films, page 20 of 31

It’s difficult for me to compare the 2010 version of Clash of the Titans with the 1981 Harryhausen version because I love the 1981 film so much. I watched it at the cinema when it first came out, watched it again when it came out on video, watched it some more whenever it was shown on TV, and bought it on DVD as soon as it came out. I’ve watched that a few times, too. So, when I heard they were remaking it, I couldn’t quite stifle a groan that summed up a whole set of grumpy-old-man-type feelings, including my weariness with the idea that digital effects are necessarily better than other (older) types of effects, or that a modern take on a story will necessarily be a better one. All the same, I knew had to watch it, if only to get in 106 minutes of tutting and eye-rolling.

In the end, I didn’t hate it. I didn’t actually feel sufficiently moved to feel much about it all. There was a certain amount of puzzlement at the changes they’d made to the story — incomprehensible, to me, in the main, but then again, so was remaking the film in the first place. It’s quite likely that a new audience coming to the film without having seen the Harryhausen original will love the 2010 Clash, and that any criticisms I have may be all down to my being so familiar with the old one. If so, I can’t get sufficient perspective to see it. I think there are a few points to be made.

In the 1981 Clash, the gods (in particular Laurence Olivier’s Zeus) were vain, petty, scheming, cheating, irascible, vindictive and self-interested — basically, larger-than-life humans who happened to have divine powers. The film’s story grows out of the tensions between them, and the way the mortals are caught up in their game. In the 2010 version, suddenly we have Hades (not present at all in the 1981 version), who seems to have been introduced simply so as to have one god to blame all the evil on. So, Hades creates the Kraken, Hades kills Perseus’s family, Hades wants to destroy all the other gods, and so on. This might seem like a minor change, but it annoyed me because one of the attractions of Greek mythology — which I first encountered, I suspect, through this and Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts — is that the Olympian gods encapsulate a quite different view of the world to the reductive, good-versus-evil, God-versus-Satan, version in which there is a definite right (as represented by the goodies) and a definite wrong (the baddies). The Greek gods were both remotely divine and all-too-human; they were mercurial, prone to vanity and vindictiveness, squabbling amongst themselves, using humans as pawns in their game (a point made literal, in the Harryhausen film, by the clay figures the gods use to control mortals). Zeus, noble father of the Gods, is in fact a dirty old man, always on the look out for another nubile young maiden to seduce, usually with the aid of a bit of divine showing off, such as appearing as a transplendent shower of gold or (for some reason) a swan. Thetis is vain and petty, revenging herself when her beauty is compared to that of the mortal Andromeda and found wanting. Basically, the Ancient Greek gods represented life as it was perceived by the Ancient Greeks: loaded with fatality, tragedy, and the sheer incomprehensibility of the wilfulness of these inscrutable divine powers who were at once both remote and (nicking Ambrose Bierce’s definition of the police) a “force for protection and participation”. The story of the 1981 film was a web of different strands caused by the gods’ competing aims and loyalties, with the mortals helplessly caught up in it all. By the mere introduction of a single evil character, the 2010 version loses all that richness, and just becomes another good-versus-evil smash-em-up. That, I think is the greatest loss in the remake.

The other main point is the effects. I’m not biased against digital effects at all. It’s just that I’ve seen rather too many fantasy films of late which, perhaps because digital effects have opened up the possibilities for what can be realised on-screen, seem to feel they have to realise every idea they can possibly have. The effects expand to occupy all the space that previously (perhaps due to limited effects budgets, but also perhaps due to the taste of the filmmakers) was left for the storylines to simmer a bit and develop. It used to be that an effects-centred fantasy film might be, say, 15% effects scenes at most; but now, with effects so seemingly cheap, it’s 85% effects, if not more — just because it can be done. Ray Harryhausen’s monster scenes in the 1981 film were few, but were handled with taste, and had the benefit of a build-up, and some breathing space in between. When they appeared, the monsters weren’t just monsters, they were acted. They were lit, they were half-hidden in shadows, they were directed — they seemed to think. They had mood, they had imaginative weight. The 2010 Clash has wall-to-wall monster scenes, so visually overwhelming with in-your-face detail that I ended up just not caring. And all the monsters do is fight.

Is this just me? Could be. But I long for the days when — yes, perhaps because of limitations in the budget and technology — effects were (not always, but sometimes) treated with that magic that made them come alive. Even though I can look at the 1981 film and know Harryhausen’s Medusa is a model made of foam rubber and a wire skeleton, there’s a magic to it all the same. The super-detailed, brightly-lit Medusa of the 2010 film just seems to have no character, by comparison. Perhaps because the visual wow of what she can be made to do so far outweighs the work required to make her truly come alive on-screen.

The worst thing is, the 2010 film seems to have a sort of contempt for its predecessor. In one scene, when they’re preparing to set forth on their quest, someone finds the mechanical owl from the 1981 film. They make some condescending remark and toss it aside. Now, I’m not going to say that Bubo the mechanical owl is a vital part of the 1981 film, or that he’s a brilliant comic invention. Thinking about it, he’s a mini-C3PO/R2D2 combo, and just as annoying. But I don’t hate him. For a fantasy film, which relies on its audience having absolute belief in it in order to work, bringing in humour can be quite a risk. If it’s done wrong, the audience can just end up laughing at the whole film. The 1981 Clash carries off its minor moments of humour without a dent; the 2010 film, supposedly showing its superiority to the 1981 original by making fun of its mechanical owl, is in fact showing how defensive it has to be towards a predecessor that, with more primitive technology and a lower budget, could nevertheless carry off that little bit of humour and still work as a fantasy film.

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Yes, but what about mad families? What about psychotic serial killer families? Tolstoy didn’t think of that one, did he? Ever since reading about Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny & Girly in Harvey Fenton & David Flint’s Ten Years of Terror (an encyclopaedic look at 70s British horror which introduced me to many films I’d never heard of, and some I realised I ought to be glad I hadn’t) in 2001, I’ve been dying to see it, but aside from rumours that Redemption held the rights (there were obviously too many Nazi-nuns-in-bondage films to release first), there was no hint of it coming out on DVD. Then I did one of those wildly hopeful Amazon searches last week and found it had just been released. Watching it last night, I was amazed it’d taken so long, as it’s just the sort of warped filmic fare to appeal to cinephiles, particularly cult cinephiles. I’d go so far as to say that watching it was as bizarre and rewarding an experience as my first viewing of The Wicker Man, where, once I’d got over the shock of people singing, I realised this was one of the most distinctive and subtle of horror films, of precisely the sort that transcends the genre and becomes so much more than merely horrific. MNS&G might not have the awe-inspiring power of that final scene of The Wicker Man, but in a slightly whackier way it is just as distinctive, just as not-quite-horror-though-it-is, and though it couldn’t exactly be described as subtle (it’s as subtle as an eight-year-olds’ jelly-throwing contest), neither is it as over-the-top as you might expect. It’s also as distinctively British a film as they come, in a Mad Dogs and Englishmen kind of way.

Based on a 1966 play, “Happy Family”, by Maisie Mosco (who is more well-known for her multi-generational family saga about Jewish immigrants living in Manchester, Almonds and Raisins (1979), Scattered Seed (1980) and Children’s Children (1981)), MNS&G‘s action takes place almost exclusively in a rotting, rambling Victwardian pile of a house, inhabited by a family whose members are only ever known as Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly. Sonny and Girly, obviously in their late teens, dress and act as clichés of the sort of naughty-but-loveable children that only ever existed in nostalgic fiction. But their gleeful gameplaying and chanting of horrid nursery rhymes is a thin mask for a family-wide psychosis. The children go outside the house’s extensive grounds to gather “New Friends” — mostly drunks from the park (though, as the film begins, we’re told Mumsy is fed up with drunks from the park, so the children make a fateful decision to gather a slightly higher class of inebriate) — whom they forcibly involve in their twisted, childish games, where the most important rule is “Play the Game”. New Friends who don’t play the game suffer the consequences, by having the darker side of nursery rhymes literalised — as in the “Humpty Dumpty Game”, which of course ends with someone falling from a great height, and not being able to be put back together again. But their newest New Friend proves to be more up to the mark, and once he’s learned to adjust to the madness of the situation, he begins to play games of his own, manipulating the subtle undercurrent of sexual jealousy that lurks beneath the family’s rule-entrenched power structure. With, as they might say, grisly consequences.

Though, not as grisly as you’d think. For a film slap bang in the middle of a British horror boom (and directed by Freddie Francis, the man responsible for Hammer’s The Evil of Frankenstein, and Amicus’s Tales from the Crypt and Dr Terror’s House of Horrors — though he was also cinematographer on David Lynch’s Elephant Man, Dune, and Straight Story), there’s remarkably little explicit horror. The goriest the film gets is a pricked thumb (hastily kissed better), though there is a corpse in a bed, not to mention the very brief glimpse of a (non-gory) severed hand. So much more is implied than shown, which may be why the film hasn’t dated. MNS&G shows its real power in a scene near the end, in the kitchen, where the viewer will already have realised that the big pot boiling away on the stove contains something that outdoes Fatal Attraction 17 years before Fatal Attraction. You never actually get to see what’s in the pot, but the cutting between its lifted lid and the horror on people’s faces is enough to make you think you have.

The film’s strength really lies in the mix between its characters’ schizoid gameplaying and the darker, messier psychology ready to break through that thin but overbright surface. Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly are always telling their New Friends that theirs is a happy family — but the fact they insist on this so much, and that “happy families need rules”, immediately gives it the lie.

So what is MNS&G about? It’s possible to enjoy it just for its weird mix of mad glee and nursery-rhyme darkness, but I think it has a power that goes beyond that. It’s of course about family. The thing about the MNS&G ménage is that, although it is sociopathic, psychopathic, not to say outright murderous, it works. It works not because of or in spite of its madness, but because the family have agreed to share a madness. And that may be the thing that transcends Tolstoy’s theory of happy and unhappy families: all families, to work as families, must be a shared form of madness — benign, in the case of happy families, less benign in the case of unhappy ones — but you know they work because the family stays together. That’s, in the end, what makes them a family.

MNS&G was released in the US as Girly, a title which, while it obviously makes the most of the film’s most striking visual asset (ahem):

…does miss the point a bit about this being, after all, a family film. Though not, obviously, a film for all the family.

Just as there were seven samurai, in House, the 1977 commercial debut from director Nobuhiko Obayashi, there are seven schoolgirls; and just as there were seven dwarfs named Happy, Sleepy, Dopey, Grumpy, Bashful, Doc and Sneezy, the seven schoolgirls are named Angel (who’s always doing her makeup), Fantasy (who’s always imagining things), Prof (who wears glasses and reads a lot), Kung Fu (who does kung fu), Sweetie (can’t remember why), Melody (who plays the piano) & Mac (which is short for Stomach, because she likes eating).

After learning that her father is to remarry, and so as not to have to go on holiday with her new stepmother, Angel writes to an aunt she hasn’t seen in years and arranges to spend the summer with her in her large, ramshackle house on an isolated hill. Taking her six schoolfriends with her, they arrive to find the aunt wheelchair-bound and in poor health, though she recovers remarkably — once the girls start disappearing.

House (whose title in Japan is in fact the English word “House”), was initially commissioned by Toho films to cash in on the popularity of Jaws. Reasoning that a film about a shark that eats people was popular, so a film about anything else that eats people would also be popular, Obayashi wracked his brains for something that wouldn’t be too boringly derivative — at the time, he says (in the excellent hour and half long interview on the DVD) there was a spate of people-eating creature films in response to Jaws, but he wanted to do something different. In the end, he asked his daughter what she would find scary, and from the list she came up with, he got the idea of a house that eats people.

The result is one hell of a weird film.

Is it a horror film? There’s certainly plenty of blood, severed limbs, and people dying in protracted, macabre ways. But the style is a sort of madcap sixties runabout comedy. Prior to making this film, Obayashi was a prolific maker of adverts, as well as, in his spare time, a maker of experimental films, and House seems to be the product of an awful lot of experimentation, wild imagination, and free thinking. Some scenes are deliberately artificial, with a Hollywood musical feel, painted backdrops, and so on. There’s a pop music soundtrack and a lot of playful cutting between shots, pausing of the image, and so on. There’s stop-motion animation (of a man skidding around stuck in a bucket). There’s a severed head that flies around and bites a girl on the bum. There’s a piano whose keys glow in psychedelic colours, and which eats the girl who plays it (though her severed fingers keep playing). Another girl is eaten by a clock, another by a mirror, another by a bath, another is smothered by futons. So, yes, it is horror, but not in the way that, say, Hostel is, or Saw III.

Just as good as the film itself is the long interview with the director, Nobuhiko Obayashi, that comes as an extra on the DVD. Before House was made, Obayashi says, there was really only one way to become a film director in Japan, and that was to join one of the two big corporate studios, Toho or Shochiku (home of Kurosawa and Ozu, respectively), and hope to get apprenticed to the film-making department. You were just as likely, though, to be sent to work in one of the company’s hotels and never get anywhere near a film-set. Even if you did get apprenticed as an assistant director, you weren’t likely to work your way up to actually directing a film till your mid or late forties. As a result, Obayashi says, Japanese films had stagnated, playing safe in both style and content, sticking to tried and tested corporate methods, and dying commercially. Meanwhile, he was working in the boom industry of advertising, and frequently found himself commanding greater budgets for a 60-second commercial than film directors had for a 90-minute feature. People started saying that if only Obayashi were allowed to make a film, he would change the face of Japanese cinema. But even when Toho approached him to discuss the idea, and he pitched House, he realised it would never get made because of the sheer inertia of the juggernaut studio system. So he set about a remarkable media campaign, promoting the film as if it were going to be released by Toho, but before it was even made. He managed to get magazine articles, a novelisation, a radio drama, and even a soundtrack album released in the two years prior to Toho finally green-lighting the project. In the interview extras, Obayashi sits there, smiling modestly, as he thumbs through a stack of scrapbooks showing all the promotional work he did for a film that only existed as a script. It’s a remarkable, and quite inspiring story. By the time House was finally released, it was a storm of a hit.

Nowadays, it’s the sort of film you could imagine Alex Cox enthusing about (whatever happened to Moviedrome?) on some late-night Channel 4 cult film slot. It seems very much a product of the free-thinking sixties (or the generation that grew up in the sixties), but also it’s a teen movie, which seems curiously up to date, as if everything that dated it (like the occasional crude bit of animation) were some postmodern imitation of the movies of the past, knowingly referenced. It’s fast-moving, bizarre, loud, brash, colourful, gruesome, funny, bewildering, and undeniably Japanese.

Just remember that all these stills are from the same film: