch for turning me on to Mark Germino’s Radartown (Zoo). This is a nicely edgy and political album, rock in the Zevon/ Hyatt/Prine style. The title song is a postindustrial dystopian/depression rocker that could become the anthem of the Rust Belt. John Wesley Harding’s Here Comes the Groom (Sire) is much in the same vein. His “The Devil In Me” would make a terrific under-the-end-credits piece for the pending feature film of Dan Simmons’s Carrion Comfort.

Contemporary folk artist Kristian Hoffman has an album out called, not surprisingly, Kristian Hoffman (52nd Street). This is solid, innovative, melodious material, boasting both social conscience and some witty playfulness. But then what else would you expect from the brother of fantasist Nina Kiriki Hoffman?

If you want to brighten your holiday season, slap a copy of Lumps of Coal (First Warning) in your player. This Christmas compilation ranges across “Little Drummer Boy” (Hoodoo Gurus) and “The First Noel” (Crash Test Dummies) to “Kings of Orient” (The Odds) and “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas” (Henry Rollins). Without lapsing into parody, it’s fresh treatment given to tired material.

Live music? I hope you all went to see Queensryche’s tour. Along with the new stuff, they performed—and extraordinarily effectively—the entirety of the Orwellian Operation Mind Crime.

And finally . . . live theatre. This is especially short, since I’m a long way from Broadway out here in Denver. Actually we do have a major thoroughfare named Broadway, but it’s known much more for thousands of antique stores than for musicals and drama. So what can I say? I didn’t fly to New York or London for Return to the Forbidden Planet. I’m afraid this reviewer’s budget is a bit too limited. But I did catch the touring production of Phantom of the Opera. Kevin Gray played the Phantom very well indeed, as the production inaugurated the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ new, state-of-the-art, Temple Buell Theatre. Every aspect of the play was lavish. I spent the first act admiring the how and the look of Phantom. In the second half, I was a bit surprised to find myself caught up in the human story. So it worked. The best summary line comes from A. J. Moses, local cultural observer, who said of Phantom, “It’s the Terminator 2 of musical theatre.”

I wish I’d said that.