The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

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Music has the ability of searing into your brain as memories. We all have songs that immediately take us to a particular place and time whenever we hear them. Movies can do that but to a lesser extent. I remember movies for their plots, or their direction, or some other thing, but rarely do they bring me back to the time in which I watched them.

I don’t actually remember watching The Silence of the Lambs for the first time in the theater, but I remember why I watched it. My brother is four years older than me. He was dating a girl named Jennifer at the time. He had just graduated high school but she was still a junior. Unsurprisingly, I was not a popular kid in school, but she was. She liked me. Her popularity rubbed off on me a little bit, by proxy. I wanted to impress her.

They watched The Silence of the Lambs on a date and came back raving about it. Somehow, I talked my mother into letting me see it. I was 15 at the time, and usually not allowed to watch rated R movies.

I did like the movie, but I didn’t love it. But wanting to make Jennifer think I was cool I pretended like it was my new favorite. I faked it so well that my mother bought me the novel by Thomas Harris for Christmas.

I wasn’t much of a reader at the time, but I devoured that book. I read it three times over the Christmas break. The novel is more of a procedural than the movie. It digs pretty heavily into the behavioral science and forensics of catching a serial killer. I loved that stuff. I’ve always been fascinated by serial killers and the book was like catnip to me.

I watched the movie again when it came out on home video and for the first time, I realized how a book can enhance a film. So many little details were filled in by the book that the movie somehow seemed better by knowing them.

It has remained a favorite of mine. The DVD was the first one I’d ever purchased that was put out by the Criterion Collection.

Every time I watch it my appreciation deepens.

I’m not the only one who thinks it is a masterpiece. It made Anthony Hopkins a star. It swept the Oscars that year winning Best Picture, Best Actor and Actress, Screenplay, and Director.

Hopkins’s performance is a thing of legend. He’s only in it for a small amount of the film’s runtime, but he made Hannibal Lecter an icon of the horror genre. He’s terrifying. He’s also immensely quotable. I found myself saying his dialog along with him in every scene.

Real quick, the plot, for the few of you who may not know it. Jodie Foster plays Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee. She’s tasked by Behavioral Science director Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) to interview Hannibal Lecter, a notorious serial killer and cannibal, currently behind bars at a hospital for the criminally insane. He calls it an interesting errand, but really he’s hoping Lecter might shed some light on catching Buffalo Bill a man who is currently killing women and skinning them.

Clarice and Hannibal form a kinship of sorts – she tells him personal stories about her life and he gives her some insight into Buffalo Bill. Then Clarice investigates and eventually captures the killer.

It was hugely influential, nearly every serial killer movie and TV show that follows owes a debt. But what I love is that director Jonathan Demme isn’t all that interested in the genre. He’s telling a much more human story. The film often uses character POV shots to let us see what others (mostly Clarice) are looking at. It gets you inside their skin. Jason Bailey over at Flavorwire has an excellent essay on the use of POV in the movie.

Multiple times Demme shows how men ogle Clarice when she passes by. There is a famous scene at the beginning of the movie where she gets on an elevator surrounded by taller men who stare down at her. Or another one where a group of men jog past her and then turn around to look at her ass.

At a funeral home, about to perform an autopsy on one of Buffalo Bill’s victims, Crawford says something to a cop about not wanting to discuss such a heinous crime around…then he glances over at Clarice. It is a tactic meant to allow the two men to move away from the crowd of cops, but the camera lingers on Clarice’s face showing her disappointment and anger. Later she calls Crawford out on it, noting that while he may not be sexist himself, moments like that indicate to the men present that sexist behavior is okay.

Over and over Demme shows us how difficult it is for a woman to get any respect at the F.B.I. And how Clarice has to be tough and smart just to stay afloat. Call it a feminist serial killer movie.

But it is also thrilling. The scenes with Buffalo Bill are terrifying. He’s wild and camp while Lecter is subdued and intellectual. Both are nightmares come alive.

I could go on and on. I love this movie fully. It is so smart and entertaining, thrilling and scary – bolstered by terrific performances, a great script and subtle direction. One of my absolute favorites.

Awesome ’80s in April: Nighthawks (1981)

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I was born in the late 1970s and so while I did grow up in the 1980s I didn’t really come of age until the early 1990s. So, the films that I watched during the 1980s were mostly kid stuff. In the years since I’ve watched most of the more popular and critically acclaimed films from that decade, but there are still tons of films I’ve missed.

I’ve said it many times before but one of the things I love about doing these little monthly movie themes is that I always discover films I’d never heard of before. Nighthawks did okay when it was first released but it seems to have been mostly forgotten, which is too bad because it’s pretty good.

I didn’t intend to watch so many Sylvester Stallone movies when I began the Awesome ’80s in April, but here I am four films deep and looking at some more to watch. Nighthawks was made fairly early in his career. Or I should say fairly soon after he found success with Rocky in 1976 (for he had been playing bit parts since 1969). He’s still clearly hungry and still trying to figure out just what kind of star he’s going to be.

It has some interesting behind-the-scenes production stories. Originally the film was written as the second sequel to The French Connection and it was going to be a buddy cop film with someone like Richard Pryor playing off of Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle character. But when Hackman declared he was done with the character they turned it into a stand-alone film.

The original director, Gary Nelson, was fired before he even really got started – just one week into production. When the next director, Bruce Malmoth was delayed for a day, Stallone took on the director’s duties so as to not lose a day of shooting. That caused trouble with the guild and he was fined for it. Later both the studio and Stallone made substantial edits to the film when it did poorly at early screenings. Supposedly Stallone cut out several scenes that focused on Rutger Hauer’s character.

None of this really matters of course, what we wound up with is what we’ve got, and what we’ve got is pretty good.

Stallone stars as Sergeant Deke DaSilva of the New York Police Department. He, and his partner, Sergeant Matthew Fox (Billy Dee Williams) work undercover (the film begins with a wonderful scene in which Stallone dawns a dress and a plastic face mask posing as a little old lady trying to catch some purse snatchers). They are quickly pulled into a new, elite squad designed to catch an international terrorist known only as Wulfgar (Rutger Hauer in his first American role).

Wulfgar has just come to New York City. He’s on the run from his European financiers due to running afoul to their good graces. One of his bombs killed some kids and he shot one of their men whom he believed had led the police to his doorstep.

He’s trailed by English Police Inspector Hartman (Nigel Davenport) who recruits DaSilva and Fox into his elite squad. A long chunk in the middle of the film is all about Hartman training the cops on how to catch Wulfgar which basically amounts to them throwing out all their police training and being willing to break the rules and kill the man if they can. This section is rather tedious.

Eventually, it becomes a cat-and-mouse game between DaSilva and Wulfgar and that’s when the film is at its best. There is a good scene set inside a subway line, and a terrific one on a tramway car high above the ocean, headed towards Roosevelt Island.

It looks gorgeous too with some wonderful cinematography by James A. Cotner. Stallone and Hauer play their parts well. Overall it is a good little 1980s thriller and one worth seeking out. But there is a reason why it slipped into obscurity as it doesn’t do anything particularly special with pretty standard material.

Frozen in January: Whiteout (2009)

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Sometimes you watch a movie knowing ahead of time it is going to be bad. You do so thinking maybe it won’t be that bad. Maybe it will at least be entertaining. And maybe, just maybe, it will defy expectations and actually be pretty good.

Mostly, you turn out wrong.

Or maybe that’s just me.

I knew going into it Whiteout wouldn’t be good. It actually has a kernel of an interesting idea – a lone US Marshall in Antarctica must solve a murder. But that’s also the kind of snappy idea that Hollywood all too often screws up.

I should have known not to watch it when I realized it stars Kate Beckinsale. I don’t actively hate Kate Beckinsale. I don’t think she’s necessarily a bad actress. She just has a habit of starring in a lot of bad movies. I don’t know if she just has bad taste, or she’s rarely offered anything any good or what. Maybe she has a terrible agent. But looking through her filmography I see very few movies that I either thought were good or that look anything like interesting.

But, like I said, this film has a setup that could be really cool so I took the plunge.

The biggest problem with the film is that it doesn’t know whether it wants to be a mystery, a thriller, or a horror film. It even throws in a bit of World War II conspiracy for good measure.

Beckinsale plays Carrie Stetko, the sole US Marshall in Antarctica. Most of the base is preparing to fly out. Winter is coming and at the bottom of the world, winter is long and hard. Minimal staff is required.

Stetko usually stays but this time she’s leaving. As is her friend, the base’s only doctor, John Fury (Tom Skerritt). As an example of just how poorly this film thinks things through that is the base’s only law enforcement agent and doctor leaving for several months. There is no indication that anyone is being sent to replace them. While most of the personnel do leave for the winter, not all of them do. What happens when a crime is committed or someone needs healthcare?

But of course, the film doesn’t think about this because it knows those two characters aren’t going to be leaving the base. A crime will be committed and someone will need medical attention and they will stay.

A body is found lying face down in a remote part – a “no man’s land” of the continent. His face is smashed to bits so it is impossible to tell who he is. Stetko and Fury investigate. Stetko realizes he must have taken a great fall. She knows this because, as we see in a flashback she once shot a man causing him to take a tumble out of a high-rise building.

The film loves its flashbacks. They pretty much all surround that one event in Stetko’s life, but the film doles it out like it is some great mystery that will reveal some insight into this current case. But really it is a pretty simple thing that lets us know what she’s doing in remote Antarctica in the first place.

The murder leads them to a remote station which then leads them to a WWII airplane buried in the snow. This should be an interesting mystery, a weird surprise for the audience. Except the film began with us watching the plane crash and showed us why. The only mystery left is what was in the box on the plane that everyone winds up fighting over. It might be old nuclear stuff which would be bad. Really bad. I guess.

Then Robert Pryce (Gabriel Macht), a United Nations security agent shows up. He’s there awfully fast for a guy who wasn’t in Antarctica before the movie began. Making us think perhaps he’s the killer. He’s not, but the movie likes throwing red herrings out like that. Anyone who has seen an episode of Law and Order will be able to figure out who the Big Bad really is before he’s revealed.

Oh, also, there is a huge storm rolling in causing the entire base to be evacuated in a few hours. Because this film doesn’t have enough going on, it needs to add that into the mix.

It is based on a graphic novel so maybe some of the script problems come from the source material. All of the plot twists and turns might work better in a comic. I’ve just started reading the book and it does seem to be more of a mystery than anything, and it definitely doesn’t begin with the plane crash so I’m prepared to say most of the film’s problems do come from the script. But only time will tell on that front.

Beckinsale isn’t bad. I don’t think she’s a particularly bad actress. But she doesn’t elevate the material either. And the material is bad. It is too much of everything and not enough of something specific.

Great British Cinema: Went the Day Well? (1942)

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George Orwell once stated that All Art Is Propaganda, and after watching Went the Day Well? I wanna ask, is that such a bad thing?

My tongue is planted firmly in my cheek, and to be fair, I’ve never even read that Orwell book, but Went the Day Well? is a piece of wartime propaganda. And it is excellent.

The thought experiment goes – what if the Nazis successfully took over a British town? What if they invaded England? The answer the film proposes is that we’d have to fight back. Sometimes brutally.

In the small village of Bramley Inn a group of what appear to be British soldiers arrive unannounced. They state that they are there to judge the village’s preparedness and ask to be quartered there for a few days.

At first, the villagers believe them and are excited to see some real action (or as real as they think they’ll ever get). The village has done its preparations, they have a Homeguard and have practiced what to do if the war comes to them.

But soon they begin to think these soldiers may not be what they say they are. One of them slips up in their English and another writes his “7s” in the European way. Just as they are trying to decide what to do, the soldiers reveal themselves as Germans setting up the invasion.

The Nazis are ruthless. They mow down the Homeguard without a second’s thought and have no problems shooting anyone else who causes trouble.

The message is clear: the villagers have to be just as tough. In an amazing scene – and I’m sorry for the spoilers on an 80-year-old film – a sweet little old lady is serving dinner to one of the Nazis. She prattles on as she cooks, revealing a surprisingly intimate detail about her life – that she and her husband couldn’t have children and they both blamed the other one. Then, when the Nazi isn’t looking she tosses pepper into his eyes, grabs an axe, and gives him a whack.

It is a surprisingly violent film for a 1942 film, but the message is clear again. The enemy will not hesitate to kill you and the British way of life, and you must be willing to fight back with all you’ve got. Even if you live in a little village that will likely never see any sort of action, you must be prepared.

As a piece of propaganda, it is quite effective. But better yet as a piece of cinema, it is excellent all around.

Great British Cinema Cottage to Let (1941)

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Mrs. Barrington, a kook of a woman (Jeanne de Casalis), has agreed to take in child evacuees from London during World War II. She’s also agreed to allow her cottage to become a military hospital. Naturally, she has forgotten to inform her leasing agent of any of this so besides the children and the infirmed she has let her cottage out to a strange man, Charles Dimble (Alastair Sim). Also living at her estate is her husband John Barrington (Leslie Banks) an inventor who is currently working on a new bombsight which is of great interest to the Royal Airforce and Nazi spies.

Cottage to Let is a wonderful little drama filled with mysterious and eccentric characters and enough twists and turns to keep everyone guessing.

Mrs. Barrington might be a bit dotty, but she’s smart enough to realize she only has so many rooms so she only takes one child evacuee, and one soldier in need of attention. Still, that amounts to a large cast of characters. Moreso when the British military higher-ups come into town when John Barrington refuses to come to London to clue them in on his work.

Early on we realize there must be a spy amongst this lot, but we aren’t sure who it could be. The film has a lot of fun insinuating various characters but never quite letting us know who it is.

It is suspenseful in the way Hitchcock’s films are often suspenseful – which is to say it creates some interesting tension while also letting you know no real harm is going to come to our heroes. It is also clever and quite funny.

I found it to be wonderfully delightful.

Runaway Train (1985)

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I’m watching one movie from every year I’ve been alive in chronological order. We are now up to 1985.

I live in a small town that has two major train lines running right through the middle of it. I don’t know how many trains pass through our little burg on any given day but it is a lot. You can hardly drive from one side of the town to the other without getting stopped by a train. Sometimes two. Or three. It is very annoying. I used to carry a book with me in my car and whenever I was stopped waiting on a train I’d read a few pages. I finished more than one novel that way.

Despite this, I still love trains. I remember the first time I ever rode a train. We were riding across France. I sat in my window seat with my headset on, listening to music and watching the beautiful countryside glide by.

Trains are so much better than planes. They might not be as fast, but they are much more comfortable and pleasant. I wish we had more trains in the USA. I’d take them everywhere.

I love movies about trains. I’ve watched Westerns where they are building the first train lines out west. I’ve seen horror films with some crazed killer stalking prey on a train. There are mysteries and thrillers set on trains. One day I’m gonna make a huge playlist of all the movies that have trains in them. That would make a fun viewing.

Not all train movies are good, of course. There isn’t anything special about a train that makes your story interesting. Runaway Train is a good example of this.

Jon Voight plays Oscar “Manny” Manheim a ruthless convict being held in Alaska’s Stonehaven Maximum Security Prison. He’s so terrible the warden has had him locked away in solitary confinement for three years. When the courts say he can’t do that, Manheim is released into general pop.

Though the prison is supposed to be some kind of Alcatraz-like inescapable place, Manheim easily gets out by having fellow inmate Buck McGeehy (Eric Roberts) roll him out in a dirty clothes hamper. Inside the laundromat, they grease themselves up and slip out through a sewer tunnel. From there they hop aboard the titular train.

Darn their luck, the train conductor has a heart attack and falls off the train. In doing so he destroys the brakes and sends the train heading down the line at full speed. Rebecca DeMornay plays a train employee who is pretty useless, honestly.

There are some dispatchers back at the base, who have computerized systems to track where the train is going. They call upcoming stations to try to stop the thing, but they are pretty useless as well, honestly.

The film periodically attempts to ring some tension out of the speeding train, but this is no Speed (1994) and they mostly fail at it. Every time they cut to the dispatch station

Voight is sporting some godawful facial hair and an even worse accent. Everyone else seems to be trying their best, but it all just falls sort-of flat. It is the type of film where after watching it I just kind of shrug my shoulders and go, “that was something,” and the look for something else to watch.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Special Effects (1984)

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There is a question that, I suppose, needs to be asked here. What, exactly, is a horror movie? Sometimes that’s easy to define. Horror movies have ghosts or monsters in them. Vampires, blobs, werewolves and other creatures of the night fill the screen of many a horror film. But what about more pedestrian horror? Movies in which the villain is human.

Jason Vorhees is just a man in a hockey mask with a machete (at least in the early films, he later becomes superhuman and virtually unkillable). But there are lots of crime movies with higher body counts. No one would argue that the Friday the 13th movies are anything other than horror, but serial killer movies are often called thrillers.

Maybe that’s because there usually isn’t a police detective trying to solve the case of the Jason killings. But then there are a lot of Italian horror films, giallos especially, that plotwise are basically police procedurals.

Maybe horror movies are more gore-filled. But that doesn’t always track either because some cop flicks concentrate on the extreme violence of their killers. And plenty of horror films have very little gore or none at all.

I don’t have an answer here. It is a big debate that I won’t solve in these pages. I mention it because tonight’s Friday Night Horror movie could be considered more of a thriller than a horror, but it does carry the horror genre label on IMDB and that’s what I thought it was coming into it, so that’s what we’re gonna keep calling it.

Andrea Wilcox (Zoë Lund) left her husband Keefe (Brad Rijn) and small child in Texas to go to New York City and pursue an acting career. Though she’s willing to sleep with producers and directors and anybody who will give her a part she’s only able to find jobs doing nude modeling and the like.

When Keefe comes to get her back and bring her home she lies and says that her career is starting to take off. Why, she has a meeting that evening with Neville (Eric Bogosian) a famous movie director. She does in fact go to his house that evening and literally begs him to at least take a look at her.

He does look at her, then sleeps with her, and secretly films the encounter, and strangles her to death. He cleans her up, puts her inside Keef’s car, and dumps it at Coney Island.

The cops immediately suspect Keef and arrest him. Neville hires an expensive attorney and gets him free on bail. He then decides to make a movie about Keef and Andrea. He gets Keef to play himself and finds an amazing Andrea look-alike in a woman named Elaine (also played by Zoë Lund) to play Andrea.

Things get weird from there.

B-movie auteur Larry Cohen mixes Vertigo (1958) with Body Double (1984) and bits of Peeping Tom (1960) into a sleazy cauldron of awesome. He has Brian DePalma’s flair for taking Hitchcockian ideas and amping up the sex and violence, but very little of either director’s sense of style. Though he does create some really interesting sets, especially Neville’s giant apartment filled with mirrors and water.

The film really is more thriller than horror as Neville takes his movie ideas to extremes and is more than willing to kill again to maintain his cinematic goals.

Special Effects wasn’t at all what I was expecting when I put it on, but I found it to be quite enjoyable.

Awesome ’80s in April: Night Game (1989)

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Jaws (1975) is one of my all-time favorite movies. It is practically perfect in every way. It is a film I’ve seen dozens of times. It is a film that I put on when I’m sick and miserable. It cheers me up every time. I love Roy Scheider in that film and he’s only my third favorite character in that film.

Scheider was an interesting actor. He starred in many movies through the 1970s and 1980s and was by all accounts a big film star (he made lots of movies up until his death in 2008 but these two decades saw him as a big movie star). But I feel like outside of Jaws, and maybe The French Connection, he’s mostly been forgotten.

He’s about the only thing that makes Night Game interesting. He plays Mike Seaver a Texas cop who might just love the Astros more than his (much younger) girlfriend Roxy (Karen Young). Somebody is slicing and dicing hot blondes on the oceanfront and it is up to Seaver to figure out who.

Given the title and his fondness for the Astros you know the killer is going to have something to do with baseball. If you are a fan there is quite a bit of gameplay on-screen and parts of it are filmed in the Astrodome. If you aren’t, well there is still Scheider doing his darndest to make a limp script exciting.

I didn’t hate it, but it is definitely forgettable. I watched it this weekend and I had to brush up on the plot via Wikipedia to write this review. It feels like a made-for-TV movie but with more violence and naked parts.

Awesome ’80s in April: Dead Calm (1989)

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When I was a young teen, probably sometime in the late 1980s my mother’s friend Beverly had a satellite dish and all of the premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime. We only had basic cable at the time so I was in awe of all the movies she had access to. She was kind enough to allow me to send her requests of films I was interested in watching and she’d record them for me onto VHS tapes. I used to scour the TV Guide looking for movies for her to record.

When I got older and was living on my own I used to set the VCR to record old movies off of TCM and other cable channels. I had quite a collection of films dubbed off onto VHS tapes.

One film in that collection was Dead Calm. Unlike Firestarter this was a film I didn’t really know much about. Nicole Kidman was not yet a star and I didn’t know who Sam Neill or Billy Zane was. It is an Australian film and I don’t remember how much publicity it received in the USA. But at some point, I must have seen a trailer or read a synopsis and decided it sounded interesting. Thus I recorded it onto VHS tape.

But I never did watch it. It sat in that collection of tapes for years and years. When I’d go looking for something to watch I would see it, think to myself “I should watch that sometime” and then skip right past it. Many years later I got a digital copy of the film and yet I continued to put off watching it. One of the things I’m loving about this Awesome ’80s series is that I’m finally getting around to watching those sorts of films.

I should have watched this one much sooner as it is pretty terrific.

Kidman and Neill play Rae and John Ingram, a married couple who recently lost their only son in a terrible accident. They have taken off in their sailboat to sail the Pacific Ocean and forget about their troubles.

One day they spy a schooner that seems to be in some distress. They hail it to no accord. Before they can make their way over to see what the trouble is they see a man, Hughie (Zane) furiously rowing toward them in a dinghy.

He says that his boat is slowly sinking and that all the other crew is dead of food poisoning. But something seems off about him. When John indicates he’d like to sail over and check out the boat, Hughie becomes very agitated. He generally seems over-excited and behaves somewhat erratically.

When he finally crashes and falls asleep, John takes the dinghy over to the boat to investigate. What he finds is disturbing. But before he can come back to his boat, Hughie has knocked Rae unconscious and taken control of the boat.

The film becomes a tight thriller with Rae trying to escape from Hughie and John trying to survive the sinking boat long enough to be rescued. I loved the gender reversal of that. Typically in movies like this, the woman would be trapped helplessly by the villain and the male hero would rush in to rescue her. But here John must be saved by his wife after she subdues the villain.

Director Phillip Noyce keeps things moving briskly and the tension held tightly. The two boats, thousands of miles from anything but the ocean create a wonderful setting where the characters must survive on their own cunning and wits.

This was Kidman’s breakthrough role and she’s terrific. She gives her character confidence rarely seen from female characters in this type of movie, but she never loses her femininity. Sam Neill is great as well. He spends a great deal of the film alone on that sinking ship and he allows his character the fear that comes from such a situation but also a determination to survive. I’m not a huge Billy Zane fan and he doesn’t quite have enough crazy menace here, but he’s still effective.

I’m surprised this film hasn’t received more love. I’m really glad I finally decided to watch it.

Flightplan (2005)

flightplan movie poster

In the previews for Flightplan they show Jodie Foster on an airplane claiming she has lost her daughter. They then show one of the flight crew explaining to Jodie Foster that her daughter was never on board the plane. And with that, there are no surprises in the film.

Her daughter not being on the passenger list/flight manifest might have made for a good surprise ending à la The Sixth Sense or something, but if they are using it in the commercials then you know it isn’t the surprise ending but a twist found somewhere between the opening and the end credits. But if it is not the surprise ending, then you automatically know the daughter is real.

Mental psychosis plays well for an ending, but in the middle, it has to be a ploy to divert the audience’s attention so that they can again surprise us with the daughter having really been taken. And if someone took her then there must be some kind of terrorist plotting.

And really if I can figure this stuff out by the previews, anybody can. Because I’m totally not the sort who figures stuff out on my own.

Unfortunately, those surprises are all the film has going for it. In a film where you know where it’s going to wind up, it’s the getting there that has to be good, and this film never quite makes the ride interesting. It’s more like a real transatlantic flight – long, tiring, and your legs feel all tired out by the time it ends.

Jodie Foster and Peter Sarsgaard are fine actors and they do their best with the material, but there just isn’t enough there.

It is the kind of film where I found myself yelling at the television over the extensive amount of plot holes, and stupidity of the characters until I fell asleep from exhaustion.