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

Friday the 13th (1980)

Film: Friday the 13th (1980)

Stars: Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Jeannine Taylor, Laurie Bartram, Kevin Bacon

Director: Sean S. Cunningham

Oscar History: No nominations

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-90'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.

Last week we talked about Michael Myers, the first true super-villain of the 1980's horror craze, where serial killers became not just big box office, but actual headliners in film franchises.  But Mike Myers is not the only major horror icon of the 1980's, and today we're going to get to one of the movies that clearly borrowed from Halloween, but became its own legitimate franchise in response.  Friday the 13th came out in 1980, but it had a slightly different track record than Halloween.  While the 1978 horror film was independently-distributed, the money that it made was something that Hollywood couldn't ignore, and so when a similar film came out, major studios were actually in a bidding war over this minuscule budget horror film, with Paramount eventually winning the distribution rights for a hefty $1.5 million, making Friday the 13th the first independent slasher film to be distributed by a major studio.  This paid off handsomely.  Friday the 13th would go on to make nearly $60 million worldwide, giving it a huge profit, and would run behind only Airplane! as the highest-grossing film at Paramount that year.  It would also span an entire horror franchise that would run for nearly 30 years...though given the plot of this movie, one would wonder how that was possible.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is very light on plot, but essentially we have a bunch of horny camp counselors alone in a campground where two murders took place years before.  The townspeople don't want them to reopen the camp, which they think is haunted, but the counselors, being young & thirsty, don't seem to care.  However, slowly-but-steadily they all start getting murdered, frequently during some act of nudity or sex, and we have only one woman, Alice (King) who is left standing when Mrs. Voorhees (Palmer) shows up and we quickly realize that she is the killer, avenging the death of her son Jason who drowned in the nearby lake while two camp counselors were having sex & not watching him.  After Alice kills Mrs. Voorhees (cutting off her head), she goes out onto the lake and is dragged under by a burnt boy, whom we are meant to assume is Jason...though she survives, she realizes that since no one found the boy, he must still be out there, and the final moments of the film look at the increasing ripples in the lake.

The movie, and your love of it, will depend entirely how invested you are in slasher/horror film culture and camp (as in campy, not in campground).  Friday the 13th by almost any measure is a bad movie.  You get no sense that these counselors are anything other than hormonal, there's nothing built around them as people or trying to grow them as human beings.  Thus, there's no real attachment to them when they start to die other than obviously one of them is Kevin Bacon (whom, it has to be said, is in a speedo that leaves virtually nothing to the imagination in proof that the 1980's handled nudity very differently than we do now).  But the script also doesn't foreshadow enough.  We don't really meet Mrs. Voorhees in the beginning (other than seeing her briefly in a car) or have some mention of Jason before she shows up.  So literally it's a wild third act that feels deeply expositional & like bad writing, as if they were making up the script as we're going along.  There's not enough break between her first scene & her revealing she's the killer for it to really count as a twist (even if most younger audiences likely had the ending ruined by Scream).  Palmer, who was a regular panelist on I've Got a Secret in the 1950's, is the best performance in the film (and only took the job so she could buy a new car), but that's hardly saying much given everyone else is so interchangeable.

That said, I was impressed by the makeup effects in this film.  Tom Savini, who has been a major makeup wizard for decades in horror films, comes up with some genuinely inventive ways to kill off characters, particularly Bacon's death on a camp bunkbed, where he's stabbed through the neck.  Horror films rarely get the due they deserve for pioneering a lot of the best violent makeup that we find is commonplace today in everything from war films to thrillers, but this is impressive, particularly for a film with not a visual effect in sight.

I mentioned above how weird it is that this became a franchise, and that's because Mrs. Voorhees is not the killer for the remainder of the movies.  In Friday the 13th Part 2 and in all of the remaining films in the franchise, the little burnt boy from the lake Jason is the killer, transformed into a roided-up machete-wielding hockey demon.  This is definitely one of those situations where you just have to assume that Paramount, seeing the dollar signs, figured that they had to capitalize on this but didn't think that audiences would continue to show up to see a middle-aged woman as a horror franchise star, so they basically gave us a knockoff of Michael Myers.  Given how poorly this one landed for me, though, I'll likely be skipping the sequels.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, The Raven, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Woman, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Son of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Mummy's Ghost, The Uninvited, House of Dracula, She-Wolf of London, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Revenge of the Creature, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Village of the Damned, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead, The Wicker Man, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween, The Amityville Horror, When a Stranger Calls

Black Mass (2015)

Film: Black Mass (2015)
Stars: Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kevin Bacon, Jesse Plemons, Corey Stoll, Peter Sarsgaard, Dakota Johnson, Julianne Nicholson
Director: Scott Cooper
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I remember a time, not that long ago but longer than you'd think, when I would genuinely get excited whenever a new Johnny Depp movie would come out.  In the mid-Aughts, Depp's films were major events, a huge deal where his longtime edgy aura met commercial appeal and suddenly he was both a major Box Office star and the Sexiest Man Alive.  During this time he garnered three Oscar nominations, a huge following, and a fortune that would make Robert Downey Jr. jealous.  However, in the past seven years or so (ever since he put down his barber razors) he's been pretty much anathema onscreen, taking on cartoonish non-human roles (admittedly in a wildly successful turn financially in Alice in Wonderland, less so with things like Mortedecai) and watching his Q-score plummet as no one really wanted to see a new Johnny Depp movie.  In fact, when I heard that Black Mass was garnering strong reviews and Oscar buzz, my first reaction wasn't excitement but instead a gigantic groan that I would have to see a Depp film, an unthinkable reaction ten years ago.  But see the film I did, and let's investigate where my Depp love stands now, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows the rise and fall of Whitey Bulger (Depp), one of the most notorious mob bosses of the past half-century, who ran South Boston with an iron fist and frequently was prone to fits of violence, killing a number of people he suspected of being "rats" and he himself working with the FBI as an informant all-the-while bribing his friend John Connolly (Edgerton) to keep the heat off of Bulger as he ran the city.  The film follows a lot of the traditional mob movie cliches, except here we have the advantage of knowing that a lot of what is happening, particularly the ending (where we find out men who clearly murdered numerous people ended up not serving life sentences) ends up being true and we watch a bit of an indictment of justice as people who probably should have received life without parole ended up being on the streets once again.

The film features a lot of actors of very strong background, as we get not only Depp but recent Oscar nominee Benedict Cumberbatch, rising stars Corey Stoll and Dakota Johnson, and dependable character actors like Kevin Bacon, Julianne Nicholson, and Peter Sarsgaard in key roles.  The cast list, however, is a mixed bag in my opinion.  The reviews are correct to say that Depp is back and this is his best role in years, though is that saying really anything?  Depp's performance is strong, and I love the moments where his penchant for crazy melds with the realistic human being on the screen (this is what made, say, Jack Sparrow so damn appealing-he was a cartoon, but a cartoon that resembled a human being).  Still, though, there's hardly any emoting going on here-we know so little about Bulger's motives, what drives his need for this kind of success?  The script seems to hint at it (perhaps feeling overshadowed by his more professionally successful brother, his lack of success in his personal life), but there's nothing there in Depp's performance.  We never get a sense as to why he's more attuned to the needs of a son he barely sees than his girlfriend, or what makes him become so outrageously violent, and this is a large flaw in the script.  The rest of the cast is also pretty disappointing, to be honest.  Some of the actors are good but have nothing to do (Stoll, Bacon, and Johnson in particular), while others are left with over-the-top work that you kind of just roll your eyes at while watching (Sarsgaard, in his scenery-chewing mode, and Edgerton).  Edgerton in particular has scenes where he's so obviously trying to look guilty while not looking guilty you wonder why the seemingly smart men around him don't clearly know what he's up to; he practically says "who me?" while twirling his hair like an old Looney Tunes episode.  I will admit that after The Gift (which has aged horribly in my mind), Edgerton is becoming one of those actors I realize I don't really like in anything.  About the only actors who get both a meaty role and sink their baskets are Cumberbatch (whom I am usually hot-and-cold with, but who lands his loyal but pragmatic state senator with regal aplomb, even if he occasionally indulges in a bit of scenery-chewing as well) and Nicholson (who nails her neglected wife role and whom I truly wish the film had been about-can someone give this woman more to do in her next movie, as she's more than earned it?).

The script itself unfolds rather interestingly at the beginning, with us starting in the middle of the story.  There's no Whitey Bulger origin scenes-he's already an established family man with a major crime syndicate and we don't get flashes to his childhood, which is refreshing.  However, the script then keeps a walnut shell over him.  We get little indication as to how he was able to demand such loyalty and respect, and why his associates (whom he frequently kills off or destroys their loved ones, particularly in a haunting scene with the air-headed mistress of one of his top assassins) stay with him.  We've become so accustomed to this sort of, well, "mob mentality" but the reality is that Don Corleone or the likes at least demand respect because he provides protection or cash.  Whitey Bulger is portrayed as simply a thug, and while the technical aspects of the film are impressive and occasionally the performances are good, the overacting from key players like Edgerton alongside the unknowable nature of Bulger and his organization cause the film to fail.  This may be the best thing Depp has done in years, but that's only because he's been drowning himself in Razzy Awards.  By any stretch of the imagination this is handsome but listless.

Those are my thoughts on Black Mass-tell me yours?  Do you consider this a return-to-form for Depp?  And what are his Oscar chances?  Share your thoughts in the comments!