Census Flashback: Double Dipping Devilry

On our Fright Flashback/Census Bloodbath crossover, every week this summer we'll be exploring an 80's slasher film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to the weekend's upcoming blockbuster.

In anticipation of Deadpool 2, which sees Josh Brolin returning to the world of Marvel as the villain Cable mere weeks after his universe-threatening appearance as Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, I'll be exploring an 80's slasher where the lead villain also played double duty. In 1989 Robert England continued his landmark role as Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, but he also played another infamous villain in that same year's The Phantom of the Opera, which we'll be discussing today.

Year: 1989

Director: Dwight H. Little

Cast: Robert Englund, Jill Schoelen, Alex Hyde-White

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I don't know what it is about classic French literature and pop culture, but two of the most adapted novels in the world are Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. Both books have received the movie treatment more than a dozen times apiece, not to mention TV specials, comics (seriously), and modernizations, as well as one extravagantly popular Broadway musical apiece. 

Phantom is pretty explicitly a horror novel (though certain people choose to highlight the romance over the monstrous element), so it's not shocking that the genre got its grubby little hands on it, as early as 1925. But what's even less shocking is that 80's horror got a swipe in at the property, because if there was one thing genre filmmakers of the time loved more than a new concept for a slasher movie, it was a well-known property already in the public domain. And why not get Robert Englund, for whom playing a man with a hecked-up face was his bread and butter, and who could at least get some literary cred from playing the role? Toss in the director of the exceedingly solid Halloween 4, the special effects guru behind Chucky, the Crypt Keeper, and Freddy himself, plus 80's shlock mega-producer Menahem Golan, and it's a match made in heaven.

Or hell, if you will.

So, the plot should seem pretty familiar, give or take a couple little embellishments. We start off in the 80's for no clear reason other than to gently ease its viewers into a period piece slasher film, following Christine Day (Jill Schoelen, the queen of late 80's/early 90's B-horror, who at this time was fresh off The Stepfather and Cutting Class) as she scours a rare bookstore for material to use during her opera audition. She stumbles across a battered copy of Don Juan Triumphant, and during her audition is hit on the head with a sandbag (?), which sends her back in time (?) to nineteenth century London, when the piece was first written by Erik Destler (Robert Englund, who was by that point a worldwide cultural phenomenon - that very year he was appearing in Freddy drag on MTV left and right).

Christine doesn't seem to realize that she has been transported back into the past, so this whole thing is pretty pointless. I guess they're going for a Mummy-esque reincarnated love thing, but let's call a spade a spade and not pretend it makes a lick of sense. She is a young soprano understudy for the diva La Carlotta (Stephanie Lawrence), but she receives voice lessons from a mysterious angelic figure known as the Phantom, who murders the piss out of anybody who gets in her way. Anyway, it turns out the Phantom is Erik (duh), who has sold his soul to the devil (?), as portrayed by a little person (?), which has made his face all burned and scarred (??). Cue a lot of bad opera and mediocre slashing.

And makeup that's even frightening when it's supposed to seem normal.

Yup, this is one of those cases where the slasher stars seem to have aligned, but alack, those stars got crossed somewhere along the line and it was not meant to be. Phantom of the Opera wants to be a legitimate adaptation of its literary source material and the trashy B-slasher it was always meant to be, but it can't have its cake and stab it too. The slasher elements undercut any ability to take it seriously, and the serious elements make the slasher a bit of a tedious slog.

At every opportunity, Phantom cuts itself short. You can tell it wants to have the quippy punnery of a Freddy Krueger adventure, but then it would tip its hand too far in the "stupid slasher" direction, so it contents itself with some light, playful japing that glances right off the scene and immediately out of one's memory. And it very clearly desires to be an icky, gross-out horror flick, at which it only intermittently succeeds.

Thanks to Kevin Yagher, the moments where the gore comes to the forefront are spectacular. Especially any time we see the Phantom either assembling or dismantling the false skin he wears to get around in the world, it's stomach-churningly gooey grue that lights up the screen. This sensibility is also applied to a certain number of the deaths, especially in the early going, but for some unfathomable reason the bulk of the murders are rendered as run-of-the-mill gut stabbings that completely lack flair and barely shed a drop of blood.

It's telling that this is about the most dynamic screenshot I can find.

That lack of flair isn't isolated to the murder scenes, unfortunately. Although Halloween 4 did sometimes have the tendency to look a bit like a TV movie, at least it had atmosphere. Here, the lighting scheme wouldn't be out of place at a community center bar mitzvah. See, a huge production is made out of candlelit rooms, and the fact that the Phantom lurks in the shadows to hide his twisted visage. But whenever he blows out a candle to hide his face, the room is still so blasted with light that it looks like he's on the set of King of Queens. If anything, the room seemed darker before the candle blew out. The lighting is so conspicuously inappropriate that it drags you cornea-first out of the movie, undermining the character to a ruthlessly extreme degree.

This is a real shame, because Robert Englund clearly cared about this character. The apathy that defines his Dream Child performance is completely absent here, and he's trying his darnedest to assemble something resembling pathos from the role. It all falls apart like a sand castle too close to the tide, but it's not his fault. There is hardly an inch of plot to hang this performance on within the repetitive (yet somehow infrequent) slashings and endless scenes of Jill Schoelen lip syncing to a deeply milquetoast opera track with English lyrics that feel like they were ripped from a seventh grader's songwriting journal.

I dearly wish The Phantom of the Opera had been much better than it was. Period piece horror films aren't exactly a dime a dozen, and when one gets a chunk of change significant enough to make that a reality, I always hope for the best. Unfortunately for the slasher genre in 1989, "the best" was never really an option. It's Robert Englund's best film of the year by a country mile, but that's praise so faint it can't even muster up the energy to damn anything.

Killer: Erik Destler (Robert Englund)

Final Girl: Christine Day (Jill Schoelen)

Best Kill: Most of the kills are pretty bog-standard, but during the Phantom's first kill, blood covers his face as it contorts with orgasmic delight, which is pretty intense. Also eventually the body is hung up in a closet, sans skin, which is likewise rather intense.

Sign of the Times: When she returns to present day, Christine discovers the completed version of Don Juan Triumphant on a floppy disk.

Scariest Moment: When Christine first discovers the pages of the opera and sings them aloud, the notes on the page turn into drops of blood.

Weirdest Moment: Christine's best friend in the framing sequence is played by Molly Shannon in her first film role.

Champion Dialogue: "Better submerged in bathwater than mediocrity."

Body Count: 10

1. Joseph is gutted with a knife while being winched up into the air.
2. Ruffian #1 is stabbed in the gut.
3. Ruffian #2 is decapitated with a knife.
4. Lead Ruffian is stabbed in the gut.
5. Harrison has his head crushed with a towel.
6. La Carlotta is beheaded offscreen, and her head is boiled into a soup.
7. Rat Catcher is impaled on a spike.
8. Morris has his throat slit offscreen.
9. Davis has his heart pulled out of his chest.
10. Richard is stabbed with a candle holder and burned alive.

TL;DR: The Phantom of the Opera is an admirable effort, but grafting a slasher onto classic literature rendered both of those things not particularly interesting.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1493

Popcorn Kernels: Only 90's Kids Will Get It

Welcome back to our regularly scheduled program of mid-length mini-reviews! Today we’re playing catch-up on two B-list entries in quintessential 90’s genres: teen movies and post-Scream horror!

Never Been Kissed

Year: 1999

Director: Raja Gosnell

Cast: Drew Barrymore, David Arquette, Michael Vartan

Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A reporter goes undercover at the local high school for a story, but gets distracted by her attempt to reset her loser reputation and a budding romance with a handsome teacher.

Never Been Kissed is one of those movies that rom-com fans should never ever revisit. Not because it’s terrible, but because in retrospect it’s deeply inappropriate. A lot of rom-coms glorify behaviors like stalking, going after taken men, or rushing into marriages, but this is the only one I’m aware of where the central relationship is between a teacher and someone who he believes to be 17. And the other spoke on that love triangle is between the undercover reporter and somebody who’s actually 17. This movie shouldn’t be allowed within 50 feet of a high schooler’s collection.

If you try to ignore that by focusing on the sparsely dotted line of morality where you know that she secretly is of age, the rest of the movie still isn’t a terrific entry in the genre, but it’s pleasant enough. It’s definitely a hang-out movie, allowing charming stars Drew Barrymore, David Arquette (who I will always love, so sue me), Molly Shannon (in an excellent and rare role as a woman who’s actually on top of things – especially in bed), John C. Reilly, and Octavia Spencer (who is still paying her dues by playing the role she would play in every movie for a decade and change: the coworker who goes “Mmhmm!”) to sit back, relax, and have fun, without getting tripped up by anything as gauche as a plot.

The first act takes up about half the film, and if we didn’t already know the title, we wouldn’t know Barrymore’s character was a kiss virgin until about ten minutes before the closing credits. Although we definitely could have deduced as much, thanks to their preposterously extreme efforts to plausibly nerdify the charming young actress, which include her clomping around with her back hunched like a hungover Igor, wearing what can only be described as knitted maternity clothes, and sporting lips more chapped than Blake Lively’s at the end of The Shallows.

The movie is actually really careless with its best element, that of an adult attempting to rewrite her high school life and learning how much things have changed. It could have been 21 Jump Street, but its utter lack of focus makes the plot a sub-Cinderella Story wash. While the humor is decent (my favorite jokes in the film are a handful of absurdist visual gags that slam into the film completely out of nowhere), the structure is both directionless (the third act monologue – as played by her story in the newspaper – is equally as confused about what it’s supposed to be saying as we are. At any rate, it’s certainly too vague and diary-ish to actually be a good article in a real paper) and deeply stupid (Love Interest is actively upset that she’s not 17, so she makes a grand romantic gesture… forcing him to kiss her in front of a stadium full of people like a goddamn psychopath). Not to mention icky. While charming, Never Been Kissed is a deeply flawed movie that you won’t want to take home to mom.

TL;DR: 6/10

Phantoms

Year: 1998

Director: Joe Chappelle

Cast: Ben Affleck, Rose McGowan, Joanna Going 

Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A small-town doctor and her little sister arrive home and discover that half the townspeople are dead and the rest are missing. They are haunted by strange visions as they team up with the sheriff and his team to try and survive the night.

With a movie that came out two years after Scream that stars Rose McGowan and other teen favorites and boasts one of those lazy group photo posters, you’d think you know exactly what you’re getting. You’d be very wrong, because Phantoms ain’t no dime-a-dozen quippy slasher. This is an adaptation of a Dean Koontz novel, one of his most underrated tomes of the macabre. Of course, being a Dean Koontz movie comes with its own set of rules. Mainly, it sucks.

Stephen King must have sold his soul to some Lovecraftian film gods, because it’s utter hogwash that he’s given us Carrie, The Shining, Misery, and so on, and the best we get from Koontz is Watchers 3.

So yes, despite being adapted from one of my favorite novels, Phantoms is a cinematic compost heap. Setting aside what they changed from the source material (everything) and how that affected the story (poorly), approaching Phantoms as a film taken on its own is still a miserable, pointless endeavor. Trying to find something good to say about it is like trying to decide which fart smells the best. At the end of the day, you’re still smelling farts.

A bizarre attempt to remake The Thing on a Ghost Cat budget, Phantoms is an effects-driven horror film without the effects. It finds so many ways around showing any sort of gore or grotesquerie (including, but not limited to, POV shots and those obnoxious film negative flash cuts that we all the rage in the 90’s) that it’s only when the characters start arbitrarily spouting F-words in the third act that you realize it wasn’t cut for TV.

And it’s not like the people on set can't act (hell, Peter O’Toole is in the bloody thing). It’s just that they’re not acting. A babyfaced Ben Affleck flounders in a tough-guy sheriff role that makes him look like a second grader playing dressup, Rose McGowan’s not asked to do anything other than be an asshole and stand in the corner, and Peter O’Toole is about fifty years past his prime. Their bored underreactions and the film’s careless editing mean that not a single shock gag lands.

When a lineup of cardboard characters is hastily shuffled through a randomly sawn-off handful of plot beats, it’s hard to get a foothold. The film sprints toward the finish line before you can even begin to care about what’s going on, despite the atmospheric eeriness of exactly two sequences.

To make a long, boring story short, Phantoms is an embarrassment to a subgenre that produced films like Valentine and Urban Legends: Bloody Mary. Steer clear of it, not that you’ll need to put much effort into that.

TL;DR: 6/10

Word Count: 1108

Funnily, Last Summer

Year: 2001

Director: David Wain

Cast: Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Michael Showalter

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It's a surprise I've managed to avoid seeing Wet Hot American Summer for so long, considering that I have a long-documented love affair with 80's summer camp movies and absurdist comedies. 

What's not a surprise, however, is how long it took me to write this review. Considering how a list of great jokes doesn't really count as legitimate film analysis and considering how there's precious little more than great jokes in the construction of WHAS, there's not a lot else to say.

But guess what! I'm gonna say it anyway. Suckers.

Wet Hot American Summer is essentially a series of interconnected sketches given context through the location and residents of Camp Firewood, a 1981 Jewish summer camp in the forests of Maine. Because he is shown first and has the most complete character arc, the de facto protagonist is nerdy counselor Coop Cooperberg (Michael Showalter), but the story is mostly composed of vignettes starring a clown car of contemporary and future stars.

We've got Romy and Michele's Janeane Garofalo as the head counselor, Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers' Paul Rudd as the resident bad boy, Elizabeth Banks as his bikini-clad companion, David Hyde Pierce as the astrophysicist next door, and Amy Freaking Poehler and Bradley Hulking Cooper as the officious siblings who run the talent show. The ensemble is fleshed out with Ken Marino (In A World...), Michael Ian Black (Ed), and Molly Shannon (SNL), among about a dozen others. Seriously, the wattage on this tiny 2001 comedy could short out every circuit breaker in a large city. Or one of Paris Hilton's smaller vacation homes.

My face every time a new character comes onscreen.

Think of all the Ant-Man/Pitch Perfect spin-offs this pairing could create.

Over the course of its 97 minutes, WHAS runs the gamut of just about every type of comedy under the sun (not to mention one or two lunar styles), but its biggest strength lies in absurdist subversion of the typical tropes of the teen sex comedy. Entire lung-busting scenes are built from the insertion of just one cliché line and the exploration of its implications. The screenwriters pick apart semiotics of the genre that the typical audience would never pick up on because they're so accustomed to the formula that they just don't think about it anymore.

Wet Hot American Summer is willing to do that thinking, and as a result, many of its parodic scenes are intelligently tilted into the absurd. In general, the absurdity of the film is its shining light, as the gods of comedy arbitrarily raise the stakes in low drama scenes, thwart any possible expectations, and spur laughter from even the stoniest of guts. Also, the denouement creates a surprisingly feminist thesis, and the films treatment of homosexuality as a running gag is similarly sensitive, surpassing even the genre titan Will & Grace in terms of its treatment of minority sexualities.

You might notice that I'm tip-toeing around the actual contents of these scenes, but that's because spoiling the jokes completely removes any reason to view the film. And therein lies the biggest flaw of Wet Hot American Summer. 

Besides this haircut, I mean.

Much of the comedy is genuinely enjoyable, but the film has no meat and potatoes. It's all sugar, and the rush wears off quickly. The sketches have no geographical or character continuity between them, and some of them are exceedingly pointless, tossing themselves like boulders in the path of the film's pacing. Two of the film's worst moments are given favored run times, and one recurring gag culminates in a sputtering finale that not only utterly fails to even attempt to be funny, but interrupts the film during a key third act moment.

But all in all, Wet Hot American Summer is necessary viewing for any fan of teen romps like American Pie or scatterbrained absurdity like Monty Python or National Lampoon. In spite of its flaws and its relative shallowness (as compared to true classics like Airplane! and other Leslie Nielsen vehicles, in both senses of the word), it has a lot of joy to give and I can't bring myself to deny anybody of its pleasures.

TL;DR: Wet Hot American Summer is an intelligent absurdist comedy that's genuinely funny, but perhaps too thin to be a truly unimpeachable classic.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 745