Venom

Venom (2018; dir. Reuben Fleischer) embraces the spirit of comics.  It doesn’t try to raise the level of its story above the level of its source.  It’s energetic, fast, full of wit and irony, and basic.  It works.  The film has an unusually long exposition during which it introduces characters, follows the crash landing of a private research vessel on earth, which results in the release of alien beings, and introduces a ruthless, brilliant ,and wealthy mad scientist, Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed).  Our main character is Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), a famous investigative reporter who is loud and brash and not entirely scrupulous.  He’s in a relationship with a lawyer, Anne Weying (Michelle Williams), which comes to an end early in the film after Eddie makes a mistake that costs him and Anne their jobs.  One intuits that the relationship is not necessarily at an end, a point of doubt that will indubitably continue into the sequel.

The aliens cannot survive on earth, so they occupy the bodies of human hosts.  Eddie (through a circuitous series of misevents) is taken as the host by one of the aliens.  We learn that the aliens have come to the earth intending to feed on the inhabitants.  Eddie’s alien periodically breaks out, and he often tells his host what to do.  What begins as a terrible calamity for Eddie gradually becomes something else.  His alien grows to like Eddie and the earth, and they reach an agreement about how to work together.  (Eddie’s alien is Venom, but I really can’t recall how this information came out). There’s a campy, humorous feel to the film.  When Eddie’s alien eats someone, it’s always a criminal or otherwise bad person.

Noise is a prime element.  The film is noisy, and the sound system in the theatre where I saw it was turned all the way up.  Speed, and a frenetic succession of events, are also important. The film is entertaining.

What’s the message here?  Well, we have another evil mogul/mad scientist who cuts corners and doesn’t care who suffers as a result of his research.  By the end of the film, since he too has been taken over by an alien, we know he will be Venom’s archenemy in the sequel. Are we to think of Mark Zuckerberg, or Jeff Bezos, or Bill Gates, or some other ambitious, power-hungry wizard of the techno world who wants to take us over? Another message is that Marvel has conquered the American film industry.

The Changeling

When The Changeling (dir. Peter Medak) was released in 1980, films of horror and terror were already ramping up towards the current state of affairs where special effects and DGI dominate everything.  In 1977 The Exorcist had set this trend in motion, though its special effects were mainly conventional.  The Changeling is a much lower key affair.  Its ghost rarely appears, at least at first.  Mostly, he makes himself known by various noises, by a bouncing ball, and in a recording made during a séance.  Suspenseful music alerts us to the presence of the supernatural.  In fact, by modern standards, the music may be overplayed in the film. 

George C. Scott plays John Russell, a composer whose wife and daughter have been killed in an accident.  He moves across the country to make a new start and is convinced to rent an “old” and “historical” house.  Both those words should have warned Russell, and the audience, that hauntings are afoot.  Old houses are almost a necessity in films about ghosts (the 1980 film The Shining employs an old hotel).  One wonders exactly why Russell would want to live alone in an old four-story mansion, why he needs so much room, how he can afford the rent. But he does move in, and strange occurrences begin: an unseen finger presses a piano key, loud thumping noises occur every morning at 6, a ball that belonged to Russell’s dead daughter bumps down the stairs.  And then, of course, there is a boarded-up room on the top floor. Russell and his real estate agent, Claire Norman (Trish Van Devere) research the past of the house and ghost and the film develops from there.

The Changeling uses the stock conventions of ghost movies deftly if melodramatically.  Your hackles do rise. There are numerous moments of suspense and fright produced by the conventional skills with which the film is made.  But the age of the film shows, a fact I hesitate to state. The portrayal of Claire Norman in particular seems dated.  Perhaps in the tradition of Hitchcock and his haute de couture leading actresses, Van Devere seems fashionably attired in every scene.  She becomes increasingly histrionic as supernatural events mount, almost a basket case at points, though Scott’s John Russell often seems equally affected. This despite the efforts of the film to show Claire as a modern woman with her own job and purpose.

Towards the end, the subtle indirectness that made the first half of the film effective gives way to things running amuck—a mysterious car crash in which a detective dies, doors slamming shut, a wheelchair that chases Norman down the stairs, apoplexy, and a huge fire. 

When I saw the film in 1980, I was already haunted.  My wife was pregnant with our first child.  We were eagerly anticipating his arrival. He appeared in dreams and spoke to me, and I woke believing the dreams had been real.  I associated the film’s ghostly child with my own child, who was still in utero.  A spooky conflation of opposites, I know. My child, my oldest son, is alive now, and 38 years old. My youngest son watched this film with me and had no patience for it.

Pet Sematary

Pet Sematary (1989, dir. Mary Lambert) is a bad film.  It’s poorly made in every respect.  The acting is weird and off-kilter.  Only Fred Gwynn, the one “name actor” in the film (he was Herman Munster, and the judge in My Cousin Vinny, 1992) is effective, and mainly he stretches his long narrow and aged face for the camera, looking alternately worried, anguished, or horrified.  The father looks too young and is a dolt of major proportions.  The mother seems histrionic and paralyzed by the memory of her sister who dies of some terrible affliction. Stephen King wrote the novel on which the film is based, as well as the screenplay.  I haven’t read the novel, but the screenplay does nothing for the film.  In brief, a young family (husband and wife, 9-year-old girl, 4-year-old boy) move to a house in the woods to start over.  The husband is a doctor who will work at a nearby college.  Huge trucks drive at high velocity up and down the highway in front of the house.  The many pets who have died on the highway are buried in a “Pet Sematary” near the house.  If you can’t smell trouble coming, you’d better get out of the way. Things take their course, and the family cat is killed by a truck.  Gwynn’s character suggests that the father bury the cat in an old Indian burial site.  Unfortunately, for reasons that must have been as inexplicable to the Indians as they are to characters in the film, bodies buried in the site come back to life.  The cat is resurrected, but its eyes glow, it seems demonically possessed, and it frequently attacks the father.  Other events transpire, and no one survives.  The special effects in this film are crude—artificial fog, a fake rat, body wounds that seem the result of makeup and fake blood, a ghost that fades in and out in the cheesiest way.  The low budget of this 1980s film might alone have ruined it, but there are too many other causes of ruination to list here. 

The most gruesome aspect of this film is the father’s attempt to bring his dead son and wife back from the dead.  The result is predictably gruesome.  But this aspect of the film focuses on a topic that no one wants to think about, and it does so awkwardly.  The demonic 4-year-old with his fake cackling and his father’s scalpel is an unintentionally comic presence in a film that inspires laughter more often than it does fear and dread.

I admire a number of Stephen King’s novels.  His work has resulted in a number of disastrous films (such as this one) it has also produced such excellent adaptations as The Shining (which King hates), Carrie, Stand By Me, and It.  A remake of Pet Semetary is underway.  This is regrettable.  Can it be better?