the Faculty: (1998. dir: Robert Rodriguez) ... in which Rodriguez gives us the best high school movie ever. Like the Breakfast Club, only without the suckage, and on steroids.
The kids at Herrington High come slowly to realize that their teachers have been infected by an alien entity, and, as traditional in the genre, neither parents nor cops can be trusted to set it right; they have to do it themselves. The cast is great, both students and faculty. Robert Patrick has a blast as the football coach, Josh Hartnett shows off his youthful mastery as the flunking genius drug-dealer, Jon Stewart is the geeky science teacher with a crush on the school nurse (Salma Hayek, weirdly underused), Clea DuVall plays the Ally Sheedy character, only way better. Bebe Neuwirth takes a couple of killer scenes to town as the principal. The only real downside is the silly endcap in which the school loser (Elijah Wood) winds up sucking face with the overachieving cheer-queen (Jordana Brewster). Also, Famke Janssen is disappointingly overwhelmed, faced with playing a neurotic introvert.
Slither: (2006. dir: James Gunn) Taking it's pleasure Schadenfreude-style via the road of total gross-out, this alien-invasion venture is both way too disgusting and has too much gratuitous cussing to succeed at becoming the Tremors-like funfest it would like to be. The cast is great, the production values excellent, and if you watch the extras, you can tell everyone had a big party making the thing. (It seems that, unsurprisingly, Nathan Fillion is a barrel of laughs to work with.) The alien "makeup" -- can you call it that when it takes up a whole room? -- is fantastic; Michael Rooker suffers a wonderful, uber-grody metamorphosis, but it's all just so endlessly disgusting that you shut off after a spell.
Still, if you have a high tolerance for the cussin' and the gross, this is your evening pleasure. Gunn is the fellow who wrote and directed Guardians of the Galaxy, so you can be sure he knows how to make you laugh. And definitely watch the "Who is Bill Pardy?" extra afterwards.
the UFO Incident: (1975. dir: Richard A. Colla) This is another of those rare '70s television movies that was actually very good. Based on the first modern tale of alien abduction, the story of Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple in middle-class Massachusetts who lost time on a night-time drive down a lonely road and woke to find their lives changed, it is so well-acted by James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons that one forgives the rubbery looking aliens.
The Hills become depressed and paranoid after their evening of strangeness and eventually go to a psychiatrist who performs the first of the now-familiar regressions to retrieve lost memories. It is Jones' performance while under hypnosis and reliving his abduction that is a truly riveting scene; man, what an actor.
When I watched it as a child I wanted only the alien story, which, by the way, is very well written, moving back and forth in time and memory gracefully, giving us clues and hints ("Silly dog. Why are you barking at the moon?") which build our suspense with perfect timing. The other half of the story, though, is the relationship between the Hills, and this I found dull and frustrating at the time. In retrospect I see that it would have been groundbreaking stuff for its day, and this may have been the filmmaker's primary motivation behind the project. Certainly it's far more compelling than any of the old Guess Who's Coming to Dinner crap. This is a loving couple whose relations are already tested by the strain of the societal gaze, who undergo something undescribable, something which must remain secret, a metaphorical Journey into the Underworld, and we are watching them pick their uncertain way back into the light. In the meantime, we watch a white woman and a black man just being married, something which I'm guessing hadn't much happened in television or even on the movie screen back then, not with any sort of realism. Leave it to science fiction: it's always easier to sneak a political or socially fraught message into the living rooms of suburban America via a genre piece, as Star Trek well knew, than through flat-out. undisguised drama.
For students of the Fortean, it is required viewing.
No comments:
Post a Comment