OVP: Flatliners (1990)

Film: Flatliners (1990)

Stars: Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Billy Baldwin, Oliver Platt, Kevin Bacon

Director: Joel Schumacher

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Sound Editing)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-00's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

While people like Johnny Depp & Kevin Bacon snuck into horror franchises early in their careers, by-and-large having a bunch of young, hot actors getting terrorized in a movie is more of a 1990's invention.  It would be perfected in Scream a few years later, and we'll actually talk a lot at the end of this month about the movies that Scream wrought as they were a bigger part of my horror movie gap than I had realized.  But today we're going to talk about a film of that nature that pre-dated Scream.  In 1990, Julia Roberts would've been a recent Oscar nominee, Kiefer Sutherland would've been coming off the successes of The Lost Boys and Young Guns, Kevin Bacon would've still been a big name due to Footloose & Diner, and Billy Baldwin would've just had a breakout role in the crime thriller Internal Affairs.  Suffice it to say-these were expensive investments, and hardly the cast of unknowns that would populate a film like The House on Sorority Row and Sleepaway Camp in the early 1980's.  Flatliners was a bigger-budget horror, the studios investing in a genre that had long made them money, with a proper budget and a starry cast, something that horror would be able to achieve regularly in the coming decades.

(Spoilers Ahead) Flatliners is about a group of med students, who led by Nelson Wright (Sutherland) decide to try an experiment.  They are going to put Nelson under, essentially stopping his heart and killing him, and then after he's dead, revive him so that he is able to come back to life and say what happens when you die.  The premise is simple enough, and it results in a series of problems for those involved.  Not only does Nelson go under, but so do his pals David (Bacon), Joe (Baldwin), and eventually Rachel (Roberts), all of them revisiting some past trauma that has haunted them during life.  This leads to a type of spirit from beyond-the-grave coming back to destroy them.  Some of them, specifically David, is able to go to the person who had been haunting them to stop the trauma, while others, specifically Nelson, are so horrified by what he has done in life (as a child, he bullied and accidentally killed another kid), that he can't escape and attempts to kill himself in the film's final moments, only to be revived one last time after being forgiven in the hereafter.

The movie is genuinely interesting as a premise.  I like the idea of horror movies doing what other movies frequently attempt to do (answer the unknowable), mostly because it's a good job for them-they deal more with death than any other genre.  But in my opinion they don't do nearly enough with it.  Part of the problem here is that they don't keep the body count high enough for a horror movie.  I'm not sure if this was something with the stars' contracts or what, but none of the four main stars (or Oliver Platt, the fifth wheel in their group & the only one who doesn't flatline) actually die in the movie.  This gives us little sense of the stakes of the game they're playing if it's relatively easy to stop the monster (just be a good person), and the ending, where our unlikable leading character gets forgiven & revived, is pretty sappy.

The film was picked by me both for its starry cast as well as its Oscar nomination for Sound Editing.  The Oscar nomination is understandable, if a tad overrated.  The same medical effects you could hear every week on ER a few years later are solidly-done if a tad repetitive and this nomination is likely due more to the way that it works solidly with the score.  The starry cast, though, is underused.  Part of the reason that Sutherland never became the leading man that his father did was he's hard to root for (arrogant & prickly), which may be how the character is made, but he doesn't help matters by underlining it in a cast of NepoBabies (Eric Roberts' sister & Alec Baldwin's brother, please take your ticket).  Julia Roberts is also so oddly dressed in this.  Despite being a rundown, broke college student, she appears in every scene in flawless hair-and-makeup that in real life would take at least an hour to achieve...Joan Crawford would be proud of this level of glamour commitment.

1920's: The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera

1930's: The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dracula's Daughter, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Invisible Man, Mad Love, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Raven, Son of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London

1940's: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Cat People, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Invisible Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Ghost, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, Phantom of the Opera, She-Wolf of London, Son of Dracula, The Uninvited, The Wolf Man

1950's: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, Revenge of the Creature

1960's: The Devil Rides Out, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead,Village of the Damned

1970's: The Amityville Horror, Black Christmas, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Don't Look Now, Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, Phantom of the Paradise, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man

1980's: Altered States, An American Werewolf in London, The Changeling, Child's Play, The Evil Dead, The Fly, The Fog, Friday the 13th, Gremlins, Hellraiser, The House on Sorority Row, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Pet Sematary, Poltergeist, Poltergeist II: The Other Side, Sleepaway Camp, The Thing

1990's-Present: Arachnophobia, The Blair Witch Project, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Candyman, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Paranormal Activity, Scary Movie, Scream