Angel Heart

In 1987, the stars aligned for Alan Parker’s horror noir adaptation of William Hjortsberg’s 1978 novel, Fallen Angel, into the film Angel Heart. It was part of a trend in the mid to late 1980s of movies featuring supernatural elements tied to Caribbean or South American magic with Santería and brujería in The Believers (1987), and Voodoo magic in Child’s Play (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) being notable examples.
 
Several attempts had been made to adapt Hjortsberg’s book since its publication, but it wasn’t until Parker signed on to the project that it got serious traction. It didn’t hurt that he cast Mickey Rourke as his lead actor, red hot from the notoriety of 9 ½ Weeks (1986), and opposite him, Lisa Bonet, one of the breakout stars of the very popular television sitcom, The Cosby Show, which raised eyebrows at the time as she was known for playing a squeaky clean character in a wholesome show to starring as a femme fatale in a sexually explicit film.
 
Despite this, and the controversial, steamy sex scene between Bonet and Rourke’s characters, which forced Parker to cut 10 seconds to avoid an X rating, Angel Heart failed to make back its $18 million budget and received a mixed critical reaction. It has, however, gone on to influence filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and enjoyed a re-evaluation over the years as an atmospheric neo-noir fused with unsettling elements of supernatural horror.

New York City, 1955. Parker immediately immerses us in the snow-bound city with shadowy alleyways and great attention to period details with era-specific cars and clothes that set a noirish tone. Harold Angel (Rourke) is a slightly seedy private investigator approached by a mysterious client named Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) for a job. They meet at a church in Harlem and right from the get-go something is off. It could be the woman outside on the verge of passing out, surrounded by family and friends, or it could be the room where a woman is scrubbing gruesome blood-spattered stains off a wall from an apparent suicide by a parishioner who blew his brains out.
 
The initial meeting between two of the greatest actors of their respective generations is as wonderful as one would hope as they face off against each other. Robert De Niro plays it low-key yet ominous with the occasional sidelong glances at his no-nonsense attorney (played by Law & Order’s Dann Florek) and exuding a cultured air while also a malevolence in his piercing stare. In contrast, Rourke playfully mispronounces Cyphre’s name and acts nervous, laughing uncomfortably as Harry is clearly intimidated by his future employer. Their scenes together, particularly their first and last one, are some of the film’s best moments if only to see De Niro’s bemused malice square off against Rourke’s smartass bravado.
 
Cyphre wants Harry to track down a well-known singer by the name of Johnny Favorite from back in the day who failed to honor a contract. Johnny came back from World War II suffering from shellshock and extensive facial injuries involving intensive reconstruction. He wants to know if the man is still alive but, of course, it isn’t that easy as Harry quickly realizes.

Rourke is perfectly cast as a low-rent P.I. in way over his head. He excels at playing these types of characters and delivers a memorable performance as a cocky gumshoe whose whole life gradually unravels. Harry is literally a tortured soul but not particular smart as it becomes apparent early on as he fails to pick up on the clues to the nature of his character. The film’s most significant moment of horror comes with his big revelation – something that was readily apparent to everyone else. Rourke gives it his all in the scene, conveying a truly tormented soul with raw intensity.

Much was made at the time of Bonet’s highly sexualized performance and how different it was from her family-friendly character on The Cosby Show. She shows off plenty of skin and is fine as a voodoo priestess with a secret, but comes off a little stiff, at times, in the scenes she shares with Rourke, a much superior actor. Fortunately, the camera loves her and she photographs very well, providing an alluring screen presence.
 
Parker’s screenplay tells us too much of what we are already seeing. On several occasions, Harry tells Epiphany Proudfoot (Bonet) how beautiful she is, which is unnecessary. We have eyes, we see her beauty by the way she is photographed. Harry also repeatedly says how much he hates chickens, which seems too on-the-nose, and that he’s from Brooklyn, which we quickly discern from his accent.

What Parker the screenwriter lacks in subtlety (Louis Cyphre = Lucifer – really?) Parker the director more than makes up for it with excellent direction and gorgeous cinematography courtesy of frequent collaborator Michael Seresin, aided by the incredible, period-rich production design by Brian Morris and art direction of 1950s era New York by Armin Ganz and Kristi Zea that envelopes you in this world with its evocative imagery of slow spinning fans and gated elevators going down, even if the latter image is rather heavy-handed (I wonder where it is going to?).

Visually, Parker contrasts the cold darkness of New York with the bright, sun-drenched heat of New Orleans. The source novel takes place entirely in NYC, but I can see what drew Parker to N.O. It is a visually stunning place with its own unique look and vibe. Parker plays up its hot house atmosphere, complete with sensual heat generated by Bonet and Rourke.
 
Alan Parker was sent the book when it was published in 1978 where it had immediately acquired a reputation for being tough to adapt as it was told in the first person “since so much of it happens inside the person’s head,” said the filmmaker. Paramount Pictures optioned the rights with the book’s author William Hjortsberg writing the screenplay. Robert Evans was being lined up to produce with John Frankenheimer directing. Not long afterwards Dick Richards replaced Frankenheimer with Dustin Hoffman starring as Harry Angel.

Parker was then re-introduced to the book when producer Elliot Kastner gave it to him in 1985. He hadn’t written a screenplay in a while, instead mostly rewriting other people’s work. He was also intrigued about the fusing of the supernatural with the detective story. In adapting the novel, Parker changed the story form being set entirely in New York City to half there and the other half in New Orleans for “very selfish reasons,” and “a lot of the leads within the novel itself went down to New Orleans, and I thought it was a way for me to open it up and give it a different look.” He also felt that New York was an “overly filmed city,” but was drawn to Harlem as he felt that not enough films had been shot there. He did research at the Harlem Library, looking into “bizarre religious movements of the 1930s and 1940s, born of economic isolation, and perhaps spiritual desperation.” He wrote most of the script there and “once I’d broken the back of the story” wrote the rest in New Orleans where he had wanted to move some of the action. It was there that he wrote, “sitting at corner tables in remote bars in the city’s shadowy back streets.”
 
In search of financial backing, Parker met with Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar at the Cannes Film Festival after a screening of Birdy (1984). The independent movie producers had made millions of dollars with the lucrative Rambo and Terminator franchises and were willing to take risks on films like Angel Heart, agreeing to finance it.
 
For the casting Harry Angel, Parker met with Jack Nicholson but he didn’t show much interest. He then met with Mickey Rourke for lunch and, according to Parker, “told me quite emphatically that he was the only one to play Harry Angel and so I should ‘stop talking to the other guys.’”

Parker courted Robert De Niro for months, meeting a few times, and went over the script, “every single line and everyone single idea that he had from the point-of-view of the character,” the filmmaker remembered. Two weeks away from filming and Parker still hadn’t gotten De Niro to commit to the film. Originally, he had been approached to play Harry Angel but told the director that he wanted to play Cyphre. Parker didn’t want to pressure the actor in case he said no as there wasn’t an alternative choice for the part.
 
Parker had not seen Bonet on The Cosby Show. She came and was the second person to audition for the part. Parker was impressed with her: “She was very young, she had an innate intelligence beyond her years.”
 
Not surprisingly, De Niro committed fully to the transformation into his character: “All I know is when we were working we always knew when he was on the set because suddenly we all felt kind of strange. He became very creepy…You’d feel his presence. Somebody would say, ‘Bob must be here,’ and you’d turn around and there he was,” Parker remembered. For De Niro and Rourke’s first scene Parker used two cameras simultaneously in opposite directions, “this way, should the two of them begin to improvise or go off at a tangent, provoking in the other an action or reaction, a moment’s magic that one inspired in the other would be captured on film.” Observing their acting styles, Parker said, “Bob was cool, meticulous, charming and generous, but had everything under control. Mickey was disarming and ingenuous, but at all times gave as good as he took.”

Angel Heart was originally given an X rating by the Motion Picture Association of America for the sex scene between Bonet and Rourke’s characters. Parker said at the time, “They have not told me what it is specifically they objected to. I am not really sure what is acceptable and what is not…It’s like carving up a body. You get down to where there’s only a foot left and they say, ‘Ah, that’s it.’” The Director’s Guild of America then-president Gilbert Cates leant his support: “We’re against any kind of censoring of material.” Parker appealed the X rating twice before cutting 10 seconds from the scene to obtain an R rating on February 26, 1987. Parker said of the experience, “The film will play uncut almost everywhere in Europe. In most countries, sex is not something that gives you a problem. Violence is. It’s almost the reverse of the way it is here, where you can blow 10 people’s heads off in two minutes and it’s OK.”
 
Angel Heart received a mixed to negative critical reaction. Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars and wrote, “Angel Heart is a thriller and a horror movie, but most of all it's an exuberant exercise in style, in which Parker and his actors have fun taking it to the limit.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Affection of any sort is totally lacking in this film adaptation. The only wit is supplied by Mr. De Niro, who delivers his lines, some of which are genuinely funny, with a comic daintiness that gives firm style to the otherwise murky, pointless narrative “ The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley wrote, “While it has a sinister elegance, the movie is over-stylized, and we're over-stimulated when the soundtrack goes berserk, from a few thumpity-thumps to a visceral, ventricles a-pumping score.” In her review for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote, “This is a lavishly sombre piece of hokum-funereal and loony.”
 
For all of its heavy-handedness, Angel Heart is ultimately a triumph of style over substance. I like how Parker gradually introduces the horror genre elements as Harry dives deeper into the voodoo culture that Johnny was a participant. He ratchets it up when more people Harry encounters wind up dead in all kinds of horrible ways. Horror noirs drenched in atmosphere are cinematic catnip for me and on this level the film certainly delivers. Parker has made a neo-noir as a waking nightmare with Harry trying to desperately to wake up, but unable to much like he is unable to escape his true nature.

Angel Heart would make for an excellent double bill with another horror noir, Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999) also with a slight script offset by plenty of style to spare and featuring a damned protagonist to anchor the occult lunacy that threatens to overwhelm the film. Whereas Polanski’s film playfully pokes fun at genre conventions, Parker’s effort treats them with deadly seriousness, which exposes the script’s deficiencies. It could have used a bit more levity other than the occasional flourishes by Rourke. As a result, at times, we are laughing at Angel Heart rather than with it in the case of The Ninth Gate.
 
 
SOURCES
 
Daily Variety. April 28, 1986.
 
Gallagher, John A. Perfect Movies. February 17, 1987.
 
Parker, Alan. Angel Heart: The Making of the Film – Beat for Beat. Tri-Star Pictures. 1987.
 
Publishers Weekly. August 21, 1978.

The Lords of Salem

With the exception of Eli Roth, no other filmmaker in the 2000s has divided horror movie fans more than hard rocker turned director Rob Zombie. People either love or hate his brand of grungy, white trash nihilistic cinema where he identifies with the antagonists rather than the protagonists, be it the Firefly clan in House of 1000 Corpses (2003), The Devil’s Rejects (2005), and 3 From Hell (2019), or Michael Myers in Halloween (2007) and its sequel (2009). With The Lords of Salem (2012), he created his first traditional protagonist only to place her in an unconventional film. Enjoying the most creative freedom he had since Rejects, he eschewed the gore and extreme violence of his previous films in favor of a heavy atmosphere of dread. Freedom from the constraints of a studio franchise (Halloween) emboldened Zombie to push himself as a filmmaker, creating a fascinating phantasmagorical experience.
 
Heidi LaRoc (Sheri Moon Zombie) is a disc jockey at a local, popular Salem hard rock radio station where she co-hosts a show along with two others – Herman “Whitey” Salvador (Jeff Daniel Phillips) and Herman “Munster” Jackson (Ken Foree). She lives with her dog in an old apartment building and one day spots a new tenant in the apartment down the hall. When she asks her landlady (Judy Geeson) the identity of the new inhabitant, she is told that no one lives there.
 
One day at work, a mysterious record shows up in an old wooden box, addressed to Heidi, by a band called The Lords. She listens to it with Whitey and the music causes her to have a vision of a 17th century-era coven of Satan-worshipping witches. She finds herself inexplicably drawn to the apartment down the hall and once there, finds herself confronted by disturbing visions, including a nightmarish beast in an otherworldly landscape. Heidi’s mind unravels over the course of the film as The Lords record really puts the zap on her, blurring the lines between reality and nightmare.

Right from the get-go, Zombie does a wonderful job capturing the cool, crisp autumn days in the Northeast via the cinematography, drawing us into this world. He utilizes a warm, amber filter for night scenes and muted colors, creating a grey, cold look for day scenes. For the first third, he adopts a slow burn approach, not revealing too much, gradually building the dread, letting us get to know Heidi so that we care about happens to her in the latter two acts of the film. He populates the film with Kubrickian low-angle shots of hallways and breaks up the story into days of the week, a la The Shining (1980). He also shows a knack for striking visuals as evident in the fiery, apocalyptic inferno that is the 17th century witch trials, illustrating the Puritans meting out their religious brand of ‘justice.’
 
Sheri Moon Zombie has gotten a lot of flak for her acting prowess and the fact that she almost exclusively appears in her husband’s films, usually in a supporting role, whether it be significant (Rejects) or smaller (Halloween). In The Lords of Salem she is cast in the lead role, the responsibility of carrying the film placed squarely upon her shoulders. Because Moon’s acting ability is inherently tied to her expressive looks and may not have the broadest range, she benefits from Zombie’s ‘less is more’ approach. Heidi doesn’t have a lot of dialogue and, once the effects of The Lords record take hold on her character. She spends most of her time reacting to the strange things going on around her. Sheri does a commendable job of showing a woman plagued by horrible visions of faceless surgeons pulling her intestines out, struggling to make sense of what is happening, and displaying increasingly erratic behavior.
 
Veteran actor Bruce Davidson is excellent as a Salem witch scholar that figures out the connection between The Lords record and the Salem witches. Zombie regular Jeff Daniel Phillips is also memorable as a disc jockey that works and is close friends with Heidi. There is a nicely understated romantic tension between the two characters, suggesting a longstanding friendship, evidenced by the familiar shorthand between them.

As with his other films, Zombie acknowledges horror films from the past by casting its royalty with the likes of Dee Wallace, Judy Geeson, and Ken Foree in crucial roles, and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos by Barbara Crampton, Michael Berryman, and Sig Haig. This isn’t simple stunt casting or a knowing wink to fellow horror genre fans, rather actors playing bonafide, lived-in characters.

The Lords of Salem is a captivating film with Brandon Trost’s atmospheric cinematography giving it a much richer look than its meager $1.5 million budget would suggest. Zombie gets the most out of his locations, choosing those that give a real sense of place including, most crucially, the apartment building that Heidi inhabits. Everything has a lived-in look, from the clutter in the D.J. booth where Heidi does her show to Davidson’s bookcase-dominated home.
 
If there is one erroneous aspect of this film, it’s the reliance on the tired cliché of Satan-worshipping witches. Witchcraft is pagan in nature. While a large number of witches don’t worship any god or goddess, there are those that do…but not Satan. It could be that he is used in film because it is an easily identifiable embodiment of evil, even outside of the Christian faith. Zombie did such a great job in all other areas and seemed to be interested in bucking tradition, then fell back on a stereotypical portrayal that is disappointing, but hardly surprising as this has been done in countless horror films.
 
Zombie tones down the gore in favor of disturbing imagery reminiscent of Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), creating an overwhelming feeling of dread and unease. In that sense, The Lords of Salem is a refreshing outlier in Zombie’s filmography as it dials back the aggressive, extreme horror films of such films as 31 (2016) by shifting gears to more supernatural-based horror, as demonstrated in the showstopping finale. Zombie pulls out the strangest imagery that he’s ever produced and marries it with his trademark downbeat ending, scored to chilling effect with “All Tomorrow’s Parties” by The Velvet Underground and Nico. The Lords of Salem is not a scary movie per se… instead Zombie creates a more chilling, unsettling experience. It appeared that he was maturing and evolving as a filmmaker but when it barely made back its budget, he went back to what he knew best – extreme horror with hillbillies and white trash with 31. That being said, he is still capable of throwing audiences the occasional curve ball as he did in 2002 with the odd career move of making a studio-backed film adaptation of the much-beloved 1960s family sitcom, The Munsters. True to form, by design or not, Zombie’s work continues to fascinate fans and detractors alike.

High Plains Drifter

 

From The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (1966) to Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) to Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood has made all kinds of westerns. High Plains Drifter (1973) is one of his more intriguing efforts in the genre – it takes the enigmatic Man with No Name gunslinger from Sergio Leone films such as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), fusing it with the gothic sensibilities of the Don Siegel film, The Beguiled (1971). It starts off as a typical lone gunfighter-for-hire story. In this film, Eastwood’s mysterious character is part avenging angel and part vengeance demon, determined to punish the people of a town for a crime that is gradually revealed.
 
The Stranger (as he is referred to in the credits) literally materializes out of the hazy, shimmering horizon like an apparition while Dee Barton’s eerie music plays on the soundtrack. After Eastwood’s credit and the film’s title appears, the score transitions into a more traditional western motif, reminiscent of Ennio Morricone’s Spaghetti Western soundtracks.
 
High Plains Drifter starts in typical western fashion with a hired gun wandering into the town of Lago looking for work. After quickly and efficiently dispatching three mercenaries who challenge him, he’s offered a job by the town elders. Stacey Bridges (Geoffrey Lewis) and the Carlin brothers, Dan (Dan Vadis) and Cole (Anthony James), have just been released from prison. They tried to steal gold from the town and whipped Marshal Jim Duncan (Buddy Van Horn) to death. Now, they aim to return, take the gold, and exact revenge on the townsfolk.

The Stranger agrees and is given unlimited credit at all of the town’s stores and proceeds to exploit their goodwill, starting off by giving two American Indian children candy they were eyeing and a pile of blankets to their grandfather, right after the store owner berated them with racial slurs. He goes on to accumulate material items for free – new boots, a saddle, and cigars. He then uses his leverage to humiliate the town elders by making Mordecai (Billy Curtis), the town dwarf, the new sheriff and mayor, and has the hotel owner’s barn stripped of its wood to build picnic tables, much to their chagrin. They have to go along with it, lest they lose the only person standing between them and the vengeful outlaws headed their way.
 
The film’s big question: who is The Stranger and what is his motivation? Within minutes of being in Lago he has killed three men and raped a woman (Marianna Hill). Initially, it appears to be a nasty, misogynistic streak in the character but, as we learn more about the town and in its denizens, the more we understand what this mysterious gunslinger is doing. His motivation begins to shift into focus early on when he dreams of the Marshal being whipped to death while the whole town watched and did nothing. The haunting music from the start of the film comes on as we see Bridges and the Carlin brothers whip Duncan at night. He pleads for help while all the townsfolk stand and stare, the camera framing them in near-dark shots, some almost in silhouette, which creates an ominous mood. As the poor man is whipped to death he mutters, “Damn you all to hell,” which is exactly what The Stranger plans to do to the complicit townsfolk.
 
Interestingly, the second flashback to what happened to the Marshal that fateful night is predominantly from Mordecai’s perspective. He takes us back and this time, we see the townsfolk’s faces more clearly. Unlike The Stranger, he was there and saw what happened. Eastwood also cuts back and forth from shots of the outlaws’ evil faces, the residents, and the Marshal’s point-of-view. In doing so, he makes the man’s pain and suffering more personal and we see the townsfolk’s reaction to what is happening more clearly – some are indifferent, some afraid, and some malevolently approving. It is Mordecai, however, who seems the most upset and remorseful.

Who is the Marshal to The Stranger? It is never clear. The hotel owner’s wife, Sarah (Verna Bloom) even asks him: he is coy with the answer, refusing to confirm or deny his relationship with the dead man. Everything he does in the town, from making a mockery of its elders to getting carte blanche with all of their resources, is to punish the townsfolk, not just for their complacency but for their sins. As the film progresses, we also learn more about what motivates the town elders – why they are so distrustful of outsiders, why they are so eager to cover things up, and why they hired The Stranger to protect them from Bridges and the Carlin brothers. The scenes with them illustrate the corruption inherent in the authoritarian structure – something Eastwood has been distrustful of his entire career – as The Stranger’s abuse of power eats away at the relationship among the town elders until they begin to turn on each other.
 
Future members of Eastwood’s informal repertory company of actors, Geoffrey Lewis, Anthony James, and Dan Vadis are well cast as the grungy, amoral outlaws that kill three men in cold blood as soon as they are released from prison, stealing their horses and clothes. These consummate character actors have no problem playing dirty, unrepentant, evil criminals and, over the course of the film, we anticipate their inevitable confrontation with Eastwood’s gunfighter. The key to his films is to have someone who is a formidable threat to his character and Lewis, with his character’s ruthless drive to exact revenge, is completely believable in that role.
 
Clint Eastwood received a nine-page treatment from Ernest Tidyman, known mostly for writing the screenplays for urban crime films such as Shaft (1971) and The French Connection (1971). The primary inspiration for the screenplay was the real-life murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, New York in 1964, in which 38 witnesses saw or heard the attack and failed to help her or call the police. The starting point for Eastwood was, “What would have happened if the sheriff in High Noon had been killed? What would have happened afterwards?” Once he agreed to do it, Tidyman took these two ideas and developed the treatment into a script that was subsequently revised by Eastwood’s go-to script doctor, Dean Riesner, who added, his trademark black humor: early in the film, one of Lago’s hired guns says to The Stranger, “Maybe you think you’re fast enough to keep up with us, huh?” to which he replies curtly, “A lot faster than you’ll ever live to be.” The biggest mystery of the film is The Stranger’s identity. Eastwood later admitted that the script identified him as the dead sheriff’s brother and that “I always played it like he was the brother. I thought about playing it a little bit like he was sort of an avenging angel, too.”

High Plains Drifter was put into production in late summer of 1972. The studio wanted Eastwood to shoot the film on its backlot but Eastwood decided to shoot on location. He originally considered Pyramid Lake, Nevada but his car ran out of gas before he got there. The American Indian tribal council were divided about a film crew shooting on their land. Someone in the production suggested Mono Lake in California, which Eastwood had visited in the past. Once he arrived, the filmmaker found a point overlooking the lake and decided that would be the site for the town. He went on to find all the other locations within a four-minute drive save for the opening shot, which was done outside of Reno. Production designer Henry Bumstead and his team built the town of Lago in 28-days. They assembled 14 houses, a church and a two-story hotel. These were complete buildings so that Eastwood could shoot interior scenes on location.
 
The Stranger has the townsfolk literally transform Lago into Hell by painting of all the buildings red – a striking image to be sure – which not only evokes hellish imagery but also symbolizes the blood on the hands of the townsfolk who were all culpable in the Marshal’s death. The climax of High Plains Drifter is where the film goes full-on horror as The Stranger leaves, letting the ill-prepared townsfolk “handle” Bridges and the Carlin brothers. Naturally, they put up little to no resistance as they are too scared to shoot and run away or as in the case of Drake (Mitchell Ryan), the mining executive, are shot and killed.
 
Later that night, Bridges and his crew terrorize the survivors, exposing their hypocrisy. It is at this point when The Stranger reappears, that, just like the Marshall, as Cole is mercilessly whipped to death with The Stranger framed with nightmarish flames of the town burning in the background. The two surviving outlaws walk through the town on fire – hell on earth indeed – only for Dan to be whipped around the neck and hung. Bridges still has not seen The Stranger until he hears the words, “Help me,” (sounding very much like the murdered Marshal) and turns to see him standing in front of a burning building for the final showdown. He easily guns down Bridges who asks The Stranger’s identity – and gets no response.

Late in the film, the motel keeper’s wife, Sarah (Verna Bloom) says, “They say the dead don’t rest without a marker of some kind.” High Plains Drifter ends on an emotional note as The Stranger observes Mordecai naming the Marshal’s previously unmarked grave before riding out of town, disappearing into the hazy horizon like a ghost with a reprise of the unnerving music from the opening credits. The dead Marshal can finally rest: those responsible for his demise have been punished. The film is a scathing indictment of how greed can corrupt those in positions of power. It is also a powerful critique of bystander apathy, as embodied by a town of cowards and petty, greedy tyrants that let a good man die. The Stranger embodies the dead man’s spirit and his search for vengeance.
 
 
SOURCES
 
Gentry, Ric. "Director Clint Eastwood: Attention to Detail and Involvement for the Audience.” Clint Eastwood: Interviews. University of Mississippi. 1999.
 
Hughes, Howard. Aim for the Heart. I.B. Tauris. 2009
 
McGilligan, Patrick. Clint: The Life and Legend. Harper Collins. 1999.
 
Schickel, Richard. Clint Eastwood: A Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. 1996.
 
Wilson, Michael Henry. “’Whether I Succeed or Fail, I Don’t Want to Owe it to Anyone but Myself’: From Play Misty for Me to Honkytonk Man.” Clint Eastwood: Interviews. University of Mississippi. 1999.

Halloween II

 

Rob Zombie’s remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween in 2007 was a financial success prompting the studio to greenlight the inevitable sequel. Enough time had passed after the making of that movie that he had forgotten what a difficult experience it and was willing to go again but this time he would no longer be constrained with having to remake another person’s movie thus allowing him to follow his creative bliss, making a follow-up that was more brutal and refreshingly stranger than the previous movie. The result was Halloween II (2009).
 
After a brief flashback to Michael as a child, recounting a dream he had to his mother (Sheri Moon Zombie), we are brought back to the present with a bloody and battered Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) walking down the middle of the road in a shell-shocked daze after having just fought off and killed Michael Myers (Tyler Mane). Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) catches up to and tries to calm her down. Slam cut to a close-up of her screaming face as she’s wheeled along a hospital corridor on a gurney.
 
Back at the site of the climactic showdown, an unconscious Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) is also sent off in an ambulance while Michael’s body is carried away as well but when the two inept coroners driving the truck crash into a cow (?!), Michael rises and disappears into the night. At the same moment, Laurie rises from her hospital bed to see her friend Annie (Danielle Harris), another survivor from the encounter with Michael, and Zombie makes a point of lingering on these two young women, their bodies damaged by what happened to them, but those wounds will eventually heal. It is the psychological damage that Zombie is interested in exploring with this movie.

He does pay tribute to the original Halloween II (1981) in the first 20 minutes or so as Michael stalks Laurie through the corridors of the hospital and manages to avoid the obvious error or having a nearly empty building for the two to engage in a prolonged cat-and-mouse game that always rang false by having her quickly escape out into the pouring rain, but oh wait, it was a nightmare and a year has passed since the events depicted in Halloween. It feels like Zombie’s fuck you to the original sequel as if to say don’t we all wish that movie was a nightmare we could forget?
 
Laurie takes pills for pain, anxiety, you name it, still traumatized and living with Brackett and his daughter Annie. It’s a well-played scene as we see these people trying to get on with their lives as best they can considering what they’ve been through. Laurie, especially, is lost in the world. Her parents are dead and Michael’s body was never found, which leaves her frustratingly without closure.
 
Meanwhile, Loomis has bounced back as a flashy television personality, cashing in on what happened a year ago and Zombie re-introduces his character via a super slick tracking show that would make Michael Mann proud, combined with a very Aaron Sorkin-esque walk-and-talk sequence. He’s become a petulant primadonna, which Malcolm McDowell has fun playing to the hilt. The “good” doctor happily cashes in on the fascination with Michael Myers but when someone brings up the possibility of the killer still being alive he loses it and we see the cracks in the façade. He is not above doing an interview in front of the now-abandoned Strode house as he tells his long-suffering assistant, “Bad taste is the petrol that drives the American Dream.”

Halloween II is a more visually interesting movie when we finally see what Michael has been up to all this time, living in an abandoned barn out in the middle of nowhere, killing and eating animals to survive, and having visions of his mother. Initially, it is of her dressed all in white next to a white horse but soon they become more involved. His mother was the only good thing in Michael’s life and once she was gone so were the last vestiges of being human. These visions are beautifully surreal sequences, bizarre tableaus that anticipate what he would delve into to a greater degree with The Lords of Salem (2012), which eschewed gore and violence for atmospheric dread.
 
The movie has the requisite kills that fans have come to expect from the franchise but here it feels as if Zombie is getting them out of the way as he’s more interested in tracking the shattered lives of the main characters than goosing the body count for cheap thrills. We get considerate character beats, such as Sheriff Brackett extolling the virtues of Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou (1965) to Laurie and his daughter who have no idea what he’s talking about. They provide brief moments of levity in an otherwise extremely grim movie.
 
A child of the 1970s, Zombie populates his movie with a bevy of character actors who were stars during that time and so we have Dr. Johnny Fever himself, Howard Hessman as the owner of a cool independent record store that Laurie works in and Margot Kidder as Laurie’s therapist. Despite working for a studio, Zombie still manages to find room for his troupe of favorite actors, such as Richard Brake, Jeff Daniel Phillips and Daniel Roebuck, many of whom get the honor of being brutally dispatched by Michael.
 

This being a Rob Zombie movie and his perchance for all things white trash, he trades in the suburbs of Haddonfield, that we normally associate with the Halloween franchise, for his preferred locales – indie record stores, deserted barns and sleazy strip clubs. He employs a desaturated color palette for this grim movie, saving key moments for splashes of color, such as the aforementioned strip club and the Halloween party Laurie attends – both awash in garish reds.
 
With Loomis’ endless press interviews and book signing gigs, Zombie is showing how infamous crime cases are commodified and exploited by people like Loomis without caring about the damage that has been done and continues with this careless exploitation. It brings out kooky fans and grief-stricken parents of kids killed by Michael that want to vent their anguish and anger on the doctor who has nothing but contempt and indifference for his audience. Laurie continues to unravel, permanently scarred both physically and psychologically by Michael and Loomis’ book only reopens these old wounds.
 
With both of his Halloween movies, Zombie is not interested in making a gimmicky Scream meta slasher movie or an over-the-top kill-happy Friday the 13^th movie but instead grounding the franchise mythos in something approximating realism by showing the toll Michael’s bloody rampage takes on Laurie and those close to her. It’s not funny but sad, leaving one drained by the end of the movie, much like Laurie. Characters live with trauma and try to carry on with their lives but Michael won’t let them. People are killed in horrible, painful ways and those that survive are haunted, their lives shattered beyond repair.

Satan's Triangle

People have been fascinated with the enigma that is the Bermuda Triangle for decades. It is a region marked by the Florida coast and the islands of Bermuda and the Bahamas, a “danger zone that seems to swallow ships and planes,” as a vintage episode of the In Search Of… television show from the 1970s aptly described it. It is an area of 60,000 square miles where many planes and ships have mysteriously vanished over the years. Science has tried to explain the phenomenon but compelling anecdotal information endures and continues interest in it.
 
It has been fertile ground for genre movies and T.V., from Airport ’77 (1977) to The Triangle (2005) mini-series. One of the more interesting and unsettling efforts is Satan’s Triangle, a 1975 made-for-T.V. movie starring Kim Novak and Doug McClure and produced by famed entertainer Danny Thomas’ production company. Originally nothing more than a movie-of-the-week, Satan’s Triangle has developed a small cult following over the years of people who have fond memories of seeing it in the ‘70s.
 
The United States Coast Guard receives a distress call from a schooner caught in a terrible storm at sea right in the center of the Bermuda Triangle. Lt. Haig (McClure) and Lt. Comdr. Pagnolini (Michael Conrad) investigate in a rescue helicopter. The two men briefly discuss the Bermuda Triangle with the former being a skeptic and the latter believing that the Devil plays a role. They come across the ship and find a man hanging upside down from the main mast and another man slumped on the forward hatch. The sails are shredded and it looks abandoned.

They try to radio the base but all they get is static. Haig decides to go down to the vessel and investigate. Once aboard, he confirms both men are dead and the one hanging ominously from the mast is priest (Alejandro Rey)! The suspenseful tone is quite effective here as the spooky atmospheric music by Johnny Pate and the wind whistling around the ship set a creepy vibe.
 
Initially, Haig doesn’t find anyone, which only ratchets up the tension including the incredible choppy sea that rocks the boat. When he ventures aft he finds another man, his body hanging in mid-air! He also finds a woman named Eva (Novak) in shock. Haig brings her on deck and they try to get back on the helicopter but the wire on the rescue basket snaps sending them tumbling into the sea. The chopper begins to inexplicably have technical difficulties forcing it to leave. Haig and Eva return to the boat. While waiting for help to return, she recounts the strange happenings on the boat that led to its current state. At this point Satan’s Triangle has sucked us in with this intriguing premise and engaging mystery. How did these men die and only Eva survive?
 
Even in the twilight of her career, Kim Novak casts an alluring presence and her sexy, husky voice warning Haig, “We’re going to die on this boat, you know,” doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world. After all, who wouldn’t want to be stuck out at sea alone with her? Novak does her best to convey the dread of the situation as Eva stares off into space with a haunted look whenever she recounts what happened to all on board before Haig and his partner showed up. In the flashback sequences she gets to have fun playing the bored, spoiled trophy wife who receives massages from one of the crew members while her older, rich husband Hal (Jim Davis) gets to live out his Ernest Hemingway fantasy by trying to land a huge marlin.

His macho fantasy is interrupted by the ominous sight of a priest floating alone at sea on the wing of plane wreckage. The shot of him adrift at sea is a haunting one as he doesn’t look quite right. There is an air of malevolence about him as opposed to say trauma from surviving a plane crash. As soon as he is brought on board all hell breaks loose starting with a violent storm that engulfs the schooner and frightens the crew so badly that they abandon ship, leaving Hal, Eva and the ship’s captain (Ed Lauter) and the first mate (Titos Vandis) with the priest.
 
Alejandro Rey is eerily effective as the priest whose stoicism and dead eyes are an unsettling combination. Ed Lauter plays another no-nonsense authority figure that he excelled at throughout his career, playing the ship’s captain who is at odds with the rich man obsessed with catching an elusive marlin. Doug McClure is just fine as the male lead who provides a skeptical counterpoint to Eva’s traumatized believer. Initially, he comes off as something of a ladies man and has no problem “comforting” her while they wait for help to arrive but the movie’s dramatic plot twist late on turns his world upside down.
 
Naturally, Eva’s account of what happened leans heavily into the supernatural with a crew member suddenly disappearing without a trace and Hal’s inexplicable corpse hanging suspended in air as she wrestles with her faith in God in the presence of the Devil at the heart of the Bermuda Triangle. Haig, the man of reason, goes through her story and explains the unnatural occurrences in such a way that he has us convinced, lulling us into a sense of complacency and setting us up for the movie’s crazy climax that delivers a deliciously chilling twist with only a look.

Satan’s Triangle is a vintage made-for-T.V. movie with cheap yet well-delivered jolts as it mixes a fascination with the supernatural and the jaded cynicism of the decade that lost its idealism in the 1960s. Ultimately, it delivers the requisite scares in surprisingly effective fashion and is anchored by an engaging performance from Novak who showed that she still had it after all those years, delivering a hell of a gut-punch of an ending.
 
You can watch Satan’s Triangle for free on Youtube.

Dust Devil

As far back as when he was a teenager, filmmaker Richard Stanley dreamed of the image of “the dark man, his face hidden, his hat pulled low, his coat gathered around him, standing alone in the wasteland.” For years, he dreamt of this man while the town of Bethanie, Namibia was during a years-long drought with several locals murdered in gruesome fashion that some attributed to local superstition of a black magician known as the “Nagloper.” Stanley incorporated this mythology with his dreams of “the dark man” into a student film that ran out of money before it could be completed but was ultimately fully realized in Dust Devil (1993), his feature film follow-up to Hardware (1990).

The Dust Devil (Robert John Burke) emerges from the hazy desert like a cross between Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name gunslinger and Rutger Hauer’s nightmarish hitchhiker in The Hitcher (1986). With his piercing eyes he hitches a ride with a woman (Terri Norton) driving alone and seduces her into taking him home with her where they have sex, killing her at the moment of climax. Wendy Robinson (Chelsea Field) leaves a dysfunctional marriage by traveling from Johannesburg, South Africa to the small town of Bethany, Namibia, encountering the Dust Devil, a serial killer that ritualistically dismembers his victims and takes their fingers as trophies.

Sergeant Ben Mukurob (Zakes Mokae) is the police detective investigating these murders and discovers that they go back decades before their suspect would’ve been born! Realizing that he is out of his depth, he enlists the help of Joe Niemand (John Matshikiza), the local witch doctor, to track down the Dust Devil. Unaware of his true nature, Wendy travels with this enigmatic hitchhiker to a town ravaged by drought and decimated by the closure of the local uranium mine. It might as well be the end of the world and it is this unlikely place where she confronts the Dust Devil with Ben in hot pursuit.

“You got to keep your eyes open when you deal with magic.” – Joe

Neither Wendy or Ben believe in magic. She believes in nothing, her grief over her increasing estrangement from her husband (Rufus Swart) causes her to nearly commit suicide. He, on the other hand, is in a profession that deals in facts and believes only in what he can prove, He experiences a dream within a dream that shakes his belief system while she encounters the Dust Devil who speaks of magic, myths and legends. At one point, they have a fascinating conversation about the belief in a higher power. When he tells her about God, the Devil or the idea of a soul, she says, “I don’t believe in that any more than I believe in magic or Peter Pan.” This is rather amusing as her name is Wendy and she is very much a “lost boy” with an emphasis on the lost. Both she and Ben have dreams that hint at their checkered pasts and continue to haunt their subconscious. They are both adrift in life. She is so down in it that at one point she nearly slashes her wrists. He wakes up every day with very little purpose in life, given garbage assignments by his superior and enduring thinly-veiled racism by his fellow co-workers.

The Dust Devil is a shape shifter that practices black magic and seduces Wendy by preying on her weaknesses and vulnerability. He feeds on pain and such people as Wendy who have nothing. He takes people’s souls but is trapped in the material world, bound by flesh until he can perform enough ceremonial murders to build up his power and return to his realm. He pushes Wendy to her mental and physical limits as he pursues her across the desert, threatening her physically and manipulating the environment by summoning a sandstorm to torment her.

The Dust Devil arrives in Bethany on an old fashion train like a gunslinger straight out of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) as the narrator intones, “He can smell a town waiting to die.” With his intense stare, Robert John Burke requires little dialogue to convey a commanding presence and this only enhances the character’s mystique. He is a very physical actor and lets his actions define his character. The Dust Devil is a wonderfully low-key boogeyman and a far cry from the chatty Freddy Krueger and much cleverer than the lumbering Jason Voorhees.

Burke doesn’t play the Dust Devil as a stereotypical monster but rather as an old soul that has existed for countless years, still exhibiting human frailties such as the moment when he cries after making love with Wendy. He tries to articulate his internal pain and how it has tormented him for as long as he can remember. Joe sums up the character best when he says, “He seeks power over the material world. Through the ritual of murder…He feeds off our light. He preys upon the damned, the weak, the faithless – he draws them to him and he sucks them dry.”

Zakes Mokae and John Matshikiza are also excellent in their respective roles. Ben and Joe make for an unlikely yet compelling team – the believer and the non-believer. To succeed they must find common ground for, like Wendy, Ben is a lost soul and it takes Joe to awaken his faith by showing him what they are up against. Ben must tap into his dreams and pay attention to them if he has any chance of defeating the Dust Devil.

There are several things that make Dust Devil stand out from other horror films. There is the film’s exotic locale, the deliberate pacing, and the emphasis on spiritualism. It has a distinctly European sensibility with an importance on symbolism over gore – although, it does not shy away from the red stuff, it just doesn’t revel in it, such as a lingering close-up shot of a fly on a blood-splattered window instead of cutting away to the gruesome murder scene nearby. Stanley wisely opts for a low-key approach to the supernatural elements with most of the effects done in camera and with clever editing techniques.

Stanley immerses us in this world with stunning establishing shots of the vast, unforgiving deserts of Namibia and the burnt-out, nearly abandoned town of Bethany with African music playing on the soundtrack, which culminates in Wendy and the Dust Devil arriving at the “end of the world,” a Grand Canyon-esque place that is simply breathtaking in its scale and scope.

The idea for the story came from the most inexpensive, simplest film he could make at the time: two characters – a woman driving a car and a “crazy hitchhiker.” Some ideas came from his mother’s book, Myths and Legends of South Africa about the “Nagloper” and the urban legend of the Vanishing Hitchhiker, an often-told tale about people picking up hitchhikers only for them to disappear out of the passenger’s seat.

It was a strange case of kismet that Stanley’s recurring dreams of “the dark man” dovetailed with the “Nagloper.” Even stranger still, he found himself passing through Bethanie while the murders were occurring and was beaten by a paranoid railway policeman. In 1984, the 15-year-old aspiring filmmaker returned to the town with a 16mm camera, a homemade crane and five friends with a 45-page screenplay entitled Dust Devil. They spent two months shooting on the Skeleton Coast until it had to be abandoned when the money ran out and two of them were hospitalized after a freeway accident.

Stanley continued to dream about “the dark man” and seven years later he decided to flesh out the script, taking out many of the hitchhiker elements to avoid comparisons to The Hitcher and placing less emphasis on the killers, and gave it to Jo-Anne Sellar who had produced his previous film Hardware for Palm Pictures. Its success enabled the production company to pre-sell Dust Devil and secure a $2 million budget from Miramax. Palm mistakenly thought that Stanley was making a serial killer movie like The Silence of the Lambs (1991) but that was the farthest from his mind, thinking more along the lines of the films by Dario Argento or Andrei Tarkovsky.

Stanley originally considered Nicolas Cage for the Dust Devil but the budget wasn’t big enough for someone of the actor’s caliber and ultimately, he didn’t think he was right for the role. Stanley had seen Robert John Burke in Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth (1989), liked the actor’s intensity and felt he was right for the role. The filmmaker could return to Namibia and shoot on location thanks to elections in March 1990 when a socialist government was voted in. The production arrived in July 1991 but Stanley met with resistance from the financial backers over the casting of the female lead. Miramax executives Bob and Harvey Weinstein wanted Chelsea Field, who had just come off a part in The Last Boy Scout (1991), as they thought she had more star power than Stanley’s choice, Kerry Fox. They pushed hard for Field and Stanley relented but in retrospect felt that she didn’t play the character as mean as written and never quite got the South African accent. The studio also tried to convince him to set the film in Santa Fe, New Mexico and use American Indians instead of black South Africans.

The shoot was a challenging one as Stanley shot the film on the actual locations of the original murders, requiring the production to cover 1500 kilometers of road during the eight-week shoot. The pre-production period pushed the shooting schedule to the start of the windy season with gale force winds making it impossible to stand upright. Cars had to be weighed down with sandbags lest they be blown off the roads. Despite these setbacks, he enjoyed filming in Namibia, comparing it “shooting on the face of Mars. I like being in landscapes where humans have no sane reason to be there.”

Three quarters of the way through the production, Palm was gradually going bankrupt and Stanley only became aware of this when equipment they needed failed to show up and the crew began leaving. By the end of production there were only eight crew members left! In December 1991, Stanley delivered a 120-minute cut of the film that was subsequently edited down to 95 minutes and shown to a test audience in April 1992 to a not-surprisingly confused response. Palm went into liquidation and any further post-production was shut down. Polygram took over British distribution rights and promptly shelved the film. Miramax produced their own cut that gutted all the supernatural elements and restructured the narrative completely. In January 1993, Stanley managed to track down all the original elements of the film and spent 40,000 pounds of his own money reconstructing his edit of the film. He went bankrupt trying to complete Dust Devil, losing his apartment and living in a spare room above the ticket office of a movie theater.

“The moment you start dealing with God, the Devil, the big issues, you end up in the genre, whether you like it or not. So in some bizarre way the horror genre has become the last place where you can really deal with these things. If you’re trying to actually do something which is about those kinds of issues, that is where you end up.” – Richard Stanley

Was it all worth it? Stanley pushed himself to his physical and emotional limits making Dust Devil with the result being a fascinating struggle between the good and evil aspects of a woman’s soul filtered through the lens of the horror genre. He isn’t interested in making a straight up genre exercise but something else, something more deeply felt, something that resonates and stays with you long after the film ends.

SOURCES

Dust Devil liner notes. Subversive Cinema. 2006.

Rowlands, Paul. “Richard Stanley Talks to Paul Rowlands About Dust Devil.” Money into Light. July 2012.

Totaro, Donato. “Richard Stanley Interview: The Dust Devil.” Off Screen. August 1997.