the Traveler: (2010. dir: Michael Oblowitz) High Plains Drifter played out on the set of Assault on Precinct 13, only High Plains Drifter was written all right and this was written all wrong. In this one, we see the guilt-scene, repeatedly, in detail; we know everyone's secret almost from the beginning. There's nothing, -- OK, some, but not much, -- to be revealed. All we have are the vengeance-killings to watch, one after the other, and five million other movies give us that much. At the end of High Plains Drifter, there still lingers an exhalation of enigma. This one makes even the full-blown supernatural feel solid, humdrum, everyday.
Mr. Nobody (Val Kilmer) walks into a cop-shop on Christmas Eve to confess to killings he hasn't yet committed. The good parts are in the details, like the peeling green paint and buzzing fluorescent lights. A piece of Mozart's "Lachrymosa" runs an eerie thread throughout, coloring the movie much as the faux-"Deguello" did Rio Bravo. There's a nice fairy-tale tag at the end in which the supernatural bad guy gets put down by the power of his name spoken aloud, but it's tacked on in an awkward way and doesn't really fit. The pieces don't jive; the world does not cohere.
Kilmer continues his slow and steady transmogrification into Brando, and I mean that in a good way. Even in soporific mode, he draws the eye, and he's still got some mischief in him.
Sundown: the Vampire in Retreat (1989. dir: Anthony Hickox) An embarrassingly misguided attempt at a broad-stroked, horror/western/humor gallimaufry, the "humor" more along the lines of Monster Squad than Evil Dead, but not even achieving success at that humble level. Even Bruce Campbell and his near-ridiculous facility with this kind of thing takes a swing and a miss in the bumbling Van Helsing role. And it's a home-run swing, too, so he misses hard. Like when a soccer forward goes down onto his back for a bicycle-kick: if the ball hits the net, people use words like "sublime" and "miraculous", but even if you're Lionel Messi, you look pretty stupid when you miss. In this movie, everyone misses. Only Deborah Foreman (from Valley Girl) emerges with any dignity intact, albeit just barely, which makes me think I ought to revisit her work.
Here's the idea: Count Mardulak (David Carradine) has established, with the help of extreme sunblock and synthetic blood, a colony of reformed vampires in a remote part of the desert. There are problems when the occasional human stumbles in, and more problems when the old-school vamps posse up with guns shooting wooden bullets and vow to wipe out the apostasy. Nothing is funny, and Carradine knows it, giving so vacant a performance as to seem in retrospect almost transparent. The only part that's any fun is the end-scene when the humans erect a cross atop the mansion and the unrepentant vampires start exploding into flame, but that's just a nice special effect. This, however, is followed hard upon by an interesting theosophical moment when Mardulak, teary-eyed, realizes that his followers are intact because the Christian God has, at last, "forgiven" them. Has there ever been a movie in which the repentant vampire actively seeks forgiveness from a God in which he believes? Because I'd like to watch that movie.
But it has to be better than this one.
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