Bored On The Bayou
Now Playing: Frederick Delius--"Summer Night On The River"
An uneventful week leads to an uneventful Friday evening, during which I drink a few bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon and watch the first half of the rather engrossing 1985 British TV miniseries Edge of Darkness, featuring, of all people, Joe Don Baker (more on that when I get finished watching it, but I manfully resisted the urge to scream "Mitchell!" every time he appeared). This week has lasted forever.

I watched a couple of videos recently that I picked up from the Campus Video clearance sale, both of them, coincidentally, directed by Wes Craven. After watching them, I realized that I now can't stand Wes Craven.

Last House On The Left (1972) I've been postponing for some time. I'm not a fan of exploitative cinema for its own sake--my main reason for getting so pissed off at Vampyres (1974)--but I certainly don't mind violence and nudity so long as they have something to do with a plot that makes sense. Last House On The Left has long had a reputation as an incredibly nasty movie, one which Craven always claimed was some sort of comment on America's fascination with violence and the Vietnam War. The plot is loosely based on Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1958)--a gang of criminals kidnap a pair of teenage girls, rape them, and murder them in a long, drawn-out sequence that's equal parts appalling and artless. Craven intercuts these scenes with shots (presumably meant to be satirical) of the typical American family of one of the girls fixing the cake for her seventeenth birthday--which happens to be the day she dies. The hunt for the killers falls on two incompetent cops (one of them played by future Karate Kid villain and "Cagney and Lacey" stalwart Martin Kove) who eventually find the criminals taking refuge in the murdered girl's parents' house (they've pretended to be a family whose car has broken down). The drugged-out ravings of one of the criminals reveal their guests' identity, and the parents kill the criminals just in time for the cops to arrive.

This movie sucks. There's one moment (when one of the girls realizes that, despite her resistance, she's about to die) that still haunts me, but other than that, this movie's a real wash. To be fair to Craven, I don't think he set out to make an exploitative mess--I think he honestly thought he was making a brilliant satirical horror film about violence in America. Like, say, David Lean with Lawrence of Arabia (1962)--probably the only time you'll ever see me or anyone else linking those two--the filmmaker's ambitions run against the viewer's conceptions in a way the former never conceived. Today, it's possible for me to see Lean trying to say something about Western imperialism in Lawrence while at the same time stereotyping Arabs as "wild men of the desert", incapable of participating in modern society. In a similar way, I can see how Craven thought cross-cutting between the parents fixing the cake and their daughter being horribly done to death would be a clever juxtaposition, likewise with the slapstick scenes involving the cops trying to find the killers--one of which actually did make me chuckle, and I'm still pissed about it. It doesn't work, though. It's clumsy and poorly done (the cheery sub-Dr. Hook music makes things so much worse), and the satirical intent is self-defeatingly obvious. I can't understand why Last House On The Left is thought a classic.

Swamp Thing (1981) is much better. It isn't really that good, but it's tremendously entertaining. Real quick--it's based on a DC Comics character, a brilliant scientist who's turned via an explosion into a Black Lagoon-style swamp creature who proceeds to fight his evil mad-scientist archnemesis. I think that was the deal, anyway. The cast is terrific, doing their best with some of Craven's awful dialogue (if memory serves, Wes bludgeons/kneads "Is the Pope Catholic?" into "Do you think that the Pope is Catholic?"). I'd forgotten about Adrienne Barbeau's coolness until I saw her machine-gunning bad guys. Watching her tied to a chair in archvillain "Arcane's" lair, I had the suspicion that she was just seconds away from gnawing through her bonds and strangling the latter with them. Ray Wise ("Bob" from "Twin Peaks") is the guy who turns into the Swamp Thing, and he's okay. Arcane is hilariously brought to life by super-smoothie (and real-life World War II French Resistance member) Louis Jourdan, who gleefully fires off cheesy Nietzsche quotes throughout the movie, the same way Ricardo Montalban does with Melville during Star Trek II. Those actually become rather grating when used by his henchmen--one beefy goon's "every man for himself and god against all" nearly made me try to jump into the screen (never mind how) and smack him (the fact that the same quote was Werner Herzog's best movie didn't help either). I think that was Craven's way of making Swamp Thing highbrow and literary.

There is one outstanding scene, though, which will live forever in the memory of coolness. The Swamp Thing manages to overpower a pair of his pursuers on one of those speedboats with a machine gun mounted in the prow, and commandeers it to take after Arcane's chief henchman. The sight of this huge green mutant piloting one of those things (and what happens afterward) elicited the always welcome "oh my God, this is so awesome!" comment from my lips. I'm sure the beer helped.

After watching those, I started thinking about how Craven had made Scream (1997) (which--in itself--I thought a clever movie in many ways), and how it kickstarted all those jokey, quasi-ironic horror flicks with various WB and UPN personnel filling the cookie-cutter roles and how horror movies all rather suck these days (at least in this country) and I realize that the man owes those of us who care about these things a colossal apology.

I also have to stop watching this--it's turning into an emotional crutch.

Today--more library overhaul over at WRAP, and then Tim Monger's playing at Crazy Wisdom Bookstore on Main Street. Good times, I think.