Census Bloodbath: He May Be Bad, But He's Perfectly Good At It

If you’re an avid reader of Census Bloodbath, first of all, bless your heart. Second, you may notice that I’ve backtracked a tiny bit. Although I’ve already run a post-mortem on the slashers of 1980 and 1981, a second round of research has added a couple more titles to my list: mostly foreign and obscure stuff, but also titles with dubious connection to the genre that I found myself being more lenient with this time around. I’ll be working back through these extra titles as we also continue to push forward into 1982.

Year: 1980

Director: William Friedkin

Cast: Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino, Karen Allen

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

One of those titles that received a less lenient treatment this time around was Cruising, an Al Pacino crime thriller from The Exorcist and The French Connection auteur William Friedkin. It’s hard to judge a movie’s slasherness sight unseen, but I was dead wrong about this one. Hell, it’s more of a slasher than half the crap I covered from 1980; don’t let the presence of prestige film mainstays fool you.

I don’t care how many Oscars you have between you, this movie has a higher body count than The Stepfather.

Cruising made the highly controversial decision to set a cop thriller in the milieu of New York’s gay S&M leather bar scene. This outraged moralistic heterosexuals, but it also caused a stir in the gay community who objected to the film’s narrow representation and violence against gay men. Fortunately, this is the rare occasion where time has been rather kind to a film’s controversial subject matter. Gay stories are becoming more abundant in the media, so this isn’t the only representation out there, and Cruising has now become something of a historical document capturing a particular urban scene a mere year before AIDS arrived on its doorstep and permanently decimated it.

There’s no denying that the depiction of the sexuality and activities of gay men is depicted with a certain sense of goggle-eyed horror, but removed from the stern gaze of Al Pacino, it’s also unflinchingly erotic, in a way that certainly had never been seen before in mainstream cinemas. It’s hard to watch this film from any perspective and not be awash with conflicting feelings, but it’s possible to read it in a way that doesn’t feel like an attack (as long as you’re aware of the strict conventions of the slasher formula).

I should probably get to the plot. Rookie cop Steve Burns (Al Pacino) is given an undercover assignment by stern father figure Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino); he must pose as a gay man and roam New York’s leather bars to attract the attention of a killer who has been cruising the area and murdering his hookups.

He easily befriends his harmless playwright neighbor Ted (Don Scardino of He Knows You’re Alone) but this deep dive into this psychosexual underworld is causing turmoil in his own mind and in his relationship with Nancy (Karen Allen).

But really, what doesn’t cause Al Pacino turmoil?

The sexual subtext present in every slasher film is incredibly transparent here. Most slasher killers are sexually repressed for one reason or another, and that repression requires a release, causing them to fly into murderous rages, penetrating those who commit the sin of tempting them, using the blade of a knife rather than anything naughty. It’s been this way from Psycho to Sleepaway Camp, and for what I believe is the first time, Cruising flips that concept on its head.

Especially in the 80’s and before, sexual repression is tragically prevalent in the gay community. Many of us are taught from birth that the way we feel is sinful and wrong, and that’s before we add a layer with a fetish like BDSM. The symbolism of the reasonably bloody kills in Cruising (the murderer always stabs his victims in the back) is unmistakable, and the motivation – while twisted – has a sad basis in real-life crimes. 

Symbolism? What symbolism?

For this reason alone, the killer would be terrifying, but combine that with his creepy whispered mantra (“Who’s here? I’m here. You’re here…”) and menacing silhouette, and you have yourself a tremendously chilling and memorable antagonist.

I didn’t even mention that he wears huge sunglasses and a leather jacket, which are pretty memorable in their own right.

Unfortunately, after a stellar first half exploring life and death in this fascinating lost community, Cruising turns its focus to its single weakest element: Al Pacino. His presence in the film was never interesting to begin with (he just silently wanders through bars gawking at men in leather hats groping each other, his only character development being the increasing amount of accessories he wears), but he fails to stick the landing on the two most crucial elements the third act needed to survive: Steve’s descent into madness and the solution to the mystery.

The reveal of the killer is a dud, as it doesn’t involve any of the characters we’ve come to know or any real agency on the part of Steve Burns. He sits around glowering, he’s handed a piece of evidence by the chief, and then he surveils the suspect in a montage so idiotic and cheesy that the film literally irises in on Pacino to underline that fact that he’s in the scene we’ve been watching him be in for three minutes. It’s a fat load of nothing, and it forces the villain’s exciting presence offscreen for far too long.

This devastating lack of action also decimated whatever feeble attempt at a character study there is in Cruising. The idea is supposed to be that Pacino gets too deep undercover and begins to question his own identity, but you get none of that in the man’s poisonously flat performance, which chokes on its own ambiguity. And the screenplay never commits to escalating his behavior to any real degree other than committing to be hog-tied once during a sting operation. It’s so easy to picture the third act that Cruising wanted to have and easily could have created, but it flinches, forcing us to suffer through 40 minutes of Pacino sitting around twiddling his thumbs until we reach the deliberately ambiguous ending that the bungled setup thoroughly failed to earn, and in fact renders completely nonsensical.

You can’t have a cop movie with a cop that doesn’t do anything, and it’s infuriating that this dreadful third act mars a film with this good a setting and villain. The lurid, saturated color and casually explicit sexuality of the first hour are so incredible that the fact the movie falls so hideously short of being a masterpiece is just devastating.

Killer: I’m honestly not sure.

Final Girl: Is there even a girl in this movie?

Best Kill: The momentum is brutally murdered at about minute 56.

Sign of the Times: One of the victims lives above a Radio Shack.

Scariest Moment: A man in a sling gets fisted in the middle of a bar. I’ve never been to New York, but I’m pretty sure that violates the health code.

Weirdest Moment: Sitcom icon Ed O’Neill briefly shows up as a homicide detective.

Champion Dialogue: “If that bulge in your pants ain’t a knife, why don’t we take a walk?”

Body Count: 4

1. Loren Lukas is stabbed in the back.
2. Eric Rossman is stabbed in the back.
3. Martino Perry is stabbed in the back.
4. Ted Bailey is killed offscreen.

TL;DR: Cruising is a waste of the monumental potential that the first hour sets up.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1263

The Devil Went Down To Georgetown

Year: 1973

Director: William Friedkin

Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Linda Blair 

Run Time: 2 hours 2 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Howdy, folks! It’s that time of year again, where the leaves change and a young man’s fancy turns to bloody chainsaws and mutilated corpses. This October, we continue a grand Popcorn Culture tradition of reviewing a classic horror franchise that hasn’t yet been explored on these here pages. Seeing how my Halloween marathon still hasn’t technically concluded, I decided to explore an easier-to-swallow series with a smidge fewer entries: The Exorcist.

This will be the first October marathon I perform in which there are no extant reviews for previous entries, though it’s not for lack of trying. The Exorcist is the only movie I’ve watched in the last three years that I completely failed to write up, having been so busy that my screening eventually became to distant and blurry in memory to reasonably critique the film. So I’m doubly happy today. I get to redeem myself while reviewing a horror classic. And I’m set to dive into another world of increasingly dubious sequels. And there’s only four of them.

Thank Satan.

In The Exorcist, like you needed to know, successful actress Chris McNeil (Ellen Burstyn) is living in Georgetown with her daughter Regan (Linda Blair) while shooting a film. Things turn bad when Regan gets sick and begins acting out, vomiting green slime, and… speaking in other voices? Controlling objects with her mind? Unsurprisingly, a battery of medical tests are not successful, and Chris decides to pursue getting an exorcism. On hand to help are Father Karras (Jason Miller), a priest/psychiatrist with a recently deceased mother who has been doubting his faith, and Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), who takes forever to get anywhere, but certainly knows how to make an entrance.

It almost makes you forget you haven’t seen him in 80 minutes.

The Exorcist is in a tough position, having been labeled “the scariest film of all time.” As the years go by, religious sentiment is hemorrhaged form the American public and patiences stretch too thin to support a two-hour slow burner, attracting some millennial backlash to the film. Both of these parties are insane. No, The Exorcist isn’t the scariest movie ever made, unless you’re a Catholic grandmother. But it’s a damn good horror film that rightfully deserves its iconic status.

If you’re open to it, The Exorcist can tear through your nerves like tissue paper. Regan’s ever-escalating condition is a series of crudely effective shocks, but the real menace here is That Damn Hallway. Every time something gets worse, our heroes are forced to make the trek up the stairs, around the bend, and down That Damn Hallway toward an innocuously blank white door. Through repetition, the film conditions you to expect something terrible every time that door opens, but it lingers, letting the possibilities fester in your mind before the big reveal. The tension created by that hallway and that door is so palpable that you can choke on it.

That’s how The Exorcist works, by psychologically grinding you down until all that’s left is powder. It should really be arrested for assault and battery. In addition to the general body horror tinged with the tragic melancholy of a mother unable to help her daughter get well, there’s also a prolonged sequence of medical testing that’s some of the most disturbing, stomach-churning material of the year. The decade. The century. Of all time?

Well, it’s in the running.

The reason The Exorcist works so well, even today, on those two terrible fronts is that the special effects and make-up design are the work of a genius. That particular genius is Dick Smith (Death Becomes Her, Scanners, The Deer Hunter, Taxi Driver, The Godfather 1 & 2, everything that’s ever mattered), whose effects are an ageless work of art, distorting the human form as far as it can go, rendering believable-looking impossibilities that still hold up forty years later. This is no small feat, and it’s a timeless, realistic nightmare of epic proportions.

Of course we can’t discount director/renowned psychopath William Friedkin. Although I have a distaste for his dubious methods of extracting performances from actors (firing guns near their heads, slapping them, and just generally behaving in a manner that would have the Marquis du Sade asking him to calm down), his control over image and sound in The Exorcist is exquisite.

The sound design is an apoplectic symphony, hammering you with harsh buzzing and thrumming that is abruptly whisked away into a vacuum. Sounds are blasted, silenced, swapped, and juxtaposed against the frame in a completely unpredictable pattern that keeps you on your toes until they’re worn down to the bone. And do I really have to spend much time elaborating on my aesthetic praise of the man who crafted this image?

Didn’t think so.

This confluence of filmmakers working full throttle doesn’t end there. The cast is uniformly terrific as well. Burstyn is an all-too human and fragile mirror for our own reactions to the horror, and Miller and Siedow sell a set of dialogue that toes the line between being unbelievably grave and deliriously campy. But perhaps the most invaluable performer is Linda Blair (with respect to Mercedes McCambridge and Eileen Dietz, who seamlessly provide voiceover and stand-in material), who gives one of the single best child performances ever put to screen. Even before the possession, she gives Regan a grounded naturalism that provides an all-important contrast to the bucking and cursing figure she becomes. Without her The Exorcist would fall flat on its face and the world would be deprived of a pivotal piece of culture.

That said, The Exorcist isn’t perfect. As much as it sings as a piece of cinematic psychological warfare, there are a surprising abundance of narrative and structural flaws. As the story skips through weeks and months, a lot of important material is let on the cutting room floor. We’re often told about things that have happened rather than experiencing them, and are frequently tossed into scenes without an important bit of context to help us understand why exactly we should be worried in this particular moment. There’s also the fact that the rich mother-daughter angle completely evaporates by the third act. 

But I noticed something odd in my notes. I didn’t jot a single thing down during the final half hour of The Exorcist, because I was so engrossed in what was unfolding onscreen, even though I’ve seen it a dozen times before. That’s the power of the film: it’s an experiential masterwork that jangles the nerve and ignites the senses, and everything else just falls away.

TL;DR: The Exorcist is a classic for a reason: it's a psychologically brutal, spine-jangling experience.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1132

Reviews In This Series

The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973)

Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)

The Exorcist III (Blatty, 1990)

Exorcist: The Beginning (Harlin, 2004)

Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (Schrader, 2005)