Hello, everyone. Bryan is back again, with two more reviews of two random movies. No real rhyme or reason to the choices this time around, they’re just a couple of flicks I happened to see recently. Well, both of their plots heavily revolve around dudes stabbing other people, and both titles start with the letter P. So, yeah, that’s the magic connection, I suppose. On with the show!
Pathfinder (2007, directed by Marcus Nispel): 4/10
The fake blood in this picture looks more realistic than the fake blood in the movie.
For some reason, we seem to have gotten a lot of movies about Vikings over the past few years. And a lot of lousy action flicks with jittery visuals. And a lot of remakes. Congratulations, Pathfinder, you managed to combine all of these tepid ingredients into one big lukewarm chunk of mediocrity. This is one of those movies where not only do you feel like you’ve seen it all before, but you’re pointing out all the individual bits that it blatantly stole from other, better movies. It’s the cinematic equivalent to a cover band, and a not-very-damn-good cover band at that, and it seems like the only songs they know are “Freebird” and “Stairway To Heaven“.
Our setting is in the Canadian wilds of Newfoundland, in the time period of… uh… before Columbus, but beyond that I have no idea. Some local Indians discover the wreck of a Viking ship washed up onshore, with only one survivor: a young boy. This paleface kid is taken in by the natives and grows up to be known as Ghost (Karl Urban). He tries to fit in with the local tribes, but his odd looks and more importantly his traumatic past keep him a permanent outsider. He’s in love with the chief’s daughter Starfire (Moon Bloodgood), but has no idea how to approach her. But then the plot picks up, when another rampaging horde of Vikings invade the land. (Yes, we do get the standard, inevitable “evil raiders kill the hero’s parents and burn down his village” scene here which has long ago become a musty stereotype.) The Viking leader Gunnar (Clancy Brown) captures Ghost, and forces him to guide the bandits to the neighboring villages, and it turns into your standard battle of wills from thereon.
Does anyone else think that sword looks like it's made out of aluminum?
God, can’t you practically smell the clichés oozing out of that premise? If you’ve seen Conan the Barbarian or Last of the Mohicans or any similar types of “action hero avenges his family’s death at the hands of foreign bastards” flicks, then you’ve pretty much seen the entirety of Pathfinder. But unoriginality is hardly the movie’s only sin! No, let’s chronicle some of the other bullshit it pulls on us: starting with the acting. It’s uniformly pretty bad. Karl Urban is the most generic action hero you’ve ever seen, a guy with very little personality. This was a year or two before Star Trek shocked us all with the discovery that he could actually, y’know, act. Moon Bloodgood sounds painfully like a modern American in her line readings, not even trying to match the vague ye-olde-speake that the other characters have.
As for Clancy Brown and the other Vikings, hell, we can’t even see their acting. The Norsemen are all covered in makeup, and dirt, and giant beards, and massive helmets which often have full masks. They’ve got less personality than an Imperial storm trooper, and are seen as nothing more than mindless barbarians. Hell, what are they even attempting to accomplish here? They don’t seem to be looking for gold or other treasures. All the Indians have are everyday goods, food and clothes and the like, and the Vikings seem interested in none of that. They just want to chop up everyone with skin darker than their own, apparently. Yes, Pathfinder is the latest in a LONG line of movies which take a rather simplistic view of race relations. It goes something like this: “The evil invading Whitey has no motivation for their cruel actions, they’re just a bunch of dicks. The Noble Savage natives are perfectly in tune with nature and peaceful and all that shit… but they still need a white guy to be their savior when shit gets real.” Gee, what an intellectually stimulating depiction of a subtly shaded three-dimensional world!
Believe it or not, there's human beings hidden somewhere under there.
On its technical merits, the film is below average God, I am SO tired of historical epics where the fight scenes all look like music videos. Fuck Gladiator for popularizing this trend, fuck 300 for making it even more omnipresent, and fuck Pathfinder for robotically copying its predecessors in such a lazy fashion. All the fight scenes are shot with that detestable handheld shaky-cam style, and of course are edited to death with your average shot lasting maybe one second. On the Unrated DVD version, giant geysers of pitifully phony-looking CGI blood erupt from every single wound. And on top of that, the entire thing is just too damn dark. Much of the movie was shot at night, in the fog, and given a generally monochromatic blue tone. It feels like you’re watching the movie through a pair of sunglasses, the gloom is so murky at times.
And oh yeah, didn’t I say this was a remake? It sure is, and you’ve surely not familiar with the original. Veiviseren was a 1987 movie from Norway, which had much the same plot; except that it all took place in ancient Scandinavia and there were no Native Americans involved. It managed to nab an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, but it’s still pretty obscure. I’d never heard of it before, and probably nobody reading this has either. Why bother remaking this story? Yes, it’s an official remake and not just a ripoff, the original Norwegian filmmaker is given a story credit in Pathfinder. But really, why? Remakes are usually done to either revive an old franchise, or to cash in on a hot recent foreign film. A completely forgotten 20-year-old movie like Veiviseren does not qualify at all. It has no fanbase, no large built-in audience who can be expected to come buy stacks of tickets to the new version. In every way possible, this violates Hollywood’s most basic motivations for why they re-imagine existing properties. So why was the movie made at all?
C'mon, scream something about Sparta, you know you want to!
Peeping Tom (1960, directed by Michael Powell): 7/10
Creeeeeeeeeeeeeeepy.
Imagine, if you will: Great Britain in 1960. A respected old English director of classy pictures and well-crafted thrillers has decided to try something new. He’s going to do a horror movie about a serial killer, a deranged and pitiful young man whose traumatic upbringing and confusing sexual impulses have led him to kill. The movie will be shot on the cheap with a low budget and few recognizable stars. And most importantly, it will go further than anything we’ve ever seen before in terms of brutal violence with a simmering undercurrent of perversion and really fucked-up libido. Does this sound familiar? Why, I might be describing Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho with this synopsis. That film was met with massive financial and critical success, hailed as an instant classic, beloved for generations afterwards. But no, I’m not talking about Psycho or Hitchcock at all. I’m talking about Peeping Tom, a film which became so infamous that it practically ended Michael Powell’s career as a director.
The story follows a young man named Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Bohm), a terribly disturbed fellow. You see, Mark likes to murder women; not only that, but he’s addicted to filming the expression on their faces as they die. But his tendency of walking around with a movie camera at all times draws no attention, since he’s an assistant cameraman by trade. He works on movie sets by day, filming dreary unfunny comedies, and then at night has a somewhat naughtier job shooting cheesecake shots and softcore porn. The one bright spot is his downstairs neighbor Helen (Anna Massey), a chipper young lass who tries to drag Mark out of his shell; and Helen’s blind mother (Maxine Audley), who sees right through Mark’s mask of sanity and wants to help him find treatment for his psychosis. But Mark is obsessed with finishing his “documentary”, and his dark desires conspire to drag him down the road to ruin.
I got no jokes for this one, folks. Somehow a "you'll poke your eye out" wisecrack would just seem shudderingly wrong here.
The 1960s were a really odd time in filmmaking. The old Hayes Production Code had for decades been the rules about what you could and couldn’t show in a movie; this went from simplistic stuff like “no nudity” to moral hand-wringing such as “crime must always be punished” and all the way to backwards bullshit like “no interracial relationships”. But by 1960, the old Code had started to be slowly chipped away. European art films of the time were putting more daring and more adult elements into their films, and those elements were slowly trickling into the mainstream as well. The censors and viewers of the time were ready for some wild experimentation, but not too much.
This is where Peeping Tom sadly fucked itself, and its director too. If this movie had come out ten or even five years later, it probably would’ve gotten away with everything. But 1960 was just barely too early. Government censors in the UK and elsewhere viciously slashed the film, removing both violent and sexual elements and leaving the movie somewhat choppy. More disastrous was the reception from the movie critics at the time; they lambasted the film as being a sick piece of filth, a disgusting and amoral wallow in a mud pit of obscenity.
"Aw, come on," his eyes seem to plead, "who HASN'T stabbed a hooker to death at some point or another?"
The director Michael Powell took the brunt of the blame, and the reaction was SO viciously negative that it practically ended his career overnight. Powell was not some anonymous hack; he was an Oscar-nominated filmmaker with many prestigious classics to his name, like The Thief of Bagdad, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Stairway to Heaven, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes. So for him to essentially get blackballed from the industry was a big fucking deal. Imagine if Steven Spielberg made a new horror movie which was considered so morally appalling that he never worked in Hollywood again.
Watching the movie, jesus christ, but that was a bit of an overreaction. It’s a somewhat unnerving character study of a very twisted guy, but you’d expect this to be a hardcore snuff movie, considering how it was treated. The actors are all unknown to me, but they all do a perfectly good job in fleshing out these oddball characters and making them compelling (although Bohm‘s German accent is a bit distracting on a man who‘s supposed to be born and raised in England). The film heavily experiments with the idea of voyeurism in general, with cameras everywhere and people watching footage and listening to tapes and there’s almost always some kind of movie-within-a-movie action going on. The kill scenes themselves look awfully dated; but like I said earlier, much of the footage was censored and cut out, and lots of it was never found again. Criterion did their usual fine job in remastering the movie for a prestigious DVD release, but there’s only so much you can do when the footage just isn’t there.
If there’s anything particularly disturbing about the movie, it’s that it just kinda feels genuinely plausible. The killer’s methods are somewhat gimmicky, but much less bullshitty and much more rooted in genuine psychology than most movie killers are. Maybe Peeping Tom suffered a similar fate as 1986’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer for a similar reason: it was just too close to home. Movie audiences seem to prefer phony killers, cackling madmen or deformed rednecks or anything other than the unsettling reality of blank-faced murderers. Whenever a movie is made which gets too close to the real world, viewers tend to rebel. They want the escapism of Hannibal Lector, not the all-too-believable insanity of guys like Mark Lewis. He’s a reminder of what really lurks out there, horrifying monsters in human form, stalking their unwary prey from behind a mask of utter normalcy. That’s infinitely more terrifying than any typical slasher villain in a hockey mask.
"Lights, camera, aaaaAAAAAAAAHHHH WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!"
One last odd point. Peeping Tom hates psychiatrists. I mean REALLY HATES psychiatrists, portraying them as either babbling pretentious fools or sadistic manipulative monsters. It’s a weird bias, in a film which has clearly done its research into human psychology in order to get the pathology of the killer feeling just right. You get the feeling that the screenwriter had a bad experience with a shrink at some point, and is using the catharsis experience to exorcise his personal demons. It’s a small detail, but one that sticks out in a strange way. Well, as much as anything can stick out as being strange in such an odd little movie.
And that’s all for this week. Join us next time, when we take a look at… uh… I have no idea. Whatever movies that seem attractive to me next time I get really stinking drunk. “Oh yeah, Baby Geniuses 2, that sounds awesome!” and then we must all deal with the horror. (Disclaimer: there is no fucking way that I’m actually going to watch Baby Geniuses 2. I love you, my loyal readers, but not THAT much.) (Unless you pay me. I am very, very open to bribery.) So I will see all of you back here next Thursday. Good night, and good fuck.
…that’s how that saying goes, right?