Working Title Reviews: The Burning and Sucker Punch

 

Hi folks.  Bryan is back again, with two more films chosen by basically throwing darts at the entire IMDB database.  This time, we’ve got two films which I thought were unfairly underrated.  One of which is a shockingly good movie from a subgenre which never produces good movies, and the other… well… I set out to explore the question, “can a movie be called underrated if it still sucks?”

 

Sucker Punch (2011, directed by Zack Snyder): 4/10

Man oh man, I’ve heard SO much complaining about this movie. From both the fanboys and the critics, Sucker Punch has received a withering storm of dismissive scorn almost at the level of a Twilight flick. I don’t remember the last time I saw everyone lining up and sharpening their knives in such a hungry fashion. It’s like they wanted writer-director Zack Snyder to finally fail, to turn in a film which couldn’t be defended by even his most ardent admirers. The trashing of this movie is so thorough that you would, on the basis of its reputation, expect it to be one of the worst films of the year. But it’s not. Not even close. The worst I can say about the film is that it didn’t even come close to living up to its potential, considering how interesting some of its ideas are.

This is the part where I usually describe the plot, but dammit, I don’t wanna! Sucker Punch is dense enough that you could spend an entire review just describing the setup, and it still wouldn’t explain exactly what happens in the film. But I gotta say something, so here goes: a young woman called Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is framed for murder and forcefully committed to an insane asylum. Her evil uncle bribes a nurse to fast-track the girl into a lobotomy; but in the middle of the procedure, reality breaks and Baby Doll finds herself imprisoned in some kind of weird alternate-universe brothel. There she conspires with the other captive prostitutes to break out, and occasionally reality breaks again and she’s plopped down into video-game-ish battles, with the prostitutes now recast as some kind of elite fighting squad which has slow-motion wire-fu fights against a variety of wacky enemies.

Got all that? In terms of its structure, Sucker Punch actually reminds me a hell of a lot of Inception. There’s plenty of parallels: multilayered dream worlds stacked on top of each other, the same actors playing different roles in each scenario, and the movie getting more stylized as it tunnels further and further away from reality. And I’d say that Sucker Punch is actually superior in one specific aspect, that it assumes the audience is smart enough to intuitively understand the different levels of plot and isn’t constantly re-explaining the entire thing to us over and over again.

But sadly, that’s the only way I’d claim that Sucker Punch is better than Inception (even though I wasn’t the latter movie’s biggest fan), and it goes on to rip off plenty of other films along the way. Some of it is unintentional; I don’t think it’s anything more than tragic coincidence that we so recently had Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, a superficially similar movie which understood video game logic much better. And you could easily argue that it owes a big debt to Chicago, and Sin City, and The Fall, and plenty of action-oriented anime, and every “young woman unjustly imprisoned in a mental hospital” movie ever. But complaining about the unoriginality is missing the point. Much like Quentin Tarantino, Zack Snyder is obsessed with taking his favorite bits of pop culture minutiae and combining them and remixing them into something new. Sucker Punch is the first time that Snyder’s made a film which isn’t a direct adaptation of another property, but it clearly intends to be a tribute to a hundred different things.

The unfortunate part is that Snyder is nowhere near Tarantino’s level in terms of understanding the most important fundamental parts of grindhouse and pulp entertainment, the bits which people really love the most on a visceral level. In some ways, Sucker Punch feels like you’re watching the most expensive cosplay show ever made. When you ask why anything is happening in this movie, the answer feels like it’s almost invariably “because it’s cool, that’s why!”. The action scenes are interesting in theory, but in execution they look a lot like you’re watching cutscenes from Metal Gear Solid. The script feels like it’s trying to make some kind of half-assed feminist statement about empowerment, but that’s awfully hard to swallow when we’ve got a bunch of Faux Action Girls dressed in skimpy outfits and being ordered around by men. And no matter how hard the actors try to imbue their characters with life, they’re all very flatly written and have few distinguishing traits worth noting. They’re almost like the Power Rangers, where the easiest way to tell them apart is just to note the color of their hair and outfits, and sometimes that’s almost the only difference.

The really frustrating thing here is that I can totally see the target that Zack Snyder was shooting for. Sucker Punch has the skeleton of a good movie, a fascinating gumbo mix of different concepts tossed together all willy-nilly in what should’ve been an incredible exercise in genre-bending entertainment. Give this same story to a better director, and something incredible could’ve happened. Imagine, for example, a Joss Whedon version of this material. Interesting to think about, isn’t it? Or Bryan Singer, or Robert Rodriguez, or Peter Jackson, or Edgar Wright, or Gore Verbenski, or hell even JJ Abrahms. You get my point. If you could’ve just tilted the entire film about ten degrees to the left, it might’ve been pretty decent.

Postscript: thank sweet fucking Christ that Snyder finally seems to be cutting down on his very worst directorial trait, that being an unholy abuse of slow motion. There’s still plenty of slo-mo in Sucker Punch, but it’s a hell of a lot less than there was in 300 and it fits the material better than it did in Watchmen. Now if we could only get Michael Bay to follow suit.

 

 

 

 

The Burning (1981, directed by Tony Maylam): 7/10

Well this is absolutely fucking astonishing. Here we have a 1980s slasher-horror flick, taking place at summer camp. There have been approximately seventeen million of these movies, and pretty much all of them have sucked to some degree or another. (Yes, I know that Sleepaway Camp has its admirers, but I’m not one of them.) So it shocked me to finally see one of these movies which is a legitimately good example of general cinematic storytelling from start to finish. What the fuck!?! I almost can’t believe it, but I just watched the damn thing. The few people whom have heard of this film tend to regard it highly, but for a movie this damn good you’d really expect a louder fan base to trumpet its merits. It’s seriously one of the few slasher films that I’d defend as an objectively good movie, without the “it’s okay, for a slasher” curve that you normally have to grade these things on.

This is the movie that every single Friday the 13th tried and failed to be. In fact, this movie and Friday the 13th part 2 share a really bizarre number of practically identical elements. What’s so strange about that is neither film was ripping off the other; both were shot around the same time, and they were released exactly one week apart. But while F13p2 was a long exercise in “watch these kids waste 80 minutes of time in between phony-looking murders”, The Burning is an honestly unnerving experience which gets right everything that these movies usually get wrong. And please don’t mistake my intentions; I actually enjoy all the Friday the 13th films, but let’s not pretend that most of those are anything but really shitty movies made by people more concerned with money than art. The Burning is a most precious example of horror filmmakers having their priorities the other way ‘round.

But enough vague gushing, let’s get on with the plot. Our story begins with a prologue: some kids are playing a prank on a summer camp caretaker named Cropsy who has a reputation for being a sadistic bully. Whoops, they accidentally end up setting him on fire, and he’s horribly scarred for life all over his entire body. Five years later Cropsy is finally released from the hospital, and immediately sneaks back to camp with basic intentions of killing every camper he sees with a giant pair of garden shears. It’s nice that one of these movies actually gives us a clear-cut motivation for why the slasher is slashing. All too often, it’s just “well, he’s fucking crazy” or “he’s a cannibal” or some other lazy, lazy shortcut to avoid doing any intellectual work in providing the maniac with a motive. This time, we know exactly why this guy just wants to stab the whole world in the throat, and it all makes sense. Isn’t that amazingly refreshing for a story about a psycho killer at camp?

Even more amazing: the kids in the movie feel like real kids, and they have individual personalities and everything! Okay, most of the main characters are clearly well into their 20s and shouldn’t be playing “teenagers”, but at least they picked decent actors (more on that later) and provided them with dialogue that doesn’t make you wince to hear it. Not only can you can tell most of the kids apart from each other with a few genuine personality traits, but they never do any of that “well everyone’s disappeared and the lights have gone out, time to walk around in the dark woods for no good reason!” bullshit which infests so many of these movies. When we get to the inevitable sex and nudity, they’re staged in a way to highlight how awkward and embarrassing sex can be to inexperienced kids, rather than the usual Friday the 13th-style “leering at sluts” atmosphere. These feel like real kids, the sort you might have known once upon a time, and how freaking rare and amazing is that in any horror film?

And even when getting to the point where most horror films tend to fall apart into a series of repetitive kills followed by the standard Final Girl chase, this movie flatly refuses to go along with convention. The Burning’s script plays remarkably fair with its contrivances; there‘s no phone lines which have suddenly gone dead, or murder sites mysteriously cleaned up and free of all blood and bodies afterwards.. To plausibly get us towards the final moments of violence, the writers had a brilliant idea; some of the older kids are taking an overnight canoe trip to a remote section of the woods, and Cropsy uses the opportunity to follow them into a place where they‘re cut off from the rest of the world. Presto, this instantly solves so many of the common plot holes which tend to pop up towards the climaxes of these films.

The film is well-made in every technical respect. Legendary makeup artist Tom Savini handled the gore effects, and let’s just say that outside of Romero’s zombie movies I’ve never seen him do better. Rick Wakeman of the rock band Yes provided a suitably moody electronic score. It sounds kinda like Italian horror flick music at times, and that’s a compliment; in fact, the whole film has a little bit of a giallo feel to it. “Italian horror films from the 1970s” is my overall favorite period of scary movies ever, because of just how unsafe it seemed. They were unpredictable in their structure, brutal in their execution, yet often bizarrely artistic in an elegant sort of way. Point is, The Burning captures that same sort of feeling that the filmmakers know what you’re expecting and don’t mind fucking with you. The stalking scenes are genuinely suspenseful, and the jump scares will actually make you jump.

Finally, we come to the other reason more people should know about this film. This is a pretty big skeleton in the closet of a surprising amount of important Hollywood people. Check this shit out: our comic relief character in this flick is George Costanza. Yes, seriously, we’ve got a very young, skinny, full-haired Jason Alexander as the inevitable class clown. His rapid-fire improv gives us a truly unique thing: comic relief in a slasher flick which is actually funny! How the hell often does that happen? Also, look for Fisher Stevens and Holly Hunter as a couple of the secondary kids as well. And oh yeah, one other thing: the movie was co-written and produced by a couple of brothers named Weinstein. It just so happened to be the very first release from some brand new, unknown, independent production company called Miramax. Yes. Really. Dead serious. This actually happened. How much WTF can you cram into one movie?!

 

 

 

 

That’s all for now, folks.  Seeya sometime.