films, page 26 of 31

Creature from the Black Lagoon is one of those films I always felt I’d see one day, classic monster flick that it is. And surely I would — it was bound to come on in the classic Sunday afternoon slot on BBC2 wasn’t it? Well, in the old days maybe, the pre-digital, pre-satellite, pre-cable days, but now it probably shows on a constant loop on The Creature from the Black Lagoon Channel, and as I’ve only got an old-style non-digital TV, and Rupert Murdoch personally stops me from accessing Freeview in my flat, I decided to put it on my Amazon rental list. That’s what the Amazon rental list is for.

Alright, so the reason for that ramblous first paragraph is I really don’t have much to say about the film. It has no real plot to speak of, other than to get the scientists down the Amazon river into the Black Lagoon where they can have a series of encounters with the Gill-Man, and a number of dives into the lagoon itself to show off about 18 minutes of underwater footage (in glorious black & white 3D, when it first came out). No, the film’s only redeeming feature is the creature itself, which works really well, even though it’s a man in a suit. In the underwater sequences, the creature moves very sinuously; on dry land, its gasping breathing is quite convincing in a fish-out-of-water kind of way. And, it just looks good, for a monster. It works, visually, particularly in the grainy underwater sequences.

It was a given in 50s horror films that the creature would kill the men it came across while trying to kidnap the one and only woman. With Creature from the Black Lagoon, this “given” has become so accepted that the filmmakers felt no need to give any explanation as to why a fish-man should want to kidnap a female human, (other than that he’s a foot fetishist, I’d say, from the evidence of these two stills), particularly as, once he’s got her, all he does is take her to his cave and drape her (that’s not a euphemism) casually on a rock. But perhaps that’s just because the “main act” has already taken place between the two of them. Earlier on, in the film’s most aesthetically pleasing sequence, the creature swims (facing upwards) below the woman (facing down), at the height of which she performs some ecstatic (and no doubt symbolic) aqua-acrobatics. Shortly afterwards, back on the boat, we see her smoking a cigarette, which she casts, half-finished, into the Black Lagoon. So the Gill-Man, by kidnapping her and storing her away in his cave after this metaphoric lovemaking, is really just trying to do the decent thing. The film’s hero, after all, has been putting off proposing to her in lieu of other, far more square-chinned activities such as diving for rocks, so it’s no wonder she’s tempted to swim out into the lake and dally (that is a euphemism) with strange men. Even if they’ve got gills.

I haven’t liked anything with Nicholas Cage in since (and including) Leaving Las Vegas, and have yet to leave a cinema more peeved at such an utter waste of money and time as that film. Lord of War, in which Cage plays a self-justifying arms dealer, was no exception, though it did have the plus of at least trying to teach its audience a thing or two about the evils of the arms trade. (Oddly enough, even what were surely the most surprising facts about the weapons industry — “There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That’s one firearm for every twelve people on the planet.” — seem curiously unsurprising, perhaps because I was so prepared to be overawed by the sheer horror of what is so evidently a horrific aspect of human life. But this point is most succinctly, and poignantly, made by the film’s title sequence, where we follow a bullet from manufacture to its ultimate destination in a child’s forehead. Thus, the film’s first few minutes are not only its high point, but pretty much make the rest of it redundant.) Far more interesting would have been some insight into the human side of the equation — what makes an arms dealer do what he does? — but we don’t get that. Instead we get a highly laboured morality tale, as Nicholas Cage’s Yuri Orlov loses all he holds dear in the world (his clichéd addicted-but-beloved brother, his clichéd trophy wife, his clichéd loveable toddler, his clichéd poor parents struggling to make good in a no-good world). Far more interesting, for me, is that Yuri Orlov is one more instance of a rather peculiar archetype that’s been appearing in so many Hollywood films of late: the professional killer as hero.

More and more, assassins are popping up as the heroes of Hollywood films — not as anti-heroes, where the killer may take most of the screen time but we’re still meant to find them despicable, but as the actual heroes, who we’re supposed to admire because of the skill and professionalism with which they carry out their work. There’s Grosse Pointe Blank, for instance, with John Cusak as a super-successful professional killer returning to his home town for a high school reunion. There’s Mr & Mrs Smith, where Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are a married couple who both carry on secret lives as professional killers. And A History of Violence could well be named as another — a film I found quite disappointing when it tossed aside all the promise of its carefully nuanced first half with a crude action-flick ending and no attempt to deal with its own moral implications.

The formula with this character type is that they always have sharply divided home and work lives. At work, they kill ruthlessly and super-efficiently. But that’s all forgotten the minute they get home, where their families have no clue about daddy’s real line of work. But what happens when the division between work and home breaks down? The family starts to suspect the truth, then someone from daddy’s work pays a casually threatening visit to his home — and suddenly, daddy stands to lose all he holds dear but took too much for granted, blah blah blah. It’s this last point that perhaps points to why this character type is so prevalent. It’s because the professional killer embodies, in exaggerated form, how a lot of people feel about their own lives. At work they have to live by a corporate morality which minimises social responsibility in favour of making money and increasing the organisation’s efficiency whatever the cost (as long as it’s legal). Then they go home and have to lock away all the casual inhumanities of the workplace in some secret inner strongbox so they can try to be a normal human being with not just their family but themselves. But that locked-away part means they can never be a fully real human being, even with their loving family. There’s always an undermining guilt, however muffled. Something has to give. The point about the ruthless professional killer is not so much that they kill other people, as that they slowly kill off their own humanity; when their families discover their true nature and either leave or are taken from them, it’s just an externalisation of the hollowness that was inside them anyway.

With Lord of War, Cage’s character is an arms dealer — not a killer but a facilitator of killings — but his life starts to fall apart when he is forced, for the first time, to face the implications of his work and actually kill someone with one of his own guns. But the film is far more interested in making its (really rather simple and shallowly-put) moral point than in creating a drama (which would have been the way to make its simple moral point really stick), so it seemed too long and by the end of it, I was wandering around doing other things while it was playing on the TV to its predictable conclusion.

An Alice in Wonderland style adventure, MirrorMask was apparently commissioned when executives at Sony realised that two Jim Henson-created films, Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal (a favourite of mine), which were regarded as flops at the time of their release, had gone on to generate a pretty much constant stream of sales on video and DVD, and so they wanted something new in the same vein. It’s a pity they didn’t have the courage of their convictions to back the idea with a good sized budget, because the result, MirrorMask, has a made-for-TV feel to it, perhaps due to the rather flat, overbright lighting that resulted from, as director Dave McKean points out in an interview included as an extra on the DVD, their not being able to afford the sort of full-scale 3D rendering required for the really complex ray-tracing that sets big budget animated and FX-driven blockbusters apart in terms of final look and polish.

MirrorMask starts in the real world, with teen Helena (played with a lot of charisma by Stephanie Leonidas) grumbling about having to work in her parents’ circus. Then her mother falls ill and Helena retreats into a dream world created out of her many drawings. The dream-world’s Queen of Light (played by Gina McKee, who also plays Helena’s mother) is in some sort of coma, from which she can only be awoken by a certain charm; meanwhile the Queen of Darkness is sending out dark tentacles that calcify whatever they touch. Helena decides to go on a quest to wake up the Queen of Light, only to discover that her place in the real world has been taken by the Queen of Darkness’s daughter, on the run from her over-protective mother.

It seems a bit mean to criticise a film for having ambitions above its budget, particularly as this is Dave McKean’s first full-length movie, and something he is obviously passionate about. (You only have to listen to the DVD commentary, where co-writer Neil Gaiman has nothing to contribute aside from the occasional interruption along the lines of, “Oh, look at that there, that’ll become significant later,” whereas McKean sounds like he could fill another DVD or two.) The dream-world he creates is full of visual invention — though I’d say over-full, because it never quite gels into feeling like one place, but shifts in tone and feel from scene to scene. For instance, some of the world’s inhabitants are human in all but that they wear masks, whereas others are barely-human collages of objects. (The police force are so weird I couldn’t work out at all what they were supposed to be.) In terms of the action, threats arise suddenly and inexplicably, and are often escaped without any clear indication of how it was managed. (For instance, when Helena and Valentine go to see the two floating giants and are forced to flee when the Queen of Darkness’s black, calcifying tentacles close in — why don’t the tentacles keep chasing Helena and Valentine? How do they escape these things that are obviously so fast and powerful?) In such a truly dream-like world, it’s difficult to feel at home and allow yourself any expectations of what’s going to happen next in the story, and so the result is a film that, for me, looks great in stills and individual scenes, but which doesn’t quite have the immersive quality of The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth.