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

Horror and Fantasy in the Media: 1992

Usually I’m griping because most of what happens in the field of SF/fantasy/horror film is exceedingly conservative and predictable. The movies may be highly crafted, but so infrequently do they hit the screen with any sense of real adventure. That’s too often left to the vagaries of mainstream film and the marketing of same. Indeed, in 1992 Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game came nearly unheralded to U.S. screens; but then succeeded wildly because of an astonishing word-of-mouth campaign combined with a collective, consensual oath of silence taken by the mushrooming audience. This mainstream movie was a mixture of political thriller, contemporary romance, and something more. It wasn’t SF. Fantasy? Some in the audience thought so. Horror? Well, without violating the audience’s conspiracy, let me just say that at that particular point in the plot, the audience reaction almost invariably was shockier than any of the screams you ever heard in Psycho. There was probably no film in 1992 that galvanized more viewer self-examination of assumptions and triggered more post-theater discussion. All this from the director of A Company of Wolves, The Miracle, and—as looks more and more likely—the long-awaited Interview with a Vampire.

Anyhow, as I said, that was a high-water mark in the mainstream. I could rhapsodize about Unforgiven and a variety of other nonfantasy films as well, but, in this venue, I won’t. I just wanted to establish a high point or two for comparison.

So what was cool down here in the ghetto—especially allowing a few expansion seams in the walls of the genre? I want to start with Rain Without Thunder. This is a highly political, non-car-chase, no-special-effects, very talky science fiction drama. Talking heads, even? Yep, but I still found it more provocative, more involving, more entertaining, than, say, My Dinner with Andre. Director and writer Gary Bennett is also a lawyer, a background which makes itself readily apparent in his debut film. Rain Without Thunder (the title’s from a Frederick Douglass quote) takes place fifty years from now in what seems at first to be a kinder, gentler America. Prisons, for example, have been euphemized into the appearance of country clubs. But don’t be fooled. A mother and daughter (Betty Buckley and Ali Thomas), imprisoned for fetal murder, are serving as the test case for the Unborn Child Kidnapping Act. It seems the mom and mom-to-be went to Sweden for an abortion (“termination,” in future parlance), in a time set twenty years after abortion has been made illegal in the U.S.A. The film is structured as a futuristic documentary, setting up its story by intercutting interviews with a variety of interested parties. Jeff Daniels plays the women’s defense attorney; Linda Hunt is the head of the Atwood Society; Frederick Forrest plays the warden of a prison for convicted fetus-murderers; Graham Greene is a coldly bizarre cultural commentator; Sheila Pinkham effectively evokes an elderly twentieth-century feminist who, in her middle years, watched everything go down the tubes. What makes this film highly effective science fiction is the quality of its extrapolation. Gary Bennett’s take on the future is not simplistic, however sympathetic it is to women’s rights. Rain Without Thunder is a complex and balanced piece that offers empathy to all sides. The writer/director knows the cutting edge of change is a serrated blade. He fleshes out a future lxxii dangerously close right now to coming into existence. This is remarkable filmmaking that should be seen by everyone interested in issues, drama, or political vision. My screening pass said, “This film leans toward the pro-choice view which may be uncomfortable to some.” Ah, I thought. A can’t-miss-this-one. I was right. What about that lack of car chases? Go flip on Cinemax and watch Freejack ten or twenty times.

The funniest SF-horror flick I saw in the last year was Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen. This French post-apocalypse farce is as dark as the shadows a hundred yards from the deli/apartment house where the film is set, and as sharp as the shining cleaver the Butcher (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) uses to slice and dice a steady stream of new handymen hired by this bastion of civilization in a tired, depressed world. Then comes a new handyman (Dominique Pinon) who is brighter and more resourceful than his unlucky predecessors. He even falls in love with the Butcher’s cellist daughter (Marie-Laure Dougnac) and joins her on duets playing the saw. Many of you will have previously seen Pinon playing a killer in Diva. Working from a script credited to the directors plus Gilles Adrien, the filmmakers craft a deliciously gross comedic extravaganza in which weird intelligence is always in ample evidence. If this movie were a storyboard, the pictures would have to be by the Far Side’s Gary Larson. Or maybe John Callahan. There are endless wonderful touches, but for me the high point is the physical comedy of the gradually flooding bathroom scene. This is WC humor at its very best, and I’m not talking the Benny Hill variety.

Not quite as funny (or lucid, or, urn, tasteful) but even more manic, is Phallus in Wonderland, a one-hour music video SF/heavy metal parody by GWAR. GWAR is a bunch of Richmond rockers and art students who decided to put on the whole metal industry with outrageous costumes, over-the-edge lyrics, and consummately tasteless—but hilarious—stage shows. GWAR uses all the best conventions of pulp fiction, SF, and Lovecraftian horror to, er, mount their productions. The video incorporates much of the music from GWAR’s third album, America Must Be Destroyed. The plot deals with the final conflict between the alien GWARriors and the (presumably fundamentalist, tight-assed, ultraconservative) Morality Squad. There is a lengthy trial scene that’s not a whole lot like, say, the one in A Few Good Men. GWAR singer Oderus Urungus has his penis chain-sawed free by Morality Squad goon, Corporal Punishment. The penis, also known, among other things, as the Cuttlefish of Cthulhu, has its own cheerful identity and is put on trial for obscenity. Wrapping this all together is a truly astonishing amount of over-the-top violence, cheesy effects, and sublimely grotesque puppet work. I watched this with jaw occasionally agape, and frequent laughter bubbling up like dead rats surfacing in ichor. A lot of this is akin to Clive Barker meets Abbott and Costello. Great stuff. Phallus in Wonderland made it onto the final ballot for the Grammies in the long-form video category, but was beaten out by Annie Lennox’s Diva. Go figure.

While we’re on strange, I want to mention Joe Christ’s new short film, Crippled. This is rebel filmmaking. Not Profoundly Handicapped. Not Really Differently Enabled. But Crippled. It’s about a paralyzed woman who, after being subjected to an inattentive home-care person, goes and hires a really abusive one. I mention this amiably savage little movie because among the cast, Nanzi X. Regalia, Margaret Petrov, and Joe Christ, there is a pseudonymous horror writer who would be instantly recognizable to you all, who’s making an interesting film debut.

Other strange ones. David Lynch’s Twin Peaks prequel, Fire Walk with Me, was a tragically mixed bag. The film depicts the sad last week of Laura Palmer, the character whose violent death catalyzed all the convoluted happenings of the surreal TV series. The best thing about this feature is that Sheryl Lee gets to play her character alive. She’s awfully good. But as for the rest of the movie, I think it would be acutely difficult to follow for anyone not familiar with the TV series. Something like watching A Few Good Men dubbed into Albanian.

Stranger and more rewarding was David Cronenberg’s bizarre tackling of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. Working with producer Jeremy Thomas, Cronenberg adapts Burroughs in a hallucinatory take that isn’t so much a direct translation of the novel—were that even possible—as it is a separate-but-equal plumbing of the kinked-out depths of a writer’s soul. Peter Weller plays the writer. Roy Scheider does a nice turn as a not-nice doctor. For those who relish the grotesque, the picture’s full of bug-powder snorting, weird mugwump creatures, a dream Tangier and the even spacier Interzone, and typewriters that melt down into fleshy, insectile, talking goo. The key word to Naked Lunch is hallucinatory. But as weirded out as the film appears to be, ultimately it seems to make sense. Cronenberg did a good job.

There were two pictures that tried to capture the shadow-haunted social/political dreamscapes of deepest, darkest Europe. Steven Soderbergh followed up sex, lies, and videotape with Kafka. Essentially this is a fictional construction in which Kafka the Man and Kafka the Worldview are merged. In other words, this movie puts Franz Kafka into the literal world he reflected in his writings. Soderbergh gets some mileage out of the same sort of black-and-white to color and back to black-and-white sandwich that worked so well in The Wizard of Oz. Jeremy Irons as Kafka is, as one would expect, wonderful. But the film never quite makes it over the top, suffering, as it does, from a critical lack of obsessive conviction. I don’t think Woody Allen has that problem in Shadows and Fog. This is another foggy, nighttime, Germanic fantasy. Shot in black and white by Carlo Di Palma, it claustrophobically evokes a crumbling European city full of maze-like streets. There’s a killer loose in the fog and vigilantes are out to get him. And director/writer Woody Allen is in the middle. The music by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht effectively evokes the mood Allen wants. Part of the fun in this one is trying to spot the cameos by Madonna, Jodie Foster, and a variety of others. At the same time, Shadows and Fog, whether or not you suspiciously want to see it as a metaphor for Woody Allen’s own peculiar mind, is an effective evocation of strangeness. And no, it’s not as funny as his early movies. . .

Wim Wenders got in on the act with an odd science fiction film called Until the End of the World. It’s a near-future road picture in which William Hurt’s on the run in a landscape crumbling at the seams all the way from Europe to California to the Australian Outback. You do have to swallow the notion that an Indian nuclear-power satellite is about to go critical, and when it does, the EMP will do some pretty weird things. Everything works well until the ending. Blooie. Meltdown time. It’s sort of like no one was quite sure what it really was all supposed to mean.

The much-touted biggies for the year were Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula and Tim Burton’s Batman Returns. Naturally neither one could match the incredible density of rumor and hype surrounding each. Dracula is one of 1992’s most beautiful films; set design, art direction, and cinematography are all breathtaking. I had the opportunity to hear Francis Ford Coppola speaking in person about the making of the movie. He claimed that he had paid much attention both to researching the historical Dracula and to translating the Bram Stoker novel conscientiously. He should be given points on both counts. The only trouble is, the shoehorning of the historical Vlad theme sticks out of the whole movie like, well, a sore fang. It’s not fatally intrusive, but it does jar and distract. The worst problem is casting. Keanu Reeves plays Jonathan Harker as a refugee from Bill-and-Ted Land. That’s terrifying. Winona Ryder, whom I love dearly, can’t seem, as Mina, to generate all that much chemistry with Gary Oldman’s Dracula. And the wonderful Anthony Hopkins goes way over the top with Van Helsing. He eats so much scenery that Allan Rickman in Robin Hood, by comparison, seems the very soul of restraint. At the same time, to be fair, I have to grant a lot of credit to Tom Waits for his portrayal of Renfield. This year the ever-fertile field of vampire film was blessed with two first-rate Ren-fields (the other being Paul Reubens in Buffy the Vampire Slayer). But the distinguishing characteristic of Coppola’s treatment of Stoker was its operatic quality. Overblown and passionate, Dracula shared this approach with 1990’s Godfather III. With both films, audiences little accustomed to grand opera in the Italian manner got solid lessons in operatic structure. Not little tasty tidbits, mind you, but full seven-course, three-act feasts.

As sequels go, Batman Returns wasn’t too bad. At the same time, director Tim Burton didn’t exactly invest the big-budget production with a lot of soul, and Daniel Waters’s script could have used a bit of wit. Villains Danny De Vito (the Penguin) and Christopher Walken (developer Max Schreck) together didn’t generate as much heat as Jack Nicholson’s Joker did in the first film. The brighter note in Returns was Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle and her alter ego, Catwoman. And I did appreciate yet another askew Paul Reubens cameo as the Penguin’s father. All in all, the movie was interesting to watch for Burton’s trademark quirkiness and striking design, but it never was terribly involving. More actual passion seemed to be raised by the animal rights movement’s protest of Batman Returns for alleged cruelty to penguins. Much of the wind was taken out of those sails when Burton pointed out that the penguins wearing weaponry and rocket packs were aquatic seabird robots, and that the live bird-actors had not been kidnapped from Antarctica, but rather had been recruited from zoos just down the Pacific coast. . .

Then there was a big sequel that had an intensely difficult time finding its own identity. It seemed like Alien³ had taken forever to put together. Zillions of dollars in development money had been spent on director after director, script after script, before a millimeter of film was shot. Scripts came from both William Gibson and Eric Red, among others, and all were discarded. There was the famous premise of a handmade wooden planet inhabited by monks. . . And then it evolved to the cheerless world of Fiorine, a prison planet inhabited by a colony of convicts-turned-fundamentalists. British rock video director David Fincher helmed, using a composite script from Larry Ferguson, Walter Hill, and David Giler. Initial critical and audience response was not terrific. People hated the initial disposing of all survivors of the previous films, save Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley. People didn’t like seeing good actors like Charles Dance getting lunched within ten or fifteen seconds of generating some audience interest and sympathy. Viewers especially seemed incensed by Ripley’s Terminator 2-ish departure from the whole depressing Alien saga. At least in T2, the viewer was allowed to feel a lump in the throat. . . . But as I said above, I think the problem was identity. Alien was the consummate tekkie nightmare of Gothic sexual violence. Aliens was a best-of-breed, rock ’em, sock ’em adventure. Both directors, Ridley Scott and James Cameron, had a coherent and compelling vision of what they were trying for. I’m not so sure David Fincher did. Alien^? was not, I really feel, the disaster so many claimed. But I can understand the disappointment of so many. Whatever territory Fincher and his screenwriters tried to carve out, it simply did not sufficiently engage the heart or the brain. It was indeed good to see Lance Henriksen get some on-screen time; but that didn’t make up for the plot’s clumsiness, Ripley’s thankless role, or the whole sour feel of the production. And it was probably a really bad idea to allow the aliens so much on-camera time in full view, in good light. But although Alien⁴ seems a doubtful project, there are ways. . . What if Ripley’s daughter didn’t really die, and grows to adulthood wondering whatever truly happened to her mom, and then goes against the wishes of the PR guys at the Company and picks up a gun and a credit chip and goes looking? And it turns out that Jonesy the cat has begat about ten generations of kittens, and one goes along with the woman who looks so uncannily like her own mother? Never mind.

For less pretentious big-screen science fiction, Geoff Murphy’s Freejack looked just the ticket. And indeed, it has its moments. Based very loosely on Robert Sheckley’s Immortality, Inc., this is lite adventure SF of the predictable variety. Emilio Estevez is a contemporary race driver who’s yanked away from the very moment of his death in a spectacular crash and transported to the year 2009. Kidnapping healthy bodies from the past seems to be the SOP for important honchos in the future—since there’s a means by which they can have their mentalities implanted in the new bodies. Estevez finds himself on the run from a very rich industrialist (Anthony Hopkins). The guy actually doing the pursuing is Mick Jagger, looking very much as if he’s genuinely getting a kick out of the role. It’s all fun, but it’s still pretty silly stuff.

For more silly stuff, I trust you saw Buffy the Vampire Slayer, directed by Fran Kuzui from Joss Whedon’s script. This was a reasonable B-movie approach to the burning question: What if the latest in an unbroken line of vampire slayers down through the ages should turn out to be a perky val-girl, a California blonde? Kristy Swanson certainly looked the part as Buffy. Rutger Hauer, however, didn’t get nearly enough screen time as the chief bloodsucking antagonist. Paul Reubens continued his comeback with a wonderful turn as a Renfield, and performed one of the all-time great death scenes. Unfortunately “silly” never quite evolved into either chilling or consistently funny. Lots of wasted opportunities here.

And for something even sillier . . . How about Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren in Universal Soldier? Roland Emerich’s slam-bam action B-movie concerned American soldiers killed in Vietnam, then resurrected as a bionic, superhuman, counter-terrorist force. But then programming goes screwy and a badass cyborg zombie (Lundgren) has to pursue-with-intent-to-kill a good cyborg zombie (Van Damme). It’s comic-book violence. Fun, but requires you to shift your higher functions into neutral.

Ditto, but without the violence, can be said for Encino Man. Les Mayfield’s comedy about a prehistoric dude (Brendan Fraser) unearthed in Southern California by a couple of high school guys (Sean Astin and Pauly Shore) has its moments when the jokes work, but still makes you nostalgic for Waynes World.

Speaking of which . . . Penelope Spheeris struck a three-bagger with her comedy vehicle for the Saturday Night Live team of Wayne and Garth (Mike Myers and Dana Carvey). The saga of these hapless suburban metal fans and underground TV stars is funny and even occasionally affecting. And, as everyone now knows, the “Bohemian Rhapsody” sequence brought immense new life to Queen’s album sales, though, sadly, not to Freddy Mercury.

While I’m talking about hits, Aladdin should definitely be mentioned. Disney released this one for Christmas. It’s top-quality, classic, Disney animation. It’s also one of the highest-grossing, fastest-breaking Disney animated features ever. Robin Williams gets a lot of the credit with a fantastic off-the-wall performance as the voice of the Genie. The Arab-American antidefamation organizations have protested the film for stereotyping Arabs, but they appear to be the only folks not buying tickets.

Robin Williams didn’t do nearly as well, either in his performance itself, or by carrying the day, in Barry Levinson’s Toys. This well-intentioned comedy about a former military officer taking over a toy factory, then determining to swing production from happy playthings to war toys, before being thwarted by Williams and his friends, just sagged to the ground and flopped around for a while. Maybe it was the lack of a backbone. Toys tried very hard, but it just couldn’t match laughs with all its good intentions.

A third Christmas holiday movie was The Muppets’ Christmas Carol. Directed by Jim Henson’s son and heir, Brian, this was a sincere and pretty accurate translation of the Dickens classic. Playing off against the likes of Kermit and Miss Piggy, Michael Caine did a fine job as Scrooge. This was successful enough; it’ll probably become a perennial Christmas classic on video.

So how would you like to see a combination of splatter and political consciousness? Talk about baking a cake and then eating it with a big knife . . . Polish director Richard Bugajski’s Clear Cut tackles that challenge, but not particularly well. Written by Rob Forsyth from M. T. Kelly’s novel A Dream Like Mine, the movie shows lots of great Canadian wilderness scenery. Ron Lea plays a liberal lawyer representing the interests of American Indians trying to keep a logging company from clear-cutting their pristine home. The good guys lose in court, and Lea finds himself trapped in the mysterious machinations of an enigmatic trickster-figure (Graham Greene). Greene’s character kidnaps the timber boss and takes him out into the boonies in company with the lawyer. The attorney has expressed a desire to see the white logger pay; Greene carries out the wish. Thus we get to see a graphic depiction of the timberman’s lower leg being flayed alive. The movie’s earnest, the scenery’s gorgeous, but the metaphysical depth is shallow and confused. Too bad.

You could see even more spiritual melodrama merged with an American Indian backdrop in Michael Apted’s Thunderheart. The cast is pretty fine in this tale of a young FBI agent (Val Kilmer) dispatched to a Sioux reservation to investigate a murder. Kilmer doesn’t even look like Kilmer for the first twenty minutes or so. He plays a repressed young quarter-Sioux man who is more than a little wary about getting in touch with the inner ancestor. The ubiquitous Graham Greene is present as a tribal cop, along with Sam Shepard as Kilmer’s FBI partner. Sheila Tousey does very, very well as a young teacher who adds tension to Kilmer’s life, but without the cliche of developing a relationship. The film’s heart is in the right place, though the New Age/spiritual touches aren’t always convincing. For frequent-flier travelers, the picture starts a touch confusingly when Kilmer is sent from Washington, D.C., to Denver, there presumably to catch a commuter plane to Rapid City. Thanks to the oblivious convenience of stock footage, he’s routed through LAX. Or maybe that’s just another Magic Realist touch.

Last year the so-called director’s cut of Blade Runner was selectively released. This year the version without Harrison Ford’s voice-over narration and the tacked-on happy ending got much wider distribution. Once again viewers could discover that Ridley Scott’s loose translation of Philip K. Dick was sadly underappreciated a decade ago. If you hadn’t seen it before, I hope you caught this re-release on the backswing. If you didn’t, catch this version on videotape and wish you had access to a huge wraparound screen and multitrack Dolby.

For a very-far-back-in-the-pack Blade Runner-inspired wannabe, you could try Split Second, directed by Tony Maylam from a Gary Scott Thompson script. This is a British low-budget production that looks swell and tries very hard to work. In those regards, it is reminiscent of last year’s Hardware: handsome and dumb. Split Second is set in the early twenty-first century in a grungy London being drowned slowly by global warming. There’s a serial killer wired into astrological patterns. Turns out the killer also is capable of incorporating the DNA patterns of its victims. The critter’s nemesis is a rebel cop played by a sadly chunky Rutger Hauer. Turns out as well that the killer and Hauer are somehow on a psychic wavelength. Kim Cattrall plays Hauer’s girlfriend; Neil Duncan does an amusing turn as Hauer’s latest partner (much as with Dirty Harry, being this sort of a cop’s partner is not a great career move); and Michael J. Pollard spritzes up the flooded London sewers as a rat catcher. The creature is eventually unveiled as something of an Alien with cool shades (Gargoyles, no doubt). That’s about it for revelations. This could have been a hell of a picture if only it eventually made sense.

There were two Clive Barker-associated films this past year. One, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, was so-so. The other, Candyman, was close to an unqualified triumph. The problem with Hell on Earth was that it veered completely off the track of the fascinating twisted curve established in its two predecessors. Gone is the gradual seduction and corruption of the Kirsty character (Ashley Laurence). Hell on Earth does fine with manic weirdness for its first half, but then degenerates into pretty standard monster schlock. In other words, it starts with a sweetly corrupt dish; then turns to hash smothered in tomato sauce. It does, I must mention, have one of the best, most accurate visions of a rock club ever committed to film; but perhaps that’s only praising with faint damns. I’m afraid director Tony Hickox and screenwriter Peter Atkins got off on a kick of adding lots more Cenobites, but in the process, lost track of the primal Barker vision.

Bernard Rose’s Candyman is much more interesting. One suspects Clive Barker had greater contact with this film, since he was the executive producer and Rose’s script was based on Barker’s own story, “The Forbidden.” Music video-director Rose previously distinguished himself with the horrific childhood fantasy, Pa-perhouse (1988). The film moves Barker’s decaying British urban blightscape to an even grungier Chicago and the Cabrini-Green wasteland. The landscape’s scary already; it gets worse when an urban folklorist (Virginia Madsen) gets on the trail of an urban myth come to life. The Candyman (Tony Todd) does multiple duty, lurking in darkness and springing out through mirrors. He’s the archetypal inner-city image of deep-voiced, smiling death, drugs in one hand, a razor in the other, oblivion always the final result. The tension is great in this movie; the nastiness, delicious. If it has a fault, it’s in the increased degree of plottiness the script adaptation adds to the original story. The addition rings a bit false. And the Philip Glass score is magnificent.

The year saw a trio of Stephen King pictures, more or less. He had nothing formally to do with Pet Sematary II, Mary Lambert’s follow-up to the mild hit scored by her first adaptation of King’s “Monkey’s Paw” homage. The filmmakers whack away at King’s vital theme—the parental fear of losing children—and do a creditable, if not entirely on-target, recap of the original Pet Sematary. Anthony Edwards and Edward Furlong do a decent job as father and son relocating in Maine (though shot in Georgia). It’s all watchable, has its moments, but doesn’t quite hit one out of the park.

King had even less to do with The Lawnmower Man, going so far as to litigate successfully to have his name removed from advertising for the film. One short scene depicting a guy getting mowed to death is about all that remains from King’s original short story. What the story mutated into has to do with what the producers think is virtual reality research. The released feature is damned close to incoherent. Rumor has it that the video release has another 20 minutes or so, and actually makes sense. I’d like to believe that.

Stephen King himself wrote the script for Mick Garris’s Sleepwalkers. This was another good B-movie entertainment with little pretention. I wanted to like it much more than I actually did, because of a few plot and character relationship problems. The story’s about an ancient family of murderous shape-shifters living among us since time immemorial. It seems that only cats are able to sense these creatures’ hidden identity. The cast is pretty good. Alice Krige (remember her in Ghost Story?) plays the mama shape-shifting demon. Madchen Amick plays the high school girl who finds herself attracted to the hunky young shape-shifting son. The cast’s real standout is Clovis, a big gray-striped tom, who gets the lion’s share of cat-lines. The picture also boasts cameo appearances by such as King and Clive Barker, and some great morphing, not only by the shape-shifters, but by automobiles as well. Cool stuff. And it’s nice to see the kitties on the side of all that’s good and virtuous.

Let’s look at a few loonies. Larry Drake gets to play one in the low-budgeted Dr. Giggles. A directing debut by Manny Coto, the movie shows some nice Portland area scenery. And star Drake gets to be a psychopathic doctor fixing family grudges against the community by icing a bunch of irritating teens in all the time-honored atrocious ways. Much of this is supposed to be funny; it sometimes reaches amusing. The movie won’t put you to sleep, but neither will it galvanize much paranoia about your next doctor’s appointment.

John Lithgow gets to go berserk—in more ways than one—in Brian De Palma’s Raising Cain. As with so much of De Palma’s work, the plot can easily be deconstructed to sheer silliness. But the pace of De Palma’s own script and direction keeps this one going. In its unreeling of revelation after plot revelation about multiple-personality disorder, the filmmaker stuffs this one with endless visual nods to Alfred Hitchcock. But then, that’s nothing new with De Palma. I can’t say this is a magnificent film, but it is a hell of a lot of fun.

I think Stay Tuned was supposed to be extremely funny. I’m not so sure about the percentage of successful guffaws, but the picture is still amusing in an incredibly lightweight way. Peter Hyams directed from a script by Tom S. Parker and Jim Jennewein. John Ritter and Pam Dawber play a couple of parents who run afoul of a demonic plan to steal souls through a giant home theater setup lusted after by unwary consumers. Essentially what happens is that prospective victims get sucked through the set and into a sequence of Satanic virtual reality shows. Some of the set-pieces bite the big one; others are hilarious. But Dawber and Ritter are stereotypically suited for this sort of role.

Death Becomes Her was supposed to be the big-budget supernatural comedy, star-loaded and helmed by Robert Zemeckis. It was pretty good, but didn’t come across with all it promised. Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn play lifelong competitors coming to grips with worldly success, aging, and physical decrepitude. A major issue between them is the man Streep steals early on from Hawn (Bruce Willis). Willis does wonderfully well—he plays his role as a weak-willed plastic-surgeon-turned-Beverly-Hills-mortician in a way that never reminds you of, say, the hero of Die Hard. The fantasy element enters in the form of Isabella Rosselini, a mysterious woman offering the gift of both rejuvenation and physical immortality. The film’s satiric core is this dark grappling with the American desire for constant youth and physical attractiveness. All that’s fine so far as it goes. The script by Martin Donovan and David Koepp and the lavishly gross special effects work on the surface. But the movie just isn’t funny enough. You keep watching situations and listening to scenes that ought to make you laugh. But they don’t. Or at least, not enough. Somewhere along the way, the nervous tissue of this film has broken down. The funny bone and the head bone are no longer connected, alas.

But then things can always be worse. Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, for example. Rick Moranis and his wild and wacky family are back. This time a techno-booboo causes their infant son to grow to War of the Colossal Man-size in Las Vegas. I wanted to laugh. Really I wanted to.

For real laughter, let me sneak two associational pictures into the middle of this pop culture catalog. Jon Avnet’s Fried Green Tomatoes is pretty wonderful. Fannie Flagg and Carol Sobieski’s script gives Kathy Bates, Jessica Tandy, Mary Stuart Masterson, and Mary-Louise Parker an opportunity to shine in this low-budget comedic drama with some tense, some tear-jerking, some very funny moments. There are touches of Southern Gothic, too. I mean, Alive isn’t the only recent film to deal with cannibalism. . . . The other funny—however bitter the laughter— picture is Robert Altman’s The Player. Credit goes both to Altman and his writer, Michael Tolkin, adapting his own novel. This is a merciless insider’s view of the Hollywood process. The terrifying thing is that it’s not satiric exaggeration. Every shot taken, every point scored, is, if anything, an understatement of the madness that is Hollywood and the movie biz. The Player should be required viewing for any of you who wish to become a star on The Coast.

Now, continuing with the theme of human monsters and acute horror (what a segue), I enjoyed more than one of the year’s psychodramas. Things started off with a bang—and a slash, and a ka-clunk!—with Curtis Hanson’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, a low-budget melodrama about a mad nanny. Rebecca De Mornay is effective as a woman who believes she’s been hideously wronged and is determined to take out her ill feelings on a yuppie family. It’s not a terrifically suspenseful plot, but I did admire the makers for letting the villain die at the end and not letting her lurch back through four or five false climaxes jason-style.

Jonathan Kaplan’s Unlawful Entry is half of a really neat movie. The paranoid plot conceit is great: What better psycho to menace you and your family than a crazy cop (Ray Liotta) with “Preserve and Protect” on his car and a large-caliber pistol in his belt? Kurt Russell and Madeleine Stowe are a nice young couple who find themselves enmeshed in a decreasing spiral of violence with Liotta after their house is broken into. The first half plays quite well as the whole setup is put in place; then the second half loses its equilibrium and topples over into simplistic melodrama.

But my favorite—and for my money, the most dangerous—crazed killer epic of the year was Basic Instinct. Remember all the publicity, both pro and con? The bondage and the ice pick? The rough sex? The question of what the film had to say about lesbians and bisexuals? The interrogation-room scene? Ah, sweet nostalgia. Now we’ve got Bad Lieutenant to deal with. But back to Basic Instinct. You can argue whether Joe Eszterhas got paid too much for the script ($3 million). You can debate whether Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven ran the plot too long, and needlessly (and hopelessly) convoluted it. But none of that stops the movie from being hot, dynamic, and seductive. Michael Douglas plays something of a sleaze as the homicide detective. There are only two sympathetic characters in the primary cast. One is George Dzunda as Douglas’s aging urban cowboy partner. The other is Sharon Stone, the presumed killer. But wait, you say, how can she be sympathetic, being the twisted, maddened, stone-cold ice-pick killer she presumably is? Well, consider this: In a world portrayed as inhabited by guys who are dick-directed dufusses, Stone is an intelligent, self-possessed woman with a sense of humor and in control of her life. She understands, controls, and enjoys her own sexuality. She’s a strong and independent character. So, yes, she does have that one eensey-weensy little foible about sharp objects, but hey, no one’s perfect, right? In any case, I think the case can be made for Stone’s character being the one good role model in the movie. So there.

There were a couple of really good and solid low-budget noir flicks. The first is Carl Franklin’s One False Move. Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson’s script has a small-town Arkansas sheriff (Bill Paxton) joined by a couple of LAPD cops (Jim Metzler and Earl Billings) after a pair of stone killers (Thornton and Michael Beach) and Thornton’s girlfriend (Cynda Williams) have slaughtered a passel of Los Angelenos in a drug rip and are headed back south-by-east. The film’s wonderfully rich and tight. The violent episodes are leavened with tenderness and humor in other scenes. Best of all, the script writers rarely do anything we expect them to.

The movie is full of surprises as the layers of the characters’ personalities start to peel back. Everyone has secrets, it seems. In its dealing with changing attitudes about race and other issues, One False Move is not only a crackling, taut suspense film, it’s an adroitly and carefully textured portrait of the New South. It’s memorable.

Equally memorable is Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. You never actually find out in the film what the title means. But you get some ideas. This is another of those low-budget shockers that drove people out of screenings at film festivals. Just not what some people were expecting, I guess. Freshman director Tarantino keeps his focus tight and taut. After half a dozen men are recruited by a money guy to pull off a jewelry store heist, the robbery goes bad and the surviving crooks realize that one of their number is a traitor, a police informant. Much of the movie hinges on unstinting efforts to find out just who the mole is. There is a scene involving torture, mutilation, and a radio playing Stealers Wheel that will ensure you never hear “Stuck in the Middle with You” without thinking of this scene in Reservoir Dogs. It’s a classic case of imprinting. A large part of why the movie was made at all was due to Harvey Keitel’s clout. Keitel plays one of the gangsters, and is party to a surprising love story integral to the film’s plot and its outcome. Maybe it’s not as startling as The Crying Game, but it’s still a beautifully unexpected (but believable) quirk. Spare and incredibly noir, Reservoir Dogs suggests much good to come in Quentin Tarantino’s future.

Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female is something of a brisker, more crowdpleasing version of what you might expect Roman Polanski to direct in this vein. Don Ross’s screenplay is drawn from John Lutz’s novel SWF Seeks Same. Bridget Fonda plays a young Manhattan career woman who splits from her boyfriend (Steven Weber) and needs a roommate. She interviews a whole series of young women and finally accepts Jennifer Jason Leigh. Leigh has been a remarkable young actor, whether in The Hitcher, Miami Blues, or any number of others. Here she plays a subtly disturbed, apparently vulnerable young woman who obsesses on her more glamorous, more accepted friend. Fonda finally notices that Leigh is looking more and more like her—hair style, clothing, attraction to the old boyfriend, everything. The film does dp a remarkable job of turning Leigh into a ringer for Fonda, other than the latter’s being about half a head taller than the former. This is a good, intelligent thriller, though the climax has some of the all too frequent usual problems in melodramas of this sort: Is the killer dead? I mean, is she really? Or is she only faking—urrrkkkgggh!

The Vast Wasteland Revisited: The SciFi Channel debuted at long last after nearly being stifled in its cradle. Being acquired by the USA Network gave the cable service the marketing clout it needed. Most of the programming is reruns of all your old favorites, or perhaps not-so-favorites. The service’s original SF dramas have been a disaster. But then the Harlan Ellison commentaries on the Buzz show have been wonderful. So all the returns aren’t in. The SciFi Channel just might make it.

“Quantum Leap” just keeps leaping along. “Beauty and the Beast” died and stayed dead. So did “Twin Peaks,” mercifully. “The Simpsons” are still the Simpsons, and not nearly so dysfunctional as the Bundys. Creator John Kricfalusi apparently got kicked off his own show, “Ren and Stimpy.” Not a good move on management’s part. “Northern Exposure” continued on, just fine (did you see the Thanksgiving episode in which we got to view a beautifully elaborate and highly unusual American Indian commemoration of the white man’s holiday?), and has been joined by another quirky series, “Picket Fences” (and the “Twin Peaks” episode in which their favorite Little Person, Michael Anderson, guest-starred with the liberated elephant?).

“Star Trek: The Next Generation” placidly motored along, and most of the country continued to be saturated with reruns of the original “Star Trek.” Then came the end of the year, the beginning of the next, and suddenly the national TV screen was ablaze with all sorts of new SF shows. “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” was to show us the grittier side of the Roddenberry universe. Less Star Fleet spit and polish. The cast is very solid, but the stories are pretty much the same. Nothing radical here. Since all three ST series are aired in most viewing areas, it’s sort of like picking six-packs off the soft-drink grocery shelf: Star Trek Classic, Star Trek Lite, and Star Trek Crystal.

“Space Rangers” appeared. And disappeared. It couldn’t decide whether it should be more serious, or more tongue-in-cheek. At least superficially like “Battlestar Galactica” in tone and characters, the series’ Linda Hunt thanklessly got to play the Lome Green role. As for “Time Trax,” well, why not have a weekly series of a cop from two hundred years in the future back here in the present trying to track down the nastiest crooks from his own epoch? It’s all lightweight, but occasionally has some nice touches: the cop taking in a prisoner and being jeered in the America of 2193. The mob screams, “Blanco, bianco/” It’s an America in which white folks are the distinct minority. And then came the long-awaited “Babylon 5,” J. Michael Straczynski’s creation for Warner Bros.’ new syndicated network. This is intended to be direct competition for “Star Trek.” The pilot looks absolutely wonderful. The effects are state of the art, though produced with high economy. The acting, however, comes out of a redwood forest.

As ever, the music scene varied enormously—and pleasingly—in terms of fantastic content. I don’t think any human being could keep up with the amount of death metal retropunk thrash grunge and still remain sufficiently lucid to get all the references to death, mutilation, blood-sucking, and chain-sawed passion down on paper. I won’t even try, but will, instead, suggest the span of weirdness in this past year’s tunes.

One way to gauge the spectrum is simply to mention the two best country songs about ghosts. Billy Ray Cyrus didn’t sing either of them. The narrator of Alan Jackson’s “Midnight in Montgomery” (Don’t Rock the Jukebox, Arista) runs into a familiar gent in a big hat (no, it’s not Garth Brooks) at, no kidding, midnight in Alabama’s capital city. It’ll be interesting to see if Hank Williams, Jr., covers it. The other, niftier, ghost tune is an upbeat spectral ballad by Concrete Blonde, “Ghost of a Texas Ladies’ Man” (Walking in London, I.R.S.). It’s a mutant rocker that has a country flavor, but isn’t really.

In terms of associational stuff, there was a variety of soundtrack albums of interest. Cool World (Warner Bros.) included David Bowie, Ministry, Electronic, The Cult, and others. Sadly, Ralph Bakshi’s movie was much better for listening than for watching. Until the End of the World (Warner Bros.) was a good deal sharper with the likes of Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. But, of course, for real sensation (I mean, with a parental-advisory label for explicit lyrics) there was GWAR’s America Must Be Destroyed (Metal Blade). This was the album that supplied the music for Phallus in Wonderland. One lyric in The Morality Squad” says, “You’re even grosser than 2 Live Crew.” Indeed. There s something in these songs to offend just about everyone. But the album’s also very sharp and funny. Lighten up, morality squad!

My favorite associational album of the year was The Turtles—Featuring Flo & Eddie—Captured Live (Rhino). This is a mixture of some of the instant-recognition tunes the Turtles play at their nostalgia gigs (“Happy Together,” “She’d Rather Be with Me”) along with less familiar material. The associational part applies because the band includes horror collector Howard Kaylan (he’s one of the lead dudes— Eddie—along with Mark Volman—Flo) and drummer Joe Stefko, the publisher of specialty press Charnel House. This album is something eager fans can get autographed at horror conventions. Forget about massive King and Straub tomes—tapes and CDs are far more portable! And this one’s first-line fun.

My rock journalist buddy Mark Barsotti offered a few suggestions. In his album Burning Questions (Capitol), vintage British rocker Graham Parker shows he’s still got the touch. “Release Me” is about voodoo. There are sharper edges on “Short Memories” (war) and “Here It Comes Again” (the war on drugs). Jesus Jones’s Perverse (E.M.I.) features “Zeroes and Ones,” a nice tekkie rocker about cybernetics. Alice in Chains’s entire album Dirt (Columbia) is more than adequately dim and gloomy, perfect background for reading serial killer novels. Consolidated’s Play More Music (Network) is listenable, rappoid, high-density message music. “Info-modities,” for instance, is a kind of 1984-ish virtual reality nightmare. Lotsa words, but good ones. As a bonus on this album, you get “You Suck” by the Yeastie Girls, an ode to cunnilingus and a very funny, sharp, subversive anthem. Listen to this and you’ll wonder why you ever thought Dolly Parton’s “Romeo” was rad. . . .

Writer Gary Jonas came up with some suggestions I largely agree with. Warrant’s “April 2031” (Dog Eat Dog, Columbia) is one of those earnestly green cautionary songs. Saigon Kick’s “Peppermint Tribe” (The Lizard, Atlantic) is chock-full of sweet, tangy violence. “When Darkness Calls,” from Lynch Mob’s eponymous album (Elektra), is about just what the title suggests. Testament’s “Return to Serenity” (The Ritual, Atlantic) seems to be about redemption and death, but heavy on the death. Green Jello Suxx is a single. On it, Green Jello does the Three Little Pigs updated, along with “Obey the Cowgod.” Very funny stuff.

Saigon Kick’s “Chanel” is a romantic antiromance piece about a lover’s disillusionment and fantasies of burying his former beloved. Faster Pussycat’s “Body Thief’ (Whipped, Elektra) takes an even more frenzied gander at psychokillers, suggesting that even Ed Gein can sell out.

On Ugly Kid Joe’s America’s Least Wanted (Stardog/Mercury), check out such cuts as “Goddamn Devil,” “Come Tomorrow,” and “Madman,” a ’92 remix of the group’s old mass-murder ditty. Also note Jeff Healy’s “Evil and Here to Stay” (Feel This, Arista) and “Christmas with the Devil” on Spinal Tap’s Break Like the Wind (MCA). Then there’s Kiss’s “Unholy” on Revenge (Mercury). Note Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” (Ten, Epic). It’s horror indeed, about an abused kid; the video’s a killer.

Okay. My personal favorite rock ’n’ roll death song was a pointed, if fairly traditional, rocker by Dave Alvin (late of the Blasters and then X, now in the Pleasure Barons) on his Blue Blvd (Hightone) album. “Haley’s Comet” is about the despairing and depressing death of Bill Haley in Harlingen, Texas. It’s an imagistic cautionary tale for anyone in the arts. I also have to admit a soft spot in my heart for Social Distortion’s “99 to Life” (Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell, Epic), a sweet, high-octane foot-stomper about the fatal consequences of a lovers’ quarrel gone wrong. Social Distortion’s a sort of garage-band wall-of-metal group with a pronounced country tinge. A favorable mutation.

Stealin Horses was originally a great Kentucky band with a debut album out from Arista. Then the band moved to Oklahoma and cut a second album with a very small label called Waldoxy. Now the band's defunct and lead singer Kiya Heartwood’s out on her own, getting ready to cut a solo album. I mention all this history not because Stealin Horses sings about ghosts and chain saws, but rather because Kiya Heartwood, if the cards fall her way, could become the Melissa Etheridge of country. She is fantastic. And Stealin Horses’s music has the kind of raw, elemental power that’s perfect for triggering the imagination and the writing process.

Aside from GWAR stage performances, perhaps the most extravagant live musical event impinging on the lives of fantasy fans came at the climax of the American Booksellers Association meeting on Monday night, May 25, 1992. This was the debut (but apparently not the last) appearance of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a literarily oriented supergroup formed for this occasion. The concert took place at the Cowboy Boogie, an Anaheim, California, C&W club. This was a charity gala with proceeds from the $10 tickets going to three worthy causes: pro-literacy, pro-homeless writers, and anticensorship efforts. The magnitude of the event was awesome, eventually requiring the volunteered services of scores of professionals, not just the musicians on stage, but also the men and women from the book trade who served as drum, guitar, and microphone techs, and as roadies in general. Project instigator Kathy Goldmark, founder of the primary Bay Area literary guide/ escort service, allowed on the phone as how the benefit concert “became a Frankenstein’s monster.”

Fortunately the monster was benign, and possessed a definite rough charm. The center-stage musical group consisted of humorist Dave Barry on lead guitar, novelist Stephen King on rhythm guitar, thriller writer Ridley Pearson on bass, Magic Realist Barbara Kingsolver playing keyboards, spiritual guru Robert Fulghum on mandocello, and a pair of terrific “ringer” session musicians on drums and sax. The band was bracketed by two vocal groups. The Critics’ Chorus included commentator Roy Blount, Jr., rock and culture writers Greil Marcus and Dave Marsh, cartoonist Matt Groening, and others. The Remainderettes, in gloves, lush tumbled curls, and sexy black dresses, consisted of Kathy Goldmark, AP correspondent and book author Tad Bartimus, and novelist Amy Tan. Tres slinkster cool.

Ah, but the music itself? No one had reason to be ashamed either to listen or to participate. There were two sets, each about an hour. The Remainders played rock covers, “Sea of Love,” “Last Date,” all that sort of thing, occasionally with mutant lyrics. The instrumental work was all first-rate and tight. The vocals varied quite a lot, but less, I think, from a lack of native talent than from the expectable flop-sweat. Nervous tension affected performers’ pipes, particularly in the first set. It’s only reasonable with a group of writers playing out a genuine rock ’n’ roll fantasy. If a prize were awarded for the best combination of stage presence and musical ability it would probably have gone to Amy Tan.

Enormous credit should be given to the musical director, A1 Kooper. Kooper, seminal sixties blues-rocker (The Blues Project, then Blood, Sweat, and Tears) and prominent producer, reportedly drove his charges hard for three days of concentrated rehearsal before the performance. Considering that brief a prep time, the results were something akin to miraculous.

It was not hard to discern at ABA that the concert’s great drawing card was Stephen King. Certainly he was, in more ways than one, the most visible of the participants. It was to his credit that he did not hog the mike or the limelight. The event came through as a true ensemble performance, both as a social cause and as an entertaining event. And it gave the audience a chance, for one brief manic evening, to forget the vicissitudes of publishing.

Later in the year, BMG (the record club folks) brought out a $20 video documentary on the concert. There’s a lot of interesting interview material presented through performer sound bites, but it’s intercut with bits and pieces of the performance itself. You get no songs complete. Too bad, since the music wasn’t that bad. So what you’re finally left with is a long series of interesting tastes, but no full meal.

Now. Maybe in 1993 we can have a battle of the bands with the Rock Bottom Remainders, Social Distortion, GWAR, and the Pleasure Barons. And maybe all four could collaborate on the score for Neil Jordan's Interview with a Vampire.

Dream on.