SCREAMING SERVICE

Check out my short review of Baz Luhrmann's EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

The weekend's other big theatrical release, Scream 7...

...was not screened for critics before release, at least not in the Phoenix area. Make of that what you will. In lieu of a review, therefore, here are seven great movie screams [spoilers throughout!]:

I'm aware, of course, that any or all of these screams may have been partially or entirely the work of a clever sound designer; the first two listed below certainly are. But that's the magic of the movies, right? The point is, they're effective.

7. The Wilhelm Scream--Originally created for a scene of Sheb Wooley being attacked by an alligator in the 1951 Florida-set period adventure Distant Drums, this scream earned its moniker when it was looped, rather unconvincingly, as the scream of a "Private Wilhelm" in the 1953 western The Charge at Feather River. The shriek of shock and dismay has been used dozens if not hundreds of times thereafter, in movies ranging from the original Star Wars to Toy Story. It's particularly effective with characters falling from high places.

6. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)--Like the Wilhelm Scream, this one is also studio-generated, but unlike the Wilhelm Scream, it's not even of human origin. It's the screech of revulsion let out by a soulless pod person when they recognize, and point out to their pod brethren, an unsnatched human. Legendary sound designer Ben Burtt, a popularizer of the Wilhelm Scream, created the effect for Philip Kaufman's classic '70s-era remake of the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, using the squeal of a pig. It chillingly distills the sense of being identified, and publicly denounced, for being out of sync with the masses.

5. Them!--Few who have seen the 1954 sci-fi masterpiece by Gordon Douglas about giant ants are likely to forget the moment: The catatonic little girl (Sandy Descher) found wandering in the New Mexico desert gets her memory jogged by a whiff of formic acid, and lets out a cry of horror followed by repeated screams of "Them! Them! Them!"

4. The Godfather (1972)--The scream to which I'm referring in this one comes when John Marley gets Marlon Brando's famous offer he can't refuse, waking up to the severed head of his beloved horse in bed with him. It was Marley's iconic moment onscreen; his wails somehow get across not only terror but a palpable despair, at the evil with which he's confronted, and his powerlessness against it.

3. Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)--When Bette Davis sees a grinning, dripping Joseph Cotten risen from the swamp, bedecked with mud and Spanish moss, her strangled, barking screams really do sound like somebody at long last taking grateful leave of their sanity.

2. Psycho (1960)--In the shower scene of Hitchcock's 1960 classic, Janet Leigh begins the family tradition which her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis would carry on in 1978's Halloween and other films: a full-throated, full-screen scream of the highest order. But...

...I would argue the scream that Vera Miles lets out near the end of the same movie, when she at last meets Mrs. Bates face to face, is at least as good. Both are greatly abetted, of course, by the musical shrieks of Bernard Hermann's strings.

1. King Kong (1933)--Can there really be any question of first place? The very name "Fay Wray" evokes the gold standard in "scream." Not only did Wray scream the best, she probably screamed the most, from her first meeting with the title simian to his Waterloo atop the Empire State Building.

Of course I realize that this is very far from a definitive list; these are just seven that occurred to me. What obvious candidates have I forgotten? Feel free to scream at me.

CORE VALUES

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire--2021's Godzilla vs. Kong began with Bobby Vinton's "Over the Mountain, Across the Sea" on the soundtrack, as Kong showered in a waterfall to start his day. This new saga starts with Jim Reeves singing "Welcome to My World" as the super simian lopes through his new home at the center of the earth. Things aren't so bucolic for the big ape; he's plagued with dental pain, harassed by hideous creatures and, assuming he's the last of his kind, he's lonely.

Meanwhile, up on the Earth's surface, Godzilla is keeping busy. He vanquishes a spidery Lovecraftian nightmare in the streets of Rome and then, rather adorably, he curls up to get some shuteye in the Colosseum like it's a cat-bed.

In other words, this is the second American kaiju flick in a row that declines to take itself too seriously. Is it as good as last year's startlingly sober Japanese national rumination Godzilla Minus One? Not remotely. Is it even as good as Godzilla vs. Kong? Probably not. But it's still plenty of fun.

Kong plumbs an unexplored region of the Hollow Earth where he meets an endearing mini-Kong and others of his own kind. They're enslaved by Skar King, a vicious ape dictator, and his brutal goons. Kong understandably feels the need to act.

Along for the ride are a few humans, including Rebecca Hall, returning as the Kong-ologist from the previous film, Kaylee Hottle as her beautiful, pained-looking adopted daughter, the last known Skull Islander, Brian Tyree Henry as the conspiracy-minded podcaster and Dan Stevens as a cocksure kaiju veterinarian. But the focus is less on humans here than even in the earlier films in the series.

As preposterous as Godzilla x Kong is, it's also genuinely and freewheelingly imaginative. Director Adam Wingard and his gaggle of co-screenwriters give us scenes of Kong sauntering among the Pyramids, or Mothra over Rio, or Godzilla taking a belly-flop dive from the summit of Gibraltar, that seem to owe more to cheerful whimsy than to logical plotting.

Still, without too much straining, one could even tease out an allegorical political subtext here. It's not hard to guess who the mangy, patchy, orange-furred King Skar might symbolize, but the source of his tyrannical power has a parallel, too. Skar maintains his rule because he holds in bondage a huge, spiky, frosty-pale monster with freezy breath. This behemoth started to remind me of a certain currently subjugated Grand Old Party.

There was also something I liked about this movie's ending: It has one. It doesn't have twenty. When the dramatic arc has been satisfied, Godzilla x Kong doesn't keep piling on extra codas, as if panicky it hasn't given us enough. It wraps things up in under two hours and gets out while the getting is good. Let it serve as an example to future big franchise movies.

BEAST PICTURE

Opening in theaters and on HBO Max...

Godzilla vs. Kong--The colossal ape of the title, plodding groggily toward a morning shower under a waterfall, scratches his butt. On the soundtrack is Bobby Vinton singing "Over the Mountain, Across the Sea." This was the point, barely a minute in, that I was pretty sure this movie was going to be fun. I wasn't disappointed.

I was indeed disappointed by the 2014 Yank version of Godzilla, but the 2017 Kong: Skull Island and the 2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters were both big improvements. This clash of the titans, their first movie meeting since the 1962 Japanese King Kong vs. Godzilla, may be the best of the latter-day lot. It's certainly the silliest, which works to its benefit.

After years of peaceful coexistence, the gargantuan reptile of the title is turned from heroic protector of humankind back into a menace, for purposes of the main event; he attacks a shadowy corporate facility in Pensacola, Florida. A conspiracy-minded podcast host (Brian Tyree Henry), a teenager (Millie Bobby Brown) and her best friend (Julian Dennison) investigate the sinister reasons behind the incident.

Meanwhile, those same corporate interests have Kong transported--in chains, by ship, just like back in 1933--from Skull Island to Antarctica in hopes that he'll lead them into the Hollow Earth. Traveling with him are a Hollow Earth expert (Alexander Skarsgard), a "Kong Whisperer" scientist (Rebecca Hall) and her adopted native daughter (Kaylie Hottle), who communicates by sign language. The two strands converge, via an actual hole to the center of the Earth, in Hong Kong, where the title monsters plus one other kaiju icon scrap in the streets.

As you can tell from this synopsis, director Adam Wingard and his screenwriters certainly don't let utter preposterousness get in the way of telling this tall tale; they loot sources from Verne and Burroughs to pro wrestling. When Kong socks Godzilla in the jaw for the first time, it reminded me of Alex Karras punching the horse in Blazing Saddles. This pop pilferage has the feel, at times, of kids improvising a make-believe monster game in their back yard.

Yet there are moments, like the scenes involving Kong negotiating the gravity deep underground, that have a near-poetic wonder. And the monsters, especially the soulful, fed-up Kong, are truly vivid characters, engaging our sympathies more than any of the human actors.

Absent profound, meaningful filmmaking and drama--and maybe, sometimes, in preference to it--this is what I want my summer blockbusters to be: fast, funny, unpretentious, with dash of heart. It clocks in at under two hours, but it didn't leave me feeling cheated.

VIRAL VIDEOS

At this writing, movie theaters are closed across the Valley. But Your Humble Narrator's need to blather on about movies is wide open for business, so here, online at Phoenix Magazine, are some video recommendations from among my favorite movies...

...plus suggestions from the career of the great, recently-departed Max Von Sydow...

Also, in case anyone is interested, here are last weekend's reviews of The Hunt, First Cow...

...The Burnt Orange Heresy and the Fathom Events/TCM showing of King Kong.

Stay healthy, everybody.

TRENCH MOB

In theaters this weekend:

Journey's End--Samuel Johnson famously said that every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier. That guilty sentiment (which now probably extends to a lot of women as well) negates the intentions of a lot of supposedly "anti-war" movies.

The makers of such movies may even genuinely intend them to be anti-war, but the nature of the western narrative tradition being what it is, what often ends up onscreen is an action-adventure story with some inserted piety about the horrors of war. They may leave young viewers in the audience even more eager to rush off to battle, and older viewers reproaching themselves, Johnson-style, for never having done so.

There are exceptions, though. Probably because World War One is now historically regarded as such a colossally wasteful, sordid mess, that conflict has produced several pretty effective cautionary war dramas. All Quiet on the Western Front, both the novel and Lewis Milestone's 1930 movie, truly seem to get across something of both the terror and the futility of trench warfare in WWI. So, from the other side, does R. C. Sherriff's 1928 English play Journey's End, about desperate, shell-shocked, boozing British officers at the end of their rope in the trenches in France in spring of 1918.

Not long ago I saw the 1930 film version of Journey's End, the feature debut of director James Whale, and was impressed with how potently and poignantly it holds up. Going into this new, but surprisingly faithful, British version, directed by Saul Dibb, I feared that the claustrophobic quality of the original might be sacrificed for a more epic scale, and I'm happy say that this isn't the case. This new Journey's End is "opened out" just enough to keep it from feeling stagey, but not enough to lose its atmosphere of crushing dread.

The focus is on the veteran Captain Stanhope (Sam Claflin), a shattered alcoholic barely held together by his older Lieutenant, the avuncular schoolmaster Osborne (Paul Bettany). There's a reason that Stanhope isn't happy to see the eager new Lieutenant, Raleigh (Asa Butterfield), an old school friend who hero-worships him. Also under Stanhope's command are the chuckling, equable Trotter (Stephen Graham), the terrified Hibbert (Tom Sturridge) and the deadpan cook Mason (Toby Jones). This ensemble is terrific top to bottom, with Claflin subtly getting across the same bitter, jittery fury that Colin Clive did as Stanhope back in 1930. Butterfield is touchingly callow, and Bettany is heartbreakingly dignified as the "Uncle" Osborne.

The drama arises from the tensions and clashes, and the kindnesses, between these men. There's little in the way of battlefield action, and what there is lacks romance; it's hectic and frightening, with no sense of accomplishment. The heroism in the film, such as it is, comes from the stoicism with which these men try to face their useless deaths. By the end, you may admire them for their courage, but you're unlikely to reproach yourself for declining to share their fate.

Ready Player One--Human society is run down and slummy, but most people don't care that much because they spend most of their time in virtual reality anyway.

But enough about present-day America. Steven Spielberg's latest, based on a 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, takes this state of affairs further, into a bleak and distressingly plausible version of 2045. The teenage hero Wade (Tye Sheridan) resides in a stack of mobile homes in Columbus, Ohio. But he, like most of his neighbors, spends as much time as possible in an immersive online universe called The Oasis, in which people assume the roles of "avatars," many of them based on favorite pop-culture characters ranging from the Mutant Ninja Turtles to Harryhausen's Cyclops, as well as many original creations: Wade's avatar Parzival resembles an anime hero.

The departed creator of the The Oasis, a socially awkward genius named Halliday (Mark Rylance), has left behind a series of "Easter Eggs," three keys that, if found, will make the player the heir to The Oasis. Tye, of course, is determined to find them. It's a bit like The Matrix meets Willy Wonka, with Ben Mendelssohn as an evil corporate Slugworth. There's a dash of The Searchers, too.

Wade/Parzival falls in with various allies, and wild fights and chases ensue, both in The Oasis and the real world. The movie starts slow, and is a bit of a mess; long stretches of it, like a nutty passage set in the Overlook Hotel from Kubrick's The Shining, are absorbing and funny, while other stretches, especially the real-world stuff, recall the heavy-handed, obsequiously crowd-pleasing Spielberg of the later '80s. It's a bit perplexing to see, after the effortless command Spielberg demonstrated a couple of months ago in The Post.

The real fun is in the juxtaposition of pop icons: Where else can we get King Kong and Chucky and The Iron Giant all in the same movie, along with countless characters from video games and cartoons and toy series? Even Mechagodzilla turns up, accompanied by a whisper of Akira Ifukube's unforgettable Godzilla theme.

Ready Player One seems to be an allegorical plea for, on the commercial and political end, net neutrality, and on the personal end, a bit of moderation where online life is concerned. Neither of these positions is particularly radical, but the movie seems to have its middle-of-the-road heart in more or less the right place.

KONG OF THE ROAD

With War for the Planet of the Apes opening this weekend...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...an ape-oriented honoree seems in order, so how about...

...this version of King Kong, superbly realized by masterly stop-motion animator David Allen for a 1972 Volkswagen commercial.

THERE'S AN APE FOR THAT

Opening this week: 

 
Kong: Skull Island—In 1973, just as the U.S. is bugging out of Vietnam, the Military-Industrial Complex mounts a secret but really obnoxiously intrusive expedition, via a swarm of helicopters, to the title island. Within minutes of arriving, the invaders find themselves getting the crap very justifiably beaten out of them by the title resident.

The survivors of the initial attack then squabble and try to regroup, and to survive further attacks by this skyscraper-sized primate as well as other gargantuan abominations. Notable among these are the “skull-crawlers,” a species of voracious reptiles that resemble two-legged monitor lizards with squalid, skull-like heads. The party also encounters human natives, and an American airman stranded there since WWII.

The original 1933 King Kong is my favorite movie, and giant monsters have been cinematic comfort food for me since I was a small child. So when I tell you that it’s been a while since I’ve had this much fun at a movie, I’ll understand if you take it with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, it’s been a while since I’ve had this much fun at a movie, and many people around me at the screening seemed to have the same response.

American popular moviemaking has been on a bit of a roll recently—two weeks ago we had the chiller Get Out, last week brought us Logan, and this week we get this boldly preposterous saga. It would be great if we could count on entertainment at that level every weekend.

Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts stages monster action with a true Brobdingnagian grandeur, and he and the special effects folks offer us a Kong who is brooding, irritable and lovable. Part of the pleasure of the movie is that he’s so much more sympathetic than the human visitors that one feels little compunction about wholeheartedly rooting for him.

There’s a tongue-in-cheek nerviness to the script, and the cast is full of character vets that can handle it. The supporting soldiers and researches are forgettable monster fodder, and the nominal hero and heroine, Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson, seem to have been cast for their ability to look great in t-shirts. But John Goodman, as the contractor leading the search, and Samuel L. Jackson as the Army Colonel who goes all Captain Ahab toward Kong, and John C. Reilly as the marooned pilot, ensure that the movie isn’t just an empty spectacle devoid of personality.

Kong: Skull Island is not, I suppose, a movie of particularly mature or wholesome sensibility. But it can’t fairly be called dumb, either—it’s made with skill, wit and imagination, and it has moments that could be called magical. 

 
The Ottoman Lieutenant—Call the title character Ismail, a dashing young Turk in the Ottoman army. He's played by a Dutch actor named Michiel Huisman, previously unfamiliar to me but very appealing. Our heroine, played by the Icelandic actress Hera Hilmar, is Lillie, a high-minded nurse from Philadelphia who goes to work in a clinic in Anatolia in the early days of World War I. She and Ismail fall in love, even though he's a Muslim and she's a Christian, even though the dull doctor at the clinic (Josh Hartnett) also loves her, and even though the Armenian Christians she cares for are in big trouble from the Turks.

This star-crossed interfaith romance tries to be sexy and swoony in the manner of a check-out line romance novel of the old school. The direction is by that excellent journeyman Joseph Ruben, who back in the '80s made three classic thrillers in a row: Dreamscape, The Stepfather and True Believer. The poor fellow hasn't been able to get a script worthy of his abilities since, but that doesn't stop him from bringing the best out of what he has to work with, like efficiently staging some exciting action scenes here, or from capitalizing on the expansive scenery.

Ben Kingsley easily nails his few scenes as another American doctor with whom Lillie bonds, a sick and bereaved man who labors on in spite of despairing doubt that life has any meaning. But crisp direction and a strong supporting turn can only take the movie so far, especially when there may be an unspoken agenda beyond the mild love story.

With its insipid dialogue and nagging, generically epic music, The Ottoman Lieutenant comes off as trite but watchable and harmless enough, on the surface. It would be remiss, however, not to note that the film, a Turkish-backed production, is grotesquely evasive about the Armenian Genocide that started in 1915, in which about a million and a half people perished.

The movie doesn't exactly deny the event, but it treats it obliquely, in bland passages from Lillie's narration like "the Ottomans took measures to stamp out the Armenian rebels, and the Armenians fought back," or "...some Armenian men were taken from their homes and conscripted to serve in the Ottoman army, while the round-up of Armenian women, children and the elderly had begun..." She never quite spits out what those "measures" were, or what the people were being rounded up for.

It's true that we're shown a small number of Ottoman soldiers massacring some Armenians on a country road. But there's no sense of the scope and sanction of the horror from this scene, the real point of which is that our valiant hero Ismail intercedes on the Armenians' behalf.

To be fair, this probably isn't much more outrageously disingenuous than, say, the classic John Ford epics are toward the real-life genocides of the American West. Still, behind all of The Ottoman Lieutenant's pieties and platitudes and tender longings and noble sacrifices, it's hard to miss a distinct whiff of whitewash.

COVER VERSION

With Kong: Skull Island opening this weekend…

Monster-of-the-Week: …it only seems right to acknowledge one of the greatest pop-culture monsters of all time, so how about…

…this rendering of the Eighth Wonder of the World by the great Frank Frazetta, on the cover of this 1976 paperback edition of the 1932 Delos Lovelace novelization of the original movie. It was reprinted in 2005…

…by The Modern Library. I wonder if it was the first novelization ever to have that distinction?

THE GILL-MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

Happy October everybody!

This past Christmas I was given a wall calendar, now adorning the wall of my office, called Cinema Noir. Along with posters for The Big Sleep, The Killer That Stalked New York and The Third Man, it bafflingly includes posters from The Birds, Citizen Kane, King Kong and the original Dracula.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s a cool calendar full of cool posters for cool movies, and I’ve been enjoying it all year. But…noir? Citizen Kane? King Kong?

October’s selection is…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this poster, featuring this week’s honoree…

…the Gill-Man, in The Creature Walks Among Us, the neglected third chapter of Universal’s Creature of the Black Lagoon trilogy, in which the Gill-Man is surgically altered and becomes, rather poignantly, more human.

I’ve always had a liking for this odd, melancholy little movie, but even so at first glance its inclusion in a Cinema Noir calendar seemed preposterous. But when I thought about it, it probably can make a better case than some of the others. After all, its main plot is a love triangle, and the Gill-Man witnesses, and is framed for, a murder. He may be a primordial abomination from the muck, but in this movie, he’s just a patsy.

IT'S ALWAYS SONNY

Time to get Monster-of-the-Week started up again, and with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes now in theatres, something ape-ish and sequel-ish seems in order, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …how about the sweet-natured underachieving (if ultimately nobly martyred) title character of 1933’s Son of Kong…

This hastily-cranked-out movie isn’t one of the more beloved of classic monster flicks, but I’ve always had a soft spot for it. “Baby Kong” is endearing, and while she’s no Fay Wray, leading lady Helen Mack is cute, too, and she sings a Betty Boop-ish song called “Runaway Blues” that gets agreeably stuck in my head for days every time I see the film.

TO BE OR NOT TO BEHEMOTH

With the new Yank version of Godzilla opening tomorrow, my mind just naturally turns to the subject of sea monsters. So…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week let’s honor a vintage movie menace from the deep, the radioactive title character, one of the last stop-motion creations of the great Willis O’Brien of King Kong fame, from the 1959 British shocker Behemoth, the Sea Monster…

…or, as the movie was called in its American release, The Giant Behemoth. This was necessary, I guess, to differentiate it from all those small or midsize Behemoths one sees.

Biblical scholars may note that the “Behemoth” referenced in the Book of Job is a land creature—and is specifically classified as a vegetarian. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to call the movie Leviathan, the Sea Monster? Or, for the gratuitous-adjective American market, The Giant Leviathan?

TO SERPENT WITH LOVE

Happy Chinese New Year this Sunday!

It’s the Year of the Snake, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week the nod goes to the giant Skull Island snake that menaces Jessica Lange in the 1976 version of King Kong, before being easily dispatched by the title character. The huge reptile looks pretty lame in the movie itself…

…but quite marvelous in this John Berkey promotional art…