redskiesmaxx

I still can't understand why anybody considers "A Clockwork Orange" to be an even remotely entertaining movie. I've always found it to be a very dreary, overlong, repetitive, heavy-handed and claustrophobic experience -- a misbegotten celluloid abomination which, like too many in Kubrick's perversely overrated oeuvre, pointlessly belabors the obvious, the insincere and the repulsive.

The deliberately garish and cheesy production design is a real eyesore to look at for 2 hours 17 minutes. Ditto for the shaky, distorted, migraine-inducing POV camerawork (all leering closeups and cartoonish wide-angle shots), which is reminiscent of the worst gonzo porn. Not to mention the awful, obnoxious, over-the-top acting and terrible costuming.

Is Alex a glamourous psychopath? I don't think so. There is nothing the least bit attractive or liberating -- or even interesting -- about this nasty young punk's sniggering schoolboy sadism particularly. Despite his rather improbable Beethoven fetish, he is not cultured, sophisticated or superior to anyone else; he's merely a shallow vicious narcissist with an infantile sense of entitlement, and that's it.

Of course, Malcolm McDowell is a LAMDA-trained Shakespearean actor delivering arch, cutesy, pidgin-Russian-as-Cockney-rhyming-slang dialogue -- and this might fool you into thinking that our humble narrator is really like a hip adolescent version of Richard III crossed with Holden Caulfield. But you'd be wrong. There is simply nothing to Alex as a character. He's just as vapid and vacuous as everyone and everything else in this irritating movie. He is as much a mindless, soulless automaton when he's out raping and pillaging as he is after having been neutered and rendered harmless by the utterly preposterous Ludovico treatment. All considered, Alex barely exists as anything recognizably human one way or the other. Even the Korova milkbar cereremony seems like nothing so much as a joyless masturbatory ritual for every bored droog and devotchka who regularly shows up to partake in it.

Yes, the anarchic free will of the depraved psychopathic hooligan is preferable to any state-mandated brainwashing meant to curtail it. Wow! What a profound and insightful message! Kubrick was really sticking it to the man with this one, wasn't he? Alas, "A Clockwork Orange" is like a "Dirty Harry" movie without Dirty Harry; and so, the thugs and miscreants are free to roam and run amok and trash everything and everybody with extreme prejudice. And instead of a .44 Magnum, we get an electronic desecration of Beethoven's Ninth as the only real threat to the life and career of the wanton criminal psychopath.

Not surprisingly, you can read the mealymouthed "moral" of this story, with its trite chickens-coming-home-to-roost irony, a mile away. The supposed allegory never rises above the level of the cheap, crude, overdrawn and exploitative. Likewise, the silly, self-congratulatory ending feels forced, indulgent and overly contrived -- meant to flatter the narcissistic vanity of the filmmaker and the audience, both of whom seem to be secretly rooting for Alex's return to criminality as a kind of vicarious wish fulfillment fantasy.

**A FEW SPOILERS**

I'd recommend "Eyes of a Stranger", a nearly forgotten slasher-style suspense thriller from 1980 that has the distinction of being the film debut of Jennifer Jason Leigh (who gives a terrific performance as a blind, deaf and mute teenager who must fight off an assailant inside her apartment like Audrey Hepburn in "Wait Until Dark"), and which also features gore effects by the legendary Tom Savini.

Set in and around Miami (just like director Ken Wiederhorn's earlier Nazi zombie feature "Shock Waves" -- clips of which appear on the television set during the first murder scene), "Eyes of a Stranger" is basically an update of "Rear Window" embellished with references to a number of other suspense thrillers. The opening scene, in which the nude body of a murder victim is discovered immersed in a mangrove swamp, is a direct nod to the opening of Hitchcock's "Frenzy"; and a much later scene, in which the killer furtively watches a striptease dancer undress before (it is implied) he attacks her in a shower stall, is a clear homage to "Psycho".

"Eyes of a Stranger" starts off with the classic slasher premise established by "Black Christmas": the creepy serial killer who stalks and terrorizes young women with harassing phone calls before he finishes them off in person. Despite a trail of bodies with a common M. O., there is no hint of any police investigation in the movie. Likewise, none of the women have any male protectors who can save them from the killer, and the ones who try just end up as hapless collateral damage -- including one particularly memorable (and gruesomely funny) image of a severed head in a fish tank, which is itself a direct steal from the then-contemporary 1980 slasher thriller "He Knows You're Alone".

In terms of its storytelling, "Eyes of a Stranger" is split into two distinct halves: in latter part, the movie deliberately alters and undermines its earlier narrative focus and becomes a different sort of genre picture than the standard slasher exploitation fare, as the killer becomes the person who is spied upon and harassed in his apartment by an inquisitive neighbor (again, think "Rear Window"). By this point, we see that the killer, as ruthless and determined as he is, is not some indestructible bogeyman like Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, or the later Freddy Krueger. Instead, he is revealed to be quite fallible and vulnerable, especially when confronted by the female protagonist (played by Lauren Tewes), who, earlier in the movie, is seen risking her life by breaking into his apartment to search for clues (just like Grace Kelly did in "Rear Window"). For this reason, "Eyes of a Stranger" has been considered a quasi-feminist "rape-revenge" vigilante film (in his book, "Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan ...and Beyond", the late British critic Robin Wood wrote an especially spirited defense of this movie along those particular lines).

The first half of "Eyes of a Stranger" generally conforms to all the familiar narrative clichés of the slasher genre by presenting us with the image of a serial murderer who appears to be endowed with the superhuman powers of an omniscient and ubiquitous bogeyman. This hackneyed "invincible killer" trope is an unmistakable feature of the first two murder scenes, where the killer's presence is only hinted at metonymically -- as a disembodied voice on the phone, as a masked silhouette lurking in the darkness, or in closeup shots of his feet following his prey or his hands brandishing a weapon. Here, we see the killer stalking and entrapping his victims with all the practiced stealth and finesse of a ninja assassin -- an extraordinary ability which the movie doesn't bother to explain or justify in any plausible way. As we watch these scenes play out, our suspension of disbelief waxes and wanes and we are left wondering to ourselves: how did he get inside that apartment or sneak into the back of that woman's car, or obtain the emergency phone number for that elevator?

However, about halfway through "Eyes of a Stranger", the movie's contrived illusion of an omnipotent killer endowed with superhuman competence is quickly and permanently abolished. This demystification first occurs during a scene where his tires get stuck in the mud while disposing of his latest victim, and he is forced to dispatch two potential witnesses who are making out in the car next to him. Here we begin to see that this killer is hardly very subtle or discreet in the way he goes about his business. Careless and impulsive, he doesn't seem to have that much common sense, let alone any sophisticated forensic awareness, about escaping detection or (literally) covering his tracks. All throughout the movie, we see him repeatedly stalk and attack women in apartment complexes and car parks -- semi-public spaces where his suspicious comings and goings could easily be noticed (and eventually are). In fact, he is so sloppy and disorganized that it seems the temporary success of his killing spree can only be attributed to dumb luck and a curious absence of any police vigilance and deterrence. By this point, we come to realize that under normal circumstances, he could be caught in the act at any time.

It doesn't take long before the killer's luck finally does run out, and when we at last see him as he really is, his pale expressionless face, portly frame and slouching gait expose him as the very image of a rather depressing ungainliness and ordinariness (much like Raymond Burr's pitifully inept and desperate uxoricide in "Rear Window"). In the end, there is nothing the least bit impressive, clever, seductive, mysterious or otherworldly about this killer. If anything, he appears dull, clumsy, slovenly, unattractive and very, very common. Indeed, it is in this way that the more fanciful and dubious conceits of the genre are deliberately undermined, and any semblance of the sadistic relish and artfully evinced horror atmosphere that slasher movie enthusiasts may have once admired about the killer during the staging of his earlier murders is rapidly and purposefully dissipated.

This undermining of the "invincible killer" trope is most clearly demonstrated during a brief scene toward the end of the movie in which no physical violence occurs at all. Here, we see the killer stripped of any theatrical pretense of devilish glamour or mystery -- his pudgy plain face and flabby middle-aged physique now fully visible in clear light -- as he casually torments a blind teenager by removing familiar objects from her reach on a kitchen counter. I imagine that the banal viciousness and petty psychological cruelty of this otherwise harmless act was more upsetting and disturbing for most viewers than any of the physically gruesome murder scenes in this movie (which are, of course, standard for the genre and are, alas, to be expected).

As the late Robin Wood astutely observed, the culmination of this studied demystification of the mad-slasher bogeyman occurs in the last reel of "Eyes of a Stranger", when the killer suddenly meets his violent and ignominious end in a shower stall (an inversion of the earlier "Psycho" reference), and the final lingering image of his broken glasses perched crookedly on his bloated lifeless face, with eyes now permanently shut from a fatal bullet wound in his forehead, seems not only a stunning reversal of fortune but a moralistic indictment of anyone in the audience who took a portion of vicarious pleasure in the movie's preceding mayhem.

Having read most of the literature on the Moors Murders, I was looking forward to seeing this. But when it was over, I was left feeling a bit underwhelmed. Suffice to say, "See No Evil" seems more or less like an extended episode of "Prime Suspect" or "Cracker" set in the 1960s. The story begins in medias res with not a whole lot of context provided for what we're seeing. More often than not, things are awkwardly explained by characters after the fact; and the banal, obvious dialogue tends to emphasize this problem a bit too much.

While I was watching I was struck by all of the things that weren't or couldn't be shown in the film (such as the kidnappings of the children and the disposal of their bodies on the moors, as well as the infamous photographs and tape recording of Lesley Ann Downey's torture and murder). These omissions tend to throw the viewer off a bit since there is barely anything that suggests the killers' motivations. Too many important facts and details are mentioned in the past tense, and not enough is dramatized and shown as happening in the present moment -- this circuitous approach tends to blunt the impact of the story as a whole.

As the psychopath Ian Brady, Sean Harris is a fine actor with an interesting, enigmatic presence, and his performance is more or less adequate. But strangely, he doesn't seem to project enough menace in the role. He scowls and looks pale and ghastly and speaks in a soft-spoken Scots accent -- which, to my ears, sounds a little forced and put-on. For the most part (and the limitations of the script may be partly to blame for this), he comes across as an actor merely playing at being a psychopath, rather than a man genuinely unhinged -- someone who feels compelled to commit senseless, heinous acts of violence. He is at his most convincing (and scary) when he sees that Dave Smith (Michael McNulty) has given him up to the police, and he flashes his young friend a condescending smirk. Harris is also quite believable when he has a battle of wits with George Costigan, who plays police DCI, Joe Mounsey -- giving defiant, insolent non-answers to the detective's incisive, probing questions.

As the notorious Myra Hindley, Maxine Peake probably delivers the best performance, but the script seems to undermine and shortchange her character. We never really learn very much about her -- such as what her life was like before she met Ian Brady and what attracted her to him, what the dynamic of their relationship was, as well as how her personality changed as a result. We certainly don't learn anything about why she participated in the sadistic murder of young children. The movie also makes the mistake of trying to replicate Myra's infamous 1965 mug shot and it only serves to emphasize that, apart from the clothes and the hair, Maxine Peake really doesn't look that much like the actual person she's portraying.

As David Smith, Michael McNulty does indeed look a great deal like the actual person he is meant to be. Although, I got a sense that the writer sanded the rough edges off his character a bit too much -- especially Smith's putative alcoholism and spousal abuse -- in order to make him more palatable and sympathetic to the audience.

Joanne Frogatt plays Maureen Hindley, Myra's kid sister and Dave Smith's shotgun bride, and the film takes her point of view. While the filmmakers were clearly trying to preserve a little taste by maintaining a slight distance from the two killers and their crimes, adopting Maureen's perspective (especially as played by Frogatt) seems a mistake. Indeed, it turns out to be a rather unrevealing vantage point that yields precious little insight about events.

Not surprisingly, Frogatt's Maureen turns out to be the sole straight arrow amidst this otherwise unsavory quartet, and the movie seems partly intended as a rehabilitation of both her and David Smith's public image in connection with the murders. Unfortunately, Frogatt is as dull as ditchwater in the role, and with her pasty, angular, dark-haired features and de rigueur beehive hairdo, Frogatt looks like she could be one of Sean Harris' siblings rather than Maxine Peake's. By the end of the movie, despite all of my prior knowledge about the case, I was left feeling just as bewildered and in the dark about everything as Maureen did. With Frogatt's character as the story's center of gravity, the moral sense of the movie seems rather uncertain and hesitant and vaguely apologetic. An earnest, token effort is also made to show the suffering of the relatives of the victims, so as not to run the risk of inadvertently valorizing the two killers. These people -- in particular, the actors playing John Kilbride's father and Lesley Ann Downey's mother -- often come across more vividly than the two criminals and their close relations do. This aspect of the movie focuses on the efforts of Detective Mounsey and as such, "See No Evil" awkwardly tries to tell two converging stories from two different outside points of view at the same time.

In the end, I just didn't feel that this production really did justice to the Moors Murders (pardon the pun). The only time that the grisliness and horror of the killings are really felt is when the police search team digging on Saddleworth Moor retrieves Lesley Ann Downey's body from her grave in the middle of a foggy night. A story like this demands a more detailed narrative context and a stronger viewpoint (even if this necessitates a bit of speculation and guesswork) or it risks wishy-washy banality. This subject would be served by a proper feature film treatment, even though the serial murder genre has practically been done to death in the movies (again, pardon the pun).